mindthefool - Tumblr blog

mindthefool · 3 years

Text

The New Spectatorship

Once upon a long table in a timeline unframed, there is a banquet, dimly lit and dangerously alluring to the most tormented gluttons. The table is made from the sort of indestructible wood that’s been baked by time. It has bare iron legs and no varnish coat. The walls and the ceiling and floor are vast mirrors. They wink and yawn as generous prisms that proliferate candlelight. The chairs at the table are hollow and floating, suited for both the living and dead. Those who are alive and were invited to the feast are fluent among the immaterial. Perhaps they only walk through my earth because they choose to.

The group of glancing individuals, filled with eyes and beasts and starving, has assembled to discuss a tiny question. These figures have each demonstrated remarkable tendencies to shred tiny things and quilt them into cosmic apparel. They are cloaked in such garments like gods: shameless, dynamic, monstrous, and sweet like lumps of infant that fold into a chest.

Most of them are writers, except a few who like to watch but never become invisible. Most of them have eyes facing art in the places it love-pokes life. My heart pecks a clusterfuck melody against the temperamental hearts of the others, as though it is extending veins to weave into somebody else’s elsewhere. I typically don’t disperse into threads until at least half way through the conversation or after at least one cup of wine. This must be a particularly special occasion!

As steaming food is softly served from yawning platters into dark shiny bowls, a small disheveled pond of sound overrides the audible pattering of hearts. Antonin stumbles out from behind a cloud. His mind, quickly unraveling like eager water, escapes him as he takes a seat. It laps and smacks up the scaffolding of indecipherable notions. He chews on a limp cigarette, the great poetic creases in his face creep into me as mischievous muses. But he doesn’t want me to write poems anymore, so I keep this observation to myself as my eyes dream towards his bending picture that sits across the table. I’m really off my game tonight; I cannot tell how drunk he is or if I’m drunk at all.

Antonin mumbles, his utterance crisp. No one informed him in advance about the tiny question currently being passed around among piles of food and the eaters. We gather here today to discuss the new spectatorship, someone tells him with a defeated but official sounding bark from the foggier end of the table.

No more masterpieces! Off with their heads! I read Antonin groan in his eyebrows. It’s too bad we are social distancing otherwise I’d kiss him right in that moving madness spot.

The group has assembled because the majority, and those adjacent, want many more eyes than they possess at present. So far there is no spectatorship established to suit such a need. Nobody is swaying yet, they have barely touched the first round of drinks. (Did I spike their drinks with magic formula? Yes. Also the soup. And the dipping sauces. All of it enchanted.)

After some time, the first little swarms of conversation bubble into smaller and smaller pockets; each guest sinks into quiet. In breath and its passage of realizations, we are seduced by curiosity about the room itself where we sit and chatter teeth. We study the walls and our eyes apprehend that the borders of the room are corridors that shrink into green. Glass mirrors face mirrors and mirrors.

Gloria chimes in immediately, “I don’t have enough eyes.” Her voice does not disrupt the lull but redirects its weight to uplift enunciation. She speaks again to mention the “agony of inadequacy.” She is so inescapably familiar. I adore writers who get me to smell their sweat. Hers is filled with magical, intricate gore. I want to ask her, how do I get more eyes? But hers are closed so I doubt she’d know I speak to her. I am silent.

She goes on, “A glance can freeze us in place; it can ‘possess us.’” Gloria, is this true? She speaks in multiple stories like a long stone skinny-window house in Paris, one of those that “do not seem made to be lived in, but are like stones set for people to walk between.” A contribution Trinh (seated near Gloria on the far end) has stolen from Walter (barely with us). I think into a deep sip of tinted water: thank you all for this delightful discourse; I am already comfortably lost.

I wonder if any of them are drunk. I’ve had quite a bit of bread so I’m feeling just fine. Then again, I see hundreds of my own faces in every direction. How will I be able to tell that I’m intoxicated if all my heads turn when I try to look at them? Why is it that the ones who turn away will have nothing to do with me? What makes them different from the other heads who return my searching gaze?

