Filed under: Dagens ord / Word(s) of the day, In the mood for, The Love Libration Movement
“If you play me, I’ll play you” is a sentence I still haven’t understood. It appeared in a talk by artist Hassan Khan at Homeworks IV in Beirut last April. It was just a sentence in a sampled pop song or something like that – but it has kept lingering in my head. Like a play back system. Now, reading an interview on love with the psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller I’m wondering whether the sentence might be a synonym for a psychoanalytical understanding of a love relation between two people. Jacques Alain Miller says that one loves the person that can answer the question: “Who am I?” and it means that one has to acknowledge one has a lack that the other person can fill. As such, one is also dependent on the other person, which is why some people become aggressive from love – it’s difficult to admit one’s dependency and thereby one’s independency.
If you make me play, press the magical play button that make my self sing on all of its strings, then, I’ll play you(rs).
Ocean's Thirteen and a love dilettante in a screen. Flying to Beirut the 24th of October 2007
article by jose ossandon in the chilean online magazine plagio
article by mathias kryger in the danish newspaper politiken
both beautiful examples of precarious writings
Filed under: Dagens ord / Word(s) of the day, In the mood for, bla bla on writing and language
“Suddenly the door opened and the long sinister figure of Mr. Lytton Strachey stood on the threshold,” Woolf later recalled in a talk at the private Memoir Club. His entrance heralded her conversational liberation. Strachey pointed to a stain on the white dress worn by Virginia’s sister. “Semen?” he inquired.
“Can one really say it?” Woolf remembered thinking, “and we burst out laughing. With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down. A flood of sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us. Sex permeated our conversation. The word bugger was never far from our lips. We discussed copulation with the same excitement and openness that we had discussed the nature of good.”
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About my red dot on a yellow dress
About Virginia Woolf
—–_____—–
Hamilton, Nigel. Biography. A Brief History. Harvard University Press : Cambridge/Massachusetts, London/England, 2007, p. 160-161
Love is a ruin. It decays, but it always stays the same. The use of it ceases to exist. We don’t know what to do with it. Anymore. So we sit. And we wait. We even left the chairs. Now they’re standing there, as two ruins in a lit setting. Spotlight is on. The stage is there. It’s freezing cold, at least minus 5 degrees. No wonder why we left. Not even the light makes it cozy or warm.
So I got them a strawberry plant. It has small green strawberries on it. Soon they’ll be red and ready to eat. And next year the plant will have dissiminated, more plants will grow from this one and so, in a couple of years their new family house will be full of green strawberry plants with white and yellow flowers. The plants will take over, cover the house. And then, the girl slept for thousand years. She woke up, there was a prince, able to cut his way through the strawberries and wake her up from her dream. What a shame, it was so nice to sleep, to stay with the ruin and live its dreamworld. Now she has to rediscover her house, the castle of her parents and the whole kingdom. Underneath the kingdom there’s a hidden world. It never ceased to decay. It keeps it’s life going, because no one dares to enter it. It cannot be decided to ruin. So she asked, what is it that cannot ruin? The love for someone, for a place? Is love existing as a renewed ruin, always alive… There was a temple, in India, a temple praising the sun. She laid down, drank a lot of water. The mountain was grey and stoney like the temple. Predicting the path of the sun. Thousands of years old. And on the way, a group of children followed them. Until they couldn’t walk anymore. To reach the ruin. As a never happy ending catastrophe. And there they sat, or did they, on two chairs in the freezing cold north. They temselves entering the only possible life, a decaying, collapsing life. Love is a ruin.
On Wong Kar Wai’s The Hand (2004), a short film out of three in the portmanteau film Eros.
She gratifies him.
(gratify • give (someone) pleasure or satisfaction • indulge or satisfy (a desire))
She gratifies him with her hand. Their first meeting takes place in her home, the place where she receives her lovers. She is a courtesan in the 1960’s China. He is a tailor with a lot of talent. That is why he is sent to the courtesan; to let his talent unfold. She asks him to undress and satisfies him with a quiet intensity. With her hand. His face is expressing pleasure and pain.
(pleasure • sensual gratification) (pain • physical suffering or discomfort caused by illness or injury • a feeling of marked discomfort in a particular part of the body • mental suffering or distress)
He continues to make her dresses. She continues to ignore him. He desires her. More and more. As she keeps him distant. He longs for a sensual touch. Replaces her body with her dresses. Pays all his attention to them. What he cannot give her in terms of touch, care, kisses, intimacy and lovemaking he gives to her dresses. He knows her figure, her body. Every inch is his territory – but only when measuring her. When he leaves her house, she becomes the territory of other men who desires her.
(desire • a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen • strong sexual feeling or appetite)
Eros is sexual love or desire. In Wong Kar Wai’s The Hand eros seems to be both. Desire and love. Desire exists alongside with a love, which cannot be fulfilled. She’s a courtesane and he is a means for her to maintain her clients because he accomplish her beauty by impressive tailored dresses. This is where the economy is clear, it is an exchange of dresses and money, gratification and talent.
(talent • natural aptitude or skill • informal people regarded as sexually attractive or as prospective sexual partners)
The exchange is clear in the beginning of the film. “Give me your hand,” she says, while she gives him hers. She touches him to give him pleasure. Thereby she keeps his desire for that moment intact and his hands cannot but keep on making her new and always more beautiful dresses. She is aware of this, so she keeps him distant while loving his tender touch.
Towards the end the give and take is more ambiguous. He refuses her money and he doesn’t want to accept her offer of paying him back with sex. Still, she gratifies him once again. With her hand. This time the glamour is gone; she’s dying in a cheap hotel room, sick from chasing client in the streets at night. They touch each other, simultaneously, but she cannot return his kisses because of her state of contagiousness.
(contagious • (of a disease) spread from one person or organism to another by direct or indirect contact)
Her decline as a courtesan is the moment where the love between them can be fulfilled and their hands can meet in a mutual touch. But this moment also marks the impossibility of fulfilling their love. She is dying.
(dying • on the point of death)
What is left is the touch of their hands. His hands; measuring her body and touching her dress as a substitute for her body. Her hand; the shared memory of her initial touch.
(touch • (come so close to (an object) as to be or come into contact with it)
And then he comes back to the tailor office. He has said goodbye to his her. His face is expressing emptiness when the master asks him, if he has finished the dress for a Lady Liu. He doesn’t answer. This woman seems of no importance to him and therefore the dress as well. There was something particular to the woman of the hand. Something which made the exchange and the talent provoked from it show other levels of value not transferable into money.
(value • the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance or preciousness of something)
What she feels is not easy to know. Desire and love. Desire or love. Desire, love and necessity. His love last. It became her only hope.
(hope • a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen • a person or thing that may help or save someone • grounds for believing that something good may happen)
Filed under: In the mood for
…is from our first ‘let’s go for a drink’. It is here as a reminder of the red wine. The red wine I spelt on my dress. It makes me recall the moment, a moment with you.
I keep it on my dress – although the pink Vanish! Stain Remover don’t like our mess.
It’s hardly visible, but people notice. It’s there on the right thigh, pling, a dot in a moment. Dripping from the glass.
