Poetics on the deserted

Poetics on the deserted

"Should God descend on earth one day there would be a great silence.” - Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“that I dumbly inhabit a density; in language” - Donald Hall

I was inside the car when I saw something that made me sigh deeply. During these few seconds of sighing, the world moved slowly and with euphoric density. I was submerged in a silence so blissful, a silence so loud. My eyes were fixed on a site of great poetic intensity, great amount of grief. I saw a small bus left to itself in a vast deserted road. Imagine how empty and dark it is on the inside, empty but dense. The air which fills it would bend if a light inside was turned on.

I was with my mother the other day when we stopped the car in an empty park at five in the morning. “Listen to the sound of silence, silence has a sound which kills me.” She told me that while we waited for the morning birds to make their first sounds.

The small deserted bus is indifferent to everything around it, like God. In it’s indifference lies the magic. It weighs down the space around it, moonlight and streetlight alike shine for it alone. It has a magnetic field which makes everything about it aesthetically pleasing, it moves me deeply. If it rained, it's mechanical metal parts would rust slowly but they wouldn't wither away. I know that I will die before it, it inhabits a time that is slower than mine, it's an image from the future.

People talk about a time when the mechanical objects we've created would turn on us, they picture an apocalypse of man versus machine. In reality, when eventually we are annihilated, we will be leaving behind deserted objects, a little bus in an empty road. What I saw from the car was an image from the future that has been transposed into the present. I saw my own death, and an earth full of indifferent objects left to their own magic. Imagine a world full of streetlights shining on deserted buses, the silence would turn the world deaf.

Imaginary Conversations on Film #8: Out 1: Episodes 1, 2 (1971) Jacques Rivette

Imaginary Conversations on Film #8: Out 1: Episodes 1, 2 (1971) Jacques Rivette

“If I was Prometheus, I would feel great ingratitude towards humanity.”

“Prometheus was bound because he taught man everything. He suffered for humanity.”

“If I was Prometheus, I would be silent.”

What would it be like to write Prometheus Bound, an Ancient Greek Tragedy, in post-1968 France? How relevant is a mythical story about a titan punished and chained by the Gods for stealing fire and protecting humanity from annihilation? Do we need Prometheus, in such post-Prometheus times?

These are the main inquiries which confront a group of theater actors preparing a modern text for the play. The film shows how laborious working on such an ambitious play can be; the group moves from one intense exercise to the next, rummaging their way through with their bodies and voices, inflecting violence and tenderness upon each other, bound and unbound, so that in the end they would reach the text. It would be deceiving to describe what they do as a journey with a final destination to be reached, since they don’t begin from scratch, but they have at their disposal a pile of old and contemporary material on Prometheus. And the finished product doesn’t matter either, what matters is the process through which this group would explore the different relationships between language, violence, politics, and their own bodies. A woman in the group questioned the need for Prometheus, if all what they wanted was to make something relevant to their present problems. Indeed, why would they need this abject suffering body in order to write their own suffering? Prometheus is the pretext for an interesting experiment. What is it like to breathe?

Episode 1

They begin their exercise with breathing. In French the word “breath” translates to “Le souffle”. In order to pronounce the word, one would have to take a breath, and then exhale the word out. Souffle, is a breath that is gently dragged out of the mouth, the way one drags out a cloth. After breathing, they forget how to talk, and learn how to touch. In two, they face each other and pretend to be mirrors. During this play of tangible reflections, they touch each other’s faces, they embrace, and they learn to trust. The main event in the exercise starts when each member of the group imagines a certain disability, and learns to adapt to it through improvisation and interaction with the other members. They can’t express their imagined suffering with words, all they can do is collide and bump into each other so that they would exhaust all possibilities. There’s room for aggression, violence, tenderness, and all kinds of emotions in this world of hypochondriacs. They bite, they lick, they touch, they destroy objects, they laugh hysterically, they groan, scream, and make animal sounds. They fold onto each other making a wave of limbs. They compose their bodies, lying on top of each other, creating a new organism. Through their malformation, this chaos of gesture and sound is striving for a resolve. They start uttering words: Fire. They strive for the word. When the exercise is over, they talk. These impostors are pretending to forget language in order to make something “pure”. They all agree that there’s something artificial about their approach. Even though the exercise pushes them towards new possibilities and limitations–which might produce something promising out of all this intensity–there’s still too much work to do. There’s no escape from language.

