Breeding Breath

I (k)now this. Bartleby is a good friend of mine. I've said this before.

Maybe my experiment is too descriptive, too methodological--in short, too literate. Give me a picture that pictures my frame of mind: my attitude, my shift, my disjunction. I've said this before:

I have no homing device. Not the content of my pictures, but the style and approach of many of my pictures should reflect this. Give me a photo that refutes my photo. I can only give you a heart, shaped like a box, without any content. I can offer up a shape, and maybe some style. I cannot tell you what THIS is.

E-mails for our course were meant to be meta-blogs. I am going to invert this, however, and use the blog to meta e-mail.

Instructions:
1. Understand metaphysical limits, and use this to approach becoming-what-you-are (appreciate the gates and know Daimon; and get to know Nemesis if you have to).
2. Make the ontological aesthetic. We are entering into a paradigm of pleasure/pain, of "aesthethics."
3. Avatar (as concept, as noun) vs. TO AVATAR
4. Flash Reason has/needs-to replace the Kantian notion of critical judgement.
5. Now and the Moment: use the GPS to better understand your EPS (to avatar).

My sustaining state of mind: anxious. I don't mean this in the sense of this present "moment," or in the sense of this course; I mean this in the sense of my existential composition at large. There are other conditions to add: paranoid, self-interested, observant, neurotic, doubtful. This state of mind, with all of its multiplicities and assemblages of conditions, inform and instruct my "self." They guide my orientation towards what it is I (want to) do with my life, particularly with regard to scholarship. Finitude troubles me: fear and trembling. As such, I have been focusing on my own apartment because the question of material limits--especially in the given sense of a "home," perhaps in the more GPS sense--very much govern my internal set of metaphysical limits, perhaps in the more EPS sense. My air conditioner re-marks (in its noisy vibration), but I only receive it as re-mark-able because of my particular presence (bound up with all of my otherwise absences).

My (Becoming) Motto: Home is Where the Cart Is.

In other words: Bartleby is a good friend of mine. What is there to ask?

The question, I suppose, would be the constant move towards the interrogative itself that practically governs my anxious life. I take this picture of my apartment, because it moves me: it takes me somewhere; it draws desire inward; it instructs me; it (re)presents joy; it positions me existentially/metaphysically. I develop an "aesthethics." I take pictures of my home. But this is not my home. Home should have some kind of ontological terra firma, right--a kind of Being to which our otherwise Becoming selves eternally return towards, yes?

Instructions:

1. Visit for the self: travel, do not "tourism" (see: McDisney Vacationing)

2. Interact with the "aesthetics" (sites, museums, landmarks) you otherwise simply consume for the sake of consumption. 

3. Be an active part of the picture; don't just buy the (postcard) pictures. 

My Figures: Rimbaud and Henry Miller wander the streets.

 

My (Being) Motto: "New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth." Yeats.

My EPS and GPS are scrambled because my sense of home, in both cases, are not in any sense clear. This is what guides my anxious interrogative: how? Not why, or what is it, or what does it mean--but how? The uncanny (unheimlich/heimlich) carries a different kind of metaphysical weight for me; it sends me on a different kind of line of flight. An anxious, interrogative one, a doubtful one, a questioning one. Blank Confession: I am not welcome "home," in the classical and literal sense, and I spent the last seven months of my undergraduate career living in Moos Tower and the library (clothes in a locker; gym showers; decent couches, though). This is why my own air conditioner re-marks to me in a re-mark-able way. It's not Alachua County, per se, but it's my location, in all senses (at least for me). I could listen to it for a lifetime, and in every instant live a lifetime. Experiential rhizomatics. 

I woke up one morning hearing my air conditioner as loudly as Proust bit into that madeleine.

This is all to say that my experiment leads me to my inevitable and obligatory fear, my own self-haunting: all of this is wrong. An extended and reflexive way of asking: am I missing the mark?

 And so I add this:

My presence: you already know I am here, enframed, the agent recording the subjects being recorded, which is to say I am not here/there; and this is to say I am never merely here or there. This is a cloudy day, let’s say, a cold one: this takes me back to a time of warmth, a yearning for it. I feel it. I am there; I want to capture this moment. Aesthetics invite me, very much if not exactly like the commodity does: pleasure-now-yes. It’s never that simple: here I have a home, but I must follow candle rules, I am gated in, enframed, the air conditioner nightmare reminds so; there I have no home, but I am free, opened up and thrown endlessly into the world, subject to the elements. These are merely different angles from the self position, each testing limits a bit differently (if at all, I have yet to fully know, such being part of my tendency and orientation towards limits, at least so far [i.e., necessarily so far, as such]. 

My GPS—candles haunting the privilege of my home; public space without privacy revealing me
endlessly—only cast context on my EPS. Rimbaud and Miller did not merely wander
the streets, and they did not also merely take up and soak in lavish pleasure when
they could as well; they did not merely about this; they truly wanted to
reproduce this, to project it out, recreate it so as to endlessly embrace it. 


