Isamu Noguchi, Mitosis, 1962.
(1) From Hoyoung’s Never Mind, translation my own:
“But why do you take hormones? There’s plenty of people who live without.” Because I want to be more ambiguous. Because I don’t want to be smoothly sectioned off.
“Why do you intentionally make your life so difficult?” Because that’s how I become more precise.
Which reminds me, as the weather warms, of Wallace Stevens’s description of a summer night: "an argentine abstraction approaching form and suddenly denying itself away. [...] an insolid billowing of the solid."
For reasons particular to myself, I find gender transition morbid in that everyday I am grieving, as well as preparing for and cataloguing the death of body parts and bodily functions, relationships, ideas, and memories. But the grief has given way to a liberating sense of disappointment that I am finally able to accept. I used to think people who quote that one line from Tokyo Story sounded trite but now I think it to myself often. Like realizing that you've been watching a terrible movie or a decent movie projected terribly, you're alerted to the fact that life "wasn't the movie of our dreams. It wasn't that total film we carried inside ourselves. That film we would have liked to make, or more secretly, the film we wanted to live." Eventually you get better at the art of walking out.
(2) I saw a 35mm print of Crash, then a few weeks later I watched The Shrouds:
Signifiers of humanity's proximity to death form the nucleus of sexual desire. To derive pleasure from signifiers requires a longing for meaning and an imagination. One has to be able to locate the rhyme between a dent and a thrust. One has to be perceptive enough to even want to see the rhyme and be at peace with the way its meaning settles. In this sense, Crash is about the evolution of an audience of voyeurs into attentive critics and burgeoning artists who start off as eager copycats, then lose the training wheels of their influences as their own tastes become more defined beyond a craving for countercultural rebellion.
The small group viewing of taped collisions recalls Cronenberg’s stories about the avant-garde screenings he attended as a university student, where he encountered films by Kenneth Anger and Ed Emshwiller. I am also thinking about Delany's writing on New York City porn theatres: the sexual tension that emerges among the gay audience because of the very absence of gay sex onscreen, the interclass contact that occurs in the face of class warfare through a shared pursuit of pleasure, the importance of this contact whether the sex is fulfilling or the relationships lasting—because life is short and people die. In both cases, the image surpasses the screen and corrupts the viewer's taste, jolts awake a sense of mortality.
The characters in Crash are startled by the pleasure that rushes in when the videotape breaks and begins to loop. The glitches form an erotic patchwork. This arousing rupture of time inspires a series of life-threatening turns against narrative, most bracingly depicted by cars speeding between rather than within the lanes and in the opposite direction. Recurring remarks among old men about viagra, scattered throughout Ozu's final films, leave behind the unspoken punchline that a few extra hours of sex brings you closer to the grave. There is wisdom, Ozu suggests, in knowing the worth of the risk.
*
I cried a lot watching The Shrouds but I accidentally deleted what I’d written about it. I thought, wow, this is the best thing I've written in awhile…but the next day I laughed about it because that’s actually not true. But it’s good to feel protective over your thoughts because they’re yours. Anyway, very briefly, it was something like this:
Love is the ultimate passage through which the body is fundamentally transformed.
[…] In love’s absence you superimpose the same scars on other torsos. You imagine every other “normative” body to be as malleable and transient.
[…] And you are left inconsolably lonely because love is real but ghosts are not.
(3)
There are times, I told Robert, swirling the ice in my glass, when a look or a shred of conversation from twenty years ago comes back to me with intensely concentrated ferocity, when a gesture or a sudden noise throws open a doorway at the end of a long narrow corridor of the faraway past, and then you can make out shapes and faces, forms, colors in the distance, at the threshold of recognition. What you really remember isn't what happened at a particular moment, I told Robert, but what you thought about yourself and the world you were living in back then, what you expected or dreamed that the future might be, how you interpreted reality at the time. What happened last week or last month, I said, sometimes settles into such remoteness you can't reclaim the smallest fraction of it, because it's still consistent with your picture of how things are. But once the picture changes, I said, the past stands out differently.
Gary Indiana, Gone Tomorrow
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Updates: I’ll be reading an excerpt of my writing on Ozu on June 12 as part of Crit Salon, hosted by Saffron Maeve, at Tranzac. ^.^