Jorge Gomez del Campo

little bits of Alison

2012-02-13T10:45:00.000-05:00

Alison Oakes

I don't really know much about the field of aesthetics, which isweird for an artist who is also completely obsessed with philosophyand criticism. I don't even know where exactly my own pastiche ofideas about beauty come from. And there are way too many branchesand sub-branches of the field to really attempt to casually figure itout on the weekend. And part of me thinks that this is somethingthat as an artist I need to consciously avoid thinking about toomuch, lest I turn into an illustrator for some idea or another about art. Istill like to imagine that the act of artistic production is also anact of (unconscious, automatic) analytic thinking, and so I tend tolet that part of my life think about art and beauty. Or something like that.

I can say of aesthetics, however, that at some point in the past we tended tothink of beauty as a thing or a virtue unto itself. It had certaincharacteristics (symmetry, balance, divinity, whatever) and artistsfound or articulated them in various ways. I had a very old arthistory teacher when I studied in Paris who would take us around theLouvre and teach us about art, mostly painting. Art in her view wasa soap opera about who was hanging out with, and sleeping with, andinfluencing whom, and how that changed the character of their work. While there was an awareness of the King and the Cross in all of herstories, mostly the narratives dealt with artists and art and beauty. [I might have hated the class if it hadn't been for the fact that it meant Icould go to the Louvre whenever I wanted and sit in front of ElCaravaggio's paintings for hours.]

David with the Head of Goliath, El Caravaggio

Galleria Borghese, Rome.

At some point, probably because of or alongside of the activitiesof artists themselves, the question of beauty shifted. It became notso much about what is the nature of beauty, but more about whatcounts as beautiful, to whom, and for what political reason. And thenalso, is it different than erotic desire; is it different thancommodification. And also... who knows what else contemporaryaesthetics is concerned with.

[…]

Sometimes I hate art so much. I am horrified by its relationship topower and privilege. I am horrified by what we become in its mirror. And often it seems no different (or even worse) than any other product for the filthy rich to fuck each other about while they fuckthe rest of us over. In the Global South what this “fuck over” means is: kill, torture, disappear, work to death, poison, exploit,etc. And while you certainly can't blame individual artists forthis, it's awful to be at a party or an opening or a happening andconsider the consequences of the “cool” we are creating. Andoften times that is all artists make - an aesthetic and ideologicalcorollary to the structures of capital and empire.

And so, I go out to galleries alone, with cynicism and sadness. Every now and then some work does just a little more than what theartist wishes it did.

Alison Oakes

I've written about Alison Oakes before. And I really like her and her work, not only because I find her compelling as a person/ object of desire, but also because she makes good andterrifying and nuanced work. Mostly, I like her because sheis everything that a traditional painter could be, but isn't.

In her words, she is “a painter's painter.” She pays obsessive attentionto craft. I doubt that when she started painting, she even understood what else she was painting about. In otherwords, her concerns are artistic, and aesthetic (driven by somepersonal (hidden) need or longing perhaps). And herthoughts on her subjects are revealed (to herself?) only through the process ofmaking beautiful paintings. The result is a formally very compellingbody of work that, by an accident of Oakes' consciousness, struggles to problematize: the beautiful, the feminine, the abject, the commodity,and the sublime.

Her work has none of the decadence of the conceptual art of recentyears, none of its cynicism, cool veneer, or alienated value. Her work isprimarily about an aesthetic experience of color, surface, texture, and luminosity. But it is not reactionary or conservative. It uses thisaesthetic experience to bring you in and open you up, so that it can call you and itself and into question.

I don't want to say too much more about her work. Go here if youwant to read more about my thoughts on her work. Or, visit herwebsite here. In general her work tugs at the sublime, deconstructs desire andthe beauty myth, toys with horror and taboo, all in the context ofperfectly rendered oils on porcelain, painted with painstakingpatience with a traditional Renaissance technique. If you're inKnoxville this month, go see her paintings. Buy one if you can. I bet she won't bearound here too long, and that a collector-market is eventually goingto find her work.

Alison Oakes

The_Year_of_the_Break-Up: or what I think about when I think about love

2012-02-06T13:33:00.000-05:00

I was at dinner with my mom and my aunt last week. They are both exceptionally intellectual people. One teaches history and the other philosophy. And we like to bat ideas around, especially in a playfully aggressive sort of way. So my aunt, the philosopher, decided to say to me that all the women I have ever dated look just like my mother, and how this is some kind of unresolved Oedipal conflict in my life.

Despite the fact that she had just suggested that I wanted to fuck my mom and kill my dad while at dinner with my mother, I decided to just go along with it. I said: there's no conflict. My mother is a smart, beautiful, intelligent, generous, thoughtful woman. Why wouldn't I want to find someone like her as a partner?

This worked. The fact that she failed to embarrass me, and that I said something more or less sensible (how are you supposed react to that accusation, except with horror), ended the fun to be had in this line of reasoning. So she said, “that's very nice of you to say,” and we moved on to other topics.

At that very moment though, the girl I was (sort of) dating walked up. And I looked at her beautiful smile; her funny, conflicted personality; and her bright and sad eyes; and I realized that in one respect the Oedipal conflict is anything but solved...

In the last year and change I have split up with way too many women, seven maybe eight. In most of those relationships, we would break-up with one another once every couple of weeks, or every few days. And it was just as traumatic every time. At one (fortunately brief) point, I was in two open relationships with two women with whom the relationship would end weekly. That's a lot of heartbreak. And it isn't like you get better at it through practice. It still feels like confronting a mini-death – a future which is missing.

Seems like too many. Also like not enough. In moments I see a Don Giovanni in me. And there were certainly moments this year where I was compulsed to seek companionship, love, inspiration, and distraction in another's body. But unlike Don Giovanni it wasn't an economic lust. I wasn't driven to acquire, certainly not at the cost of my ethical self, like Don Giovanni whose lust was not even tempered by rape and murder. I was, rather, driven to fall - in love perhaps, but also just to fall.

In some ways this is unfortunate. Life would be much simpler if I fucked more like a sociopath (or a bro) and less like lapsed Catholic. I don't want to suppress the horror or monstrosity of desire the way a liberated protestant might; I want the opposite: meaning, ritual, struggle, fall and redemption. In short, I can't see, in my object of desire, a mere piece of ass walking down the street. Instead, I see a complicated, nuanced, tragedy waiting to happen. And I see a weapon to use against myself. It's a cliche to say that you always fall in love with the wrong person. But everyone who has ever elicited that exciting vertiginous feeling of longing, joy, and alienation we call falling in love, has always also hated me, on some level.

Something about me (and them) has always insisted that the relationship end in tears and anguish, over and over. Many of these relationships this last year, the ones that lasted any amount of time, required weeks or months of separations, midnight phone calls, threats, intentional cruelty, barely comprehensible levels of love and violence. In one, that has lasted six months, I think we have spent just as much time apart as together (It might still be going on, it's unclear). We miss each other so much we forget how painful last night or last week was. Or how monstrously we acted. We try and not call. We try and not suggest promises we can't keep... and so on. It's becoming absurd. It's a labyrinth we know doesn't exist, with no exit, where Joy Division and Lucinda Williams are always playing, and where we dance with The Nuremberg Amateur Dance Society at every other turn. This desire is obviously irrational. Beyond control. It's stronger than me. And it's stronger than her. Significantly, all desire follows this careful manufacture. You could suppress it (why would you want to). But it would get away from you, anyway.

Any specific object of desire pulls at something in us that resists rationalization. Meaning, you can give it a name, a structure, a meaningful story; you can make lists and spread sheets and flow charts; you can model it mathematically and statistically; you can even identity it's physiological processes and codes; but, then it slips out of it, reappears elsewhere, in another body, in another place.

We have tried over and over to simplify and model and rationalize human desire. The Soviets in the 50s and 60s tried to plan an economy (based on rational and scientific ideas about human need/ desire) that would only produce what they predicted their citizens would want, which was never what they actually wanted. Here in the U.S. we tried to rationalize our enemies and predict how they would react based on how many deaths or losses they could tolerate. And through these scientific analyses we produced the most absurd, irrational and barbaric policies imaginable. Just like our Soviet counterparts maintaining their economic plan through the gulag, assassination and ordinary terror, we razed civilizations in the name of modeling our little human desires..

And just like my maybe-girlfriend and I who engage in whatever level of violence we can live with (not very violent), all of desire always seems to slip towards horror and brutality. The story behind anything is like the Nuremberg trials, a narrative of a good and just war against obvious evil that conceals the experience of barbarity; that conceals a citizen-soldier - the baker, the tinker, the banker - willing to smash a kid's face with the butt of his rifle. And when he goes home, he is no longer human the way he was before.

Desire, even conflicted shameful desire, always feels right. The thing you want is without morality. Until you have it. And then in regret you might see yourself for what you are. Or not. Desire is not a mirror. You probably don't know what came over you. You reach for straws to explain what you have done or felt. But the explanations rarely ring true.

Desire is a ghost. You glimpse it and name it and it's gone. It can be objectified, forced outward into the commodity fetish-object. But then just as quickly it disappears from there as well.

Desire is always tragic. It ends in the dissolution of itself. And in the dissolution of the lover. And sometimes even the beloved object.

And in this is the truth of the Oedipal conflict my aunt was wielding at me. All desire is basically Oedipal. Outside of psychoanalysis the story of Oedipus is primarily a story of fate, of an irresistible force. And however you conceptualize it, the irresistible force for us humans is that we each end. Awareness of that ending is the burden of recognizing yourself in the mirror. The details of the Oedipus narrative which so obsess the psychoanalyst – blindness, incest, patricide – merely tell the story of symbolic castration, of alienation from the human (through the breaking of the incest taboo), and of the end of authority; all of which are the story of our horror at the confrontation with our own death.

And so we're in a (not) funny situation where an irresistible force (that we end) meets an immovable object of desire (continuity). Thus: we act like idiots; we act like tyrants; we are shocked when nothing works out the way we planned.

30 seconds of racism can ruin your whole evening

2012-01-25T21:28:00.000-05:00

I don't tend to write too often or too directly about race and ethnicity. It's a very unsettled concept for me personally. I don't feel like I quite belong in any easily defined space of brown or white. I have relatively light skin and green eyes. And in my country of origin (hardly my home country, Tennessee is my home, like it or not) this would have meant a life of definite privilege.

But I didn't grow up there. I grew in Oak Ridge where I got to watch my historian mother and nuclear physicist father treated like idiots by just about everyone (police officers, cashiers, doctors) because they spoke exceptionally correct English with a Mexican accent. They've been citizens of this country for more than twenty years, and they are still treated like this. The assumption is that they are stupid and ignorant, until they show otherwise. My sister-in-law is from Mexico and doesn't speak English very well at all. She has dark hair, dark eyes and beautiful brown skin. She has it much worse. Every day when I'm in line at the grocery, or at the bank, or wherever, I see how she and other recent immigrants are treated: like incompetents, or thieves, or addicts, or... . This is a subtle and pervasive racism whose only real message is you don't belong here. (I guess that should come as no surprise when that same message plays overtly on our mass media, daily).

This isn't, however, how I am treated. My Mexican-ness is met with incredulity. No one believes me, if I tell them. I am often treated as if I were just white. For example, the receptionist at my dentist's office explained to me while chatting, that she moved to Knoxville from Ft. Lauderdale because it's “not how it used be,” that there are “too many immigrants” there now. Or they say things like my neighbor, who suggested I rent my house to Mexicans because I could rent to 20 of them, because they are accustomed to living like that, “in over-crowded filth.” When I explained to him that I was Mexican, he said I wasn't one those Mexicans. I could go on and on. But the specifics don't matter too much to me. None of this has ever been malicious. None of it is even directed at me. In an odd way, I feel like I get privileged access to the ethnic attitudes that would never be said aloud to an ethnic minority, except by the most malicious personality. You would have to be bordering on cruel to say those things to someone you knew was not white.

Sadly, that's exactly what happened last weekend at a benefit for a local community farm.

During the highlight of the night, a beard pageant and competition, the MC said to the only non-white person on stage something to the effect of, “you are not American.” I can't speak to who the MC is as a person, or what his ethnic politics might be, what I can say is that, in that context, and acting on behalf of a community based organization, what he did was racist, cruel, and humiliating. It immediately created an environment in which I felt like I wasn't welcome. This small sentence sent a message to everyone in attendance about who this event was for. Thirty seconds of racism can ruin your whole evening.

When those words rung out, there were a few groans from the audience, and at least one “fuck you.” I hung my head in disbelief and empathy. I felt for that young man who was humiliated and insulted by the MC because of the color of his skin and his national and ethnic background. He literally grinned and bore it, with much more dignity than I would have shown in the same context. Kudos to him.

It doesn't take a lot to make someone feel unwelcome. It doesn't take a lot to create a climate of hostility. Undoing it is another story.

my only parenting blog post ever: on those lists about being a good parent.

2012-01-17T12:00:00.000-05:00

I have seen a few lists floating around Facebook that suggest a bunch of things you can do with your kid to be a good parent, or to get the most out of parenting. And I (honestly) have nothing against them. I don't have a kid. I don't really want one. And I believe in birth control. So I don't have very strong opinions on whether or not you play with your kid or teach them to do laundry, or ... . Similarly, I don't have strong opinions on parenting styles. Doesn't seem to matter too much whether parent-friends of mine treat their kids like little soldiers (of sports/ dance/ whatever); or whether they treat them more like small autonomous adults who deserve their own agency; or whether they let them run amok expressing their unrestrained creativity. Or whatever else.

Some parents read books and make spreadsheets. Others dance and make funny sounds. Others do other stuff.

I don't actually know that it matters too much one way or another beyond the basics of: love, food, shelter, safety, stability, and education.

I do know one thing though. Your kid will learn from who you are, from what you do and say in your own life, far more than anything else in the world. Or to put it another way, what's unresolved in your life, will seem to your child like fate (to steal a construction from Jung). Think about this for a second. Look at the pathologies, struggles, and anguish appearing in your life. Look at all the successes that you've had. Do you see any of that in your parents, in their parents? Each of us perpetuates what is (beyond?) good and evil in our culture in ways we are rarely aware of.

So maybe, we should all make lists on how to suck less in our own lives.

My list is very short (and deceptively complex):

Be more empathic.
Be more expressive.

foreclosure. a new start: the abundance of your mind and the richness of your life

2012-01-16T12:02:00.000-05:00

I might be foreclosed on any second. I knew this was coming. But now that it's real I am having doubts about my future.

Basically, like most of us, the housing market took all the money I had and turned it into a pile of nothing. And so now I have nothing. That's melodramatic. I have no money. I have a lot other things. You just can't pay the mortgage with them.

And so what this means is that any second I might have to move out. And I really don't want to stay around here, so I'm planning on moving to Mexico City. Which might be complicated by the fact that you can just as much pay for a new start as you can a mortgage with the abundance of your mind and the richness of your life, George Bailey notwithstanding. I have the beginnings of plan for landing in Mexico. Here it is:

Try and save a little money. Get foreclosed on, or sell my house and make a tiny bit of money, or short sell my house and get nothing. Put my sculpture studio in storage along with whatever else won't fit in my truck and little trailer. Take myself, my paintings, my dogs, and some stuff to Mexico City in my truck. Find a place to live in a not too dangerous neighborhood with enough room to make art, read books, sleep, and cook. A tiny garden or rooftop (doberman potty) would be ideal but not a deal breaker.

[Oh right, before all of this I need to train the too sweet dobermans to attack on command and not trust people – not because I think Mexico is that dangerous, but because I can't stand the thought that someone would steal them and fight them, especially the little one, she'd almost certainly be used as a bait dog. In a country where murder is essentially decriminalized, you can imagine how much enforcement there is for a crime like dog-fighting … Wow, now that I think of this maybe I should find them a nice plush home on a farm here in Tennessee. It would make me so sad, but at least they would be safe and happy.]

Then, when I'm a little bit landed in the city, I want to do a giant Day of the Dead mural with these guys, who work to preserve the ephemeral cultural heritage of the world. I've talked with them a little bit about this already. As part of the work they do, they organize a yearly day of the dead event in Mexico City. My thought was to fill the space with a traditional looking mural that would depict Catrinas and calaveras and scenes of Mexican life in the aesthetic of the cut-paper, candy skulls and decorative lines common to this remembrance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Catrinas_2.jpg

But the mural would be made out of hundreds of thousands of bits of torn paper, like any one of my collage paintings.

All of the paper would be from US and Mexican lifestyle, fashion, and pornography magazines, along side of newspaper and crime-rag photos of those killed in the war. In addition, I would ask if people could send in images – snapshots, clippings, notes – of those they have lost in the war, so that the mural would itself become a memorial to the disappeared, murdered, and wounded.

I've been thinking about a way to address the war in Mexico for a many years now. And this mural seems like a perfect opportunity... It would take several months of work at the scale I am imagining, so the next step would be coming up with funding: the problem with a life that adamantly refuses to believe that the market is the only arbiter of human relations.

It's hard to imagine leaving my home and family and friends. Sometimes you just have to go.

play, love and cooperation. hunted to extinction

2012-01-15T12:25:00.000-05:00

I am reading Civilization and Its Discontents. I justwatched this great documentary from the BBC. I am still workingthrough From Bakunin to Lacan, andBataille's Erotism anda too big handful (for a slow reader with a day job) of other booksconceptualizing pain and violence and representation. All of this in order to try toanswer one very simple question:

are webasically more like banobos or chimpanzees?

And Ihave no idea. The way we have thought about this problem from theEnlightenment forward tends to go something like this:

Withoutsome kind of coercion would we get along okay or would life be morelike Lord of the Flies? Hobbes, Freud, Bataille, Nietzsche, ... : state of war of all against all (more or less). Rousseau,Bakunin, Kropotkin, Marx (ish), … : we more or less get along (after some troubles, sometimes).

Answeringthis question maybe doesn't matter over much. We can become different no matter what. But it does seem to matter in one respect. If we are basically bad,then fascism is good. If we are good, then fascism is bad. Seewhat I mean? If we are more like chimpanzees, prone to fighting andkilling and domination then something like the king or state or ideology muststep in to protect us from ourselves. If instead we are more likebonobos, prone to play and rampant fucking and cooperation, then whatwe need is to liberate our humanity from the coercion and demands ofthe repressive king, state, ideology...

NineteenthCentury anarchists believed in our humane human nature so thoroughlythey were willing to murder in order to bring down the state and freethe basic goodness longing to come out of everyone. Sans-culottes, Decembrists, Bolsheviks, Communards … all felt some similar kindof optimism. Our moment in history was the problem. Not ourhumanity.

Perhapsour humanity is only this very thing then: Robespierre erectingthe guillotine. This reminds me of the famous Stanley Milgram experiments, where most of us seem willing to torture another human, sometimes to death, in the service of a greater good, or a higher authority.

(Here's a great TED talk about Bonobos. Ironically this "make love not war" cousin of ours is being hunted to extinction, by us).

On Tragedy: all of life is just disco. And disco sucks. Part_2

2012-01-08T18:19:00.002-05:00

Part 1

What is it about suffering that allows us to overlook it? Really overlook it. All of us. All of the time. Is it our fear of it? Is it a mirror that is too terrifying? Or are we really just monsters.

Freud thought so. After World War I and just before Hitler came to power, Freud wrote Civilization and Its Discontents. Its basic trajectory is that we are not to be trusted. We are subject to dark forces we don't understand. We must learn to control ourselves and someone must control us. Otherwise, we might (my example) dig giant holes in the ground again and poison, blind, maim, and machine gun our young and old alike. It is hard to resist this idea if you just open your eyes. Right now we are killing, maiming, blinding, poisoning, machine gunning ourselves around the world. This isn't an exaggeration. Take a moment to think of what life is like in northern Mexico, or Syria, or Afghanistan, or Iraq, or most of Africa... Or for that matter, in a factory in any free trade zone, or on a farm in California during the strawberry harvest, or in a mine in Chile, or etc.

Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, who cut his teeth on war time propaganda, came to the front of US business culture in the 1920s and developed the mass-psychoanalytic techniques to manufacture desire for the products of the emerging post-industrial society. Follow that trajectory through another war, cultural upheavals, a depression (or two), etc. and you find the engineered, docile, happy (un-happy) consumers we have become. Obviously, this is a book-length cultural history. But as a sketch it leaves one important trace behind:

You are a fiction. You do not exist.

This isn't philosophical pot-headedness: “woa man, nothing is real.” I mean something specific by this, which is equally pot-headed, but in a much more tragic, realistic way. If you are a kid today in the USA, or of the last couple of generations, you have grown up in radically mediated environment. I have argued that consciousness today is like my paintings. That we are a pastiche, a mash up, a music video of all of the cultural artifacts which we see, touch, manipulate, move through... And that this is creative and meaningful. And there is some truth to this image of you and me.

But, there is another side to this mash-up-you-and-me.

I cry all the time. I am constantly sad. Everything seems fucked. This is merely a symptom. Not of some underlying psychological problem, or hidden trauma, or dark force I don't understand – I get me. Through and through. But of a growing awareness. In Stranger than Fiction the protagonist finds himself in a novel – as in he becomes aware that his life isn't his life. That he is being written. And I think that this is analogous to the situation we are in, only what we're confronting is not an earnest novelist, but a complex of institutions with one goal – to manufacture the illusion of a dynamic, actualized, complex creative self in the form of a docile consumer. No wonder we "need" every increasing doses of medication to merely function in the world.

Think about what this means. Think about all of your life and feelings and longings and drives. And then try and imagine a world in which you are not always already reflected in the focus group, psychiatric paper, police blotter, revolutionary student movement, etc. and etc. Or try and imagine something you love (or love to do) for which there hasn't been generations of marketing campaigns, scholarly and media articles, movies and whatever else to create this marketing-lifestyle identity. If you start to peal away the consumer, is there a there, there?

When I was punk/ goth/ queer/ club kid, strange adults would come up to me and say something like “why does a smart articulate young man like yourself dress in such an outlandish … blah blah blah.” And I would answer the only thing I could answer: “It's a closed system and there are only so many options open for resistance, for creative expression, for...” Most of them would nod, knowingly. I think what they knew, is that all of life (including resistance) is just Disco. And Disco sucks.

I thought then that I was doing/ making something. Alas.

It isn't that resistance has been co-opted by the market. It isn't that there is cabal of right-wingers and Rotarians and Chamber of Commerce types running the show (even though it has been and they are). It's far worse. There is no other show. And all the complexities of your individual experience are literally the result of several generations of intentional social engineering, backed up by the school, prison, hospital and (in the few moments when it's needed) by the baton and the tear gas canister.

Or, resistance is futile. It isn't even resistance. Where can you resist from? You are not even you. You are a dupe. Or, to go along with the Star Trek reference, you are already the borg. Occupy whatever. Makes no difference.

I have wondered for a while how we (rich Westerners, and third-world elites) can go through life without caring about the immense suffering we cause around the world. Why we haven't, at least since I was a teenager learning to organize for change, risen up against the cruelty, injustice, and unfathomable violence we unleash on the world? When the occupy movements started in the US, following the indignados of crumbling European economies, an answer began to take shape.

Kill half a million civilians outright. Poison countless others. Not a problem for us. Take away our life savings, our hope for a fancy future, our ability to shop constantly (for skinny jeans? why are skinny jeans so maligned?). Then watch out. We're coming for you.

I don't mean this to discount the intentions of those who resist. I love them. Occupy Movements and shopping mall riots, though, do have something in common: they are the activities of desperate consumers. One longing for a product it can't afford, the other longing for a social horizon that doesn't exist.

The institutions and markets that have created us, the legacy of Freud and Bernays, have always failed us in some ways. But now those institutions and markets have betrayed the dream/ illusion they created. They fucked it up. How can we continue to suspend disbelief when Toto barks at the funny, weak, desperate man behind the curtain, when the Matrix flickers, when we put on Roudy Roddy Piper's glasses?

Sadly, the only illusion we have to relinquish is us – all glitter and flashing lights and affected outrage.

