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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Perversion--with a cherry on top

“Structurally, perversion such as I have delineated for you on the imaginary plane,
can only be sustained with a precarious status which, at every moment is contested, from within, for the subject. It is always fragile, at the mercy of an inversion…The fundamental uncertainty of the perverse relation, the fact that it can find no way of becoming grounded in any satisfying action, makes up one aspect of the drama of homosexuality.” Jacques Lacan

I want to suggest that my project to live online as a young gay man is profoundly perverse, it doubles so many losses that within a phallocentric economy, it can only be understood as a form of masochism.

BUT...

the fact is that I do not experience this as masochistic, for I see my double identity as a performative feminist act that questions the very idea that feminine identity is formed through a masquerade that serves heterosexual male desire. I do not deny that this play is an act of radical self destabilization which, if one remains within the dominant hetero male symbolic realm can only be read as a loss of self that is tantamount to castration. But, I think that outside of this system, it is possible to experience loss differently, as a kind of excess, an ecstatic remainder, the piece(s) which can not be incorporated into a whole (because the whole is imaginary.) As in the meditations performed by the beguine mystics this fluidity of identity is experienced as divine.


This doubling of surfaces--the persona of the male homosexual that overlays, but does not replace the female is not a disavowal of castration nor a fetishized femininized male identity but an active rebellion that destabilizes phallocentric structure itself.

When nothing remains...nothing but skin and bones, when bones appear to be nothing...nothing but layers of skin, what once was called "reality" becomes not only unbearably light but impossibly thin. At this point...in this point, the boy is deprived of its substance and appears on the verge of disappearing. The missing body sets in motion the detective story ---in all its (dis)guises. Mark C. Taylor, Hiding

In Irigaray's terminology, I am performing a mimetic act of strategic essentialism, for, "if women's bodies are viewed as multiple and dispersed, women should speak from that position in a playful way that suggests that this view stems from a masculine economy that values identity and unity (e.g. the penis or the Phallus) and excludes women as the other (e.g. lack, dispersed, or "nothing to see"). http://www.iep.utm.edu/i/irigaray.htm

In other words in my world, this “No” is not the threat of the law, in the name of the father, it is the “No” that itself denies a transcendental signification and in doing so, provides a site for embracing other ways of being and communication with an other.

Thus, with Sebastian, I want to create a inner experience that transcribes "loss" and "abjection," into something creative and sacred. If I can do this, it is possible that, Sebastian's own abjection, his act of radical forgiveness (in the face of a brutal beating) which is the central action in the novel, can be read not as act of self-loathing, but as an expression of a divine love: either a compassion for all others (even those that hate) or as love for God (love of the divine.)

How can I transmute a personal mystical experience into something that communicates? How to communicate with all these unknown others. It will require a move from the imaginary to writing much like that attempted by Georges Bataille.


I will not talk about language as fetish because to do so can only bring me back into the economy I am rejecting. Rather, I see Sebastian as a form of poetry. Poetic language resists fetishization through its instability and generosity. In other words, poetry mimics, in material form, the immaterial state of consciousness I am trying to achieve.

Bataille however is not confident that poetry can achieve his aim. He says, "I fear courting poetry. Poetry is a drawn arrow. If I have aimed well, what counts, what I want--is neither the arrow nor the target (but)the moment when the arrow is lost, dissolves into the air of the night, until the memory of the arrow is lost."

Of course, in true Bataillean fashion, he opts to use a metaphor to describe his rejection of poetry. Bataille understands that the moment of (self) negation is a silent moment, it can not speak itself. For this, it requires the resurrection of the body and identity, memory and language.

Thus, "as the site of endless deferral and difference, writing contains asceticism without capitulating to idealistic totalization and the effacement of history. Yet as a present trace through which communication occurs, writing engenders community without necessitating the fetishization of the other." Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy


Moreover, I see Bataille's writing as an early form of hybrid media, one that, anticipates the disembodied world of online presence. "Bataille’s textually generated, always moving, desirous, anguished and annihilated subjectivity replaces the lacerated body as the site of communication, suffering, desire, and identification.” Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy

Bataille, however, (perhaps because he identifies himself as a hetero male and, thus, has more to lose,) continues to revisit a site of trauma that presupposes the transcendental whole. He seems to forget that pain as it is lived is experienced not as trauma, but as pure sensation. It is only when the cognitive consciousness begins telling its stories, connecting that sensation with objects and events and thoughts of past, present, and future, that is, when it is re-inscribed in the body, in time and space, that trauma as such occurs. But, the site of trauma is also the site of "communication, suffering, desire and identification" in other words, it is the site of compassion and identification with the other. (It is emphatically not abstract or dehistorized like Bataille's Chinese torture victim is).


