Without ceasing to meditate during the journey, and in a kind of state of self-disgust, I very soon reached the conclusion that it was this identity which made it possible for every man to be loved neither more nor less than every other, and that it is possible for even the most loathsome appearance to be loved, that is, to be cared for and recognized–cherished.

Jean Genet What remains of a Rembrandt torn into four equal pieces and flushed down the toilet

‘I have abandoned my child, I have abandoned my child, I have abandoned my boy’, hollers Daniel ‘oh-how-delightfully-mis-fitting-his-last-name-is-for-the-incoming-cavalcade-of-words’ Plainview A.K.A. Daniel Day-Lewis, who not that long ago still kept pretending on the silver screen to make a living. Contrary to his explosive admission, I have no regrets that I have become deaf to letters, to the wild and restlessly reshuffling ABCs sprouting from the Deleuzian Baroque house metaphor, to my own concept of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture, to novels which constituted its hypnotic, oftentimes convoluted entrails, its obfuscated crystal-clear interior, its rapaciously enrapturing floor plan – I have none. I have lost my way before. Every single time it was worth it. And I know it will be so in the future. Because losing is always a mode of finding another type of wandering, meandering, zigzagging. It’s taking five to take a hike. But some things just have to be SEEN THROUGH. They simply have to.

I’ve had a rather unexpected conversation the other day with someone who is very fond of giving space. As I conversed with this Space Giver, let’s call him that, about movies which are of no relevance here, he struck upon a peculiar note, or, rather, a theme. Inexplicable rules was it, and what it entails fits like a glove to the current situation with my Swan Opera. In the century overly fecund with unhealthy and straightforwardly damaging overexplicity, subduing oneself to unnameable rules feels surprisingly refreshing. Do it just because. ‘Just because’ has this air of innocuous innocence of children playing around in a kinder garden backyard in a somewhat dilly-dally-ish, somewhat dilettant-ish manner. But I digress…

Anyway, I donned myself in my grossly undersized and slightly shabby clothes of “just because”. I put on my “just because” sweatpants, my “just because” t-shirt, a pair of my “just because” sneakers, and went to see the Mansion of Litera(p)ture again. And upon seeing it, momentarily I knew the Space Giver was right – the mansion needed to be seen through. THAT was the inexplicable rule. Without hesitation, I came closer and reached for the door knob. The main entrance was locked. I looked around the porch and its immediate vicinity for some useful utensil to overcome this untoward nuisance. Fortunately, or, rather, precautiously, I had a jemmy on me, just in case, and with its invaluable aid I broke and entered the premises again.

The Litera(p)ture of Ontological Passion

So where were we? Oh yeah, we stepped in and out of an “unmansionable” intrusion, humbly bloated with a post-existential gloom. Before that we had climbed the staircase up, down and sideways, fondled and fumbled within the obsessive confines of the crawlspace, wined and dined in the desirable fusion of kitchen and home cinema, and, last but not least, we sauntered around the enchanting vestibule. Not being all too keen on falling into the same rabbit hole of referencing our previous route in total, I’ll try to outdo myself and keep this unrelenting necessity as concise and precise as possible.

Our last purely litera(p)turing pit stop was a staircase a ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky summoned up with his deontologized diary. He went sideways into somewhere where every duty, obligation and imperative is deprived of its “should-y” nature, where every phenomenon is exempt of its haughty ontological necessity to boast about that it is (‘I AM,’ they holler, just like Daniel Day-Plainview does, ‘I HAVE BEEN,’ as if they expected some prize for having the ontological ability not to cease temporospatially, ‘I WILL BE,’ oh, knock it off already, will you!), where the relation of a human being to reality shuts up at last, and it is possible to hear the ever so elusive sound of silence and the ensuing ever so subtle roar of infinities unfolding, frothing, and fuming incessantly. Nijinsky checks out his new dance moves on an infinitesimally elusive and exclusive dance floor, metaphysically uncharted territory, topologically indefinable dimension. And he is full of one of the most bifurcated and “ambidexterously” ambiguous feelings one is capable of having – limerence. Besotted with the reality he surreptitiously tries to encapsulate on a couple of hastily penned pages, he almost forgoes all that made him connected with the world before. He is able to hear the silence, and feels voracious drive towards the mute plane of infatuation with the infinite, yet he stays firmly grounded in its finite apparitions. He hasn’t scissored the upper floor of his Baroque house by “unfolding” the frequency and intensity of his own dark and minute perceptions. It (the upper floor) simply has been redraped according to its in-itself topology preconfigured by the incompossibility, itself bordering on being impossible. That’s why he seems to be simultaneously secluded within himself and abject from another variance or mode of folding within the reality (the said ‘variance’ taken here as another human being like his wife, daughter, etc.), yet he exudes the notion of having been permeated with the world’s essence, resembling a whirlwind inside a vortex. Deleuze writes:

Such are the monads, or Leibniz’s Selves, automata, each of which draws from its depths the entire world and handles its relations with the outside or with others as an uncoiling of the mechanism of its own spring, of its own prearranged spontaneity. Monads have to be conceived as dancing. But the dance is the Baroque dance, in which the dancers are automata: there we have an entire “pathos of distance,” like the invisible distance between two monads (space); the meeting of them becomes a parade, or development, of their respective spontaneities insofar as their distance is upheld.