In some moments this feels like the most pregnant, creative possibility imaginable. In other moments it feels like watching a loved one die.

On Tragedy: all of life is just disco. And disco sucks. Part_1

2012-01-06T12:17:00.000-05:00

I am not dying. I still don't know what's wrong with my heart. But the likely problems are not fatal. And also not too disruptive. It could be electrical. It could be a structural problem. Whatever the problem, I am not about to drop dead at any second. And the doctor encouraged me to keep exercising. And he even said that when I get the heart monitor in the mail, that I should really push it, fuck myself up running up the sides of mountains, so that they know exactly what the problem is. I look forward to this kind of suffering/ joy again. As I talked to him, I realized that I had been worried about this for months. I felt relieved, lightened.

But I also realized that I am simultaneously disappointed. I wanted to hear that my heart was on the edge of failure. I hoped the decision of whether or not to live would be made for me, by personal history and genetics, by accident. I suppose that this matters, somewhat.

I want to be able to look at my life, and like Camus or Sartre choose to live with the absurdity of it all. Or, to decide that Sartre's “divine irresponsibility” and Camus' happy Sisyphus is reason enough. Or I want to believe something like that self-actualization guy in the 70s who said that the meaninglessness and absurdity of life is also meaningless and absurd (maybe that's why Reagan came to power).

Most days, I wish that the decision to live would be taken away from me. I sometimes want to commit suicide. But most of the time, I have a much more passive desire – to not exist, to no longer exist, to never have existed.

I read a book recently. A kid's novel that has popped up, occasionally, in my life through troubled women I have loved. I had never read it. A lover gave it to me for Christmas. She said it reminded her of me. I finished it the other day. I finished reading it in a bar. And all I wanted to do was cry. Endlessly. For a few days. I am still crying.

There are some stories I can't tell because the telling itself would be tragic. And so when I encounter similar narratives...

[...]

I always want to cry. I hear a story of even the littlest tragedies and it breaks my heart. The other day on NPR I heard about donkeys being abandoned in Texas because they are too expensive to feed. I cried into the ground up horses teeth I was cleaning from a Swiss gearbox. All these Texas donkeys will soon, likely, be killed en masse because the shelters and rescues are full and no one wants them. As far as tragedies go, this one is not that terrible. Most lambs, cows, goats, pigs, dogs, cats […] people have it much worse most of the time. But then I think of that one donkey who is turned out by his owners and it seems so awful. The owners seem so cowardly, insensitive, inhumane. And the Donkey then starves over drought stricken lands until the sheriff picks him up and then shoots him. Maybe it's so sad, because it is a little too much like life.

I imagine that I have to suppress this empathy I feel, in order to live. Which is a way to say that I have to die in order to live.

Is this they way we all do it? Is this why we insist that life look like disco?

When I was a kid, doctors and counselors and teachers told me that what I felt was not about those tragedies out there, but about something in my own life. I clearly remember saying, “I feel their (that persons, those animals, …) suffering in here,” pointing at my chest, as if it were my own pain. I wasn't told that the world is a terrible place and you have to learn to live with this sadness in order to do something about it. I was told instead that the world was fine and I was sick (this was in the 80s. Psychiatry is primarily a normative practice). This strikes me as so incredibly fucked up now.

All of life, on balance, is tragic. All of consciousness is consciousness of tragedy. There is no other realistic way to see the world. Every human endeavor is tragic. As much as I hate Schopenhauer, he did put it best:

The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.

End Part 1

Christmas Day: Love Death and Singing

2011-12-27T13:07:00.000-05:00

We gave each other things we don't need.

I always refuse to participate and explain that I don't believe in the exchange of gifts for a number of political and ethical reasons. And then no one listens to me and gives me expensive and thoughtful things I don't need but really do enjoy. This year I decided to play along as much as possible. I made my nieces and nephews little wool hats from old sweaters. The hats didn't really fit.

And I bought all the different families some moonshine from my neck of the woods. And I painted each family an oil painting.

I always feel weird giving paintings away. Because I feel like that “special” relative that everyone nods at and thanks, but is secretly a little afraid of. Everyone was very gracious. The day was really quite nice. And I thought a lot about belonging and exclusion. About family and connection. About power, continuity, and being human...

And then my dad had a guitar in his hands.

In another life he might have been a world renowned tenor. In this life he always provided the musical accompaniment to every family gathering and holiday in my life. Growing up, whenever I had a new girlfriend, I was always thrilled to bring them to meet my family for the holidays. Dad would sing and play old Mariachi songs and everyone would sing and dance along as best they could. My few memories of childhood center on these songs. On these gatherings.

A few months ago I was sure I would never hear him sing or play again. For many years, the tremors, pain, stiffness and emotional weight of Parkinson's had rendered him more and more quiet, more and more anxious, less apt to sing and play. And the complications from surgery a few months ago really made it appear that we would be lucky if he merely lived. I doubted I would ever see him walk and talk. No one imagined he would sing and play.

His voice shook. His body trembled, not entirely in time. And it was the most beautiful song I had ever heard in my life.

I hope I get to hear many more of them.

Random Strange Encounter Number 2

2011-12-19T17:15:00.000-05:00

A smartly dressed, very attractive woman handed me a napkin as I left a show the other night. She knew me by name; I didn't recognize her; and she didn't linger; so, I probably mumbled something like "thanks" and looked very confused.

It must have been in reference to this post.

What a lovely gesture.

Thanks. Again.

fear and death and Circle Modern Dance

2011-12-14T13:18:00.000-05:00

The other night I went to see a dress rehearsal of Modern Dance Primitive Light, the dance, music and solstice celebration Knoxville's CircleModern Dance puts on every year. The too short program consists of 9 individual dances choreographed by the members of Circle Modern and danced by professional, amateur, and first-time dancers. No matter what you think of dance, you don't want to miss this show. It's one of those rare works of art that is both honest and affirming.

I don't say this idly. Much of my life is filled with old tragedies. Many of them persist all around me. And while I realize this sounds silly, I am overly concerned with death and dying at the moment. I try and avoid the reality of thinking about this. And it might be nothing. And I continue as if it were nothing. But my heart rate is constantly elevated and irregular. When I exercise (dance, swim, fuck, run...) it races to 200 plus beats per minute and then drops to less than 30 beats a minute. Sometimes it just stops for seconds. So I do less and less. I move less and less. I am losing weight. I sleep too much and I am still tired. I feel weak and prone to infection. I think I have just developed pneumonia... Cheerful thoughts.

Maybe it's all moody bullshit and in a few days when I see some doctors they'll laugh at my symptoms and be like “Yeah, you got blah blah. Get some rest.” Or maybe not. Whatever.

My paternal grandfather died (in his son's arms) when he was just a couple of years older than me. He was a soldier and a gambler and a drinker. One afternoon in Mexico City his heart failed after he lost his family's life savings betting on jai alai.

I noticed my fucked-up heartbeat late this past summer one afternoon while swimming (and thinking about genocide and transformation). I didn't get it checked out, in part because I didn't really want to know. And also, because right around then my dad almost died. His body started wasting away after complications from surgery. He's out of the hospital now, dying much slower than he was. But we are still watching a terminal disease take movement away from him day by day. It's death in slow motion. And like all death, it's inevitable. The symptoms of his Parkinson's will get worse and worse. He will have more tremors, more rigidity, more pain, more complications. He will continue to lose cognitive function. And then he will die from it.

I mention all this right now because you would think that an evening of modern dance would have a hard time piercing this sort of moody veil. And for the most part you'd be right. Much of dance and song and art (and life) fails to resonate with me. And I've always been suspicious of sentimentality and false hope. My sister, as a kid, went on tour with this singing and dancing group called “Up With People.” I knew immediately, even at age ten, that this was bullshit, artistically. Even then I knew that this had no real relationship to life, that the big numbers, big smiles and sequined t-shirts were just another big lie. But this is exactly where Primitive Light succeeds, it is as full of earnestness, irony, sadness, triumph, failure and joy as real life. And in its best moments something indescribable flickers there as well.

The show starts and ends with ensemble dance numbers that are big, funny, ironic, and full of life. It's easy to let the opening number, set to a start and stop version of a Men without Hats song, fool you into thinking that what you are seeing is something superficial. But as soon as the individual pieces start, their smallness begins to pull in different directions and nuance the opening number's smiles, exuberance, and humor.

Morgan Fleming's brilliantly funny and dark Hammer Squash looks directly at the kind of circumstance so common in entertainment, where a showy smile hides something a little bit sinister. Three dancers in something akin to school girl uniforms come out, full of neurotic happiness, dancing to a snappy track by Stealing Orchestra. The choreography points to a kind of strange beauty pageant. The dancers come across like strained bratz dolls. The whole thing pushes towards magical realism. As I watched, I almost expected one of their heads (Amanda Sewell's specifically) to pop off and a stream of animated red felt to pour out of her neck. Had something like that happened, I am sure the other dancers would've smiled big, fake, eye-popping smiles through it all.

Hammer Squash Photo: Sarah Shute

This dark humor comes across as extra funny following the heartfelt, silent movements and spoken-word performance of Dr. Mary Alford's Rememebering the Day. The narrative elements of that piece, that hint at loss and change, are picked up by the shows most arresting work, Maria McGuire's Hearts in Apocalypse, which begins with a wrenching scene, in silence, of a dancer being kicked across the floor by another dancer. This little moment is a kind of brutal re-conceptualization of the myth of Sisyphus, wherein the stone we are doomed to roll up the hill, is a loved one we are harming. McGuire's piece goes on to show us a small bit of a too common story about the bloom and bust economies of love and loss.

This element of connection, loss, and reconnection appears throughout the show's other dances. Dancers lean on each other, support each other, turn away, and then pass a gesture or movement from one to another as in Laura Burgamy's Laughing Is, and Elizabeth Kirkwood's pas de deux with Nathan Barret, If You Would Only Say... .

Laughing Is. Photo: Sarah Shute

Often the choreography is simply beautiful to watch, sometimes with no discernible narrative image (tragedy) lingering in the background, like in Sarah Whitaker's Moonlight. Other times as with Kim Matibag's work i carry your heart, the spoken word and narrative come to the forefront.

And many of the dancers are mesmerizing in every piece they are in, irrespective of whatever else is going on. Amanda Sewell, Elizabeth Kirkwood, and Maria McGuire really stand out. I could watch them dance for hours. And there is beauty imaging that your limited body could learn to move like theirs. Or, that they move the way that they do for those bodies that can't, or can't anymore.

Kirkwood in If You Would Only Say...

Photo: Sarah Shute

Many of the dancers are not professional dancers. Some are very new to dance of any sort. And I think that this is exactly where Primitive Light succeeds. The grace and athleticism of a Sewell or Kirkwood or McGuire is amazing to be sure. But, I think that we are more drawn in by those bodies that are more like ours, more or less limited, more or less able, straining to act out the movements and narratives this show calls for.

Watching a body endeavor, succeed and fail honestly, is beautiful and inspiring on its face. This humanizes the formal and narrative concerns of the choreographers. This show succeeds because it allows us to see ourselves in the dancers, narratives, and structures in front of us. It allows us to imagine ourselves in a world (not just of movement) a tiny bit beyond our reach. This talks to us about empathy and connection and alienation. This suggests a discursive strategy in which we are not just talking at walls.

Most of the time we have to go through the world in a thoroughly rationalized and alienated way. Much of time and work and social life demand this. There are moments though, where (my, your) otherness disappears. I was learning to ballroom dance with a friend a few weeks ago. And most everyone in the class was awkward and anguished to some extent or another. But there was a moment where the fumbling steps of my partner and I came together with the music, and we both got lost for a second in synchronous movement. In this respect dance is like Eros or like mysticism. There is a moment in dancing, fucking, and praying where the anxieties of separate bodies vanish into a song, into each other, or into their god. And this kind of transcendence flickers in the background of Primitive Light, illuminating what's important in life and in art.

As the piece closed the other night I was reminded of my father. He has been many things in his life: a scientist, an alpinist, a father, a husband... He was also an excellent dancer and singer. He was also a bullfighter. He moved with grace and beauty. I doubt he will come. But I want to bring him to see the show. To remind his body, that is barely able to move the way it once could, that its limitations are beautiful too.

Amanda Sewell in Moonlight Photo: Sarah Shute

The Show opens on Thursday. Check it out.

(anti?) rape ad corrected

2011-12-08T13:31:00.000-05:00

Just saw this "anti-rape" ad on my facebook feed.

There's a lot to criticize here. This is pretty good start.

But it occurs to me that the ad is easily fixed (assuming you think it's okay to use a sexed-up image of an unconscious girl to combat rape...)

the vast possibilities of cool: hey artists, you suck

2011-12-02T12:31:00.002-05:00

As far as I can tell there is no good definition of art. If you look at the processes, or intentions, it is too broad. If you look at the objects/ systems of distribution/ critiques, too narrow and broad at the same time (as in, whatever an artist puts in a gallery, and a critic discusses, is art).

Do the cartoon sketches my friend's kid does for her own amusement/ edification count? What about the doodles and little hearts adorning the name of a crush on another school girls notebook? Is design art? The Guggenheim thinks so. Are crafts? Religious objects from New Guinea? How about a pamphlet from an Appalachian pentecostal church? The answer to any “is this art” question is yes and no. It depends.

I have a Facebook friend who publishes thousands of pictures of her 18 year old image looking cute, stylish, funny, mad … some of them exceptionally savvy. The only thing that makes it not-art is the missing gallery wall.

This portrait of Louis XIV, for instance, is exactly the same kind of thing my virtual friend is doing. Only it comments on the vanity of the state/ body of the king, not the commodification of identity and femininity.

And I guess right here is a(n incredibly complicated) clue. What counts as art (what is brought into its discursive and marketing systems) seems to hinge on how the object/ artist reflects the institutions and power structures of the culture.

Our time is obviously not concerned with the body of the king or the power of the Church. Rather, we are (have been? Los Indignados/ Occupiers are onto something) giddy with the dizzy heights and limitless growth of capital and human ingenuity; and we are flip about our utter brutality, and the unimaginable suffering of millions. All this so that we in the global north can fly high on the vast possibilities of cool. Our art reflects this cool. And while I hesitate to use this word because of its art-historical associations, I find the contemporary state of the art world (in general) to be decadent in the extreme, completely alienated from everything that makes human life human. The 19^th century anti-communist slogan l'art pour l'art (art for arts sake) has found it's apotheosis in the expressions of the contemporary art market, the visual and conceptual corollary of imperial aspirations.

By chance I stumbled across this in my Facebook feed. If you are interested in art, read these things. If you are interested in life, read them.

Art as we know it is finished
How art killed our culture

I'd like to discuss these little essays is some detail, later. For now I am left with the following response: It isn't that artistic practice itself is corrupt. It is thriving all over the place. We make thoughtful, exceptional work: videos, photos, music, drawings, banners, tags, dances, meals, parties, murals, etc. … Art forms are growing and changing everywhere. We must figure out a way to support artists that completely bypasses existing systems of distribution and legitimacy (gallery, museum, catalog) and glorifies what matters most in art... however we come to define it. We should do this because it is the right thing to do, but also because it will save us from all that crappy art.

Instead of a few art-stars, I would prefer to see millions of independent artists making a working class (living) wage to bring nuance, depth, wonder, anguish,and joy to our communities. I wonder if part of the problem isn't in us artists. Would we be happy thinking of our contribution to society as no different than a carpenter's? Do we need to be special? Do we need to be cool? I think we might be like Veblen's idiotic (coerced) laborers, aspiring towards a leisure class that we will never attain...

snapshots: love, letters, eggs, chickens, and maybe I'm little more than the women I've fucked

2011-11-28T21:31:00.000-05:00

My mind is everywhere. Not really. It feels like that. But in all reality it is firmly planted: anguish, sadness, longing, death, suicide, pain, communication, war, narrative, continuity. Planted in love, in short.

[...]

I'm working on a video, which is a love letter to a girl I don't remember who might have saved my life one night that I cut my wrists on her lap.

[...]

The other night I couldn't sleep. All of a sudden I was overcome with an unbearable, incommunicable _______. I wanted to reach for the shotgun. Instead I sat with that incommunicable thing for hours. I was doubled over. Desperate. I didn't want to call out to anyone. I thought I should just feel it. Eventually, I noticed this stack of books on my nightstand:

I laughed a little and thought of eggs and chickens. I thought of what that stack would look like to a nice girl, if I were to ever bring one home. Eventually I slept an uneasy sleep. The following night I danced till three in the morning with a funny, troubled and kind lover.

[...]

My response to Bataille's "The Story of the Eye" is going to be more complicated than I thought. I am writing a novella telling the story of all the people that the narrator and Simone rape and kill. This seems like an ideal way to address what is missing from the novel that figures so centrally in Bataille's thought: the inner experience of anguish, the taboo, and the divine. So far, it's more than just a little heavy. And it demands of me that I imagine the trauma and psychology of those characters in the novel that only exist as empty objects of lust and transgression. It demands that I look to my own experience to imagine Marcelle's past, and the cyclist's, and the bull's torture, and the priest's submission... And especially, I want to imagine all the lives on the peripheries that are also touched by agonies of this sort.

[...]

I am reworking an old self-portrait. I am painting over it because 1) I hate it; and 2) I think it's dishonest.

I will be keeping parts of the original, but the rest will be re-rendered with a kind of serpentine, flesh-narrative of myself as little more than the women I've fucked... It would be impractical to render all of them in detail, so I am choosing the one's that persist as _______ in my inner life.

Even though it's possible that they are all just stand-ins for some other story (aren't we all something like that to each other?), I sort of doubt anyone wants to be included in this list. These are the first two (you can see them in relation to each other in the first image of this post, above):

On The_Story_of_the_Eye: Preface

2011-11-21T12:46:00.001-05:00

Last night I sat down to write about a novel that has always bothered me. In certain circles, it's a famous, well respected little book – Bataille’s The Story of the Eye. I've read it a few times over the years, and honestly I always found it boring, trite; like all pornography it was little more than a facsimile of the erotic and divine. Many times I just quit reading, usually at the orgy. Or at the bullfight. Or at the hanging. I would roll my eyes and wish that my favorite theorist had kept to writing theory. Maybe to a more puritanical mind, it would have some thrill of the forbidden. To my thoroughly late 20^th Century, nothing's-shocking-mind it seemed more like an overly-literary (self-conscious) illustration of the author's thought.

Last night I decided that maybe I'm just missing something. Maybe I'm too stupid to see the linguistic genius. Maybe I should read Sontag's and Barthes' essays about it (again? I don't remember). Maybe there is something to all those metaphors and metonyms about eyes and eggs and piss and rain and mud and death and cunts and chalices and testicles and horns and crevices and . . . oh my. And maybe there is.

But after a few minutes of reading literary analysis, I decided to go fuck and fight and live instead. [Well, the fighting was incidental, but not entirely unexpected with that lover.] I think Bataille would approve.

the tyranny of happiness might also just be tyranny: on memory, death, transformation, and the Khmer Rouge

2011-11-19T13:48:00.000-05:00

Imagine for a second that you could change yourself, all of a sudden, without side effects or risk. Would you?

I guess it would first make more sense to think about what this is really asking. All of us would likely change some small things about our bodies, or personalities. Maybe we would want to be smarter, or stronger, or faster. Maybe we would want to be better looking. Or have blue or brown eyes. Or be more confident. Or whatever.

I wrote a bit about the promise of super-humanity a few months ago, about the way that biotechnology promises to transform us (some of us), and how these very post-modern possibilities are just old dreams with new reality. And I wondered aloud to myself and to others, whether we would want to grow wings, or have circuits and USB5.0 ports integrated into our brains. More likely I think we would choose to be enhanced to resemble our particular image of sexual desirability – I might look something like a cross between a goat, bat and a succubus, at least that would be my party-body. I might have an exoskeleton and claws for fighting. An anime tail for fucking, etc. A furry could actually be a stuffed-bunny. A looner might have giant neon (poppable) balloon tits and ass. And on and on.

But that's not the only thing this asks. What if you could actually rewrite the narrative that has become you, change any or all of the stories that are written on your one body. If you ask it this way, though the results would certainly be similar, the question becomes more poignant. Imagine that thing, or person, or loss, or trauma that somewhere, sometime wrote tragedy all over your body. Imagine that one event, or series of events that have come to inform all the fear and pathology in your life. What if you could simply erase it? Remove all affective results, longings, obsessions... What if that lost lover, or rapist, or abusive father, or whatever... could simply vanish from your consciousness? Or combined with other developing technology, what if that limb could be restored and the memory of it's loss erased? Or etc.?

For the time being this is still a theoretical question. But most likely not for long:

As good as our last memory.

Rewiring responses to painful memories.

Ironically, as I write this at my local coffee shop, a girl walks in who looks exactly like an old lover. For a moment I thought it was her, and my insides sighed and rained. And that old love was a step by step recreation of an old tragedy, one that we repeated for each other daily, that repeats and repeats in my life still. And in my case, if I were to pull that thread out of my consciousness entirely, what would be left of me? And why does that matter?

All the joy and anguish and creativity that this one narrative vein has brought to my life would be gone. To a greater or lesser extent I think most of us have something similar in our lives.

The researchers of the experiments linked to above, and the journalists who covered it especially after Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, talked of the possibilities of treating mood disorders and other complications resulting from trauma. For now the results suggest an affective treatment possibility, one that doesn't erase the memory, but erases the pathological emotional response. And while not entirely the same as excising memories, it is close. The memory would become a story to which you have no connection, no real relationship. In some ways it would be like a movie of yourself with the character erased.

Over the years I have been (mis?)diagnosed with any number of mood and personality disorders. Some of the doctors I saw willingly, others I had to see in order to secure my freedom. And while PTSD, or panic disorder, or oppositional defiant disorder, or _______ dependance (or whatever else might be hidden in my medical records) significantly alter a persons quality of life, and are life threatening or terminal given the correct circumstances, removing the memories or emotional responses that together constitute one diagnosis or another strikes me as deeply troubling.

First, what kind of world would we end up with? And is that the kind of world we want? Imagine if St. Francis of Assisi's crisis of faith had been treated by removing the memories (the ideas) which caused him to destroy his burgher father's goods and walk down the street naked into his new life. Would the world have been a better place without him? What if Bukowski's childhood trauma could simply be wiped out? Would we better off? Would he have been better off? Or imagine an entire population of victims whose trauma was treated by simply removing the memories of that trauma. Who would agitate for change in such a world? Who would cry out in the wilderness? Who would be willing to risk everything to stand up for what's right?

There are clearly some things our culture and our selves shouldn't forget, no matter how painful or debilitating the memories.

Auschwitz

Secondly, this has actually been tried on a macro-scale, with very rough tools. The push to erase memory is one lens with which to see Cambodia after the social and political collapse caused by years of US carpet bombing. What might Pol Pot have done given the ability to literally reprogram memory? The Khmer Rouge's re-education camps for urbanites and intellectuals would not have been a euphemism for torture and murder. A population could someday be humanely erased with these nascent technologies. You could wipe out a (sub)culture and kill no one.

And at a very small, insignificantly personal level, these technological possibilities talk to each of us about death. No one agrees on what a self is, on what consciousness is. It's unclear whether or not it even exists. What we can say for certain is that each one of us is a body with documents, and relationships, and narratives that together make up that body. What makes each of us a particular individual is very slight, ephemeral. In my case, if you pull out the stories that have almost killed me, that have caused me (personal, small) immense pain; if you extract the records and documents that point to them; what you end up with is no longer me in any real sense. Maybe that wouldn't matter to new me. Just as dead-me wouldn't care. Just as super-human me wouldn't lament the days when I couldn't fly, or fuck ten people-monsters at once with my octopus cock, and bifurcated tail.

I am not conservative by nature. I embrace transformation. I agree with Nietzsche that we are human in so far as we are overcoming. But these kinds of questions will exist for some of us, some day soon. And in the worst moments of our individual and cultural lives the promise of not living in pain or fear or panic may well lead us to embrace a new authoritarianism that will pale in comparison to everything that has come before.

