Right now im thinking about the idea of being able to be next to one another. I do not know if there is a purpose to life, but i know that if there is, it is to be next to one another. i’ve been thinking about this idea ever since i’ve read some of the words of Hil Malatino and T. Fleischmann as I was writing my thesis.
In Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad, Hil Malatino writes of intercorporeality, specifically of trans intercorporeality. Derived from the notion of intersubjectivity developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Malatino details intercorporeality as the idea that, “our body schemas are developed through intersensorial relationship with the world in which we’re embedded and, by extension, through intercorporeal relations with others,” and thus trans intercorporeality refers to the ensembles of touch, connection, embodied intimacy, and identification that circulate between trans subjects. In short, it is a term that Malatino uses, “for thinking what happens when trans bodies meet and intermingle.”
In T. Fleischmann’s Time is The Thing A Body Moves Through, the author writes: Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about two people next to one another. Who is next to each other, for instance, and why are they next to each other? Or why not? That sort of thing. I love this line of thinking. Proximity as a conduit of intimacy. Points of contact enabling touch or something deeper, if you allow it to. Lines radiating outward from us in every direction, grabbing hold of whoever is around us… One of the reasons I'm thinking about this is that I’m not supposed to be next to anyone, in the sense that I never knew people like me existed, so I never imagined myself next to someone or not. Being a person next to someone feels precious, especially while so many forces in the world work with such violence to make sure I am not next to so many people, and although it is violence, also, that brought me here in the first place, that is why I am next to who I am next to.
I had read Imogen Binnie’s Nevada a while back, but when I was over my friend Rosie’s apartment, I saw that she had a newer copy of the novel, with Binnie’s afterword in it. In the afterword, Binnie writes, “It is awful never to have had offline trans community. The internet is great, but it is not a substitute for being in physical space with other trans people who care about at least some of the same shit that you do, smelling and seeing and hearing one another, nervous systems engaging directly.”
I have had the pleasure of seeing Alex Walton, one of Boston’s great transsexual rock n’ rollers, play music live a couple times. Seeing and hearing her play the titular track off of her album SHAME MUSIC always hits very hard. As important are the words she says right before the band plays. At one show she prefaces it with, “it’s one for anybody who’s spent an amount of time in place where they don’t want to be, surrounded by people who deny you” At another show she says, “it’s about being less alone than you were.” I had the chance to talk to Alex Walton about the world. She says one of the most important things, like being next to one another, is just “seeing each other.”
I see myself forgetting what’s really important sometimes. I’ve been thinking about those words in Binnie’s afterword lately. There are many many important people in my life that I have met through the internet, but sometimes when existing in the world gets very difficult, there is just something about being physically next to another that makes you really see with the fact of just being, that so many things do not actually matter other than being alive and being able to cherish being able to be next to each other.