Filed under: Santiago stories, The Love Libration Movement, bla bla on writing and language
There he was, again: ”You can do better than that. Bring interesting thoughts to the fore. Don’t think you have to please people.” This time we were sitting on a terrase viewing Valparaiso at night. I had invited both of them for a Pisco Sour. I looked at the lights, the sea and the dark reflections moving in the cold summer wind. Soon it would be autumn, in April. This was just another thing I had to get used to; inversion of rythms that meant clashes and conflicts between my body, it’s stubborn habbit of orchestrating itself by seasons, daylight, weather. Now I could only submit and it, my body, didn’t like it.
I registered his presence next to me, how he was attentive for an answer, or more, a response. ”But I cannot do that, you cannot expect me to be clever on behalf of being displaced, uprooted.” … ”I’m exhausted, I’m trying, but I really don’t know what to do. I can only register, I can only take in; I can smell, look and listen as far as my body lets me do it.” … “And just to let you know, to register is a phenomenological methodology; always first register. And this, I want to follow.” (1)
Now our voices were loud, in front of us was a smiling face, a smiling, but investigating face. What are they doing, why are they word fighting? Why this clash?
Today, I learned that ”soy” does not only mean I am in Spanish, but also spoken word and woven material in Dogon language. (2)
Yesterday, a woman told me she by chance had read my story on returning to Denmark. She really liked it. It made her hair rise. ”It’s Sisi who’s writing this!” She didn’t know I liked to write. Or, like to write.
That’s another thing. I’m learning a language. A new language. One day I wrote in my diary: ”Today I said the rr-sound correctly for the first time.” I felt like a baby registering its own first word. It’s on this stage I find myself, like a fragile being without words in a new world. How does he want me to reflect, to bring interesting thoughts to the fore?
What felt in the fore, in front of me, was a wall. I met it everytime I went out. ”So, what are you doing here?” ”Do you know Spanish? Oh, you’re learning. You really have to improve your Spanish to get somewhere.” (I know that, I’m not stupid, why do you think I’m spending my savings on private lessons?) ”What would you like to do here?” ”Oh, you came here because of love? I suppose that’s good, I mean, or what….” ”Do you have any plans for your future?” (What do you think yourself, I do, of course, but how can I make plans in a situation I cannot control, a situation I don’t know?)
One night I told someone that my future doings would not only depend on me, but also on the place, Santiago, my new city. She got aggressive, it did not depend on the place, but on the attitude. One can make it everywhere, it only depends on one’s attitude. I retrieved from that discussion. Didn’t care and didn’t dare. Too much, just let me be, don’t look at me, don’t reflect me, I don’t want to face myself.
Today, an other woman told me: ”There’s a difference between seeing oneself as a link in the net and being subjected to comparisons of oneself to others.” (3) It helps me to retrospectively answer back that other woman, the aggressive one. I don’t want to compare myself, “to make it.” But maybe this is what people see in me, a Western woman coming here to make it?
Traditionally, I cannot be an other woman as I’m from the West, from Europe. I have red hair and milk white skin with a bit of freckles. I cannot be Other. My body tells the world so. And yet, I feel so other, so otherly other. It’s nice. And it’s completely horrible – like when the nasty speaker in the conference wants secretely to know about that wonderful woman in the back. Viejo verde (4) was a clever response of an other older woman. She’s been in the business for some years. She has found her way.
This is what I’m trying to do; find my way. I get small confirmations on the way. Like reading this sentence: ”To be an other among others can be a profoundly transformative experience.” (5) This is what i want. I want to be transformed, I want to experience, to live and to love. And this is what I am doing, what makes me so utterly happy. But also what rubs off so otherly many sparks, so much heat that it’s not only nice and warm, but hot like hell.
-
It was today he played the song that said I love you badly. We were sitting in the same room in front of each a table. Writing and reading. Concentrated. The refrain made us look at one another. This is why we’re here, we’re here because we love, badly, too much. We sleep close, we eat close, we bike close, even our desks, our books, our clothes want to be close.