Mirrors are kind of a nasty problem. Especially when there are this many. My eyes reflect back little holes at me in the bottomless black bowl above my lap; they make the room a bit greener. If mirrors can happen in soup, does that mean I can eat them?

I can hear Gloria saying that mirrors reproduce images. No shit! Each of us is reincarnated one million times by the walls of this very room. I agree that mirrors eat things up like carnivorous sponges. I wonder if anyone among us feels robbed by this stealth of self for the sake of image and reproduction. I wonder if I can ever steal it all back from behind the glass, (and from patriarchy too, while I’m at it). But I’m snatched from this curiosity as the conversation unfolds.

The thing is, mirrors force you to look AT and trick you to believe you’re seeing INTO or THROUGH. And if you’re an idiot, you didn’t even think about it hard enough to get tricked. It is typical for some people to leave unexamined the destination of pulse, particularly when it self-identifies as a dimension rebel. Some of the dinner guests roll their eyes at this line. Gilles raises his brow, Minh-ha looks up in a puzzled diagonal glance, perhaps they contemplate whether I can play along with all the other wordsmiths. I continue, uninterested in my worth.

Viewers of mirrors understand a split self and if you don’t see the split then you don’t get the trick or the treat. Try being queer. It’s so tricky. The queers in the room and their inner queer crowds resonate, smile, or even chuckle. In mirrors, subjects are captured by their own gazes and reduced to images of their selves as outsiders. But the image bends and expands the experience of vision to the great worth of a metaphysical meat sample on a toothpick; an existential Ikea meatball, or if you’re vegetarian, existential tofu, or if you shop at Trader Joe’s, an existential shot of coffee to get you wired on why, why, why.

As viewers of our captured selves, we also see through subjectivity, the infrastructure of our eyes and cognitive performances. And thus, the accomplishment of the mirror is that sight is spit back out from the glass, backwards like a wave in rewind. The spectator does not move but is altered and must choose to enact more-than-picture. Now Gloria insists on the immobility of eyes. Yes ok, they trap things, but that doesn’t mean they can’t sing.

A friend of mine named Heidi G, has chorus in her eyes. They dart as though motivated in ballet. You are what you eat, I guess. Her laughter is a tickle-rifle, it washes people. Her writing traces the activity of puppets and the lifeless and she contemplates quickly; chatter as excited as chewing. I’m swept stuck in her stubborn asking. She has asked me before about disappearance, how to enact disappearance, how do the lifeless move?

Meanwhile Gloria babbles in a bedrock lullaby voice about mirrors as doors for spirits to pass through. Some glances are exchanged as people consider the placement of moving spirits on the lifelessness graph. A few take generous swigs from their beverages. My chest tightens with expectation.

Why is it that those among us who are no longer alive can also be seen in the mirrors? The lifeless do not reflect or express any less than the living and me. Gloria’s eyes bleed open and she softly frowns to the side. I recall her saying, “I can tell how others feel by the way they smell” and I roll my neck low and discreet to secretly sample my armpit. Sure enough, my perspiration is the perfume of fixation: trance energy, fixation on the dead, the harshest and littlest concentration pushing deep into things. I can smell my fear and my longing.

I look into my own eyes in the mirror all the time. From all my years of being a girl I got quite obsessed with my face. When I stopped wearing makeup and curating hairdos for esteem-protection, I began to notice my eyeballs. They are rather large. If I wait long enough, they will show me how afraid I am. Afraid of nothing in particular and of everything. If I wait longer, they will show me the desperation of being caught in my own gaze because I love myself so much and know myself so little.

I’m fortunate to be the person becoming the “person” inside the mirror whenever I look at myself in trance. Most people are mystery pictures. I can always tell when someone switches from looking and seeing to feeling seen and being seen through. It is a small performance in the eyes. A tiny violation, recession, a turn away, a closing up, no more gift of unafraidness. But my eyes landing on another’s will not make them any less private unless they choose for that to happen. Spectatorship really does fall short of its presumed desires sometimes.

“In vain your image comes to meet me...” Louis, one of Heidi’ guests has also perhaps caught a whiff of my body odor.

