The heart is to tear apart somebody else’s heart. Key becomes a weapon, each conquest a lesson.
A quality to leave, a weakness to grief.
11.13.2010
5.29.2010
WHY ARE YOU CRYING
WHY ARE YOU CRYING
Language and the senses/The sensuous language
What words do you want to hear? Are they the ones that make you cry or put you to sleep? Language easily fails in communicating. Language is a function of understanding, employing the rational and reasonable in you. It is built up by semiotics; it represents what we already know in our physical exterior world. An ideal language would speak our hearts, the void of our loneliness. How do we communicate what is inside of us when language fails us?
I am looking at the sensuous language and how it is used in film and theatre, working with a set that is dramatically concentrated both in time and space. To touch an audience, how would one build a successful set? What will be communicated and what would be left out?
Film and theatre, for which I would like to find an adequate name, already use modalities of language we use in real life, although it is generally concentrated to images/text and sound. It therefore employs the senses of vision, considered the most important sense in a historical aspect, and hearing. A touch is always represented in front of you, and deals with the complexity and difficulty of reproducing a highly intimate and personal experience. Did the reproduction in front of your eyes of him leaving you make you cry, or the very event, which happened to you? What is the history of the senses and do they have a good reputation? Mark M. Smith explores the history of the senses in Sensuous History.
Film, contrary to theatre, works along linear lines. It is not able to show different layers to the viewer simultaneously, as it would be possible on a stage. In order to ensure the viewer, as she will always look for meaning, you need to present an image before another one to which she later remembers and can refer to. Text, linear as well, and together with images, creates an expectation and therefore a build-up with excitement, wishes and fears. It fully participates the senses. Julia Kristeva talks about neo-realism aiming at the real, often presented in montages of representations in Sensuoury history. But how do the blind see and how do the deaf hear? Is text better percepted in sound as voice? Writer and poet Tan Lin explores this matter of linearity of truth and its expectations in his texts and art works.
This type of touch has been examined by a few of the greatest philosophers of our time. Deleuze and Guattari speak about affect. As does Michel Serres in The Five Senses: a philosophy of mingled bodies, JJ. Gibson in The senses considered as perceptual systems and furthermore D. W. Hamlyn in Sensation and Perception. A history of the philosophy of perception. And you will always find inspiration in George Bataille's Visions of excess and My mother among others.
Someone’s work that has been very helpful and inspirational is Robert Wilson, beautifully put together in The theatre of Robert Wilson by Arthur Holmberg, although there are more books to read on him. His collaborations with Hans-Peter Kuhn regarding performance and sound I find very intriguing. The fact that they are working with theatre is a good way of analyzing what I will have to add or leave behind in film. Wilson creates confusion; I want to create reassurance, safety. But of course, one factor is in need of its opposite. This problematic I hope to find solutions to in Repressed spaces: The poetics of agoraphobia by Paul Carter.
What I hope to find a solution to create is change, by all these means of modalities. This, according to me and van Gennep, Victor Turner and Kristeva (who talks about Chora) among others, is a function of the liminal. The only place you are able to cry.
4.30.2010
CRY
We're selfish when we cry
and to say it's what we worry about
when our beloved does
Drying my tear
is another victory for you,
I fear
There's a whole from when we were young
that we must keep filling with lies
beautiful ones
Lie to me dear
for what you don't say
it holds me near
Honesty
will never sound clear to me
I hold you hostage for every word you say
You will never get away
4.20.2010
3.21.2010
YOU, EMBODIED
What is it that people cannot explain, when they come out from a cinema? Not knowing what moved them; the music, what was said or how the characters moved on the screen, is confusing, because there is not a single answer to it. Changing requires various factors, to make their job, but it is inevitably your responsibility to allow it to happen. A successful change is the one when you come out with new eyes, experiencing the world in a new fashion. This change, or touch, is not just for well-educated or intellectual people, on the contrary, it is those who let go of their rational thinking who gain most. Ingmar Bergman describes it as putting yourself in a mode of imagination rather than the one of intellect. He says he listens musically to a piece of theatre, being either drama or film, because it entails a rhythm. [1]
The haptic could not survive by itself though, being able to touch you, it is relying on other circumstances for you to set up or find. A space has to work with you as well as serve you; a liminal place has the qualities of this. The theatre and drama are good examples of suitable settings for change, based on time and space they exist only in a certain time and in a certain place. But what hopefully comes out of it, goes far beyond this setting. The viewer would let the characters or what is happening in front of him represent something out of his own life – let it all play an embodied model for himself.
