I had a challenging night last night. My mom came to my art opening on zoom. Apparently she didn’t get the trans day of visibility memo. She accidentally unmuted herself before things started and turned to her husband to say “oh look at [Dead Name]. He looks just like my sister!” I took her sister’s (who died to mental illness in her 20s) name - Penny - as my new middle name. The irony is not lost on me.
In my working through my feelings about I came back to Genesis and Lady J Breyer P-Orridge’s The Pandrogeny Manifesto.
The body is used by the mind as a logo for the self before we are able to speak language. It is almost a holographic doll, constructed by outside expectations even before our body is born. If the baby’s gender is known earlier in the pregnancy, the embryo will to some extent hear and feel the parent’s preconceptions. These hopes and expectations are far more complex than we imagine. Even the name we are assigned is another holographic program in the prophetic story of who we are to become. Our identity is fictional - written by parents, relatives, education, society. [...] We are not trying to look our best, or even look better. We were happy with that. Reunion of a fragmented self to create a self determined identity is important to us.
I set it to techno
https://soundcloud.com/scarletdame/pandrogny
Today is April 1st. It's been a day of beginnings for me for many years. Of relationships. Of businesses. Of paths. Today I'm launching The Outwork Accelerator with a small group of artists to whom I feel deeply connected. It's the first step on a longer and exciting journey towards building a community and practice together focused on sharing the work outwards generously and inviting others in to platforms that we own independent of social media. It's a statement of freedom, a call to action, and a dedication in service to ourselves and others. Above all, it's a commitment to process.
I've been focusing on the process and participation for the Accelerator itself - my own web materials are lagging a bit behind. Wouldn't it be helpful if someone was creating a container to work on that stuff? Oh good! That's me! Looking forward to participating in the process. The best way to follow along is by signing up here.
Along with my continued advice to take my own medicine, here's my personal 10 year plan.
In 10 years i'm sitting in my studio. Light is flooding in large and ancient windows. I smell old wood and cold stone, rafters hewn by hands of another age. I'm sitting at my tea table. My hands move slowly in practiced patience, never rushing.
My tattoos disappear into the sleeve of a silk robe given to me on a trip last year to a trans artist's studio in China. Most of my body is now covered in interconnected tapestries mapping the symbolic evolutions of my spiritual process. My body feels young and supple and I feel at home and joyful within it. I've had some gender affirming surgeries and I feel connected to my original form.
I feel the gentle swell of my breasts with my breath the curve of my hips as I ground down. My favorite physical features are my smile lines and the small shock of platinum white hair amidst my long my back length blonde. My voice rests where I feel comfortable and I take pleasure in shifting its perceived gender according to given situations.
I watched the thick black tea liquor pour from the gaiwan. A shou puerh from Taiwan, a favorite but not too expensive. Present in a complex depth without being opaque.
I write. My morning pages form the foundation for my life.
I hear my partner stir and the other room. She's flown in for the week. We meet often in different parts of the globe. In different parts of our heart. She's one of a small number that I choose to share my inner heart with. Yet I give freely to everyone. I try not to play favorites. Everyone gives me something unique, something special, a perspective impossible for me to provide. I smile feeling my endless love for her. Feeling it buoyed by my love for others, for myself.
Today is April 1, 2031. It's time to begin again as it is every day. Time for beginnings and a time for endings.
I write. I let myself imagine.
I reach down and in, finding the deep connections that spread infinitely outwards, and I ask them to carry me, to allow me to be their servant, their messenger, their lover.
I repeat the mantras that have carried me.
I'm am awake in a dream.
I allow myself to dream. Part the tendrils of consensual shared reality that block me from the direct perception of the divine. I step through. There's nothing beyond our wildest imaginations. Only our courage to travel there. I pray for courage.
I call to mind and then down into my heart the faces and energies and work of the 1000s of artists that I have worked with in the last 10 years. I feel their pulsing creativity - interconnected, outward reaching, generative, generous. I move along the network in my mind. Artistic and personal narratives intertwine with the hopes and dreams of those they wish to serve. They are in service of the process. The artifacts of change.
I think of the experiences and work I have seen grow, among, around, and within us. The profound, the intimate, the monumental, the tearing, the grief stricken, the beautiful, the soft, the violent, the confronting, the human, the machine, the energetic, the divine.
In the presence of all the work, I allow myself to be changed. I give as I have strived to teach - completely, and without reservation. I give knowing where my energy will be received and resonate with generative feedback and where it will be consumed, already planning the ties to other parts of The Outwork that have strong processes in learning to recognize the need for personal accountability and boundaries.
I think of my own work. It's threads far reaching and particularly bright for me. Not because it was ever more important or more successful. There are far more publicly visible, wealthy, politically influential nodes in the Outwork. But because it is my own and it reflects me. My music has taken me around the world. My favorite gigs always in the old places. I take few others now. And the new places. The ones that would have been impossible 10 years ago.
I still consider myself a musician first. But my work is more about experiences than music. It always has been. Electronics and artificial intelligence work to form a long standing partnership. A cast of actors and characters within experiential dramas, between the spirituality both man and machine. I am more technoshaman than leader. I create worlds, I destroy worlds. Kali - sister, mother, lover. I offer myself to thee.
I exist in many places at once. I move in many circles. But the most important is right here. In these moments that I take with myself.
I live in on borrowed time. I remind myself at my first show 10 years ago of the coffin of rope, my future shroud, that hands on my wall at eye level.
I ask not escape death, but to embrace it. To live this day fully in service of life. My art, my activism, my achievement - I exist only to advocate for the awareness of our truth and the joyful defiance against death.
I pray not for another 10 years. But to be present in gratitude for this moment. I pray for the same now.
Knowing that is never the vision, never the ending, that is fulfilled. Rather I am filled in this moment wit the abundant possibility of life.
Never forget the cosmic joke that is the certainty in the best laid plans. I am a moth in the wind. Come fly with me before we return to ground.
I am awake in a dream.