Friday, November 27, 2009

Scary Monsters/Super Freaks




If as Agamben suggests “ the profanation of the unprofanable is the political task of the coming generation,” then the task of writing in the 21st century is the profanation of the apparatus of media that aims, Agamben says, at the “neutralizing (of the) profanatory power of language as pure means, at preventing language from disclosing the possibility of a new use, a new experience of the word.”

How does one profane media except through the appropriation and mis-use of its own codes? Agamben would call this a form of play. “For the cat, what is the possible use for the ball of yarn? It consists in freeing a behavior from its
genetic inscription within a given sphere (predatory activity,
hunting). The freed behavior still reproduces and mimics the
forms of the activity from which it has been emancipated, but,
in emptying them of their sense and of any obligatory relation-
ship to an end, it opens them and makes them available for a
new use.”

What I refer to as “kitsch” narratives are really media forms that, because of their propagation, repetition and relative stability, are contemporary substitutes for myth. Agamben writes that, “Play breaks up this unity (of myth that tells a story and rite that reproduces and stages it): as physical play, it drops the myth and preserves the rite; as wordplay, it effaces the rite and allows the myth to survive.”

To have the two in union produces a great satisfaction that is not unlike the process by which a new being is produced. But, if the point of the modernist project was a sacred object, the point of contemporary art ought to be perversion. For, resistance manifests not in the attempt to substitute one sacred object for another, a process that Agamben calls secularization, but in the conscious production of an object that cannot be made into a symbol of anything except that process of unmaking that produced it. Agamben calls this “pure means.” In other words, there can be no absolute winner, because there is no universally accepted set of rules.

Or as Deleuze, quoted by Zizek http://www.lacan.com/zizrealac.htm#_ftnref2
puts it, “I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed."

Zizek goes on to point out that: “This Deleuzian procedure has an unexpected theological precedent - not the Christian immaculate conception, to which he himself refers, but the Jewish legend about the birth of the Messiah, reported by Joseph in a monoscript from the 13th century. God wants to give birth to the Messiah, but knows that all of the forces of evil are waiting in front of the vagina of Shekina to kill the Messiah the minute he is born. So God goes at night to his mistress, Lilith, the symbol of evil, and penetrates her anally (the expression used can also mean that he pees into her vagina). The Messiah will come from Lilith after anal sex: this is the way God tricks the forces of evil, by bringing the Messiah through evil.”




Keren Cytter’s "History in the Making or the Secret Diaries of Linda Schultz" which combines film, dance and theater is the best example of Deleuzian monstrosity that I’ve seen. It is about a male liberal activist and a female graphic designer/waitress who fall in love and wake up one morning to find they have shifted genders. Cytter utilizes repetition in dialogue, music (I am almost positive it’s constructed from free Garage Band loops) and choreography to empty it of a dominant meaning. As Zizek points out, “If the founding move that establishes a symbolic universe is the empty gesture, how is a gesture emptied? How is its content neutralized? Through repetition.”


Cytter’s project is not purely nihilistic. She acknowledges our nostalgia for revolution—though she kills off the protagonist--liberal activist Webber, she allows him to resurrect again and again with his identifying data slightly changed. In this way, Cytter hints at the potential for revolution. Nothing is infinitely reproducible, no category of knowledge or naming is stable for ever. [R]evolution will happen, Cytter suggests, not with a grand, unified effort, but in the slippage.

