Batesian Mimicry. I wanted the biggest butterfly in the world.

Little glass jar. Aposematism, inertia; forward motion: this constant unhappiness is a good thing. Pitter-patter-little-glass-jar. I have become a wax figurine.

Biology textbook. Title: butterfly life cycle: a manual. You pick it off the shelf. Fragile wings beat only when asleep.

But you do not need to correctly balance C6H12O6 + 6O2 →  6CO2 + 6H2O to believe that life, the self, the core of it all: is cyclical. This doctrine repeats itself when the seasons change. Ostinato in minor key.

If you die having never found your self, people will continue pulsing towards their destinations. This is the tragic truth. Ants in their hypnotic pheromone-induced death spiral. One dies and the others continue. Stepping over the silent corpse as though it were a crack in the road to enlightenment.

But silence is needed to transcribe treble clef into alto, listen to what’s speaking within you. G5 to F4. B4 middle line moves to B3 second space. C5 third space moves to C4 middle C.

Waters break before contractions. But this is not a rebirth, it is me, standing in front of Matthew Wong’s The Realm of Appearances in the Albertina in Vienna, and crying for the first time after antidepressant withdrawal. Modern medicine will do that. Try to drug you away from finding your self. We seek clarity in the spaces we leave open, subconsciously. The pursuit of self is a pitiable venture when preoccupied with extinction. Not the species but the individual. This has become a narcissistic dance. Natural selection, transmutation, elbows and wrists wrap around, and I am dancer and partner. Subject of study and portrait artist. In a thousand faces I evolve onto the page. Paint me chin up, face down. I am Schiele, Picasso, a Cloisonnism-Gaugin landscape. Chugging collective unconscious, the self must be plucked from the melting pot.

Search for the self begins with wanting to be held. I write it over and over. Ostinato: I want to be held. I want to be whole. There is an intimacy in learning how to balance equations. C6H12O6 + 6O2 → 6CO2 + 6H2O. He likes numbers, too. Intimacy is solved by applying matrix algebra. Self is a system of linear equations. 

I try him on as a lover. In the morning, he pours two cups of coffee. Taxidermy steam escapees screech on the stove. Does the butterfly feel the prongs of entomology pins. Deoxygenated blood runs dark, bitter. It tastes burnt; I feign sweetness. Feeds from nectar via the proboscis. There is a certain shade to the self which I am searching for. It cannot be steeped in try-on-lover’s cup of coffee. Sometimes the proboscis demands decay. Species: Red Admiral, Question Mark, Pearly Eye. They feed on rotting peaches for amino acids and nitrogen.

Dichotomy of being human. I have enough cracks to be convinced of my mortality.

RCH(NH2)COOH, N2. Nitrogen is only stable as a pair.

The self begins not with a steady footing and the affirmative this is me! but with a spinning. Both have repetitive spots and stripes which travel in the wrong direction. The self is a series of haunted landscapes where Wong could never belong. This is the tragedy of being tactile. Curse of the clay.

Everyone files out of the dimly lit room playing the documentary before me as I clutch my manual to breathe.

I linger in moments of my own humanity. Corridors. It is not always I feel so caught up in these black amorphous episodes I liken to hypnosis. Ants in a death spiral. Rotten apple Eve tossed in Eden.

I sit and stare at a rippling body of water. A stranger invites my indecision, asking how long I could study it. Navy on blue or blue on navy, the sides keep switching.

Vertigo means I am alive. We are shrapnel fragments of what we have consumed and what we spit out. This is why I take my coffee sour. 

Five domes left, pushed around the plate and staring back at me, a sushi restaurant down a side alley in Paris. Five pairs of saumon et avocat eyes. An army of crinkled, furry edamame shells. Knobbed cartridge caterpillars, with beans unpicked. The blanks. Butterfly life cycle: a manual.

The self is caterpillar-shaped.

Small puddle of soy — I spilt it on the dark wood. Cannot eat another bite from the tree of knowledge. I pull out Sexton for company. Only she understands this feeling.

It is a sweaty process, amalgamation of self. Like the meeting of two strangers in bed. They wrestle to find the hinges to hook themselves together, become one vessel. Pulse through flesh. Molten wax turns solid, shaped to the contours of another’s back. He pours it over gently. Deems the mould its finished shape.

We are veiled, gossamer to opaque. Don cloaks of distraction in rehearsal of who we are meant to be. Practice makes permanent, not perfect. Repetition does not guarantee finding the solution.

Concept: doll in doll’s house. Stage directions: master puppeteer, real or imagined, pulls on strings. Script: There is no slave more blind than she who believes himself a master. No master more cruel than he who believes herself a slave. Curtain closes: rest implied. Norma to Pollione: I can, at last, make you as unhappy as I myself am. When I cannot find the words, I use those of others. The self is borrowed. A work of plagiarism with a shirked author.