I am that wretch comparable with mirrors

That can reflect but cannot see

Like them my eye is empty and like them inhabited

By your absence which makes them blind.

Gloria smiles, “the mirror is an ambivalent symbol” she coos with wet vowels. A puzzle again; my cheeks make fists around my eyes. Gloria, I ask gently, aren’t symbols the faces of feelings? You said it yourself on page 60. How can feelings and their faces be ambivalent? Aren’t they trying to say something?

In rising unison Gloria and Antonin melt body and voice, as though their minds have collided with mine, almost as if my voices have stolen their words. But what on earth would give anyone that impression?

I feel their shared eyes inquiring. I continue my train of thought. Choo choo: ambivalence is double possibility and duality rearranges desire. If both options are possible and present, despite any contradictions they contain, what prevents anyone from noticing the branches of possibility within the two initial ones? An ambivalent symbol is a whole alphabet, so feelings are certainly never contained in mask, voice never contained in words, space never contained in walls.

The privilege of ambivalence is that it will not presuppose authority; yet it holds the great power of soft, steady eyes; the sort of eyes that do not claim to be superior but everyone who looks into them feels less-than. Ambivalence borrows the likeness of clouds or horizons of fog. It might also fashion itself into steel and grow legs like an ornate industrial bridge. Ambivalence is difficult to face because in order to move, you must feel. Many who walk this earth do not like this about our condition; so our condition evolves to distort its constraints, we get drunk on the mainstream bizarre. Our only hope is to find circumstance, doses of disaster; better to seek situations than confront the great condition which begs to be destroyed by science and thought; better to do magic. If we’re fortunate, someday we may stumble into a set of circumstances (they often come in sets) where we look into a mirror and do not see ourselves. Or, perhaps we look at a wall and find our own strange sets of eyes watching from the surface as though glowing through projectors onto screens.

I’m nearly voiceless. No one at the table receives me at first so my voice gets involuntarily small. My head buzzes lightly from drinking but I can tell Antonin is further gone. He keeps looking at the space above my head when I speak, like his eyes refuse tangible.

All of a blink-sudden Gloria is soft and charged. Yes, she winks between her lips and her teeth. I am soothed, only slightly, and I turn a damp palm towards the walls that are mirrors. Condition is framed, made of pillars. All of its content exists in-between so I’m shocked when its subjects don’t attend to the liminal bits.

Everyone here knows the liminal bits. Otherwise we wouldn’t have received invitations to this event. Quite exquisitely liminal indeed. There isn’t even a host to thank. We compose amongst ourselves a structure of witnesses, imagination, and danger; in one moment bitter, another too sweet, an overall nomadic taste in teary mouths and drooling supper.

Gloria spends her time with snake people. Heidi watches dancing puppets and bodies that imitate the dead. Antonin likes when the theater storms. He likes danger-hypnosis. Liminal spaces with borders that bleed mean vision is never complete. Such spaces will fragment the language of edges and morph stolen time.

〰

Dinner is accompanied by a spectacle, of course. Fancy occasions always include snob chefs and opera— this is my impression having been to a few weddings in my day. Oh, but this will be no opera, Antonin booms in a silver snail voice. I still cannot tell his age. Nor can I place the blank serenity and frantic power that swap places like restless greedy tourists, all over his perky dead body.

A snake oozes out of a crack in one of the mirrors and all of the mirrors because they saw it happen. The snake is one million snakes but most of them are behind the glass in captivity with our flat and greenish mirror-selves. I suppose each dimension gets its own snake. Fine.

Our snake is thick and low and stiff. Its body manipulates weight and substance with a belly and spine that swell down to lick the floor. Felix from France lets go of the tight grip of his playmate Gilles. They were holding hands this whole time, seated across from each other and mostly keeping to themselves, quite focused and delighted by the drinks before them. Felix pulls out a wide wooden flute from his coat and it shines. Everyone breathes in their fear of the snake and breathes out an acceptance of serpents. Felix is a psychoanalyst, so the music he plays is real good and might get you to vomit some trauma. Mmm.