Indeed, I am in poverty because I want so much and have so






much so that I can expend so much: my place is constantly messy because I want

to make it clean, and vice versa. It is strange to get drunk to get sober, so
as to get truly drunk again: heimleich/unheimleich so literally and figuratively true, as nestled in my gut of guts. The full blast of Deleuze’s plane of immanence, of his rhizomatics, his folding over, becoming attached itself to never because of a critical appreciation of it. No. It was an


aesthetic approach towards life, a way of being, rather than explanation of

what being is. It was a how. A book not as a box with contents; a book as an
empty box (Negotiations). This has always been my home. 



Limits: figuratively and literally, at least in my existential narrative. Enframing. Walls and ceilings, literally and figuratively. The context shifts, but the Moment exacts and opens up my EPS. Becoming-what-I-am in reception of these circumstances—these circumstances constructed by an examination, an aesthetic undergoing: my air conditioner reminds me every fifteen minutes to a half hour. 





The other day I found myself stuck in an elevator. A literal (always still figurative) elevator. Turlington Hall. Once I was stuck in an elevator, and everyone started immediately getting distraught. They screamed and moved and tried to pry the door open; they pushed all kinds of buttons. I sat there and sighed. I giggled to myself. What an experience, I thought. Then






I moved to push that button—THE ALARM BUTTON. And that awful ringing commenced,



and within seconds, maintenance was there to get us out. They looked at me, and I looked at them. Sometimes it’s okay to embrace the annoyance, if it brings you closer to you, to your position, to becoming-what-you-are. My air conditioned nightmare: such a rattling has never been so pretty—now. 





I receive my past; my present intimates itself to me; my future remains an empty courtyard. I stare baffled through my window into other open windows every day, every night: do they see me? Are they not baffled too? I know not, and perhaps that is the fortuitous cross that I bear. In the adorned halls of this Coca-Cola City, I can only hope that they will stare into


the abyss of the empty soda can long enough—long enough to see that their desire remains primary, their capacity remains primary, their sense of joy remains primary. I happened to happen upon myself here, limits and all. I am always still back in Moos Tower. It’s a gentle haunting. And yet, I am always where I am going, and even more so now. Rimbaud used to have frantic, feverish dreams, and I have them, too: “Onward! Onward!” Or, to use Yeats: “New dreams; new dreams. There is no truth.” 



My air conditioner re-marks, to borrow the Derridean refrain, but its re-mark only became re-markable, to me, in me, and on me, when I woke up and re-cognized it, truly experienced it. I went deeper into it; I was drawn to it. And why not? 




Instructions:

1. Desire your object; be with its otherwise capture; don't just shoot it (dead)

2. Catalogue your existential narrative

3. Frame/construct an epiphany 

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Once Before: Or, Where My Air Conditioner Takes Me

Once before (or, once, if my memory serves correct) I was homeless. I spent the last seven months of my undergrad career sleeping in Moos Tower and the library. I found this to be difficult and liberating. I kept my clothes in a locker; I showered in the gym; I shaved in this private public bathroom stall that also had a sink and mirror. I even worked as a barista right down the street. I had no enclosures, no rent. No gates. No cameras. I had no candles (see: a previous post). As a University of Minnesota student, I had every right to be there (in Moos Tower) and they were open 24 hours. Nursing and medical students would stay there all the time in order to study, and they would often fall asleep. I would just pretend to do the same. The couches were rather comfortable.

You can't see the couches distinctly, but if you look to the background of the last posted picture, then you can see the red couch. Behind that was a better couch. I slept on that. I would hear all kinds of commotion, but later in the night this commotion would consist of mechanical and operational doings.

I had to live strategically. I am not endorsing nomadic living, but this is why rhizomatics is important to me:

University of Minnesota had a network of underground tunnels that allowed you to get around everywhere. It was warm.

Strategy for sleeping in a library: put two chairs together and curl up. They (the computer lab monitors) cannot see you when you're down sleeping. Sleep in the back. Pretend like you were doing research.

My air conditioner re-marks: see, is my re-mark not re-mark-able? I am stuck between limits, always, now. The Continuum and its gates, its point of (in)direct exile makes me ill. The candles: eat your heart out, kid. Your existential position: roam, roam; row, row. Everybody row. I gag on the idea of a bright-eyed project from anyone not familiar with the tactics of that which is without: home. Thus, the odd pictures of my apartment.

MY NOISES: My Attunement

The Subjective in the Subject

I want to return to this particular photograph that I took because of this passage that I recently ran into in Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 2: “It was inevitable that the cinema, in the crises of the action-image, went through melancholic Hegelian reflections on its own death: having no more stories to tell, it would take itself as object and would be able to tell only its own story (Wenders)” (76). Do we make something different of the photography?

