Sea Moths

The bees buzzing in my pocket bring an image of pale green hair, the colour of Luna moths or ectoplasm, pulled and fallen streaming from your wooden brush. Like a spray of ocean foam or tendrils of jellyfish, you too come from the sea, my dear friend.

Searching Ursula K. Le Guin’s line, “What cannot be mended must be transcended.”¹ I press copy, paste, send. The text floats in a blue bubble soon marked read. I try to await your reply. Fishing for emotional relief from thoughts of a world made empty by your possible absence, I fill more bubbles, hoping something will catch your attention.

My texts spin thoughts around cocoons and chrysalis. How they hold the time of waiting and melting and becoming-someone-changed, different, but nevertheless whole. How they contain the stuff of metaphors and metamorphosis, words which bear the story of Morpheus, son of Hypnos and the god of dreams. Still waiting, I describe Morpheus as a mammoth man-moth—clinging to the bark of a tree, drying his massive corpus as the sun sets. Taking off over fences, walls, and buildings. Fully formed with wings pounding like the beat of a hummingbird. Sensing the density of objects with an inner radar, he glides between branches that overflow into the night sky. Pulled ever upwards toward the blaze of a cold-white moon. Drawing nearer, he bumps into false fiery globes, their heat singeing his tails. Tasting dust through the coils of his proboscis, he moves on—flying through an open window, landing on a glowing-lavender painting. In this spiral, he vibrates! Consumed by colour!²

Morpheus—the fashioner, the shaper, the changer, the former—namesake of morphine, a risky release from pain; morphallaxis, the regeneration of a destroyed body part by the reorganization of its remaining cells; and biomorphic, a descriptor for all those sculptures by Henry Moore, Jean Arp, and Louise Bourgeois we adore.

Have you seen Bourgeois’ 1986 sculpture, Nature Study, at the Tate? A freestanding patinated bronze hand grasping a small recumbent figure whose snaky locks flow under and around the bearer’s wrist in tight intestinal knots. What might have appeared as a smothering or even violent gesture is made soft and supportive under the hand’s supportive touch. A cyclical expression of relation and rebirth.

Nature Study by Louise Bourgeois, 1986.

Also, do you remember Lisa Robertson’s essay where she explains how “Etruscan was a secret ceremonial language constructed on inversions” and how their word “form” might just be Greek’s “morphe” spoken backwards? A vital tautology in which form carries inside itself an inherent capacity for change.³

Hours later, you respond, “That’s funny. I actually named my chemo port Orpheus as a reminder to not fall into doubt and just keep walking my ass out of the underworld.”

Soon, another photo arrives: you in hospital with bandaged tube running under skin to some unseen device. Hanging from your neck, a relic from Ron Athey’s iconoclastic Martyrs and Saints (1992) performance where he uses BDSM techniques to explore rituals of passage as an escape valve from persecution—a charm appropriate for times in need of resilience and transformation.

I text back, “you’ve become a legit cyber-feminist.” You respond, “I thought being a cyborg would be sexier.” Me, “I know there’s a joke about holes in there somewhere.” You, “Hahaha.”

Weeks afterwards, the punchline arrives when I, too, am lying in hospital. As the nurse performs a trans-vaginal ultrasound, lubed-up wand in hand, Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” (1982) plays unironically on the radio … singing, heal me my darling, heal me my darling.

1. Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 1990), 273.

2. Elizabeth Bishop, “Man-Moth,” in The Complete Poems 1926-1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), ed. Alice H. Methfessel, quoted in Elizabeth Bishop, “Man-Moth,” Poetry Foundation,  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47537/the-man-moth. This section owes thanks to Bishop’s poem “Man-Moth”— inspired by a newspaper misprint for “mammoth.” Special thanks to Jessica Groome for co-writing this section from the vantage point of the man-moth flying over a Berlin skyline.

3. Lisa Robertson, “Garments/Etruscans,” in The Blue One Comes in Black: Liz Magor (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2015), 58.

[Lead image: Terracotta study of Blessed Ludovica Albertoni by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1671 — the figure of Albertini, a pious noblewoman lays on a mattress, her head thrown back on an embroidered pillow in mystical communion, the deep, rippling folds of her habit reflect the tension of her inner turmoil.]