And while it hard to say to someone suffering, “this suffering is important. It is beautiful in its own way. And it will pass, you will transform it into something else,” we must remember that the tyranny of happiness might also just be tyranny. It's not for nothing that after the plane bombs, George Bush told us that our patriotic duty was to shop.

At the end of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the lovers choose to recreate the memories they willfully destroyed. Or, they are irrationally drawn to one another and cannot resist that choice. While I find this somewhat schmaltzy in the context of a love story, I do wonder if continuity would persist through these near-future technologies. Would some part of a memory resurface? Would our behaviors and motivations become even more mysterious to us? Are there cracks in all systems that seek to rationalize, coerce, normalize and explain? In this future we might all be castaways, adrift and entirely at peace in an incomprehensible tempest. Old dreams live on.

reflections

2011-11-10T01:17:00.001-05:00

I have a favorite new spot in the heart of Mexico City. It's a little cafeteria attached to book store a block from the Zocalo. It's cheap. It's tasty. It has a vegetarian dish or two, a full bar and good coffee. And best of all, it's on a roof top terrace overlooking El Templo Mayor. It's a good spot to finish off a day in the city.

Reflecting over the last few days, something remarkable stands out. I seriously don't believe we see the world. At least I am sure that I don't. What we see is ourselves reflected in the surfaces and artifacts of the world around us. It is a kind of internal society of the spectacle. It isn't so much that the world doesn't exist, that everything is a simulation that mediates all human relations, but rather that our ability to see anything is tied to the internalized structures of that spectacle and the particulars of the places where it breaks down within us... or some such non-sense.

What I am really talking about here is much simpler than that. I doubt my ability to live here. I am too far adrift. I can't help but see the world from a fracturing and shifting internal experience. In moments my perception of everything changes.

Last night I visited a sick family member in one of the poorer neighborhoods of Mexico City. He lives in one of the small Colonial towns swallowed by the megalopolis. It has one entrance off of a busy thoroughfare. It's made up of a labyrinth of tiny dark alleys that turn back on themselves. It has it's own small church and plaza and shops. I lived there for a summer as a kid. And as I walked into the maze of streets early last night, I was in love with the place. My memories painted the darkness, the murals, the crumbling homes, the little shops and video arcade with a warmth that they may or may not have. It was a quiet, peaceful eddy in the midst of one of the densest places on earth.

My visit with my family was lovely enough. My uncle was recovering nicely from a near fatal illness. Our brief encounter was filled with love and kindness. But as I was leaving, running late for the last train, something changed. In an instant the world was a threatening and terrifying place. I am accustomed to these switches in consciousness/ perception. Things go bad in my life very suddenly. Sometimes dreadfully. And occasionally they are existentially dangerous. Usually, all it means is that I am suddenly terrified of the grocery store. In Mexico City, a more or less actually dangerous place, this shift was quite nearly debilitating. Under the best of circumstances threat looms over the city. Last night every face concealed violence. Every stare sized me up. Every footstep, every voice, every car that slowed, every dark doorway compelled me to fight or run. It was everything I could do not to start running. The only problem with that dreadful compulsion was that I was lost, in a rougher part of town. And to make matters worse, I no longer recognized anything. I was totally disorientated.

I did the only thing I could do. I acted as if I were the most calm, confident person in the world who new exactly where I was going. I made it home on unfamiliar and sinister streets. Streets I am about to walk again. I wonder how they will appear now, in the rain.

Location:Pacífico,Mexico City,Mexico

working guillotines with which to kill little birds, and so on. Part_3: an inner experience

2011-11-09T13:37:00.001-05:00

I stage fights. Mostly it's for fun. There is something in giving people the opportunity to express this desire that they kind of can't resist. It's scary. You might get hurt. You might (doubtfully) hurt someone. It's a safe way to experience the pleasure of violence. But there is another end to it as well. When most people fight, what you feel most of all is that you are weak and uncoordinated and out of shape. Win or loose, it isn't like the movies. Throwing punches for a minute is incredibly hard. Throw on some 12 ounce gloves and the loss of momentum and padding renders those imagined weapons into something only a little bit more dangerous than a head of lettuce, but certainly less dangerous than a cabbage. In other words staging these fights brings us back to reality. We are not tough. Everyone is vulnerable.

Trained fighters know this. You are not a bad ass, you are an athlete. And there will always be someone faster, younger, bigger, stronger and better trained than you. And some days you'll just have an off day. And this means next to nothing. For most of the trained fighters I know, aggression is only a means of asserting dominance for the weak and afraid, for those that lack confidence in their abilities, for the powerless. All of us in our basic state.

[This is obvious in dogs. My 110 pound male doberman, Mister Snuggles, is an insecure baby. He has to dominate any other dog he encounters. And he only gets on with really submissive ones. This makes him appear hyper-aggressive and terrifying. And at times it is a little terrifying to see 110 pounds of sinewy muscle and teeth coming for you. But his aggression is weakness. The only time I have seen him behave with other dogs was when he walked up to a pack of great danes at the dog park. The danes stood there calmly looking at Mister. The danes were confident, quiet. And Mister turned tail.]

I'm not sure how much of this has to do with real violence. This is play acting. A window into a world no one really wants to admit to knowing. Or at least only wants to imagine from a distance. In that respect I find these fake fights much more ethical than say, American cinema. At least in this context you are close to the reality of trauma and domination, have a real part it in it.

And the inner-experience of violence is a necessary element in conceptualizing it. I have been in dozens of real fights (lost most of them), have been assaulted, experienced real mortal danger at gun and knife point. And I have experienced the rush (and brush with the divine) of very real domination. And in conceptualizing violence, spectacle, and power it seems absolutely necessary to understand that it is also pleasure. So here's a little violent anti-pornography for you.

I once (thought I) set out to murder a Mexican prostitute.

This was at the beginning of a very heavy sado-masochistic relationship I entered with a sweet, smart, and exceptionally beautiful girl. We were in our twenties. I had seen her at school, across the quad, hanging out with the cool kids (everyone at this school was a cool kid). She had seen me too. We had longed for each other from a far. One afternoon I was sitting at my local coffee shop in The Mission (in San Francisco) with a couple of friends. A handsome girl I'd never seen before came up to us and said, "My sister wants to meet you. She's in the flower shop across the street." I should have rushed over to say hi. And maybe because I was feeling shy, I instead said, "Tell her to come over."

She wouldn't. So my friends ran across the street, found her hiding in the closet, and dragged her to meet me. I was immediately smitten. She had insanely high and crisp cheek bones, a birth mark on her face that made her look like she'd been fighting, one droopy ear and over-sized curious eyes. She was thin and tough and girly and sweet. She literally tried to hide behind her sister. We exchanged numbers.

Fast forward a few weeks or months. We danced to old timey music on an old console stereo in her Hunter's Point house. We cooked elaborate meals. And we spent days locked in each other's arms and legs and teeth.
I've never cared much for the theatrical versions of S and M. The outfits, the speech, the elaborate scenes, always a little too much like the piggy scene in "Bitter Moon," an attempt to spice things up. I like real violence. Kicking and punching, choking, grappling with life and death and love and trust. The first time I kissed her I grabbed her throat. I pressed carefully against the arteries and air passage. There are few moments as beautiful as the look of love and trust and terror that crossed her face. Complete surrender. And that is what I have always sought to find or be in a lover, some kind of means for a supernatural or mystical union, the divine.

In practice what this means is that fucking has nothing to do with the physicality and athleticism of fucking. This lover's body became more mine than my own body. It felt what I wanted it to feel, literally through my voice. It spasmed and cried and convulsed and lost consciousness through my desires, not my touch. It dreamt and felt and lost itself through a look or a word. What kind of pornography can you write about something like this? How do you capture something that only exists in an intoxicating ether between two people? Imagine, then, how it feels when you are apart?

And like every relationship, this one took on it's own mythologies, it's own rules, its own games. We played at possession. We played at anti-romance. The outside world vanished. We read too much Bataille, and the idea of the sacrifice resonated with us. Only neither one of us wanted to lose the other. Like the members of Acephale, neither one of us wanted to serve as executioner of the other. Hence the murder fantasy.

We drove to the border. We knew that we could act with impunity. That another dead girl in a border town would go unnoticed. As night fell, as we approached the border, everything turned. The initial glee of transgression became a sinister knowledge. We talked about choking her. Binding her to the bed. Fucking her unconscious body. The rush of domination was palpable in the car. It smelled like adrenaline and ozone.

We walked across the border. We indulged in the liminal space created for us by the economic brutality of US-Mexican relations. We rented a hotel room, straight out of a scene from a bad exploitation film -- vintage bedspread and a single lightbulb. We found a strip club and propositioned a beautiful young dancer.

We agreed on a price.

I want to think that her humanity prevented us from going through with it. She was a cutter. Her belly and left forearm were cross-hatched with old and new scars. This was a manifestation of her trauma, of her humanity. It was equally likely that an excess of cheap drinks, and a devil named Fernando in a white Lincoln kept us from making a terrible mistake. More likely it was something else entirely.

I wanted to believe that I was capable of this kind of transgression. And that this kind of transgression, while obviously not ethical, was at least edifying. But the most likely reality is that this was almost a parody of "Natural Born Killers," a fantasy, that it was play between myself and my lover, that it was a dream about the transvaluation of all values, about transgression, about "L'histoire de l'oeil." And dreams are never right or wrong, they just speak truths you might not otherwise want to know.

I was walking to the train yesterday. I passed a family of four begging. It brought tears to my eyes. But I did nothing about this violence. What might I have done? I passed a sleeping or dead man in a ditch next to the rows of vendors at the entrance to the subway station. The bottom of his feet were black. He had nothing, perhaps not even his life. A few minutes later I saw a middle-aged developmentally disabled man crying on a woman's shoulder (a passerby, a sister, a mother, a girlfriend, wife ?) just after he was assaulted on the train. This moment we are killing and raping and torturing. This moment a body in incommunicable pain cries out. What are we to do?

By any external measure we are a species with a unique capacity for brutality: mechanized war, systematic torture, brutal spectacle, crime, poverty, slavery, labor and resource exploitation, organized rape, genocide, etc. We torture millions of human and non-human animals to death capriciously.

In the first instance, we must admit that this is what we are. That we take pleasure in it, or in its representation, or in its products. Not necessarily every individual, or even most (who knows), but as a culture and across cultures. Even the most pious and kind among us, profit in some capacity from the suffering of others, and not merely those we turn into the other.

In the second instance, we are equally capable of empathy and compassion. What are we to do?

El Chopo. Mexico City Punk

2011-11-06T12:59:00.001-05:00

I have had the pleasure, once or twice of seeing Mexican punk shows. Today I went to the heart of the Mexican punk, metal, goth, ska and oi scenes: El Chopo.

Basically this is a weekly, free show and punk flea market put on by a collective who loves the music and the culture. In every respect it exhibits the horizontal organization of the best of punk culture. But it is also a little bit weird.

In some respects it felt like a third world Hot Topic. Hundreds of kids walked down a closed off section of road where vendors hawked everything from thigh-highs and fetish masks, to spiked bracelets and bomber jackets. In this sense it clashed pretty firmly with my ideas about punk music and culture. Buying a spiked jacket seems as un-punk as anything I can imagine, but maybe that's because when I got into the music, you couldn't buy the identity at the mall. But this wasn't exactly a mall and it's hard to situate these concerns in this context. It's possible that some of the merchandise was locally produced by collectives, but most of it really looked like sweatshop clothes-- but I'm not sure what that means for poor kids in a poor country. This might just be a judgement from a (relatively) rich punk who is writing this on an ipad (yuk).

I did talk to a few vendors, who carried some very DIY local bands, and they were telling me that much of what I love about the scene, the anarcho-punk consciousness, had disappeared. Which is too bad. Last time I went to a Mexican punk show it was during the Zapatista International Encuentro and the music, energy, and social awareness of the kids was without equal, like nothing I had ever seen in Europe and Gringolandia.

On the other hand, there was a very real beauty to this show. Most of the punk kids are incredibly poor, from harsh environments, and seeking solace in a scene and sound that draws on their sense of desperation. At least that was my impression from the few kids I talked to. And it was really lovely seeing young boys, trying to figure out how to dance, bang their heads, and learn the trappings and attitudes of this culture. They were a bit rough around the edges, looking to their friends for approval. The pit was more like US football practice than dancing, and many looked a bit worried about things getting out of hand. And I did feel some sense that there was a greater threat from some of the postures these kids take than in most shows I've been to. But then again, there is a lot more at stake for them than the the rich white kids I usually see shows with. They find power and belonging here that they don't have anywhere else. That's a lot to lose and it's fragile facade. But maybe some of that sense of threat is a latent racism on my part. Were they more menacing because they had dark skin and no money in their pockets? I can't really answer that. But it might have something to do with it. Or it could just be that my whiskey and coffees and the thin air went to my head a bit. Who knows.

I danced. Hung out. I marveled at the way this was a simulation of a 30 some odd year old movement that felt more authentic than most. And then I hopped on the subway to get lost in en el centro and find a nice cafe to eat and write a bit.

Then a old man shined my boots. And I thought how very un-punk of me.

Location:Pacífico,Mexico City,Mexico

working guillotines with which to kill little birds, and so on. Part_2

2011-11-05T12:49:00.001-04:00

We move through space. It is filled with the entirety of human experience, over time. And the way it appears to us, is not in any direct respect the way it is. Even our observation machines see selectively. The camera lens is obviously an exclusionary apparatus. It focuses on one point in space and time, and records it while excluding the rest. It has then a strange combination of truth and artifice. It's record is, without a doubt, accurate. But equally, it is suspicious.

There are always many things to see. And maybe we see the world from the inside out. Meaning that what we see in the world is really just our own inner life reflected back at us. We focus on the points in time and space which are comprehensible to us. And certainly I have some sense that when walking through any space, you are drawn towards the things in which you see your own reflection. Or at least some reflection of who you might be, or who you believe you are in the world, or how you feel. Or some other hidden something wanting to come out.

The other day, driving on the freeway, I was penned in by traffic next to a cattle truck. I could see their noses pressed against the grates. Or a big brown eye looking out. Heads dropped. They were squeezed into this truck, head to tail, being driven to slaughter. And while I doubt they think about Plato, I have no doubt that they think about something. They exhibit fear, affection, stress, desire ... whatever this means to them is certainly not what it means to me. Perhaps their feeling of divinity is a great green field and a large herd providing safety. Perhaps they have no soul. But then again we probably don't either.

I kept trying to get away from this truck. But somehow it kept finding me. And each time I would see a heartbreaking yearning in the eyes of those cows. A longing to run and graze and fuck and sleep. A longing to live.

As I tried to pull away, ramps on either side of the freeway fed more and more traffic into and out of this one thread of a system that covers the world. And then its violence reflected back at me as well. A little cross or wreath of fake flowers, here or there, remembered the absurdity of deaths brought on by a systemic necessity. The automobile is basically violence-- it is impossible to move people through space at these speeds in these cars without it. It is impossible to fuel and produce them without it. And a world of sadness and loss and failure overcame me. And was carried in every direction by the flow of traffic. That this is the "nature" of our world does not make it immutable.

I am alive today, sitting in a comfortable apartment in Mexico City. And those cows are being force fed, loaded with antibiotics and growth hormones, while standing in vast fields of their own shit waiting to die. If they get sick, a fork lift will push them out of the way unconcerned with that individual creatures suffering. And then they will driven, screaming in their own way, into death and rendering machines.

I was talking to a professor of philosophy at the UNAM last night. She had seen the book I was reading, Sontag's "Regarding the Pain of Others," and she mentioned that she and some colleagues were planning a class on that very subject, on representing violence. And I am left with the following thoughts:

What we are talking about is not violence, but domination. The death squad and the rape gang need not be coerced. The desire is always already there in the following construction: If I am raping, torturing, or killing you, you are not doing it to me. And in this incredible simple construction all of the complexities of domination play out. The feeling of omnipotence (the UNAM philosopher's word, I prefer continuity or immortality) created by turning another into the other is irresistible, given that we live subsumed in ordinary, pedestrian fear of our own weakness in the world (our mortality). Perhaps that is the sadness I saw reflected in the eyes of those cows being driven to slaughter -- weakness, fear, otherness.

While this construction is very simple, it's implications are not. For instance, at what point, ethically, is there a difference between the Nazi officer and the Jew he coerced or bribed to kill or torture his fellow Jews. Or, is the child soldier, drugged and tortured, responsible for his actions. Or, is the rape victim justified in torturing her attacker. Or is Israel, living in existential fear, justified in its brutality against the Palestinians. Or is the narco, in fear of his or his family's life justified in the rape and torture of Mexican women in Juarez. And on and on.

Of course there are other elements to this construction. Pleasure. Desire. Propaganda. Masculinity. Epistemology. More on that later.

Location:Pacífico,Mexico City,Mexico

working guillotines with which to kill little birds, and so on.

2011-11-04T11:20:00.001-04:00

I could really use a whiskey to go with this coffee.

But I'm stuck in the Miami international airport for the next few hours and for some reason the bars aren't open yet.

I am headed to Mexico City for a week or so. I haven't slept. And I've been reading a very funny somewhat self serving book about the cultural history of violent entertainment, Savage Pastimes. The thrust of the narrative so far is that we Americans (mostly it's about US pop culture) are less enthralled with violent spectacle than past generations, that in the earnest hand wringing and pious lamenting about moral decline and decadence and what have you, what critics of violent entertainment forget is the historical context that brings us the slasher movie, the first person shooter, etc. And that savagery is basically pleasurable to all humans since, "forever." And while in the introduction true-crime writer Schechter briefly delves into the theoretical and psychological roots of this obsession (he quotes Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, for instance), mostly this is a fun romp through cowboys and indians, the penny dreadful, murder ballads, and all forms of good clean violent spectacle from the earliest public tortures and executions through the time when kids' toys included working guillotines with which to kill little birds, and so on.

I have to admit that most of the traffic that comes to this blog is looking for pictures and descriptions of violence and the erotic. And certainly my work, my life, could count as a kind of violent entertainment. And I'd feel a little silly in pointing out that writing a history of violent entertainment is also violent entertainment, when my own concerns mirror Schechter's so closely. The most read posts on this blog, for instance, are the ones in which I am contemplating blowing my brains out, or recounting getting assaulted, or trying to understand the nature of our cultural obsession with aestheticized dead girls. And when you walk into a gallery of my work, most of what you see is sex and violence and gore tinged with god and sadness and irony and ...

I wrestle with violence and taboo regularly; with my own desires: to hurt someone I love to whatever level that they would allow, to hurt myself, to destroy everything I touch; and also I struggle to understand these same desires as they play out in our cultural and political life. And this moment is perhaps an unusually apt (sleep and whiskey deprived) moment to consider violence and spectacle. I am traveling into a country whose current war is, I believe, the pinnacle of performative/ mediated brutality. There is no real end to this war in any traditional sense. And I mean "end" in both the sense that this war will continue in perpetuity (in the foreseeable future), and that there is no goal or objective to be won. The specific character of this war is not so much of territories controlled or drug shipments intercepted, which is certainly an apparent object of contention between the warring everybodies; but rather, the war is much more about the destabilizing distribution of violence throughout the culture. This Klienian state of perpetual crisis ensures that the money keeps flowing from the U.S. to Mexico and from Mexico into global markets, and that the structures of power (if not the individual groups) remain. The deployment of real mediated violence becomes an end unto itself where there can be no armistice. Or Surrender with dignity.

This description, I'm sure, strikes some more knowledgeable readers as a stretch. But it seems very unlikely that anyone responsible for interceding into the drug system could reasonably believe that they are onto a winning strategy. It should be very apparent by now that no amount of firepower, troops, cops, etc. will ever stop this flow of drugs. And that the interdiction might actually help raise profits by keeping prices artificially high. Since there are very real rewards to destabilizing violence in Mexico, the only conclusion can be that if it's ignorance, it must be willful ignorance. A discussion for another time perhaps.

Right now I am thinking about pleasure. And while I certainly accept the intimate link between violence and real embodied pleasure, I am deeply suspicious of its deployment. The joy that Schechter exhibits in his prose makes sense to me. I have a dear friend who lives entirely off of violence, real and theatrical. When I met her she was a funny, vulnerable, wounded little bird. And through the course of a rather heavy BDSM relationship, I watched her slowly change. Violence allowed her to mitigate the sense of insecurity in her life, both personally and financially. The more it developed, the less and less she resembled the fragile being she was before. In many respects, I felt like that Victorian toy guillotine, only deployed by my lover to cut off her own head. I am not judging her. She is happy with her decisions. But my impression now that she is a legendary pro-domme, is that the vulnerability must continuously be mitigated by escalating levels of violence... And in that impression of her, I see one thing quite clearly: that the performance and spectacle of violence is pleasure in the most basic sense of the word. In every respect it is akin to drugs and whiskey and fucking and laughing and loving. Exercising power becomes a psychological end unto itself. And it is an end that can be as intricately tied up in the consciousness of a person (or a culture?) as much as any powerful/ encompassing/ transformative anything.

And that exactly is the horror of this war. As the cartels, and gangs, and the State, and the media, and the people compete for their own interests, the violence escalates and transforms and becomes linked to the culture through the individual lives it shatters and supports. And those immensities, those lives, are mostly lost on us in the United States. For us it is yet another story on Gawker to horrify and stimulate, or another piece of fodder for nativist paranoia. And in this, I take issue with Schechter's narrative. It reads as an apology for violent spectacle. It says, enjoy, this is mostly harmless and we are much less savage than earlier generations of humans. And certainly I agree that violent spectacle is not an evil in itself. One way or another, we come from violence. And I agree with the suggestion towards the end of the book, that violent simulations are a way to master or rationalize our horror of real violence and catastrophe. That is essentially what I argued in "On Bullfights Dead Girls, Real Dolls, and immortality.

But there is another element for concern here. In talking about 1950s American comics, Schechter says that the nascent horror comics were a way of "purging a sanity-threatening nightmare [the holocaust] by turning it into a comprehensible story with an emotionally satisfying climax." And while I understand the social and personal need to transform violence and trauma, transforming it in a way that rationalizes it is far more dangerous than it seems. The formal elements of popular culture give us a violence that comes with a frame, an ending, a climax or release, justice, whatever. It comes with a resolution of some kind, even if only something like "now I turn the page, or browse to a different website." And in this it is to easy to forget that there is little difference in the way we consume representations of real violence and fictional violence. The mediated experience of actual, lived violence comes with the same emotionally satisfying climax as the horror comic of the 1950s. Through the paper, magazine, or terminal screen, we gain the emotional satisfaction of containing our horror. Or we are given the illusion of our own immortality while denying the very lived humanity of the victim whose face we can turn off.

For its victims, there is no switch to flip or page to turn. There is no end or reason or climax. Just the persistence of fear and agony, unto death.

How might we enjoy and represent violence in a way that brings us closer to the humanity of its victims? Brings us closer to our own?

Location:Pacífico,Mexico City,Mexico

Miami International

2011-11-03T10:40:00.001-04:00

and all the bars are closed.

Sunrise

2011-11-03T08:50:00.001-04:00

viva la vida: really_really_un-dangerous_danger

2011-10-29T11:29:00.000-04:00

I was killing time at a bar last week when I get phone call from my friend.

Jorge, what are you doing?

Killing time before the show (a benefit for a new community/ infoshop space).

Skip it. Come down to the Jig and Reel. My favorite band's playing and no one's dancing.

So I went. I liked that my friend thought that I would bring the dancing. I do like to dance, not that I'm very good at it. And I'm not terribly shy about it, mostly 'cause it would be a little like being shy about fucking, which would be silly. Once you get started, you get a bit lost in the activity and there really isn't much to worry about.

So I get to the bar and a couple of young women in vintage dresses and some bearded, pierced punks are playing old-timey, jazzy music on wash boards, and banjos, and fiddles and who knows what else. It had a bit of a swing feel to it and it was very danceable. But no one was even standing there, bobbing their head.

