Total Sex, or, Eye to Eye
'The perception of nature is a sort of dance'
-Simone Weil, dead French Hegelian
'O body swayed to music, O brightening glance
How can we know the dancer from the dance?'
-W.B. Yeats, dead Irish poet
'Does the body rule the mind, or does the mind rule the body?'
-Stephen Morrissey, singer of The Smiths
---------------------------------------------
Dancing With Myself - A Play in One Act
Act One - Umsturtz der kopernikanischen Lehre: die Erde als Ur-Arche bewegt sich nicht
SCENE and SYNOPSIS: In some hovel in Golgotha two losers scribble out Ian Curtis wishlists. Once finished, each shoves the paper into his mouth and moans and grunts only before myopically running into the walls on unsteady morphine-soaked legs. Anosognosia has made one of each of their arms like a long cold snake, and just as Frankenstein or frogs' legs, electrodes that have been stabbed into the polar ends of their muscles cause them to twitch and spazz. Their goal is to dance, and through repressing their habitual bodies they interact, but the persistence of memory brings both to their final conclusion.
Me: "I saw you from across the kitchen. I was wondering if you wanted to dance."
Myself: "Ok. Can I put a record on?"
Me: "Sure. "
Myself leaves the kitchen and sits in front of the stereo in the living room and puts on 'Total Sex' by Whitehouse. The noise makes the walls start to melt. Me walks out of the kitchen and into the hallway, checking his part in the mirror on the wall before joining Myself in the living room. Myself turns to Me and sets a drink down on an old cork coaster. Me reaches into his pockets and takes out all his loose change (21 pennies), a picture of a fly-rod, some lint, and a slender pink orchid and arranges them on the table in the shape of a Rhinocerous. Myself picks himself up off the floor, removes his cuff-links, his suspenders, his gaiters, his wig, his wing-tips, and his bowtie and looks Me in the eye. Me looks at Myself. A staring match. The eye sees the eye. Something happens.
Myself (taking out a switchblade from an unseen crevice): "So you wanna dance, motherfucker? What the fuck are you looking at?"
Me: "Not much, bitch."
Myself lunges at Me, but Me dodges, sustaining only a tiny knick to his elbow. A scuffle ensues, and the knife is accidentally stabbed into the melting drywall, where it too begins to melt.
Me: "So you wanna play, fatboy? I never knew you were so fat and retarded."
Myself: "Get real, fucknut. I can't believe that you can survive the night without your lungs being crushed by your huge bulk."
Suddenly, a brace of pistols appears on the table next to Myself's drink. We both dash for them. Face to face, pistols pointed simultaneously at one another's temples, Me and Myself gaze upon each other one last time. The triggers are pulled, the bodies collapse, and a huge jet of black blood gushes up and out of our heads like a merry fountain, like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket. Splatters of suet and flakes of scab have speckled the cottony clouds and I gaze at them as I walk home in the sun thinking about the 'naturalicher Weltbegriff' and the 'lebenswelt'.
FIN
DESTINATION: BLOOD!
"Could you think of anything more perverse than a multiple-personality disordered person killing himself? You'd have to try to fuck your own mind or something. BTW, pretentious quotes are for assholes. Get real, fucknut." --Eds
-Simone Weil, dead French Hegelian
'O body swayed to music, O brightening glance
How can we know the dancer from the dance?'
-W.B. Yeats, dead Irish poet
'Does the body rule the mind, or does the mind rule the body?'
-Stephen Morrissey, singer of The Smiths
---------------------------------------------
Dancing With Myself - A Play in One Act
Act One - Umsturtz der kopernikanischen Lehre: die Erde als Ur-Arche bewegt sich nicht
SCENE and SYNOPSIS: In some hovel in Golgotha two losers scribble out Ian Curtis wishlists. Once finished, each shoves the paper into his mouth and moans and grunts only before myopically running into the walls on unsteady morphine-soaked legs. Anosognosia has made one of each of their arms like a long cold snake, and just as Frankenstein or frogs' legs, electrodes that have been stabbed into the polar ends of their muscles cause them to twitch and spazz. Their goal is to dance, and through repressing their habitual bodies they interact, but the persistence of memory brings both to their final conclusion.
Me: "I saw you from across the kitchen. I was wondering if you wanted to dance."
Myself: "Ok. Can I put a record on?"
