ON FILLING VOIDS, PROTECTIVE STRUCTURES, JELLY, AND SOULS

People say (some people say) that the body is the temple for the soul. This squidgy, penetrable, jiggly (mine is) mass as sacred space. I picture ziggurats, towers, monoliths of quivering jelly. When cut, when penetrated, it is soft; it splits exposing shimmering innards, resembling nothing so much as slate or split stone - except for the wiggle-wobble. Unlike stone, which as monolith exists only in positive space jutting up from the earth to point into (empty) space, for a monolith of jelly to exist, it must first exist in negative space, it must first have a void to accept it, a monolithed negative surrounded by positive (space). Jelly starts as liquid, poured into the void, rushing to fill the crevasses of the exoskeleton, as a soul might fill a body, as a congregation of bodies might fill a pantheon. It pools, ripples, stills, hardens, solidifies. The tension inherent in jelly is that it will quiver, each vibration sending a shiver through its mass; a matryoshka contracting and expanding infinitely from the nucleus of self, through the mass(es), through the cosmos until filled. The jelly is de-moulded, anticipatory. I imagine a spear; the spear of Nebuchadnezzar, a question, a phallus, a finger, a spoon, pierces that solid membrane (membrane that is not solid, but rather the entire structure is membrane) and the resultant jelly segments rent and jiggling. This action describes violence, but this texture also demands love, softness, tenderness; the gentle tap on the bum from a playful lover. To sing to it, to watch it quiver in delight at the resonance of a sweet voice. The song, sending shivers through the jelly mass, reverberating through it as the echos would the void, as its liquid form once filled its hollowed container. I feel a kinship to that quivering mass, my own flesh pulsating in empathy to its naked vulnerability. That yearning for gentleness and sweet caresses. Knowing too that unquenchable desire to pierce its soft flesh. To watch its perfect bouncing structure respond; the object that fills the void, the voice that fills the temple, the soul housed by my quivering flesh.