So, if Nijinsky, our incompossible dancing monad, remains convergently ‘imbibed’ by the limerence towards everything, although having redraped his upper floor beyond conceivable recognition, and therefore manifesting within the world in a rather incomprehensible way, resembling a spaced out yet tangible phantom (a ghost ballooning from the world-membrane, pullulating as yet another multi-fold of highly indiscernible knots, loops and manifolds), where does the Clarice Lispector’s protagonist situates herself, then? How is she able to surpass Nijinsky on our lovely spectrum, and in what part of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture do we end up trailing along her passion?

The Monadic Calamity

In order to reorient ourselves on the floor plan of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture, to which we have not yet fully grown accustomed, we have to apply the Baroque house allegory on ourselves, or to put it simply, go back to basics. Why don’t we (re)turn to Deleuze again:

It is the upper floor that has no windows. It is a dark room or chamber decorated only with a stretched canvas “diversified by folds,” as if it were a living dermis. Placed on an opaque canvas, these folds, cords or springs represents an innate form of knowledge, but when solicited by matter they move into action. Matter triggers “vibrations or oscillations” at the lower extremity of the cords, through the intermediary of “some little openings” that exist on the lower level. Leibniz constructs a great Baroque montage that moves between the lower floor, pierced with windows, and the upper floor, blind and closed, but on the other hand resonating as if it were a musical salon translating the visible movements below into the sounds above.

Since the Baroque house has two stories, however abstract or even body-horror-ish they might look, it also has the fold as a border which separates the upper floor from the lower, stretching, snaking, wreathing according to two different orders. The fold coils, unfurls, and is generally subjected to all sorts of inflection planes. It is a den from which a sort of two-way convergent piping or, as Deleuze puts it, “cords or springs” sprout forth, constituting and decorating both floors. Every oscillation in the lower floor generates the resonance in the draperies in the upper. Now, imagine this: what would happen, if one of the cords from the lower floor oscillated so wildly that it shattered a part of the fold, cracking open the upper floor? Or better yet, what if it pierced the latter, and barged in with its obtrusive air of total ontological de-calibration? That’s exactly what happened to the protagonist of The Passion According to G.H.

Lispector, the Passionate Inspector of the Metaphysical

Constraining myself just the way I like it, just like contorted boa constrictor crushing a careless capybara for dinner, plot-wise, I am going to give you only what is unavoidable. The nameless protagonist of Lispector’s tour de force, who is known only by her initials, G.H., is a rather well-to-do sculptress who lives on the last floor of an apartment complex in a finely furnished penthouse. A refined woman, a woman of all human predicaments (here, taken as broadly as possible), she crosses the backrooms of her apartment to take care of the room vacated by the recently dismissed maid. Stumbled by the barren condition of the chamber – with blinding, sun-soaked, whitewashed walls, one of them being doodled with speculative and crude outlines, Keith Haring style, of a man, a woman and a dog – her complete set of beliefs and ontological constitution is soon to be turned upside down by an enormous cockroach which is unintentionally almost released from a dilapidated wardrobe…

The interaction, altercation, the silent encounter with the cockroach wrecks G.H. so profoundly that she is forced to redecorate the perforated upper floor of her Baroque house. Like houses of two not so diligent pigs, her entire worldview crumbles and is blown down by a big bad wolf of fierce, totally unexpected, raw metaphysics, completely incommensurable with everything she has believed up to the point of fateful confrontation with the shattering crustacean. A metaphysics of such a pervasive intensity, raw nakedness and insurmountable power as to strip down all cultural and/or civilizational accretions, causing them to dwindle and wither in the liberating pureness of the profound ontological blast. Or rather a particular dimension of the metaphysics we all intuitively know and, under the skin, sense that it’s true, but which is obstinately obscured by its blatant counterpart with the tendencies to overshadow and to take the credit for what it simply shouldn’t. Frankly, so penetrating is the shock the cockroach induces in G.H. that she reaches a certain point, where the restrictive plane, the hindering boundary between phenomenal and noumenal–itself a profoundly peculiar space, where the being allegedly acquires “translative” powers to turn the bifurcated incompatibility of externality and internality into seemingly comprehensive and corresponding mutuality–reveals its true nature. The primordial ferocity with which pure life non-differentiates itself within the world exempt of all conceptual contaminations and misappropriated appearances, unfolds itself as a neutrality full of unquenchable thirst to depersonalize, desist, and distance itself from everything to the point of reaching non-being. For only on this level of non-existence, absolutely full of life, miraculously pure and existentially barren, G.H. claims one may fully and truly experience what passion towards everything genuinely means. Taking with a pinch of salt the literalness with which she names the clichéd three-lettered wholeness of the passion through which she becomes a oneness with everything, nothing and the ominously clandestine raw modes of in-betweenness, Lispector dives into infinity, perhaps not headfirst per se, but her dive has divine repercussions which simultaneously cannot be called that, for the words bear the stigma of a past full of complacent timidity of an everyday well-organized life. For life, as very few know it, is extremely close to (and ‘with’, too) infinity. Sometimes, perhaps, it is all too close. And when it opens, there is a gasping gaping and a spasmodic panting which both leave our gobs agape. Oh, but am I all but foreshadowing again?

