Goodbye

Last day of DMAC and I'm glad that I've put together a good "draft" of my Website. It will require ongoing development and tweaking, but at least it's off to a good start. At the very least, I think I'm closer to a "thesis" (which is a word that sounds odd in this context...):

What we see in Cocteau's work is a sense, simultaneously, of queerness's unknowability and of the necessity of connecting with the unknowable queer. Multimodality, then, gestures toward a queerness that can't quite be captured and must remain ungraspable in its queerness while also putting into motion multiple texts, genres, and sense experiences that invite connectivity with that unknowable queerness.

We'll see how that works out. Or not.

Thanks to everyone at DMAC who was so very helpful--Claire and Cheryl in particular, who taught me about Dreamweaver.

I

the theoretical question manifesting as an obsession/compulsion

How might multimodality figure queerness?

Even more specifically, how might multimodality embody the queer in dynamic dimensions? We can read, see, hear, perhaps even touch the queer—and have it touch us through multiple senses, potentially even interactively.

Of course, there is no one experience of the queer.

And there can be—and should not be—one way to figure the multiple experiences of the queer.

How, then, will we proceed?

How indeed!!

∅⊕⊗

∅⊕⊗

Making Strange [two stanzas]

In theory, we approach the world dreaming in black and white, and some will call this life: poets, dreamers, others of compact imagination. I’m thinking of Whitman, who wants us to expand our souls till the finely beaten filament of the stuff that is us stretches to infinity: an aerobics of spirit, stretch up, up and away until everything is consumed: life, death, man, child, woman, and the pimply bag boy you didn’t think you wanted at first. There is nothing to spare in this infinity. And when the last atom of life rolls itself into a ball for one last fling, one last day in the sun, we see how unutterably small everything has become: sucked in, the belt pulled tight, everyone comfy, ready to go. This is our death, uh, life—our filament pulled taut, the spirit stretched. We are everything sucked in. Compact. Imagine.

In the evening the tenderness of loneliness, a soft tread of something you forgot to do in childhood. Peace murmurs below any comprehension while your husband catches the shrieks of crows and twists their tortured song into his own music. And your own…breath that twitches your body an itching in the skull. The mirror, its double, the kiss you give yourself when no one .is looking. The drool on your pillow, the leftover dream. In the morning burning coffee in the kitchen and the need for this day to be exactly like the day before and nothing like it at all. After all, there is only one question: what transforms the forms of experience already received as form? Part of you is bored. Who will remove…the--Who will remove…[missing stanza?][and?] Sometimes you let the bullet come home to give the rise out of everything

An Unknowable Other

reflecting on the incommensurability of living in a world in which the other is never really known

photo by Jackie Rhodes

< > ≈ ∞

Daybreak [after Nietzsche in an early English translation]

...

I will tell you
I have come back

whoever proceeds on his own path meets nobody
he goes his own way

Has he still a path before him?
Is he really moving at all?

I went down
undermining
a long privation of light and air

One easily unlearns
how to hold one’s tongue

Does it not seem
as if some faith
were leading him on?

But, after all
why must we proclaim so loudly
and with such intensity
what we are
what we want
what we do not want

Let us look at this

Let us proclaim it
as if among ourselves
in so low a tone
that all the world fails to hear

Let us say it slowly

The leisurely art of the goldsmith
an art which must carry out slow, fine work
more desirable than ever before

We step to one side
We leave ourselves spare moments

to grow silent
to become slow

profoundly, attentively, prudently
with the doors afar
with delicate fingers and eyes

My patient friends

learn to read me well

✗✘☐☑☒✆☎☏✉☠☢☣

...

The White Web

Started to learn Dreamweaver today. What an amazing program. I'm delighted that I'm finding it pretty intuitive. It's going to make posssible my work on The White Web, my exploration of Cocteau, queerness, and multimodality. Here's a bit from the "intro":

How might multimodality figure queerness?

Of course, multimodal composing, the use of multiple media (text, image, video, sound) to figure queerness need not imply or forward any necessary ideological view, value, or assumption. Such valences are still part of both the conscious and the unconscious prerogative of the composer. But I do believe that exploring queerness through multimodality—that is, taking advantage of increasingly rich ways of figuring and composing—may help us develop richer insights into the experience of the queer, the possibilities of multimodal composing, and the possibilities (and limits) of figuring the queer.

Even more specifically, how might multimodality embody the queer in dynamic dimensions? We can read, see, hear, perhaps even touch the queer—and have it touch us through multiple senses, potentially even interactively.

Of course, there is no one experience of the queer.

And there can be—and should not be—one way to figure the multiple experiences of the queer.

How, then, will we proceed?

How indeed!!

Cocteau Riffs

Tuesday at DMAC and [still] thinking about Cocteau, queerness, and multimodality. Finding out that sometimes my thinking is better expressed in [or I know better what I'm actually thinking in] my short little crappy videos.