Again, this is from Zizek’s essay, “Today’s crisis is indeed one of experience, that is, a crisis of the destruction of experience, and the ‘spectacle’ is indeed the means of that destruction. But what exactly is the relation between spectacle and the destruction of existence and temporality? If by spectacle we name our captivation by the techniques of the audiovisual technical system, then the question is to understand this process. It is a question of understanding what it is about experience as such that makes us susceptible to such captivation. And this means understanding the ways in which the flux of consciousness is able to enter into or be entered by another flux, that flux constituted by the programs of the audiovisual system, programs which are nothing but, as Stiegler calls them, “industrial temporal objects.” If clues about this process can be inferred from Agamben’s writing, these are not pursued to the point of constituting an analysis. In the end, Agamben fails to grasp that if the word or the image is insubstantial or immaterial, nevertheless the conditions of both are always material, and technical, and therefore historical. Agamben fails to think through the history of the exteriorisation process itself, to think the historicity of the changing milieu, from language to writing to photography to cinema, and beyond. For Agamben, in the end, everything is reducible to language, the apparatus par excellence, and hence what is taking place today is seen only as destructive (which it is), not as the opening of new dimensions of preindividual potential (which it potentially is).”

Google images is perhaps the best example of this potentiality. Below are search results for “sacred.”











There is something wonderful and horrible about this. Clearly some video game has co-opted the word in the collective imagination. Nevertheless, that “sacred” has been released from its conventional associations opens up the possibility of new ways of working, thinking, communicating.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Ordinary Gospels


So the golden boy shows up in this airport and it’s just a madhouse: people shouting, selling things, kids high on glue, people begging.





I happened upon an essay by Juan Suarez entitled “Myth, Matter and Queerness: The Cinema of Willard Maas, Marie Menken and the Gryphon Group, 1943-1969” in the Grey Room journal. Suarez links myth with metaphor since both serve to temporarily arrest the flow of time and meaning. He then juxtaposes these with matter and metonymy, the senselessness of surfaces jointed through flow in time and/or space. “…the rise of matter to the surface of film (is) a way to stage the vagaries of sexuality…’queer’ might be another name for the way in which sex uses everything and anything, indefinitely extending libidinal connections across the surface of the world…” The ability of desire to connect bodies in sex is part of a larger desire to connect things. These objects “both recall and replace the primal sources of sensation and affect.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqqaSno6EoI



In Menken's film, the unification of the images occurs through the soundtrack. Used in this way--even the natural sound of birdcall-- is experienced as patently artificial. Likewise, our experience of the garden- which begins with certain inchoate sensations and evolves into the cataloging of material objects, is shown to be a highly restrictive and reductive process. Nevertheless, this process is also always incomplete. The sheer variety of objects overflows all attempts to contain. Thus, despite the soundtrack and crude slide show, the film manages to re-invoke a primal sense of wonder. It is just this tension, the back and forth between what Suarez refers to as the "centripetal" pull of myth and the "centrifugal" attraction of objects, that I am interested in exploring in the novel.

The flux between myth and matter is nowhere better demonstrated than on flickr.
Once we documented what we held dear, what we wanted to remember, what we did not want to lose in the flow of time. Now we photograph everything and upload it in an instant for all to see. Searching through the creative commons, I seek the banal, the incidental. The photographs I want are the ones that prompt the question: why did the photographer choose this subject and not some other? In these photos, the original meaning is lost. Only the power of materiality remains. By placing the object in an alien landscape, I hope to strip even the meaning that is acquired passively through its everyday use, and then reconstitute the divine aura of meaning through an overt act of fetishization. I am experimenting with makeshift shrines or frames. The frame itself will communicate through its material qualities: the color, texture, weight, opacity or reflectivity of the cloth. Ultimately, it is the text that will unite the images—in other words, the story itself will act as myth.




A show of Haley Tompkins work at Kreps Gallery allowed me to synthesize my recent obsession with objects. Any description of this show will fall flat which is part of its magic. It resists any attempt at abstraction. Tompkins takes objects and alters them. The intimacy of her gestures is what communicates. There is no great meaning, but these "objects" (that is what she calls her drawings and sculptures) become the meager but lovely substitutes for the artist herself. After viewing the show, I felt that I knew her in a way that was akin to sneaking into her room after she'd left for the day and lying in her bed and smelling her sheets and looking through her drawers. In other words, I had access to unquantifiable information. It was like touching a sleeping body.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Turning