And here we are, now, again, he’s looking at me, with a smile. An investigating smile. Why is she so concentrated, what is it that she’s writing? He hasn’t known me always, he’s still learning. But he knows. He approaches me and kisses me. Just in time, at times, I guess. (6) Outside, Santiago is turning dark, the cars are flickering together with light from commercials. Champagne and socks. The Madonna is still there, on the hill, holding her hands over the city together with the 80’s cell phone shaped building. We have to finish, we have to go out there, to become embraced by noise, smell, pollution and the many encounters, between people, in nets, among others, among each others. Once again, I ask the tissue of neighbourhood to grasp me when I’m falling. I think it likes me, I think it’ll grap me, rescue me and give me a hand everytime something pushes me over the limit. Up, again, we’re here, we’ll hold you, as you’ll hold us.
1: Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge, 1992, p. viii: ‘It is a matter of describing, not of explaining or analysing.’
2: Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other. Bloomington: Indiana university Press, 1989, p. 128.
3: Minh-ha, Trinh T. Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Films Featured at Documenta. An interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha and Genevieve Shiffrar. June 26, 2002. Page last visited May 10, 2009.
4: Viejo verde means an old man who likes young women in Chilean slang.
5: Minh-ha, 2002.
6: Bowie, David. “Cygnet Commitee” in Space Odity, 1972.
Filed under: Dagens ord / Word(s) of the day, Kunst / Art, The Love Libration Movement, bla bla on writing and language, never written books - or telling titles
Hvad jeg gerne ville skrive om på bloggen lige nu:
En intro om at læse en intro, der udreder et kludret og endeløst forgrenet stamtræ, som vokser og vokser og bare bliver ved og ved og er kortlagt bagest i bogen, så man bladrer frem og tilbage og repeterer på vejen, men forstår kun lidt – min intro ditto.
Om det hemmeliges potentiale som værende det ultimative skabelses-frirum i en kunstnerisk kontekst
Om Walid Raad, “performance as faith” og Raads fascination af enkeltpersoner i historien.
Om at vågne op og ikke vide hvem man er eller hvor man er, men være sikker på, at det er juleaften.
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
Today, I was chatting with my friend M, who also has a blog. Or maybe I should say; Today, I was chatting with my friend M, who also has a block. A writers blog/ck. A couple of hours later I received this email:
Sisi
chatting with you today, I had the idea of writing in the blog about resistances and voices, intuition, breath. Is there a nice passage on the voice that I can have a look at? There is the Michel Serres book here, Genesis, going to have a look.
bawse from the office
Miro
I answered:
yes, i have something for you, i’ll scan it, kisses, s
I went upstairs to the scanners at my university and there I found two pictures with their white back facing me. I decided to scan them without knowing what they depicted – it may be a sign!
It was not, or maybe it was. A sign of campus life and a happy youth; snapshots (or not, it was paper photographies) to be send to friends or family abroad.
cut
The passage I wanted to scan for M is from The Black Beach by Edouard Glissant. I hadn’t been thinking of this text for two years until i read the words resistances and voices, intuition, breath in M’s email. I hope the silent ghost on Glissant’s beach will provoke some thoughts. They both gave me a reason to post a block.
(I imagine two young women (one at the corniche in Beirut and one on the beach in CPH) walking in resistance and silence, listening to the breath and voices of the sea)
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.
Filed under: Kunst / Art, The Love Libration Movement, bla bla on writing and language
i know you got charm and appeal.
you always play the field.
i’m crazy you are mine.
as long as the sun continues to shine,
there’s a place in my heart for you.
that’s the bottomline
(- so let’s face it, it interests us. after all it’s our field; a battle ground? a playground?)
email to mirene
and thinking about borders and places. to me home works IV was inspiring for two reasons:
1, that you, kati and i were spending time together within a frame that generated thinking and that we rediscovered a desire and a need to act; ghost dance project, the article for exit and a possible proposal of a writing workshop for a.a.. we seem to have taken up some threads that were already there in london, and now they have developed into different directions. it adds people to place and borders and i really think the environment within or outside of academia is extremely important, i.e. i believe in collaboration and collective reflection (alongside solitary studies, if wanted)
2, the complete interdisciplinarity of the event (home works) was a great statement. interdisciplinarity between disciplins and between peoples practices. not for the sake of interdisciplinarity, but because it showed that what you are not necessarily what you do.
