Gothic Animism - Paris-Montmartre

I’m finding myself in the city of lights (at least cultivating the illusions of finding something other..). Paris-Montmartre is my dwelling; here and there along the serpentine inroads and the vertical steps by steps heights one encounters strange shadows that take their dark pleasures by pale light - due to the exceptionally warm weather during the day, by evening, the steep heights of Montmartre have been shrouded in an ethereal mist which hovers the stony inroads with an aura from another world, a world of gothic amorphia, of gothic ladies whose sombre allures are mixed with a distinctly Diosneau touch, unlike the UK variety. The mist that veils and unveils the ambiguous nature of all feminine choreography, of the Gothic ladies whose depths of time « regards » are in the shades of red and black…the colours of infinity for Baudelaire….

The mist that obviates the distant traffic noises and dilates the senses to the stone outside… there is an animism to Paris even if it is all stone and glass, due to the light, the light that souls even stone, traffic and steel…

Epiphanies

James Joyce speaks of moments of revelation, beauties engorged with life:

“…the instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the aesthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure...”

Joyce describes these experiences of beauty, of beauties, as epiphanies: "a sudden spiritual manifestation... the most delicate and evanescent of moments". Epiphanies should be apprehended with extreme care, should they vanish for ever…

Italy…In the shimmering orange heat of this August evening I hear the crickets mingling with the distant echoes of urban noise whilst the smoke of an opium/hashish combo to strong to inhale pierces my lungs. I look beyond the balcony at the heat ridden city and back again within the yellow-orange obscurity, within the room occluded by mad gyrating fans (where)…a languid body exhausted by pleasure and pain slightly moves through breezy sheets of perfect white…all this is enough for an unforeseen pattern to emerge, nothing more, nothing less…an epiphany for an instant of eternity…"the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure"…this is "it"…pure Zen…

Gothic fascinations / 2 K

"The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn an Event".
Roland Barthes

The first thing my camera eye took in: cemeteries with their mournful statues and melodramatic epitaphs, junky squats riddled with graffiti, satanic pentagrams, wasted aluminium wraps, abandoned production sites, several “rave” spaces after the event, and last but not least, abandoned industrial sites/warehouses that still populate here and there the urban field of our sprawling cities…

Cemeteries, urban wastelands, warehouses, derelict spaces and squats: one could call them wastetopias, to borrow from Foucault’s anti-utopia notion of disjunctive spaces: Heterotopias. These wastetopias are my gothic fascination.

Whilst Foucault’s spaces are based on the hetero function of certain spaces in a grander social space, which are heterogeneous or other to the grander space in which they find themselves imbedded, my waste-spaces, are former spaces of life which have been laid or put to waste, “deathsized” so to speak. But Thanathos calls for Eros. The image of Eros framed within the urban frames of Death - the capturing of these two aesthetic forces in one form-image.

Kate K (or double K) had surged from various K Holes, and wanted to be sane again; can’t quite imagine why escaping from an dissociative anaesthetic would entail taking up the aesthetics of photography…maybe as she surmised, the photographic image is a safe and cool point: space and time do not move. A good excuse as any, I guess.

Of course the moving image (i.e. cinema) is drugged time all on to itself, as Gilles Deleuze purports to "argue". Cinema is time on drugs. As it turned out, we both hated cinema, we preferred the “real” thing (unlike uncle Gilles who preferred the sitting on your ass screen approach to life). The moving image, we both suspected, was, as all good Bergsonians know, a fiasco - the moving image does not really move, it’s made out of discrete stills!!!! And what double K needed, was exactly that, stills – to still her life. No more Ks would be added to her name. "Stills" to stop the K madness surfacing again; she had to stop the pull of the vortex K Hole from surging; for Alice was always waiting with her rabbits and Cheshire smiles to take her down to Kwonderland…what a naughty girl,, sweeet Alice…

When I first meet my K, she was adjusting her camera, not quite knowing what F stops meant, or what the fuck lens to use or not….“let’s stop the charade” I whispered….The order of things finally restored, the female principle has become muse. The White Goddess has not left our sunken world. Her frail frame would be framed.

