Olivia's Diary IV

Read Part 1 here.

Part 2 here.

Part 3 here.

Sangre Sani, Sangre Sani…

A woman stands up. Black skin and holy fuck she is beautiful. A dreadful aliveness, utterly absolute and terrifying. Not merely beautiful, not just different, but transposed, like the contours of a familiar room after ketamine. She turns and speaks something to her traveling compassion (another woman, more plain). Words phrased not in French, English or Arabic, but something more smooth, more circular. Another world, another image.

Hips like the holy moon, reflected in the midnight watering holes of Africa. Thighs fixed and warlike, yet feminine as Venus in foam.

Black Babalon, screeching womb convulsions into violently sculpted eye flickers. To fuck with her must be like the sun temple, exploding into a thousand imperial reigns.

****

Wake up refreshed. That’s a first.

Face down on clean sheets, all pure and fresh, rich people fresh, where things seem washed in honey and essence of fig.

Still in my travel jeans. Oops.

Half-glide to the toilets, head in my hands. Sounds like the fountain in Hyde Park.

Back to bed feeling fucking weird.

What am I doing?

Probably more missed calls from Harold the Jew.

Check phone. Yep.

Text from Chloe, “Are you ok?”. Ugh.

Chloe. My sister. Pretty pain queen bee normal girl top-of-the-everything straight into Oxford Cambridge blablabla. Perfect little Blairaite born too late for Britpoppers. She and her yuppie friends are being crushed by the decades, all too well brought up to complain about it. North London leftism of the purest elite non-profit variety, everyone in environmental conservation or Palestine trousers or some trite refugee Live Aid spin off brand.

Chloe lives with Dad again now she’s single. I pity her. She hates me for being the vaguely successful outlier who exposes her bullshit.

I don’t say anything at all, I just live a rejection of her so-called principles. She’s charming, cosmopolitan and a believer in “One Humanity”, I’m cynical, misanthropic and intensely dedicated to this.

She loves that I’m a “queer artist” though, as if that’s some kind of qualification.

I’m a werewolf with a paintbrush.

I’d better text her back.

Does anyone remember Jacqueline Wilson?

She wrote beautiful little children’s books, we had them in school. Tracy Beaker was the famous one. Books about kids being let down by adults, adults being let down by adults, fairy tales for council estates, ordinary miserable shit Britain made magical.

Bleak, painfully bleak, but also beautiful. Through her, I could imagine growing up rough, not as a middlebrow madam of lesser private school England.

They always had these pretty covers, smiling childish cartoons, the innocence untainted by the ordinary human horror within. What Peep Show was for comedy, Jacqueline Wilson was for children’s books. Modern life in all its millenarial disappointment.

****

Blood Sappho #7

Model: Zoe Lacette

Style of Photography: Naive, Amateur, Blurred

Zoe stands nude, hands stretched overhead, displaying the scars on her arms, her chest, her belly and her thighs. Some are faded and grey, others darker, fresher.

“I have come to see my body as a work of art. It is a process, over which I have only some say.”

A closeup of her chest follows, displaying heavy scars etched into the flesh above her breasts. Silver bars are pierced through her nipples.

“I have tried to stop it, but my body wants to open itself. Who am I to play God?”

Closeup of her belly and pubis, dark hair shading her labia, scars exploding up her flanks like fireworks.

“Women open themselves and fill the holes with silicone. We treat it as socially normal. What’s not normal about me?”

Closeup of her face, sharp cut black hair, round eyes and a pretty nose.

“I just want to live without other people telling me what’s healthy.”

In my darker moments I wonder if all of this, all of me, is a failure to engage with the world on terms that actually matter.

Ordinary people don’t need extremism, they need spaces to live, work, and breed with dignity. That’s what the left wing press says if you can stomach reading it. I can, sometimes.

I fear that my entire artistic and sexual oeuvre is a species of high velocity, mechanized trauma, not exactly designed but certainly optimized by the pressures of algorithms and virtual traffic. A constantly expanding hyperreality of war, where bodies are continually torn open and bystanders are but frozen ghosts haunting the plastic.

And I, Blood Sappho, am a medium for their entry.

Curiatrix, perhaps I should call myself. Psychopompos to imperial decay and capital new-vice.

