Truth is your nutrient. Truth makes the way you move. You’re a great dancer because your interpretations are better felt than spoken. How you move is the meeting place of beauty and surprise. It can be occasionally halting or awkward but always stunning. Stunning and halting both stop the watcher in their tracks. Your hyper sensitivity decides what comes into you, and your hyper sensuality shows them what it is. You don’t make everyone comfortable, but it is imperative that you experience a certain comfort yourself. A certain comfort, I say, because it is the comfort of interest, not of peace.
Peace is rest and certainty. Peace is power and you are not a power tripper. You don’t rest in your watchers’ eyes, you move just beyond. And you are not, emphatically, a disruptor. You halt people with your movements and invite them to go on, keep going on their own way as they cross you. You are taking in the world, the categories of function, knowledge, and atmosphere through the sensitivity you developed to manage your pain, your ecstasy, your curiosity. You are letting the world back out through your hips, spine, the back of your head, the sides of you, the thighs of you, your walk. You’re rolling in the multitude of being.
x
Your chosen method of self-protection is an owlish wisdom, a filigree of idiom and knowledge that rearranges the attention of the one looking at you. You try your best to be the perceiver, not the perceived. Mostly, this happens. You do not register as an authority but as possessing the mellow composure of a med student or ornithologist, one that conceals your passion for identifying with the one you speak with. Because really you are a shapeshifter, someone so knowledgeable as to be a slick identity thief, of the sick and birdlike alike. This is not something you ever wanted. It’s an unrequested talent.
Your sharp mind and soft heart can switch bodies before you are prepared for it, and you’ve experienced this as a brutality to all your cultivation of what you know. When you are alone, you come into a vagueness that, unwatched, can be a depression. To stop this process, you prepare your home, protect it with the twigs and stones of interest, the charms of knowledge. The world is overwhelming without these pieces of facts. You are an excellent researcher or journalist, an underliner, a highlighter, a verbatim quoter. You find your delight in mimicry, in echo, in reverb. Of course, you understand those closest to you without any of this, with the soft touch reserved for dogs and cooking, and this will feel painful for you. Your challenge is to learn to imitate this pain, to bring the play of cadence and question to it. When you meet this challenge, the world will break open into laughter for you. A laughter without sense.
x
You’re a huge lover because it gives you the juice. I mean it makes you feel very strong to pour your devotion onto someone. It gets you up out of bed, roaring like a west coast wildfire. Your love is more an amphetamine than the antidepressant everyone says it is. For you, I mean. Who knows what your beloved feels. You need to know when to stop and look at the object of your desire.
You’ve felt like this since you became conscious at four years old. Always rushing to smother your sibling with a blanket to protect them from the cold. You can be too much. You want with an adrenal magnitude. You want the squares of sky in between the skyline, you want the sweet young trees, you want the girl bent over on the side of the passing bus, orange juice, pie and big drinks of wine. The world is a teeming present just for you, and you are trying to contain the necessity of your need, trying and often failing to calm the urgency of these belligerent desires.
And what do you desire for yourself? The opportunity to dissolve, to be the pucker in a kiss, the rainbow on the surface of the gasoline?
x
You love to motorcycle ride, but not for the speed, for the risk and, well, sometimes for the speed at which you get away. Mirrored sunglasses and tough leather are all about repelling: roadburn, sunshine, while compelling: attention and fear. You generate these responses without these accessories. You always have. It’s because your own psyche repels fear like a windshield. You won’t let it in. You need attention to keep trying to feel love, trying to feel connection, but your relationship to fear leaves you with a tendency to bolt.
Your efforts to love are heroic and those who receive them are changed positively forever. You armour your beloveds with a shiny ferocity they need to engage with you and that always forces engagement with themselves. Your flights are never expected and often painful, but they always take you deeper into connection with others, rather than further away. You are individualistic, cunning, macho and somehow still learn benevolence from your experiences. Maybe it’s all those vistas that keep you open to temporary love and closed to permanent fear.
x
You’re always parenting. Maybe an older child? Maybe an orphan? Either way you stagger around like the originary one, mother and father and beyond embodied, constantly fetching to provide, rubbing your fists in your eyes, tugging at your sore body, exhausted by the need that wakes you up and finally conditions you to be done, like the day of the farmer. You provide more than you give, in a stoic but natural way. You don’t bear this role lightly or with resentment, but you do bear it with exhaustion, and one of your greatest gifts is a silent sleep that allows you to wake up without the assistance of coffee or alarms. You wake up with purpose and weight.
I could suggest here that you let others share your burden but you know painfully well that that happens without your say-so. You feel your task is to try to lift what is too much, the heavy wet corners of the shared burden. You have a tendency to panic when you notice how much is shared, how much you can never be responsible for however much you try, so perhaps my suggestion instead is to notice, gently, what those around you are carrying. They aren’t all pallbearers.
x
Your mind causes you many greater problems than your body. They don’t support each other, your body responsive, racing past your intelligence to cull the highest peach or aim to pull rocks from the ground. Your thoughts circle the bottom, trying to knock each other out of circulation. Your body is the ripe peach it found with its animal sense pulsing like an organ around your stone brain. Your whole life, you’ll feel newly thawed, on the edge of control.
These impulses, which some people call instinct, will draw you like a suture through life. Offering your obedience to your own canny body is your only course, and allowing your thoughts to be guided by your body as your body is guided by the crackling and firing of life around you. This will create unbelonging for you, sometimes, in social life. But you will intimately know your belonging to an order of beating and pulsing, living and dying.
Lee Suksi’s first book, The Nerves (Metatron Press), won a LAMBDA Literary Award. Their book of drawings of couples, Acting on You (fine. press), is forthcoming in 2023. Psychic Lectures is excerpted from a longer work in progress. They live in Toronto, where they write texts for artists and tell fortunes.