While it's not canon, I've always envisioned Arthur's body as being marked with self-inflicted scars, particularly cigarette burns. Little clusters of irregular circles, some silvery and faded, others still-red and raised. All gathered together in little groups, making it obvious he had spent time re-lighting the same cigarette over and over just to put it out on his skin.
I imagine when Arthur first began doing this he tried to keep it from his mother by covering the places he'd burned, hiding his body partially out of shame and partially because he feared her reaction. But eventually he would forget, or she'd walk in on him shirtless, or the sleeve of his jacket would expose his forearm, and she'd see a line of blistered marks. He'd know she had seen because she'd pause in the middle of a sentence and her jaw would tighten just a little, and he'd tense, waiting for her to yell, or cry, or demand he explain himself. But then she'd just continue speaking as if she had not seen anything at all.
So the scars and the blisters would become this unspoken entity; Arthur feeling both relieved and hurt that his mother refuses to acknowledge even the understandable pain of a burn, and his mother treating the visibility of it like roaches passing by on the floor between them.
Arthur
Would allow himself to be trepanned, craves a new opening.
Would hesitate to trepan another, but at times fantasizes about performing the act himself - fixates on the positioning of his hands and holding someone's head in his lap.
Views trepanation as a deeply intimate gesture, would not trepan a stranger.
Louis
Would not allow himself to be trepanned, appreciative of being closed.
Would trepan another as delicately and precisely as possible, largely due to his own self-imposed professionalism.
No sacredness about the procedure - would stumble upon some niche self trepanation forum and attempt to convince strangers to pay him for a surgical operation he would perform on them in their bathtub.
The feelings for Arthur are strong, overpowering, and ritualistic, but carry the cold shame of predation. Deep below love, in some empty chasm where the floor is worn smooth from pacing.
The Man With The Painted Face's word: Reverence
The experience of awe, of magnetism and terror; the way one should feel in the presence of something far beyond human. He is a series of concepts, a jagged collection of shape and color, more edible than touchable, and far off limits to myself. The evocation of being smothered to death by a squeezing force.
Lou's word: Enamored
A beautiful man who would prefer to see me dead, and a yearning to fulfill that desire.
Outside the apartment door.
Kneeling on cold tile, one ear pressed against peeling paint. All of his sounds muffled by the building and engulfed by the echoes of the city outside. The halfhearted hope that he won't see the shadow of a body through the gap beneath the door.
Under the couch.
Flattened uncomfortably between its fabric-lined frame and the hardwood floor. All of his heat and weight pressing down. The threat of suffocation as a ribcage struggles to expand.
Beneath the kitchen sink.
Curled in darkness surrounded by sweet scented poisons. The slow tack of bare feet on linoleum before his shadow obscures the bright line where the cabinet doors meet. Water rushing through a metal pipe.
In the apartment above.
Crawling silently, hovering just above the floorboards. The soft thread of his voice drifting upward and crumbling apart before it can be grasped. Following the sound of his footsteps to the place where they pause, knowing he is directly below.
Love is passive, it is involuntarily held. The lover may contain their love within themselves despite the pain it causes them. Devotion is almost arcane in its activeness. Rituals, enshrinement, and prayer exude from the devoted toward their subject in a manner that is disturbing in its directness.
There is an inherent humanity to love as well, a conceptual and physical grounding. But the weight of devotion is inhuman in its sacredness. The devoted must obscure the humanity of their subject in a way the lover does not dare to. Love may shadow the humanity of its subject like a clouded sky, but devotion is an eclipse.
Devotion also carries the weight of predation, a lack of the mutualness that love implies. It is voyeuristic, chaining, vaguely impure - love, by contrast, is engaging and inviting in its expression. There is a belittling nature to devotion that lifts its subject to a place that is necessarily high above the devoted. The devoted wrings humanity from their subject in untamed fits of voraciousness, they suck their subject dry and replace what they consume with their own obsessive thoughts.
For the subject of devotion, there is no escape. There is no detangling oneself from the worship of another. However, one who is loved may find themselves able to disengage by asserting their humanity, their boundaries, their ire... the lover cannot stop loving, but their love can be smothered in a way that devotion cannot be.
Desiring to be one of Arthur's organs... not something as metaphorically significant as his brain or his heart; something less often considered nestled within him, doing its part to keep him alive.
His liver, cleaning toxins from his blood, or his lungs, expanding and contracting with the force of his breath. A full system, maybe - skeletal, nervous, circulatory - spidering through his body and contorting with his movements. His spinal cord would be ideal; curving down the length of his torso, hugged by his vertebrae, surging with the electrical energy of his thoughts. His eyes are off limits (they belong to the man with the painted face) but I can imagine being them, rapid in movement and hungry for light. Translating everything around him into two colorful dimensions.