Episode 2

Before they begin with their second exercise, they gather around a pile of books and texts which are related to Prometheus Bound. They read the play in German, and reflect on how a different language could give more intensity to the text. One of them reads a story about a village in Mexico where children have been infected with an illness that causes blindness, so at their school they teach them how to read and how to work the fields in case they became blind. The group of actors first talk about language and then they learn how to be blind with aggression. In their second exercise, one woman in the group plays the role of an abject victim, a corpse lying on the floor motionless with her eyes closed. The rest of the group are supposed to do whatever they like with her. She becomes a subject that is objectified, since she volunteered. She let goes of her body. They jump around her making all kinds of noises, they lift her up, drop her down, bite her feet, breathe heavily on her belly, carry her on a stretcher, stroll her around on a chair, drag her body on the floor, smother her face, fold her arms. The possibilities are endless. At one point, they grab a heavy chair and hold it two inches away from her face. I was terrified that they might smash her head. When the exercise is over, they talk. She says that what had made her endure the violence was breathing. Le souffle. And when the noises became so intense, she was able somehow to leave her body and hover above it, “You guys looked ridiculous.” She says she trusted them. The rest of the group thought that they weren’t aggressive enough, and that next time they should start early in the day when they were in their full energy. “To be properly aggressive, you would need to be relaxed.” Next time they might smash her head.

Imaginary Conversations #7: Out 1 (1971) Jacques Rivette “Episode 1, From Lili To Thomas”

Imaginary Conversations #7: Out 1 (1971) Jacques Rivette “Episode 1, From Lili To Thomas”

- I don’t know much about the theater.
- I don’t know much about destiny.
- I don’t know much about Greek Drama.
- The theater, destiny, Greek Drama.

- There’s a deaf-mute who gives sealed envelopes to people at cafes. “Know your destiny.”
- They don’t believe him, that’s why they give him money.
- If they believed their destiny is in a sealed envelope, they wouldn’t take it.
- I would burn it.
- Prometheus stole fire.
- Burn it.

- There’s a woman pretending to draw a man’s reflection in the mirror. He gives her money, and she runs away.
- “Now I can see your eyes.” She couldn’t see them in the mirror.
- Mirrors help us touch.

- A group of actors are rehearsing “Prometheus Bound.” They are struggling to reach the text, they’re not ready yet.
- How can one be ready for human destiny?
- Destiny is in a sealed envelope prepared by a deaf-mute.
- How can you be ready?
- But destiny is over, that’s why they are doing rehearsals.
- The event is over, everything is an after thought.
- Everything is a reflection in the mirror.
- Burn the envelope.

- The group rehearsing “Prometheus Bound”, begin with a mirror stage.
- In couples of two, they stand in front of each other and learn to touch.
- “Have you ever touched yourself in the mirror? Have you ever tried to touch someone else’s reflection?”
- Then they “start” to reach out for the word.
- They are all in a nonverbal state, and each improvises according to an imagined disability.
- One of them thinks he has no feet, and start walking on his knees.
- They become hypochondriacs. Theater is the art of improvised hypochondria.
- This search for the word, allows their bodies to become sites of both possibilities and limitations.
- They make sounds. They have the language somewhere at the back of their heads, but they pretend to be deaf-mute.
- Language happened long ago.
- This search for the word, allows them to stick together and become a wave.
- A wave made of body parts and unformed noises.
- Noise has a form, it’s the word.
- Where is Prometheus? Give them the word.
- Destiny happened long ago, burn it.

- The deaf-mute sits in his room, putting torn pages of books and sealing envelopes.
- The woman who draws mirror reflections, sits in her room and draws a gun.

Yesterday, I found myself doing something strange: I kept opening and closing the bathroom door, just to see what would happen to the sink. I wanted to catch it doing something other than just being a sink. I repeated this five times, until I caught my reflection in the mirror above it, and a sense of shame took over me. I left it alone.