As a poet, I aim to disguise a spiritual message in my sketches. The wings of Blake beat over me, shadow-like, as I write, skellig-figures wrapped in basement dust, banishing beauty unto my severed figures. Frames of ordinary life, machine distress and physical intimacy rolled into inkwells and feathers.

We all fuck ourselves quietly to strange horrors, and with that in mind I can sympathise with the legion converts to Islam and Orthodoxy. Sympathize, though never condone. Crowley appreciated their masculine vigour, he just thought they were stupidly materialistic in their vulgar eternities. The wiser traditions have welcomed the visions of the witch without seeking to burn her. It is a curiously Abrahamic affliction, and perhaps that which has annihilated our priestly cults in the 20th century. Afraid to face our spirit, we import barbarian creeds, evolved for desert bloodshed and starvation.

They may burn us and hate us, but the Queen of Night plays her aria, ever waking, ever watching.

Gina peeling an apple with a knife.

Bright red skin, winding around her fingers, single, delicate coil, waxxy and sweet.

“Olivia” she says, looking up. “Will you have a seat?”

I sit.

“Did you sleep well?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“You were asleep five hours.”

Eyes dart to the windows, last rays of light in a darkening sky.

Shit. Harold will be making calls.

“I was about to ask for coffee”

“We can do coffee. Or we can do something stronger.” She shrugs.

“I’ll take a drink.”

“Si, me too.”

Naked apple and knife left behind on the table. The skin is hissing.

She crosses to where I sit, stands behind me, places a hand on my head.

I shiver, sparks flaying down my neck and spine.

Inhaling apple and roses.

“I’m so glad you’re here” she whispers, pulling my head backwards to rest against her. Chest against my scalp, fingertips gently massaging.

Do whatever you fucking want with me.

“I am busy with cooking this evening” she says, gesturing towards a tray of cut fruit. “I always like to welcome a guest this way. Do you like apple cake? You have something similar in England, no?”

I nod.

Fingertips biting into my scalp turning my body soft.

“Good,” she continues. “And tomorrow we will be together. I show you the island. Tonight, you do as you please. Drink, eat, swim, write, take photographs. Nothing is off limits, dearest Olivia.”

Lips against my forehead, and off in search of a bottle of red vino.

****

Millennium domestick abuse vagrant on walls, peak of popular vulgarity ringing, high culture all but vanished. New Labour working its way across the commons, turning all to gold and shit. Thank God for my schooling. All the other girls, mind, went in for the moral superior complex, Slug and Lettuce Clapham Common 0.7gshitcocaine nightlife wannabes. Everyone aspiring to be a fucking Kardashian Only Way Is Essex Love Island faggirl bitch.

Back when I still had friends, they went down that rabbit hole. Emily and Annita getting excited over Arctic Monkeys, posh girls screeching for Sheffield’s grotty fry up finest. Greasy spoons in between champagne Christmas totty lunches at Tiffanies, Daddy’s a Tory but “I still love him” course you do love, he has your future on credit.

First year I did the festival circuit, Reading United, off we all go on the train down from Birmingham, Emily’s boyfriend stacking MDMA and weed in his asscrack, everyone buzzed to get high and fucked with the riff raff.

Freddie and Harry wearing their Amsterdam caps.

Always love the assorted accents of England on the k-hole circuit, posh kids sniffing, Deano and Stacey looking keen, mandem and Muslims hooded out, stacking Ps and wrecking BPDs on the darkside of the industry.

We caught a gang robbing our tents, the Rugby Boys chased them but of course they were outnumbered by the nebula of class debris, cousins and boys springing out of nowhere screeching

“Come den bruv” –

“You accusin’ man of theft” –

“Fuck off fam” –

“Your posh gal wants man next innit” –
“Wasteman still” –

Pointless drama minus a few black eyes but I suppose it’s the bed we’ve made for ourselves.

Feral hip hop beatz the mutant mess of multikulturalizms.

I got lucky but Emily’s cash and keys were taken (as usual), as was Freddie’s weed. She cried and he swore he’d fuck them up and nothing changed.

At least I got to see Green Day play Jesus of Suburbia, the highpoint of my millennial angst, a record that has slowly unfolded its depth as the world aged through it (I was 6 when it came out).

Son of rage and love, hand over heart grenade, it’s not over till you’re underground.

And screaming.