From the flute pours a buzzing rhythm and it curves into my nervous system. All of my spaces shake. The mirrors quiver and so do the millions of glass selves, my vision reverberates almost as if mocking me. My heartbeat is interrupted by the heartless flow of sound. It washes me ambivalent, maybe as an instrument or as meat; I cannot tell if I make sound myself or if it passes through me. Thus utterance is rendered pointless, sourceless, destinationless. My organs defy themselves as movement consumes me but shaking hands are able to lift my glass to sip.

The snake stiffens and raises a swaying body. The bodies of the guests sway too like tender wooden ghosts, all of us more tipsy than the unmovable table where the booze has been spilled. The mirrors wave like mischievous seas and my million selves mix their own sauces with monsters. Gloria will not give me her eyes anymore, the snake has trapped her attention. Antonin roars and Heidi is dancing and others surrender to storm.

I am drunk and I feel an insufferable warmth. That’s it! I always knew I was too big to be loved, I could end it all now if I purchase this watch. It’s made of fool’s gold which I’m told is indestructible and who cares if it tells me the time. I just need it to look fancy.

Well fuck, I’m being watched. And I only wanted the watch to change how I look. It’s not fair, I can’t see straight or stand still in this room that’s so tolerant of illusion. These are such perilous walls. I do not like the hall built of my own faces for I cannot tell, am I sea-sick or regular sick?

Oh Seamstress of the Sea! If you piece together swooning flakes of disobedient water with the hope that it will make the sky more comprehensible, you will quickly unravel yourself and your sewing project! And since you equip yourself with needles, not oars, you will soon slip under indistinguishable waves or clouds, whichever you prefer! Ultimately, they are the same since neither can resist the wind! The distinction between sky and sea was a comfort I had not recognized before they joined and I expanded like threads of molasses, one of the most reluctant liquids!

So here we are my friends! Angels cannot fly, the band is out of sync. I didn’t bring a metronome. Maybe I’ll bring one next time if the spectacle doesn’t die before next week. Alas, it has already died before our very eyes. No more masterpieces! There are too many cooks in the damn kitchen.

I don’t want to watch a play that has too many cooks. I will never be hungry again. The cooks should NOT be making theater. You cannot eat theater.

The ensemble is clumsy. It is not honest with life.

The human body is scandalously insufficient!

Actor is neither savior nor giver of life. If actor is to speak the unspeakable, it is not the sanctified word of god but rather an affective glimpse of something unsayable-- something even the old man-god himself could not conjure adequate words for up in his ever holy sky.

I can tell how others feel by the way they smell

excruciatingly alive to the world

they encourage us to kill off parts of ourselves

the unsavory aspects of ourselves

the supra-human, the god in ourselves.

it must be destroyed, it is necessary for all actors and actresses to die of plague… for it is they who render art impossible.

This frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death

Answers to heard and unheard questions enabled by its vanishing.

The compulsion to repeat,

The compulsion to repeat, which is now replacing the impulse to remember,

If only the saturated fragments of mainstream bizarre landed deeper than the hairs on my skin, if only these bits knew how to be tender and microscopic, if only they visited me for years and years until I began to deeply trust

the art of living, which here appears more like an organic art of war, Emptied of drama and emotion

He was grinning. Nobody else could have sensed it. He started laughing now. Nobody else could have sensed it.

Open bodies, bleeding wounds, dissected abdomens, and missing limbs

little things with dramatic consequences.

The body is “hot” again, but the spectacle of the altered or wounded body is much hotter.

You can only visit it in time, a place that happens during, the vocabulary of space just won’t get you there.

The sky can still fall on our heads. Right Anto?

Hhey Anto thiz iz kinda weird bud how ol dar you? Wowwhh. Really? Cool cool, thaz scool. I’m thiss many. Yeww don’t belief me? I think your wOrk is scool... it so cool, yur so smart howd you have thoze ideahs? I’m like... really fuck withem you like say my brain and what it says? Anto? howd you get in... hahaammfuck I cannnttake. Aww no no no, talk. I’m talk. id doesn’t madder. id doesn’t madder.