The Artist/Model Binary In Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse

Imaginary Conversations on Film #6: La Belle Noiseuse (1991) Jacques Rivette

- This conversation should be long and it makes me speechless. I’m going to tell you about the body.
- What body?
- The body ascribed to the male modernist artist under the rule of patriarchy.

The binary relationship artist/model is made obvious right from the beginning of the movie: Nicolas, a painter, is sitting at a café making a sketch of a stranger woman sitting at the table opposite of him.

I once asked a guy if I could draw him, he was sitting at the table next to mine. I was with my friends and I made one of them go and ask him because I was too shy to do it myself. He agreed, but he kind of felt offended at my request. I understand how awkward and rude it can be to break into someone’s privacy, turn the other into a self-conscious being, and all in the name of “art.” It was a humiliating experience for me, it changed me.

Marianne, Nicolas’ lover, is up on the terrace sneaking to take a picture of him. He looks behind: there I caught you! She comes down and he takes the picture from her, she pretends to be an undercover journalist snapping pictures of a celebrity. He paints from pictures. They were playing: switching roles.

He’s the artist, she’s the lover of the artist. But he isn’t a maker of masterpieces. He still sketches stranger women at cafes. The film had to develop a character which makes masterpieces.  The characters become three: the artist (Nicolas), the model (Marianne), the art dealer (Porbus). They go together to meet the Artist, the maker of masterpieces, Frenhofer. They meet his wife Liz first, he shows up late with a body of a dead rabbit. Liz preserves the bodies of dead animals and makes portraits with them. “Animals pose too” Porbus tells Liz.

- What about Liz's body?

Frenhofer, used his wife Liz as a model for a painting titled: “La Belle Noiseuse/ The Beautiful Troublemaker.” He exhausted her body to the point of failure. He never finished the painting. Ten years later, with a rabbit in his hands, he meets Marianne. “Would you accept losing him for a painting?” Frenhofer asks Marianne over the dinner table.

“…used Liz as a model.”
“…Marriane losing him for a painting.”
The painting is what matters, the masterpiece remains, the rest is lost and disfigured.

Frenhofer, Nicolas, Porbus: The Artist, artist, art dealer. These three meet at Frenhofer’s studio and start talking about the painting, but they end up talking about tMarriane's body. Porbus, the art dealer, wants “La Belle Noiseuse” as a commodity, Frenhofer wants his masterpiece, Nicolas agrees to let Marianne pose. Now as I have outlined the set of relationships we have here, the question of why Nicolas has the authority to Marianne’s body is an urgent one. One answer could be is that he already situates himself in the artist/model binary, and would one day like to make a masterpiece. Another answer could be is that he believes in the myth that a painting has a truth that should be reached, and that he wants to know the truth of Marianne. The only answer is that this has been the history of “Art meets Patriarchy.”   Three men make a deal, and the body is Marianne's.

Marianne gets mad at Nicolas for giving an artist the permission to tear her apart. She nonetheless walks into the trap at ten in the morning. The movie lasts four hours, we spend most of the movie’s length in Frenhofer’s studio. “We want the truth in painting, it’s cruel!” He had the title from the beginning, all he needed now was the body, and truth beyond that body. He makes a sketch of her dressed, then a sketch of her face. “Don’t stare at me like that, it disturbs me.” I see her struggle with her body as it is being turned into lines. He too struggles with the sketch book: he makes rough lines with black ink, then wets his brush and smudges black paint on different places on the paper. They both are anxiety ridden: he might lose his masterpiece, she might lose herself. The stakes are high with every sketch, with every canvas being rolled out and pinned on wood.

“There’s a robe up there.” She comes back a female nude. The female nude has a long history in art: “the female body has so often been identified with the body as such.” As time passes, Marianne’s body takes different poses and shapes, each more difficult to hold on to: still life. His sketches are like Man Ray’s Photographs: a woman without a head who has feet peeking out of her ass. Frenhofer tells Marianne, that as a kid he used to enjoy dismembering dolls. He tells her he wants what’s beyond the nudity, the truth, the blood. The first day ends, she tells Nicolas that Frenhofer has changed her.