Squeaky Clean Bathroom in a Shaken Attic

So, where did we end up in the Mansion of Lite(r)apture? The room is dark, only a frail smudge of light pierces its interior as if a stray ray of unknown luminescence mimicked the décor of the dreaded drapes, still in shock from their recent defilement. The meager illumination suffices for us to see we are in the bathroom. It must have unfolded right there, at the moment of impact. Its walls made of glass bricks, mocking the orificial nature of the lower floor, invoke images of a certain inaptitude of rules that must have redefined themselves in order to create surfaces which allow seeing through. The bathroom fittings and piping, threaded wildly throughout the files, ascertain the whole room must have been (re)decorated hastily, as if adapting strenuously, an invasive bubble within the hapless realm of punctured enclosure. Its bizarre aura of authenticity and falseness intermingled together in an unprecipitable solution convinces us it touches the true essence of life. The quintessence of it, in itself, unexpectedly as welcoming as possible.

For it is bathroom, no matter how otherworldly furnished or refurbished would it be, where we are most likely to shed our masks of dealing with life, the world and ourselves. How many of you have ever read a book while having a bath? Soaked inside an intentionally frothy and fragrant multiverse of escapism, you shed your outer selves and plunge into the opposite of you, forgetting about one ontology in favor of the other, conjured up by the text. Or, on the other hand, how many of you have ever been so absorbed in a so-called “moment of truth” in front of the mirror–staring into the abyss all too “post-” it didn’t want to stare back anymore–so much so you jumped on the other side of yourselves into the pure absence of every “I” you could have at that moment constituted? It is the silent triumph of the overshadowed, clandestine realm of metaphysics. It is how the Bathroom attempts to regain its intrinsic ability to reverberate and resonate with the oscillations from the different parts of the Mansion. But it forgets, just as we forget while donned in a foamy “sumo suit” of being somewhere else, or gone through the looking glass of our quasi-enlightenments. It was born out of the jolly nature of contingency, a fortunate aberration. The fold – which serves as a ceaseless beginning and fateless end to the unbreakable continuity of the feeling-spectrum – we surf upon while relocating ourselves on the premises of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture must have gotten an ontological hiccup. Just as the infinitely “loveful” neutrality, which has revealed its ineffable nature before G.H., is tautologically taut, immovable, unshakable, and, thus, impalpable neither by word nor any concept (yet Lispector is able to touch upon it somehow, using this abominable all-too-human invention like prose), so is the quietude of our realization that, surprisingly, this bathroom is already different.

Exit through the Toilet Drain Pipe

Surprisingly, this bathroom is already different. It is sterile, insipid, susceptible to perfect anonymity, as if belonging (to) “somewhere” else. The shelves are empty, the drains aren’t clogged with a stinky gooey mass made of rotting strands of hair and a defoliated outer skin. There is no piece of used dental floss lying on the rim of the wash basin. Water splashes, which precipitated into nameless constellations of semi-translucent matte grey-ish blotches, are nowhere to be seen, neither on a mirror nor on the files in its immediate vicinity. A little trash can containing the holy trinity of hygiene disposability- tampons, cotton buds, and makeup remover pads with the accompanying wrappings – still awaits its first meal. The bathroom is so unbearably pristine, unfathomably spotless that the parts of its interior lose their ability to uphold the meaning of concepts which designate them. It is dirty with pure unrecognizability. The unglued names drop on the floor and smash, their “re-lettered” shards and splinters creating a thick layer of grit, as if a bunch of stray cats have frolicked in a litter box for hours without end. The bathroom’s ultimate unCORDiality begins to show. The interior “re-drapes” itself, the fold origamis into another pit-stop within a series of differences and repetitions. Or perhaps the purely monadic upper floor is reclaiming its territory, unabashedly conquered by the ontology of a different metaphysical “flavor” beforehand? The piercing with which the Bathroom was able to unfold, if only for a brief, fleeting passing of time, a tacky tic tac toe of ticklish tick-tocking, just like G.H.’s passionate revelation, wasn’t MEANT to last forever, just as our impressions on a feeling-spectrum aren’t. Among the pulses liquefying and coagulating, throngs of creases crescendoing, throes of the fold transubstantiating, we look around, half-astounded, half-enthralled, for an exit. We reach for the door and open it. Nothing in there, just more fabrics of the upper floor flapping around, fluttering as if to flee from the ever so fallible fantasm. The only way out is to flush ourselves out. With the bathroom walls folding onto us, we take a deep breath and jump headfirst into the toilet, just in time to pull the cord, mid-air, dangling from the elevated cistern right above the bowl. The thunderous roar of whirlpool within a whirl within a vortex of pure passion towards the litera(p)ture drowns out our heartbeat…

Amonne Purity

I don’t mind the slight disorder.

Talking Heads

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Dance first, think later. That’s the natural order.

Samuel Beckett

The Litera(p)ture of Ontological Limerence

The intermission has ended. We are back inside the Mansion of Litera(p)ture and our tour continues. So far we have sauntered around the enchanting Vestibule, the desirable Kitchen/Home Cinema and the obsessive Crawlspace. Where are we headed now? Are we going to snoop around on the first floor a little bit more or should we better go upstairs? Fact of the matter is, we don’t have much choice. The Mansion has decided for us. Or perhaps we, having been slurped back by its voracious interior, simply hit the newel post with our knee. Upon finding the banister, we begin to wonder: what kind of stairs have we just bumped into? Or better yet, stairs leading where?

