Have you ever tickled a man’s soul?
That man may be frowning, but if you feed him the right bite, pour him the right drink, run your finger just right down his chest, that man will split in half. His heart will be in your hands.
But what do you do with a man’s heart? Once it’s in your hands, it’s going to stop beating. It becomes a mess, a nuisance. Preserving it is achievable, but it never remains as plump or lively as when it was thumping strong in that man’s chest. It slowly greys on your shelf. Sometimes it starts to smell. The cost of formaldehyde or epoxy or whatever you’re using can be high, and its use requires expertise. If you’re going to preserve hearts, you’ll need to go through a crowd of men before you get a good technique down.
Once I learned how to take a heart it became inconvenient. Leaving so many men around, drained and torn. There was too much to get rid of, too much left on me. On my clothes. Bleach doesn’t get it out. Hearts are weak, with only a rhythm to distinguish one from another, and once that stops, once you change it. The man is worthless, the heart boring. Dead.
And that’s it, isn’t it? You can’t see the damage on a heart when it’s stopped. There’s no permanence to the thing unless it’s ruined. And a ruin may excite the imagination, but in the way a grotesque screams disgust at you. Something else took possession of that heart before you; it’s so impersonal. That obesity heart, fatty and hardened, gives only shock value, revulsion. Alcoholic cardiomyopathy, pity and disgust. I graduated from mild curiosities. I wanted passion, yes, but I wanted to own the whole soul of the man. I wanted his brain as well.
Once you reach this point, start taking heads. It’s still messy, but there’s so much more to do with one. You can knock it around, kick it about, cradle it, kiss it. And the faces… are satisfying. The heart feeds the head, but the head governs whether the heart beats. And once you take a head the heart stops.
The dead heart is a busted drum; the owned head is a symphony frozen. Every twitch and tic from the tug of a neural string pulling the face into an impression of sensation, memory, feeling. Beautiful. To take a head you must take in that person. You must learn their buttons and fibers, their bodies and lives. Where they have been. Where they think they are going. How far a poke will ripple across their flesh, how much a strike will shatter their posture. To prod a man, to tease and compel him into a perfect portrait, there is a deep satisfaction in this.
To sculpt a feeling in a man, the perfect moment, exactly what you desire. To capture that moment, to freeze it, to take that head and place it on your wall. It’s more than art. It’s alchemy.
-05/13/2017