The next day she goes back, she says she was going to take over. She brings the mattress and prepares to pose. Marianne wants to seize control, she wants to lose herself on her own terms. But the space gets more tense, tenser than her limbs. The poses get harder, and her arm keeps loosening as she snatches a cigarette.  “You can’t smoke now we have work to do.” She tells him how his studio reminds her of her time at the boarding school, she wasn’t allowed to do anything. At one point they get really drunk, she is still posing but he can’t pin her down anymore. “I keep losing you, oh I found you again.” She slips between lost and found. But he doesn’t want her, he wants the masterpiece. “I started painting Liz because I wanted her.” But he stopped painting Liz.

He exhausted her body, he exhausted the canvas. “Never let him paint your face.” Liz warned Marianne. They say the face is the mirror of the soul, too much violence has been done to her body, he could spare her soul. He has no need for the soul, he has the body and the truth he thinks resides within it. And the only means to find that truth is by destroying the body, turn it into lines and colors and call it a masterpiece.

In part, I feel that Marianne agreed to play the role of the model to get away from the shackles of her relationship with Nicolas. But as the movie unfolded, I found that she was as invested as Frenhofer in the making of “La Belle Noiseuse.” It’s as if she wanted to reach some kind of truth about herself. When she saw the finished painting, she thought of it as a cold dead thing. “It’s me.”
There’s a long distance an artist needs to cross to create a painting that on his mind bears the weight of a “masterpiece.” But the power of this film is that it shows what distance the “model” takes in order to lose herself.

Imaginary Conversations on Film #5: Black Moon (1975) Louis Malle

Imaginary Conversations on Film #5: Black Moon (1975) Louis Malle

- What happens if you decide to look for ghosts in your own house?
- “Louis Malle shot this film on his own 200-year-old manor house and it’s surrounding estate.”
- “I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”
- He created a nightmarish day-dream.
- No, he found ghosts.

- Lily, a lost teenage girl hears the cries of a herd of sheep: their shepherd is hanged on a tree.
- And they’re looking for replacement already?
- She runs away horrified. They’re looking for his ghost.

- She finds herself in a manor house.
- There’s fire in the fire place: signs of life.
- They’re actually signs of human intervention.
- She finds a big glass of milk on the table, leans forward and drinks. When she looks up, instead of a human face she finds a pig.
- Animals even if domesticized, still occupy a different realm.
- The pig was on a baby’s seat.
- There’s food cooking on the stove: signs of human presence.
- She hears someone playing the piano–for someone has to be playing the piano with human fingers–she finds a cat walking on the piano keys.

- Even though the house seems empty of people, their presence is overwhelming and terrifying. That’s what we call ghosts, the absence of human presence while there are signs of life manifesting.
- Animals don’t have ghosts, animals are too real.
- The sheep are still looking for the shepherd’s ghost, at the end of the movie they go to the manor house.

- Derrida says that good cinema “is the art of allowing ghosts to come back.”
- Where have they gone to? “They come back to haunt you.”
- They never leave their place, the ghost is already in the living.
- We are all ghosts, only if we allow ourselves to be ghosts.
- “I am already a ghost, because this film will be seen after I die.”

- Lily hears a man singing opera, while burning tree leaves.
- “The Phantom of the Opera.”
- He wears golden wings on his neck, Icarus?
- Icarus is a ghost  His wings were not golden, they were made of feather and wax. But he flied too near the sun. Icarus is a ghost of the sun.

- The man with the golden voice holds her shoulders, and presses his fingers on her body as if he’s playing the piano.
- She is listening: “I understand, your name is Lily too.”
- Ghosts who can’t talk, touch.
- He types again on her flesh: “Oh you spell it differently.”

- Black Moon: the absence of a full moon in a calendar month.
- In paganism, the black moon is considered a time when any rituals and spells to be more effective.
- If the moon has a ghost, it’s the black moon.

Self Destructing Washing Machine: Death, Life, Erotics

“Am I the only person who felt guilty watching this, it’s like a snuff vid.” - youtube user

“The organism wishes to die only in it’s own fashion.” - Sigmund Freud
———
Part 1:

One day, I found myself watching a video of a washing machine destroying itself. It made me think about death. A washing machine is a kernel. It’s essentially made of a core which spins while allowing the flow of water, soap, and energy. This core has another function, it’s the main carrier of a washing machine’s death. The spinning is Eros, it carries Thanatos within it. Imagine a washing machine that spins forever, beyond death, it would eventually cease being what it is.