In this essay, I will declare for what the haptic is to me, in relation to all the great thinkers who in some way explored this matter. In doing so, I will present the settings in which this change would allow itself to happen, and what depends on it. As I am dealing with the haptic, which is emotions most of all, I will not be able to resist discussing the nature of the human both embracing and neglecting the sides of changing. I will try to make out the complications furthermore concerning these settings, as they are restricted to time and space. Because as soon as we put “walls” around these areas of settings, both physically and theoretically, we say that I belong and you do not. Another great part of and influence of the haptic and the science and history of touch is distance, which I will evaluate closer. Eroticism is one of the areas that handle this to a great extent, in fact what its centre is made out of, alongside the notion of the opposite. It really comes down to what Laura U. Marks describes it as coming close, pulling away and coming up close again. [2]
The Haptic
The haptic has been looked at, analyzed and applied first of all on the Egyptian art, and its opposite; optical, on the classical Greek art and the late Roman art. Through art historians such as Alois Riegl, Adolf von Hildebrand and Wilhelm Wörringer the research was meant to clarify and distinguish the meanings of both terms, and thus find out what these art movements were all about. They found out that the haptic, also mentioned as near and objective, was a way of seeing, not only with the eye but with the whole body. The optic, was looking at objects from a distance, also known as subjective and tactile. It is easy to get confused between all these notions about something rather abstract. But they were all looking at how art was long ago, not yet infused by the digital era. The art works were sculptures, in form of pottery or other three-dimensional objects, paintings or even architecture. I, myself, have never really been able to find anything that moved me in these areas of art; the haptic is inevitable above all individual. I am not in a position to say whether it depends on how I was raised not looking at art works (although, I cannot tell you if that only would have worked to its advantage either) or a fear to embrace it in order to retain the difference towards those people. I am undeniable a child of my time, memorizing things I have seen and emotions I have gone through, and furthermore recognizing them when they pass my way again.
Reality is looking out from a car window. Music is memory. In search of who I want to be, changing is travelling. Life is writing, a process.
Since the haptic allows you to see inside of yourself, triggered by something exterior, it has already everything to do with your experiences and memories. It reminds me of how I felt that time, and what it felt like feeling it. It reminds me of you leaving me, and that I am alone with everything we had. The haptic is as much a violent visceral feeling, like a stab in your heart, as a smooth one reminding you of something pleasant. A mode of vision, indeed. For me, a tactile touch can almost never be as overwhelming as the same one on the screen, reproduced in front of my own eyes. There, it has the benefits of being accompanied by music or voices talking to you, in a way you did not hear it when you experienced it live. In real life, you were too close, so this is the distance to yourself, viewable to you. “Photography”, a similar art to motion pictures, “is not the image of reality, but one of the means that allow it to be described by rendering it visible.” [3]
In search of who I want to be, changing is travelling. Life is writing, a process. Laura Marks explains it in the way that “You cannot help but change in the process of interacting.” [4]
The haptic = Touch = Changing = Liminal + Immediacy + Distance
The Liminal and the Settings
When you go to see a piece of theatre, meaning drama, music or film, you have already set yourself in a mode of emotion, rather than one of will. This is to enable you to use your imagination for you to take in the impressions you will be given. These impressions will be received directly through your senses into your memories, and furthermore connect with all the parts inside of you, instead of rationalizing them with your conscious. This should work alongside the setting you are in, only enhancing the feeling of self-dissolving and being unaware of both yourself and people around you.
