1/30/2024

The Great Wave: Perspectives, Tits, and 2024

It's the end of the beginning. January's newborn blood runs off the year as we look at February. I'm long overdue to update this blog and here we are: an update. 

Things are going pretty well, all things considered. I'm writing. My habit of writing in series and along thematic lines continues. When I visited my sister in Seattle I found myself in the Seattle Asian Art Museum. Amongst the traditional art from Korea, Japan, India, and elsewhere, there was a visiting exhibit about the influence of Japanese woodblock prints on French artist Henri Riviere. Posters for Chat Noir hung alongside the iconic work of the artist Hokusai. The pieces, in conversation with one another, swirled around like shadows on the wall until I was pulled forcefully toward the exhibit's focal point. 

The Great Wave by Hokusai

Hokusai's most iconic work is The Great Wave from his series 36 Views of Mount Fuji. This breathtaking image with its meticulous composition and simple shapes had such a profound impact on Henri Riviere that the French artist created his own tools to approximate their technique. In homage to Hokusai's Mt Fuji works, Riviere made his own 36 Views of the Eiffel Tower. 

Staring at the work of both artists in the museum, I was swallowed up completely. Here was the singular and inimitable Eiffel Tower broken into a kaleidoscope of 36 images across time and perspective to reflect the myriad ways these fixtures of our world change us with their changes. 

Riviere’s art shows the infancy of the tower, its wobbling coltish legs years before they stood in the center of Paris. It shows the construction workers resting in the crosshatched iron of its adolescent belly. The work makes me see what was a garish tourist trap as something deeper. As the end result of a collaborative and demanding journey of work. It shows the context. It shows the respect Riviere not only had for the Eiffel tower itself, but also the work of his art’s inspiration. To see all the pieces of the puzzle together resulted in pure awe as I stood in the room.

This is my favorite thing about art and my largest gripe with most art museums: the white walls. I hate the vacuum of museums. Stripping pieces of their context save for a plain text plaque. Personally, I love to be choked with context. I like to be surrounded and steeped in background. To see Riviere amongst his influences, to see a full picture distilled into something so small and simple as a paperback book of prints. Art lives in its moment, over and over again to inform how we see it now. I like eating the whole meal, to better burn what I can into something beautiful and transformative. 

One of Henri Riviere’s 36 Views of the Eiffel Tower

Inspired, I sat down in one of the museum's chairs and wrote a poem about my breasts. That one poem has since evolved into my latest exploration. Hokusai honored the landscape of Japan by treating it like a system of stars and planets swirling around the mist-capped mountain. Riviere honored France's history and breadth by showing an Eiffel Tower under construction and framed in the distance. I decided to honor my transitioning body by writing about my tits. 

To me, tits are a fascinating concept. All my life I ran terrified from the concept of "man boobs"and the distinctly toxically masculine way fat is treated on the body of men. Tits are something the human body is set against in relief. Their absence, their presence, their connotations. Tits are for mothers. They’re for infants. They’re for feeding and eating. As I fitfully work to grow my own breasts into the shape of my dreams, I meet a woman who feels most at home without them. 

Her megawatt confidence at her smooth, nipple-less chest fits perfectly with the bursting joy of my budding one. We fit, inspirations to each other. Again, even by their defining absence, tits have some strange and almost supernatural capacity to evoke strong emotion one way or the other.  

To distill my personal journey, once again I turn to the writer Dodie Bellamy (who I should really send an edible arrangement or something at this point considering the impact she's had on me) and her book The Mina Harker Letters like I always do:

"my breasts are no longer breasts but titties just the thought of keyboarding the word titties excites me." 

They do excite me. In selfies, in the mouths of lovers, in my hands, in their aching weight on my chest. I can’t seem to shut up about them. So, if I can produce 36 poems of a satisfactory quality about my tits, then I'll have, if you'll pardon the pun, a body of work. Maybe a chapbook. Maybe something longer. Who knows?

The cover of the Sexiotext edition of The Letters of Mina Harker by Dodie Bellamy (with a pair of tits on the cover)

On the subject of my body, another development is that I've been exercising. The same visit I met Hokusai and Riviere, my brother-in-law gave me his old VR headset. Since then I've been doing rhythm and boxing workouts at least three times a week. I won't allow this to become a praise song for good ol' fashioned Sweat and #Grindset propaganda but the central truth is I'm happy. It's about discovering the body, the same work that I do with my writing. Being trans means acknowledging the will of the flesh, the pull towards change. The body I want has tits, works out, and loves women. That's all I've been able to work out lately but that's been enough for me. 

It’s another country in this shifting continent of my flesh. I notice new changes every day, just like with my hormones. I suddenly crave movement. I suddenly experience joy with sweat and strength. I even drink fucking water. I had a smoothie for lunch. Just like with my tits, there’s a past version of myself who would bet a bullet on never turning into something that has a smoothie for lunch.

It’s me…having a smoothie for lunch

Another year of change seems to be rumbling in the clouds at the horizon.

Last year I rekindled my love of poetry, started writing and performing regularly again, and found success, but, more importantly, found happiness. This year promises to be no different and I feel nothing but excitement.

Here's to more writing. More working out. More discovery of what this body wants.

What it can let go of.

What it can hold.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B