When the Water Blushed
: Shattered Star
The microphone shakes in my hand, beating like a small and stubborn heart.
A roar rises—thick as a tide—and carries me toward the center of the stage.
For a brief second my presence flickers, and the stage becomes whole in place of me.
I tilt; the cheers consume me; the world restores its order around my unsteady shape.
Shattered stage. Shattered star.
Lines of light fall endlessly and close over me.
Inside the steady rush of applause, I stand alone and burn.
The downpour of brightness feels like a blessing, though it lays me on the altar all the same.
Ecstasy and sacrifice arrive with the same borrowed face.
Song and cry, stage and altar—none of them stay within their borders.
Everything moves like one long river, and I flood with it.
Light cracks, sound splinters, applause grows heavy.
The microphone slips deep into my opening and fixes itself there.
Shattered stage. Shattered star.
Then the paradox turns over.
My body becomes whole, and the stage begins to shake instead.
I stretch into something eternal, swallowing the world, reigning inside the contradiction.
If eternity is possible here, I do not mind kneeling.
I press my face to the floor, stripped without resistance.
I lift higher for you, as far as the spine will allow.
And again the lights rush in and devour me,
and again the microphone drives into the hollow at my center.
Shattered stage. Shattered star.
The stage has always held me—not as a place of performance alone, but as a ritual where society studies its own reflection. Desire folds into control; rapture meets violence; and the body at the center absorbs every trembling of the time. I have watched how this body gathers the world’s pressures and reorganizes its own sensations around them.
I understand the body as a kind of script: a living text marked by belief, guilt, pleasure, and contradiction. It is revised relentlessly. Reverence and destruction land on its surface at the same time, inscribing the crowd’s longing and dread in one gesture. Through this rewritten body, the architecture of the world becomes legible.
We claim disbelief in gods, but the forms of divinity remain necessary to us. A figure is lifted only so it can be broken. Sacrifice replaces salvation; frenzy slips into the place of faith. The body onstage becomes the emblem of this paradox—cherished through rupture, praised through exposure. Applause becomes a language where devotion and punishment coil together, and the crowd both relies on and denies the structure they animate. In this I glimpse a modern rite: a secular belief system that survives long after religion itself has thinned.
The queer body makes this mechanism visible. Situated at the margins, it gathers desire and prohibition at their rawest points of contact. But it is not simply the object of repression; it writes back. It translates the world through sensations once forbidden, turning power in unexpected directions and revealing the violence embedded in the ordinary. This body is no emblem of sacrifice, but rather a delicate sensor tuned to the breakage of the world.
Through the stage—and through the body—I watch how belief continues to be rehearsed. Rituals survive in altered forms: in pop culture, in politics, in fandom and media. People refuse the divine yet still search for a body to offer up. The stage gathers that desire, and art gives it form.
Art does not promise salvation. What it does preserve is the moment of fracture. There, the body is revised and meaning rearranged. In that rearrangement a different grammar of sensation appears—not organized around belief, but around perception; not promising redemption, but opening a space for exposure.
Shattered stage. Shattered star.
Every stage eventually collapses, and from the debris a new language begins.
Encore, Again (2025)
After the Applause (2025)
The Second Bite (2025)
† Altar of Animosity † (2024)
The Enchanting Offering (2024)
The Last Scene (2023)
Solo Romance (2023)
I Surrender (2023)
Enrapture (2022)
As If... (2022)
DEEPSPACE EXODUS (2022)
When the Water Blushed (2021)
Dear Fear (2020)
Why Did Ishtar Go To The Underworld? (2020)
Kiss of Chaos (2020)
Purple Kiss (2018)
Me Gustas Tú (2016)
Paradise Lost (2016)
: On the Aesthetics of the Offering
Sacrifice has not vanished; it has simply shed one face for another. The altar no longer stands within a cathedral. Instead, it hides beneath stage lights, appears on political platforms, and flickers across streaming screens. Each day, contemporary life selects new offerings, lifts them up, consumes them, and calls them back again. Blood may not be spilled, but emotion circulates freely, and pain becomes a ritual vocabulary rather than a taboo.
Society constantly negotiates between order and violence. René Girard once argued that human communities do not eliminate violence but condense it into a single figure to keep it under control.1 This is not a relic of older cultures—it remains one of the core techniques of the present. The tone of political debates, the choreography of media, and the structure of stages may seem unrelated, but they share a remarkably similar pulse. Stability forms when someone’s suffering becomes public, and once that suffering is visible, the crowd briefly feels justified.
That sense of justification is thin. Mary Douglas reminds us that an “impure body” is always required for a community to affirm its own purity. By looking toward a body marked as burdened, tainted, or excessive, people confirm their own safety. Light appears to bless, yet it also polices. Applause resembles support, yet inside it hides an imperative: show us more. The body onstage becomes adored and surveilled at the same time—no longer a person, but a device that seals the contradictions of its era.
I sense this most clearly in the quiet after a performance. Even when the lights have gone dark, the room holds the trace of something spent. In a culture obsessed with efficiency, this expenditure is dismissed as waste, yet without such “waste,” neither society nor art would function. Civilization calibrates itself through moments that refuse productivity; it condemns excess while secretly craving it. The burnout of a star, the hunger strike of a politician, the exhaustion of an ascetic—these scenes seem disconnected but are all reprocessed as techniques for stabilizing collective feeling. It is difficult not to think of Georges Bataille’s description of sacrifice as “the necessary expenditure of excess energy.” Seen against the scenes of our present, the phrase becomes unexpectedly precise.
Giorgio Agamben’s figure of homo sacer—“abandoned between law and life”—also shifts in meaning today. Such bodies are no longer pushed to the margins; they are summoned first. News feeds, fandom timelines, and political live broadcasts all echo the same arrangement: they seek not a role but a body willing to bear discomfort, a face ready to fracture, a presence that absorbs fear on behalf of others. Their suffering does not affirm an ideal; it becomes an ornament of emotion, a spark that activates social self-preservation. Agamben’s “abandoned one” has become one of the most frequently summoned figures of our time. The modern offering is not excluded—it stands at the very center of emotional circulation.
Ultimately, sacrifice functions as a system for managing collective feeling. People regulate their own emotional temperature by observing the pain of others. They release their anger, adjust their sadness, and steady themselves through someone else’s collapse. Pain is not an ethical truth but a tool deployed for emotional organization. And this tool now works with increasing speed and refinement. Contemporary society produces offerings endlessly—faster, more smoothly, and with ever more polished surfaces.
The altars of this age are unstained by blood. They are built from light, sound, image, and mood. The offering does not die. It is consumed alive, reshaped, and summoned again. Sacrifice never left. It simply returned in a subtler, more intricate language—softer, smoother, and closer than before.
1 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977)