point 2 became much more apparent when coming from and going back to a danish context, where the borders are kept quite strict. many artists still believe that art historians are people who never succeeded to become artists or that art historians are in desperate need of artists to interpretate wildly over something which is quite banal; there’s still the idea of the art historian as someone who lives from artists (like these animals) and that even though this is a close cirquit relation, it’s not regarded as 1 organism, but 2 really seperate things. what we have is the role of the art historian as a mediator and not as a producer… not as someone who creates a thing on its own (as they tried to teach us at goldsmiths) and thereby there’s no possibility of generating anything new that might have the potential of being political.
this environment is of course killing together with academia, where one cannot experiment with new forms of text (should one?). one can only experiment with ones research as i try to do with my archive. but this archive cannot be incorporated into the academic text i’m writing.
place/borders/people – borders are there for people to cross them and experience new places/contexts… should we try to eliminate any border between theory and practice..? i’m not sure, but i know it’s necessary to have a space for this elimination/playfulness etc. should it be within academia? – yes, why not. it will give a serious space for such proposals to unfold.
the political – agency. some of the texts mentioned in the beginning (Roland Barthes: barthes on barthes Ranciere: politics of aesthetics, benjamin: the author as producer, sedgwick: paranoid reading and reparative reading, or, you’re so paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you, okwui enwezor: the artist as producer in the time of crisis) relate to the political through either openness or creation of the new/creation of an abruption to make people take a stand. the text itself has a potential, which the artwork has as well.
regarding the new and liberalism i think the discussion after brian holmes‘ lecture at home works was interesting, because it touched upon the need of creating new possible dreams for people with the dilemma of having neocapitalism and liberalism incorporating these dreams immediately. and it asked the question, should we produce the new for the sake of the new? and what if the new is worse than the old?
Filed under: The Love Libration Movement
Maybe site specific love has to do with the different implications of the noun: SPELL?
spell 1 |spɛl| |spɛl|
noun
a form of words used as a magical charm or incantation.
• a state of enchantment caused by such a form of words : the magician may cast a spell on himself.
• an ability to control or influence people as though one had magical power over them : she is afraid that you are waking from her spell.
PHRASES
cast a spell on it’s as if this town cast a spell on me.
under a spell not fully in control of one’s thoughts and actions, as though in a state of enchantment.
under someone’s spell so devoted to someone that they seem to have magic power over one.
ORIGIN Old English spel(l) [narration,] of Germanic origin.
spell 3 |spɛl| |spɛl|
noun
a short period : I want to get away from racing for a spell.
• a period spent in an activity : a spell of greenhouse work.
• a period of a specified kind of weather : an early cold spell in autumn.
• a period of suffering from a specified kind of illness : she plunges off a yacht and suffers a spell of amnesia.
ORIGIN late 16th cent.: variant of dialect spele [take the place of,] of unknown origin. The early sense of the noun was [shift of relief workers.]
Sentences underlined are those I find significant for site specific love – in particular in the case of a person visiting a city (see the very thoughtprovoking and somehow (un)grounded (when I say ungrounded i mean grounded because love is conducted by a place/a ground and ungrounded because love flourishes anew by always visiting new cities, love is trembling and restless, existing in different spheres) quotation in Site specific love – prologue). Site specific love is then related to time (tempus (defined as a period)), geography (geographikos, earth + write/draw (a specific city)), specificity (specificus, species (this specific city and what it casts off)), magic (magikē (tekhnē) ‘(art of) a magus’ (the spell the city casts on one)), movement (movimentum (moving around this city)) and company or the idea of it (compaignon, ‘one who breaks bread with another,’ from Latin com- ‘together with’ + panis ‘bread.’ (the existence of a (possible) lover and of eating (with) this lover)).
