Tuesday, February 19, 2013

unbourne

It was something worth wondering about.  How this, this experience here, might find its way into something else, something written somewhere else, in another context entirely.  That idea that everything was some kind of raw material for art was liberating and troubling all at once.  It meant that he would have to pay close attention to everything, to think about it both inside a certain narrative (his own language structures in thought) and outside the narrative, in order to make it possible for larger connections with other narratives.  It also meant that the thoughts he lived in might become a part of that same circle of narratives, and that meant that he would eventually become a character in those same stories.
He wondered if it really made that much of a difference, or if it was just a question of revealing codes.  His narratives were constructions of several unstable identities, and, over time, they revealed a larger whole, something that occasionally coalesced into something like a singular persona.  That always made him enormously uncomfortable, because it was like being locked into someone else's language, the language of the one interpreting him, and once he was locked, things never continued in any interesting directions because he would spend his time trying to unfix himself, in order to allow for more possibilities of being.
That may be the whole point of it, ultimately, unlocking the structures of being in order to make them visible, so that there would be more liberation in the day to day experience of being.  He sometimes secretly, sometimes not so secretly hoped that he was doing the same things, allowing others the possibility of becoming, at best, or at worst, being conscious not to contain them in his own narrative structures.  No matter how much metaphor or hypertext or metatext, there was always a sense of limitation, because we are always trying to contain each other and are always trying to be contained, and there was never any lightness to it, because the base was always already much too heavy.
And if the art-image could be captured, something that was inevitably wound up with our own mechanisms of desire, then it seemed unlikely that placing them in a conceptual realm would do anything to diminish that effect.  Even if it were called an idea.  An idea that was like a tool that was useful.
On a larger cycle, however, one he couldn't possibly understand fully, there was always, at root, an uneasy suspicion that all of these things did become unhinged when there was something like love near the center.  Love doesn't necessarily reveal the codes, but rather complicates them, particularly when there was something like a spell involved, and all experiences of love, or sometimes just desire, carry a palpable and elusive aura that is very much like a spell.  All spells can be broken when the mechanism of desire becomes visible.  And what he was wondering most lately was about how liberated beings might move in space, toward or away from each other, or more likely a combination of both, after that initial spell was broken, and the hands pull the face closer anyway, and experience becomes something that comes from actions not taken out of reflex, but something even older than this particular instinct in this particular moment in time, something that language can no longer capture, and doesn't even dare to try.  Absence of writing is always already its presence, and the act of not-writing was starting to become the essence of his work, not as an artist any longer, but as a human being in an act of becoming, after a change of heart started to make that heart beat with the idea that liberation was not a lie, and not even impossible, but actually right there.  

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