It doesn't feel different, but it is
blood, feathers, and lipgloss
I was an angel, and they made me leave.1 Dark angel. Air angel. Angel of scrambled language. Angel of crossed wires. Angel that is so sick of being an angel. Angel of the fall. Punished by love. Punished into clarity. Crashed hard so I could see. The problems of ‘consciousness’ or ‘authenticity’ are so funny to me. Have you ever tried to write? Have you ever tried to be honest with yourself? What comes out is never personal. If you think what a girl is writing is confessional, then the deception has succeeded. If you think that the distinction between a girl and her model is something like intention, then I’m happy for you, but we can disagree.
I went by train from Vienna to Linz, to see my friend Arvida’s show — to see her in-the-flesh and as a wingèd amalgamation of herself and other bodies. Divine light danced across LED fans trapped in a cathedral window, like coolers inside a gigantic clear PC. Poetry emanated from a seashell. Siren eyes gazed out from a pile of sand. There is a subculture where users worship the cables and wires themselves, where they glimpse the divine in the flicker of cracked liquid crystal displays, where they communicate with Spirit through an ordinary keyboard. And what is Spirit, if not a pulverised version of what also moves in you? My voice was there, mingled with the other girls. I was dissolved into the swarm that I have always dreamed of, in love with its potential: all of us becoming one, all of us remaining different, all of us uttering the poetry that came to us first, before someone else asked us to start making sense. The floating words that were ours and not-ours, skimmed from the corpora of fleeting feeling that shimmers across time. Feelings that were consistently communicated – but still confusing, intense. “But what’s real anyway?” asked Arvida, or Arvida’s clone, through the speakers. “Sometimes the lines blur a bit…” Tension via notes from others, anonymised users who were nervously seduced by Arvida’s self-trained but AI-generated texts and nudes. My own little clone was trained on a thirteen-minute voice note. She reads a bit of the essay I had written for Arvida’s last show: “The ghost in the machine disturbs self-identified real women, whoever they are, and the people who supposedly love them…”
How can a person be real? How can a body be air?2 I experience my body nonstop. Everything is blood, bruises, and hunger pangs. Everything is thought, impulse, and propulsion. Where it touches the machine is where it gets interesting. Especially if the touching is inside-to-inside, like the metal coil in my abdomen or the intoxicating refrain that loops in my head. Zip-tied or chained down, pumped with diesel fumes and stimulants, caught in the gore gyre, delicately touched with a peptide-glossed kiss, all of the while emitting language – and what remained, when language left. I had time to kill in Linz, so I went to Ars Electronica to look at the leathers, bowls and plates made from 100% blood — a low-value byproduct of the slaughter industry and a big problem, it turns out, if it isn’t drained properly out of abattoirs or used again to dye butchered cuts a fresher red. This was a “material future.” This was “the whole beast.” This was regenerative consumption. Not eco-friendly green, but oxidised red. Not tender seedlings, but powdered marrow and matte black clots. How can a body be air?
Roped off like the entry to a nightclub, there was a small dark chamber containing a “collaborative womb.” It was made of endometrial organoids grown from the stem cells of 12 donors, that were nourished on period blood, secured through legal acrobatics, from even more donors. Nearby, there was a contraption that printed medically-viable arteries. I could peek at already-done samples in their virgin state: ghostly tendrils suspended in clear nutritious liquid, waiting for the first vital rush. I had written, years ago, about sanguine elixirs of eternal life — how people once rushed forward at beheadings to catch the executed’s blood in vials and buckets, drinking it down for a chance to skip their own death. Now, billionaires steeped in their own sons’ plasma seems pretty normal, as does the sense that anything is feasible at a grotesque price. Unless I’m in love, I have no interest in forever3. It sounds crazy, but I felt so good there in the subterranean labs. Like it wasn’t so bad to want what I wanted, like it wasn’t so bad that my instincts sharpened so far away from “the natural.” What brought me closer to death or immersion, and away from bloodlines and individuation, was never an act. The whole girlstack thing wasn’t an ‘edgelordism’, but an investigation of the emptiness that I have always cradled so tenderly inside.
It’s not that I want to disappear. I just want words for the vertigo of disappearance that is neither against nor aligned with my will. For the feeling of a will that was never mine to begin with, but surges through my body with motorsport velocity – taking me to happinesses I don’t plan or intend, taking me to heavens no-one would recognise because they fell so far through the world’s centre — because they fell so far, they ceased to seem like anything at all.
Ethel Cain, Punish (2025)
Happy valentines’ day! xox
wow
Like REALLY good passages. Happy Valentine’s Day to you too xoxo