Tuesday, December 23, 2008

I Fell In Love With A Dead Boy





the molecular unconscious, on the contrary, knows nothing of
castration, because partial objects lack nothing and form free
multiplicities as such; because the multiple breaks never cease producing
flows, instead of repressing them, cutting them at a single stroke—the
only break capable of exhausting them; because the syntheses constitute
local and nonspecific connections, inclusive disjunctions, nomadic
conjunctions: everywhere a microscopic transsexuality, resulting in the
woman containing as many
men as the man, and the man as many women, all capable of entering—
men with women, women with men—into relations of production of
desire that overturn the statistical order of the sexes. Making love is not
just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand.
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus




“I love you.”

In so far as love has an "I", this book is about identity. To broaden the concept of love and compassion requires a loosening of this "I", such that the other’s concerns become my own. I want to talk to Cyril, my web designer, about making a virtual perfume bottle, an old fashioned kind of cut crystal with a little red-tasseled stopper. I’d ask my readers to say these words and send me the file. When you opened the bottle, they would all play—peppery, musky, flowery---pheromones, phonemes.


"I have this thought sometimes, that I would like to be made of chocolate . The finest, silkiest kind, stuff that tastes a little like wine and a little like earth, stuff so good that it makes you drool like a baby when it melts on your tongue and you feel pleasure spread like warmth from your belly to the top of your head. If I could, I would feed the world this way. I'd break off pieces of me as I walked through a hungry crowd, a finger here, there a leg. I'd scrape chunks from my chocolate belly and feed oceans of fish and skies full of gulls.

I realize (sometimes) that love has nothing at all to do with me or any estimation of my happiness. And yet how miraculous that loving someone makes me happier than anything and bigger than I am without it. What mechanism is it that makes less always more?

Please, don't mistake what I am saying for desiring abuse or self-abnegation. You see, I want someday to learn to live like that-- to be part of the world, to let love flow everywhere, to the flushed faces of beauties and the festering wounds of a beggar, pumped from my heart, like blood is pumped, without calculation.”


I didn’t write this. S. did. If it is read as “feminine” because it is lyrical, because it reeks of sacrifice, it is still not exactly my “I” that wrote it. The fissure is filled by the thought of difference-- the rubric I provide. 19 years old. Gay man. It comforts. We can breath a sigh of relief. There is some explanation for our dis-ease.


The Cinematic Relations of Corporeal Feminism
Theresa L. Geller http://www.rhizomes.net/issue11/geller.html

“In other words, the movement-image and gender performance both may "seek to approximate the ideal of a substantial ground of identity;" however, "their occasional discontinuity, reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness of this 'ground.'" Discontinuity reveals what, in effect, constitutes both bodies and the cinematic image—singularities. "Singularities are the impersonal events from which we compose the world into actual bodies," and it is from decomposing the cinematic image, or gender performance, into its singularities that an active image of thought is made available."




COMING TO A THEATER NEAR YOU (YOUTUBE)

The Red Dress:

When I was little, my mother said
Shame on you, and
it’s a crying shame
And shame about that
She didn’t say
Shame is a red dress
That you will wear
Shame is a tight red dress
worn without underwear
She didn’t say that
You will cry tears
Hot as tea,
Hot as pee
streaming down your leg
In kindergarten
She said, “God is good.”
She said, “Love all men as your brothers.”
She did not say,
“If you love him you will let him hurt you.”
She did not say,
“If you love him, it will not matter what.”
He put on my face like he put on love
With his hands
And I looked in the mirror
And saw myself –as if for the
First time.
My cheeks like apples
My mouth a laceration.
When he kissed me
My features slid off
Dripping like juice
from a squeezed fruit.
I found the dress in the morning
Lying on the floor
I picked it up.
On the front was a stain,
A dark island of semen in a sea of red.
All morning, I traced the routes
I couldn’t find the way back.
So here I sit, with the dress in my hands.
It is nothing, a cloth,
A synthetic blush
You wanted to shame me,
you said I wasn’t much of a man,
Then why dress me in red
the opposite of surrender?
You should have dressed me in white
And made me your bride.







D. N. Rodowick - Unthinkable Sex: Conceptual Personae and the Time-Image from the online journal Invisible Culture

"Conceptual personae are the subjective presuppositions that map a plane of immanence….
the conceptual persona only rarely or allusively appears for himself. Nevertheless, he is there, and however nameless or subterranean, he must always
be reconstituted by the reader. Conceptual personae manifest a non-teleological movement where the subject wants to differentiate her or himself in constructing new concepts or positions of identity
that function as vectors for becoming.”


Time as layers of sediment
Media fragments
PETALS
SKINS
Face as screen.
Text as tattoo.

Sebastian is dead. I am resurrecting him into his future, my present or else he is dreaming his own story, beginning middle end.

"There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules, and particles of all kinds. There are only haecceities, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages. […] We call this plane, which knows only longitudes and latitudes, speeds and haecceities, the plane of consistency or composition (as opposed to a plan(e) of organization or development)."[3] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

IF S. CAN BE FOUND IT IS IN What D&G call STRATIGRAPHIC TIME.

THE PROCESS I CALL RADICAL SUTURING IS UNIQUELY SUITED FOR THE INTERNET—so familiar is that idea of having multiple widows of various media open at the same time. What is the fuel that initiates the mechanism? THE DESIRE TO KNOW, >DESIRE FOR THE STORY> the desire for TRANSCENDENCE or else death.


The text is that which is written on the body. “TRANSCENDENCE” and “DEATH” are tattooed on Sebastian’s hands like Goan crosses. But, the novel is not only text, and the act of reading is not reinscription, but movie-making, the text becomes fluid as it is projected onto a ground of image and sound.