She was a frail creature, whether by design or by intoxication she did not say, with sunken eyes, trembling lips and a whiter shade of pale skin…cute in a sort of wasted way. The contrast was from another world, behind the lens she was magic; she became more embodied, fuller and her frail limbs restored to a higher aura of life: in which7 the wasted looks combined with a hard lusciousness...that would have made even the angels weep of cum…

The camera eye followed her every move, and my eyes became possessed by an image from another world. Was this the same double K? Or I’m I on liquid K? The flashing flashes kept my questions at bay. I pursued her across wasted land,.. her poses were a tropical provocation to the derelicts around her. Her lips were pouting a hyper-Bardot aura of unbridled erosia amidst ruins of desperate desolation…Eros and Thanathos all in one images…

Triads

Technological environments as pure aesthetic engineering, trance-like states produced by electronics producing the most primeval effects of ancient rituals. Pleasure domes are to be engineered. Welcome to the gates of the moments of Eternity…

Spiritual masks implementing techno-carnivals, permitting wearer to assume another identity to transgress for a night the limits imposed by the work of matter…

The fascination for the aesthetic is with the form, not the content; but paradoxically it is the content that gives the form, not the other way round. Nietzsche/Kant: live the content of your life as if it were form, purely formal…

We search for the vectors of beauty…the illumination of bodies magnified into divinities lived in the sublimation of being…

The soul of the body

There's a fascination for things that do not exist in the material/conventional ways of the world, “regulative ideals” or “virtual events”, spiritualities such as: justice, community, eroticism, love, mysticism, intoxication, etc.

Filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni (the Blanchot and Camus of film) in his “beyond the clouds” quartet (four stories that have the theme of “im/possibility” haunting them from within) films the “im/possibility” that love, communication and eroticism are not of this world, but “are” at the interstices of the real and the imaginary.

Beautiful Ines Sastre in the foggy Italian town of Ferrara meets her love of all time, but only for one night; they refrain from making love. The male character (Silvano) performs a mime of caresses over Sastre’s half naked body as if to Platonise her body into a halo that will last into perfection. End of relation. And the male character leaves in the mist of the morning dawn.

A bodily Love so perfect it would not last a second of consummation; to carry on for another night, another day, would be to ruin and destroy - to refrain from the feverish embodiment of an “event” that could not possibly exist in the profane economic matter of things - an illusion born out of this world has no more chance to survive into reality than a mirage in the desert could be proven to be an oasis…

A Love so strong, a body so beautiful, that one cannot live “it”. By not actualising, what, by all regards is the strongest thing ever, they abstain from fulfilment, from fulfilling the event, and “win” by losing. Both partners in crime refrain from embodying a love that is too strong to survive into mediocre reality - paradoxically, all the stronger for not having been lived, for having never happed. To abstain is to preserve, a sacred caress without profanity: protected from the ravages of entropic actualisation, from the termite materialisms of actually living “it”. For not being equal to the event of their lives, for bodily recognising but not actualising or consummating the event, they fulfil another order: such is the temporal price of eternity.

But what a temptation to go back (in fact Silvano meets Sastre three years later) to actualise further and further that night, just a touch…just a touch to further caress the night into delirium…and all will be alright…if love is a drug, then we are all junkies, shooting up pure ideals, virtual crystallisations, in our, material far too material, veins…

The virtual preference of not actualising a physical lust, a psychic intoxication, a spirituality of mind and body (love) - what is in fact only a virtual idea (of the imagination?) - is almost never achieved in reality, we are too weak, so inevitably, as Oscar Wilde saysd “each man kills the thing he loves”.

But what if it was the other way round, as7 in the fear it would not work out, when in fact everything is in place to be one of the greatest actualities in existence. We “counter-actualise” the event. We ruin the actual with the apprehension that it could not possibly be anything that would last beyond a lustful kiss, and we move on, in our material ways.