So I start fake swing dancing. First with my friend. Then with his friend. And still no one else is dancing. And I look around the bar, and it's a pretty buttoned-up crowd: a few tables of more or less fratty college kids, a few middle aged couples, my friends and that's about it. A great band is better with a great crowd. And sometimes you have make your own fun. So, all I could think to do was to start asking random girls to dance.

Instantly I was in grade school again in cut off jeans and an Izod at my first suburban basement dance party, where everyone leaned against the wood-paneled walls and looked at one another nervously for the first hour or so, till the cookies and soda pop and hormones took over. That party room, incidentally, was also the sight of an inexplicable brutality and horror that I would learn about many years later. But that's a different story, that goes on and on and on in my life. This story is of the littlest traumas.

I was at the party, with kids two grades older than me. My mom had dressed me so that I would look cool, like them. I'm pretty sure my collar was "popped." She made my older sister take me. Part of me knew, from the very beginning, that this wasn't going to work out well. And I should've known that a 4^th grader doesn't ask a 6^th grader to dance.

But I did. Nervously shuffling my feet. And she didn't just say no. She looked me up and down. Lingered on my fringed cut-off jeans and brown shoes. She sneered. She curled her upper lip, shook her teased sky-high Aqua-Netted hair and mumbled something I thankfully couldn't hear over the music. I spent the rest of the night sitting on a carpeted foundation edge staring wistfully at all the fun everyone else was having. Thirty odd years later it is still terrifying to walk up to a table of strangers and ask someone I don't know to dance. It's actually more nerve racking than fighting.

But then also, there isn't actually any real risk to it. In that sense it's kind of the perfect activity for me. There is the perception of danger, the perception of risk, the tiniest hint of (remembered) existential anguish, but then the worst thing that can happen is you look a little foolish and rejected in front of people you don't know anyway... And the best outcome is that you get to share a very intimate and formal interaction with a new someone in which you are instantly connected through movement and music (and probably a bit of mutual nervousness or fear). And significantly, you also take a little something of your own joy and anguish and share it with someone else.

And besides two sorority girls who did actually sneer with contempt, and their dates who looked affronted that I would dare talk to their table, everyone was really great and fun. And people started dancing. And the bands were awesome. Viva la vida.

an examined life

2011-10-24T07:26:00.002-04:00

At his trial for corrupting youth and atheism, Socrates famously said “that the greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living [...]” I recall learning about this as a kid, but most of the focus was and is on that last fragment taken out of context – that you should know yourself. And I have kind of taken this on faith. That being a critic of your place in the world is important. That thinking critically about yourself is a value unto itself. And while I am not sure that I am ready to cast this away, to eschew the self-referential philosophical gaze, I am wondering about it a bit.

My roommate and I were chatting the other afternoon and he asked me if I had ever thought of just writing a traditional memoir, a non-fiction account of my life or some part of my life. And I said, isn't that what I am doing? And he said, bluntly, “no.” I was perplexed. He went on to explain that I speak very vaguely and generally about the events in my life, always in the context of some idea or another. And he went on to say that this was a way to remove myself from the narrative. To keep the pathology or trauma or love or whatever from really appearing. In other words he was saying that I was using philosophy to obscure the realities of my life. And I must admit that there is something to this.

I try and write honestly. I try and and be direct. But it seems true that overlaying a theoretical concern on living and remembering gives you a sense of distance. When I write about, say, a break up, I think it's not really about a break up, instead I am writing about gods and mortality or whatever else. And as much as I insist upon the specificity of individual experiences in the world, writing generally about my own is kind of nonsensical. The particulars of my reality are left out, and thus the authenticities of it are left out as well. The other thing that occurs to me is that telling these sorts of stories is also an attempt at mastery over the feminine in myself, over the spaces in my consciousness that resist rationalization.

It could be that this Socratic fragment is just plain wrong. That I have been wrong in not examining the push to self reflection. What is beautiful in daily life might never need to be reconsidered. And those spaces that resit all attempts at rationalization might be best understood irrationally. More likely though, these are false dichotomies. Thinking is also living. It is not possible to (successfully) suppress the irrational. And significantly, examining life, uncovering it's richness and complexity, makes life messier, contradictory, more rich and complex. Indeed I love my life most when it is filled with critical stories and tensions alongside of fantastical mythologies shared only between a lover or a friend. I guess I want to know that I am tilting at windmills, even though I have no intention or capability of stopping.

apparently, I am an anti-porn feminist

2011-10-21T21:01:00.001-04:00

We were talking in a nether world as we both lost consciousness in each others arms. The following morning my lover said, with a look of concern or confusion on her face, “you said you loved me last night.” I looked at her. I though for a second. I had no memory of it. But I believed it was something I would say. I did love her. Fucking is not just fucking. It is the beginning and the end of the world. At least for a while.

Courbet L'origine du Monde

I mean this quite literally. Well, mostly. It's obviously the beginning of each of our individual experiences in the world. And fucking mimics the end of that experience as well. Or at least points to it, in that the relationship between desire and murder is often clear; fucking rarely leads directly to murder, but always at least to little deaths, la petite mort. And power and meaning and money and art and life are all intimately linked to fucking, to whom we desire and why, etc. Mostly though, I mean that in that moment, of arms and legs and mouths and desperation, the entirety of the world is contained in those hips and teeth and grunts. There is no time or death or god or life. There is no you or I. Only an us and a nobody. [At least that's how it should be.]

And this is necessarily an inner-experience. A reality that no one shares from the outside. That, as Bataille says, is incomprehensible from the point of view of the scientist. The scientist has very little to say about things that matter most, existentially: eroticism, god, value, justice . And this bias towards scientific knowledge and the distanced observer, is why pornography sucks. And churches. And many other things too.

From the point of view of “impartial” observers none of the meaning of the ecstatic ever appears. Their distance from the inner experience renders pornography and religion into simulations of the erotic and divine. The camera and the priest alienate eroticism and divinity, remove the particular individual experience and replace it: with a generalized object of adoration, alienated lusts with no meaning and no connection, stand ins for authentic value, false idols.

In this respect, pornography and religion are also like marketing, the intentional manufacture of desire for an object you neither need nor really want, for someone else's gain. Thus the acquisition of the marketed object leaves you wanting. This appearance of perpetual lack is an essential component to consumer culture. Porn, God, and capitalism all dovetail nicely. It's no wonder that we gringos are so filled with excesses of every sort; we are obese or Jane Fonda fit, medicated or self-medicated; we are subsumed in spectacle and entertainment; we are subsumed in the gym and the bar and the movie house and the church. We are desperate for meaning and always find it missing. So much so, that we don't even note it's absence.

We are all bulimics. Eating up the products of our culture and then regurgitating or excreting all sustenance. Pornography, religion, and capitalism are like diet sodas; the perfect bulimic product; it is empty to begin with. A diet soda has no calories, just stimulating marketing – color, taste (of a sort), packaging, graphics – and most often they even dehydrate you.

And something in this matters. The difference between living a life worth living, or just living a life, is contained in the difference between eroticism and pornography, between religion and the divine, between value and capitol. All of these relationships displace the particular meanings of connections between persons, and offer in their place alienated relationships based on external values that hover somewhere near meaning, but never attain it. In place of you or I, is an exploitation in which we all disappear. Or at least become tragic facsimiles of humans - stuffed with with prostheses and spectacle and alienating violence.

An erotic or divine relationship only exists as a specific communion of specific beings, on equal footing, exchanging power and meaning. And these exchanges have to be particular to the individual realities of lover and beloved/ mystic and divine. And agreed upon. That it might all be a sham, is existentially insignificant. We humans are endeavoring machines.

I never thought I would say this, but apparently, I am an anti-porn feminist.

This wall from a Mexico City recycling spot, kinda says it all.

gonzo_philosophy: life is tragic; eat it up

2011-10-21T20:26:00.001-04:00

The other night should have made me very happy:

I have no idea what time it was when I stopped at my local grocery store to get some food, two, maybe three in the morning. I hadn't eaten all day. I was drenched in sweat. Limping, staggering in my skirt. Licking blood off my swelling lips. Dripping blood from my hand. Drunk out of my mind. Trying to leave the store (accidentally) without paying. Everything about that moment had the kind of ecstatic, exuberant strangeness I want (thought I wanted) out of my life. It had been a completely perfect night: bands and bikes and beers all over town with a perfect mix of close friends, choppers, tall bikes, new faces, and even a couple of very smart, pretty, at least not entirely uninterested girls. It was a night full of inspiration, excess, violence of the best kind, possibilities.

But at some point a switch turned in my consciousness and everything became terrible. And while I seemed to know that this night was fun, it felt like a nightmare. And this lasted for days. In an instant nothing I had ever done was worthwhile; everyone I had ever touched was worse off for having known me; I was a failure; I had let trauma, and fear and anxiety take my life; I wanted to take my own life.

When I slept, I dreamed I was awake with insomnia and anxiety, fighting the urge to pull the trigger of the gun in my mouth. Calling friends I no longer talk to. The only way I recognized I was sleeping was that time passed more quickly, and the gun kept disappearing. And while I, or some part of I, knew that this misery and loathing was an elaborate illusion, a trick of some hidden character deep in my consciousness, it didn't matter. The only narrative you can operate under is the one you believe at the moment.

That bears considering I think.

And Gonzo philosophy is the only way to approach it. We should be thinking from the gutter, or the bedroom, or from the hallways of the grocery store. Gonzo philosophy starts with the (also self-referential) application of the observer principle in daily life, which (roughly speaking) states that observing or measuring a phenomenon, changes it so that it is impossible to be certain what exactly you are seeing. Significantly, the (theoretical, historical, cultural, ethnic, physical...) place you are looking from equally displaces the object of observation.

This is not to say then that science or philosophy should be mute. Rather, I very much agree with Bataille that the problem of science and philosophy is that they are too divorced from life, so that some events must be seen from the inner experience of the participants and observers, and not only from a supposed impartial observer. And also that when speaking scientifically, you should do so with as much fealty to the narratives as possible. Significantly then, all understanding is essentially limited and some truths are invisible from one place or another. In order to think, we must stand in many places at once.

From the point of view of gonzo philosophy there is another small truth that intrudes into anything. Yes, seeing something (yourself) changes it (you). And where you see from equally transforms the thing. But also, the viewer is always unreliable. Or, I might be crazy. Not just me. We all might be crazy. So that all the rules we use to arrive at the truths of things might just be the ramblings and delusions of the mad and infirm. A shared delusion is still just that. This is an old epistemological puzzle, about an an evil-demon deceiver, one that hasn't really been satisfactorily answered (to my mind) and maybe doesn't need to be.

And I am probably deceived, and crazy. I have been tempted to go back and get my medical records from when I agreed to go to the asylum in order to avoid jail. But, I don't think I would really get anything out of it. They had to come up with something, or the insurance wouldn't pay; and any old thing that fits some or most of my behaviors would suffice. From my point of view, all of that is crap. From the scientist's point of view, all of this (writing, art, living, god) is crap. Who is right? If both of us? It's all crap. If just me? Then why can't I levitate. If just them? Then who am I or you or life or god. If neither one of us? Then what?

[…]

Thinking from the gutter

On a summer night, the year I ran away from home, I was asleep in a gutter in Nuevo Laredo, or Laredo, whichever is the Mexican side.

Now, I try and imagine the narrative I was operating under, what I was thinking then. And as far as I can remember, I didn't think. I went from one thing to the next. Sometimes, I would think a little bit about the thing right in front of me. Like that night, I was in the gutter 'cause I couldn't get comfortable in the back seat of the car I was in. I probably thought that the gutter would be more comfortable. And it must have been, 'cause I was dead asleep when a baton in my back and foot on my neck woke me up.

The guy who'd picked me up, the guy with the car, bribed the cops. We were parked 'cause he was so drunk he couldn't find his home. And I couldn't help him. I was adrift. He took me to his home after the cops left.

He was dirt poor. In the morning sun, he introduced me to his wife and child. He fed me breakfast. Refused money to cover some of the bribe. Gave me some food for lunch. Gave me his phone number and told me to come see him whenever I came back through town, as if this had been the most ordinary night in the world. He might as well have said, "Have fun storming the castle."

That summer I had run away from home. I was out looking for a story. I wanted a narrative to replace the ones I was running from (funny that they are ones I am still running from). And I (truly thought that I) had left them behind somewhere in the Texas desert. Without meaning or thoughtfulness, you can do or be anything. I believed I could levitate. I believed I had flown. I believed that the world was what you thought it was and nothing else. That if I posed just right, I would be rock star. When, in a blue van on a Texas freeway, I smoked crack with a van load of US Marines who thought I was hippie chick, I really thought I was superman. When I crawled up on a teenage girl on a picnic table and told her I loved her, I meant it. I was confused by her laughter. But I didn't think anything else about it.

In that gutter, that night, I thought of nothing at all. I acted without meaning, or with rambling contradictory meanings that poured out of my mouth unheard. All I really knew was that everything was fucked and that I had get away. No abstraction could have replaced this truth and lie. Operating under that reality was not just some adolescent nihilism. It was a means to rethink my reality. I had stepped out into a very hostile, dangerous world with arms completely open. I neither expected to survive or to die. And I came close to getting killed, raped, and disappeared, but in the end nothing really bad happened (I did get robbed once, and was extorted for money several times, but that wasn't too bad). Instead, at my most vulnerable, I was taken care of by the world and returned safely home.

No matter how lost and adrift you are in the world, you have to approach it openly, otherwise life isn't worth living. You and those you love will be hurt and sick; everyone you love will some day be gone. Life is tragic; eat it up.

new painting: Christ_Asleep_during_the_Tempest

2011-10-11T11:28:00.000-04:00

A couple of months ago, I came closer to taking my own life than I have since I was a kid. I wanted desperately to end my life that night. Looking back on it, I wonder about many things: the reality of that desire; its kinship to love and beauty; and especially the existential and intellectual trajectory that followed.

I started this painting a few days later

My thought was that I had no choice but to embrace the very personal reality of my inner life; to accept the experience or perception of suffering as my only real; to deny the search for happiness, escape, redemption; to embrace anguish.

During that suicidal night, I was also lamenting the loss of a lover. Not so much that she was no longer in my life, but that I had once again fallen in love with someone who (also? mostly?) wanted to destroy me. [...]

I grew up with a copy of this Delacroix hanging in the living room.

I always wondered about the Christ's serenity, about His ability in the Biblical narrative to calm the storm. I wondered too about the panic of the apostles. What would they do without the intervention of God? Throw themselves overboard in their distress? Freak out until the storm killed them or subsided?

This suggests an alienated eroticism. I always had the sense that what they really wanted was to hold one another, not the oars, or the bow, or the tiller. I never understood why they didn't comfort each other...

All eroticism has an element of the divine, and all desire for divinity an element of the erotic. In the rare event when your lover becomes the world, these relationships are most apparent. There are moments, fucking anyone, when their hips and limbs and mouth become the beginning and end of everything. When you are in love with them, it becomes something else entirely: a tempest and a deep deep sleep.

I am not sure I am answering anything in this painting. But I am pointing at things, asking questions of myself and the world.

a love letter, to no one and everyone

2011-10-08T11:38:00.000-04:00

I often read personal ads. I sometimes write them for fun. I get a kick out of not sounding very appealing in print: “troubled former athlete, pushing middle-age, balding with perpetual love handles, seeks ...”

I preferred the ads when they appeared in newspapers, and were distilled into a (very) few lines. I had a girlfriend who always pushed me to answer this ad that ran weekly in San Francisco when I lived there: “Hairy, skinhead switch seeks same. Will fight for top.”

I've only ever answered one. It was on a BDSM forum. Turned out it was the girl I was living with. I didn't know she'd placed the ad. She didn't know I read them. I thought it was very romantic in an “If you like piña coladas/ And getting caught in the rain ...” kind of of way. It bothered her for some reason.

Once, I placed a missed connection to a motorcycle I met on the bay bridge. I couldn't see the rider. But her bike was a super-cute, Elvis-pink, early 70s 350 twin. I met her later at a party. It was a little embarrassing.

I'm thinking about this because I feel basically alone in the world, so incredibly alone. It's overly dramatic, and wrenching. But it's funny. Funny because I am absolutely not alone. I have plenty of incidental human contact, meaningful meaningless connections with people all the time. I know how to smile and be charming and be genuinely interested in people who are not at all like me. I also have close friends, family, and lovers who are part of my life, daily, many of whom have been a part of that life for decades. And people tend to reach out to me in very personal ways because of the thoughtful and honest way they see me through my work. And yet the longer I am alive, the more alone I feel.

I realize it is somewhat irrelevant. And also an incredibly narcissistic illusion about self-loathing and vulnerability and who knows what else. But it could also be, that we are all simply alone. From the moment of self-consciousness through the moment of death, we will each only have our own unique experience of being in the world. And the presence of another in our lives is always, eventually, transitory.

I tend to break my own heart. At some point I walk away, or manage to (accidentally?) create an intolerable circumstance, like poor Oedipus. Fortunately, I tend to live through these things sans incest, murder, and eye-gouging. There is always constant tension in my life between isolation and community. The trouble is that I don't find either entirely satisfying. Or more precisely, I find them both equally intolerable and absolutely necessary. So I often act like an idiot, or a yo-yo.

I have only been left once (sort of). And of the many lies we told one another, the one stands out in my mind is the story about how she wanted to find herself, to find that thing within herself that outlasted all transitory relations. She was walking away for Godot. At least that's the story she told at the end; she had been (in love with me and) pushing me away from the start. I must have loved her because she was just like me. God (who I don't believe in) might have decided it was my turn to see what dating me is like. Frankly, it was kind of terrible... and wonderful.

My first artist statement was for a library show in high school. I wrote an honest, silly something (slightly pretentious perhaps) about finding a place where I fit, about square pegs and round holes and how the artistic process was a way to explore that. What I should have said is that I was calling out for Godot, acting like an idiot while nothing happens and no one comes.

In this empty tension between isolation and community, between the self and the other, between the will to power and the herd, between the lover and her or his beloved is all of human life, all of it's pathologies, politics, metaphors, and language. This part of the discussion could merit a book or two, has merited several. But for now I just want recall these few lines from Nietzsche's “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”

Insofar as the individual wants to preserve himself against other individuals, in a natural state of affairs he employs the intellect mostly for simulation alone. But because man, out of need and boredom, wants to exist socially, herd-fashion, he requires a peace pact and he endeavors to banish at least the very crudest bellum omni contra omnes [war of all against all] from his world.

[…]

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in
short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished
poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

This means a lot of things. And there are many different ways to navigate this model of truth, of language, of the human. What's important to me here and now, is really quite simple. This anti-epistemology calls for us to think differently about truth and power; about the human power relations concealed in our languages, in our truths, and in the way they play out in public and private.

I encountered this very Nietzschian declaration in an unlikely place the other day, in a TED talk by a social worker talking about vulnerability. Brene Brown's basic premise in that talk is that what we all want, neurologically, culturally, is a sense of connection; and the thing that keeps us from establishing that is shame, a sense that we are not like others, or to state it in a slightly different way, that if they knew the real me, they wouldn't like me; and that what this shame leads to is a desire for certainty, to stave off insecurity and isolation; and that this need for fixed realities produces conflict/ pathology, both personally and politically. On it's face this is opposed to what we generally think about Nietzsche; isn't his point to surpass the drowsy herd, not connect to it? Yes and no.

For Nietzsche the too human condition that produces the empty truths and worn out metaphors of our knowledge is the need to mitigate “the very crudest bellum omni contra omnes,” a vulnerable position for everyone, to say the least. In her talk Brown points us towards the vulnerability of epistemological insecurity, mystery, the divine in place of the numbing, sleeping truths of taking fat from our ass and injecting it into our face. This sounds very similar to the trans-valuation of all values, to me. Nietzsche's super-man overcomes the half-truths of the herd to see the reality concealed in its mobile linguistic army. That for Brown this means connection, seems somewhat irrelevant. For her connection is merely that thing we are alienated from. For Nietzsche it is the will to power. Different yes, but both of them want us to burn everything down in order to get there. I honestly don't know what would be left in Nietzsche's view. Nothing but what we make, I think. Brown might agree that the nature of this new world remains to be seen.

Her premise works well for me. I have argued in my work and writing that many thinkers situate our humanness in the anguish of separation from: the teat, from the divine, from the will to power, from the excess of life and death, etc. In an essay I have been working on, and in my most recent painting (unfinished because of the time I've spent with my dad in the hospital), I explore the tyranny of happiness, that happiness itself is alienated and alienating. What Brown suggests is that we numb (seek to suppress discomfort/ pursue happiness) in order to cope with vulnerability. The only thing is, she says, that we can't numb selectively. When you numb, you numb everything. So in order to experience joy, well-being, etc., you must also experience anguish, fear, sadness, etc. And I more or less agree. In effect, in a very Kierkegaardian turn, when I suggest that happiness is tyranny, I am also saying the only way you can be happy (in the sense of experiencing well-being) is through the rejection of happiness, or more specifically the rejection of the search for happiness. We must not protect ourselves; we must be open to the possibility of, and the reality of, assault and trauma; we must risk it all. Anything less is inauthentic. And our humanness, meaningfulness itself, is in this endeavor. We are da-sein, throwness; we are overmen; we are lovers.

In other words all of human life and art is a love letter – a declaration of love, an insinuation of separation, a longing, and a deadly violence. These letters, that always betray the multiplicity of love, are an avowal and a plea. Or, they are desire and murder.

Certainly my work is a love letter, to no one and everyone.

Occupy Your Street. Wherever you live.

2011-10-06T11:07:00.000-04:00

This protest, moving across the country city by city is tapping into something very tangible, that we all know: our world is no longer the same. Many of us in this country became accustomed to a basic level of security, and optimism for our futures. And now that the confluence of social, economic and environmental catastrophe looms more and more on the horizon, we see that in effect our futures are becoming dystopian. Already the world resembles too much the world of Oryx and Crake: hyper-stratified, technologically advanced enclaves thriving towards self-destruction over the abysmally poor. It is no longer impossible for middle class people to imagine a third world America; more and more Americans are learning what it's like to live without means or control.

Seeing what it's like to live and die with a hint of the trauma and insecurity most of the world lives and dies with daily is a powerful motivation. When it's close to home, it's even harder to ignore. Look at these images and read the very real, lived costs of a system that protects itself and its architects. These are the very human, heartbreaking stories of our neighbors and friends and family. Stories of struggle and sickness and despair. And now that they are happening to more of us, that more of our individual futures are in question, I hope that we prove that America has never been reflected in its consumerist and media landscape; that we are a land of freethinking, dynamic, different, inclusive people that can take to the streets and come up with ideas for how to elevate all of us from underneath the overwhelming horror of a dying hyper-capitalism.

I used to think that we just didn't care in this country. That what we wanted most of all was to consume and succeed and have our lives regardless of the suffering we cause all around the world. I wonder if that's true. Perhaps many of us just felt there was nothing we could do about it. If the Arab Spring tells us anything, it's that a few kids out in the streets can bring down the most repressive regimes, even when they're backed by The United States.

I want to be in New York right now, standing up to bullies, standing up against injustice. I don't get to. I don't want to loose my job. I don't want to leave my sick dad. But every second of every day, I think about every one of those kids getting maced and clubbed and detained. And I am incredibly grateful to them for being fed up, and willing to risk everything to try and make a difference. Thank You.

If you're in Knoxville, there's a solidarity march Friday evening at Krutch Park. 6pm.

Occupy Your Street. Wherever you live.

the night and stars

2011-09-28T13:40:00.001-04:00

I finally got home from the hospital; something in me felt entirely different. I don't know what it is, yet. I may never know. The unfortunate thing about knowledge of this kind, all knowledge really, is that it's situated in time and place and narrative and who knows what else. What you think you know here may not make any sense there. (This is as true for the so called 'hard' knowledge of the scientist, as well as the 'soft' knowledge of the poet).