〰

And what remains is the new spectatorship; the spectatorship that lines demand if you slip and fall inside of them. I cannot find Anto or Heidi. Gloria is gone. Felix and Gilles and the others are nowhere to be seen but definitely, probably present. The snakes have disappeared, or at least I do not recognize them. My millions of mirror selves search in their respective dimensions.

My attention is captured by a pair of wide eyes with a red nose between them. Moimus? I call to him, he is somewhat familiar. My voice wears a little coat and a fuzzy hat. I’m careful not to frighten him if I speak too cold. He watches me as he is suspended in time, still dry despite the crashing waves of wet sound that rock us and bite at our windy limbs. He speaks with only his eyes and their silence is noisy, a bit demanding, and reaching right into my skull brain. Moimus has vision like the reckless and tender hand of a child over the stem of a wildflower about to be plucked; he offers objects the touch of an elderly lady picking up broken shards of her favorite teapot that until now had lasted a lifetime. Her husband gave it to her as a gift way back when she could still see and remember.

There is in-between space among hands and their touches by the way, not to mention the gaps between eyeballs and sight. It hurts a little to be touched or looked at in these in-between ways; when eyes project too loudly and scream, I want to touch, touch, touch! That’s how eyes can grow hands and do touching themselves. Eyes that want touching are always afraid and hungry at the same time, looking to fill something because the alternative is ambivalence.

No one has ever gazed at me as fearlessly and as simply as the little clown does now: not hungry, not wanting to touch, not concerned whether I am a picture or a person or a lifeless pouch of pulp because all of those would be wonderful to him. I am not an imposter though I do not belong. I am no more or less dangerous than the next mystery or the one before me. I am present as many things and also between things; this is more present than I could ever choose to be. How does he do it?

Between watching and speaking is the gaze that gazes back; it doesn’t proclaim itself more important than sound, touch, taste, or smell. Oh, my self-righteous eyes must acquaint themselves with the back burner before my other five senses are caramelized without me noticing!

I learned sight from the people who watch me, both desired and undesired audiences. I learned this particular spectatorship because many things that I look at tell me how they want to be seen, especially if it’s internet food and I’m young and snacky; also if it’s organized according to patriarchy taste and I’m young and snacky. My former spectatorship never allowed me to decide how to be seen. Like the millions of mirror-selves in the banquet hall, the new spectatorship won’t let me have all the information! It’s quite annoying. But of course, I have five more delicious senses to research experience with.

Moimus, the darling, tells really obvious secrets and never gives instructions on what to do once you’ve received them or what they may behold. The secrets drip from clouds post-collision and mid-disaster; or from residue on beaches that are trickled upon by chaos and its charming reappearances across quotidian dissonance. It is appealing to crash into the violent force of condition. It’s quite loud and clumsy and such crashes are like hollywood so we’re supposed to want them and find love at the end or die. Remember the pillars? Why headbang the pillars? The in-between space is just as exhilaratingly horrible.

You may encounter a masterbatory courage that you meet for the first time, or devastating nostalgia as you mourn five different child iterations of self. Circumstance can direct you to very beautiful things, small things, that have no other way to reach through the pillars but long to visit our world and the dimensions that mirror it: elsewheres-within-here, spaces you can only listen to, the way my body odor reveals how I’m feeling.

The new spectatorship is nomadic, sometimes it may even abandon the spectators. It is ambivalent towards apocalypse and pop culture, it does not use disaster to comfort people. It does not seek to move them. Moimus did not come here to watch, nor did he come to perform. Decide for yourself why he brought you along. I mentioned earlier, I’ve been hoping for more eyes and that’s why I’m here.

Do you want to know what I used to spike the soup? Salt water. From the sea. Not magic formula, I lied. It was only water from the sea. The sea understands that the point is never to mirror, the point is to look. The point is to face unknowability in unending blankets, to react to the void-quilts and apprehend their stitches and mimic their seams. The point of mimesis is to deterritorialize pointing; it is enunciation of the hand that has no message, direction severed from intention. And this is how Moimus holds the universe together. Occasionally he uses tape, but it often gets stuck to his butt, so usually the new spectatorship does most of the work for him.