People on Youtube videos throw bricks and all kind of things into the front load, while the machine takes care of the rest: it starts spinning faster and more violently, it jumps about it’s core, it flips on one side while convulsing like a fish on a boat, until it drops from exhaustion. “If only that machine didn’t spin, it would have survived.” If only death wasn’t immanent in living. “I spin and my death spins within me.”

How do you kill a washing machine in the slowest way possible?
- Load it with the clothes of an entire town and watch it suffocate.
- Keep using it normally.

How do you kill a person in the slowest way possible?
- Let them live.

‘Self Destructing Washing Machine’ uploaded by YouTube user Aussie50: A green backyard, the machine is in the center, spinning towards death- a little faster than earth. As it begins to reach it’s end, it starts doing things a normal machine wouldn’t do. It becomes a super-machine: it jumps above ground level, it opens the front load without any human intervention, it screams like a dying animal, it disintegrates it’s own parts, it pushes the walls of its self, it attempts to fly, it dies. The transformation is complete. But then the guy shooting shows us that the motor is still working. The story is not over yet.

3,589,815 views on YouTube. A death has been made public:

“It looks like it’s about to open a portal to hell or something.”

“When you fap too hard.”

“This looks like me when I get possessed.”

“Persistent mf.”
———-
Part 2:

Matmos - experimental electronic music duo released an album last February titled: Ultimate Care II. They created the album by sampling a wash cycle of a washing machine. Their project explores brilliantly the repetitive swooshing sounds, the drumming, the electronic sharp and soft beeping sounds, the quirky glitchy noises a washing machine would make in a cycle. A lifetime of repetitive rhythm. The music videos of some of the tracks also show possible erotic formations and fetishes between the machine and the person using it.

In Excerpt Three, we see scenes of a woman holding the machine with her arms while her head lies on top of it; eyes closed in total enjoyment. In other instances, we find her on top of it, either legs dangling down or feet on top with curled toes. In one of the destruction videos, a woman is seen on top of the machine sitting there happily enjoying the vibrations, while a man throws a brick after brick, making the spinning and reverberations faster. “What a weird fetish” a youtuber commented on
Excerpt Three. The music video also shows 3-D renderings of a washing machine, and what appears to be the flowing matter on it’s surface. These renderings expose the unseen possibilities of this mundane object; constellations, vibrations, energy, pleasure, death.

Washing machine, oldest drummer invented on earth. Excerpt Eight from Matmos’s album starts with the sound of approaching sea waves, and then the drumming begins. This track is so sinister, it reeks of doom. The drumming sounds like a warning or a preparation for a ritual. At the end of the track the drumming stops: electronic sounds of a dying machine are heard and the track ends. The machine dies. But it doesn’t end there, in Excerpt Nine, the drumming takes on a different character: vitality and strength. The machine becomes a super-machine. The motor is still working. The story is not over yet.

Let us then send a spinning washing machine to space, put Ultimate Care II inside it, and whoever finds it will know the story of earth.

Art project : I’m making movie posters for the future. The idea is that in the future, there will be no movies. So all you will get for now, is a transparent layer over existing movie posters. The future is a transparent thin layer over the now.

Blue

Two years ago, I was sitting in a cafe writing about the colour blue. I was writing about blue to conceal my discomfort at finding a blue pen in my bag instead of the black ink I usually write in. I wrote : “Blue is a mysterious colour. People looking up thought: ‘How did the sky become this blue? What makes it blue?’ Why did God pick blue to render the ceiling of earth? Blue eyes, blue seas, blue skies, these are all worlds existing on their own and reflect on eachother. If you look…”

When I was about to tell you to look, my pen slid on the paper and made a streak of blue. What stopped my writing about blue, was a friend who was standing behind my back watching me write. He wanted me to stop because writing about blue is dangerous. Then he wrote names of Polish poets
on a small piece of paper :

Zbigniew Herbert
Wiskawa Szymborska
Czeslaw Milosz

He was high, I was blue.