My Table, Motherfucker

There is no such creature as a big man...

An asymptote is a parabola approaching an axis it will never actually reach. Ponder that, a deep and philosophical pleasure. To thank for this tidbit of genius, I have Ms. McClaren, my sophomore calculus teacher. But it was her chaotic mullet, khakis over loafers, and men’s button-down dress shirts that were frequently the center of school lunch discussions.

“Ms. McClaren is a dyke,” somebody would declare.

“Duh, look at her,” somebody would answer.

I’d agree, but I really didn’t care. I loved Ms. McClaren’s impassioned blackboard scribbles. At all times, she carried a stick of chalk. While speaking in front of the class, she would nervously tug at her poplin cuffs and bat her bare eyelashes. She never wore makeup; just eyelids, cheekbones, lips in the raw. It was calculus (and coaching girls’ volleyball) that brought color to her face.

The day we learned about asymptotes was a revelation. Exquisitely, she dramatized this concept, walking the length of our classroom to demonstrate. The mere word sparked across her lips like a struck match: asymptote!

“See…” She took a few steps toward the far wall. “Imagine! Imagine that if I walk halfway between that wall over there…and where I now stand…”

Her khakis swished; a few more steps.

“And then, if I walk half of that distance…” She sped up, the wild thrill of math in the air.

“And then, half of that distance…and Again…and AGAIN!—” She spun to face us with open arms, hands wiggling like Ta-dah! A magic trick.

“As long as I’m always walking exactly half of the preceding distance, I’d never actually get to the wall.”

Blank stares back at her.

“Watch!” She jogged the remaining distance to the wall. She planted her face against the surface, nose smashed. Her loafers were wedged against the baseboard. Speaking straight into the wall, she concluded, “The only reason I’m touching this wall right now…is because the dimensions of objects like my body and this wall here are different than what’s possible in the infinite division of numbers!”

Her smashed nose was a muffled trumpet, exclaiming, “We could divide half of this distance to infinity!” Grunting, she smacked the wall with her palm. Then spun toward us, a lit face of teeth. “Asymptote!”

I loved her.

***

I know it’s an asshole assumption to make, but whenever I hear people say, “We’re all one,” I imagine they cannot—and likely never will—experience this irrefutable truth. Maybe that’s because I often encounter it platitudinously as a defense against self-inquiry. Or because I believe it too, with all my heart, while knowing full well that I do not (cannot?) consistently live by it; an equal and secret part of me tallying atrocities “out there” as a buttress against the possibility that I may be next.

If I walk halfway between that truth over there…and where I now stand…

In Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness, Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson write, “In our times, the lack of a guiding mythology, the fragmentation of the world, politically, economically, philosophically, have led to widespread despair” (p. 209).

The purpose of a myth is to locate human experience in the largest possible community, the community of life in relation to the Divine. Without a genuine mythology, human experience remains imprisoned within boundaries that are exclusive rather than inclusive, boundaries that may shrink to solitary confinement. Now that the planet has become, in essence, one country, the necessity of finding a way to relate human experience at the personal level to the entire community of life becomes critical. The role of the Dark Goddess at this moment of mutation is crucial. Her Presence is essential to the emergence of a global community that includes not only human relationships but the relationship of human beings to every form of life on the planet and to the planet itself in relation to the Divine. (p. 227)

Great, I’m all in. Except for the nagging awareness that the Dark Goddess also wears a garland of human skulls freshly hacked from bodies. She holds a sword overhead, blood streaming from her lips. Inevitable submission to her blade severs one’s ego and ignorance. I love the idea, but since the ego is a psychic force that does not willingly relinquish its investments, I guess that means blood.

***

When I was very young, I begged my Dad to protect me from sharks in my cousin’s swimming pool. He promised to kill them and serve them for dinner. He took me wading in ponds to fish for bass, instructing me how to watch out for water moccasins. I never questioned whether or not he was a hero, because he was.

I was in first grade when, at the grocery store, a thief snatched a woman’s purse and ran out the door. Even though it was dark outside, Dad sprinted after him into an alley. He did not recover the purse, but for the rest of the evening, Mamma and I did hang on his arms like bags, a savior among us.

