Ṭaüs | “I Dissolve”

“i dissolve” is an expository piece by musician, producer, and transdisciplinary artist Ṭaüs. This multidisciplinary collection combines personal essay, song, and video in a candid account of waking up to gender dysphoria and the road to healing. This body of work sits alongside Ṭaüs’ second full-length LP of 2023, and is “a tomb” to bury, honor and celebrate music made in the years prior to his gender transition. Ṭaüs Jafar (طاووس) is a transdisciplinary artist who specializes in sound and sensual-perceptual acuity. His multimodal practice centers explorations into ecstatic state and poetic eroticism through the lens of queer liminality. His ongoing research exploration investigates the potential for building intentional peace-affirming experiences and processes into the spatial and socio-cultural fabric of cities. Ṭaüs has a B.A. Hons. in Government from Harvard University, and received a Presidential Merit Scholarship from the Harvard Graduate School of Design,

ESSAY

"i dissolve"

written by Ṭaüs 

edited by Alex Darby

'i dissolve' is a love song to an intangible aspect of metaphysical reality: namely, the constant requirement to surrender oneself - or, to dissolve identity - in order to be alive in any given moment. 

A few years ago, I experienced a necessary, near-delusional break with reality– it was amazing. Unwittingly, I was in the process of reconstructing a wider and more glorious concept of the material and immaterial universe. Hindsight would reveal that this reconstruction would be necessary to face and heal from the hopelessness and despair that often inspires transgender individuals toward suicide. 

I was in a particularly deep denial because of my experience of the world up to that point. Every single pair of eyes that saw and reflected me, both as a child and as an adult, was wrong about who I was. The discourse around mirror-neurons suggests the developmental importance of being reflected back in the eyes or actions of another– monkey see, monkey do. I did not see my “gender” experiences reflected back. Instead, they were proactively negated. Like others in this predicament, I had to invest in a much longer formation of self-concept through labyrinthian processes of elimination and internal inquiry. In the openness to inquiry, just past the bottom of despair, I found the companionship of beings, like gods, who also experience invisibility to most eyes. 

I was not armed with vocabulary or a context that would empower me to assert self-knowledge at age three and so I internalized deeply that I was a small girl. More precisely, I internalized that there was something deeply wrong with me. As young children do, I simply accepted what I was told as truth. This acceptance was fortified by the strict, implicit critiques and gender policing of both family and society.

Through self-inquiry, meditation, therapy, and the use of psychedelics, I embarked upon an internal reorganization that would ultimately reveal that I was a human being with an entirely hidden gender construct and self-concept. In order to get there, my mind recalibrated to remain open to the inexplicable. It had to. It is inexplicably cruel to deny a child their sense of self and it would require seemingly otherworldly strength to reconcile the impact of that cruelty on my nervous system. As an adult, I would have to soberly and privately observe that the scaffolding of my entire self-concept was built upon a fundamental lie. I would have to mourn and accept the years of adult life spent focused primarily on healing rather than spending those years focused on literally anything else. I would and will continue to have to do all of this while trying to pay my bills. Still, this reorganization brought me back to my humanity, to sensation in my body, and helped me divest from toxic environments, spiritual communities, work and relational habits. 

When writing the song “i dissolve,” I had already begun the process of healing yet I was oblivious to the extent of the gender unpacking that remained before me. Years later, my voice and appearance evolving, and my creative tastes now different, I question the value in sharing work from a time period when I was existing in a normalized dysphoric and dissociative state. Am I bringing harm to myself and others in doing so? I keep coming back around to a simple idea: I am not ashamed to talk about the pain I was in and acknowledge that beauty can be born out of pain. Now that I am (mostly) on the other side I feel capable of sharing this without it being tied to the unconscious self-harm I had become accustomed to.

I also feel compelled to advocate for myself as the artist. She is still my greatest creation. In order to heal, I have had to acknowledge the depth of love both for myself and others that I poured into her as a function of the desire to survive and connect on this planet. She was what my mirror neurons (or whatever) came up with in response to the needs of others to perceive me. She was my interpretation of who I needed to be in order to live relatively safely in this world. From where I stood at the time, I felt I would be more protected by assuming the risks of living as a cis woman than being an out trans person. That sense was born out of an embodied feeling of fear over how humans treat those who are not legible to us.   

