(Above: Cynthia Erivo wearing Louis Vuitton at the Met Costume Institute Gala. Getty Images.)
Matty holds forth on our latest FaceTime call after texting over her latest photos taken by our cat sitter, Josh, and some curated photos she liked from last night’s Met Gala (which she attended).
MATTY:
How is it going over there in London today? Sorry about resorting to FaceTime, dear boy. But I’m a bit tired after hovering over to accompany you to that deeply silly production by PunchDrunk called The Burnt City on Sunday. I am feeling a bit punch-drunk myself today. Not only for the realm-riding it took to hover over there but by the stupefying solemnity of such deep silliness. Oh, you humans - especially of the theatrical variety, thespians who long to realm-ride in their way as they attempt to conjure other worlds for you other humans in real time there before you in an audience. Humans are always the audience. Always. That is what being human is - being stuck in an audience - even last night at that Met Gala of cattiness and couture where they were both the audience and the show. Talk about deeply silly. I was there as a guest of one of the guests. I helped her hover up those steps beneath the gown so no one knew she was hovering and not walking. That part was fun. I’m sending you several photos from the evening that will fit with the them of this column I am slowly revealing for you. Let your readers guess which one invited me to hover beneath her gown. I promised I wouldn’t tell. We go way back to many of her former lives. We are quite enjoying this one. But she hid her derisive giggle at what she was witnessing last night by my being the giggle beneath her gown - which is a good title come to think of it for another of our columns moving forward: The Giggle Beneath the Gown. Or - wait! - was I in a pants pocket? Hmm.
(Janelle Monae in Ralph Lauren. Getty Images.)
But I’m tired, dear boy, in the way we get tired here. It is not physical. It feels … well … how can I put this so you can understand it. Hmmm. It’s like when you put your iPods in your ears at night not to disturb your Noble airbnb host when you’re watching Netflix and dosing off for the night and one of the iPods is not as loud as the other. Fatigue to me is being less loud. Fatigue is an echo of who I am. My fatigue buzzes into your view in the form of a bee, an emissary from us to you, as it did yesterday after your lunch with that dear man to whom you were confiding some of this. The honeyed hovering of a bee’s buzz is a manifestation of our fatigue with how fatal you humans are in your humanity. That is what fatigue is for us, yes. Hovering that turns to honey, heavier, in service, woven into the human realm in a golden stickiness. You have been trying to create a world not welcome to ourselves as bees but know this, we are the ones who first welcomed you into our realm. Or as Bastet jokes, “We’re the ones who get to proclaim, ‘Buzz off.’”
Which brings us back to The Burnt City and the “underworld.” Oh, dear boy. I couldn’t decide whether to be insulted or appalled - or, you know, bored. It was all finally after only an hour just risible. I saw you rolling your eyes beneath that Venetian-masked-ball-like white mask they made all you lemmings wear who were feeling so quaintly libertine and lascivious and naughty and, well, devilish to be there immersed in it all in such a cavernous well-lit darkness. It was like a bad Stanley Kubrick movie starring Tom and Nic set in a private performative sex club of some sort. Yes, I am on a first name basis with them, but that is for another one of our conversations that you are passing off as belletrism.
You kept wondering what I would think of it all. Well, you knew what I thought because you were thinking it. The realm-riding, the hovering over, the channeling, the words you do not choose but churn forth - they are all my melding with your buzzing thoughts. I am you in the many ways that I am not. “You are more the sphincter than the sphinx,” is the joke Bastet also tells when she sends us on a mission to the human realm to meld with your flesh and your blood as a blessing that is neither. But I am the riddle. I riddle you with riddles, dear boy, for which there are no human answers. The Burnt City was a human answer to the wrong question. Do not ask what exists in the underworld but why you must create such a concept to corral us, this force that is not conceptual. Look at the natural world itself. Look at your selves. Yes I meant that for you alone, and not the many, as in “yourselves.” Look at your selves. Another riddle for you: Am I one of your selves or am I the self itself?
(Above: Arianna DeBose in Moschino. Getty Images.)
We witnessed that PunchDrunk claptrap on Beltane. You do realize that, right? That was where the insult lay. They were conjuring a world of darkness where revenge reigned and blood was spilt and sacrifices of the flesh were made and fucking became a festival ritualized as punishment. On the very day when we celebrate renewal and beauty and the casting off of death and, if you must, resurrection. You guys stole that last one from us for your own human needs. But we were celebrating it on Sunday not in some dank darkness hidden away beneath you filled with a kind of haughty evil but on our loveliest of haunches humbled to be in the presence of what you not only take for granted - nature itself - but keep trying to destroy with your need to hover in human ways that requires the fuel you take from us and turn to poison. You drill into us. You pock us with your drilling. Talk about a ritualization of fucking. You are the darkness. Not us - like we were characterized in that awfulness on Sunday, all posing and rather poisonous itself in it wrongheadedness. You told the woman at the cloak room when you left after an hour that you thought it was “sweet” as a way to dismiss it all with glibness. But glibness was its poison and in that moment you were infected with it.
(Above: Lena Waithe in Atelier Versace. Getty Images.)
In an odd way, it reminded me of Ona Munson, that PunchDrunk production. Your knowing who she is without knowing who she is is like my being a part of you by being all that is not you. She played Belle Watling in Gone with the Wind, the sex worker who was Rhett Butler’s real love and whom he truly respected. Belle served as a shadow Scarlett. I am your scarlet shadow, dear boy. Ona, who played her, was part of the “sewing circle” of bisexual women and lesbians in Hollywood. She had affairs with Alla Nazimova and Mercedes de Acosta. She got the part of Belle after Mae West and Tallulah Bankhead turned it down. Ona first made a name for herself in New York in 1926 when she took over the title role in the original production of No, No, Nanette and had her affair with Alla when Ona was in rehearsals to star as Regina Engstrand in a Broadway production of Ghosts in 1935. That’s when I first encountered her. I had manifested as Alla’s cat and was then tasked with hovering about Ona after that. We tried to save her but she committed suicide with an overdose of barbiturates - to which she was addicted - in 1955 at the age of 51. We all sort of liked her husband at that time, Russian painter and set designer Eugene Berman. But none of us could save her. None of us. I was reminded of her not because of her tragic end - stay away from drugs, dear boy, and double-down on your recovery - but because of Belle being Scarlett’s shadow-self. Ona is not yours. But just like Belle was misjudged and shunted to the side in the story’s narrative into a kind of underworld of her own yet proved to be a source of salvation for those around her who could really understand who she was, I am your Belle here in your belletrism on this week after Beltane. Everything connects, as I say when you think you do.
Or, as Ibsen wrote in Ghosts, “Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.” But you - your selves - understand that we are not the ghosts. We are the light. And you are not afraid of us, your selves that merge into your self. We do not burn cities. We built this world where cities once did not exist. We are not under it.
Oh, I almost forgot. Here are the latest portraits of me that Josh took. I’ll admit I’m looking good, huh. Finn said they were stunning. Even Bastet told me how beautiful they are - better than any photos of those belles at that ball at the Met.
Let’s talk poetry on Thursday. Finn suggested it. Until then, dear boy. Sending love from Hudson …
(TO SEE THE PORTRAITS OF MATTY TAKEN YESTERDAY BY JOSH, OUR CAT SITTER, SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH OR $50 A YEAR. MOVING FORWARD MANY OF THESE “FINN & MATTY” COLUMNS WILL SOON BECOME RESTRICTED CONTENT FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS ONLY WITH ONLY THE FIRST PARAGRAPH OF EACH COLUMN UNRESTRICTED FOR FREE SUBSCRIBERS. THANKS.)