Just as easily he would explode like gunfire. In nanoseconds, time and space would warp around me, our orbits crashing like meteorites. Once, I was running away from him, and he kicked—the tip of his boot clipping my tailbone. My body flew forward, and my head crashed into the bumper of our car. I was thirteen and hated how small and fragile that made me feel. Standing up and dusting myself off, I was both crying and trying to pretend like nothing had happened. What stuck was an imperative to look over my shoulder.

These are seeds of my adolescent bloom. My first male intimacy.

I don’t know if I hate him. I’m still orbiting this question, forever dividing in half as I approach an answer.

***

In Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe, Brian Greene explains, “The mental faculties that allow us to shape and mold and innovate are the very ones that dispel the myopia that would otherwise keep us narrowly focused on the present” (p. 9). It isn’t clear whether or not conscious thought as an evolutionary feature will continue after humans disappear. We conjured our own exceptionalism as a unifying, inchoate balm for the perpetual ripping of ourselves to pieces. What we’re trying to get back to.

Grind up anything previously alive, pry apart its complex molecular machinery, and you’ll find an abundance of the same six types of atoms: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur… Fused in stars and ejected in supernova explosions, or jettisoned by stellar collisions and amalgamated in particle plumes, an assortment of atomic species float through space, where they swirl together and coalesce into large clouds of gas, which over yet more time clump anew into stars and planets, and ultimately into us. Such is the origin of the ingredients constituting anything and everything you have ever encountered. (pp. 73-77)

The day after Trump won the election I went down a dark tunnel on YouTube, watching numerous videos about nuclear war. Graphic simulations depicting what to expect, how to survive a nuclear winter, and how to…prepare. More than ever, I am one hundred percent certain I would not want to survive.

A few days later, I asked my therapist, “Have you ever watched YouTube videos about nuclear war?”

“No.”

Her expression, tone, and subsequent silence—a crystalline subtext.

But also, “Did you know that stars are essentially colossal nuclear reactors? Those motherfuckers are toying with the forces that birthed us.”

I think her eyes were beginning to glisten with tears—or maybe it was just allergies, who knows—but I felt ever closer to the axis.

I refuse to accept that it’s only a matter of time, maybe mere hours, before I explode. More like submitting to nonnegotiable, nonconsensual domination—which I have done and can do again. I don’t know how to be human any more than anyone else, though I pride myself on my striving for exceptionalism.

We yearn to be stars—even as it decimates us, unexceptionally atomizing us in a forever darkness.

***

I was getting plowed. Perfectly. Working hard to take all of him. I begged him into me as far as he could reach, all the way back to the day I was born.

Legs spread, ass up, I bucked into him to shorten the distance between our souls. The weight of him drove me into the bed, held me down like home, and secured me to my own lonely frame. Untethered emotions raced away from me in every direction as I became wet noises, sloppy nonsense. Years lost to me in fragments were resurrected around his driving cock, aggregating my history—a scattered clash of currents—into a single, unified ocean.

“Fuck me harder,” I pled in jostling syllables. Break in and steal each of my father’s buried relics.

There were stars in my eyes, my skull on a garland somewhere in space. But that vastness unmoored me, and I panicked. Parts of me that heretofore had been parcelled along both sides of my heart’s divide collided—because the dimensions of objects like my body and his are different from what’s possible in the infinite divisions between a father and son.

He was kissing me, and I couldn’t breathe. I felt pinned down as he came inside me. My cock was lost in a nameless void; soft and loathsome, its veritable signifiers.

And I realized that it was his gratuitous affection that shrunk me. Unarmed in his gaze was a lifelong reflection I have most feared: myself.

***

Every day it gets worse: the obliteration of political safeguards and DEI; the crushing of women, people of color, and trans folx. The list will certainly proliferate…maybe mere hours before we explode. In the end, Whiteness will save no one, isn’t it obvious? A superlative monomyth is already being crafted, and I doubt it includes humans.

I force myself to stay off of social media and limit my news intake to a few Substack newsletters. Writing and working has been difficult. I would rather sit motionless with my dogs and sleep on my partner’s chest while I can: these are becoming my most pertinent spiritual practices. I was never promised anything. My health and privilege alone should be enough to drive away every neurotic, narcissistic crisis, keeping me narrowly focused on the present.