The difference in my life is likely something very simple, like some small shift in the way I see: mortality, meaning, connection, continuity, recurrence... . But those small changes of perspective, of conceptual space, can lead to huge differences. I am looking forward to discovering whatever it is that might be different.

I write a lot about the similarity between eroticism and life in general, and more specifically about the use of the erotic to understand relationships of domination and meaning. I see eroticism in everything. I have written about eros and continuity in relation to: God, disease, art, narrative, falling in love, going crazy, politics, and who knows what else. Every now and then some friend will send me a message about how I failed to consider fraternal or platonic love and I would think something along the lines of: “you poor naive soul who believes...” I may still think that. I may not. I don't really know. And I am not sure I care to try and muddle through definitions that probably don't matter in order to see if there really is a difference. I kind of doubt it.

Much of what has drawn me into the aesthetic, philosophical, and sensual exploration of the erotic is trauma, not merely the little tragedies that have peppered my life, but also the big historical, cultural and existential tragedies that color all of us with the same and different brushes. And I tend to look at life from the point of view of this trauma, probably as the result of some cultural disposition, or from some innate melancholia. Whatever the reason, it occurs to me that if I see the world thus, and revel in the beauty/ horror of that life, and go so far as to situate our very humanness at the site of immense anguish, and look for the erotic in everything that we do from cooking to war … then the exact opposite point of view must be true as well.

I don't know what that means exactly. But it suggests that for instance, if I see death in love, then I must also see love in death. This is literally obvious in my work:

I hate work that has a rotten, grotesque aesthetic. I am not trying to horrify you, or gross you out. Nor do I want to make decorative work. I want you, the person interacting with this writing and this art, to think and feel a little differently about: the person, love, ideology, violence, otherness, etc. And mostly to see the metaphor of this one thing here (a girl on swing for instance), being the same as this other thing there (the violence that produced the image and makes up the paint). Here is one of many possible discussions of 'Jane' on Swing.

And so, if my desire for that exquisite girl walking by in a mini dress and cowboy boots is the same as my desire to die or murder, as Bataille suggests, then the question of how to feel about it is entirely open, as is the question of how to look at it.

It is all rot and beauty, let's have a party. Or it is all rot and beauty, let's hang ourselves from the rafters. Doesn't matter.

[...]

I am at the hospital as I write this. I am bracing for a long, hellish night. There have been complications in my dad's condition. A degenerative neurological disease runs it's slow course. It is fatal and incurable. The medicines he takes to manage the symptoms can cause hallucinations and are interacting negatively with the medications that are supposed to manage his pain from a surgical infection in his spine. The pain has subsided a bit. But it has been almost two months of debilitating pain now, and he has wasted away to near nothing. His soft tissue is being consumed by his life functions. His muscles have atrophied. And the pain returns and gets worse because of the weakness and atrophy, which in a descending spiral, worsens the weakness and atrophy. And the psychological pain, something to be taken seriously, is interacting negatively with everything else. And so on. You pull or push on one part the system, you pull and push on all of it.

My father's body is a site of complication. And as I watch him try to sleep I see more than just him in front of me. I see his entire personal history: the toreador, the reactionary, the physicist, the father... . But I also see countless filaments extending into and from his body, into time and place. Each is a tiny piece of much greater narratives about: medicine, God, family, environmental catastrophe, war, physics … about all of life and art, in short.

This body in front of me may disappear sooner than we all want. But those tiny filaments that right now have turned his reality into a perpetual hell are also being pulled along by him. In other words, he is literally immortal. We all are. It's only our individual consciousness, which ceases. Small comfort. Everything else persists.

And this picture of a person, extended beyond the limitations of his body is not only accurate, it's beautiful. He is this body here, and those stories there; he is the night and stars in your lover's eyes.

Maybe it's because I haven't slept; I half-expect him to levitate.

Leave me alone. Don't go. Come back. Stay away.

2011-09-27T10:57:00.000-04:00

As I have struggled watching my father's push and pull with death, I have begun to long for an old love. At first I didn't understand. She certainly never loved me. She might have once been in love with me, but for the most part I was not a person to her. I don't really understand why. And it is heart-wrenching just thinking back over her voice and face and body. And I couldn't understand why I would be longing for someone who was so terrible to me, and dishonest. It is still a little confounding.

But there is one thing I always understood in who she was to me; I loved her simply. And in that respect she was my first love, the first time I recall being in love with the person as well as the object of desire. And that love was a promise of perpetual death and rebirth. It makes sense to me that I would desire that immortality, when faced with the horror of my father's degenerative and incurable sickness.

It's hard to admit, but I truly hope to never see her again. The promise is just too strong; it would certainly overcome me again. And I'm pretty sure I don't want to live through it... What I miss is the promise of my love for her. Not her. She was a monster.

And the most beautiful and inspiring person I ever met. Maybe I do miss her, too.

Reminds me a little of this video I made last year.

recognition is nice

2011-09-21T22:54:00.000-04:00

A very thoughtful and complimentary review of my latest self-portrait in Knoxville's free local weekly:

Deserving of its prominent placement in Frutos Latinos II is Gómez del Campo’s only piece in the show, a stunningly disturbing collage/painting made up of countless printed bits from magazines and newspapers. (If you frequent the Public House, you’re familiar with the artist’s large reclining nude centered over the bar.) Despite some notable differences, Gómez del Campo’s suicide-themed self-portrait is oddly reminiscent of German painters Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer, in that it possesses a certain explosive quality due to how it’s made as well as to the angst it projects. Words and images are subtly incorporated into the work and include snippets of mass-media photos featuring an array of female lips, limbs, augmented eyelashes, and bikini-clad flesh—tesserae creating the contorted form of a man with intense eyes and a gun in his mouth.

The full review of the show Frutos Latinos II: here.

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

2011-09-21T03:50:00.000-04:00

I am still at the hospital with my dad. Today the primal anguish of watching him waste away has ebbed. I don't see a cadaver in front of me anymore. I see a man, who is troubled and ill and suffering, but who will not die just yet, not from this story.

Tonight I am here to fluff pillows, call nurses, talk him down from delusions, feed him, keep him from pulling out tubes and IVs, etc.

Before tonight, I was with him in order to be there if he died. His father, my grandfather, died in my dad's arms about fifty years ago. My grandfather was a doctor, a soldier, a gambler, a drinker. He also had a bad heart. And one afternoon in Mexico City, he lost all of his family's life savings betting on jai alai. He died of a heart attack shortly (minutes, hours) after that. I like to imagine that as he died, of guilt and shame in the arms of his youngest son, the love in those eyes mitigated his suffering a bit.

Maybe I thought that my being with my dad would help. Maybe I just like old tragedies that repeat.

There's a lot more about this story I want to tell. About compassion and vulnerability. About why mitigating suffering matters. About political power and suicide and courage and love. Mostly though, I am just sad. About so many tiny things and so many terrible things.

The people I most wished to share this “me” with are the ones that are no longer here (were they ever?) – except some part of them lingers, and some part of me drowns when I imagine their human voices. I am like my dad calling out to the ghosts that I can't convince him aren't here.

continuity_story_life

2011-09-18T15:34:00.001-04:00

Nights are sinister. I don't really know why. Perhaps it's the isolation. Perhaps it's some primeval fear; the rustling in the leaves of a harmless squirrel, or the littlest bird, sounds terribly huge in the dark.

I was camping in the mountains with some friends as a teenager. There was three of us, and only one small tent. So I slept outside in my bag. It was cold, but I curled up naked and settled into sleep. I was warm enough. The fire died down. And sometime in the middle of the moonless night, some woodland creature decided to have a look around for a meal. It was huge. Or it sounded huge. And it took an interest in me. It walked around the campsite a few times. Sniffed at my sleeping bag. Knocked me with its head. Breathed, grunted, pawed. And moved on after what felt like minutes. It might have been a bear. I thought for sure it was. But I certainly didn't want to risk appearing like food and peaking out from the inside of my bag. I was quietly terrified. Had I risked a look, I wouldn't have been able to see anyway.

It might have been something smaller. It might have been Bambi for all I know. And that's probably why night feels like night. There is a bit of the dangerous in the unknown, in the other. I have always wanted to be more like the thing that sniffs, grunts, bumps in the night, than the kid terrified of whatever lurks in closets and under beds. Night/ otherness/ the abject plays in our minds and in our culture. Maybe that's why we like cities so much, where there is no open space to be filled by imagination, where there is no darkness, and going out is filled with too many blinking lights and too many sounds to drown out the unknown. And ironically, cities bring us closer with those that are different from us, but also allow us not to see them at all...

Night before last my phone rang over and over. It was my dad calling from the hospital in a panic. He woke up and suddenly felt that no one knew who he was. He was alone in the world and reaching out. During the day, he is more lucid, more calm. Pain and disease and isolation bring out the ghosts. Add the darkness and it seems too much for his mind. We've all had nights that bare some vague resemblance to this...

He is wasting away. He has been for weeks. And the terrifying thing is that we haven't had a story to tell about it. He's in constant anguish. And the toll on his consciousness is obvious. He needs a story as much as we do.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

-Joan Didion

Sometimes literally. In this case the story is all we have. We need a story that accounts for his symptoms, for his pain and weakness. And much of what the doctors are doing is trying to construct a narrative that makes sense. They ask him questions. They interpret the mixed and confused dream-narratives he tells. They interpret our stories about him. They look at abstract images of his body on terminal screens. They discuss the hermeneutic nuances of tiny irregularities in their texts, like rabbinical scholars. And my father continues to disappear.

The most recent revision of this story is about an infection in the bone at the sight of the surgery. This would be a long and painful story, but it's better than the earlier version, told by the surgeon: “Everything is fine. Everything looks perfect from the surgical point of view.” And to the nurse: “he's faking it 'cause he's a junkie.”

There are other stories happening all around my father. He sees ghosts. He is transplanted from one place to another. Forgets where he is and where he's been. Struggles to speak and is misunderstood by people no one can see but him. Those stories are chimeras to the rest of us. They are his new reality.

There was a moment the other day when my nephew came to see his grandfather. He was concerned with a tube coming from my dad's body that was filled with blood. He kept walking around the bed and returning to it. Trying to follow it back to see the injury. He's four. All he could say is “Sangrando?” And for a brief second my dad smiled at him. And I saw the simple logic of this moment: two consciousnesses, on either end of their narrative arcs, trying to comprehend one another.

Continuity is neither good nor bad. All we can say about it is that it persists.

environmental catastrophemy dad's bodysecondary, collateral damage

2011-09-16T09:00:00.001-04:00

I'm sitting with my sick dad, for the n^th day in a row.

Two CT scans and a botched spinal tap later and we still have no idea what is causing his debilitating pain and weakness. There may yet be some explanation. But the uncertainty suggests possibilities that are terrifying to consider...

We live in a part of the country that is “unlike others, where poison bomb ingredients wafted into the air, sank into the soil and leaked in the water for half a century (The Tennessean).”

I am looking out of the hospital window at the mountain ranges circling Oak Ridge, TN. This is a Manhattan Project town, meaning it was built as part of the super secret effort to develop and deploy the atomic bomb during WWII. After the war, it continued to be a nuclear science, technology, and weapons development hub.

I grew up here. Mostly. There is way too much to say about growing up in town like this... with its laboratories, weapons plants/ national security complex, and strange mix of the international and Appalachian. But one of the things about this place, that keeps jarring me now, as I watch over my unconscious father, is the environmental catastrophe.

There are indications of a link between environmental damage in Oak Ridge and an increased rate of sickness among workers and the general population (see PDF and link below). And it makes sense that there should be a relationship between illness and place, especially in a place where: we routinely dumped or incinerated radioactive contaminants and heavy metals in the 1950s and 60s; where all the local streams are contaminated with mercury, radioactive strontium and tritium, and other waste; where the local flora and fauna show unsafe levels of radiation; and where mercury leaks out of basement walls in buildings at the Y-12 National Security Complex.

Anyone who grew up here: played in these streams and woods, swam in these rivers, caught crayfish just under the signs that warned of mercury poisoning and unsafe biological contamination. And if you happened to be poor and black, your home was nestled right up against the labs and weapons plants, where we still service and store radioactive warheads and materials.

A series of articles in The Tennessean talked about the health impacts of environmental contamination around Oak Ridge. I was unable to find the articles on their website... but I did find a few excerpts:

A mysterious pattern of illnesses -- from immune systems gone haywire to brain malfunctions doctors can't explain -- is emerging around this nation's nuclear weapons plants and research facilities. […]

In 1997, The Tennessean found scores of people suffering a pattern of unexplained illnesses around the Oak Ridge nuclear reservation in East Tennessee. [...]

The illnesses, including tremors, memory loss, debilitating fatigue and an array of breathing, muscular and reproductive problems mirror those found in Oak Ridge.

It is always hard to link any one illness with any general environmental contamination. My father worked for 30 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He took medical retirement a few years ago. He might have had cancer (in remission now) wherever he had worked. He might have developed Parkinson's anyway. How can we know?

It is very strange to see the world in your sick father's body. But it's hard not to imagine the ecological disasters of militarism and capitalism at work in his flesh right now with his unexplained debilitating weakness and pain. In the sanitized speech of military-technocracy, perhaps my father is merely secondary, collateral damage.

Read this. It's chilling:
The Oak Ridge National Security Complex: Human Health and the Environment as Casualties of Hot and Cold Wars

And this:

The Risks at Oak Ridge

sui caedere - another suicide watch, another time

2011-09-13T23:07:00.002-04:00

Behold me then, a man happy and in good health, hiding the rope in order not to hang myself to the rafters of the room where every night I went to sleep alone [...]
– Tolstoy

I forced myself to go and write the other night. I say forced because all I can bring myself to do these days is run, literally and figuratively. I find myself intolerable, most of the time. I can't be with myself.

I don't know that I am actually suicidal. I think I am probably just desperate. Maybe. I don't know what I'm talking about anymore: I long for an old love who never loved me; I long for redemption, only it doesn't exist; mostly what I want is a string of good, old-fashioned, transformative, violent, drunken punk shows.

I was going to tell a story about a suicide attempt of mine, and a park, and a suburban bedroom. But then I remembered the line from Tolstoy quoted above. When I googled it, I came across a book from the 1960s called Traitor Within. I couldn't put it down. It's probably not the smartest thing for me to spend the evening alone reading about suicide and suicidal culture. But I found it irresistible.

I fell asleep before I could I finish it. And I dreamed of death and dying and autonomy. And the next morning as the media frenzied over the 10^th anniversary of the September 11^th attacks, all I could think of was the narratives we always seem to leave out, the one's like this one Chris Hedges mentions here. He says:

The images of the “jumpers” proved too gruesome for the TV networks. Even before the towers collapsed, the falling men and women were censored from live broadcasts. Isolated pictures appeared the next day in papers, including The New York Times, and then were banished. The mass suicide, one of the most pivotal and important elements in the narrative of 9/11, was expunged. It remains expunged from public consciousness.

What about these images, these deaths, needed to be repressed? These suicides did not, according to Hedges, fit into the narrative that the nation required at the time. What the nation wanted was stories of heroism and self-sacrifice, unity and national pride; not a reminder of the inevitable reality that, at some point, we will all be faced with the choice of how we die, no longer how we live.

Another way to describe this is that what the state and it's related institutions demanded were stories about respect for authority, not stories about the radically personal and terrible choices faced by those men and women who threw themselves from the tops of burning buildings – in sequence, alone and in pairs.

Historically, ending one's own life has been viewed with more or less contempt by Western cultures, based, in large part, on the character of authority at that moment in time. And this makes a kind of sense. A conservative social order that emphasizes the connectedness and inter-responsibility of its members will view suicide in a much more negative light than one that values self-determination and autonomy. Or, to put it another way, if authority rests in the vestments and body of the church and king (and later in the state and its institutions), then your individual body is their property and it is their right to torture and kill you, not yours.

The suppression of these narratives of tumbling bodies and horrific impacts mirrors our own indecisiveness when it comes to the community and autonomy we wish for ourselves. This isn't an either/ or situation. As I have repeated ad nauseum, we are (that is, we exist as human) only in relation to each other – to language and power and will... . But we also seek and want some sense of our own individual agency in the world. That is to say that we want to belong, and we want to be free to choose our own lives. And when faced with the monstrosity of some situations (whether personal tragedy, or intolerable social and cultural barbarity like that of post 9/11 America), sometimes that choice comes down to how we die.

I started writing this post with the intention of telling a story about a suicide attempt of mine that I survived accidentally; an attempt filled with desperation, tragedy, warmth, and humor. But a more sinister humor reminded me of another suicide narrative from my past.

A few years ago, for reasons that are publicly unexplained, an older couple close to my family, Manfred and Margarita Kopp, killed themselves. It was ruled a murder-suicide by police. They didn't leave a note explaining their actions.

When I was growing up, Manfred taught me to sail. Margarita tried to teach me piano. Their son, who found their bodies, taught to me to slap box. They were a lovely and remarkable couple. And while I can never presume to know what went through their minds that afternoon, I can imagine. Manfred had been very ill with Parkinson's for quite a while. And as I watch my own father suffer with that same disease, and see the unbearable pain he is in today, I can imagine what lead to the deaths of these two family friends.

It is only conjecture on my part. But I imagine Margarita shooting her husband and then herself because of an immense love, sadness and desire to end his suffering. It is tragic. It is also a final, beautiful gesture. [In this love, I am reminded of the story of the Japanese Princess Pu who died cradled in her lover's arm instead of being forced to marry the prince she did not love.]

It was my suffering father's humor that reminded me of the Kopp's murder-suicide the other day. He has had Parkinson's for many years. And a recent surgery for nerve damage has left him in debilitating and constant pain. It's entirely unclear how much is mechanical (pressure on the nerves, inflamation, etc.) and how much is a neurological result of the Parkinson's. No one seems entirely sure. The hope is that a slow recovery will bring him back to manageable levels of pain, the pain merely associated with Parkinson's. In the meantime he responds to mine and my mother's looks of concern with gallows humor. “Don't get any ideas,” he likes to say. “I'm still in good spirits.”

I have some sense of what this is like for my mom. I cared for a sick partner as well. And watching someone you love suffer is terrible, at best. And while you might think that it offers some kind of existential redemption, mostly it just hurts. Today I find myself leaving the room in order to spare my father my tears, just like I did a little over a year ago with my former partner. She got better; her cancer is in remission and she seems happy and full of life. He will likely get a little better. But Parkinson's doesn't go away, and at this point we just don't know what the rest of his life will be like.

There is still hope that it will be a long and meaningful life.

A while ago, a close friend of mine came to talk to me about my suicidal inclinations. He said, bluntly, “I have no doubt that you will kill yourself someday. Just not now.” He meant that I loved my life too much: art, pathos, girls, dancing, beer, friends, bikes... . I doubt that any or all of those are reasons to live. But, when looking at the tears well up in my dad's eyes when he tries to sit up and eat, the thought of taking my own life becomes unimaginable... for now.

Me and Breivik's Manifesto Part_1: the dead father

2011-09-07T12:34:00.003-04:00

Me and Breivik's Manifesto. Preface: are you a legitimate military target

I totally get mortal terror, not merely because of the times I have looked down the barrel of a gun, not always with my own finger on the trigger; since I remember thinking I was thinking about my own death. Developmentally, in large part this is likely the result of the fact that I drowned as a very young kid. At one year, more or less, I threw myself (or was pushed, or fell) into a swimming pool in Cuernavaca at a cocktail party. I (falsely) remember all of it, not only from my point view: the look on my mother's face as she jumped into the pool in her 1970s cocktail dress and brown sandals; the way I looked so at peace, with the blue sky behind me, floating arms akimbo in the cold clear water; my older sister, on the edge of the pool in blue inflatable arm bands (I guess no one thought I would decide to have a swim)... These memories can't be my memories. They must have come from all the stories my family must have told me, and each other. I remember some sense of God and purpose in these little narratives – something like you came back from the dead for a reason (when they pulled me from the pool my heart had stopped and I wasn't breathing; my grandfather, a cardiologist, did CPR until I came back).

Death and mortality are intimately linked to just about everything in human culture – from porn to god to medicine. Mortal terror is not only about the physical reality of death. It plays out in our culture and individual lives in countless ways. I might need to explicate this more clearly, at some point. Right now, I would just like to suggest that in our anxieties about, for instance, love/ companionship, health, politics, the economy, etc., what we are worried about is a sense of control over our lives and our futures, agency in the world, in the ability to provide for and protect our loved ones and ourselves. This is, at its most basic, a fear of inevitable death. Symbolically, this drama also plays out in our consciousnesses and ideologies. And at this symbolic level, Breivik is my mirror image.

We are both looking at the dead Father. It would be more accurate to say dying, sick, emasculated Father, which of course is the same as the death of the “Father.” We are looking at Donald Barthelme's dead Father being drug to his grave by his sons, and their lovers. Barthelme's novel is a joke on Freud and Lacan. And it's funny. Postmodernism is funny. But it's also tragic.

I remember listening to Zizek at work one day talking about something or other, authority maybe, on some youtube video. He told an anecdote about how the exercise of authority by the father, actually punishing the kid that is, renders him ridiculous, desperate, a clown. And this is where I think we are in the death of the Father. In one of my larger paintings, War Cries, I looked at consumerism and violence and desire. My contention in that painting (or at least in writing about that painting) was, among other things, “that the end of authority creates the alienated longing to re-establish it through any means; and the alienated longing to do away with it entirely. Or, that authority has never existed but exists only as the desperate desire to overcome death, which leads to murder … . How else can we explain the apparent (suicidal) trajectory of Militarist/ Capitalist social organization?”

This is exactly the situation of Breivik's Declaration. The text and the man are desperate to (re)create an imagined paternal authority that undoes the the threat of an invading other. And it leads Breveik to murders that will ultimately prove senseless.

Ironically what Breivik fears (in the death of the Father/ the end of stability, certainty and authority) is exactly what he himself unleashes: uncontrollable violence and fear. Breivik states (p.12):

Most Europeans look back on the 1950s as a good time. Our homes were safe, to the point where many people did not bother to lock their doors. Public schools were generally excellent, and their problems were things like talking in class and running in the halls. Most men treated women like ladies, and most ladies devoted their time and effort to making good homes, rearing their children well and helping their communities through volunteer work. […] If a man of the 1950s were suddenly introduced into Western Europe in the 2000s, he would hardly recognize it as the same country. He would be in immediate danger of getting mugged, carjacked or worse, because he would not have learned to live in constant fear.

He goes on to describe other 'social problems' the family of the 50s might encounter: pornography, homosexuality, violence in schools, and, oddly, that dad can't crack sexist jokes at work and mom would get laughed at for dressing pretty (p.12). What this nostalgic “memory” of a better time betrays is an encompassing fear of actual and symbolic (directed against cultural/ intellectual institutions) violence.

I sort of doubt that Breivik ever read any of the 'multiculturalist' thinkers he criticizes in the introduction, but whatever primary or secondary sources he did read, he got the analysis about the decline of paternal authority and paternalist social structures right.

Let's imagine that authority (perhaps more generally consciousness / language) was established in order to manage (forbid, control, unleash) the will to power (Nietzsche), the excess of life and death (Bataille), the abject or the feminine (Kristeva). And then follow a trajectory that leads (a long way) to the rise of the nation-state in Europe, and then the relative peace and prosperity (for some) that followed WWII through the decline of authoritarian communism. And then imagine that for a generation or two, certain Europeans and Americans (excluding ethnic and religious minorities, the poor) lived with this (fake, built on violence around the world) edifice of stability, security, prosperity. If you were born into the (memory of this) place, class, and ethnicity that benefited from this order of things, and saw the world from your own place in it, then the terror of its decline is mostly sensible.