Why three dates in the title and who the hell was Vaslav Nijinsky you may ask. Well, answering the second question first, Nijinsky was a ballet dancer and choreographer active in the second half of the 1900s and 1910s who revolutionized the ballet and made huge impact on its modern form. Hailed back in the day as “The God of Dance”, he was a principal dancer for the Ballets Russes founded in 1907 by Sergei Diaghilev, a then world-famous Russian impresario. Moving on to the first question, the first date tells us when the diary was actually written, the second – when heavily abridged version (although the more precise term here would be “completely butchered”) was released by Nijinsky’s Hungarian wife Romola de Pulszky. The third one is the year the unabridged version was finally published. But enough of this biographical mumbo jumbo. For Nijinsky’s diary, the result of a six-week outburst of writing, at first glance grants us once in a lifetime opportunity to witness a descent into madness of a genuinely brilliant mind. At second, though, allows us to construct something truly extraordinary and remarkable – a staircase leading to the upper floor of our Mansion of Litera(p)ture.

The Metaphysical Shift

The unavoidable feature of any series of texts with a “common denominator” if you will, is the necessity to contextualize by repetitions. Making sour faces about this unfortunate prospect, I promise to encapsulate and recap the following repetition as tightly and lightly as possible. In my last text before the Intermission, I interpreted the two main characters from Crash – Ballard and Vaughan – as demonadized obsessed conjurers of reality full of lascivious technological desires, mainly intermingling sex with physical deformities sustained from car accidents. The said reality was so separate that it prevented anyone form stepping in to participate, unless you yourself were obsessed (with the same or at least similar objects of your dark desire). The two men succumbed to their minute and dark perceptions and shut themselves off from the rest of the world as thoroughly as it was virtually possible. Or so it seemed, for Nijinsky pushes it even further, totally unintentionally of course. Allow me to quote monsieur Deleuze:

(…)we have seen that the world was a unique, infinitely infinite, converging series, and that each monad expressed it in its entirety, even though it clearly expressed only one portion of the series. But, rightly, the clear region of a monad is extended in the clear portion of another, and in a same monad the clear portion is prolonged infinitely into the obscure zones, since each monad expresses the entire world. (…) That is the very condition of “compossibility,” in a manner of reconstituting over and again one and the same, infinitely infinite, converging series, The World, made of all series, its curvature having a unique variable.

This “reconstitution” or, rather, its alternative – remodeling – is our key concept here. For Nijinsky’s “clear region” is not only far from being extended “in the clear portion of another monad” (turning compossibility into incompossibility or even impossibility in the process), but is most definitely withering away, coiling upon itself, getting minuscule with every second going by. The darkness prevails, canceling the converging series down to the last infinitesimal. The rambling style of Nijinsky’s diary – with its short, barren, almost primer-like syntax, loaded with repetitions and contradictions (some of them utterly brilliant, full of insightful sensitivity, only pretend to be paradoxical by nature) regarding his life, wife and her relatives, key politicians of his era (Georges Clemenceau, Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George), his turbulent relationship with Diaghilev and several other members of artistic society – seems like a passage leading towards something beyond incompossibility. Where else should one go, when everything that remains is nothing? And what about this whole alternative remodeling?

The dance-in Staircase leading…where?

As a kid a had this recurring dream. I was playing in front of my block of flats on a see-saw or swing when out of the sudden a stentorian voice coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time announced if I don’t get back to my apartment, something bad will happen. Then, a 10 to 0 countdown commenced, and the time was dethroned in favor of his slower bullet “nephew”, Matrix or Max Payne style. Most of the times, I managed to be back in my apartment on time (which caused me to wake up). However, on four or five occasions I didn’t. In hindsight, these were one of the most off-the-rocker experiences I have ever had in my life. All the geometry was altered (the squares were round and the triangles had trapezoidal shapes (please don’t ask how it was even possible, because I don’t know), gravity had different properties (it repelled and its repetitiveness was inconsistent), as well as all the ontological notions about me as a particular human being, with such and such personal records, history, etc., were completely erased. It seemed as though I was not only thrown into a different mode of reality, but also the feral countdown has eradicated me as a particular human being and substituted with someone else (simultaneously, I didn’t feel as a swapped individual, everything seemed unchanged). To this day I can vividly remember Escher-like situations, during which going upstairs lead you downstairs, or better yet – sidestairs (don’t ask, just imagine!), jumping didn’t result in landing (although it didn’t resemble short-term weightlessness either), and entering various apartments (including my own) ended in handling a disgruntlement among baffled neighbors who were fuming over some estranged strange kid, most likely a youngster thief, who didn’t think twice about breaking and entering. When I finally reached my apartment, my parents didn’t recognize me. Then, at one point, after a bout of vivid adventures which had taken place on the staircase (a different one each time – a teleportation to Venice where an ominous cloud of pigeons loomed over the city, a confrontation with a slightly shorter cousin of the Slender Man, etc.), I simply succumbed to a sinking feeling and burst out of the dream back into the wake.