An inversion like the Italian softcore film “l’anima del corpo” (“the soul of the body”, a Wittgenstein inversion: “the face is the soul of the Body”; to understand this is to apprehend the secret of the universe) in which an im/possible coupling attempts to exist, and in fact does exist: a beautiful twenty year old girl and a seventy year old feeble man (and talking about inversion, how come the other way round is not possible? it seems that even the event, spirit, has its limits…). Of course, the male character is not taken in by the erotic relationship; he knows that it is not possible. Money and other material interests are at play, as always, he repeatedly whispers…

But how can he resist (which he doesn’t) her “freely given” bodily gift? Why is she giving herself so freely? What’s in “it” for her? What does she want in exchange for her given youth? He’s so sure that she nothing but a whore, whoring after strange gods (economies of egos and deceits) that whilst they tumble in various erotic couplings, he becomes obsessed, not only by her youthful vitalism, which he sucks dry as if to invigorate his aging frame with new blood (she’s the vampire however, he’s convinced by that…) but in finding out that after all, her soul, her spirit, is only a simulacrum of eroticism, a simulation of orgasmic bliss without exchange…whore and only a whore, she will be found out to be just that…but of course, he never finds out…he cuts off the money…she comes back for more bodily ecstasies, and freer than ever…the more she fucks other men and women the more she comes back for him, freer than ever. She resists his every attempt of entrapment, all the traps designed to make her confess her simulacrum - her innocence is still intact after every chess move he makes.

On the chessboard of life, spirit is white and matter is black; but her white is never taken, his black matter loses every piece of evidence…the more he loses the more he becomes obsessed by her soul motives…

Is there a moral? Material scepticism destroys spiritual doubt. Maybe, in the end, he whispers, she may have been genuine after all…but it’s too late, he has poisoned the relation with matter. He has checkmated himself. Destroyed by not having faith in the event, he was not equal to the event that was actualised, he was not worthy of what happed to him, of the event that surged in him…for the body is the face of the soul, and he looked elsewhere, in thinking the soul somewhere secret, hidden away, separate from the body…

1 the event is not realised, even though the event has surged into the real; but it retains itself by not actualising itself. 2 the event has happed, but it is not recognised to78be the case. The event in both cases never happens…

How many times we spoil, desecrate and defile the event by over recognising “it”, over determining “it”, materialising “it” by wanting to embody “it” at all costs…

How many opportunities missed, how many potentials lost because we are too postmodern for our virtual heads and hearts to take the oblique ironies of things seriously…

Baudrillardage

Baudrillard is dead. The prophet of simulation is dead. But in the age of simulacrum and simulation, can one really die? Baudrillard is a mere image now, but was he (or we) ever more than an image shimmering in the desert of the real?

…because Baudrillard knows that nature is the first simulator of the simulacrum:

"Snow no longer falls from on high. It lands only at those venues designated as winter resorts" (Cool Memories).

…and that because theory has become inseparable from anything and everything, oh how sweet the days of alienation and critical distance…

"For us everything is predictable: we have extraordinary analytical means but no situation to analyse. We live theoretically well beyond our means: hence our deep melancholy" (The Transparency of Evil).

"Every event today is virtually inconsequential, open to all possible interpretations, none of which could determine its meaning" (Fatal Strategies)

….because:

"Popular fame is what we should all aspire to. Nothing will ever match the distracted gaze of the woman serving in the butcher’s who has seen you on television" (Cool Memories).

…because Baudrillard always believed in not believing in a world before the word, in the beginning was the word:

“As to whether language is the trace of the imperfection of the world, no story better demonstrates this than John's. Up until the age of 16, John, a happy and handsome youth, gifted in every sense, had never spoken. He had never uttered a single word until the day when, suddenly, at tea-time, he said: "I would like a little sugar." His ecstatic mother cried out: "But, John, you speak! Why didn't you ever say anything?" And John replied, "Until now, everything was perfect” (The Perfect Crime)

…because Schopenhauer’s all is will has become digital; the white ontology of boredom still remains inscribed in the screen eyes of our fading reflections…