Safe, enough to cry
Safe, enough to lie
A cinema for example, is a dark space, suitable to percept impressions to touch – and thus change you. It is a space to cry in, to let go of yourself; leaving enough space empty inside for the senses to absorb something new, and come out as new. This, could one call a liminal space. It does not have direct contact with the reality or concrete surroundings, neither yourself in all your right. It is the place you are in, more as a state of mind, before having let go of your old self – yet about to enter your new one. This is a great moment. Of course, there are complications concerning changing. With changing being inevitable that someone or something else has the power over you in one of your weakest moments, and to “give up that you are right” [5] , there is suddenly a shame in it. It is of highest importance that this setting and mode you are in treats you with great delicacy. To be safe, I rank as one of the top liminal factors. Where do I find safety? I feel safe when I feel like I can cry. We wait to until we get home, or lying on our bed – we cry ourselves to sleep. Sleeping as a ritual is liminal. “When you came home, you started to cry, when you woke up, you wanted to die.” [6]
Yes, I know what you mean
When we find ourselves in a safe place, being it internal or external, we require something more in order to be touched. Yet again, it is a responsibility us picture-makers have, being it still or moving, and should treat with great respect towards the viewer, and we could make the most of touching someone. To see myself, and furthermore realize and change, I need to be seen. How can a picture-maker ensure his viewer of this? Something that can be applied to all humans, yet being highly individual, is to let someone know you know what he or she means. This gives great comfort and re-assurance – and thus builds up a self-confidence and strength for the viewer enabling her or him to change. “I suggest that spectatorship is a ‘scene’ in which pleasure, responsibility and trust are negotiated between viewer and film.” [7]
Translate me, and set me free
Re-locate me, to where I’m bleeding to be
Translate me into colours, or your favourite words
So you can relate to me, when I fly with the birds
“(Robert Wilson) once told an actor to read the text as if he didn’t understand language. There’s so much going on in a line of Shakespeare, that if the actor colours the voice too much, the audience loses too many colours.” [8] Interpreting is indeed translating something into your own colours. A relationship involves respect and trust, also in a relationship between image and viewer. This should result in a freedom for the viewer to translate in his or her own fashion. What is communicated in a successful piece of haptic theatre? To me, changing is moving. I need to be put in a mode of travelling, as a visual symbol for me leaving something behind and moving towards something else. But it does not necessarily mean moving fast, a mind in its most beautiful state – change, deserves for it to go smooth, as if you were enjoying a great meal, and thus it should be relaxing and boring. Writer Tan Lin takes this notion to the extent that he is happy for his readers to fall asleep reading his work. [9]
There is so much, to learn
Far more, when we yearn
“Life is served by the ability to come close, pull away, and coming up close again.” [11]
The haptic could not survive by itself though, being able to touch you, it is relying on other circumstances for you to set up or find. A space has to work with you as well as serve you; a liminal place has the qualities of this. The theatre and drama are good examples of suitable settings for change, based on time and space they exist only in a certain time and in a certain place. But what hopefully comes out of it, goes far beyond this setting. The viewer would let the characters or what is happening in front of him represent something out of his own life – let it all play an embodied model for himself.
In this essay, I will declare for what the haptic is to me, in relation to all the great thinkers who in some way explored this matter. In doing so, I will present the settings in which this change would allow itself to happen, and what depends on it. As I am dealing with the haptic, which is emotions most of all, I will not be able to resist discussing the nature of the human both embracing and neglecting the sides of changing. I will try to make out the complications furthermore concerning these settings, as they are restricted to time and space. Because as soon as we put “walls” around these areas of settings, both physically and theoretically, we say that I belong and you do not. Another great part of and influence of the haptic and the science and history of touch is distance, which I will evaluate closer. Eroticism is one of the areas that handle this to a great extent, in fact what its centre is made out of, alongside the notion of the opposite. It really comes down to what Laura U. Marks describes it as coming close, pulling away and coming up close again. [2]
The Haptic
The haptic has been looked at, analyzed and applied first of all on the Egyptian art, and its opposite; optical, on the classical Greek art and the late Roman art. Through art historians such as Alois Riegl, Adolf von Hildebrand and Wilhelm Wörringer the research was meant to clarify and distinguish the meanings of both terms, and thus find out what these art movements were all about. They found out that the haptic, also mentioned as near and objective, was a way of seeing, not only with the eye but with the whole body. The optic, was looking at objects from a distance, also known as subjective and tactile. It is easy to get confused between all these notions about something rather abstract. But they were all looking at how art was long ago, not yet infused by the digital era. The art works were sculptures, in form of pottery or other three-dimensional objects, paintings or even architecture. I, myself, have never really been able to find anything that moved me in these areas of art; the haptic is inevitable above all individual. I am not in a position to say whether it depends on how I was raised not looking at art works (although, I cannot tell you if that only would have worked to its advantage either) or a fear to embrace it in order to retain the difference towards those people. I am undeniable a child of my time, memorizing things I have seen and emotions I have gone through, and furthermore recognizing them when they pass my way again.