〰

As I leave the banquet hall, a pair of dark glasses falls into my hand. I recall Antonin and his alluring deadness and I imagine him saying, the sky can still fall on your head. That’s right, I should wear the dark glasses. It will be bright when the sky falls and I’m pretty hungover. I depart with shade on my eyes and forget about light. I pass by a window on my way out and shrug at my reflection thinking only that I look cool and hot. But don’t worry yourself! The purpose was to forget everything all along, I am no conqueror of dreams. One day, if any of us diluted visitors manage to remember the banquet, we will experience it again for the first time, amplified exponential and possibly blind. The spectatorship we enact in that moment will be new once again.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. "Entering into the Serpent." In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Third Edition. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987: 47-61.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. "The Coatlicue State." In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Third Edition. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987: 63-73.

Artaud, Antonin. “No More Masterpieces.” In The Theater and its Double, Trans. Mary C. Richard. New York: Grove Press, 1958

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Gilpin, Heidi. “Lifelessness in Movement, or How Do the Dead Move? Tracing Displacement and Disappearance for Movement Performance,” in Corporealities, ed. Susan Foster (New York/London: Routledge Press, 1996), 106-128.

Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. "Culturas-in-extermis: Performing against the cultural backdrop of the mainstream bizarre." In Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy, edited by Elaine Peña. London and New York: Routledge, 2005: 45-64.

Minh-ha, Trinh T. “Other Than Myself, My Other Self.” In elsewhere, within here: immigration, refugeeism and the boundary event. New York: Routledge Press, 2011: 27-34.

0 notes

mindthefool · 3 years

Text

Evisceration Promenade

In quarantine, my creative process is an evisceration promenade: a public stroll without my organs and a quest for intimacy in isolation. Now, reader mine, I confess, there is a bit of a contradictory process going on here. I want to create intimacy in isolation, through the screen or in writing, but I also am insistent on becoming a stranger to myself in isolation. I am developing oscillation rituals between familiar and alien.

Some days quarantine melts my center, some days it hardens. Some days I am puppet, some days puppeteer. When the world is reduced to one place, I find I do not stay in place. I hardly stay in space anymore, or at least I try my very best not to. I’ve long since reached the end of my drug phase, so I have to be much more intentional about finding methods of escape or adrenaline rites to enact when necessary or desperate. Drinking is a flawed strategy, I always end up drunk too early in the night because the winter took my 8pm and made it 4pm. Time is screwing with me so I screw with it back. We are not on the best of terms, you might say.

My housing companions are keeping me alive and I lean on them like extra legs. Sometimes I feel wet, sticky fire on my skin and all my internal organs ache, longing to vomit, because my loved ones make me so anxious and angry, and everything is too tight and too loud, including the crowd of people I share a bedroom and a brain with. Sometimes I drown out the nervous voices of my brain family with the words of vindictive Artaud, or the sorceress Anzaldua, or the mid-bender brunch mood of Deleuze and Guattari. They all scratch a particular itch and it helps sometimes, but other times they can make me feel much worse, confronted with the peaks and valleys of creativity.

I have had to expand my subjectivity and proliferate it, to endure isolation. And no, this did not become an antidote to boredom or loneliness, I just met new selves who dwell in such states. We tolerate one another. We cohabitate in modes of peculiar familiarity. Sometimes I am eager to neglect and abandon certain selves. Their vengeance, though often frightful, is something to look forward to. Most events are. Any motion is interesting at the very least, if not entertaining, revelatory, or disastrous.

The existential planes of thought and feeling are as bold as the walls of my room. Nothing is ever as simple as these walls and their promise to contain. It is a deceptive offering; they can hardly keep me within and I can hardly even see them anymore, even though I keep covering them with bright art to counteract winter. And what occurs amid the shifting, false walls is performance; a special quarantine theater which I’ve named the Evisceration Promenade.

The Evisceration Promenade is a stubborn habit, documented delicately in writing and video. Evisceration Promenade is a mode of embodiment that functions at the degree of intensity where it becomes an objectification, a mechanism for receiving cosmic impulse. I find that it is a matter of befriending my organs, not transcending my body, for this can be dangerous and distracting. Activities that are almost transcendent but too inadequate and incomplete to achieve such an eventful climax, are those that simultaneously chisel and broaden consciousness.

