The hanged woman

My stupid job and a shibari workshop

It

happened in June, in a field in Portugal, in a large mud tent pitched against the heat of the evening. Forty of us sat on the ground with our knees up. A woman tied a man into a harness of rope, and lifted him off the floor. When he was up she pressed a mirror to his face, picked up a beater and struck a gong. The gong was struck once and could not be unstruck. As the sound reflected off the metal, out it went and kept going out, past the tent poles, past the field, thinning as it reached through the water of our bodies the way milk thins in water.

He was hanging, one hip higher than the other, arms pulled back so that the chest was opened to the roof of the tent, and when the wave arrived it went into him without asking. He could not lean into the sound or away from it or set his jaw against it. I felt it in the sternum, in the small bones behind my ear.

The mirror was small, held close, angled up at him – it shrunk the room to the size of his face. Whenever he tried to look past the glass and out at us the rope took up the slack and turned him back, patient as a tide. He had been placed somewhere he could not narrate. No angle, no commentary, no remark to hand the moment back to the room. Only his own face, coming round and round again.

For a long time nothing happened. He spun, and the gong dwindled, but then something in his face, not dramatic, nothing that would show on a photograph, only a giving way about the mouth and a wetness that did not fall and it was private, and it was his. It happened in front of everyone, nothing except a man meeting himself with no way to leave.

In tarot the twelfth card is the Hanged Man. He hangs by one ankle from a beam, his other leg crossed behind the knee and his hands out of sight, folded behind his back. His face is not in pain. He is not being punished, nor is he dying – he is waiting. The hanged man tells us that there are things that cannot be seized, only received, and the price of receiving it is the temporary loss of your ability to do anything at all but to wait.

I have been waiting since march,

Entangled in a dispute with my job,held in suspense. They have hung me upside down and emptied my pockets and my hair is wild and falling and as the blood rushes to my scalp and my face is dark and full and for those whose eyes have met mine they have seen mine wet not from feeling, but pressure, with my veins standing at the temples.

This imbroglio has a process, and the process has no visible end. I write emails and wait. Other people write emails and I wait .

The waiting room even has its own furniture now . The phone face-down on the table, the particular disassemblage of an email. My golden pedicure on the chrome towel rail as I expel another anxious load.

Me and the Hanging Man have both been inverted, and what I felt watching him pierced me. First it was envy and then something like drunkenness, a wanting that came into the room already dressed and knowing its own name. I wanted to be fli

pped like that, held still by somebody and made to look.

When I watched the Hanged Man gaze at himself in the small mirror, naively I thought it had just been about sex. I had recently installed a mirrored wall in my bedroom. I put it up myself and told myself that the room was dark and needed the light. The mirror had given me the long line of Jake’s back and the good arrangement of legs and the flattering evidence that a spectacle was occurring. But a small mirror held close to the face gives you no space to arrange. There is not enough frame to fit another person.There is no lamp and no bed, no second body. You are not watching the sex, you are watching the one who is having it and she is watching you back, neither of you has anywhere to be. At that distance, there is no tent, no rope, there are not forty of us on the ground with our knees up. I think that is why the mirror was there. Not to shame The Hanging Man, but to make him the only available witness.

I have been waiting since March without anybody fastening it. I have been held still long enough, longer than being held captive in the throws of Iyla’s red hot led facemask, told ‘ HUSHHH, stay there and to lie still. The SSense Professional Led Face Mask brings neither warmth or coolness, nothing to report back to myself, it is as light as a birdcage and I balance its plastic on the bridge of my nose. If I speak it slips. So I do not speak, and when she switches it on red comes through my lids the way afternoons come through a hand held firmly against it . Domesticated I lie there for twenty minutes and allow myself to be worked on. Nothing happens, and goes on not happening. When she relieves me – lifting the mask, she tells me that it’s cumulative, that it’s all working there underneath. I check myself in her bathroom mirror, stretching the skin around my skull, and so I turn to face myself.

It happened in June, in a field in Portugal, in a large mud tent pitched against the heat of the evening. The forty of us sat with our knees up in the heat, waiting to be told it was over like a child stood at the window, looking for headlights. Letting the wait move through us the way heat moves through the mud.

So you wait and the waiting becomes its own kind of rope, its own kind of bondage and understand for the first time in your unbound life – that patience perhaps, is not a virtue but a posture , something the body invokes to survive what the mind cannot control. My waiting has simply become indistinguishable from the field, and the wind whistling onto the tent canvas, indistinguishable from the low, permanent noise a summer makes.

And at some point after that, a woman began quietly untying the knots.