The next post will discuss the work of Derek Jarman whose work, like Battaille's, employs (an) imagistic, non-linear way of working…(that)… disrupts the hierarchies of both medium and narrative and, in doing so, refuses patriarchal logic.” Chrissie Iles, "Derek Jarman" for Serpentine Gallery, London.

This clip from Sebastiane, Jarman's first feature length film demonstrates his creative achievement. The most striking thing about this scene is the radical equality of the beautiful lovers and their lovemaking. Watching it, I suddenly understood that not only was it impossible for such a scene to be filmed between a man and a woman, but that other possible structures for viewing/touching/loving (an)other can and should be sought.

Reading:
Jacques Lacan Seminar XX
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman
Mark C. Taylor Hiding
Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference and the Demands of History
Chrissie Iles, Derek Jarman: Brutal Beauty
Georges Bataille, Guilty

Being (S.)

For a few weeks now, I have been living on-line as a not quite out of the closet, beautiful 19 year old gay man residing in the Midwest with my parents and attending community college.

I have proclaimed my first love on line. I picture him dark, longish hair, side-burns, cleft chin, leather jacket, clever, not smart and charming as a dancing cobra. I’ve wrote the end of the affair today, inspired by reading Genet’s The Thief’s Journal on the elliptical at the gym this morning. (thanks for this, Mark Amerika) It’s hot and dirty, what else? I already had the youtube video in mind before I wrote the post: S. in teary drag (he’s been dressed by his lover in an act meant to humiliate) slow dancing with his beloved. It’s going to be lovely: tender and strange. Sartre writes in the introduction that in Genet’s work, he uses a double to represent himself. “Each of them has the strange property, of being both itself and a reflection of itself.”

Yes. I feel the same way with the man I am.

At first, inhabiting him made me intensely uneasy. I felt myself leaking out and him seeping in. Contamination. But, now that the initial wound is beginning to heal, the graft is starting to itch. And, an itch, as we all know, can be a source of both pleasure and pain

(depending on the intensity of the stroke.)

I feel myself wanting to scratch. I am falling in love with him—my dream self. There is a woman on-line who could be me—smart, likes poetry, has a small child, a distant husband, and she is falling in love with him, too. Because, for one, she can, because he’s gay and nineteen and writes like an angel about how “the wide world had shrunk to a six inch plot of warm, brown skin….how (his neck) plunged past the collar into the white foam of his shirt… the scapula—those bones like fins cutting through the ocean of skin.” So, who is she falling for?

I think of Marina Abramovic’s Role Exchange piece (1975) in which she and a prostitute switched places—she--in the prostitute’s show window and the prostitute at the gallery. Now this is clearly about embodied identity, but what of disembodied identity? This kind of identity is much more about what and how we write (language) and the display of our preferences (books, movies, tv shows, music.) If I seduce, the framework is gay 19 year old man--those are the limits, but the rest is a convergence of what I want to show and what my “friends” want to see.

It ends at the body, of course—I will forever be closeted. A lonely gay man near me in MO wanted to meet (not just for sex, he assured me) but, of course, I couldn’t. I haven’t heard from him since.

Today I met young woman who is a children’s minister whose page is devoted to the suffering of children, but who posts intensely erotic poetry on myspace.

And, I think we are all leading double, triple, quadruple lives. Perhaps we always have and we are just now seeing how fluid it can be when the pieces of ourselves are given in bytes.

More of Sartre on Genet’s Thief’s Journal: “His stories are not stories. They excite and fascinate you; you think he is relating facts and suddenly you realize he is describing rites…His memories are not memories, they are exact but sacred; he speaks about his life like an evangelist, as a wonder-struck witness.”

Yes. How odd that before I’d read this, I’d already planned to film a performance of my feast day.