(when using parantheses in the above I’m inspired by and indebted to the work of Jacques Derrida and Jalal Toufic (once again))
And then I’m asking myself, why is this interesting? Isn’t it just post-romantic thoughts of and for wealthy, rich first world people, who can travel/cross borders and have time to wonder in the cities of the world? people, who don’t have to marry for social reasons, security, tradition etc.? people, including myself, who trip on the idea of love? Where is the relation to reality? Where is reality? What is it? A dream? Of Love? But, doesn’t everybody share this dream? So, maybe it’s interesting. But then, where did the place go? And who is then, at the end of the day, in love? Those under a spell? Those not fully in control of their thoughts and actions, as though in a state of enchantment? Those who suffers a spell of amnesia? Who knows. The city does. It holds them, the loving couples, at night, in parks, at cafés, in pubs, at funfairs, and in embrace while a narration is taking place.
Filed under: The Love Libration Movement
The epilogue for site specific love got lost in a f(l)ight between Beirut, Copenhagen and London.
Filed under: The Love Libration Movement
Is love site specific?
Reflections on Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) directed by Alain Resnais and written by Marguerite Duras.
As a work of art can be site specific, my question is; can love be site specific? Is love bound to a place and if yes, how is it bound to that place?
The proposition came during a skype-chat with my fellow writer Mirene Arsanios. We were discussing private matters as this more general question appeared. We wanted to write on it, it was a simple, but exiting thought.
Thinking of site specificity, I’ll begin by situtating myself socio-geografically. I’m living for a short period in Beirut. It’s a period, which by accident/chance is the worst time of the country since the Israeli invasion, summer 2006 – some even say since the Lebanese Civil War ended in 1990. The return of the civil war is a regular fear. A fear, which is hanging in the air as thick as the thunder I can hear right now through my trembling windows.
Being attached by a kind of love to another city, I’m experiencing love in Beirut from a distance. Love (and the need for love) is here on many levels. Love as possession, obsession, security, escapism, exitement, romantic ideas, idealisation and as a dream. It is a particular experience bound to people meeting other people, the history of places and to personal itineraries. This is how love always works, but when places have an extraordinary history, something happens to the way in which people enact love. This is maybe why watching Hiroshima, Mon Amour in Beirut added new levels of understanding to the film, even though I’ve watched it several times.
”How could i know this town was tailor-made for love?
How could i know you fit my body as a glove?
I like you.
How unlikely.
I like you.
How slow all of a sudden.
How sweet.
You cannot know.
You’re destroying me.
You’re good for me.
You’re destroying me. You’re good for me.
I have time.
Please devour me.
Deform me to the point of ugliness.
Why not you in this city and in this night?
So like other cities and other nights you can hardly tell the difference?
I beg of you.”
An arbitrary meeting is the ground for Hiroshima, Mon Amour. A nameless French actress is in Hiroshima to act in a movie about peace. As a loner, she sits in a café and it is here, she meets the Japanese gentleman, with whom she enters into a short love affair lasting a little more than 24 hours.
In the quotation above the French actress says the city of Hiroshima is so like other cities. This is in the beginning of the film. She doesn’t know Hiroshima will bring back memories of her youth. It does. During World War 2 she was in a love relation with a German soldier, who got shot the day of liberation just before they were about to flee the country together. For a day and a night she hugged his dying body as it slowly became cold underneath her.
”[I was] Young in Nevers. And also mad in Nevers”
She was abandoned that spring in 1945 in Nevers, France. She became mad and was forced to live in the basement of her parents house scratching her nails on the raw and humid walls not to feel the pain of her lost lover. Next spring she moves to Paris where she manages to start all over again. She gets a job, a husband and a family. And she lives alone with her memory.
”Listen to me. Like you, I know what it is to forget.
No, you don’t know what it is to forget.
Like you, I’m endowed with memory. I know what it is to forget.
No, you are not endowed with memory.
Like you, I too have struggled with all my might not to forget.
Like you, I forgot.
Like you, I longed for a memory beyond consolation, a memory of shadows and stone. For my part, I struggled everyday with all my might against the horror of no longer understanding the reason to remember.
Like you, I forgot.
Why deny the obvious necessity of remembering?”