Breivik talks at length about “political correctness.” By this he means the “the General Line of the Establishment in Western European countries today (p.11)" and, roughly speaking, the cultural element of Marxist economics (p.13) as seen in the philosphical positions of The Frankfurt School and Deconstruction. I don't think he has really given these positions a fair reading. Instead he merely looks at the way that they are put into practice as an assault upon the values and institutions he holds dear – partriarchy, traditional gender roles, (his) ethnic identity, capitalism, etc. And in this respect he does get it more or less right. Postmodernity (I am using this term for convenience to refer to the philosophical and critical traditions developing from Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and company; I realize that the term itself means more or less nothing at all), at least in the humanities and social sciences, is deeply suspicious of Western power and knowledge.

But Breivik sees this critique as violence (an ironically very postmodern position). He envisions a robust and influential militant movement seeking to dismantle patriarchy (and succeeding). And the telos of all multiculturalism according to Breivik is that “In the end, the result is inevitably the concentration camp, the gulag and the grave (p.11)"

To me, however, this "multiculturalist" movement looks like a tiny, self-referential, irrelevant joke. While Postmodernity has certainly had a cultural and social impact (the loss Breivik laments), it has, for the most part, left all of our Western structures of domination intact, and arguably stronger than before. In some respects it has created a hipster in place of a revolutionary. In other words, in the cultural space where we once questioned what our dad's had done in the war, we now have an entirely apolitical, fashion-obsessed, self-absorbed (creative) class more concerned with bikes, music and skinny jeans than murder, torture and war. And everyone else still doesn't give a fuck (I am reminded of the citizens of the Capitol in The Hunger Games). And even those few of us with a political disposition, tend to take part in praxis that will never have any structural effect upon the organization of capitol and domination. Candle light vigils, civic participation within a two (or five or whatever) party system, street theatre, etc. will never change the world. And why shouldn't it be that way if everything is equally good and equally bad. Breivik on page 340:

In addition to just plain decadence, there is a widespread ideological feeling in Europe that nothing is worth fighting for, certainly not through armed struggle. There are no Great Truths, everything is equal.

Interestingly for me, I almost agree. I ended this post about the development of a robust reactionary right wing in the United States with this statement about resisting authoritarian structures:

A messy, fluid philosophical position doesn't lend itself to throwing Molotov cocktails, so much as sipping appletinis, and then thinking about it.

The dead Father is likely scary enough on its own for someone like Breivik. But when Breivik looks at this dead Father, he also sees a militant horde of Islamists ready to occupy the wake left by this receding power. Islam, for Breivik, will take over the failing social structures of European culture not in a strictly military campaign, but in a cultural war. Al quaeda will not win this war. Europe will lose this war (without intervention from the Justiciar Knights) because of it's own cultural and social decline.

Another way to say this is that Breivik's (symbolic) Father did not just die; he was killed. For this reason in the Norway attacks, Breivik's "military" targets were the “traitor whores” of multiculturalism (p. 1160). And the use of this word "whore" is telling. In one way of looking at this document, it is an expression of a deep and pathological fear of the feminine other; and an extended lament of, and anxiety about castration.

Next time.

from page 563

while I listened to Gillian Welch: the_difference_between_eros_and_masturbation

2011-08-25T12:32:00.001-04:00

I can't think these days. Not even in circles. I haven't been able to write. Until it's on the screen, it doesn't exist, much less make sense. My body, on its own, feels its way through the world; and its images, sounds and fragmentary narratives don't come together. Without this text, I am adrift. Somehow the terminal screen has become the only means of telling myself stories (lies) in order to live. And even then, it is probably only a stand in for you. Only you don't exist.

What I do I mean by that? I mean that I envy musicians.

It is cliche to say that art comes from trauma. But in its banality is a certain truthfulness. We are (according to some points of view) primarily social-linguistic-ruptured beings in a constant state of want. The desire to bridge the space between I and Thou is ubiquitous, however you conceive of that space and that other, or sublimate that activity in cultural or economic production/ consumption.

There is no way for you to experience what it feels like to make this

The immense anguish, boredom, and joy that goes into one of these is only reflected in it. There is no connection between myself, my work and an other. And the experience of another, no matter how alienated the interaction may be, is, more or less, all there is. Making a painting may be and mean many things, but it is mostly solitary. A viewer comes to a painting and can only feel the hand of the artist in the most oblique way. Only the artist's ghosts persist. “I” am no longer really there in any immediacy. At an opening you see the artist; but in his or her work all you see is some kind of object that relates to, but is alienated from the inner experience that produced it. A painting was hours and hours of a body in relation to a vast set of possibilities that slowly narrowed to a singular object, contained in a comprehensible frame that becomes more a reflection of the viewer than a projection of the artist. Painting is a mostly tragic form; much of it lost in the space between us. [This is obviously closely related to discourse, speech, and eros.]

Music is essentially different. In music you have an immediate experience of the being of the person(s) performing. It's not always emotionally accessible, and can be hyper-intellectual, but the performance of the thing is the thing shared with an other, even when mediated through a representation. In some musical forms (like opera for instance) I even prefer the electronic, solitary, mediated experience of the thing, but even then it is like a memory of something that happened in the connections between performers, writers, media, etc. In other words the art of music does not exist separate from an interaction; the making of music itself is a connected/ social activity, occurring in between musicians, a text (the score, song, etc.) and an audience. And it is something tactile, that you literally feel on your skin and interior surfaces.

And in this a very real beauty. Last night, while I listened to Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, I witnessed the transformation of an inner life into a shared experience between hundreds. We each, I'm sure, had a different something to see in us reflected back from the experience. But that we all created it together is undeniable. And no matter how tragic and lonely their songs might be, the performance of them is something basically hopeful, full of possibilities for non-alienating discourse.

The difference between music and visual art then, is something like the difference between eros and masturbation.They're both good, but one is infinitely better.

I wish that I could have been a musician instead of an artist. I like to imagine I would have been something resembling a cross of Lucinda Willians and GG Allen. That life would have been fun.

Sometimes I love this town.

2011-08-20T12:11:00.000-04:00

Seven mile run in a lightning storm at dusk to a bar packed with good friends. Running home after a couple of pints, the streets blacked out and sinister. The dogs on edge, fighting every shadow, looking over their shoulders. The night air unusually clean, cool and electric.

Swing dancing at a little honkytonk till three in the morning.

Waking up in tears.

Whiskey and coffee for breakfast, reminiscing: about missed calls at four in the morning, the girl I might love who doesn't say hi, and last night's other littlest heartbreaks.

Time to go for another run. Sometimes I love this town.

surgery waiting ghosts

2011-08-19T19:53:00.002-04:00

I spent the better part of this afternoon in the surgical waiting room. Seems like over the last few years I have spent a good deal of time in waiting rooms, concerned over loved ones. Concerned might not be quite the right word. Worried, anguished... Nothing seems to capture the combination of studied calm and extraordinary panic that you feel when a loved one is having their chest split open for the second time in 24 hours, or having a breast removed. The lingering possibility that they may not ever come out of it, combines with the requirement that you be strong to mitigate the fears and anxieties of those others you love who are waiting with you.

This afternoon, my father was having a more or less routine surgery to correct some nerve damage. But still the thought of never seeing him, of complications, persisted. And as the estimated time for the procedure passed, and our concern increased, a very strange thing happened.

One of the waiting room volunteers came over to us and said, “There's a woman on the phone asking to speak to you. She said her son Jorge had surgery this morning.”

My mom and I looked at each other. Confused.

“Are you sure you have the right person? I asked.

She was. And then I said: “This really isn't possible, his mother died many years ago.” And for a brief second I hoped that, indeed, my grandmother was calling from whatever afterlife there might be, to let us know he was going to be alright. When my mom took the call, the line was dead.

There's nothing like death to make you want to believe in the future.

a brief note on sleep_anguish_authenticity

2011-08-18T11:39:00.001-04:00

It isn't like my life is any less fucked (it's probably more fucked) than normal, but for some reason I am sleeping. Too well. Six to seven hours a night. And even though I do really enjoy being sleep deprived, I'm not willing to intentionally not sleep.

All this really means is that I have no time to do everything I want and need to do on any given day: run, swim, write, make art, fall in love – so I don't go crazy; and work – so I don't go hungry, or lose my house/ studio, or not be able to buy coffee and beer and smokes.

And this week the writing has more or less stopped. But I am in an entirely unrequited love affair with someone who doesn't know and probably should never know, which is nice. And this painting is coming along, which is also nice:

It's a retelling of Delacroix's Christ Asleep During the Tempest.

I am looking at it from the point of view of the essay I have (not) been working on about The Tyranny of Happiness, and from the Freudian/ Bataillian/ Kierkegaardian notion that our sense of self and our humanity derives from anguish, and that suppressing that experience is alienating, dehumanizing, and in Kierkegaard's word: inauthentic.

this mortality accidentally reflected in another's gaze

2011-08-08T11:38:00.001-04:00

I met up with some friends for a drink the other day after the swim where I discovered an irregular heartbeat. And it was before I really had a chance to figure out what the fuck my racing, poly-rhythmic heart might mean. I still don't really know, but after talking to google and a few friends it could be absolutely nothing. Certainly nothing to panic about without getting some more information first. It was interesting, though, to see how that small, immediate suggestion of mortality effected me. For the most part, death and dying have been as close a part of my life as it is for most people who've been around as long as me with backgrounds and experiences similar to mine. If you're around long enough, eventually everyone you love dies. And I am more or less comfortable with the idea of my own death. And in many ways I find the thought intimately pleasurable.

“The dreams in which I'm dying” … and all

And I have read, written and explored with my life the link between eroticism, meaning and death since I was a kid, before I ever understood what I was doing. Sometimes though, knowing doesn't really change the existential experience.

When I met my friends, there just happened to be a woman I found completely compelling. She was by any measure wonderful – smart, funny, adorable, driven, creative, etc. I do tend to run into amazing, compelling people in my life. But there was something about her which created a below the surface compulsion to know her. I tend to trust my unconscious. That vertiginous edge where everything seems possible and doomed all at once doesn't happen accidentally with me. It could be some old tragic history wanting to play itself out, or some pathology or another, or it could be a pointer for a promise of the kind of creative and beautiful something that sometimes develops in a friend or lover. It is also a bit of that primal anguish Bataille describes at length in L'Erotisme and that I have recently discussed over and over in this blog … But something about that moment felt very different.

As I was leaving I wanted to say: “I […] tell me you love me, but that we can't be together.” I didn't say it of course, because that would be crazy. But I lingered over that thought and that anguish. As if everything depended on it. And slowly what I have always known occurred to me, that the promise of eros is the promise of continuity, of immortality, and the promise of death. My own worry about my possibly failing heart had transposed onto the face of this person whose openness and warmth and joy-in-her-life promised some future I knew didn't exist. Her look promised some Hegelian aufheben, some transformation which leaves nothing transformed and everything different. And isn't that more or less what we always see in the object of desire, un-dangerous danger:

O brawling love! O loving hate! / O anything of nothing first create! / O heavy lightness, serious vanity! / Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms! / Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!

Closeness to the idea of my own death, this desire for continuity, probably informs much of what I think and do in my life. For whatever inexplicable reasons, I have been suicidal since I remember thinking. I am completely at peace with it, even though its anguish can seem unbearable at times.

A few months ago I wrote about a self-portrait of mine (left) that I began as an exploration of suicide, and of suicidal impulses and people in my life. But it failed, in my mind, because I was dishonest. To me it looks like a vague caricature of something existentially unique, most of us can only commit suicide once (I do have a friend, who I haven't heard from in months, who successfully attempted suicide. She died only to be revived later... She may have already tried it again). In talking about the failures of this portrait and the possible meanings of suicide, I wrote:

And there is a type of pleasure in imagining suicide. The same kind that is involved in falling in love or meditating on the divine. And there is a politics to it as well. For a long time, when I would think about killing myself, I would think what a shame it would be if I didn't use it as a performative event, like self-immolation.

And this is almost exactly what I felt on this night where I barely managed to live. I had entirely forgotten what I had already felt and written. (Am I writing a future then, or is my narrative so predictable?)

As I struggled to understand all of this mortality accidentally reflected in one random encounter, in another's gaze, I was finishing this piece:

I have decided to destroy the old self-portrait, the one I feel lacked conviction and honesty. I want to transform it into another something that doesn't flinch at the immense incomprehensible thing that always returns. I have decided that I have nothing to hide, that I am at peace with exactly what I am and the life that it has lead to, and the one that is yet to be written.

And all of this suggests a question. I wonder how much we can ever see an other.

Me and Breivik's Manifesto. Preface: are you a legitimate military target

2011-08-07T15:08:00.003-04:00

Manifesto p822 illustrating "Our Primary Objectives"

I've been writing a couple of interrelated longer essays about meaning in my work and life, and the tyranny of happiness (I have published some of it already on this blog). In the process I ran across the work of Anders Behring Breivik in whom I saw my uncanny double. We more or less read the same material and came to the exact opposite conclusions. His act of violence, his propaganda of the deed, declares war on me, and you. It's a war we've been in for a long time, one we see in the rhetoric of the right wing in this country, all of whom have had to denounce the attacks and try and distance themselves from Breivik, but who have had to admit that he mostly got the analysis right.

Perhaps the project of post modernity, Breivik's Cultural Marxism, is in fact a kind of unconscious suicidal cultural push; that what we “traitor whores” want is to burn the whole thing down. We have certainly created the cultural space for Breivik and his ideological fathers to do it for us. And much of our cultural life does have some aspect of fiddling on the Titanic.

Breivik killed 76 people in Norway. And these attacks are very clearly a manifestation of the theatrical/ performative nature of political violence.

In the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, composer Karlheinz Stockhausen described them as the greatest work of art by the devil. He was obliged to back pedal by the predictable response from an outraged and wounded population, but the reasoning of that statement still rings true, even if its sentiment is monstrous and inconsiderate of the very real trauma and suffering resulting from those attacks. In general it is clear that art and political violence have a close relationship at the level of intent. Art seeks to transform by means of an aesthetic experience. Political violence against civilians – whether by US UAVs, drug cartels, Al Qaeda, Christian extremists, or (once upon a time?) anarchists – seeks the same kind of impact through the (secondary) aesthetic experience of the (primary) act of violence. These are not equivalencies, but they are similar. This is to say that political violence exists as a theater of real cruelty in order to deploy widespread vicarious trauma through the ad nauseum re-presentation (in the media) of the primary act of violence. [This is something I have written about and considered at length since I first read about the Symbionese Liberation Army in college. Maybe I'll take it up in detail later]. And in that the media exists as a mirror/ generator of ideology as well as capital, we see an aspect of performative violence over looked by Stockhausen and explicitly stated by Breivik. Today the propaganda of the deed is merely the logical extension of the rationale of capital. It is marketing, a manipulation to manufacture desire. And Anders Behring Breivik left a fascinating and precise, thoroughly American document accounting for this performance. That's not quite right. It's more accurate to say that the act of violence was intended as a marketing tool for the document.

I have just about finished my reading of the document, skimming sections in which I have little interest or knowledge (if I didn't have a job I might have the time to read all of it). I'm pretty sure that Jeff Sharlet's article for Harpers, when it comes out, will cover the aspects I know very little about. This is him on Democracy Now!.

And here is a .pdf of the document in its entirety from a neo-con blog. I will be focusing on Breivik's presentation of the feminine; on it as a lament of castration and fear of the (feminine) other; on it's equation of feminism, pluraility and the philosophical traditions developing from Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche (even though he doesn't mention him); and on the future blood baths he promises that holy warriors and cultural conservatives will bring down on us, to make the world right again.

In case you are wondering if you're a legitimate target in this war (from pages 930 and 931 of A European Declaration of Independence):

This classification system is used to identify various individual cultural Marxist/ multiculturalist traitors. The intention of the system is to easier identify priority targets and will also serve as the foundation for the future “Nuremberg trials” once the European cultural conservatives reassert political and military control of any given country.

Any category A, B or C traitor is an individual who has deliberately used his or her influence in a way which makes him or her indirectly or directly guilty of the charges specified in this document: 1-8 [see page 770 for a detailed description of these 'crimes']. Many of these individuals will attempt to claim ”ignorance” of the crimes they are accused of.

Category A traitor: […] Political leaders (NGO leaders included)/ Media leaders (chief editors)/ Cultural leaders/ Industry leaders/ Punishment: death penalty and expropriation of property/funds [...]

Category B traitor
Category B traitors are cultural Marxist/multiculturalist politicians, primarily from […] parties who support multiculturalism […] They can be elected and non-elected parliamentarians, their advisors and any public and/or corporate servant who has been and still are indirectly or directly implicated […] Category B traitors can also be individuals from various professional groups (but not limited to): journalists, editors, teachers, lecturers, university professors, various school/university board members, publicists, radio commentators, writers of fiction, cartoonists, and artists/celebrities etc. They can also be individuals from other professional groups such as: technicians, scientists, doctors and even Church leaders. In addition, individuals (investors etc) who have directly or indirectly funded related activities. It’s important to note that the stereotypical ”socialists”, collectivists, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists, environmentalists etc are to be considered on an individual basis only. Not everyone who are associated with one of these groups or movements is to be considered as a cultural Marxist/multiculturalist. […] Many professionals such as f. example journalists, influential sociologists or university professors etc. are considered and categorized as category B traitors as we consider them political activists and not merely professionals. They will of course claim ignorance and state that they are a-political. This strategy might work for them until the day where they are visited by a Justiciar Knight - their judge, jury and executioner [my emphasis]

Punishment: death penalty and expropriation of property/funds. Punishment can be reduced under certain circumstances.

Category C traitor

Category C traitors are less influential and lower priority targets (often individuals who have facilitated category A and B traitors) but who are still guilty of charges 1-8.
[...]
Punishment: fines, incarceration, expropriation (considered as acceptable indirect casualties in larger operations where WMDs are involved). [again my emphasis]

[…]

Imagine your anti-Cultural Marxist neighbor, that young man down the street who listens to Rush all day, who gets his 'news' from Fox, who thinks that Glenn Beck speaks factually; who heard Pat Buchanan say that Breivik's analysis was right on, it was his actions that were wrong; who is frustrated because pretty white girls fuck black men instead of him; who thinks girls who won't talk to him at a bar are snobs who don't understand their place in the world (these last two are actually the concerns of the document, not mine)). Then ask yourself how much you trust that he will never decide that you are, in fact, a legitimate military target.

This has always been the climate I live in. I know for certain that some of my neighbors already see me as a target. I know for certain that one of our neighbors here in Knoxville gunned down 'liberals' in church, in part because those 'liberals' took his woman away from him. I know that shortly after that, a couple of men in clan outfits paraded in front of the same church. I know that we spent tens of thousand of dollars to protect the 'right' of Nazis to march on Market Square. I know that women, fags and queers are routinely threatened or attacked in this town (for instance a queer couple's house was burnt down, and a gay bar burned under suspicious circumstances).

Breivik's document and propaganda of the deed is a call to action by a very smart, thoughtful and analytic person. He is no nutter. What we do in response will determine the future of this country and the world.

Breivik's image (of himself) of a Justiciar Knight

sport fucking, slut walks and transit systems: sublimation_anguish_dialectic

2011-08-06T11:19:00.002-04:00

Not every conversation I have pushes towards the dark side. Although, most people I know teeter on that edge, where just beside them is a chasm waiting to overcome them. And much of what we describe as pathology could be seen merely as an embodied response to metaphoric vertigo.

Last night at a bar with a bunch of inner-city school teachers (easily some of the coolest people I've ever met) the conversation took a turn that might rapidly have ended with us confronting our monstrous fathers in hollowed out trees. I am normally inclined to fall down these holes. But something about that potential seemed to bother one of them, so I let it go before it got too heavy. But there was an interesting, if not entirely pleasurable (since for some reason the conversation was also a bit contentious), general discussion about mental health and sickness, about metaphor and anguish. And in some respects I think we were all saying something similar, albeit in different language.

For Nietzsche, Freud, and Bataille the basic requirement of human life (language) is the exclusion of the will to power/ libidinous desire/ the excess of life and death. But in all these thinkers this exclusion is also creative – meaning we don't actually intend to suppress the erotic. Which, of course, is not exclusion at all. We simultaneously say don't touch the fire, touch the fire this way. And in this I see a Hegelian dialectic that works out in a way very similar to the aims of the Slut Walk.

The Slut Walk makes a complicated theoretical and political statement about sexual violence, liberation, and desire. At least one aspect of it, the reclaiming of the word slut, is entirely dialectical. The idea of reclaiming something is perhaps more complicated than it seems. On the one hand I think that most of us believe or consider that reclaiming a word (or an image, or a demeanor, etc.) is merely a change in the meaning of the word – a suppression of its negative or pejorative association in favor of some new, affirming meaning. And to some extent I think that this is true-ish. My sense, though, is that that desire for transformation is antithetical, meaning that the original term, and its replacement no longer exist as they did but are transformed into a third term that retains elements of both. My saying “I'm queer,” or “I'm a spic,” works as 'liberatory' only in so far as the pejorative elements of the words persist. Otherwise they mean... nothing at all really. It would be the same as saying I am unusual, or of Hispanic descent. It is the suggestion/ memory of violence that gives the new term its radically liberating effect. In order for the Slut Walk to work at this performative level, it must retain and insist upon the violence and degradation of calling someone a slut, or a bitch, or blaming a victim for a rape.

What is interesting in this dialectical thinking, is that the terms are not contradicted/ repressed/ excluded; instead, they become something else, are combined in a conflict and transformed, so that what we seek in our humanity – in Bataille's transgression, in Freud's sublimation, in Nietzsche's overcoming – is exactly that union of terms which creates an entirely different Being that pulls that dialectical conflict along in it's wake. In other words what we seek in our humanity is the promise of Eros.

I like the idea of carrying the dialectic with me, that all of history, place, and trauma comes together in each person's vast and tiny wake. Late last night a friend suggested that since I'm single I should be “sport fucking.” I told her that that was very protestant of her; that I'm much to Catholic to sport fuck. I want even the most casual sexual relation to be anguished, meaningful, and with a spark of the divine. And that doesn't happen with just anyone – I like what's written with and on the bodies of smart, complicated, wounded, and tragic figures. Or, I prefer people who don't just have baggage, but rather, freight and transit systems. I'm not sure if that counts as slutty.

a life worth living

2011-08-05T10:16:00.001-04:00

I'm about finished with a new painting. I'm going to glaze or paint on it some more to unify the surface a bit. These are some snapshots and a video of the process.

i would happily swim myself to death

2011-08-04T13:14:00.000-04:00

I swim (and run) every day. I deeply enjoy the clarity of mind that comes from pushing my body beyond its limits. It feels meaningful to me. Without it I am unable to think. I am unable to see myself or the world in any kind of open and honest way. In large part this is a result of the personal primordial and developmental trauma that pushed me to swim in the first place. For ten years as a child all of my existence was processed through swimming back and forth in a pool to exhaustion. There was a moment where I would likely have gone to the Olympics had I continued. I don't know if I would have ever been capable of making the US national team, but I am a Mexican national, and at that time in Mexico no one in my age group was even close to posting the times I was posting in the 100m and 200m butterfly. When I was 13 and 14 years old, a rich Mexican elite was already courting me to give his chain of fitness clubs an international name. He took me to visit his estate in the city complete with private security, servants, gardeners, etc. Incidentally, he eventually received, in the most tragic way, the international recognition he had wanted through my body. His daughter was abducted, held for ransom for months and then killed.

Instead of swimming and potential fame and success, I opted for the short-term loves of drugs and girls and life instead. I don't regret that choice. I couldn't have made a different choice at the time. I'll never swim as fast as I did then, and the drive to compete has really left me. If I can't be the best at it, why bother ... . But I am deeply committed to the activity and the existential meaning it produces in my life. I don't want to imagine my life without it.

The last couple of days my swimming and running have been exceptionally strenuous. Motivated in large part by this drive I have recently had to live to the fullest, to understand and accept pain and joy (and ennui). And sometimes I check my pulse just to see to what extent I have exceeded the limits of my capability to withstand that pain. Yesterday and today after runs and exceptionally long (for me) descending interval swims mixing sprints with sustained swims, I noticed that my heart rate was unusual. I often push 220 or more beats per minute for minutes at time. It wasn't the rate that alarmed me. It was the fact that my pulse would race normally, then drop to the equivalent of a near resting heart rate for a couple of seconds and then race again.