If as Judith Butler says in her Psychic Life of Power, the coming into being of a subject is predicated on loss of a desired object and the process of internalization of the object through identification, then the psychic landscape of the subject is populated with images of things, fictional entities, that serve to demarcate boundaries of self and other through ritual and repetition. “…a subject only remains a subject through a reiteration or re-articulation of itself as a subject, and this dependency of the subject on repetition for coherence may constitute that subject’s incoherence, its incomplete character.” Referencing Althusser’s idea of how the law hails the subject and how, the subject, in responding to the interpellation, not only buttresses the power of the law, but also, limits his own freedom, in so far as naming, and language itself, does. How then to escape the law? Butler says, “such a turn demands a willingness not to be—a critical desubjectivation—in order to expose the law as less powerful than it seems.” In other words, “ 'being’ (is) precisely the potentiality that remains unexhausted by any particular interpellation. Such a failure of interpellation may well undermine the capacity of the subject to ‘be’ in a self-identical sense, but it may also mark the path toward a more open, even more ethical kind of being, one of or for the future.”

Why ethical? Perhaps because the loosening of attachments and the loosening of the boundaries of self allows one to see and experience the fact that the self and other are dependent upon each other for their definitions. If self can be reinforced through repetition and ritual, perhaps it is possible to use repetition and ritual to iterate an(other), more expansive self. Or, as Foucault puts it, “The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate us both from the state and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us from the state and the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of the kind of individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries.” The idea is perverse. It upsets one’s idea of natural law. This brings us back to the body, especially a body in pain—that which cannot be shared and so can be used to justify cultural, social and political institutions that would limit the self to a singular guilty subject.

The law and the subject co-emerge because the power of the law depends upon the illusion that the law is other than the subject, resistance to the law (experience of law as law) occurs only when law and subject are perceived as self and other. Thus, resistance empowers not only the self, but the law as well. But, what happens if the subject’s submission is so complete, without any resistance that would serve to reify self and other? The self as such becomes a vessel for the law, is not separate from the law. Again, the stomach turns, the skin bristles, the self resists, “no, it can not be, I will not allow it.” In Tibetan Buddhism, the reliance on the teacher is paramount for progress along the path. Optimally, the guru’s will becomes inseparable from one’s own. The word guru brings to mind cults, brainwashing. But, the difference lies in the self-consciousness of the disciple’s act. The self is given not as blood-sacrifice to a higher power but as an offering for the sake of all sentient beings. What remains of self is something that exists and does not exist. It is a will, a entity of the future, that exists only in the future, the proof of which lies only in the past—in memory and the world—in objects and in habits, in ritual and repetitions that we are barely conscious of. The law is everywhere. Why accept the cup, but resist the blow? A man sits contemplating a tree. He says, “I know that is a tree, I know that is a tree.” He isn’t crazy, he’s just doing philosophy. The first noble truth is the truth of suffering. To recognize that there is no suffering is to understand this. The only response is compassion. It is a mathematical law, like adding two plus two. Knowing this, there is no other answer.

Sebastian is in that in-between place. He begins with a blind obedience. He spends his life between resistance and submission. At the end, death forces a complete submission. What it is that Sebastian submits to is open to interpretation. Should we perceive his death as punishment meted out by the law (divine or natural?), an act of nihilism, or the occasion for his liberation? Can the conception of a self be so radically altered that death of the self is experienced as freedom instead of annihilation? In writing him as me and a male counterpart, I am playing with this expansion of self. It is a game, of course, but it feels real. The leakiness of self is the leakiness of bodies. Blood, semen, urine, shit. It shames. I try to embrace it, but it is hard. I hide. Guarding the image of myself, I am closed up, wordless, unable to write. When I started this project, I wanted so badly to change Sebastian’s name. I hated signing it. If I were a man, I’d be a real one, I vouched. A real man called by a real man name. When the law hails me/him, we will turn, in rectitude or shame. If I lived virtually, could I be a thousand selves, a million? By what name would I be called, what would my/our turning be?

