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Cyborg mind, have you been human today?

reflections

In the beginning of the semester, as I tried to make sense of this class which seemed hard for me to break into, I found myself describing the course to a friend as comprised of poetic intent, poetic technique. In a way, the class felt like it was teaching us to be poets: poetic lenses perhaps precedes, in someway, poetic thought, poetry. 

I began this semester in the strange place of attempting to deny past, forget memory, despite in many ways feeling intensely controlled and trapped by personal histories. 

Being away from home for many months had made things that had once been (treasured) repositories of memory fade. Another conversation with another friend, a man who had also spent roughly the same amount of time away, in Bosnia, making films. I don’t remember how closely our new, evolving relationships to memory resembled each other, but I recall trying to explain that it was something more than nostalgia that objects, artefacts of my very own quotidian, carried. I recalled how seeing the stuff of life that I had curated and chosen out of the arbitrariness of unordered stuff of the universe, sometimes things I had created out of the same arbitrary material reservoir, seemed to draw things into order and infuse me with certainties otherwise elusive. The green of the bed spread and the green of the tree outside. At some pointed I had painted about seven tiles of paper, thickly, thickly, with paint, thinking with each one of a dear and beloved friend. I used wooden clothespins donated by my then-boyfriends grandmother, painted in cheap acrylic pinks and oranges, to hang them from a tangle of christmas lights, wrested from that unruly and mysterious museum of Old Things our garage. The cards were always there as I moved about life, soft reiterations of beloved certainties that I couldn’t always see (most of my friends had moved out of the city), soft reiterations of who I was and could be to them. (I’ve been reading theories of alterity lately, and am reminded of how contact with an “other” reflexes back to reconstitute, modify, one’s own self sense. I would see these from my bed, and at times when things felt hopeless, when I despaired, I recall the peace and stability that this installation of sorts seemed to softly offer up. All objects were like this: clothes, saucepans, familiar foods, streets—even the ones that I hated—reverberated with faces, feelings. 

What I was trying to tell my friend was that as much as memory can get swept up in the arms nostalgic, it has a power entirely its own. I’ve always found it hard to get rid of old things. It is not nostalgia: it is the fear of forgetting. And, it is the loss of presence. The loss of one’s own “ordering of things”, to invoke Foucault, in a world of systems and orderings to which you’ve never given your consent. 

Between Bombay, Singapore, Tokyo, Kottayam, and, finally, Istanbul, Memory and Presence worked themselves out in different ways. But I returned with a new fear: a fear of the chains of memory, of the prison of the past. Memory includes silent darknesses, some sort of live organism that is entirely thought; from these, I felt, I could finally claim a sort of freedom. 

I'm not from here, nor from there

I have no age, nor future

and I wanted so badly for the following  proposals, in the absence of anchorage, to be true: 

Chavela Vargas continues

and being happy is the colour

of my identity

I have few items formally of those places, and my new desire for an ascetic aesthetic of existence couldn’t last: California is too unkind a place for beauty not too matter. But memory leaked out also in different forms. Often, mirage like, the streets, the buildings seemed to flicker and static and then it was not the flat gray concrete panels of Berkeleyen sidewalks under my feet but the brown red bricks of Istiklal Caddesi, catching the light in so many different ways. Buildings flickered, unsure, unstable… 

Two themes were recurrent in this class: Memory, and the (possibility of/the right to) someone else’s place and culture. I don’t have answers. Throughout the semester the desire to kill the past battled the resurrect and remember old meanings. There was the uncertainty of appropriating the meaningfulness of Mexico and its history and its present into my own personal framework. If Memory and Transcultural Transposal defined the questions that this course most consistently brought up for me, my answers tended provoke the the possibilities of fierce ambivalence, under which a sea of ambiguities roiled uncertainly. Ambivalence however is only so productive before one is forced to admit impasse. 

In terms of my artwork: I started with a number of experiments, that attempted not to translate texts to image, nor function as narrative metaphors, but become expressions of the things itself i had in mind. (This, of course, can never be completely successful, given the limitations of representation as external to being—expressions of being, rather than being itself)—but as at some point I began to feel a certain uncertainty about doing this with a history/culture that I have no clear personal relationship to, and I admit, there was, at points, a desire to ‘fit in’ and become legible. All of my worst, and least favourite projectos fall into this second category, and indeed, they were the ones I approached with the most confusion and inhibition. They also correlate to a point in which life outside the class felt, for various reasons, particularly unstable, alien, and uncontrolled. The final two projectos were, in some ways, a return to my own. Not exactly a reassertion of self perhaps, but an acceptance of self as existing within, among the arbitrary.