I imagine it's probably nothing – some normal response to the stress of intentionally pushing your heart to its limits. Maybe I'm just to old to train (for nothing) like this. But if it isn't nothing, the only thing that occurs to me is that since I have to die anyway, I would happily swim myself to death.

does any of this (life) mean anything at all. Part_2: the genesis of George W Bush's America

2011-08-02T11:23:00.002-04:00

I went for a run this morning just after publishing part one of this post. The stories of these Rwandan cyclists were fresh in my mind. I thought about the ways that accepting pain is transformative, about their unimaginable bravery to continue and succeed. I ran and ran and ran. I used to believe that there were some kinds of pain (in sports) that your consciousness could not transform. If you tear a muscle, I thought, no amount of thinking can alter the damaged physiology. I get injured a lot. I know what a tear feels, what a strain feels like right before the fibers tear and you can no longer move. This morning the pain in my strained calf was almost unbearable. And I kept running thinking of these young men. And it never got any worse. I was in tears for most of the run, but at no point did the muscle give out, the way it has so many times before. Right afterward I went swimming. I swam 3 and half kilometers doing intervals of all out exertion. I thought for sure that my body would just quit. It hurt, but it kept going. I have written in the past about movement, about thinking with your body, about trauma and transformation. I don't think I really felt the power of an idea, until I imagined these guys in Rwanda in the physiology of my body.

Theirs is a simply inspiring narrative in the most Oprah Winfrey Network kind of way. But I don't forget the part of the narrative that is often excluded in these sorts of uplifting, overcoming adversity stories. The roots of this genocide lay firmly upon the back of European colonial and post colonial rule. Our Western culpability is not lost on me. And finding ways to resist exploitative relationships is a significant part of why this story matters to me. I see us reflected in the machetes and clubs and rape gangs that so thoroughly colonized the consciousnesses of these young athletes. I want there to be a way to resist.

I doubt that any work of mine – of art, of writing, of living – will ever resonate the way this story resonates with me, but I have to believe that there is some purpose to this project of mine. Certainly there is a need to think about the world differently.

Much of what I write about, probably appears incredibly narcissistic. And I freely admit that I am looking at this mess from the point of view of my very limited reality. And I recognize an alienated and solipsistic nature in this. And perhaps I need to address it if I ever want someone to read this the way I intend, as a theoretical work. But maybe not. I have no idea. What is clear to me, though, is that if I have no access to the the world (if everything is merely a movie in my head), then none of us do and the critique is mute. On the other hand if there is some relationship between I and thou then some part of that relationship must be understood from the inner experience of its terms. And that is necessarily from a single inner experience. The epistemological uncertainty in these relationships could be an open place of resistance and affinity. For now it is the exact opposite. The uncertainly in the possibility for non-alienating, non-totalizing communication (knowledge) creates the cultural space that produced George W. Bush's America.

Bush's America (still our current America) was a reactionary affront to reason. His entire persona was centered on a kind of (fake, cynical) pragmatic, anti-intellectual, folk spirit of what-I-know-I-know-best. So that the Bush myth simultaneously rejected certainty in the form of reasoned and scientific knowledge, while positing certainty in an immutable knowledge of another sort. He had his cake and ate it too. He could act with recklessness and abandon, while also acting with conviction and rightness. This probably doesn't strike you as an entirely unusual circumstance. Ideology always works this way. But this America inhabits a particularly strange intellectual/ historical place in that there was basically no viable resistance to this cultural power grab. This unusual circumstance of Bush's America has its roots in the intellectual upheavals of the 1960s, which have their roots in 19^th and 20^th century Continental Philosphy.

If we take from Nietzsche that all language is a metaphor concealing/ wielding the will to power, and that knowledge, discourse, and morality are situated in this will; and add an awareness of material conditions along with an alienated sense of our own motivations (Marx and Freud); and then, since god is already dead or at best an opiate, we kill the author (Barthes, Derrida-ish), or at least look at him functionally (Foucault); and dissolve the master-narratives (Lyotard); and become deeply suspicious of all totalizing and coercive discourses and even the possibility of communication (Gadamer, Foucault v. Frankfurt School); and we do all these things to the point where it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to talk about anything resembling good and bad, right and wrong, then those of us who oppose all authoritarian impulses, in our desire to oppose them in ourselves, have no place to stand.

Trying to resist domination while refusing the structures of domination is a complicated endeavor, practically. To my mind, (what we could call the project of) post modernity has created the conceptual space for the development of a reactionary, international right-wing movement by tying our hands behind our backs with theoretical knots. There is no clear non-totalizing, anti-authoritarian practice. And some of this is necessarily good; revolutionary movements have always re-stated, in other forms, the power structures they claim to oppose. And the current trajectory of postmodern thinking is (to my mind) far more revolutionary than any revolutionary ideology in that it identifies that the problem is indeed in the baby and not the bathwater. There is a sense, rightfully I think, that any praxis is akin to some kind of propagande par le fait, that it does nothing to oppose domination as such. Unfortunately, this creates the kind of cultural space that is easily occupied by those acting with certainty and conviction, offering simple solutions irrespective of whether or not they have any basis in fact. Ironically, we on the intellectual left don't trust facts as such. We see them as situated, or motivated. Not as just the truth of the matter. It's hard to act when there is no thing in itself, no epistemology, no certainty; when I is as indictable as thou.

A messy, fluid philosophical position doesn't lend itself to throwing Molotov cocktails, so much as sipping appletinis, and then thinking about it.

End Part 2

does any of this (life) mean anything at all. Part_1: on sports, genocide and metaphor

2011-08-01T08:47:00.000-04:00

I was at work today cleaning ground up animals out of machines. Not the whole animal, only teeth and maybe some soft tissue from the around the mouth. I mostly find the job bearable, and it is a little bit fun sometimes. Most of the time, though, I find it means nothing at all. I care so little about the money that I rush through the work just to get out of there sooner, even though the 'rational' thing to do would be to take my time.

I have to admit that most things strike me as meaningless most of the time: this writing/ living project; making art, generally being alive. Maybe meaningful isn't quite the right word. Most things seem not to matter. 'To matter' is just a tiny bit different than 'to mean.' I want this (life) to matter. I'm not sure to whom. And I'm not sure why or how. But I want that something (whatever that might mean) should come from life.

[...]

I was listening to one of the New Yorker Out Loud podcasts today at work. It was about competitive cycling in Rwanda. And it was heart-wrenching. In it Philip Gourevitch tells of a group of cyclists, Tutsis and Hutus, who were kids during the Rwandan genocide in which, over the course of 100 days or so, 1 in 5 Rwandans were killed by government forces, militias and mobs. I try to imagine what that means, how it would be for me if I were in their place: that either I lost lost my family and my friends, or that my parents or siblings (or even I) took that from someone else. I try to imagine how it might 'be' to know that the last seconds of my loved one's life meant gang rape and horror and mutilation; or, I try to imagine doing that to someone, or knowing that my dad did that, or my brother. I'll thankfully never know what it's like to grow up like this. And my sadness right now as I imagine it, is a tiny, pale approximation of the real horror.

Gourevitch's piece is about sports. And in it is a very simple beauty.

In talking of one the nation's star cyclists, Gasore Hategeka, Gourevitch writes:

He had grown up in the midst of inescapable violence […] the government mobilized mobs from the Hutu majority to exterminate the Tutsi minority. Millions more, most of them Hutus, were displaced from their homes or fled into exile. Gasore’s family was Hutu, but he didn’t speak about that. In accounting for himself, he told only of private hardships, and of how he had pedalled away from them as fast as he could. His only interest in history was to make his mark in it as a cyclist.

Gourevitch continues:

Cycling is an excruciating sport—a rider’s power is only as great as his capacity to endure pain—and it is often remarked that the best cyclists experience their physical agonies as a relief from private torments. The bike gives suffering a purpose.

And this resonates with me. In this sport, these young men find a kind of redemption from the pain of their past. But not as an escape, it seems. As an appropriation of that trauma. And while we will never know or even be able to imagine the horror they come from, we can see ourselves in a small part of their story. Competitive cycling, like competitive swimming or running, pushes the body to its limits. And all of us have some understanding of what that drama means, of doing something to excess, of running because you have to run.

Gourevitch quotes another cyclist:

“The bike is good. I forgot all the pain I had before I joined the team. [...] Cycling is like a fatal drug. When you get into it, you don’t want to do anything else. You don’t look to one side or another.”

And while this statement suggests an escape, it is important to remember that this escape is through a very real physical pain, a kind of pale reflection of the horrors of these cyclists' past. And in this (overcoming/ transcendence/ transgression) I see a simple beauty. Through the bodies of these cyclists, one thing becomes another; and that is metaphor. Like seeing stars in your lover's eyes. In their daily trauma, the trauma of a nation is transformed in minuscule ways. Somehow that matters.

End part 1

the tyranny of happiness and Mountain Dew, part 1

2011-07-28T10:12:00.002-04:00

I had a teacher in high school who made quite an impression on my young mind, Dr. John Shedd. He was the kind of self-effacing, quiet, smart person who managed to make you want to think. He taught Modern European History with an emphasis on the relationship between the culutural/ intellectual life of the era and its social/ political/ economic life. And he had a bit of a gift for telling stories that brought out these relationships.

[The following might not have happened exactly like this. It was a long time ago.]

In talking about the reaction to WWI in art and intellectual life, Dr. Shedd described all of the traditionally accepted “causes of war” and said that these causes did not actually explain the war, that they always existed. Why then did war break out at that precise moment in history? And the possibility he suggested was that it was an accident. That there was no specific cause other than the shear absurd motivations of limited people with limited information. And then to further drive home the emergent cultural response to the war, he told a story of what it would have looked like to a Martian.

Basically the story goes like this: Europeans dig giant holes in the ground, and fill them with people and crap from around the world. Then when the people on one side of the holes run out of stuff, they fill all the holes back in.

As you zoom in to this absurdity, it takes on a much more sinister view. Those holes were filled with the endless fear, anxiety, suffering and death of millions, and that suffering extended well beyond those trenches.

And thus

Kollwitz 1921

In another context – maybe when reading Candide, or maybe just for fun – Dr. Shedd told us about his theory of teenage suicide, The Mountain Dew Theory.

It was really quite simple. Kids kill themselves because they are conditioned to expect an impossible life. On TV they see their mirror-selves, surrounded by beautiful friends, who love them, having more fun in a few seconds than they can expect to have in their entire lives. So they feel inadequate, like their life lacks meaning.

This is one of a series of Mountain Dew commercials airing at that time:

And while I doubt he really meant to draw a direct correlation between suicide and pop, I do think there is a story worth exploring here, especially when taking Dr. Shedd's Martian into account.

Anxiety, anguish, distress, horror are not unreasonable responses to the world as seen from the point of view of a Martian. If you were a Martian looking down on this planet right now, what you would see is something not entirely different from Dr. Shedd's WWI, but on a much larger scale. Huge amounts of machines and people are moved around the world to get stuff from the ground, which is then moved around the world by other people and machines to another place where different people and machines turn it into different stuff that then gets sent around the world again, where a whole other group of people receive it. And then they dig giant holes in the ground to bury part of it, incinerate other parts of it, and send the rest of it back where it came from to sit in giant piles to maybe get turned into other stuff that will … . When there is a disruption in the flow of stuff, more people and stuff are moved around the world to get it moving again. It goes on and on like this. And I bet that if we were to ask our Martian friend how this story ends, she would say something like: "well, it looks like eventually they're gonna run out of stuff to make stuff, and then most of them will die."

And as you zoom in from Mars what you see is that, by any metric, our current form of social and economic organization produces the largest amount of suffering for the largest amount of people to benefit the fewest.

[...]

I'd really like to spend the rest of the morning finishing these thoughts. But I have to go do my small part in this process. Fuck work.

un-dangerous danger: mirrors and chisels

2011-07-24T12:36:00.001-04:00

As a kid, I spent a good deal of time immersed in the culture of self-help and twelve-steps and psychology. Much of it strikes me as deeply pathological now. This is, in part, due to the fact that the main intellectual and spiritual sources of this knowledge in my life were creeps. Both my 'sponsor' in meetings and my therapist were dirty old men with an agenda other than my well-being. I don't resent this, and some part of me must have loved the way their attention made me feel important. And I more or less understand; I was a cute, independent, creative and smart kid who doted on their every word and probably looked at them like they were the most important people in the world. That must have made me an usually appealing object of desire for these lonely middle aged men. In 16 year old me, they likely saw a fun-house mirror and all the possibilities of everything their life wasn't. I was unaware of their desire for most of that time, and when it became apparent, I felt betrayed and told them to fuck off. Part of me wishes I hadn't, but trauma and betrayal usually win out over intellectual desire.

[..]

I don't normally date in any traditional way: dinner, drinks, get to know one another, kiss goodnight, etc. In this particular moment in my life, I have been on a couple of dates. I think they're fun mostly because I enjoy the little dance of hidden and emerging desire and longing. And I must be becoming slightly less narcissistic as I am genuinely enjoying meeting and hearing from people that are not me.

A lot of people seem to hate dating. They find it filled with anguish and insecurity. Maybe that's why I like it. It's un-dangerous danger. On a date you encounter an object of desire that might reject you. Simple enough. But in that, there is a whole world.

According to Bataille “we are discontinuous beings […] who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure. [We find our binding] to a random and ephemeral individuality hard to bear. Along with our tormenting desire that this evanescent thing should last, there stands our obsession with a primal continuity linking us with everything that is. […] This nostalgia is responsible for the three forms of eroticism in men (Bataille, Erotism, 15).” This is almost exactly what Roman Rolland described as the source of all religiosity, his “oceanic feeling.” Freud situated this feeling as a remnant of the primitive ego, 'remembered' and developing from the moment in development where the infant does not yet recognize that it is separate (discontinuous) from the teet of its mother. I don't specifically recall reading that the awareness of this separation is traumatic in Freud. But since everything with Freud teeters (ha) on those edges, I think in this it's safe to assume that this realization of the “I” is not a happy revelatory moment. In Lacan, it certainly isn't. And this developing subjectivity is tied to our life long subjectivity, and to libidinal desire and the body (image).

Recently, I have been on a few dates with a (kind, thoughtful, smart, funny, sweet, coy, incredibly beautiful) woman who is as best as I can tell, not like me. This is an illusion of course, as no one has any idea who or what anyone else might be. And since I (and all of us?) confront the world from the inside out, it is hard not to feel monstrous when looking at a mirror (an other, in this case my date) whose surface offers no indication of depth. I am certainly not suggesting that she is shallow, only that my insides don't look like her outsides. And in this is a promise. Maybe that promise is a sham, but it is, nonetheless, irresistible, or at least stronger than me. The moment of desire is the moment of longing for the lost oceanic feeling. That primal loss is also (in Freud and Lacan) the origin of the individual; and firmly situated (for Bataille) in the denial/ affirmation of violence. So what we see in the erotic object, isn't a sexy, or hard or elegant or _____ body, but a (messy, bloody, incomprehensible) rupture and longing ( maybe I shouldn't say this ... if she reads this, it might be then end of our dates). The promise in the object of desire is that this monstrous (discontinuous) world will be undone, even if only momentarily. Or that death itself will be undone, that you or I will be immortal. That this sham, this continuity, definitively involves the loss of the self renders the mirror into a chisel.

Because we find ourselves in the reflection of others (or the big Other?), we see in the other everything we are not (primordially that meant teet and sustenance and safety), all of the paths not taken, all of the persons we might have been, all of our losses. For this reason I can't really fault those dirty old men from my youth. In me they certainly saw a reflection of themselves that had to be irresistible. I was young and hopeful and vibrant (and pretty cute for a teen-age boy). They wanted to grab me and hold onto me, to possess me, because of the promise contained in my body. The promise to undo their monstrous realities, made so much more monstrous by the forbidden desire they felt for me. And in this we see that all desire is also political.

Who we want and why is obviously a reflection of the complicated intersections of the (fictitious?) self of class and ethnicity and oedipal lust and whatever else informs the very specific place of lover and beloved. Irrespective of the particulars of any one desire (which are vastly interesting in themselves), what is at stake is mastery, domination. It would be easy to look at it as a simple domination of say the ability of a culture to reproduce itself (the domination of women). But I think it's a little more complicated than that. Power, as Nietzsche and Bataille suggested and as Foucault elaborated (in mind boggling detail), is not only something that is exerted in one direction. It is also creative and self-contradictory. So that our desire for the beloved (object) is a desire to control, but also a desire to unleash, the abject (in ourselves).

All of this suggests that we approach the object of desire from an essentially alienated place – alienated from ourselves, from each other, from everything we wish were, from god, from meaning.

No wonder I like dating.

hell's angels, homm(e)o-sexuals, violence, and meaning

2011-07-23T11:01:00.002-04:00

I'm sitting in my regular coffee shop. And everything is more or less the same as it always is. But somehow I feel strange. I intended to write about my first night at a job I had a long time ago now. The story resonates with me. But somehow suddenly a small change in expectations and I can't seem to focus. Everything feels a little bit off. And this time there is no real pleasure in it. Well maybe there is a kind of pleasure in channeling the beginning of The Lost Boys: faces look ugly; people seem wicked. I guess if I want to inhabit an insecure place, on the edge of an experiential abyss, I should just learn to embrace these moments.

When I was swimming this evening, there came a point when my heart rate was too elevated, my arms felt like weights, my chest was tight, I was cramping, and I knew if I just pushed through that the physiology wouldn't change much, but my understanding of it would.

Many times when I sit down to write or paint, I am filled with anxiety. It could just be that I have an overdeveloped fight or flight response. Or that I have some kind of nervous disorder. Or it could be that looking at yourself, looking back at you, can be terrifying.

…

In the mid nineties I was dating a stripper in San Francisco. I had just dropped out of art school and every night I would show up on my motorbike to pick her up. I was a slight, thoughtful, self-important punk kid full of piercings and a little bit of the appearance of a fighter. And since I seemed like a nice guy, this guy who hung out at the strip club and managed another night club offered me a job as a bouncer.

Despite my appearance, I was more or less terrified. I hadn't been in a fight in years and somehow had manged to pose/ talk my way out of every conflict I had encountered. It's not quite right to say I was terrified: I went to a skinhead show in Paris in drag, you can imagine how that went over; my friends had to keep me from getting into a fight in the Pigalle subway with half a dozen soccer hooligans who called me a poofta; in Knoxville in the 80s a good friend kept me from getting killed by a couple of “Outlaws” who didn't appreciate the finer points of my outfit . . . But despite all this I was still kind of terrified. But now that I think about, it wasn't that I was terrified of fighting. I was terrified of being alive. It was a time in my life when I could barely manage to leave the house … but that's a different story.

I took the job and he told me to show up to the bar on Wednesday night at 8 0'clock. I had done a few months of Jujitsu when I was, like, 12, so I tried to remember what I once didn't really even know. And then I went to work.

My first night as a bouncer was a Hell's Angels benefit. House of Pain was playing.

We were not responsible for security per se, the HAs were taking care of that. Our only responsibility was to protect the club's liquor license. A lot of things happened that night. There were fights everywhere. But my job, my only job, was to sit at a pair of exit doors and keep anyone who didn't look like a Hell's Angel (or a hanger on) from leaving with their drinks.

In the middle of House of Pain's set, I looked over towards the bar and there was a group of Hell's Angels in a circle kicking a young black kid in the head and back. (I mention his race because that is the only thing he had done wrong). He was on the floor in the fetal position bleeding. And they kept kicking him. I didn't really stop to think about what to do. I looked left and right to try and find someone on our staff. I got on the radio and called for back up. No one came. So I walked over, calmly, to the group of Angels and started talking to them. I said something like “hey guys, just let me throw him out.” I'm sure I sounded like a little fairy talking to a herd of buffalo. Of course no one listened. I got pushed/ punched around a bit. Obviously, I didn't start swinging. When it became clear that these guys were lost is their racist blood lust, I did the only other thing I could do.

I pushed my way inside of them. I covered the kid with my body; told him to relax. He was bleeding out from a rather nasty looking laceration on the side of his neck and several impact cuts on his head. I applied pressure to the cut on his neck and started trying to pick him up. He was tiny. Maybe he weighed 140 pounds or so. The younger guys in the circle were kicking and punching me, and I stumbled a couple of times. Fortunately, some of the older guys recognized me as Trocadero staff and pulled their brothers off of me. I got the kid to the door and walked him down the sidewalk a few paces towards the line of police cars at the end of the block.

Then he was gone.

I hate bullies. I hate people who are needlessly cruel. But I understand the appeal of what these racist fucks were doing. In their performance of violence (as Bataille suggests) they find (a kind of) god and community and agency. And almost all of their activities are homm(e)o-sexual.

I dated (not really dated, was fucking) a young fashion designer around this same time, who was also dating one of the Hell's Angels. (It's good for me that he never found out who I was. He was also a semi-pro boxer). She used to tell me stories of what it was like hanging out in the club house... being a possession on display. I think she was a little like me, and doing this for the transgressive experience of being wholly objectified and dehumanized. And she found pleasure and even meaning in it. But it was clear from the way ______ reacted when he found out she was seeing someone else that behind the fists, and colors, and bluster, and blood rested an insecure boy parading a phallus around to solidify his place in a hierarchy. I am certainly not suggesting he wasn't a badass. Instead I'm suggesting that every badass is a faggot sublimating limp-dicks through violence.

I do actually believe something near this. You can read a (my) close(ish) reading of Irigaray's homm(e)o-sexuals hidden in this post, here .

In some respects I think this limp-dick insecurity is somewhat unavoidable. In the primeval development of our consciousness, as told by Bataille and Nietzsche anyway, the need to work/ live communally required the concealment/control of violence through language/ culture. And this response to the excess of life and death, this response to the will-to-power, is also apparent in Kristeva's abject and Irigaray's fag and Becker's denial and … The point is that we are all of us driven to deny/ master the messy, fluid, contradictory impulses of death – of the feminine. And no wonder us men (must?) perform like unusually rabid/ intellectual apes (this statement is actually unfair to apes whose capacity for cruelty pales in comparison with ours; and it's inaccurate, but it sounds good) … It's too bad it's so much fun pretending to be a badass, 'cause we're on a suicidal trajectory that for most of the world, most of the time is nothing but misery.

I'm definitely not a badass. I have learned to fight a little since that night long ago in San Francisco. But I've still lost just about every fight I've ever been in. Part of the problem is I can't pick a fight. And I can't fight someone who appears weaker or less trained than me, it just doesn't seem sporting. And so it means that I only end up fighting the guys who are willing to swing at me … and they can usually fight. But, mostly the problem is I'm just not very good at it. Win or loose though, I have yet to be in fight (or a relationship for that matter, I'm not very good at those either) I haven't enjoyed.

During that Hell's Angels benefit I became a slightly different person. I discovered my ideal job in my ideal place. Nowhere else have I encountered the same mix of sex (that night as I was getting on my motorbike to go home some incredibly cute club-chick hopped on the back of my bike ...), violence, comedy and tragedy. All of life comes down to these moments, sometimes.

I like to imagine how much I would enjoy myself today if The Trocadero Transfer hadn't closed, if I hadn't been evicted from my cheap storefront studio in the Mission to make room for yuppies from the Mid-West, if I were still friends with the East Bay Rats MC, if life hadn't interjected ...

me and a motorbike in that era

pretty fucking fun: creativity, anguish, and the uncanny

2011-07-22T12:47:00.000-04:00

The other night I went to get a drink with a friend. We ended up back at her apartment rolling around the floor, for a while. We went out onto the roof of her porch and lay there, mostly naked, looking out over the freeway. Drunks and prostitutes walked by. We couldn't tell if they could see us.

