The Sutras, According to Effie White (Part Three)

-- December 18, 2025, 1:21 to 2:39 am

Final repetition, final incantation: 

I’m staying, I’m staying

And you—and you—and you—you’re gonna love me

PAIN. It courses through her, causing her to double over, twitching, hands clenched and shaky as the affect finds its expression through her body and its release through the escape valve afforded by her crescendoing voice. She lets it go, through and out. She turns around, staggering ever so slightly as she heads back toward the curved mirrors. Music swells.

Cut: not a wound, but a red backlit orb glowing beside her mouth that visually emanates and extends her vocal ferocity. She turns again, and so does the prism. Cut to a long shot: even as a distant amber figure, she gathers the frame and holds it together.

Cut to medium shot under a spotlight, shot from behind, arms outstretched between gravity and grace, Effie becomes opaque as she lets suffering flow through and beyond her. 

The music stops, and only her voice remains, singing, shrieking, screaming, throbbing, breaking. [The only place I can ever approximate that kind of singing is in my head—what thinking feels like, sounds like, inside my head, before I attempt to translate it into writing. Once I do, it’s nowhere near as operatic. But I digress.]

Her voice, the cathedral, love without self-erasure. Effie suffers with all her sensory organs (that’s perhaps the most obvious takeaway from the song)---and as a result, she is changed by her suffering. Amplified, multiplied, texturized by it. 

Pause—then, an initiatory inhale before the last, bellowing run of the song. The force of her affect folds her forward into a pain-induced bow. She holds her stomach with one hand and reaches out with the other.

Reaching and holding = devotional grief as praxis. She holds... she reaches... even after the lights go out.

More soon.

--Dianna