Ultimately the desire is to be so close that I'm a part of him, useful but quiet. Pulsing within the sauna of his body until it grows cold in death.
Sometimes a person is unlovable not because of the way they are, but because their concept of love is so warped that it severs them from love entirely. Arthur may crave love, but he would flinch away from it if he were to get it, or become so consumed by it that the experience would make him sick. To him, love has always been smothering, brutal, and clawing; like having his head held underwater. His mind endlessly sieves through it, but his body will never let him accept it.
The unlovable person has value as they are, but that value is not readily seen. Often, their value is actively denied. When the unlovable person is discussed it is with suspicion, pity, or disdain, because the unlovable person is alone, and the lonely are despised. So there is a demand - framed as a moral imperative - for the unlovable to reform themselves. This focus harms the unlovable by miring their existence in tragedy and destruction. It impedes the change demanded of them.
Acceptance of one's unlovability is disturbing to many. It is akin to accepting inhumanity. But to the unlovable person this acceptance does not necessarily mean a rejection of others - it is peace with oneself. To say "I am unlovable" is not synonymous with "I am discardable, I am nothing, I am without value," it is comfort with what is true in the moment. And because all moments end, it can also be a stepping stone to something new. What lies beyond love, or beside it? Only the unlovable person can seek this out. And what they are able to find - this thing so unique to them - is part of their inherent worth.
It is rewarding to realize I have been doing the same thing for nearly two and a half years. having a familiar subject to return to and examine from multiple angles; recognizable stability. The body of work has grown so vast - larger and more diverse than anything I've created in the past - and the desire to make more has inspired the cultivation of new skills. It's surprising how much there is to mine, but it bounces against my own life just as much as it bounces against the object of obsession. Arthur is not me and we do not react similarly to everything, nor have we had the same life. It's exploration from a safe distance where I am largely uninvolved.
This year I started my own private journal in which I make entries in a way Arthur would approach them, followed by my own entry. It helps to break apart the barriers around emotions and experiences. Maybe this idea will be helpful to someone... If not, I'll contend with the embarrassment of having revealed it.
The Marbles
Marbles are the most positive outcome of 2021. It's not the most interesting or social hobby, but having things to look forward to and something tangible to enjoy has been pleasant. I share them here only because I connect them to Arthur and the body of work cultivated in this space.
Why marbles? It's inscrutable. It's too abstract to put into words. But it's good to have proof that the mind will never stagnate. It will continue to latch on to simple things and leech joy and contentment from them. There's always something waiting for us in the future.
Sometimes Arthur visits this nook of a shop that, far in the back, has a small box of old postcards being sold for a nickel or so. To him, this box seems to refill magically. He would never want an explanation as to who abandoned these cards or why, and he would never want to walk in and see them being put into or taken out of the box by hands that are not his own.
He picks out anything that catches his eye, but secretly he is there to find old love letters with no names attached and long descriptions of trips to places he has never seen and "Wish you were here"s. Buying lives he can pretend he's lived and stories he can imagine the endings to.
He goes home and puts them into his own box, hidden far away in the back of a hard-to-get-to drawer. It's full of things that only make sense to him, some that he's kept for decades. All of them are small and easy to hold, easy to move from one apartment to the next, but they're full of memories and feelings that are good and bad and everything in between, and they're all his.
I think often of what it would be like to share marbles with Arthur, to pass them from hand to hand. Cool glass warmed by one palm, then warmed again by another. Muted clicks and chirps and color rolling over color. Light bouncing off a sphered surface.
When I imagine him examining a marble he is holding it close to his eyes - much too close for him to be able to see anything but a rounded smear. This is probably the fault of a nearsighted brain refusing to maintain the reality that a man with perfect vision could not see something held close to his face, but I like the inquisitiveness of it - his hunched back and his open eyes and the slow turn of the marble between his fingers.
But if Arthur has two pairs of eyes, then the reality could be that he is able to focus on objects both near and distant. Maybe he has the gift of detailed vision without the loss of vision more broadly; and maybe he has never needed to use a magnifying glass and doesn't fully understand its purpose.
Likes marbles, identifies with marbles, finds them sensorially pleasing (colors, textures, and sounds), intuitively breaks them down into concepts, becomes curious about their origins and looks up how they are made, owns a few he considers to be special, an appreciator - not a collector
Lou
Completely indifferent to marbles, sees no value in them, would not keep one (except Arthur, who is marble in nature)
Morf
Believes marblemaking is an artform that is beneath him, has not considered the conceptual aspect of marbles because he relies on artists to package information for him, could be tricked into appreciating marbles if they were referred to by a more aesthetically affluent term (for example: spheres)