My Hearts aflame

My body hurts, only it’s not my body. This body belonged to someone else, who used it carelessly because they did not desire anything. They pushed it too hard, let it work carelessly, let it live without care, and in the end it was broken. When this body worked, it fell off roofs and ladders, it kneeled on the concrete in freezing temperatures you would not believe. It bled and cut and was stitched back together until it was monstrous. It was young and in youth it didn’t creak and strain because the muscles it had were new and soft. They could move through this pain, a searing sensation running wild through muscles and threadbare nerves, but none of this was desire. No rhythm moving blood through to the heart. This body that is now my body was old before it was new, and it was reborn as something monstrous.

Whatever the first song was, even if it was just sticks pounding rhythm from stone or flesh, it was surely about desire. Songs by birds and beasts, rudimentary and violent, were about desire. Music and expression and art are monuments to yearning, erected and held in place by those that make and those who perceive them. That we are all creatures of desire is our single, common thread. We are built of this same yearning, that existed before we would exist and will trail on long after we have turned to bones and then to soil.

If the first song was about desire, then all songs that come after it are born of that idea. They build on it, compounding beauty and yearning upon desire, adding want and need until it becomes everything. An all-consuming flame. Desire is all we have, even the beasts and the creatures because we built them from such. To have a body and to be alive is to desire, and without it a life is nothing. The rhythm that moves blood through to the heart. This lineage of desire built the line my hearts aflame, my body’s strained, but God I like it. “Wolf Like Me”, from TV On The Radio’s landmark record Return to Cookie Mountain, pivots around the undeniable presence of this song. A single that towers over things and ideas and other work. A song about desire, as all songs are about desire, but this one more than most. A song about monstrosity, blood, and desperate things. About love, and about lust, and about the body. How the body changes when we become creatures of need.

And even to say creature is to conjure monstrosity. A creature is a thing, a foreboding beast that lingers at the outskirts of ideas. A creature is a synonym for an icon of fear. And given that, how can it desire anything but blood, and how can a creature want anything but the absence of beauty because the words we have made for them carry this terrible weight? There is a transformation in “Wolf Like Me”. Not just a man becoming a wolf in the moonlight, although that is the surface read. It’s the reason for its inclusion on endless Halloween party playlists. Which is not entirely unwelcome because your party playlists should always be about something more. They should work for the season, if there is a season to have a party for, and they should inspire desire. They should let you believe that when you leave this place, you will find love, even just for a single night. You should be changed by the sight of the moon.

In its way, it’s about lust and thirst. About seeing yourselves reflected in someone else, seeing who they are below the skin and all perceived veneers. Got a curse I cannot lift Tunde Adebimpe howls, shines when the sunset shifts. The drums beat heavy, driving rhythms below him, as synths and guitars conspire to form a steady river of sound, that builds and swirls as it approaches where it might drop off and become an ocean. Kyp Malone sings in the backdrop of him, I know it’s strange, another way to get to know you. There are horns here too, and they are like the birds singing those first songs of desire.

The werewolf isn’t real, per se, it’s just an idea of a thing. A body. A creature. It’s a haunting vision of something terrifying, but not to everyone. There are those that see it for what it is, for this desire, and it becomes beautiful. Only beauty here is something else. It’s not a simple bloodless thing. It’s haunting and dangerous because that’s what it means to want. It knows what it means to feel alive, dangerously alive, transformed by the night and by the secrets of the world, the truth of all things, and all it wants is to open that door for those that know there is something more for them. Adebimpe sings my mind has changed my body’s frame but God I like it.

I suppose I’m considering in this framework the perceived monstrosity of transsexual bodies, as all bodies that are considered something different are cast as creatures and beasts. These bodies that we claim by desire, and how that desire is frightening because it wants, and it needs, and it hungers, and what can be more terrifying than that. Once there is a rhythm for blood, who could help but be afraid. I’m thinking about this as my body hurts, as my back causes sharp pains and stilted movements. As pain follows the nerves down my legs and into my feet. How I keep a cane on hand just in case. How this is all because of my body before it was my body. How it didn’t want anything, and how nihilism destroys more than desire ever will. How nothing will swallow everything, all our beautiful and tender things, if we don’t stand in its path. This body that is now my body, and how I have to learn what it means to desire something for it.

Desire not just as lust, and not just as love, but something more. I want this body to not feel pain because it is my body. I want to love it. I want to feel it and know it. I want it to be loved, even knowing that it will be feared. This is the way of monsters.

There’s the video of TV On The Radio playing “Wolf Like Me” live on Letterman that regularly appears on the internet as a perfect offering of a world that was. There are other videos of the band performing this song, arguably their biggest and most undeniable hit, but this is different. On this, the band is kinetic, Adebimpe stalks the stage, his hand gripping the microphone, his body moving with the rhythm. A body that knows desire and the need to sing monstrous secrets aloud.

The audience is pressed against the stage, as if the Letterman studio is itself transformed into a new kind of body. It’s a stadium now or a cathedral, with the stage its altar. When the camera pans to the audience, there are bodies standing and there are bodies moving, and the bodies moving surely know the secrets of this song better than those that don’t. They move with this same rhythm, the one that builds as the band gets louder, as they sweat under the flashing lights of this transformed place. Drums and keys and horns. Everything that builds together. There is a moment when Adembimpe finds an audience member dancing exuberantly at the head of the stage and gives her a high five before he howls gonna teach you tricks that will blow your mongrel mind, as if he can only see the people who understand that this life is about the movement of this. The desire in all this noise and sweat.

What makes this video stand out from all the others is the magic unlocked by base intensity. The movement, the sweat reflected in flashing lights. The high-five. The connection. That text translated into action. The desire on display, stalking the stage, letting you bear witness. Letting you know that there are surely claws and fangs, but they are not to draw blood, only to connect. The body that is made new, changed by the secrets of a round full moon. Yes, it is lust and yes, it is passion, but these are simple things that become part of a grand project of the body. They are born of desire. They are begging you to give in, not to lose but to accept yourself. There is something to be said about being seen, that simple moment where Adebimpe connects with the audience they are seen, and maybe that is the moment where the mind changes the body.

The song is finding a resurgence in popularity once more, as it was included on the soundtrack to the latest Spider-Man movie, which feels thematically appropriate. What is Spider-Man after all, if not a man who is changed by a single moment, and must now learn the secrets of a changed body? A man who has to learn how to know his real and true body, changed by science and circumstance, and all its monstrous desires. I’ve been seeing memes floating around the internet of trans girls re-imaging Spider-Man as a transsexual woman, and it's easy to see why. Spider-Man wants the same thing we do in his way, to know, and trust, and love this new body she could have never imagined. Someone she can see and feel and know. She wants this body, her new body, to be perfect even though there are so many that will see it as monstrous. Even though it hurts. She is a creature of desire. Her hearts aflame.

When my body hurts, it’s because it once lacked need or want. Standing when it could have been moving. The passive damage inflicted by only wanting the life held within it to be over. When it hurts, I want it to be better. This too is desire. The need for the body to be something better than what it is. There is transformation in this. You’re a hideous thing inside Adebimpe sings, in recognition of seeing the same secrets hidden below the skin of another. That despite all perceived ideas there is something below, that can come out, that could be perfect, even if driven mad by bloodlust in the moonlight. That the perfect body is monstrous in its way, and given to desire. What a perfect thing desire is, then, that allows us to know who we are, our needs and wants, and urges us to ask how we might unlock them.