Friday, July 31, 2009

The World is All That is the Case


I have just finished devouring a book called the Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarry. Reading it provided another of those uncanny moments that no longer seem supernatural, but still amaze me. Her book has two parts. The first focuses on the “unmaking” of the world as it operates in war and torture. The second focuses on the process by which the imagination remakes objectlessness (that is pure being or sentience) into an image object that is then materialized into the “real” object which is self-substantiating and which acts back on the sentience of a being to alter it’s conception of itself. Thus, she says, “human beings project their bodily powers and frailties into external objects—telephone, chairs, gods, poems, medicine, political organizations that in turn become objects of perception that are taken back in to human consciousness where they now reside as part of the mind or soul and this revised conception of oneself as a creature relatively untroubled by the problem of weight (chair), as one able to hear voices coming from the other side of the continent (telephone), as one who has direct access to an unlimited power of creating (prayer) –is now actually felt to be located inside the boundary of one’s own skin where one is in immediate contact with an elaborate constellation of interior cultural fragments that seem to have displaced the dense molecules of physical matter.”


She relates the beginnings of this object making to the biggest object of our making –God—and shows how in the Old Testament, that God (who is pure idea) is substantiated by his inscriptions upon human bodies (mostly in the form of wounding, but also in the form of pregnancy). In the O.T. God is voice/hands and human is body, mostly deprived of voice except for God’s words and forbidden to create images. The commandments and law itself becomes a substitute artifact for the body, but if man breaks God’s law, only the body is left to substantiate Him. Christianity is a radical move: God’s embodiment in the form of Jesus Christ makes the wounding of human bodies unnecessary to the display of God’s power. In fact, the reverse occurs, Jesus’ wounds become proof of his divinity and the disciples are called on to witness-to touch, to see that which before was only voice. Compassion is bound up both with imagination and with the knowledge of the sentient origins of the world. In a world flooded by images, constant acts of making, a remembrance of suffering body (the origin of world making) is important else the reciprocal effects of objects on private realm of being be forgotten or dismissed.

In so far as we can extend ourselves (our identity) through objects we make/cherish, we not only share our private mental state with others, but also escape the confines of our bodies. Even so, bodies remain and torture, war, illness of all kinds remain. Scarry describes torture as an unmaking of the world for the victim—where every object/idea loved or despised becomes meaningless, is essentially erased by pain. The victim of torture loses language—resorting to the pre-language of scream or else the words/confession the torturer supplies. She makes a very impressive analysis of the torturers re-appropriation of a most basic object of human construction-- the house. Whereas before, walls, floor, table, chair had allowed a human to ignore some of the basic wants of the body, now these things become the objects used to elicit pain. Thus, the torture cell becomes a horrible inversion of shelter.
Scarry talks about Marx’s writing as a conscious alternating between sensuous abstract passages about the moving of capital to the most banal, detailed recounting of workers lives—how big a room, the kind of food they eat, the illnesses they have. In other words, he brings it back to the forgotten body. He does not object to object making, in fact believes that this is key to human happiness, but he objects to the loss of the reciprocal action of the object on it’s maker’s being.

So, you can see that there are so many ideas here with voice/body, making/suffering, self/object, contraction/extension, being/world, God/human. The narrative voice has a divine quality (the Word) and yet the objects which point back to a body and its needs will also be present in the form of the short object films. Scarry says that if the object is intended to have greater reality than human beings themselves (as in a god or king) then it is important that the existence of that be made to seem natural (ie not artificial), it should be “seamless” without “cutting marks.” But, I am interested in no other reality above human. I am interested in the power of human imagination and meaning making to overcome suffering and to extend the self (a process of dispersal, that if infinite would be akin to negation) through creativity and love (extension of one's concerns to another’s wants/needs.)