Reality is looking out from a car window. Music is memory. In search of who I want to be, changing is travelling. Life is writing, a process.
Since the haptic allows you to see inside of yourself, triggered by something exterior, it has already everything to do with your experiences and memories. It reminds me of how I felt that time, and what it felt like feeling it. It reminds me of you leaving me, and that I am alone with everything we had. The haptic is as much a violent visceral feeling, like a stab in your heart, as a smooth one reminding you of something pleasant. A mode of vision, indeed. For me, a tactile touch can almost never be as overwhelming as the same one on the screen, reproduced in front of my own eyes. There, it has the benefits of being accompanied by music or voices talking to you, in a way you did not hear it when you experienced it live. In real life, you were too close, so this is the distance to yourself, viewable to you. “Photography”, a similar art to motion pictures, “is not the image of reality, but one of the means that allow it to be described by rendering it visible.” [3]
In search of who I want to be, changing is travelling. Life is writing, a process. Laura Marks explains it in the way that “You cannot help but change in the process of interacting.” [4]
The haptic = Touch = Changing = Liminal + Immediacy + Distance
The Liminal and the Settings
When you go to see a piece of theatre, meaning drama, music or film, you have already set yourself in a mode of emotion, rather than one of will. This is to enable you to use your imagination for you to take in the impressions you will be given. These impressions will be received directly through your senses into your memories, and furthermore connect with all the parts inside of you, instead of rationalizing them with your conscious. This should work alongside the setting you are in, only enhancing the feeling of self-dissolving and being unaware of both yourself and people around you.
Safe, enough to cry
Safe, enough to lie
A cinema for example, is a dark space, suitable to percept impressions to touch – and thus change you. It is a space to cry in, to let go of yourself; leaving enough space empty inside for the senses to absorb something new, and come out as new. This, could one call a liminal space. It does not have direct contact with the reality or concrete surroundings, neither yourself in all your right. It is the place you are in, more as a state of mind, before having let go of your old self – yet about to enter your new one. This is a great moment. Of course, there are complications concerning changing. With changing being inevitable that someone or something else has the power over you in one of your weakest moments, and to “give up that you are right” [5] , there is suddenly a shame in it. It is of highest importance that this setting and mode you are in treats you with great delicacy. To be safe, I rank as one of the top liminal factors. Where do I find safety? I feel safe when I feel like I can cry. We wait to until we get home, or lying on our bed – we cry ourselves to sleep. Sleeping as a ritual is liminal. “When you came home, you started to cry, when you woke up, you wanted to die.” [6]
[6] As sung by Brun, A. featuring Matters, S. Little Lights, Duets.
