Welcome to David Wojnarowicz Week

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes genetics isn’t enough. Sometimes genetics isn’t enough and even incest can only extend genetics a tiny bit. I wish our fathers did have fantasmic knowledge/experience machines that could inject their knowledge/experience into us. There are so many ways to fuck a boy.

 

 

Welcome to David Wojnarowicz Week, which is a private rather than public holiday, so you can celebrate it, you can observe it, whenever you choose, though, for me, its generally the second week of February.

 

 

Whatever is most sad is most beautiful. So this is the week to work against sadness and beauty. Whatever is most sad is most beautiful, until or unless it becomes too aggressive, too wounding and the beauty is crushed, as in the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby."

 

 

 

It is not clear whether the blood on the leaves comes from some outside source and is merely an external drip, or whether it comes from inside the tree, pulled up from the blood-soaked earth, a kind of rejected sap.

 

I want to gain an overview of the entire human and animal community. To know all their fundamental proclivities, wishes, ideals — and to reduce them to simple precepts. With these precepts at hand, I will develop myself until I become thoroughly, endlessly pleasing. At last, without losing this universal love, I will reveal my imminent spites and meannesses. I will become the only sinner that is not roasted. I will have defrauded the entire human and animal community. Defrauded, but also deepened, enriched.

 

 

You know, Nietzsche was right when he said that never had more been demanded of living creatures than when dry land appeared. Dry land really is the beginning of our troubles. The expulsion from Eden was really a myth; the prelapsarian world was aquatic.

 

 

It is not quite correct to say that plankton is the most content species, for plankton is not a species. Plankton is not defined by phylogenic or taxonomic classification. In this way, it escapes having a name pinned to it. They cannot swim but drift suspended; their names float away.

 

Once desire is separated from motility, one is truly free.

 

The so-called “paradox of the plankton” is that they flout the competitive exclusion principle. When two species compete for the same resource, one will be driven to extinction. While scientists have a range of theories for solving this “paradox,” they have missed the most obvious. When names float away and desire is separated from motility, there is no more competition. Plankton is the most contented species; it is suspended in itself; its own endless, structureless nutrient bath.

 

Fifty years ago Deleuze and Guatarri turned from tree-thought to rhizome-thought. Now it is time to turn from rhizome-thought to plankton-thought.

 

Plankton-thinking: a suspension, form without structure, without points of entry or departure, pure flow, all immanence, no lines of flight, no need for memory, nothing to remember.

 

 

 

 

Nothing ever happens on a Wednesday, but we must pretend otherwise. Wednesday is the best day for dropping in on friends, as it is the least expected day for socializing, or anything. You can always catch them off-guard. At least the first few times. After that, you have to move on, forge new acquaintances to interrogate and delight.

 

 

It looks like Doug isn’t home, though. There isn’t any response. That’s okay. If Doug’s not home, we can always make a pilgrimage to his other home, his spiritual abode: the bush by the lake in which he tried to kill himself. I’m not sure where it is exactly, but it must be around here. It was in the fall, I think, so there would have been more leaves. It was late at night, a Friday, he took a bunch of pills, a bunch of booze and crawled into a bush with a novel, Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star, waiting to die. But his boyfriend found him and dragged him back — dragged him back to this particular world. This was five or six years ago already, so it was the old translation of Hour of the Star. It would have been an untimely death as the new translation was already being prepared. So, if we compare the old and new translations we will find that their difference, that which has been remaindered, is equal to the potential that lies between life and death.

 

This is really the sort of task that textual analysis was made for.

 

 

I'm spending today going over old audio effects records, not for any particular reason, they just sooth me.

 

I’m disturbed by the use of foleyed audio in otherwise documentary film. I would much prefer that the audio for films be documentary and we just make up the images. After all, the world is a cartoon in which images are free to roam phantasmically. Not so with sounds. It is much more difficult to make sounds up.

 

 

Foley: two guys stand in a little closet manipulating rattles and bits of my metal. They look through the little window and crumple paper as — on the large, silent screen — villages burn.

 

 

 

Monday through Thursday are writing days, but Friday is reserved for making charts and diagrams, mapping things out. Visual information is so much more succinct than all those words that just call forth endless, other words.

 

 

Is the actor happy? Well, it depends on the play. Also, I guess, the audience. Is all the world a stage? No, not at all. A stage is a very particular thing. In the world, the world of predators and randomly moving objects, binocular vision is very useful, but performers really don’t need it. They do fine with one weak eye as all they must do is find their mark and orient themselves to the spotlight. It seems like a triangulation — spotlight, stage mark, Cyclops eye — but eye and mark cannot be separated. They form a unity, a body. This body is oriented to the spotlight. There is a psychic pull that joins groin to spot.

 

For quadrupeds and feral humans, its sun/anus, attached to the earth by hands and feet, a kind of box of ass presenting solar. For humans, it is sun/head, earth feet. For actors, groin to eternal fake sun, an ungrounded existence, reduced vision. They have a smaller, but potentially richer — or at least more gratifying — world.