Sunday, April 5, 2009

The Rules of the Game



95. The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind of mythology. And their role is like that of rules of a a game;





What if the player acts to directly oppose the rules? It is the same for the one who plays obediently. At some point, the losses will necessitate either a return to the game or a position of abjection.

467. I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again "I know that that's a tree, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: "This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy.

In the position of the abject, that is to say, in philosophy, anything is possible, even if most things are extremely unlikely.


How do we get from the ordinary sensory data to objects, and how then from objects to belief? Wittgenstein would say that a belief in ordinary objects is not so different from a belief in God.


144. The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

203. If everything speaks for an hypothesis and nothing against it , is it objectively certain? One can call it that. But does it necessarily agree with the world of facts? At the very best it shows us what "agreement" means. We find it difficult to imagine it to be false, but also difficult to make use of it.





Monday, March 2, 2009

Slipping




“Virtual existence is the condition of possibility for the return of the soul to the divine.” Amy Hollywood on Meister Eckhart


“If I were so rational that there were present in my reason all the images that all human beings had ever received, and those that are present in God himself, and if I could be without possessiveness in their regard, so that I had not seized possessively upon any on of them, not in what I did, or what I left undone, not looking to any past or to future, but I stood in this present moment free and empty according to God’s dearest will, performing it without ceasing, then truly I should be a virgin, as truly unimpeded by any images as was when I was not.“

“So let us therefore pray to God that we may be free of God, and that we may apprehend and rejoice in that everlasting truth in which the highest angel and the fly and the soul are equal.”

Another great read from Professor Amy Hollywood. The Soul as Virgin Wife.

I am interested in the multiplication of images. I go to Google and type "soul" and "fly" and "angel" and these three appear among thousands, millions. I choose the first three that suit my purpose. Eckhart associates the will with the desire for certain images. I think that is why I want to use everyday images in the novel. Identity and particularity coemerge. Self-portrait as collection. My cup has a crack in it. I have blond hair. The table is sticky with jam. I am a woman. And if we could rid ourselves of the images we use to represent ourselves, would we annihilate ourselves? What if we choose infinite images instead of these few, in other words, God? In other words, nothing?

In so far as we are exist in a physical world (embodied), there are limits. The limits of imagination (image making) are grounded in the body. What does God look like in the world? What does infinite look like incarnated? Obviously within a Christian tradition, it looks like Christ. With world as frame, Christ is God in the world, and acts that are Christlike are called just. Eckhart is very keen on this concept of justice. I think this is because justice is part of the world as such and nowhere else.

The world is all that is the case. Tractatus 1

Wittgenstein said that the Tractatus was an ethical document.

Wittgenstein Brown Book, Part II

"Do we have a feeling of familiarity whenever we look at familiar objects? Or do we have it usually? When do we actually have it? It helps to ask: What do we contrast the feeling of familiarity with? One thing we contrast it with is surprise.
One cold say: unfamiliarity is much more of an experience than familiarity."

..."What makes us use the expression 'seeking in our memory?' when we try to remember a word?

Let us ask the question: 'What is the similarity between looking for a word in your memory and looking for my friend in the park?"





The sensation of looking at trees: driving past them, I realize that there is nothing to see. A familiar feeling that is nothing but a body looking at trees. I extract the sensation and try to project it, so that looking becomes a kind of worshiping. I wonder: if I could nail it down would the tree become another me and I be emptied of every tree?





jeffwaa (2 years ago)
Nice video and lovely music. Sorry about the two-star rating, my finger slipped. I wish I could take it back.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Trespassers Will Be Violated






This novel is a memorial to someone who never existed. Who is he? A space alien, a man who fell to earth. one queer bird.