This year, as I begin to let go of old songs and create new things from this body that I now vividly inhabit, it occurred to me that I would have to acknowledge a remaining ambivalence that has not been easy to place. Decades in the making and unmaking, it is now time for me to fully let go of my primary creation, of her. This entity, this persona - my protector - is leaving me for good. I have felt and still feel on occasion, a deep pang of grief in that realization– the feeling of loss even though I can rejoice in the fact that her absence connotes my existence. At the very least, I felt I owed her a burial.

The visual collage of “i dissolve” is a container to bury, honor and celebrate my previous self. It is a tomb. The tomb I offer her is a hand-stitched version of the multiverse as conveyed by the elements, a transforming body, the psychedelic marrow of a branch as a dimension of existence, then many branches, a highway, lots of performative glitz, natureboy.  In a mundane and ironic twist, editing this body of footage became a labor-intensive dive into mask-creation, a practice I am deeply acquainted with. As I found myself eschewing masks in real life, the masking and visual layering functionalities of the editing software became my primary methods for tomb-construction. The simple animations I created took hours and hours of clumsy - and then precise - node to node connection. Then mess-ups and so disconnections and reconnections. Despite the tediousness, my metaphorical mind was well-fed and amused by this and so the repetition became somewhat meditative and healing in nature. It took patience (and will continue to take patience) for me to hone an understanding of my own creative language now that I am not living with the impairment of a deeply embedded, fundamental, dishonesty. 

Though it doesn’t feature heavily in the final piece, there are glimpses of her. I allowed myself to spend time looking back, watching her in performance. Present to sensations of both grief and admiration, I worked tenderly with images from my past whilst re-organizing and then carefully sculpting multiple dimensions of newer footage that feels nearer to me now. Nearer to how I would commemorate and celebrate a loved one now. Nearer to how I experience life now. I am far enough away from her that I can almost not relate at all anymore. Perhaps because of this safe distance, the task shifted from a personal clearing and healing into the deification and enshrinement of her - who, to me now, lives in the land of invisible gods worthy of worship. She is my hero and she will remain alive as my protective phantom. 

There is more. 

I will always be creating through the lens and lived experience of a trans-Arab-Muslim person. Though my creation will never be divorced from that, there is a part of me that feels deeply self-conscious about making that explicit or primary. In part, that comes from my queasiness around the click-baity commodification of identity as trauma. It also comes from a feeling of discomfort around the uncertainty of how others' hands may or may not bring sensitivity or care to the re-telling of my story and whether that will have implications on my personal safety.  Mostly though, it comes from a pervasive, underlying wish that my creative expression will exist as more than just a coincidence of the ways I’ve experienced or survived this complex labyrinth of oppression. I want my work to be suggestive of an existence that is thoroughly allowing itself to exist. One that is enhanced by call and response to form and light and a connectedness to all, seen through the eyes of the child underneath that beholds wonder here and who survives as evidence that the gruesome requirements of self-abandonment can, with healing, dissolve. In other words, I want to be a trans-Arab-Muslim person who is living in their body rather than chronically protecting their body. I don’t deny any part of experience or suggest we ever “arrive” somewhere. I simply wonder what it would feel like if the scales of healing tipped in my favor. Until recently, I denied myself from opening to this wonder. I never believed anyone would meet me back.

And as I re-watch “i dissolve” and take in its visuals, I realize I have already begun creating from that space. Perhaps I have been doing so for some time. I can see the celebratory and triumphant spirit of the sublime. I can acknowledge the nourishment and pleasure I felt during the creative process. I can reveal here the openness I felt to these disparate pieces of footage becoming literally anything. It is from this space that I am able to state explicitly that living as a transgender person, in this world, at this time– choosing to stay alive, wanting to be seen, wanting to find something beyond despair– has required more skill and care than any craft will ever demand. Simply existing has been (and perhaps will continue to be) my primary mode of creation. 

When contemplating suicide feels like a better option than publicly existing as who you are, you know humanity is not on your side. I meet this level of lived reckoning in the eyes of almost every trans person I have ever met.

As I return to the tomb, I think we have arrived at the highest place that one can ask of an ephemeral capsule. I feel complete with it and with her. I have loved and served her and I will continue to love and serve her memory for as long as is required of me. I have stumbled upon a way for a now emboldened man to bow gratefully to the woman who kept him alive.