Reader, please know, I do not gain consciousness by departing from my body, nor do you by departing from yours. Instead, I connect to all that I am not, by honoring my capacity to confront such forces; honoring the impossibility of being eternal; and surrendering to becoming. Becoming is necessarily a process that occurs in in-between space, in oscillation, and in proximity to limits. When I befriend my organs, they become receptors of divine messages and the impulses they receive channel into my voice, a chorus of the cries of organs.

Performance— a deceptively public art— is a mechanism for survival in isolation. The promenade claims movement as its imperative and evisceration refers to the drawing out of sputtering organs to brave the light and the air for the first time ever. When enacted together, these two gestures or rituals (a public stroll without organs) achieve a special embodied objectification (a result of outside gaze + relation to the organs as external friends). This particular embodied objectification allows one to name and redirect shadows, as Artaud suggests, a critical survival strategy when you’re stuck in a house with your own madness as your only companion. Organs inside the body never experience light. Once removed, they make shadows, like growths that collaborate with sun. My partner put it rather eloquently in a text message on the matter, “Evisceration is to make painfully public the private… the sudden act of isolating a piece from itself… isolation is then, the reverberation of the first torn intensity.”

The circumstance under which I create performance requires simultaneous and contradictory impossibilities. I eviscerate: I have no organs because I am an object in relation to other objects, including the relation between self and the Body Without Organs. I promenade: I move through an externalized public because I observe and document assemblages and their components. My organs are my audience; my nerve-juice, joints, bones, tissue and blood are my friends and do not belong to me. If I held myself superior to them, I’d be trapped in subjective interiority that cannot be sustained while also trapped in a house.

Antonin Artaud states that theater exists only in the moment where impossibility begins to occur. In the pandemic, theater as it was known to me, became impossible: assembling crowds is impossible, standing closer than six feet to people is impossible, conversing with uncovered faces is impossible. Therefore, the theater that I am interested in, quarantine theater, began at the moment when the art form was banished to the untouched margins of possibility, where I await to meet it for the first time.

Truthfully, I feel as though I am making theater for the first time, which may come as a surprise to you. In quarantine, I must conjure an audience myself and weave it into my compositions, which requires great, reckless fortitude of the imagination. I must also conjure stakes high enough to put me in “danger,” for the actor experiences true affects in imagined situations. To believe that I am in enough danger to require enormous risk, while trusting I am safe enough to take them, I must ritualize entering into and parting from states of fight or flight. Deleuze and Guattari might refer to this as injecting doses of caution, the key strategy to interacting with the Body Without Organs. The BWO is a force that produces desire as it resists organization and the functional conformity of an organism. “The BWO howls: They’ve made me an organism! They’ve wrongfully folded me! They’ve stolen my body!” It is a body with no belonging or form, one that acts upon its violent desire for formlessness and “expresses the pure determination of intensity, intensive difference.” The disorganized body is encountered in pursuit of a dismantled self. It is dangerous. Deleuze and Guattari prescribe “injections of caution,” for the “human body is scandalously insufficient” so if handled thoughtlessly, the BWO can override the organism and destroy it.

Reader, my dearest, I have known it all along. Artaud knew it too. Impossibility and insufficiency are tools of the theater. Artaud opens his book The Theater and its Double with an essay called “The Theater and the Plague.” Timely, I think. The text pursues similarities between the bubonic plague and performance. Both pose disasters that must either be settled in death, or satiated by some remedy. He describes the agonized social psyche of the plagued era: the invasive imagery of dead people in heaps, loved ones blistered and passing one by one, the dreaded familiarity of various moans and groans that spurn or welcome death, the false privilege of escape into seclusion, the fear of dropping dead unexpectedly like the neighbor did yesterday.

Today, our plague kills millions, with a particularly brutal fondness for the most vulnerable people, abused by power structures and neglected by those privileged with resources. Many people rightfully fear this plague, and many others act as though it does not exist. Outside the house there is life-or-death risk bursting from the orifices of strangers and all they touch. Inside the house too, there is the risk of ever-approaching psychosis or of suicide.