Rehearsals erase past pattern recognition. They call these extinction memories. The self cannot be a phobia. Dichotomy or affinity between the compartmentalised and holistic selves: you choose. To admit method in your madness is to paint the other faces you show the subject. Am I multiple faces in one, or faces tacked onto one body. How do I distort. Do I ask you to paint my side profile, or do I look you dead in the eyes.

Lispector, Água Viva: This contact with the invisible nucleus of reality is of such purity. 

I want to die whilst my heart still beats.

I feel too alive for certain cities. Rimbaud says we must not seek out entertainment. Escape is in the present tense. Topping up my red lip for the seventh time that day in the little silver antique mirror with Van Cleef & Arpels Paris engraved on the front, I reread the day’s fruits from a café in another suitcase acropolis.

Everything I do is in some perverse affirmation that I exist.

The way I draw on my cupid’s bow to protrude beyond the pink borders. Self-prettification, stencilled-on-self, you can re-place and re-draw with a looking glass found in your pocket.

The self-help guide markets this as “you can decide who you want to be!” But the voyeur dissolves in the self-help aisle. Voyeurism is self-indulgence. Decadence. Huysmans. Tortoise shell encrusted with Compostelle hyacinth and Sudermanian ruby. The precious stones in Revelation Chapter 21 mock me. The self is the source of polarised light. It fulfils predictions uttered into existence years prior. Anisotropic properties: the self disperses.

The diagram has an arrow slicing through it. The Bible is a spear to the self. How can one find the self if in continual denial of it. Perhaps I see spears instead of blunt objects and two-dimensional arrows. Compostelle hyacinth and Sudermanian ruby are anisotropic when shot with polarised light. I have been shot with enough anger to tranquilise a horse. I put my Bible down; the words already course through my veins.

Life imitates life with eyes closed. Most of the time I am mid-sublimation. The self is a paper-maché city, tactile, palpable. I’ve been wearing black for too long. I would let myself be pulled into a line of traffic; this hesitation is destroying me so. Bear takes a jab under the bubbles. But impatience is not a virtue. It does not reward with fresh fish.

To establish self, I must first believe I exist. This is the tricky part. But even if this is a lie, the first step in telling one convincingly is to believe the prophecy yourself. And lying is a universal talent which does not require a stained mouth.

One must be careful not to spend too much time looking in the mirror. Mirrors. Distorting glass veils. Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who is the jester of them all. Beggars and fools go on pilgrimages to the self. The self is not your destination. You are not a freak in the city of circus acts.

I catch my mother staring back. We are so drastically different; the self is not hereditary. Nor stocked in different sizes to try on. The self is not convenient. The garment, the self, is an extension of you. In this, sometimes it digs into our heels as we learn to walk.

Contagion doesn’t seep through flesh the same.

I am not a good patient zero. I am missing a chunk of a vital organ. I live in states of selective amnesia. Elbow through goopy fog to emerge from the chrysalis. I try to sculpt what I can from the clay which cracks as I try to seal it in place.

It is a pitiable cycle.

—

[Retracted] asks if

the train ride through

Belgium is pretty & 

I suppose it was 

but it didn’t look too

different from England &

I think a lot of things

are pretty because they

are different from

what our eyes are used

to seeing or trained to

look at we learnt about

desensitisation in the

neuroscience module

or was it psychology

it seems more something which 

forces its slimy way 

into your head than 

existing in the

natural circuitry extinction

memories 

stored in the medial 

prefrontal cortex

desensitisation can be

systematic sensory

involve dopamine

depleted stores don’t

overwhelm the receptors

lose your subject

of study confuse the field of 

view de-focus principle 

of reciprocal

inhibition means you

cannot be tranquil and

fearful at once inhibit the

amygdala don’t feel

fear distorts the shadows

on the walls as you stare

laying on the tracks

abstracted from the

carriage your seated self

habituation has

already taken place how

can I find this scenery

not pretty but not repulsive

my two eyes hollow from

looking always 

at those same things

double exhaustion

blur distortion

charcoal on fingerprints

make strokes on paper

smudge the lines
paper maché process

shot Gaugin painting

gives me double

vision

but my eyes they’re

are not averse habituation

non-associative

learning

taken too far

turns into loss of the 

person de

person

alisation two cavernous

eyes loss of self

belief desensitisation turns

one to violence in our

pursuit of self

I become too urgent

to admire the view

from the train window

shutter pressed

too far down

impatient focus

endless repetition

oil paint absorbed

into canvas flat planes

Cloisonnism rejected

realism multiple

dimensions falling

flat trails

[Retracted] asks if

the train ride through

Belgium is pretty & 

I suppose it was 

but it didn’t look too

different from England &

I think a lot of things

are pretty because they

are different from

what our eyes are used

to seeing or trained to

look at

I reply the train

ride was pretty

pretty fine.