In Sexuality Beyond Consent: Race, Risk, Traumatophila, Avgi Saketopoulou (I know, I know, her again) writes:

Because the social can provide a bolstering of one’s narcissism, it can also operate as a fortification of one’s resistance to encountering one’s opacity. In this sense, dominant social location (e.g. Whiteness) works on the side of resistance: by giving the illusion of being at home, it may embolden the subject’s narcissism, creating the (fragile) sense that problems need not be encountered—an illusion that requires constant reinforcement to be maintained. (p. 10)

This is where We’re All One and White Jesus collide. A fiction of progress, the telos of which is a fucking relentless fantasy of purity—a signifier in play with an opposing, abject coordinate. What this amounts to is a covert, infantile demand to be rescued from atrocities “out there” somewhere. Both crying and trying to pretend like nothing’s wrong at the same time. The more gargantuan the illusion, the more painful its forfeiture.

In The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva elaborates on the futility of keeping “consciousness apart from defilement, which, nevertheless, dialectically constitutes it” (p. 31). Said simply, we are all one—including our appalling and evermore explicit putrefaction.

I’m not positing atheism any more than I’m refuting theism. Just trying to preempt the blade of the Dark Goddess; and considering, with as little illusion as possible, what real spiritual responses to horror are available? That I keep coming back to Love as a choice—even for those who don’t deserve it—doesn’t make me happy. As I write this, I am already compartmentalizing its truth. But it’s the only way I can make sense of murder fantasies alongside the incredible effort it takes to willingly prop open my heart. Woodman and Dickson say it better:

Love is the dynamic of the opposites, holding them together in their opposition, free of the bondage of contractual union that may gratify the ego’s demand for a reconciling synthesis, a demand that places the ego’s restrictions or conditions upon the act of observation. This binding of the other to the demands of the ego is precisely what unconditional love rejects. (p. 212)

And if refusing Love, “Consciousness and unconsciousness are not in harmony. The metaphors that could bring the two worlds together are blocked” (p. 171).

By definition, metaphor means transformer; a crossing over from one state to another. Just as the body will attempt to heal itself if it is given the chance, so the psyche will attempt to heal itself; often that healing comes about through metaphor—an image that is part matter, part spirit—a physical picture indicating a spiritual condition in the dreamer… Living the metaphors often involves a leap of consciousness, which forces us to recognize not only gifts we buried long ago, but gifts we know not of. The leap involves taking responsibility for our own potential. Metaphor is a gift of the transformative feminine, the energy that connects psyche and soma. (p. 171)

There is no rescue. Why not skip over saviors in favor of demons? At least, in our collectively dedicated hands, their horns may be blunted.

***

Dad smacked my jaw shut when I mouthed off. My back slammed against the wall, he owned me, a foothold on his slog toward Jesus. We went on like that for eighteen years: a rush of blood and friction, fangs in bodies on edge. The bite of awakening cannot be forgotten.

He’d jeer, “You think you’re a big man?”

I tried to be, for too long; a weary endeavor.

I’ve fucked bodies of many sizes. There is no such creature as a big man. Any such is predicated on imagined geometry; a signifier in play with an opposing, abject coordinate: his mother—The Mother—always already devouring his cock. Uncover for a big man that nameless void, and he will manhandle you like his own discarded feelings.

But how the fuck do I now reveal my fangs to my sweet, sweet man—the one who sleeps in my armpit, my baby monkey? Over dinner, we chat about our day. We chew with our mouths closed and use the right silverware at the right times.

What I learned from Dad is that a dinner table is turf. You own it or you don’t.

One night, Baby Monkey was sitting across from me, chewing politely and smiling like missiles might not fire at any second. And every second they do not, we are ever closer. He was so precious I could have bitten him.

Instead, I stood without warning and cocked my trucker hat to the side. I pissed a jar full of gold and set it next to his greens and cornbread.

“Drink up,” I ordered.

He blinked. I towered over him. My expression, tone, and subsequent silence—a crystalline subtext. Keep your head down, boy, ain’t nothin’ to look at here.

He gulped it down. My dick was a rush of blood and friction, a big man.

This is my table, motherfucker.