“Stuck for hours on the motorway with his family, a tourist declares: `Well, you know, we're on holiday. Here or the beach, what does it matter?' The need to be nowhere - this is what drives the hordes out on to the roads. And nowhere means anywhere but home. It's the same with work and leisure: drudgery in the one place, drudgery in the other. The moment of freedom comes in moving from one drudgery to another. And if you go away, it isn't to wipe out the effects of the eight daily hours of forced labour, but to compensate for not being forced to work twenty-four hours a day, as the higher executives do - people who have no need of holidays” (Cool memories IV)

….because Baudrillard is Camus’ Sisyphus revisited for the mediatic age:

“Ants, too, must know that God is dead, since they engage in such frantic activity. Is it to avoid internal revolts and boredom that they have developed such a relent­less programme (not too different, perhaps, from the human race)? Have they developed a cult of the absurd or some crazed ritual for turning life and its mean­ing to their own perverse ends? Have they invented a perfect model of cloning, the only way of guaranteeing the eternity of a species and solving the problem of indi­vidual existence? A wonderful hypothesis, but how can we know? Let them speak, on walking around these ants, let them confess! What is their message? Yet they just go enormous distances to bring back things that are actually plentiful on the anthill (in this, too, they are not so different from the human race)” (Cool memories IV)

And last but not least, because Cioran is his bittersweet simulacrum, minus the either or choice between reality and illusion:

“Like the disabled child who sued his mother for not having worn her safety belt, when she was pregnant, in the crash which left him disabled, soon all children will be able to sue their parents for having brought them into the world” (Cool Memories IV)

Baudrillard for ever….we won’t miss you, you are the age...

Gorgeous A -Trance the world - (in 80 days)

She travels around the world, around all the trance festivals of the world: Fullmoon, Soulclipse, Solstice, Omni, Rainbow…Gorgeously curvaceous, beautifully precise in her manner, dressed in an impossible mix between the darkness shades of Goth and the kaleidoscopic colours of psychedelia…a psychedelic trance angel that wears Yves Saint Laurent, Opium and Gucci…all the more beautiful in77 that these logos of luxury and pretension will soon be ripped to pieces and soiled by lustful hands, dust and dancing bodies…An deep sea oriental goddess far too refined for the gyrating crusties surrounding her…a top-model who has finally escaped her gloss and make-up cage into the trance freedom of the open-air. A flesh made sculpture…if geometry had an origin she would be “it”…

She trance travels and pursues a worldly adventure of freedom and transgression. She encounters bodies that come in all races, shapes and sizes - from all over the world…seeking in tandem a hedonic transfiguration through the pills & thrills of dance, nature, artifice and chemical disunity.

Just image…imagine, she provokingly whispers…a life purely lived on rhythm, light, and chemical intensity – time and time again, only to get higher and higher on the vibes of life itself. Her eyes sparkle with excitement as she tells me her story…She only lives for the music of the mind, the lust of bodies and the dance of the soul…trance, Goa trance, dark trance, psytrance…all around the world, the same vibe, the same dance, the same beat…Rio de Janeiro, LA, Madrid, Amsterdam, Bombay, Tokyo, etc. secret and not so secret festivals are located and zoomed in by eagle eye Amelia, or “Gorgeous A”, as she is nicknamed by her party network…

How does she finance such a lavish and intensive life style? I ask…she didn’t need to follow up on my question; the mischievous look gave it all away. I guess that one thing that being beauty graced has over mere mortals is the actuality of a life lived in pure immanence, a life of pure immanence. Her life fuels her/self; she is all she needs, she lives off herself: no matter, no work - there is no distance between what you fell and what you need.

She pays her dues in fluids of semen and milk. Amelia is indifferent to the female or male side of things: young or old, mothers to be or fathers on the run…it’s all flux and fluids for her…She is the very embodiment of Pierre Klossowski’s philosophical fantasy of “living money”; following in footsteps of the “passion utopia” of Charles Fourier, Klossowski imagined a “payment” made out of libidinal sensations; impersonal transactions of what bodies could give and receive: a kind of “universal prostitution” without the commodity of money to enact the exchange.

Amelia is her own capital, so she can afford the best of what capitalism has to offer: global trance.

