Corporeal

“all i have to do is dream”

perhaps it was the heat. i’ve had some vivid dreams, nearly hallucinogenic epics that might be in a certain light nightmares. rather than feel fear i felt fairly safe even if that environment surrounding me was on the surface bizarre.

take last night for example. i can’t recall the particulars except that anna and i were holding up in a massive motel or apartment complex. the reason why we were their long faded into the clear light of day. what i do remember is a uniformed figure who took his revolver and pressed the business end to my forehead. i knew he wasn’t going to shoot, but i wasn’t sure. i closed my eyes, felt the cold heavy steel of the barrel pressed hard against my skull. i told myself to concentrate on this here now. hear my breathing. listen to my heart beat. register this life before it is gone. then i woke up and that was that.

when i told anna about my dream and how i told myself to concentrate on the very minute particulars of the present she asked if my last thought was about my writing. fair enough question. but no. why i did not think about my writing or anything other than the very fact of my corporeal existence i can’t answer. maybe it is because without the body the mind, and everything associated with the mind, love, cogitation, desire, fear, those things would be moot. without the body there would be no body here. without the body i couldn’t even dream.

– Richard Lopez, 7/20/2009, http://reallybadmovies.blogspot.com

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IN THE LANGUAGE OF BEING

skins of

propriety are thin

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6/23/08

To “take dictation,” to attempt to “listen” to the body and write, is, it turns out, a process of coming to terms with the author’s (ego’s) need to control, and even to dominate. Perhaps this is the same with any encounter with an other, in which one listens. There is always the urge to interpret, to put a spin on things, to put things in order.

At first, I thought that my job was to become a passive instrument, to record whatever language emerged from my perceptions of the body. But the urge to fashion something, to control the language, and to play with it, is too strong, too….sexy. So, I go back and forth, allowing the body’s presence to work it’s language upon me, and then I upon it.

I won’t pretend it’s not about power. And although what I write here sometimes appears solipsistic, I know that it’s also very much about my erotic relationship to the world at large.

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Haptic Visuality – from the Finnish Art Review: http://www.framework.fi/2_2004/visitor/artikkelit/marks2.html

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Encryption

E as in e-mbrace. e-mbattled. e-nigma. e-xhuberant. e-lliptical. e-mbroiled. e-ccentric. e-namored. e-bullient. e-xpectant. e-xonerate. e-xile. e-veryman/woman.
***
am not through with you yet. icheckasifthosesevendigitsmeansomethingasifyou’resendingmea messageasifyoucareandasificareandasifitmattersonewayoranotherandasifitmakesadifference.
***
with Nothing it is easy to make up stories that assuage whoknowswhat. the lover of trickster stories follows the trail of fecundity leading to lucidity. maybe. maybe you will never return and even if you do someday it will no longer be in the same form. will i recognize you then? when you are done writing your story is there a watermark in it with my sign on it?
***
this body is animated with interiority. not some body out there. not godnordemonnorangel. i am training my perception of desire. so that i may learn the habit of looking, of listening, of touching. you – not as an artificial presence or object of desire or a loss of ideal or aspiration. in search of a language that is not in the hands of received history.

— Leny Mendoza Strobel

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Stephen Vincent Says:

February 22, 2008 at 7:11 pm e

Corporeal as a book title is interesting.
But did you also think (at the moment) that moving – that is,
taking the inside of your house apart – is a kind of
“decorporealization” – that’s if you think of the house as a
body, a body of knowledge, memory, etc.
Art is a re-corporeal act – of course, it isn’t the same.
Writing erases memory & all that French biz!

Just a thought,

Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/

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I propose, however, that there is such a thing as a love “profound,” (romance, even) to be found in lovers and friends (and even in husbands and wives). As separate from “Romance” shaped to be more easily commodified. — J

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Oct. 8, 2007 [Columbus Day]

If the psychic split of modern subjectivity is to be healed and made whole, then we must return to the place of beginnings: the body. This body has a History that it needs to unpack and reconstruct.

I am a body-in-relation to other bodies. As we read our bodies as texts, we realize that our interpretations are subjected to a priori discourses about what it means to be a human being, male and female. As a Filipina and a postcolonial subject, I have been colonized by these discourses. If I want to return to the place of beginnings, I must re-trace my steps and work my way back to the wisdom of my body. Easier said than done.

– Leny Mendoza Strobel

[Oct. 6, 2007]

Between girlfriends, we have this ongoing conversation about Eros versus Romantic Love. Yesterday, this comment: yeah, the notion of romantic love is really a capitalist construct. If the sole province of legitimate and sacred love is monogamy within marriage , then it is in the interest of capitalism to manage and control that institution and conversely, to punish and discipline all those who dare to express love outside of this romantic notion. And as couples find themselves imprisoned inside the institution, how much better for capitalists to find profitable ways of prescribing products for coping with marital misery: couples therapy, expensive divorce proceedings, sleeping pills and other addictions, self-help books, cosmetic surgeries, etc. And then there are the escape mechanisms available mostly to men: illegitimate dalliances in airport restrooms, at the White House, at pink brothels in the desert, etc, etc. The more numbed and distracted, because most folks no longer have access to or have forgotten how to construct their own History, the better it is for capitalists. The keyword is: History. This history that defines Love has been defined by western philosophers of subjectivity where women have always found themselves defined only in patriarchal terms. This is violence to men and to women alike.

(I know. A writing mentor once told me that my brain is rushing with too many things to say and my pen can’t keep up. So if the above sounds cryptic, my brain is on overdrive. Ask me again later when I have slowed down to explain better.)