A monument does not commemorate or celebrate something that happened but confides to the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody the event.
Deleuze and Guattari


What sensations should the novel and films produce? Just this: a sensation that “I,” the reader/viewer could be otherwise, that the world and me in it could become queer-- QUEER in the broadest sense, though queerness is not unrelated to sex. For the seductiveness of skin is the seductiveness of difference, it is the seductiveness of that intimate/infinite distance that lies between two bodies coming together.
The working title for the novel is Queer Skin. The idea of skin relates to identity as a mask that is put on, but also to the medieval beguine mystics who talk of “wearing” Christ as a skin. This requires a kind of radical submission, a self-effacement, an erasure of prior identity and historical memory that can be read within conventional power structures as feminine and masochistic. The idea of skin is also related to the idea of a screen, upon which we inscribe and project our impressions. Skin is the original wall, the original ground. If the body is a house for the self, the skin is that which separates. The seductiveness of skin is the seductiveness of becoming other.


Elizabeth Grosz reminds in her essay, “Chaos, Territory, and Art,” that there is an overabundance of data that we select from in order to create and reinforce one form and not an infinite number of other forms. Bergson talks about the skeletalization of objects meaning that we perceive only what interests us, is of use to us, or that to which, by habit or evolution, our senses have become attuned. Flesh/skin is the material ground for sensation, the necessary screen upon which sensation is experienced. But, like the movie screen, “flesh disappears in what it develops.”

Body as such exists only so long as skin that defines its territory exists. The body, always mindful of survival, preserves itself through kitsch, habit, and ideology so that predictable sensations are produced. How do we reframe, then? How do we begin to feel queer in our own skin?



The first gesture of art is the construction of a frame, this area of space-time that traps these fragments of chaos that slows and filters the continual flux of life. How does framing relate to Foucault’s idea of heterotopia—that virtual space between the real social and the unreal (utopia). Can we think of the novel as a heterotopic space, a temporary frame, for imagining transgression? It could be the honeymoon train that Foucault speaks about, the not quite-space where deflowering occurs, and therefore does not-quite take place.

Foucault says that Galileo was heretical because he destroyed absolute emplacement, since position was no longer fixed. Thus, the delineation of sacred and profane space became relative. In this novel, the sacred and profane should coexist. The novel itself should act as a heterotopia juxtaposing several incompatible spaces in a single site. The reader/viewer should be given enough freedom so that their own desires/belief provide the delineation. Thus, every viewer’s grouping of profane and sacred will be different. This should be accomplished through tagging. There must be an association of the words chosen by the reader and the material that is brought forth.

I think that the films need to act as heterotopias. The flip is a great device because it is a chimerical organ of vision and touch. You look with your hands. I would like to exploit its proximity to the body. When you move, it moves, that is important because the perspective is always linked to a lived, embodied experience. The smallness of the machine also allows for flexibility—you can run, jump, bend and stretch with it. What does the world look like when we see this way? For one, there is an immediate and overt awareness of framing. You see these things and not others and those things are seen through the eye in your hand because you do not hold the flip to your eye, you see through the frame. I think the key to the films is to see the world differently, to see place differently and part of this is dictated by the mechanism itself, this having an eye in your hand.

I want to capture the “real world” without trickery or cool effects or even artistry but with a change in perspective, a slowing, a consciousness of the frame and an examination of contents of the frame. The films should be intimate, as near as the camera is to your body. I want the films to reflect this sense of discovery of a new world, of beauty and horror. This could be anything from filming the landscape formed by sheets over a body in bed to view out a window of a building. I think the two key characteristics are making the everyday appear in a new way and to always maintain a consciousness of the intimacy of the mechanism ( to the body) and the personal act of framing, of choosing small pieces of information. So perhaps landscape is not the right word. I am interested in a perspective that is unique not because of content, but because of framing. At the same time, I am interested in the everyday because I want readers to be able to posit their own bodies (through memory) in that space. The images should be visually enticing, if they could be read as sacred or profane or somewhere in between, so much the better. There cannot be a real narrative to them. Rather, these films should create virtual spaces where the viewer can project him/herself into a world that is like and unlike that which they see everyday.