Why am I boring you with this lengthy reminiscence? Because Nijinsky’s state seems almost as if he has gone somewhere sidestairs. Literally. Yet, due to some unknown or indefinable factor, which escapes particular as well as general metaphysical credibility, he seems perfectly OK with himself and his perception of the world. He seems engaged in its being with whole of his might, ability and feeling. Illustrating his everyday life as a somewhat sidetracked dancer/choreographer (the diary begins on a day of his last public performance), husband and father with his crude yet honest style, he expresses irritation, disappointment, excitement, which are not that all too different from those of a so-called rational and mentally healthy human being. Surprisingly, his relation to the world (let alone his relationship with God!) seems more affectionate and heart-warming than majority of his peers would ever express. So what God orders him to go lay in the snow until he cannot feel his arm. So what a couple of sentences later he calls himself God. So what his writing seems abject of him as an individual who should be somehow (being-somehow – here regarded in a purely metaphysical sense), who should follow some somehow (‘somehow’ taken as a noun here) thanks to which, under normal circumstances (never mind the term ‘normal’; it is too questionable to define it here…), not only would he be compliant with the prevailing and widespread notions of social human behavior, but also would curtail his own exquisite penchant for sheer brilliance as an individual entity. For Nijinsky is the entity which rejected every possible should (again, ‘should’ as a noun), therefore is able to feel limerence towards the world. His stairs of infatuation, Escher-like, unfold before him. And he is trying out his new dance moves. He might be rehearsing his new mode of being without repetitions. Does it have any folds? Is it going to withstand Nijinsky’s explosion of writing? And where would it lead him, ultimately, with us, hitchhikers and voyeurs, jumping on the bandwagon of his non-negative disunity with the whole world? Well, it definitely leads somewhere. Where? Why should I be the one to ascertain where exactly? All I have is this unsure premonition that every limerence might turn into passion. But let’s not put a cart before the horse, shall we?…

Amonne Purity

How could a pain follow a pleasure if a thousand tiny pains or, rather, half-pains were not already dispersed in pleasure, which will then be united in conscious pain?

Gilles Deleuze

My fantasies
Have turned to madness
And all my goodness
Has turned to badness
My need to possess you
has consumed my soul
My life is trembling
I have no control

Animotion

The Litera(p)ture of Ontological Obsession

Here we are, delving deeper into the Mansion of Litera(p)ture, alcoves accelerating, its interior intermingling with the possible intrinsic dimensionality. So far we have checked out its enchanting Vestibule as well as Kitchen/Home Cinema full of dreamy desires. We shrug off the grogginess, the aftermath of potential overstimulation, for it’s no time for a break yet. The corridors are getting darker, they are almost pitch-black now. Where do they lead? Intuitively, we outstretch our arms, resembling tentative tentacles of a blind octopus, groping around for a remote determinant of direction or our whereabouts. Let’s hope we find a light switch fast and don’t crash into anything along the treacherous way. Or perhaps we should crash, after all?

Some novels are extremely approachable yet highly uncooperative. They welcome you with open arms only to dodge, duck, and finally flee from your reading embrace afterwards, snapping their vicious jaws of avoidance, simpering slyly. J. G. Ballard’s Crash is one of them. In the first half of the 70’s, when it first came out, its bizarre, perverse, electrifying charge must have been absolutely gnarly. I can see pulverized imaginations and overheated emotions of then readers left behind to rot in awe. But does the novel hold its own today? And, more importantly, what part of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture does it constitute?

The Slaughter of Infinities

A warm-up question: how come it’s so easy to discard countless factors of a given phenomenon just to deem it “graspable” by naming it? Why is it almost obligatory to hack through the halo of infinities radiating from any given thing in the world? An economy of thought? A safety mechanism preventing our brains from charring like a skin of an overdone pig on a roast? A necessity of being able to function in a hyperactive everyday environment? This slaughter of infinities always seemed to me as far too zealous. As if unintentional mindless eagerness, with which it has been perpetrated, took shape of a superfluous layer, as if addition meant subtracting not adding things together. Surprisingly, it is almost always the underlying reason for every obsession – we add by subtracting. For the sake of object of our infatuation, for which we are able to create unimaginable wonders, we loose touch with everything else. The constituents of our perceptions seem altered. The images are superimposed, the patterns of behavior – iterated, and, last but not least, our moral judgments – overlaid with doubtless self-assuredness, contradictory only to our previous assessments. We are literally someone else.

This is exactly the case with the protagonist and the antagonist of Crash – the obsessed duo of novel’s Great Attractors, if I may borrow the term from a more stellar domain. The former is James Ballard (I guess no disguises were used in the making of the narrator) – a producer of TV commercials – who miraculously survives a head-on collision, killing a man in the process. In spite of the fact that he has totaled his car, he gets out of it relatively unscathed – smashed kneecaps, a gargantuan bruise on the abdomen from impacting a steering wheel and a deep laceration on the scalp are the only injuries he sustains. On the other hand, the antagonist – Robert Vaughan, PhD. – an ex-computer scientist whose area of expertise comprised the implementation of computerized processes to administer all international traffic systems – is a walking map of car crash injuries. But it’s not his scarred body what fascinates the most – it’s who he has become: automobile accidents fetishist, to put it mildly. I don’t want to reveal too much plot. Let me just say, that Vaughan is totally consumed by his obsession to die in a car crash with a famous movie star Elizabeth Taylor. And Ballard becomes more and more obsessed with Vaughan…