Amelia does “it” in secret however. Only an elected few will ever know what sweet transgressions lurk behind those emerald sparkling eyes of hers…always keen to get down and dirty with the beats, the beasts and the lasers…

As if her life was not intense enough, like a Wildeian Lord Henry, I further whisper sweet transgressions into Amelia/Dorian not so bright mind. After all, I got all theory she could possibly ask for: the Batailles, Foucaults, Deleuzes, and the Artauds etc. She voraciously opens up to these sweet lullabies…I entice her for more confessions whilst implanting here and there, more mind fields for her to transgress, more limits to absolve and dissolve… As psychedelic guru John Lilly says in the “centre of the cyclone”:

“In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits”.

A game with the limitless cosmos, a gamble she seems to play to win…

The Sublime Viscosity of the Milky Way

Aesthetics is – in direct opposition to the hedonic and the ascetic...

Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics: the sublime is contrasted with beauty. Beauty = harmony (and proportion) of form, and is within the non-conceptual realm of the re/presentable; whilst the sublime is the formless, it is excess and infinity: i.e. magnitude (“mathematical sublime”) and power (“dynamic sublime”).

“All of this”, for Kant, means that the aesthetics of the sublime is the “subjective” effect of trying to re/present what exceeds the comprehensive faculties of the mind. A thundering gap between apprehension and comprehension - which gives rise to the sublime aesthetic experience: a double-bind aporia: simultaneously made out of the necessary and hopeless effort of the “imagination” to estimate the magnitude/power of the sublime object (e.g. storm, war, pyramids, etc...) - paradoxically, this lacuna or hiatus is felt as: aesthetic pleasure.

But what are the post/modern objects of the sublime? What is sublime nowadays?

One object stands out among the many, the most sublime of all post/modern objects: Bukkake…

Bukkake is a sublime object, because of its excessive, disproportionate, explosive, and of course, volcanic modality.

Mainstream western video porn has always been obsessed with “the” ejaculating on the face of woman after coitus - the so called “money shot”. The whole affair seems pretty tame, and dare I say, quite boring, but not for the Japanese who/ seem to have a semen fetish to end all fetishes. In their usual fashion of taking western “technological values” (i.e. happy go lucky nihilism) to the extreme, they have taken the western porn’ “money shot” to the limit; hence, the pearly birth of Bukkake (recopied back into the west with a lucrative niche of its own).

According to some pseudo legend, Bukkake is an old Japanese tradition of punishment (the porn world loves tradition: “no ejaculation without tradition”…), in which women were punished for their “disrespect” by being isolated in some rundown location, and then sequentially ejaculated on by a group of on cuming males, (who// take it in turn to aim and project - usually the female face (Emmanuel Levinas would not be surprised) is the principle aim of the penal parade…

DVD Japan is taking this venerable tradition of semen ingrata to the limit; and when one takes any phenomenon, even the most trivial and banal, to the limit, it topples over into sublimity. Sublime excess; for which the imagination struggles to re/present “with” and “in” an adequate idea/frame: a sublime object is an object in constant need of, but perpetually failing, re/presentation:

Bukkake is no ordinary (beautiful) semen shower, the (female) object is not washing in “it” but bathing in “it”, or should I say, flowing in “it”? The female night is taken by a whiter shade of pale...

Flows of upon flows of molten lava hit the flesh, from head to toe. Flow pearls of thick viscosity transmogrify what was merely beautiful into the sublime formless of the disproportionate and the immense...

The thick viscous whiter than white transparently fusions the mundane skin beneath with an otherworldly ivory glow. However one tries to look at the gang-bang dream-shower scene, it is “almost” impossible to re/present within an adequate idea of rational perception - the sheer and banal quantity has been enlarged into an (aesthetic) quality unbeknown to the dollar signs participants...

The (aesthetic) spectator loses all grounds of comprehension and the aesthetic effect of the sublime takes over - at least if one is not lustfully or vicariously “participating” oneself. As Kant said, the aesthetic state is defined by its disinterestedness and contemplative enacting. One should keep all hands off, if one wants to experience the viscous sublime...