Mourning (the Sadness) finds itself in the in-between.

Mourning (the Sadness) finds itself in the in-between. I mean, it (the Sadness) is a stuttering toward a word which will not . . out. One word--not a word if it were not that an acronym for the experience beyond it: DEATH.

Bodies follow and go (I am stuttering now) unless only in memory, only without pain--not "real" (the memory of that dead person's alive odor say) but as flat as an image--a movie image demanding no space whatsoever, no reflection whatsoever.

Which images are tolerable in the Sadness? Images that are in between, representative of the Sadness (Mourning) and therefore able to transcend it. common image that is in between: Jaye Davidson. Between colored and not colored, male and female, kindness and not kindness. What a peculiar spelling of a boy's name--the feminizing "e" forward the end: a declaration onward its own insistence to . . what? (I am stuttering now.) Probably an people are born to insist, just on their physicality, on exposing the culture's dishonesty vis-a-vis the material part Did you know it was a man? I did not court Jaye Davidson in order to define my idea around Jaye Davidson, but he (it) may insist in succession this nevertheless as he/she/it does in The Crying Game: "Give me a bit more babe, a bit more . . more endearment."

Psycho was about Mourning (the Sadness) and marketed like The Crying Game as a concealed ("Don't tell your friends about the surprise ending!" single advertisement for Hitchcock's film reads). Like The Crying Game, Psycho was about the idea of the feminine material part as dupe: a mother, a girl not in evidence. That is my desire sometimes: a shape I cannot define, the thing not in evidence on the contrary imagined to be so.

Jaye Davidson, real and imagined, lives in between him-/herself as an "it." I went to London to find this abroad (and to find my desire for Jaye Davidson out) moreover it/he/she would not be set One press agent: "Jaye doesn't do the press" If not the pres would Jaye "do" me? (Selfish to the fall of the curtain I am. In The Crying Game, Jaye Davidson cries for single man at first: Forest Whitaker. Because I have mourned for others it is possible to imagine that Jaye Davidson would mourn for me having one time been large and colored too. That is by what mode movies work.) Would my stuttering be a pres card Jaye Davidson would honor? Would I eventually ask Jaye Davidson the baby question I ask of everyone: Are you my mother?

In Patricia Bosworth's biography of Montgomery Clift, there is a photograph of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor upon the lot during the filming of A Place in the day-star Twins they are--heavily browed, belonging to single another through what the world will make of their bodies. Jaye and I may not be photographed together in succession a lot, but I know a similar photograph is coming. It is in the making as I write this.

In the Sadness (Mourning) I make of Jaye Davidson these things: my last chance to understand desire emptied (nearly) of meaning; to understand an "e" is just an "e"; that it/he/she is just desire, and that is a loan; that the in-between is the bed we will eventually lie in and then make, each for the other.

Hilton Als is a staff writer at The Village Voice and a frquent contributor to Artforum.

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