The Crawlspace with Translucent Walls

The most fascinating thing about obsession is its creative part. As both Ballard and Vaughan are spiraling down into the bloated world of perverse, the latter serving as a mentor to the former, the ceiling of their worldview gets lower and lower. The height of the first floor of their own baroque houses is being set. It consists solely of an overbearing crawlspace – stuffy, crummy and dusty, yet transfixing, absorbing and bewitching. With their minds altered and hell-bent on making their exploratory visions come true, they begin to add. Just as the not-so-innocent trinity of protagonists from The Dreamers reduced themselves to the minute and dark perceptions, their modus operandi being debauchery in their own triangular circle (now, that’s one resplendent imaginary competition to squaring the circle!), Ballard and Vaughan push the limits of darkness and minuteness even further. They shut themselves off so thoroughly form other infinities offered by the outside world, they are bound to engage in it on their own alternate terms. After all, the nature of things hates vacuum; its folds are – surprise, surprise! – infinite. Ballard and Vaughan’s excesses are sparking new infinities, but due to the fact they are born by obsession, their “geometry” is different. I don’t want to say flat, but it is the first adjective that comes to mind. For example, when Ballard’s wife Catherine ends up having sex on the backseat of Vaughan’s Lincoln Continental (the same generation in which Kennedy was shot) with its scarified owner, and Ballard is peeping them in the rear-view mirror, the latter’s sensations and perceptions of Vaughan’s scars in geometrical relation to the various instruments of the car interior, which allegedly create new possible designs of pleasure, don’t seem too convincing. Then again, I am not obsessed with car crashes, so what do I know, right? Lucky for me, the walls of their crawlspace are diaphanous, so at least I can sense what it may seem to mean.

So what’s with this murky idea of translucency of walls of their crawlspace, of their technosexually motorized obsession? It’s as simple as it gets. Obsession doesn’t give a shit about anything anymore. It’s as blatantly evident as two plus two equals four. It never resorts to any social masquerades, isn’t subjugated to some fanciful behavioral smokescreens. One wears it on one’s sleeve. However, the walls might be translucent, but are not permeable. You cannot (and almost always simply don’t want to) join this flat universe of extreme extravagance. Unless you fall for obsession of your own, whose premises are identical to those which founded the circle of infatuation you are, by then, bound to join. For obsessed individuals find each other unwillingly, almost miraculously, just like artists who leave a lasting impact on culture do. That’s all there is to it, really.

The Obsession of the Outside

Deleuze writes:

For Leibniz, to the contrary, monads exclude only universes that are incompossible with their world, and all those that exist express the same world without exclusion. As this world does not exist outside of the monads that express it, the latter are not in contact and have no horizontal relations among them, no intraworldly connections, but only an indirect harmonic contact to the extent they share the same expression: they express one another without harnessing each other.

But what about the “revenge” of incompossible worlds? Are obsessed individuals free to do whatever they will, all conveniently nestled within the realm of their flat infinities? Near the end of Crash, Ballard and Vaughan are very far from not harnessing each other. As if something outside of the monads is to have the last laugh. Now, that sentence is something which would make Leibniz tear his wig out. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t forget that Ballard and Vaughan, just as Isabelle, Théo and Matthew, are not monads anymore. They are demonadized modes of obsessive expression, wayward explorers of the frantic flat infinities of future technological desires. Their obsessions add so much, by subtracting all there has ever been, that their minute and dark perceptions project new configuration of separate reality. Their crawlspace breaks free from them and suddenly expands, self-sustained and imponderable, looming large, totally out of spatial control, incompossible with its postmonadic origin of convoluted obsessions. Nevertheless, thanks to its transparent walls, we, who aren’t obsessed (or whose own private infatuations lie elsewhere), may witness the tingling sensations Ballard and Vaughan are conjuring up before our very eyes. Their obsessive crawlspace is situated perfectly outside of us, yet we are able to remain within its apparition – the Crawlspace of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture.

Spanking in Tongues?

All thanks to Ballard’s (the author, not the protagonist this time) literary style. The narration consists of descriptive dryness, terse and virtually nonexistent dialogues and an overwhelming sensation of inexplicable, alienating, foreboding oddity. Everything seems singular in Crash, visually eviscerated, metaphysically separated. The impending drives of technosexuality are a jarring, jagged premonition of postmodern landscape. Traffic congestion, overpasses, hard shoulders, perimeter fences, flyovers, median strips are all too material to become truly substantial and, thus, unable to convey any meaning, to constitute palpable surroundings other than a gruesome dehumanized stage for horrific roll-over or fatal pile-up collisions. No wonder one of the most convenient books used as an interpreting tool on Crash is Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. However insightful Baudrillard’s work may be, I am going to skip it. One Frenchman at a time. Especially, when the one I have been quoting all along, heartily refers to individuals from other countries:

For with Leibniz the question surges forth in philosophy that will continue to haunt Whitehead and Bergson: not how to attain eternity, but in what conditions does the objective world allow for a subjective production of novelty, that is, of creation? The best of all worlds had no other meaning: it was neither the least abominable nor the least ugly, but the one whose All granted a production of novelty, a liberation of true quanta of “private”subjectivity (…).The best of all worlds is not the one that reproduces the eternal, but the one in which new creations are produced, the one endowed with a capacity for innovation or creativity.

Ballard (again, the author, not the protagonist), by sheer coincidence, hits the bullseye with narration. However, its novelty doesn’t lie within itself. Crash doesn’t strut with a gait of bombastic form. There are no narrative loops, nor double or triple twist endings. The characters are groomed with conventional literary utensils of moderation and plot utilitarianism (excluding their obsession, that is). The novelty lies outside Crash. In sensations which the book ignites within the reader. Naturally, not in every reader, just as not everyone is prone to obsession. But those of you who are, brace yourselves, should you choose to hitch a ride with Ballard and Vaughan. The expressways meandering through the Crawlspace of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture – robust and vast, twisted and irresistible, infatuating and fateful – await! Just don’t forget to fasten your seatbelts.