The presence of war, destruction and love in Hirsoshima brings about her memory and makes a reconcilation with the war in France possible. She painstakingly visits all the museums on the nuclear bombing and she wants to see everything. Still, her lover tells her; “You saw nothing in Hiroshima.” This is before she tells him about her past; a trauma of war related to love. She almost becomes mad in Hiroshima as well, she takes the Japanese gentleman as the German love of her youth. She tells him her story, he, becomes polymorph existing of the two lovers of her life. Two bodies, but one love.
”I meet you.
I remember you.
This city was tailor-made for love.
You fit my body as a glove.
Who are you? You’re destroying me.
I was hungry. Hungry for infidelity, for adultery, for lies, and for death.
I always have been.
I had no doubt you’d cross my path one day.
I waited for you calmly, with boundless impatience.
Devour me.
Deform me to your likeness,
So that no one after you will ever again understand.
The reason for so much desire
We’ll be alone, my love.
Night will never end.
The day will never dawn again on anyone.
Never again.
At last.”
Here, in Hiroshima, she’s able to remember her past. A bridge is built between two cities and two periods in time. The ephemeral love has a long life cycle and is deeply rooted in memories of the past. She forgets in Paris. And remembers in Hiroshima. She reconciles with her past; she saw everything in Hiroshima. Because she saw him. Towards the end she gives the Japanese gentleman his name. It cannot but be bound to the city where a specific love took place.
Hi-ro-shi-ma. Hiroshima. That’s your name.
Yes, that’s my name.
And your name is Nevers.
Nevers in France.
________
Inspiration: Marguerite Duras: Hiroshima, Mon Amour and India Song. Jalal Toufic: Over-Sensitivity. Stephen Wright: “Toward Extraterritoriality: The Dilemmas of Situatedness.” Plus all the loving people in Beirut.
This is the first article made within the framework of The Love Libration Movement. Here, Mirene Arsanios and I will curate articles on each others blogs under the theme; love.
Filed under: The Love Libration Movement
”I was in Auckland, New Zealand, two months ago, on my way to Christchurch for a teaching position interview. It was my first visit to that city. Again I was sensitized to the sensuality of women after a long hiatus of no longer feeling it in familiar cities. We go to foreign cities in search of sensuality and possibly love. And vice versa: we get in love in search of making the city in which we reside unfamiliar. All love affairs happen in foreign cities. Two weeks after returning to los Angeles, I was offered the position as Christhchurch. Two months later I had to decide whether to accept the offer or stay in Los Angeles, where I was starting to fall in love. The decision I have to make is presently between two foreign cities.
The architect of Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters drives his two attractive women companions around Manhattan, showing them his favorite buildings in that city. Is he in love? No, the city regarding which he acts as a guide has not become tinged with foreignness. Does the city become foreign through the other love stories in the film? No. Has Woody Allen failed here in his depiction of love? Not if his main love in this film is for the city itself.
When single, one explores a city, its museums, cafes, and bookstores, with a future lover in mind as a companion. Having found her, for a while one takes her to some of these places. But then, soon enough, love gives rise to a tendency to seclusion with the beloved away from everything else. He could not stand the cat in her house; the world was still there through that pet. She ended up acquiescing and getting rid of it.
Since they both usually stay up late, they called each other around midnight, She did not ask him: ”Did you dream of me last night?” He did not, with the provocation of seduction, tell her: ”Tonight, you’ll dream of me,” but rather: ”Have pleasant dreams.” He was relieved when she answered, ”I don’t remember my dreams”: he would be spared being asked to listen to dreams and even to interpret them – he was ill-equipped to do that. Little did he know that he would soon have to start the interpretation of insomnia. It took him three hours to fall asleep following their fifteen-minute phone conversation. He had lost interest in anything else besides her, even sleeping – he thus became acutely aware that sleep is not a rest from activity, but one more activity. If waiting is a non-accidental topos of love, it is because love divests us from interest in all other possible activities and in all objects other than the beloved. After a long sleepless night next to her in slumber, he left her a brief note: ”You have beautiful eyes – even when closed.”
Index: Love: of the city, as an exploration of the city; as a seclusion from and dis-interest in the city.”
Undying Love, or Love Dies by Jalal Toufic. p. 2-3