Artaud writes, “The state of the victim who dies without material destruction, with all the stigmata of an absolute and almost abstract disease upon him, is identical with the state of an actor entirely penetrated by feelings that do not benefit or even relate to his real condition.” My favorite challenge of quarantine theater is that of enacting impossibility, rather than representing it.

In a paper about Tadeusz Kantor, Heidi Gilpin writes that such a challenge is precisely the function of theater. Theater manifests contradictions and utilizes them as affective materials that serve a sort of collective surrender to the ambivalent insistence of “life’s appetite,” which Artaud defends as a characteristic of the inherent evil of the universe.

Kantor’s work is centered around the bold, sneaky ties between performance and death. The importance of representing death in theater is reinforced by the fact that it cannot be represented. But when an audience does experience a spectacle of disappearance and enactments of death, they are confronted with the inadequacy of representation, and furthermore must reimagine their personal relationships with possibility. Since theater happens when impossibility begins, Kantor raises the necessity to witness death. It is the same necessity which I encounter more and more frequently: that which Artaud names as cruelty, and that which I outline as the shifting distinction between speaking the unspoken and raising the unsayable.

Theater has a very important task in the face of impossibility and the unsayable. It can be accessed through the enactment of incompleteness, or insufficiency, in addition to repetition. Gilpin offers examples of repetition from psychoanalysis that function similarly to the repeated experience of witnessing disappearance in theater, which makes possible the impossible through self-referential, partial enunciation of that which is absent.

Repetition is a consequence of failure. It is an action performed from the desire to control past events, to overcome failure, but true repetition is impossible. In performance, the tight activity of repetition and its oscillating manipulation of memory, which eventually licks open scar tissue, fulfills the desire of the audience to view becoming. This particular form of becoming faces Artaud’s cruelly, or necessity of life. Gilpin names it as “a desire to witness survival mechanisms at work.”

The desire to witness trauma reenacted and inadequately confronted, is connected to the spiritual inclination of theater to raise the unsayable. It is a measured injection of release toward the vast hazard-loaded landscape of the BWO. Artaud, in his section about the plague, elaborates upon my reflection, “... the action of the plague that kills without destroying the organs and the theater which, without killing, provokes the most mysterious alterations in the mind of not only an individual but an entire populace.”

Quarantine theater is Artaud’s theater that dispels evil. It is not made to rouse chaos, but to redirect it; “naming and directing shadows,” to reduce the frequency of mind spirals, sinking nihilism, claustrophobic grief, and other apocalypse-imposed madnesses. I have spent recent months inquiring about theater as a mechanism for survival. My writing honors performance as a source of life in isolation. It works as medicine, it is a worthy spine to wear through ambient collapse. During Evisceration Promenade, many things that had never known light before have now grown shadows; their gestures are unrecognizable and complex.

The other day, one quarantine roommate took it upon themselves to reflect back to me some observations they made about my behavior when I am creating during quarantine. I am glad they shared their study with me, for it delighted me greatly. They described the way I move erratically through the house, often bursting into rooms where people are consumed in quiet activities and I announce: THAT I AM HAVING AN EXPERIENCE, AN ARTISTIC BREAKTHROUGH, MAKING UNPRECEDENTED THEORETICAL COMPOSITIONS, FALLING INTO UNCANNY FRIENDSHIPS WITH THIS AND THAT WRITER. Or, on unfortunate occasions: A DREADFUL, INSURMOUNTABLE CREATIVE BLOCK AND IMMENSELY SPECTACULAR DESPAIR IN REGARDS TO MY WORTHLESSNESS AS AN ARTIST, STUDENT, AND PERSON. My roommate giggled as they told me all of this, and I cackled relief, in awe of the accuracy. They carried on, describing the daily inconsistencies and the conspicuous cloud of mood I invariably don. And I carry on too, careful not to lean too far into the trope of tormented genius, but parading my guts around my ever-shifting house as the fantastical, untethered prodigy that quarantine has taught me to be.

References

Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and its Double, Trans. Victor Corti. London: Alma Classics, 2010.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

1 note · View note