8 EL HIJO DEL PUEBLO

I recall El hilo del Pueblo being the absolute hardest theme that, at week 8,  we were asked to work with. i recall too, that at this time, i was still struggling to find viable approaches to this class as themes left off from the realm of the personal and increasingly invoked themes specific to Mexico.

I can read, and I can write in an academically-inspired tone about something, but—this class seems to ask us to veer away from being particularly academic in our approaches, and I felt no entry point—indeed doubted my very right to enter—personally into the realm of the pueblos. Today’s drawing, then, is a product of this impasse. in fact, the very fact that I had decided to draw rather than paint, and to stay away from colour, is rather telling in this regard. In trying to visualise and relate to cultural phenomena, my starting point tends to be (visuals of) the location; so I looked up pueblos online, and it is from this imagery that this drawing results.

10 FAROLITO

farolito (ˌfærəˈliːtəʊ) (n.)

a paper lantern used by Hispanic people in Christmas processions

(from the free dictionary)

…though google translate doesn’t seem to know that. 

I focus on the lamppost: symbol that it is of urban night, indeed the locationary prop for urban dream. a thousand and one memories spring to life under the particular light of weakly luminous bulbs…

Disinterested, this week, in excavating those corpses, and feeling a certain call of duty to stay relevant to the subject, rather than talking over it through unrelated personal reverie, I take a somewhat more visual historian’s lens: recall the many reiteration of the lampost as urban symbol, often romantic symbol, in popular culture. Immediately what springs to mind is Singin’ in the Rain, but also an Hindi film, (circa the same decade, but sadly the name of which I cannot remember) that all but repeats the same imagery of some star-crossed lover’s unconventional joy in the rainy night, a lamppost to keep him company and render his (so we are supposed to believe) spontaneous movements choreographical. 

From what I’ve read and understand of Agustin Lara, this image of transnationally-exchanged, popularized visualities of the modern and urban, gaining some sort of universal currency facilitated through spreads of popular culture, seems characteristic. For myself, I notice how much more accessible and legible his sound is for me, compared to some of the other music we’ve listened to this semester It is far more familiar; images flow along readily, invoking indeed romantic lamplit streets and the like in some midcentury bourgeois urban class air. Lara, it turns out, indeed was a romantic movie man (as far as musicians go), more interested in the poetry or his aesthetics than the felt reality of living (La Llorona, for instance, seems to deal simultanesouly with personal and historic pains even within the lyricist’s/composer’s personal poetry) and this comes as little surprise. The logical knot is this disinterest in public/collective reality, but the aesthetic appeal to popular taste. But also, what is interesting is fantasy as a role, both for poet and for audience, to engage life…!

13 LAS MEXICANAS : CHAVELA VARGAS

No soy de aqui, ni soy de alla

I like the sun and a woman crying

the swallows and the bad ladies

climbing balconies and opening the windows

and the girls of April

I like the wine as much as the flowers

and the lovers, but not the gentlemen

I love being friend with the rovers

and the songs in French

I'm not from here, nor from there

I have no age, nor future

and being happy is the colour

of my identity

I like to be constantly lolling on the sand

and chasing around Manuela on a bicycle

and to gaze the stars all the time

with Maria in the cornfield

Continuing on the thought of ambivalence: I'm posting this song because those two lines seem to resonate so closely:

I'm not from here, nor from there

I have no age, nor future

Vargas lets her fluidity of identity carry her into such brightness--cavorting and regaling, even. Because when you have no strings, you have few obligations. Meaninglessness allows you to do whatever you want. It hardly matters

The matter of identity: is it set in memomory? In this commitment to things like place and time? 

If Vargas is able to testify to fluidity, I feel that my history has testified rather to series of lacks, erasures, and, more recently, reassertions. I haven't found the promise of happiness in an identity that refuses commitment.

I am writing this retrospectively so I can say more clearly: I confess that this time, my projecto is conflicted in both wanting to reassert my own interests in painting, using paint, and in yielding to a certain desire to some sort of legibility, a desire, perhaps, for the belonging that commitment promises. It was a complicated moment, then, to receive the (nonetheless highly-valued) notes of praise that I did. Presence and identity are not autonomous self-projections: to the extent that they are, they are also self-delusions. But equally so the sense of validation built out of convictions foreign, imposed upon, oneself. Presence and Identity, rather, seem to elicit from a dialogic process within a social sphere. It is something I am still after, my own forays being characterised alternately by compulsive, fear-driven hiding and withdrawal, and sudden anxious attempts at self-disclosure. I don't know where on the spectrum (if there is a spectrum as such) this tiny canvas stands: It seemed to in some way testify to the kind of success that one is left at the mercy of others to validate, but at the same time--I know the mark of my own honest strokes. 