In Love of the Beast, for instance, how everything seems to turn away from meaning, from knowability, from being known. But you must love the beast. Isn't queerness kinda like that? Queer is [or at least used to be] the realm of the unknowable.

I've been sifting such thoughts through Cocteau's La belle et la bête. [Clips from La belle et la bête are readily available on YouTube, such as the following clip of Belle entering the Beast’s castle for the first time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQtmFglneko]

We can read B&B in a number of ways, in a number of sexual ways. A little bit of Freudian imagination might figure the Beast as the id who needs the social taming of the Beauty to restore ego balance. Along these lines, the rampant materialism of the boyfriend and other family members itself is disciplined as potentially destructive id energy. Pushing further, the story seems to valorize a particularly heterosexual solution to unwieldy desire. The beast must be loved by the beauty, having left her father (to whom she seemed overly attached) to usher both of them into mature intimacy and sexuality. And indeed, they both “ascend” from the natural world at the end of the film, overcoming their potentially baser desires and connections.

Such readings are not necessarily wrong, but I believe such a glossing of the filmic text misses a key dimension of the film. Specifically, Belle, the Beauty, must come to love the Beast, even as she does not know him. She cannot know him. But the bête can only be free if she loves him without knowing him.

As such, the film offers what I would call a queer fantasy. Despite the seeming heterosexuality (Belle is a woman and the Beast seems male), B&B shows us how someone must come to love a completely alien being—what is being is this? what kind of beast is he?—in order to make a space for ascendant liberation. Love precedes knowledge. In fact, love must exist in the absence of knowledge for it to be liberatory.

The beast is a queer figure in the sense that he is not only not normal, but abnormal, monstrous, frightening, and ultimately unknowable.

Back to DMAC/Cocteau

Got back to OSU today to rejoin the DMAC group. Been thinking a LOT about Cocteau, who is one of the principle figures I am working with right now. I think of Cocteau as a MAJOR founding figure in multimodality, though I think I may be alone in that assessment. Here's some relevant thinking I did earlier today on this, getting to the leading question for which I don't have much of an answer yet:

Jean Cocteau was among the most influential mid-20th century French artists. A poet, novelist, playwright, artist, and filmmaker, Cocteau also wrote scenarios for some of the most famous ballets of the 20th century (Parade, music by Erik Satie) and libretti for works by famous composers (Oedipus Rex, music by Stravinsky).

Cocteau worked throughout his life in multiple media, exploring and experimenting ceaselessly, seeing everything he did as “composing,” or making art. This embrace of what we would today call multimodal composing is perhaps best seen in his films, some of which are considered among the most important in early French film. Cocteau was also relatively open about his homosexuality, and there are several interesting ways in which his queerness finds expression in his work. Most notably, The White Paper is a frank treatment of homophobia and contains several of Cocteau’s original drawings.

Cocteau’s work thus raises the question of how queerness is represented or figured multimodally.

More on this later...

Fringe Festival

I have come home to Cincinnati for a few days to attend performances at our local Fringe Festival with Mack. Mack got us "Full Frontal Passes," which allows us to see anything we want--nearly 150 shows, installations, films, etc. I get antsy after 2-3 shows in a row. Fringe, though interesting, is still a pretty "passive" experience. You sit and watch, bitch or clap. Passive. But we did have an interesting experience early Friday evening. En route to one of the shows, a couple of late middle-aged white guys passed us, muttering the word "homosexual" under their collective breaths. About a block later, a group of teen black girls skipped past us shouting "GAY GAY GAY!" Neither Mack nor I had encountered such behavior in a while, though we have experienced it before (but mostly in the conservative hellhole known as Colorado Springs--for me, at least. Used to live there--long story.) Anyway, I inevitably started thinking about the digital dimensions of our lives, and how easy it is to *block* homophobic interlopers. Harder to do IRL. It also occured to me that this is an experience that STRAIGHTS just don't have. If they do, I'd like to know about it. But I doubt it. I believe this is one of the dimensions of radical difference, incomensurate difference between queers and straights, though some overlap is certainly imaginable. I agree with Dider Eribon in *Insult & the Making of the Gay Self*--the direct experience of homophobia is a key marker in the construction of a self-conscious gay identity. Does the digital allow us, as queers, to escape such constructions? Might it allow us to turn the tables, as it were, in the creation of queer spaces that would be pleasantly heterophobic? Might it invite straights to experience the kinds of (potentially) empathy-inducing discriminations that often (still) characterize so many queer lives? I know I can't share with straights the fear-induced adrenaline flush experienced when walking down the street and being called out as queer... I wonder if Jason Bruffy, the delicious Producing Director of the Cincy Fringe Festival, experienced some homophobia (either his own or that of others) when posing for this wonderful photo to promote Fringe? Note how, in the poster, everyone turns away from the naked man. The naked STRAIGHT man. Not everyone turns away from the queer. Sometimes they turn TO the queer...

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