Amonne Purity

First, a couple of explanatory sentences. Every now and then comes a time when one simply knows the end is near. The curtain falls. But before it does, there need to be something left behind. It is an obligation which rejects any doubt as to the necessity of its happening. The last chef d’oeuvre, the swan song – no, wait! – the swan opera. The following text is the first “installment” or – if we follow the trail commenced by the crucial term above – the “overture” of my farewell. So buckle up or sprawl on your couch, if you like. The ugly duckling has finally metamorphosed. And it sings…

Angel made in heaven
All I want is your love
Gimme some of the action, reaction

Erasure

The Litera(p)ture of Ontological Enchantment

In 1988, my favorite philosopher of late – Gilles Deleuze – published one of the most intellectually enthralling books I have ever read: The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque. This brilliant lecture not only on notions of Baroque traits and characteristics as an epoch in general, not only on marvelous audacity and holistic tenacity of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s thought, but also a splendid example of Deleuze’s own interpreting prowess, with a prominent allegory of the Baroque House at the forefront – an ample approximation of how human being functions as a Monad – the key concept of Leibniz’s philosophy. This and many more scintillating profundities left me in a state of titillating rapture. I, being a bookworm par excellence, smitten by explosiveness of ruminations, with which The Fold… filled me to the brim, suddenly felt the inexplicable surge in infatuation towards literature, which was even more intense than my usual outbursts of tenderness towards it. So strong was the said affinity it resembled almost some kind of premonition. I just knew something was in store for me. All I had to do was keep my eyes open. So I kept them open. And then it hit me like a stray, flamboyant meteorite, propelled by Deleuze’s high-octane book and my ongoing rapture. The litera(p)ture…

Taking a simultaneous ride on the Ferris wheel of pondering and the roller coaster of excitation, I began mulling over the imaginary endeavor – to take Deleuzian allegory and “redecorate” it with the newly coined term as a heavenly guideline. The problem was I didn’t have any “materials”. Nevertheless, being a firm believer in serendipity, I wasn’t to be left at the mercy of chance. I quickly recalled I had had spectacular (mis)adventures with Nabokov’s Pale Fire which I happened to mention back in the day on one occasion, which have recently been somehow rejuvenated by yet another novel. Both of them, on a completely compossible plain or, rather, fold of perception, escorted me to a path, which in turn led me to the right confluence, allowing me to pick up the best novels along the way and compose my grandest literary ornament so far. The first of the books in question – the “overture” of my farewell opera – is Boris Vian’s 1947 novel Froth on the Daydream.

Entering the Baroque House

I have never shunned from my irrational fascination for metaphysics. The surreal depth of thought it offers, when favorable mental conditions meet appropriate stimuli of questions, always bedazzles, befuddles and bamboozles me thoroughly. Because of it, oftentimes I am hot under the collar, have ants in my pants. I exude overeagerness to ask further questions, to speculate boldly and without an ounce of hesitation, and extend my chain of thoughts via the wild new variety of unpredictable associations. However, the best, the icing-on-a-cake type of sensation I get out of metaphysics is during those rare moments when I see something completely unexpected somewhere where there was no telling in doing so whatsoever. When all the ensuing jumble of jubilation makes me jump out of my bed, for I always read in horizontal position. That was the case with The Fold… It cast a spell on me. It teleported me before the Baroque House itself. I stood in front of it, among the shrubs sheared with pious pruning passion of Edward Scissorhands. I regarded the edifice of the House. Its first floor wide, spacious, with several windows up front, some of them claustrophobically tiny, others gargantuan in size. The second floor, strangely soaring, skyscraper-ish, windowless. It resembled a body of an old overgrown smock mill without the sails. I was enchanted. Breaking off from the mesmerizing stupor, though only slightly, I set my eyes on the main door. The double rectangle of old oak wood pulsed and breathed. Videodrome style. It summoned me. And I stepped inside…

The best and most vivid representation of this rather anthropomorphic yet, on the other hand, simple entrance to the Baroque House of Litera(p)ture is Froth on the Daydream. Vian’s best known work is the finest example of what does it mean for a novel to confirm that something exists without neither material nor spiritual proof (let alone diligently discarding necessity to justify a “taking-it-for-granted” mode of existence). The book doesn’t have to do anything. It just is. Its qualities are pure. The story the Frenchman subjects us to (here, without the nasty connotation the “subject someone to” expression entails by default) is even purer, yet it makes us wander among thoughts and wonder on the fringes of imagination. The Lewis Carroll-ish language conjures up the Wonderland-like world with remarkable ease and without much ado (eels living in sewers being caught using pineapples, ice rink commuters stretching out due to velocities attained on ice, pianocktail concocting fancy cocktails out of fine tunes and even finer spirits, junctiquitarian forced to overbid due to customer’s munificence when bargaining, snow-moles with marmalade furs and noisy dispositions snooping around, rozza-erasers being pulled on rozzers, etc.) – as well as paints hearty, honest, oftentimes absurd exchanges between characters. But this is only the beginning.