She started telling a breathless story about a family vacation (maybe there was a station wagon, and coyotes) in some southwestern desert state. Cars and trucks drove by on the freeway a few yards from where we perched. I could feel the ground vibrate. The night was awash in orange lights. And everything about it had the feel of a movie that I had already seen but couldn't remember. At one point I looked over and saw a building I have passed hundreds or thousands of times. It looked essentially different. Out of place and out of time. I looked over at her body and watched the shadows change over all the curves and recessions as she breathed... And it too seemed out of place and time. No longer merely a body, but a vast landscape.

The same type thing happened last night while talking to a friend on my porch. He was speculating about anxiety and death and suicide and knowledge and alienation … and what it all might mean. And as he spoke, I felt a moment of vertigo, of intellectual disequilibrium in my guts, as I and everything I thought I knew became a stranger in familiar place.

A few weeks earlier I met a girl at a coffee shop for something resembling a date. Perhaps, because of this blog, she had some knowledge of my mind and steered the conversation in that direction. Nonetheless, the moment we started talking I felt like we were the same person: we had the same concerns in life; the same anguish following us; the same lust for knowledge (maybe to explain our places in the world); the same compulsion to make art; the same attraction and repulsion by community... Only she was entirely different from me: she was meticulously made up to look like vintage doll; she was beautiful and young and self-educated; an outsider on the inside who was always sought out for company, but who resisted it. I immediately wanted nothing more than to fall into her and be turned inside out … I told her, basically, that I found her monstrous, uncanny: attractive and repulsive at the same time. (I didn't hear from her again).

These moments, where everything you thought you knew becomes strange, are the root of horror and creativity. It's also what we (at least some of us) should want from love and art and life in general.

It's been a long long time since I read Freud's The Uncanny, or Jentsch's On the Psychology of the Uncanny. What I remember is that Jentsch focused on the uncanny as the result of being intellectually or cognitively adrift or disorientated. And, not surprisingly, for Freud this experience was ultimately about castration anxiety and the repulsion/ attraction of the desires of the id. In this I see the entire scope of Bataille's life work – that defilement and blasphemy is the telos of all human desire.

This is a big chunk to try and chew-up in a short-attention-span format. But I'll give it a shot. For Bataille we are always drawn to those things which point to the violence and excess of life that we exclude (sort of) from the world of work (in Nietzsche this is akin to the way the will to power is exercised and concealed by /within the herd's language/ morality). In eroticism there is a moment where the rules of that world are suspended; where, in the desire for the beloved something divine appears as “full and limitless being unconfined within the trammels of separate personalities, [as] continuity of being... [as] the truth of existence (Bataille, Erotism, 21).” What interests me here in the context of the uncanny is not what happens next for Bataille: the sacrifice, the transgression, love . . . but that very moment where “the truth of existence” as an object of desire appears.

Early in the introduction Bataille talks about nakedness and obscenity as the signal of our desire to be dispossessed of our discontinuous existence. And that, obscenity is merely our word for the uneasy feeling of having our self possession upset. This moment that promises the continuity of discontinuous beings through violence “entails a breaking down of the established patterns […] of the regulated social order (18).” It is then a liminal space between a stable, ordered, predictable world and the vertiginous, excessive world of the divine (for Bataille there are three different kinds of eroticism – physical, emotional, religious – all functioning in more or less the same manner). Between these two worlds is a space where everything is at once familiar and alien. Here, in transgression/ in obscenity you are out of place, adrift, free (and for Bataille (and Freud) this is anguish – especially since there is some indication that with Bataille the continuity/ truth offered by the beloved is “a sham” (I'm still working on this one)).

This state is exactly what Freud was looking at in The Uncanny: the familiarity/ strangeness of your double, of being lost in the woods and coming back to the place where you were, of seeing yourself as an alienated object, of encountering the repressed infantile material of your unconscious …

It's my believe that this place of anguish is our most creative state: where we see the world as a poet and a philosopher all at once; where the strangeness of the familiar allows us to think differently so that we might find paths that didn't exist seconds before (and be willing to take them).

And, arriving at that space, living there, is usually pretty fucking fun. Even if looks like this sometimes:

the photo-collage I'm working from

the painting in process

screaming quietly

2011-07-21T14:57:00.000-04:00

I have written in the past about the person as a work of art (here and here), about the experience of a body as an essentially aesthetic/ linguistic experience. And I do wish that instead of pastors, and teachers, and therapists, and doctors we could learn from literary critics first. Understanding a narrative/ a person/ an image as metaphor is a much better way to live.

Caitlin, I met you a few weeks ago. At a street party. I couldn't quite tell what about you was so appealing. It might have just been the amazing (vintage) outfit. But I doubt it. In the madness of a crowd, you stood out because you were perfectly still, or moving slowly, ignoring the rambunctious and banal narratives playing out around you. Your face was hidden behind a camera, most of the time. You blended and watched and disappeared in the ebb and flow of dancing, and screaming, and falling and laughing. I've learned that this was anguish for you. But that's not how I experienced it.

When fate brought you close enough, I talked to you. And in my very brief encounter of you, I found you to be unusually open and honest. You were immediately forthcoming about how you felt in the world, around a bunch of drunks, and in general. You did hide behind your camera, but you did it shamelessly. And that quiet life might feel inexpressive, but it isn't. I like artifacts and events and people that are what they are in that moment. Maybe you are merely a quiet and subtle work of art these days. All that means is that we have to lean in a little bit to get what you're saying.

Screams are nice sometimes. So are whispers.

[If you're lost: this is a response to the second comment on this post]

viva la vida

2011-07-19T23:02:00.000-04:00

Some of you are worried about me. I appreciate that. And I don't normally write about those moments where I struggle to live in such a direct and immediate way. I almost didn't publish this post. I worried about my friends and family who would worry about me.

I realize that the things I write about, and the subjects of my paintings are a little terrifying, some of the time. But I have had a lifetime to invent ways to manage and embrace this turmoil. It is an ordinary part of my life. And I am still around. Most people that know me, know that the reality of this world is not the only reality I inhabit. There will be more sinister nights, maybe even worse ones. Part of me hopes that there will be ones that are much worse. But I will also still wear funny glasses and mini-skirts, go running with my dogs, swimming in quarries, and dancing on sidewalks. I am more or less happy with my life and myself. Like anyone else. The particular circumstances of my experience, some perhaps innate disposition towards the world, etc. create some amount of suffering that follows in my wake. But for the most part I am (I think) no more or less fucked-up than you.

A little bit of this writing/ thinking/ creative/ living project is like an actor who goes to far into character. To date, I have always been able to come back, more alive and more real than before. Maybe I have an unusually resilient mind to go along with an unusually dangerous and persistent unconscious. So if you're close to me and worried . . . I think I'll be fine. I am the happiest, kindest, most expressive, thoughtful, danciest, full-of-life sad-suicidal-maniac I know.

I don't have too many uplifting paintings. This little porno-painting (which I destroyed) is as close as it gets. Viva la Vida.

suicide watch; a walk in the park

2011-07-17T11:33:00.001-04:00

I spent the night with the shotgun in and out of my mouth. I didn't any have any shells. I looked. I tried to call a good friend. She didn't answer. It was four in the morning. I sent her a text saying “Answer your phone. I'm desperate. I don't want to die, yet.”

If I had killed myself... what an awful thing that would have been for her. Maybe that's why I sent it. A reason to live. I also brought the dogs into my room. Another reason to live. I don't want to be cruel.

I didn't really sleep. So it's nonsensical to say when I woke up. But when I woke up I decided to go for a walk in the park. I put on some glasses to hide my eyes.

As I walked I thought of love. And pathology. And little birds. And how so many of us create a sense of our own agency at the expense of someone else. With and without consent. And how I never want that. And how I am sure I do it, too.

When I got to the park there were two little girls in the pond where the dogs and I usually wade. They were happy and sweet and full of the kind of life that seven and ten year olds have, at least ones from stable homes and societies. I said to the younger one that if she were smaller she could ride on Mister, my hundred pound doberman. She said she couldn't get any smaller. She was already the smallest second grader in school. She actually tried to shrink. I thought she might.

She hugged Mister's head. It was the size of her torso. The girls both laughed when the dogs splashed them. They asked silly questions and didn't remember where they had moved from, because it was so long ago, last year.

They were innocent and safe and unafraid. Their mom came and checked me out for a few minutes. I was glad that she was there to protect them. Just in case. She was friendly and conversational. She must have decided I was okay.

These kids were beautiful because of their innocence and warmth and openness. I insist too that I am beautiful, with or without a shotgun in my mouth. That these paintings are beautiful.

Francis Bacon

Sir Edward Burne Jones

Caravaggio

Beautiful, not despite the anguish they or I carry. Anguish itself is beautiful too. Like in the work of art, we are obligated to carry it quietly; express it indirectly like Abraham.

Though I would never say it in the moment, there is a kind of pleasure in the fear and trembling of looking down the barrel of a gun. It takes over your body and your mind. It is your transformative everything. If you wake up from it, the world looks entirely different to you. Much more sinister and much more kind. And in this way the drive to suicide is no different than the drive to lose yourself in your lover. It's just a little bit riskier, and more permanent.

whether it leads to immolation or drowning

2011-07-14T06:50:00.000-04:00

I have been in a mutually unrequited, sublimated love affair, off and on, for years now. It is mostly very creative and non-alienating for everyone involved, most of the time. But on occasion (for me) the longing for the object of desire I can never have becomes a bit overwhelming. A bit? At the time it feels like the end of the world, or the end of myself at least. In one of those moments I began to look at her life, and was deeply jealous of the love in her family, and her personal and professional successes, of the equilibrium of her life. As I looked at my life, all I saw was perpetual sadness and failure, existential dizziness. I felt it was unfair of her to ask me to continue this (non)relationship when I found it so painful to want someone so desperately and only see my failure reflected back to me in her success (I know this is irrational, but I was (am?) in love)... In the course of this conversation she said that she too was jealous of my life. And I was stunned. What, in my (ruined) life could there be to be jealous of...

[...]

These days I feel entirely alone. Not in the 'I have no friends/ acquaintances' kind of way, but in that deep I am alone, a voice in the wilderness, kind of way. To some extent I believe this is a passing/ returning fiction told by my mind on my body, or by my body on my mind. In another way, I think it is more or less true that I am an outsider, anywhere. Either way, it is a (personal) reality (anguish) that persists.

And it occurs to me that it must be (has to be) what I want for my life. Every time, I choose the least stable option, the one that rejects the familiar. Instability is necessarily creative. In stable environments nothing happens. There is much more to this statement than is apparent at first glance. In the desire for instability is the whole history of human consciousness, at least in the way it's told by Bataille (and Nietzsche).

I recall reading both of these thinkers many years ago and feeling like I had finally understood myself. Throughout my life, from many points of view, I had seemed pathological, ill, destructive. And certainly I recognize that in myself. And I also recognize the occasional desire that longs for stability/ extension/ continuity. But when I imagine the person I wish to become (again), I see someone who is comfortable adrift in the tempest. And not as renunciation of anguish, but as an embrace.

In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard argues this very point. Our most authentic (Christian) act, for him, is to embrace anxiety and reject God, and this is the only way to arrive at an authentic love of God.

This idea of the embrace of anguish is central to Bataille's analysis of the erotic and the divine. For him, the first humans felt 'uneasy before the dizzy succession of new birth and inevitable death (Bataille, Erotism, 85) and thus with the taboo, man “attempted to set himself free from the excessive domination of death and reproductive activity (of violence that is) under whose sway animals are helpless (83).” In creating this denial of violence through the taboo, humans also affirmed violence and transgression. Bataille argues that in combating his natural impulse to violence, brought about by the necessity of communal work, man signifies “his acceptance of violence at the deepest level (69).”

(Echoing Kierkegaard) Bataille says: “Humanity became possible at the instant when, seized by an insurmountable dizziness, man tried to answer no [to the excess of life] (62).” “Tried to answer” because humans never tried to “contain themselves in this denial,” but rather wanted to step out of it as quickly as possible (86). So:

“Anguish is what makes human kind, it seems; not anguish alone, but anguish transcended and the act of transcending it (86) […] Anguish always works in the same way. The greatest anguish, the anguish in the face of death, is what men desire in order to transcend it beyond death and ruination. But it can be overcome like this on one condition only, namely, that the anguish shall be appropriate to the spirit of the man who desires it (87).”

When I first read this last line almost 15 years ago, it terrified me. My spirit seemed unusually driven to anguish. It was maybe the only time in my life that I have ever been simply happy. And much of that exuberance translated into greater and greater risks. That left me thinking that at some point this ends in murder/ suicide. And I don't live through this. The impulse to love/ murder/ suicide is not much different than the simultaneous repulsion and attraction Bataille is talking about above (as his life's work insists). Confronted with this trauma/ reality, something in my consciousness/ body stepped in to put end to this search for transcendence/ transgression.

To me it felt that my flesh revolted. And shortly after this period in my life I was living in a basement in the Mission District in San Francisco, paralyzed with fear and anxiety, unable to leave my house. This went on in one form or another, to a greater or lesser degree, for years. And nothing I tried changed it. And in some ways it is still going on now. The exuberant, risk taking, happy trajectory towards love/ death is now mitigated/ debilitated by a mind/ body that no longer feels able to risk it all.

So in a way I am trapped in the same repulsion/ attraction and striving that I wish for (which is to say that I am merely human, at least according to Bataille). And in this two very important concepts resonate.

If in order to understand the taboo/ consciousness, you must not suppress it but experience it, then it's horror must be real to you. In this very same way when confronted with my own feelings of uneasiness in front of the future I wanted for myself, what I tried was suppression. And I found, many years later, that that simply doesn't work. It took me to a whole new place where I no longer even understood or saw myself, where everything I wanted simply ceased to exist. Fortunately, the real persists and returns. And in this I see a mirror to the project of epistemology run amok... where knowledge confronted with the thing it could not rationalize (ideology, the unconscious, will to power, whatever) turned its back on it; and continues to reseed it anyway.

Secondly, no one lives through this. Life is terminal. And while the risks I was talking about above are sometimes physically dangerous (fights, cops, war/resistance, erotics, etc.), for the most part I am talking about intellectual risks that put the self or your own concept of yourself into question, which means I am talking in the broadest sense about eros, about falling in love – which can also be dangerous to life. Either way none of these dangers matter. And in this I finally see how Bataille could say in such an off hand way that all desire is a longing for death, and a longing to overcome the excesses of life (and death).

There have been moments in my life where continuing seemed impossible. Where the appeal of the shotgun blast in my mouth was almost irresistible. Over the years, a few things have helped me to not pull that trigger – the cruelty of my lover having to find my body, the (imagined) grief of my parents and a couple of close friends, a story or two told by a friend or lover . . . But I think there is some other persistent reason to live... I only have one life to lose. And I want that death to mean as much as any death can. When I figure that out … set me on fire.

Before the war (WWII) Bataille was a member of a group called Acephale, fascinated with the idea of human sacrifice. Supposedly, all the members agreed to be the sacrificial object. But none were willing to serve as executioner. They might not have tried very hard... seems like they could have hired an outsider. But as an idea, I think I get it

I am working on a new painting. A rendition of Delacroix's Tempest. I grew up with this painting. My parents bought a (quite good) reproduction of it in Mexico. It hung prominently in our living room, haunting it for most of my childhood (until I burnt it all down -- every one of my childhood memories can end like this). I have always been caught up in this painting's imagery of panic and isolation while adrift in a storm. That part of the painting has always seemed to mirror my (and my family's) reality.

The Christ figure has always troubled me. Why is he calm? Is he renouncing this life? Is he embracing death? Or is he merely at peace with the panic around Him and inside Him?

I'm pretty sure that the version I am working on represents more or less what I want and have always wanted for my life – to live in the most engaged, thoughtful and exuberant way possible whether it leads to immolation or drowning. Because, no matter what, it all ends.

Whether I have the ability (anymore) to pursue this life I imagine for myself remains to be seen (potentially, I am already living it and don't recognize it). It might be hard to convince my analyst to help me kill myself (in the way that I want), even though it is really just another way of saying: 'help me live.'

I started this talking about my friend/ sublimated lover. There is one small thing to envy in my (ruined) life: I am totally free to make any kind of life I want.

arts and crafts, solitary confinement, the hospital,

2011-07-11T08:24:00.000-04:00

I wrote a story a couple of years ago called Juan and the Machine(s) about a young man who wakes up entirely alone being kept alive by a machine (here, in three parts, part three is where it gets dramatic). The story is about his struggle to figure out who or what he is in relation to the only reality that he knows. I don't think it's very good. I don't really have an ease for telling stories of that kind. But it reflects a theoretical struggle that interests me, about and around: love, trauma, consciousness,and isolation.

In the story, I entertain the idea that self-awareness/ an inner-experience/ consciousness may as well be an elaborate illusion. And that, Matrix-like, reality is an equally shared illusion. Even if life isn't a tale told by an evil-demon, and even if there is a God to answer the puzzle, we have still have a puzzle. The following is probably very obvious from certain ways of thinking – but that puzzle of power and reality and identity only exists in the very social construction of language.

What would you or I be if we weren't situated in time, place, others, etc.? I don't know that there is an answer to this question …

And I guess I don't care if there's an answer. What matters to me in this framework is that you or I are because we are in relation. And those relations, however we conceive of them, are also relations of power and domination. I remember discussing Foucault in an undergraduate philosophy class. And much of what we discussed was the function of power through language and cultural institutions. And in the context of the prison, it occurred to me that if domination worked so ubiquitously in social organization, wouldn't solitary confinement be a respite from dogs eating dogs?

What I failed to get then was that domination doesn't work merely on bodies, but also that, as Foucault put it, the soul is the prison of the body. Meaning that, in this context, these systems or structures or networks of power are what we are already, not only what acts on us. And so in solitary confinement it may no longer be a world of dogs eating dogs, but it might be a world of you eating yourself.

I was held for three days in solitary confinement after a scuffle with cops as a kid. By scuffle I mean they beat me up and I yelled at them. And the one thing I remember most clearly about that confinement was that thinking about or remembering loved ones, or people who loved me, made almost no difference in the feelings of going crazy that began almost immediately. What mattered to me, what I remember most, was how this isolation gave substantial meaning to any human contact whatsoever – even with my jailer and my lawyer.

None of those interactions could be described as uplifting or non-alienating. Indeed they were the opposite. My jailer merely threatened and coerced me so that I wouldn't make his life unpleasant. To him (a meaty, buzz cut, military type) I was a responsibility at best and a nuisance at worst. My (private) lawyer didn't care one bit about me as a person. I was a case to him. Nonetheless those limited interactions made the twenty-three and half other hours of the day slightly more bearable.

Later I was held in detention in a state hospital (I agreed to this, based on my lawyer's recommendation, in order to avoid charges (mostly faked by the cops to justify beating me up) and potentially jail). In that 'observation' ward, I found that limiting access to physical space was the main threat used by the guards, along with forced drugging and restraints. The unit had an intricate series of colored lines painted on the floor which granted you more or less access based on your compliance with the rules. At the time it merely seemed like a completely irrational system of rewards. The lines went basically nowhere. No matter how compliant you were, you were still imprisoned. What I see now is that they were really only limiting access to others, however non-rewarding those interactions might be. Crazy adolescents don't generally make for stimulating conversations; they tend to drool and throw chairs and make shit up.

There was a common room where you could only enter if you were at a certain color-level. So that if you did something bad, like talk back to the guard, or read a book with 'Anti-Christ' in the title (me), etc. you would be dropped from green to red, and then you only had access to, say, the bathrooms and your bedroom. If you were really bad – threw a chair, struck a guard, etc – you were literally drugged, restrained and put into a padded room, alone, sometimes for days depending on how pissed the guards were. Interestingly, the isolation room had no colored lines on the floor. Alternately, if you were really good and cooperated with the guards – against other inmates, for instance – you had access to the arts and crafts room, etc. where the floor, painted with a single colored line made an odd piece of abstract art. The colored lines were an obscene simulation of the threads of meaningful relationships out in the real world.

…

This system of punishment and reward recognizes that we 'are' only in relation to others. And removing context from a person removes a very tenuous sense of self. This gels with accounts I have read of people who have been held in solitary confinement for extended periods of time. It is I think the main reason behind Stockholm Syndrome where victims identify with their torturers or kidnappers, etc. It is also not entirely different from accounts by abused partners in situations of domestic violence where their access to friends and family is severely limited by the (insecure) controlling partner.

I mention all this now because I spend most of my time alone, not because I am imprisoned, but because I live and work alone. It gives me the opportunity to consider the overwhelming power of perceived and real isolation. And while it takes very little to create a minimal sense of connection with the world, a meaningful sense of connection is much harder. And while the memory of friends or loved ones is always present, their physical presence makes all the difference.

There is a scene in The Stranger where the protagonist learns to find meaning in a passing cloud. And I used to hold onto this as testament of the resilience of humans, of our ability to adapt and find value in the worst circumstances. Now I wonder how true that is. In my experience of jail and detention, a very limited one thankfully, I coped ... I doubt that it would have worked without a jailer telling me that we would get along just fine as long as I didn't throw food on the walls. And I doubt a passing cloud would have sufficed.

Isolation and confinement renders a person into a non-person. And it begins almost immediately. There is a memory of a former life. But that life is absent. And as much as I hate to say this (it probably comes as no surprise that I would), this is not entirely different from eroticism, which is why it is both so terrible and so wonderful. More on that later.

Jorge Gomez del Campo

little bits of Alison

The_Year_of_the_Break-Up: or what I think about when I think about love

30 seconds of racism can ruin your whole evening

my only parenting blog post ever: on those lists about being a good parent.

foreclosure. a new start: the abundance of your mind and the richness of your life

play, love and cooperation. hunted to extinction

On Tragedy: all of life is just disco. And disco sucks. Part_2

On Tragedy: all of life is just disco. And disco sucks. Part_1

Christmas Day: Love Death and Singing

Random Strange Encounter Number 2

fear and death and Circle Modern Dance

(anti?) rape ad corrected

the vast possibilities of cool: hey artists, you suck

snapshots: love, letters, eggs, chickens, and maybe I'm little more than the women I've fucked

On The_Story_of_the_Eye: Preface

the tyranny of happiness might also just be tyranny: on memory, death, transformation, and the Khmer Rouge

reflections

working guillotines with which to kill little birds, and so on. Part_3: an inner experience

El Chopo. Mexico City Punk

working guillotines with which to kill little birds, and so on. Part_2

working guillotines with which to kill little birds, and so on.

Miami International

Sunrise

viva la vida: really_really_un-dangerous_danger

an examined life

apparently, I am an anti-porn feminist

gonzo_philosophy: life is tragic; eat it up

new painting: Christ_Asleep_during_the_Tempest

a love letter, to no one and everyone

Occupy Your Street. Wherever you live.

the night and stars

Leave me alone. Don't go. Come back. Stay away.

recognition is nice

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

continuity_story_life

environmental catastrophe__my dad's body__secondary, collateral damage

sui caedere - another suicide watch, another time

Me and Breivik's Manifesto Part_1: the dead father

Me and Breivik's Manifesto. Preface: are you a legitimate military target

while I listened to Gillian Welch: the_difference_between_eros_and_masturbation

Sometimes I love this town.

surgery waiting ghosts

a brief note on sleep_anguish_authenticity

this mortality accidentally reflected in another's gaze

Me and Breivik's Manifesto. Preface: are you a legitimate military target

sport fucking, slut walks and transit systems: sublimation_anguish_dialectic

a life worth living

i would happily swim myself to death

does any of this (life) mean anything at all. Part_2: the genesis of George W Bush's America

does any of this (life) mean anything at all. Part_1: on sports, genocide and metaphor

the tyranny of happiness and Mountain Dew, part 1

un-dangerous danger: mirrors and chisels

hell's angels, homm(e)o-sexuals, violence, and meaning

pretty fucking fun: creativity, anguish, and the uncanny

screaming quietly

viva la vida

suicide watch; a walk in the park

whether it leads to immolation or drowning

arts and crafts, solitary confinement, the hospital,

environmental catastrophemy dad's bodysecondary, collateral damage