The novel is about love and forgiveness and the possibility for radical forms of this. When S. forgives the man who attacks him, he does it at a point where he has no choice. He is about to die. His options are only love or hate. He could resist, go down fighting for himself, but he does not. He submits. He becomes something other than his narrowly defined self and because of that act of non-attachment, comes back to life. This is how S. will understand it. And, the fact of that act so upends his sense of himself and what is possible in life, that he tries to leave his old life, history behind by running off to African, to the desert like the saints of old. It is ridiculous of course, possible in philosophy and biblical tales only. The end is not utopian. S. dies of AIDS, but he will have lived and loved in a way that is not at all tragic. If the reader is sad, S. is not. The point is to not neglect the limits of the body: hunger, pain, sickness, death. The point is to allow our vision of our own concerns and needs to expand beyond ourselves to include others. The divine limit of this (and also the Buddhist ideal) is that we love all others equally without consideration of how they relate to us or our welfare. The notion is perverse. It makes a lot of people angry mostly because it requires that they detach from their notion of a fixed self.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Experiments






text: Jean--the medical student from France and Sebastian's last love.

He was already very sick.
It made me angry that I couldn't do anything for him.
What did it matter that I was almost a doctor?
I told Batilde, I was going back to France.
She called me a coward. I took the bus to Bamako.
I missed the first plane. The next was fully booked, so I spent the day
looking for souvenirs in the marketplace.
When I got back, Sebastian had become an old man. He couldn't even stand up.
The suit was dry like parchment, yellowed and stained.
He asked me not to leave again.
I promised. It was unbearable at the end.
But, there was nothing else to do. I had given my word. I had to see it out.


Voice-over narration: Sebastian

Jean at my bedside. Big Head. Skin shiny as navy silk. Lips pink and round as moons. His eyes were red. He had been crying. I always forget how young he is. He could have gone either path—to jail or to this--his private glory that manifests not as a golden laurel or halo, but as a quiet and steadfast confidence. J. is waiting for me to speak. And I do. I tell him that I would like to learn how to tango before I die. And he looks at me as though I were mad, and laughs raucously and shakes his head. A big laugh from his belly as if from a bass violin. Two days later, he made the trip to Bamako and in the bazaar there by the Great Mosque of Djenne, found a seller of old toys, dolls with real nylons, and waxy tubes of orange lipstick, he found a water-stained cardboard box containing numbered plastic feet decals and an inscrutable set of instructions, I believe, in Portuguese. In addition, he bought an old, yellowed suit of white duck and white tasseled white nubuck loafers, slightly cracked and flattened.
He wanted to dress me, but I was, too weak so he dressed himself and danced round the room using a shepherd’s stick for a cane. I love him. And, now that I am dying, I have no fear. I would proclaim it from the rooftop.



Carlos: the prosecuting attorney
He sent me a letter from Africa on hotel stationary—the Intercontinental. Old fashioned letter head, cheap paper that soaked up the ink. It must have gotten wet. I couldn’t read half of it. He asked if I would forgive him. He’d asked me that before at the trial. At the time, I thought it was some kind of stunt. I didn’t know he was sick. But, the letter seemed like he was saying goodbye. I remember thinking that I wouldn’t have been surprised if I heard that he’d jumped off the balcony. He told me he’d been mugged his first week there. It must have brought it all back for him, Even though Suzanne did not think he had post-traumatic stress disorder, I still think that something like that kind of violence affects you. It has to. I called his boyfriend, Alex after I got the letter. I thought he might know something. He never called me back. I thought about telling the police—they knew that Hector was lying about Sebastian, still they were not happy about him leaving the country. Legally, yes, it was the correct thing to do. But, then I thought, what good will that do? So, I just ran the letter under the faucet, let all the evidence run off like invisible ink.