Indeed, Wenders' instructs: "What then is the recoil of the photographer?/How do you feel its impact?/How does it affect the subject,/and which trace of it appears on the photograph?" (8). Well, the "camera-man" is always imbedded in the picture itself, part of the picture, captured him- or her-self within the desire to take the picture in the first place: "The camera therefore is an eye/capable of looking forward and backward/at the same time./Forwards, it does in fact 'shoot a picture,'/backwards, it records a vague shadow,/sort of an x-ray of the photographer's mind,/by looking straight through his (or her) eye/to the bottom of his (or her) soul./Yes, forwards, a camera sees its subject,/backwards it sees the wish/to capture this particular subject in the first place,/thereby showing simultaneously THE THINGS/and THE DESIRE for them" (9).

My FACE/GESTURE/MOOD/SITUATION/ATTITUDE (9-10): willingness, curiosity, frankness, vulnerability. I am always open to the mirrors which reflect me, which capture a redoubled image; I am always open to my home--a home which feels not a home. An exile: but still nevertheless without some sense of home. Those guarded gates in my previous post: unheimlich/heimlich.

Willingness, curiosity, frankness: negotiation, between limits, anxious, mobile. Becoming-what-you-are recursively and endlessly so captured otherwise: the mirror you break for bad luck. Negotiation, between limits, anxious, mobile.

(Re)Presentation and Perception

This is what the Continuum (re)presents as their complex:

City living without the city: I think, at times, that even their palm trees must be made of plastic. Much like the Happy Meal, or a Happy Vacation, The Continuum (much like many other housing communities in Gainesville for [grad] students) gives the "consumer" what they want: predictability, safety (no city terrorists here), convenience, calculability, efficiency--seemingly non-human. Look at their faces: they are happy, pleased; they feel good about their experience here in Gainesville.

This is what I see:

Gates, impoverished limits, fences: don't let the Others in. We have a Community. Recently, there occurred a rupture: a woman heard a knock on her door at 2:45am; she opened the door; some male perpetrator hit her in the face and ran away. The police noted: we found her in a pool of blood. How could this happen in Our Community? Can't you see the city through the gated fence, right above? We are gated! The surveillance is top-notch, too, as you can also see from the picture above. For example, I was cited and sent through a judicial process when the maintenance crew discovered a candle in my apartment. Candles are banned, and such a judicial process was for the good of Our Community. Logic/Their Instruction: Being afraid of being watched only lessens our fear of being attacked--in Our Community.

I walk through my own complex as a stranger, entering the gates of a compound not truly a part of me, though entirely apart from me. I am gated in. They watch my burning of candles, as though I once, if my memory serves correct, were a dark ancestor burning pagan herbs. It's a new method of exile: I just wanted a regular burger, but now I'm knee-deep in McDonald's play-pen balls. And every paranoid suburban soccer mom is watching my every move. No trespassing. It's a disjunction: I expect to see strange, shadowy figures in any city endeavor, as I always have. Exiled from this EPS, my GPS finds me in a plastic container--and my screams only ring sensitive alarms (for sensitive people). And the worst part: most of them wake up early to work out every day.

Tour/Travel My Apartment

As I mentioned in class, I have a whole explanatory run-down on this particular experiment--but the experiment is still in progress. For the time being, here are some of the images. I am working on gathering the "sounds" and editing them into a sound-image synchronized slide-show, in which you will be able to travel Alachua County from the very home of a resident--ME!

Another side-note: I am restricting/constructing my experiment within the "enframing" of my own apartment for a specific reason (namely, Gestell gone wrong). I was not joking when I realized, during our readings, that I was being equally indicted: I seek so much "outside" that I forget that which is "inside." I forget the ordinary, mundane, undesirable, non-ideal; I forget what (en)frames me to such an extent that I seek a (perhaps false) line of flight outside of the (en)framing. Or, at least, I seek one that is not necessary--when I do not even know my own apartment. For example, in the past couple of years alone (give or take), I have traveled to these places: San Antonio; Salzburg; Seattle; New Orleans; Terre Haute, IN; Bowling Green, OH; Durham; Rochester, NY; Finger Lakes; New York Adirondacks; San Francisco; Los Angeles; Minneapolis; Gainesville; Chicago; Philadelphia; Las Vegas. And I believe I am missing some.

My limits are not "out there," though in their reception they can help me negotiate such. Beginning with the microcosm, I begin in the most local of object senses--my apartment. Again, my finished experiment will have a whole run-down synthesizing our sources, our CATTt thus far, citations, etc. For the time being, I am re-happening upon, re-cognizing, re-experiencing my apartment. Here are the images:

I have much to say about these photos, and more photos to share. But I wanted to start with what I have been gathering. I'll post more (in terms of aesthetic response, as well as more pictures) tomorrow.