There is this oldie with Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak entitled Strangers When We Meet which tells a story of a love affair between two married neighbors. And… that’s it. There’s nothing more. The movie consists only of the said fornication. Of course, there are some additional events within the story which lead to its melodramatic end, some qualities (like wooden acting on Novak’s part) constituting the “meat” of the movie, however they somehow disappear, as if gobbled up by the wholeness and simplicity of the main idea – the love affair in itself. In the same vein, Froth on the Daydream is the story of falling in love and nothing else (notwithstanding the fact, that, in truth, there is more to it than meets the eye). This paradox of having and not having anything else is the main latch on the entrance door to the enchantment. It is, in turn, the first of the openings to our redecorated Baroque House.

The Litera(p)turous interior

The unfolding of love in Froth on the Daydream composes the vestibule of our inflected lathery den. It is reciprocated, the love, free from the deathly torments of its murky, gloomy, unrequited opposite. Wholeheartedness, honesty, exultation, elation, delight – these are the words that come to mind when we recall the suave and chic fondling of reality procured by Colin and Chick – our two main male characters. The willingness, eagerness, the sheer hankering for love exhibited by the former, and the ongoing double limerence of the latter toward Lisa – his girlfriend – and Jean Pulse Hearte’s (sic! [if I may throw in a multi-faceted pun – almost noseating 😉 ) literary and philosophical output – are not only as straight as an arrow, but also surprisingly tender. Suddenly, we are beginning to pine for something similar for us to happen. Colin’s conjugation of the verb “to wish” at the beginning of the chapter X seems almost like a prayer or a chant, which is only one vowel and consonant away from our crucial verb “to enchant”… Not too many pages later do we realize we have already fallen under the spell of the novel, lithely, along a new fold…

Long story short, the characters are purely positive. Even when they do questionable or outright malevolent deeds, they are momentarily and miraculously excused. Vian achieved something truly remarkable – he created dramatis personae lacking in qualitative spectrum yet being able to shine bright with integrity exempt from the one-dimensional naivety and symbolism of fable heroes and heroines. Colin, Chick, Chloe, Nicolas, Lisa and Isis neither fumble with nor fume at themselves, neither forbid themselves, nor resort to pretentious altercations within confines of their psyche, yet they are solidified, far from paper-thin, trite literary machinations a certified bungler would pen. They invoke one charming association – a soft focus photography. The colors of sensations Froth on the Daydream invokes are pastel-like, bland, almost bleached, yet their atmosphere is dreamy, slightly shifted, as if expectant. Why is it so?

The geometry within the Mansion of Litera(p)ture

The end (taken literally here) justifies the means. Thus, I am going to quote Deleuze verbatim in order to show you the “point of departure” of my redecoration of the Baroque House:

Yet the Baroque trait twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other. The Baroque fold unfurls all the way to infinity. First, the Baroque differentiates its folds in two ways, by moving along two infinities, as if infinity were composed of two stages or floors: the pleats of matter, and the folds in the soul. Below, matter is amassed according to a first type of fold, and then organized according to a second type, to the extent its part constitutes organs that are “differently folded and more or less developed.'” Above, the soul sings of the glory of God inasmuch as it follows its own folds, but without succeeding in entirely developing them, since “this communication stretches out indefinitely”.

All we need to do is shift the allegory, push and shove it into something more… seductive. The Baroque House ceases to be the allegory of monadic human being. With all of its intricacies and generalizations, nuances and totalities, fluxes and influxes, flexibility and rigidity, redundancies and quintessences, modes of repetitiveness and one-time ingenuity, etc., ad infinitum, the Baroque House turns into a Mansion of Litera(p)ture. Our senses do not unfurl to infinities, swirling and swinging along right to the top room of the soul floor, do not occupy the interior of the first floor. Their motion of riding the wave, trailing along the ever-infinite folds, is overtaken by the geometry of literary intensity.

A cavalcade of immediate questions comes tumbling down on us. What does this new geometry look like? What is it based on? Does it have preferable shapes? What kind of topology of the ontology of letters is permissible here, on the premises? Is it dual? Does the Mansion retain two storys? Why is it based on intensity? Imagine a flicker in the eye casting a smoldering glance, just like the one in the Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s painting The Love Letter, or the other, half-coyly half-blatantly peering from behind a slit in a wavy blonde curtain of a peekaboo hair of Hollywood’s Golden Age star Veronica Lake. Imagine the alluring light of its sparks, the immediacy of shadows permeating your retinas, flirting with an opacity of their possible reciprocation, and their raucous triumph, thundering silently somewhere else, where prepositions give birth to the next generation of word allocations – a grand yet straightforward spaces of sentences to be, to denote, to invoke, to delineate, to subvert, to encrypt, to celebrate, to joke, to multiply, etc. Imagine the geometry of longing for the plausible beginnings of whatever you wished them to begin, as enchanted as Colin was when he danced with Chloe for the first time, as enchanted as I was “enliteraptured” while reading Froth on the Daydream, as enchanted as I wish you truly were at least once in a lifetime. I know you can sense what it all looks like, but are unable to describe it using mere hackneyed words of old. Lucky for us, the true enchantment hates descriptions and loves turning into mutual desire. It craves, covets, yearns to do so with every fiber, every fold of its post-infinity. So keep your eyes open. The Vestibule, the Overture ends here, but the desire that follows is nearer than you think…

Amonne Purity