12 CORRIDO (adelita)

It's not that the lyrics from La Adelita particularly evoke a character that I have then tried to paint...

La Adelita, I think, is allegory. The story of Adelita seems to embed and attempt to rejoin the non-militant reality of war to the battlefield. War and Revolution often take shape under (contested) masks of nationalism, and I think one reading of the story can seek alternative, non-nationalist narrative integrated into the story of fighting, despite the overt appeal to sentiment and nationalism together.

Along with all the other readings of La Adelita (one website notes that she often becomes a symbol synthesizing sexuality and patriotism), I am interested in the thought of what remains as comprising a compromised real despite a new, displacing reality of war. Songs abide. Love, feelings abide. The Human, if we believe in Adelita, does not fade.

If any word comes to the fore as a leitmotif over the last four months, it is ambivalence; I hope, then, various ambivalences come through with this piece of cardboard with some paint on it.

11 SIN TI

Aside from the points of the story that we touched in as a group, there are two moments in particular that i want to pause on, (re)consider. 

1. We hear about the red car from Arturo Manzana, another fixture of the city. My mind, when he mentions it, flickers to the main street in Taksim, Istiklal Caddessi, and the “Tram”: A Red Car, appropriated in kitschy keepsake art as symbol of urban Istanbul, at once nostalgic and indicative of the city’s urban-ness. 

When we are still in the beginning of the story—Morales (Morality figment) has just questioned the main Apple—when Arturo takes the A streetcar. 

The experience embeds so much. 

The experience of the urban transcends the flaneur’s distanced observance. Something about public transportation stuffed full of the sounds the noise of people, music. 

As Arturo speaks, the scene flickers back again, the metros, streetcars, Taksim, Şişhane, music. 

We were interested, last week, in how it is possible to love another culture, implicitly, how to know another culture. 

Music is a great mystery, I think: indeed, we have far less sound-specific adjectives for the intangible phenomena of sounds than we do for the visible and the touchable; the description of sound, like taste, tends to borrow adjectives from these two other senses: soft, textural, blue, bright. Or from affect: sweet, sad, angry, harsh, passionate. Arturo describes the Harmon’s as effecting  “elegance and refined melancholy.” 

Music does something fantastic, simultaneously affecting psyche, cognitions, sensorial. 

Arturo sings sin ti, elegant, melancholic, refined, residues of Big Red Cars and Fellow Musicians—jazz Filipino dance halls boogie boys mariachis—and the strange suffocating combination of oppression (curfew, later, we learn, combined resistances) and vivacity still on the palette.

And I flicker backwards again. 

In a café owned by a family of Georgian musicians, with their instruments strung up all on the walls and lying on a table here or there, and Oktay’s brother(-in-law? or cousin? or…?) and his sons or someone else’s sons smoking and playing football outside, and Oktay telling me carefully at first but with growing conviction of the fascism of Erdoḡan, and this one time as I’m sitting there reading about Medieval Turks, the Mother and daughters(in-law?) are singing around a table and playing their instruments, with so much laughter and such beautiful harmony, the two of the kids  join and suddenly they are all up on their feet in that tiny cafe of theirs, laughing and dancing with stomping feet…

how do you fall in love with someone else’s culture?

another night, in Kafka’s Cafe, this time i’m reading about Byzantium. In the over-cushioned room, only two other girls. Their Turkish turns high-pitched and fragmented by their overpowering laughter—tears cascading, sides clutched, they are quite literally rolling around in laughter, as I sit in a purple armchair not reading about Byzantium. 

each time the stones of the pavement rising up before me, ready to catch my face on their creviced crystalline planes. each time, the Red Car. and the soundscape of Istiklal Caddessi throwing a different tune to you from a different street musician every twenty feet. 

how do you fall in love with a place that's not yours?

~~~~~~~~

2. Sin ti. 

The strange ubiquity of pop sentiment. Its strange resonance.

Without you,

what else could I care for?

if that what makes me cry

is far away from here.

Without you,

there is no mercy for my pain,

the hope of my love, at last

you are taking it away.

Without you,

it is useless to live,

as useless it will be

wanting to forget you.

To read this as though I’m reading poetry rather that to hear this within the familiar confines of a musical type is astonishing.

Arturo:
"The poetry is simple, the sentiment is common. But there is the art! Effortless, comfortable, each thought set before the listener like  pearls strung into a necklace by the hands of a beautiful woman, one by one."

how do you fall in love?