I AM A WITCH

I WAX BUT DO NOT WANE

The audio version of this essay is backed by an informal recording of a sound piece by Gazelle Twin called We Wax. We Shall Not Wane, available to experience at The Horror Show! in Somerset House. The exhibition is open until February 19th, 2023. All recordings and documenting photographs my own. Artists credited.

She is a witch, wandering London. A beast in disguise. Dirty fingernails and sweat encrusted. She steals sandwiches with a smile and hops buses. Lawfulness is a thing she tries like a new years resolution. A tentative, constructed, shallow puddle of an aspiration. Did you see her in that leather jacket at the bakery, flirting for free focaccia and aioli, tortilla, flat white, froth.

That night, she brings him home with her. Siren-like in her grease and splendour. She is slippery, stone cold sober. Staring at his body like dinner. She’s passed hunger from the platform and is heading somewhere delectable. £7.50 artisanal. An inferno. Nonsensical celebrations at the foot of the bed. A congregation of bodies.

At the exhibition, she breathes with the speaker. Hums with the escalator. She eats at boyfriends with her eyes. Window shopping. Scolds herself briefly. Guilt is a jacket to take off.

Did you think a witch would do this? Be so plain in sight? So seeing? I met her in the corridor of a street, freshly cleaned windows, and she smiles as I did. Moved as I moved. My reflection. She is myself. Between the party and the bus stop she looks at me and tells me it’s my birthday. My nightmares. The freckle on my pubic bone. She knows my insides out. Exposed me to the trees with the secrets I hadn’t realised I had. That’s me, she said, looking out at the face I wear. Eyebrows brushed. Flushed face. She knew me in the way I only know my shadow when it’s not quite right. Warped by the wind or glass. I ask her how to resist it – the rules of it all. She seems to know. She seems to know how to tell me how to be a witch. Tell me how to stand steady, firm, how to believe in what isn’t there as well as what is. I want to live the whole thing - the clean and gritless side. The bare boned bits. I am to the bone.

When I go home I peel the wet leather from my back and feel the shower wash my body. It will never be completely clean though. There will always be unreachable corners. I think of wishes. Curse the way I consider myself. Curse the way I program myself. Curse the bugs and viruses in my hard drive.

A witch is never torn between responsibility and revenge. She flies in the interim. She builds fires in the intervals. She makes faces in puddles. She scares me because she is me. This monster. A gut feeling suppressed. Rancid.

At the moment, Somerset House is showing a collection of rebellions. The trinkets that pulled hard enough against their leashes to snap clean away from them. This memorabilia that barks back. The exhibition is split into three parts – Monsters. Ghosts. Witches. They speak of rejection and exaltation, resurrection, magic potions against political agendas and I visit from a place of unwaverable fidgetry. I want to be surrounded by lawlessness. Screams. Middle fingers. Bodies splayed in protest, and I find them, and myself, thinking about this story I’ve been telling myself and writing for over three years, about a woman and a man and a baby and a disappointment, and I realise that I have been missing the rage. The fury. The quiet fires.

As I stand and watch Anne Bean’s film Paussus (1981), with her flittering tongue wriggling, sap covered, ugly ugly ugly, screaming, click into place: 

I am going to make a film about the limitlessness of apathy. The terror of apathy. The horror of difference and indifference. The threat of autonomy. The beauty of blood. I cast a spell and come into focus all of a sudden. I have this eureka moment in the gallery. I am a piece of expanding foam. I am making sense. I swell into myself. I come into my own. Later, I go to a party and engorge bodies, strangers, spit out their bones. I get the bus home. I’m gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous.

Have you ever thought about yourself as an antihero? The villain? The heathen? A red mark on a page? I’m all of them. When I piss in the gallery bathroom, red potion drips from me. I show my rotting teeth at my own sorcery. Smiling, I find myself exploding in the amber heat lamps of Gazelle Twin’s We Wax. We Shall Not Wane – a sound piece that punctuates the end of the exhibition with a big fat full stop. I am sobbing on the sofas. I am being looked at by the men in their cord suits and little beanie hats and I do not care. Let them swim in me. Let them wonder.

Imagine bleeding for seven weeks, waxing but not waning. Shedding skin from the inside out. Reverse snaking. Cowgirl costume on Halloween night, on fire with my magnetic energy. Karaoke and a pulsing lung of hysteria. I cough my lungs up and onto the parquet floor and we dance around them like a bonfire. I am a witch in London, stomping through the streets like some fictitious beast. The reality of a body that knows to shed itself. I am transforming, metamorphosing, shapeshifting. Transient smoke cloud. The witch emerges from me. Not a reflection anymore, but an embodiment. I claw at the misfortune like a cat on a brick wall. It feels so good. Feels so good to make a mark on the city that is mine. To spit on the gates. Steal what I want. Leave traces of my red blood potion in every gentrified cafe in the city. My potion mixes with the water of the Thames. It glimmers under the red and white and gold light of the city, and though it’s diluted, molecular, invisible – we see it float by.

I’ve been where you are.

I am who you are.

I know what you’re feeling.

Dance.

Fuck.

You’re so full of power.

You’re so full of poison.

You’re so full of life – the witches tell me,

as we talk about television, pretending to be anything but miraculous, matter of fact messes with intent, opinion and fury.