Later that evening, as I was listening to Van Jones (you can buy and download files from Bioneers) talk about California’s gulag/prison economy, I couldn’t help but think about my previous blogmeditations about war as porn, about prison and education, about the repression of Eros… it all somehow connects and makes sense.

to be continued…this body needs to go for a long walk…

– Leny Mendoza Strobel

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Leny writes:

as if to counter the unsettling emotions that arise from thinking about war, i think of this:

to caress is to be aware of the qualities veiled in communal life, qualities that civil laws and practices should guarantee to all, removed from the violence of an everyday life which has no concern for intersubjectivity, removed from the violence of utilitarian practice — whether it involves commerce in the strict sense or the commerse of sexual desire– removed from a gaze or a practice not concerned with respecting the other.

the caress is also praise. it is homage of the evening, of the feast, of the spring to what i have perceived, sensed and experienced of you during the day, the week, the winter, during daily life clothed in the grey of ordinary demands, of urban transit, of the submission of sensible rhythms to the instruments of labor and to the rules of citizenship. (Irigaray, to be two).

i have always translated “intersubjectivity” as pakikipagkapwa-tao. this word – Kapwa – evokes for me a universe of relations that is seamless, fluid, passionate, fecund, all-encompassing, respectful, non-possessive. to say — you are my Kapwa — is i love to you in the language of Irigaray.

i suppose this is my roundabout way of saying that what the French philosopher has learned from Buddhism, the Filipina has always known and carried in her body. let her body awaken to this truth, dug up from the rubble of colonial history, dusted up and dressed up in full naked regalia of her gloriousness and sensousness. without shame or guilt. only love uttered in her own tongue. say it. write it.`

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A haptic dream

I am in a room. No… I am in a room, my front room, sitting in a chair, my chair. No… Yes, my chair. At my computer, working. I am not afraid. They said how real this would feel, that you feel like yourself, and you do, really… but no… I reach out, pick up my cup, it has weight, substance, it is hot from the coffee. Its surface is smooth and hard. I feel it in my hand, no, it’s pressing against my hand. No…

I stand, I mean, I feel I get up. Because I stand, I feel like I get up…. Yes… The suit I am wearing, feel I am wearing, pushes in/out on me. I can feel my back tighten, my feet flex, my forehead crease, my brain dull behind my eyes… yes…no, I am (am I?) feeling it tighten around me. It grips me… no… A wave of pressures on me, inside me. I feel I am being wrapped from the inside, a coil pushing out. No… no… It’s just me. They said it would feel this real, the hardness of things, the textures. I am not afraid. I feel my weight and size shift as I move. Strange sense of being outside myself… the sense that I am elsewhere, or nowhere. In a room experiencing all this, tightly wrapped up. Yes, in a room, my room, wrapped under my skin.

My computer blinks and I start. I touch its keys, and they feel my fingers and push back on them. I enter a number I have been given, no… my computer enters the number into my fingers. Suddenly everything changes. I am back in my room, at the computer, my computer, at work. Nothing has changed. Yes. I am not afraid. They said it would feel this real.

“The coils of a serpent are more complex than the burrows of a molehill.”

Deleuze places this sentence at the very end of “Postscript on the Societies of Control” in a section contrasting the socio-technical “programs” of control and disciplinary societies.[1] He writes that we have learned a few things about the telos of the disciplines, but much remains to discover about the forces that control societies make us serve. What is clear is that a strategic shift in power relations is underway.

From: The Coils of a Serpent: Haptic Space and Control Societies – Wm. Bogard.

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“I work with a profound faith and energy in the found, everywhere and always to be found.”
– David Baptiste-Chirot

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“Hi Jean – to back up to your question about what is a ‘haptic’??

…I asked Leslie Simon, a poet and friend what did Charles Moore – the architect – mean by “Haptic”.

Charles Moore extended the definition of haptic to include how our bodies feel in a certain space, place. He’d love how you put it, I believe. The pulse and the received visual music. He thought it was a sort of sum total of all available senses.

I explaining to Leslie as what I mean by ‘haptic’ said:

By ‘haptic’ I just mean to draw the “pulse” of things by the way of senses – primiarly sounds that register then re-registering the sounds through my fingers. They are not ‘drawings’ in the formal sense of drawing an object in a visual, representative sense (as a chair or person). I am not looking at anything. And the pen moves every which way across the page. It’s a form of ‘deep hearing’ without imposing any formal frame or narrative, other than the margins at the edges of the space.
The unfolding piece, the making of it, becomes a kind of visual music.

It’s probably most influenced by the practice of meditation – the paying close attention part – to both my insides and outsides.”

— Stephen Vincent (8/8/07 correspondence)

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“…The universe is essentially a cold and lonely place. There appears to be an entropy of civilization; despite all social efforts, the gravity of time moves culture towards selfishness, destructiveness and cruelty. Almost any gesture to signal another, to welcome another (and all art is such), even a hateful or angry work (in the context of art) says: “you are not alone-we share an essential emotional humanness”; when so much of life’s message implies, oh yes indeed, you are, as an individual, quite powerless and isolated. Anyway, that’s how I’ve been thinking lately. On the other hand, deliberate “healing” and “therapy” and “communication” can feel patronizing and intrusive. What I love about art is that- since it is an inanimate object- it is just there; it has repose. Nevertheless, despite its stillness, the effort that produces it iinvariably originates from the body and mind of a person.”

– Nick Piombino
From a lengthy discussion about Misgivings on a Therapeutic Poetics, with Nicholas Manning, HERE.

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you fall into my skin

but fail once more to sleep
as you feel me write a new poem
by licking and biting it into your skin

–Eileen Tabios, “Enheduanna”
Ménage á Trois with the 21st Century

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