Sebastian narrating:
It was like they say in the movies: my life passed before my eyes. And, suddenly it all seemed so absurd. I felt like I was on top of a mountain range looking at my life. The mountains were massive, immoveable and as I stood looking left and right, I saw how it all continued on and on.
I wrote letters to everyone. I cried doing it. I wasn’t sad. I was grateful. The tears drip-dropped onto the paper. I sent them anyway, I knew I wouldn’t write again. I didn’t want them to try to find me. I could picture my life, returning home sick—hope forced down my throat like some awful treacle. But, I did want to communicate some things before it was too late. I had to tell Alex, first off, so that he could get tested. I wanted to tell Carlos that I was sorry for running away. I wanted him to know that I was happy, not that that would make a difference. But, he was a kind man. He actually did care. I wrote my mother, too. I hadn’t talked to her in years. She came to the hospital, stayed for three days while I was still sedated. Alex told me later. I could only assume that she’d defied my father in coming. I wanted to thank her for it. For a long time, I had wished she would leave him, find a life somewhere, but I understand now, that I was wanting that for myself.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

The Eskimo Trick




















Ladies and Gentlemen: I want to make this perfectly clear.

I AM NOT
, (nor have I ever been) A MAGICIAN.

I was speaking last night with a man who came from of family of famous magicians. Their job was to make their audience believe. They did not consider themselves liars, (he was talking about me) because there was never any expectation of truth. It was a complicit arrangement.
Being professionals, they did whatever was required to finish the job.

So, the man says to me that he has spent his life trying to assume the correct position ( I could only suppose that it was missionary) in terms of self-authenticity. And, that he could not believe that such a woman as the one I/SebastianA. had befriended on line , the children's minister who writes violent erotic poetry, could be charged with the spiritual education of children. I said, do you mean to tell me all your thoughts and feelings can be shared with your wife and daughter? His answer was essentially "yes." I felt ashamed because I realized that he was in the position of the magician and I, by that binary logic, was necessarily the liar.

I'd be a sad excuse for an illusionist. I admit it-- I wear my heart on my sleeve. The blood drips over everything. Really, I wanted to say to him, (we were in a swank sushi place in Chelsea), really, you can’t take me anywhere.

I AM NOT WHO YOU THINK I AM.



I do love minimalist art, I do. And piano music, too—so clean, so precise, the stroke ringing out. I am sure both arts have bored people to tears or even to death, but they have never embarrassed a soul.

I saw for the second time, the Pipilotti Rist video installation at the MOMA. Draped with magenta curtains, the two story high screens present a video so overflowing and luscious that it delights for hours. In viewing it, all the sensual pleasures of the body are experienced again pre-cognitively. The work is unapologetically female and brilliantly subversive. The traditional association of female with irrationality, sensuality, and nature is not denied; nor is it celebrated, rather it is made strange by making a world and acts that are usually imperceptible to men (and women) perceptible to both. Whatever shame rooting through the muddy grass for a fallen apple ought to bring is buried in the visceral satisfaction of that experience.

In other words, one ought to know better. The two little boys, who crowed and ran around touching the screens like skin, don’t yet.



I look for Sebastian in crowds. The thought of him makes me pulse warmly as if he were a newly missed lover. I am slowing the writing of him online. I will stop it soon. It is too painful. I am a bad liar. Is it this shedding of old skin that hurts? or the new one emerging?

Once in college, this guy to whom I was attracted and I were sitting in a dorm room drinking and talking with friends. At some point, we ended up exchanging clothes so that I was wearing his jeans and briefs and a white t-shirt with no bra and he was wearing a too tight skirt and sweater. Everyone watched us watching each other. The next day my friends all said, “we were so sure you were going to f*.” But, we didn’t. We certainly might have, but the exchange was erotic enough.

Sometimes I don't know who said what. It it like Deleuze's becoming-Eskimo--I write in a hybrid space between us.














Reading:


Elizabeth Grosz Space, Time, and Perversion http://books.google.com/books?id=Htf7y-rcVFwC

www.cinestatic.com/trans-mat/Beddoes/BD6s5.htm
Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II , page 53. http://books.google.com/books?id=8GJlkhNCcy8C