Yes, I know what you mean
When we find ourselves in a safe place, being it internal or external, we require something more in order to be touched. Yet again, it is a responsibility us picture-makers have, being it still or moving, and should treat with great respect towards the viewer, and we could make the most of touching someone. To see myself, and furthermore realize and change, I need to be seen. How can a picture-maker ensure his viewer of this? Something that can be applied to all humans, yet being highly individual, is to let someone know you know what he or she means. This gives great comfort and re-assurance – and thus builds up a self-confidence and strength for the viewer enabling her or him to change. “I suggest that spectatorship is a ‘scene’ in which pleasure, responsibility and trust are negotiated between viewer and film.” [7]
Translate me, and set me free
Re-locate me, to where I’m bleeding to be
Translate me into colours, or your favourite words
So you can relate to me, when I fly with the birds
“(Robert Wilson) once told an actor to read the text as if he didn’t understand language. There’s so much going on in a line of Shakespeare, that if the actor colours the voice too much, the audience loses too many colours.” [8] Interpreting is indeed translating something into your own colours. A relationship involves respect and trust, also in a relationship between image and viewer. This should result in a freedom for the viewer to translate in his or her own fashion. What is communicated in a successful piece of haptic theatre? To me, changing is moving. I need to be put in a mode of travelling, as a visual symbol for me leaving something behind and moving towards something else. But it does not necessarily mean moving fast, a mind in its most beautiful state – change, deserves for it to go smooth, as if you were enjoying a great meal, and thus it should be relaxing and boring. Writer Tan Lin takes this notion to the extent that he is happy for his readers to fall asleep reading his work. [9]
This should preferably be accompanied by a ‘travelling’ piece of sound. Something with a rhythm, be it breathing, a piano or a choir reaching for some kind of ecstasy. “Where is life the most beautiful? Life is the most beautiful when you’re in a plane or a car going to the place you think is the most beautiful.” [10]
There is so much, to learn
Far more, when we yearn
“Life is served by the ability to come close, pull away, and coming up close again.” [11]
Life is indeed made up of opposite events that are necessary it seems. Too much of what you desire, even if you get it, is going to somehow reduce that desire. Sophie Zelmani describes it accurately: “I want to wake up and find you, I want to wake up and find you, but if it’s true I won’t continue to.” [12]
In order to make this distinction far more stressed, which is often necessary in theatre as it exist in a concentrated form of time, these opposites have to be clear. The distance is only made visible by an immediate nearness.
- - -
Bibliography list:
Holmberg, A. (1996) The Theatre of Robert Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marks, Laura U. (2002) Sensuous theory and multisnesory media. Minneapolis: University of the Minnesota Press.
Delaporte, F. (2008) Anatomy of the Passions. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Anatomie de Passions, 2003, Presses Universitaires de France.
In conversation with Jim Brooke to Anna Sundström. (10.11.09)
Brun, A., featuring Matters, S. (2005) Little Lights. Duets.
Deleuze, G., Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The Athlone Press London, 1988. (Milles Plateaux, volume 2 of Capitalisme et Schizoprenie, Les Edition Minuit, Paris, 1980.)
Iversen, M. (1993) Alois Riegl, art history and theory. Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Interview with Pennsound and Lin, T. (2008) Philadelphia.
Interview with Scavullo, F. and Weld, T. as published in: Scavullo, F. (1976) On Beauty. New York: Random House.
Zelmani, S. (2005) Truth, Love Affair.
My favourite thing.
I don’t really know anything about my favourite thing. But I do really have one, or even more. I am defending it, as it was someone offending something I cant really think about, but that is really precious to me. It could be a person that I’m in love with. When I was younger and it was easier to fall in love, I sometimes couldn’t remember who it was. I really tried to come up with who it could be, what he looked like and what we said if we even had spoken to each other. Maybe it didn’t matter so much who it was, only the fact that I felt in love. Nowadays I hear people being really certain about what their favourite thing is, and it is mostly just one or two so it is easier to tell and for them to watch them and defend them and look after them in general. I didn’t have to look after them since I didn’t really know what they were from the beginning. I don’t know my favourite thing by heart. Maybe because I have a lot of them. Or maybe because unconsciously I see them as a sign of weakness. If it was a thing, and if I was a child, not the child I used to be though, it might have been a toy pet.
My favourite word is a word I don’t really use a lot. If I even know it. Would I recognize it then? By the gentle sound it possesses and the light feeling it leaves you with. Or just a word that describes how the hair lays on the girl you wish you were in high school.
I hear people being really certain about what their favourite thing is, and it makes me nervous.
To hear your favourite words but not to utter them. Or to see them on a screen.
- My room is a field and my mouth, containing all things I don’t favour, I’m afraid of having them close to me.
- I lie to all of them.
3.20.2010
Measures
Measuring my worth around you
Wer're just a man and a woman too
I can't see why you have to choose
I'm just afraid that it's me you'll lose
We'll measure it all in time, in time, in time
When someone's left
and it's all mine
I'm always left
with what's mine
As long as I stay with you
and remember; I'm under you
The power it lies within
forgetting and letting no one in
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