Daniel (no, not you, another one) says, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and so begins again. Reading, thinking, wondering. Trudel says, Itziar Ziga, and I find two scraps far distant somehow I might stitch together. Thinking about abjection.
abjection. It has its own category now, that’s a good sign, no? Julia says, (well her translator says in English):
The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance. A would with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death – a flat encephalograph, for instance – I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit — cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything.
This was something Daniel (yes, now you) and I played with in pestilence. After much time, a year and a half, I think about how this makes now something for me, something from me. I tie and suspend myself, well, partially, only from a ladder, so semi-dangling, but find in this a diversion to entangle myself with more.
Then, I am reading. Or rather, I am not. The purpose is not to read, yet to have the semblance of a normal distribution of text. And if I decide to read what I have used hundreds of times to fill empty pages, I discover in Lorem Ipsum lies Cicero. Ah, but that is just the beginning, so I read de finibus Bonorum et Malorum, and find again now what I think upon.
No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure.
I am cleaning one of my folders also, filled with pieces I make a note to look at again soon. Until the Light Takes Us, of course why would this not be there? I think though I need to be more critical of my darkness. And of which, I find Berlin both opens me out of this and provides, as Cicero might say, moments of encountering consequences. Though is it the place to make such a piece as this? Perhaps yes, perhaps… otherwise. I read Rem Koolhaas’ essay, A (A) Memoir, The Berlin Wall as Architecture, finding in it more said about the sensibility of Berlin than the thousands of pages I have read to feel my way into this city. Yes, I have a fascination for it as I do for Guangzhou. (Did you know you can paste this link into your browser address bar, Chinese characters and all and it will still lead to the right place? A strange irruption of the other into the roman characters of the url.) Though Guangzhou holds something of a private enjoyment, its history unwritten – in English at least – in the same manner Berlin has been written on until worn smooth, erased.
There is more to say yet, perhaps on Spinoza also. Where is this leading? To a studio, naked and empty for sure. To the barre also, repetition and finding my body, a feeling of desperation also, how did i leave all this so long, so late?
