(1991-1998)
(heresy)
HARANGUE
I tell you that you need to do this and you ignore me. I've seen this and it's
true. I've seen it happen. If you do what I tell you, then they will see
you and they won't see you. They'll see you differently. Put on the clothes
of another and you will see that what I am telling you is true. If you take
on the markings of others, then you can be a particle with them and they won't
see what you really are and then you can do what you like...(gap here)...you
need to make yourself poor and then you will make yourself pretty. You will
swim in your own wishes. You will be beautiful and clean and if you go in the
clothes of another, you will wear that skin for awhile and when you look at
your face in the glass it will be the face of an angel that tricks us and
leaves us happier than we were before. You have nothing. You have to be
empty like a wire that sound comes through. If anyone asks you for your hair
or for a piece ofyour skin, than youshould give it to them.
(This is a fragment from a tape retrieved when city workers found an area
beneath the subway littered with mattresses, empty food cans and other
signs that people had been living there. There were many tapes containing
fragments like this one. The group who lived in the area may have been the
Blood Friends who were active about six months ago. Members of the group wore
simulated police uniforms put together from cast off clothing. Observers
consistently report being"fooled" by this disguise although they usually
recall a detail, such as a pair of brown shoes, that might have revealed the
impersonation if they had noticed it earlier members of the group managed to
obtain guns and usually hats and badges]. The Blood Friends would, as
individuals, alternately preach "sermons" to crowds and fire their guns into
the air sometimes hitting and doing minor damage to office buildings. There
were arrests and the group soon dropped out of sight.)
submitted - Oswald, April 19, 1991
HUMILIATION
I am inside my skin. I am inside of air and when I outline the edges of it
with a razor or a piece of glass, then I feel light outline too. I am
a sign to others. I am here to make them see the value of what they are told.
Their eyes skip over meas though I were something that hurt. I am a vacant
glass for you. I will show you what you love and what you fear. You think thatyou have to behave yourself but you should be like me. They want the nails
from my hands and feet. They want the hair that falls out of my head in clumps.
They want the skin that I leave floating on top of the water that I dip myself
in. When they taste these things from me, these pieces of me...they might want
to go with me to where I go...to be like me. I could make you so happy.
Falling away and out of everything that is known and seeing a strange
handshaking and dirty at the end of your own wrist. I can make you like what I
am. You can open your skin like I do and feel the sun and the wind dry and
burn you. There are cracks at the sides of my mouth and I laugh all the time.
Happiness pushes into me and makes my heart slip into my hands.
(from the confession of Marguerite Porete - November 5, 1996)
HERESY
They recognize each other by the marks that they have carved on their wrists.
They all look alike. They are uniformly emaciated and their skin has become
smooth and hairless erasing all evidence of age and gender. Medical experts
who have examined them believe that these characteristics are deliberately
inducedbut they are unable to tell if this procedure is chemical or surgical
or a mixture of both. However they accomplish their aims, whatever these are,
they are well aware ofthe outlaw character of tampering with the organism.
They look like plastic dolls! They have removed anything overt from their
bodies and they speak, still, of having the ability to "penetrate" each other.
One of them actually said, "I can fuck the world by looking at it." Some of
them claim not to eat at all. Others of them say that the only food permitted to them is "castoff". They find it in garbage...this is food that is "given
not taken", and so "blood" has been removed from it. "It has stopped
screaming," according to the answers given during one questioning. The rest of
us are cannibals. It seems as though they equate the exchange of money with
drawing blood out of the world. Everything has a life according to them. They
talk about a heaven of glass. What are they? They talk about being perfect in
the world so that one's own skin is the only necessary vehicle, providing the
"oil of translation", They are revered. One of them had died, probably of
exposure, andthe body...the "rind" as they would call it...was intact except
that three fingers were gone, presumably seized as relics. When asked why they
seem to show such distressed arrogance under questioning, one of them replied,
"We smell better than you. God breathes through our skin."
(court document - Seville, February 26,1998)
(c) Dea Anne Martin - 1991