The Whore in the Background
Maybe your secret is the similar to mine. Maybe you were there once too, in that mysterious underworld where innermost flesh is transacted and men’s secret desires create the market — where women parade naked and men abandon pretense, that paradoxical realm of the secretly un-hidden. Maybe you have since erased all evidence linking you back there (though you can never erase it from your heart). Perhaps you created a new, good life, far from that underworld, where you are loved, have earned respect, are accepted.
After all that distance, why would you go back to that darkness, even if only in public discourse?
Who in her right mind would voluntarily re-assume the stigma of a whore — fraught symbol of the depths of womanly despicability and/or abject victimization? Who would volunteer to be that screen upon which society projects so much murky shadow and hatred?
You know, if you’ve been there, that the weight of prostitution comes as much, if not more, from the way the world sees you (forever after), than from whatever abuses and indignities a John can inflict. The deepest and most enduring cut is the way prostitution permanently separates and reduces you from the rest of humanity. Why reclaim that stain?
Worse, why attempt to explain the inexplicable, to share meaning with a world certain that it already sees all there is to see?
This whole question of secrecy around prostitution makes me wonder, what is vulnerability really about? Where does shame come from? What causes the epidemic impulse to hide behind flawless facades?
They say once you see a pattern, you can’t un-see it.
Do you remember those “Where’s Waldo?” books? Oversized picture books, each page a visual cacophony, bustling with color, teeming with hundreds of people, a multitude of buildings, animals, vehicles, implements. And somewhere on each page, Waldo is tucked cheerfully, in his red and white striped shirt, waiting for the reader to find him. My son had the whole set. They occupied him for hours.
I have my own Waldo, but with differences. I call her the Missing Voice.
Differences — the Missing Voice is also always there on the page (frequently in multiples), but optical puzzles are unintended. No artist hid her in plain sight to increase her allure, like with Waldo. No-one seeks her out. No-one recognizes her when their gaze rests on her. They’d rather not see her, and she’s well disguised.
The context does not play hide-and-seek with her, but hide-and-deny-the-existence-of.
But the biggest difference is that I never search.
I don’t have to — she jumps out at me. Always the first thing to catch my eye, she sees me there and wriggles her luscious hips my way. I couldn’t miss her if I tried.
Maybe it was the fact of my own self missing from another place I could equally have belonged to, my awareness that though I knew exactly where I was, there were others for whom I was the long-lost family member — perhaps the lost-baby meme in my own narrative imparted an affinity in me for the missing.
Or maybe it was my tendency to transgression that attunes me to the out of place.
Maybe it was the knowledge that when you looked at me, you looked her as well — but you would never see what was right in front of you if I didn’t spell it out, which makes me wonder what else we look at but never see.
Which has me always trying to see below the surface.
Or was it simply the bodily resonance — visceral memories being stirred up? Or my fixation on the nature of the feminine? Or just intimacy with the demands of poverty?
In any case, I am always accutely aware of the whore in the background. That necessary stock character so often present but silent (or intentionally gushing inanities).
That character who shows up everywhere, yet is, in most places, unseen — or rather, seen, since the visual is her second medium (the physical being her first), but seen like jewelry or artwork, or perhaps carpet — a beautiful object, adornment, bling, furniture. Ambience. Not seen like a relevant human presence.
Regardless of why, I always see her, and she sees me — I’m the one who attends to her character above all others— I’m the one who honors her oh-so-relevant human presence. I’m the one who misses her, the missing voice. My soul.
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