I am brushing the hair of my ugliest doll. I am made of nonsense, and I, like the doll, am crumbling and crackling and the edges. Bits and pieces of me are crumbling, falling off completely, to flutter down and make a technicolor splash on the sidewalk. At these times, the hair, the nonsense, everything, I struggle to speak, words splash and thrash against the walls of my throat. Instead, I am babbling like a muted monkey, reduced to a swollen, babbling tongue and hand gestures like that of a doll. Thinking in gestures, trying to do something, anything else but this doll consumes all direction of thought.
About the doll; she has this terrible, rotting smell you can sense from two kilometers away. She reeks of singed, smoky flesh and sunburned vomit. I smell her and I struggle and I hate her and I love her. Despite her smell, she means well, or at least I think she does. When she feels too low to the ground, she jumps on cars, just as well. That crunching sound of cheap metal creates a familiar CRRRUUUNCH that no one likes to hear. And I hear her, the doll, me. My doll lets her mind run wild like the meadows you’ve never seen but know are there, like the inherited feelings of everything.
I pass through the chaotic, zigzagged streets of Madrid. The unceasing horns and roundabouts. The smell of piss on concrete and pervading cigarette smoke. A busy city with beautifully calm people. Trying to rid myself of my doll following behind me, I wonder: is there a focal point to everything? A center, if you will, to the circles swirling around the streets, to the atoms spinning pretty inside of us all? And where is the salvation for the man inside of the dingy old suit in which he lives when he stays out until 6 am to catch the metro… reeking of something and smoking cigarettes where he shouldn’t, offending his surroundings. And as I try and fail to maneuver around him, he still approaches, looking scared and disgusted, and I sends him away with a sharp look and several Nos. But I too am bleeding from somewhere deep down. Bleeding from a deep abyss saturated with ruby red blood, dripping slowly, seeping out and flooding the subway tunnels.
And all of this is a function of dreams, hopes, and passion. The doll is no longer following me so I must be following her. I pass by a steamy, crowded Spanish bar and see her sitting around the table with what appears to be an expat and an idealist. And no one must find her as revolting as I do. Then I am there. Within her. With the passionate youths sipping vermouth debating the merits of passion. The expat sees the terrible things that have occurred in the name of passion but the idealist believes idealism is horribly misconceived as a damning function of youth; a temporary naivety. The idealist defends passion until the end. A tragically beautiful necessity to the evolved human consciousness. But she searches and searches her bag for a pen, a writing utensil of any kind. Searching and searching like a drunken, romantic quest. Two lighters but no pen. “what is happening to me?” she cries, “what has become of this cruel cruel world?”
The doll spends her hours converting Celsius into Fahrenheit, staring at the wall, inundated in a cliché, fully immersed. She vomits rainbows and sometimes finds herself trapped inside of the mirror on the fast train from Munich after she walks up and down the train past the Oktoberfest zombies; the drunken debaucheries wishing desperately to belong. So the boys and girls collide pathetically with one another in the most intimate of ways. She feels nauseous, asking who the fuck am I? Who the fuck are you? And from the mirror she sees humanity, or at least a slice of it, catapulted into a train bathroom that doesn’t lock. Like the blonde girl, curled over the toilet, lovingly regurgitating everything society would like her to be. Vomiting for a red-faced man she met on the train. A red-faced man who ignores that small golden band once filled with promises while he instead braids the hair of strangers… beautiful, blonde strangers with the same loving, sexually repressed touch he gives his six-year-old daughter waiting back in Antwerp. “Where’s Daddy?” she must ask, excited to hear his stories when he returns. Excited to joyfully receive the dress he brought back for her, perhaps a very particular dress reminiscent of the braided blonde girl in the train bathroom. His red face, how slim and smooth her thigh felt encased inside of his red, braiding hands, how he pulled those two braids with the force of a thousand ocean waves as they bobbed up and down in the center of that circular train bathroom.
The doll watches the red man and the blonde girl, carnal dance moves scratching their various itches. Eventually, when he returns home to Antwerp, his child is happy, his wife has missed him, and he, therefore, feels pleasant as well. His pretty, dollish little girl will grow and grow. Not quite as ugly as my own doll but those sad braids continue to bear striking similarities to mine. And maybe one day she’ll be lucky enough for red, wrinkled hands to braid her hair the way her father once did. She will reflect and project the stories of a thousand dolls and a thousand years; bleeding all over the sidewalk. Fifteen years later, she’ll be saying, “can you at least ask me how my day was before you fuck me? Before you choke me and pull my hair and groan louder than I do as you touch me, infatuated with your own talent?” she asks this of a man in the alley, a faceless lover, knowing she would let him do as he pleased if she didn’t already feel so empty inside.
So she casts him aside and turns another other boy, the one she gave her heart to. Does he feel anything? she wonders. Anything at all? When I step on his fingers and crush those little bones, he only smiles back. And such indecisiveness kills her more than any other man ever has. “FEEL SOMETHING” she cries, “HATE ME LIKE I HATE YOU!” “HATE ME LIKE I HATE MYSELF!” If only he knew what she would do for him, if only she knew that he already does know. Because she would cut her very own heart out, squeeze it and smear icy blue blood allover him, down his throat, if only he had asked.
Instead she has many more drunken sidewalks down which to stumble. After all, art is dead. After all, we humans have self-exhausted and have nowhere to turn but to self-destruction.
But enough of this star struck nonsense, enough self-speculation. I bleed nonsense and right now I have hair to brush. This doll of mine. The ugliest doll, let me reiterate once more. She dreams anxiously of being late and always missing the person for whom she is looking. Despite her self-perceived worldly knowledge, her head is on the brink of completely exploding. And no, not figuratively. She is my ugliest demon, my pestilential friend. She is Bob Dylan’s Rolling Stone and Yeats’s Stolen Child. Except she has been a rolling stone for as long as she can remember. As long as anyone can remember. So all of that rolling has left her filthy and as dirty as her soul. And that hair I’ve brushed for so long is falling out by the heaps. Shit. So I’ve learned we’re all along for this ride. We’re all grabbing the longest knife we can find and sticking it so far into her brain that her head finally does explode. All over you, all over me… a brilliant mix of concentric circles, intoxicated synapses and multicolored grey splattering the walls; covering this page, down our throats, making love to my soul.
-GG 0915