Me: "Sure. "
Myself leaves the kitchen and sits in front of the stereo in the living room and puts on 'Total Sex' by Whitehouse. The noise makes the walls start to melt. Me walks out of the kitchen and into the hallway, checking his part in the mirror on the wall before joining Myself in the living room. Myself turns to Me and sets a drink down on an old cork coaster. Me reaches into his pockets and takes out all his loose change (21 pennies), a picture of a fly-rod, some lint, and a slender pink orchid and arranges them on the table in the shape of a Rhinocerous. Myself picks himself up off the floor, removes his cuff-links, his suspenders, his gaiters, his wig, his wing-tips, and his bowtie and looks Me in the eye. Me looks at Myself. A staring match. The eye sees the eye. Something happens.
Myself (taking out a switchblade from an unseen crevice): "So you wanna dance, motherfucker? What the fuck are you looking at?"
Me: "Not much, bitch."
Myself lunges at Me, but Me dodges, sustaining only a tiny knick to his elbow. A scuffle ensues, and the knife is accidentally stabbed into the melting drywall, where it too begins to melt.
Me: "So you wanna play, fatboy? I never knew you were so fat and retarded."
Myself: "Get real, fucknut. I can't believe that you can survive the night without your lungs being crushed by your huge bulk."
Suddenly, a brace of pistols appears on the table next to Myself's drink. We both dash for them. Face to face, pistols pointed simultaneously at one another's temples, Me and Myself gaze upon each other one last time. The triggers are pulled, the bodies collapse, and a huge jet of black blood gushes up and out of our heads like a merry fountain, like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket. Splatters of suet and flakes of scab have speckled the cottony clouds and I gaze at them as I walk home in the sun thinking about the 'naturalicher Weltbegriff' and the 'lebenswelt'.
FIN
DESTINATION: BLOOD!
"Could you think of anything more perverse than a multiple-personality disordered person killing himself? You'd have to try to fuck your own mind or something. BTW, pretentious quotes are for assholes. Get real, fucknut." --Eds
posted by Esoteric Clique at 11:50 PM
5 Comments:
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Paul your offering was not my favorite. To say it is some of the best writing ever seen would certainly be a stretch. It does have a certain Bloodness to it but in time the reader becomes jaded of this singular approach and yearns for something else. I for one would certainly like to see you use your powers for good - something more upbeat, and bouncy, and la, la, la, and phun. We all know of the darkness that is why we seek the light.
As mentioned in a previous post it was wrong of me to encourage writing of this sort. Only if it is understood as a example of where one might go once lead astray is it appropriate.
As far as the phenomenology of perception and philosophy, I gave that all up long ago. I do espouse to Lemma i which states that a does not equal a, but as to all the rest I leave them to others to do with what they will.
I would be interested in why you thought this piece was so good? To base anything on what I might think would certainly be wrong.
Enjoy your day in a million ways,
D
A fan of pastiche and an admirer of the traditional of post-Heideggerian (Husserlian?) genetic phenomenology, Blood decided to combine the two here in a mind boggling work that blends the distinctions between the mind and the body, tries to usurp the Cartesian 'cogito' a la Merleau-Ponty, and ultimately bestows merit upon itself in its intentional infusing (confusing?) of the existential-phenomenological philosophical tradition with the drama and realism of southern gothicism -- there is an important implicit violence that emerges when the perceiving body perceives itself, a violence that conjures the maddening haze and heat of a dry September or the inevitable gush of pent-up black blood at a lynching in the dying light of August. The marriage of Faulkner and phenomenology is uncanny, and the dramatic twist opens up the possibility of a whole new approach vis-a-vis the local semoisis suggested in the semiotics of performance and theater -- there is a suggestion that at each performance of the play, each individual event, the body will gaze upon itself again (for the first time) and disappear in an original heretofore unseen manner. Bravo, Blood -- subjective metaphysics are indeed dead, and your self-analysis reaffirms the reuiniting of man with his Being. Bravo.
Perhaps I would have just called the piece Dancing and originally named the characters something else, leaving the Me/Myself discovery until latter in the progression. Since I am into d&s – dumb and stupid – I suspect I might have missed a significant clue to the mystery given that I don’t do German. But the thing that really put me off the scent was –
Me: "So you wanna play, fatboy? I never knew you were so fat and retarded."
Myself: "Get real, fucknut. I can't believe that you can survive the night without your lungs being crushed by your huge bulk." –
Almost anything would have been better.
As for your etiology of the work I take exception to – “there is an important implicit violence that emerges when the perceiving body perceives itself”. Without first establishing this as a universal your discourse lacks virility. My own reflections on violence associated with self awareness suggestions that this condition would most likely occur in one with an extreme obsessive personality disorder.
I am still waiting for something more upbeat, and bouncy, and la,la,la, and phun,
D
Post a Comment
<< Home