.

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?

6.5 la llorona-los hijas de la malinche bridge (march 13)

i dream of burial:

(imagine) the coolness of red earth pressing up against you

the coolness of red earth, pressing into your face

imagine sleep in that cool, soft suffocation!

and the richness of colour, that iron rich soil.

animation short

write something good      write something worthwhile
write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile

write something good      write something worthwhile
write something

11 SIN TI (Trío Los Panchos)

1. he watches.
usually, you think you watch; the musician's the spectacle.

2. he watches and he responds.
he sings to you, he sings, maybe, what you need to hear, what you've already been hearing without paying attention.

3. There are many 'he's, and they play on a hierarchy.
sometimes they sing behind stars. (Do they sing to stars? Do they sing to stars?)

4. one must not aim too high.
.
.
.
10. Music to get up at 5:00 am

20. She had access to the medicine I needed. Morphine, it was called. 
~music. cinema. medicine/drugs.~ what is life. 
Life could be beautiful.

6 LA LLORONA

One wonders if Paz had been thinking of Heidegger at all.

But Arendt had proposed Natality as the definitive characteristic, Natality and Plurality for Social Creatures rather than the Unique Death of the Private Individual. 

But that’s neither here nor there. (though It IS interesting to see how death and life are treated by these thinkers—at least two “public intellectuals”—of the same century. Diagnoses and prescriptions around the MODERN human condiiton). 

Don Paz’s chapters so far have generally included some sort of comparison section where the overlying theme—here, death—is treated in a Mexican framework, and then differentiated from Euro-American/European/American contexts. No surprise—I can always feel more at home with his remarks on the latter; how to work with his explications of Mexicanness (because I am in a class that requires active engagement with this) remains a question for me. One can’t sort of insert the comfortable rationalizing distance of academia and scholarship between the material and oneself, one’s comprehension of it and relation to it. 

I haven't said anything directly about death, or this tearing song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KvtdCOIdWA (one, of course, of many versions...)
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5 PRENDA DEL ALMA

Don Octavio has just told us about the mask that each face wandering the solitary labyrinth wears, and—related—how bound this world is, carefully formed, formulated. He has described for us a harsh world of defensive personalities.

Fiestas, as Don Octavio harmonizes, fiestas are the gash in form. Fiestas—offering the guise of literal masks, rendering perhaps unnecessary their figuritive counterparts—break apart the stony masks described earlier (if only for a day), rip into, smear, form, the formalization of informal life. He has some wonderfully evocative, wonderfully ACTIVE prose, so I won’t try to make his point again. 

I haven’t read the full chapter—i stopped at Death. So I feel like this write up is bound to feel incomplete until then. 

in tandem, these are the lyrics, clumsily Englished by Google. 

What will away from you, turn the soul?

Without seeing you, without hearing you talk without

Every moment you remember

Although our love is impossible

How to remove the scent of flowers?

How to take the wind harmony?

How can we deny that I love you, sweetheart?

How to delete my soul is passion?

Seeing the cruel fate condemns us

My goodness, you forget me I have fear

My heart tells me I can no longer

I can not hide my anguish

How to remove the shine to the stars?

How to prevent runs the gentle river?

How to deny mine suffering chest?

How to delete my soul is passion?

what will away from you, turn the soul?

somehow the muddiness, the obfuscation, resulting from the distortion of google Translate is strangely…eye catching (Ear catching? mind-catching?) Perhaps its the tension between obfuscation and tender, tender, deep emotion that nonetheless is signaled.

How to remove the scent of flowers? How to take the wind harmony?

tearing questions. Think about how memory works, how painful…

How to remove the scent of flowers, the harmony of the wind, the shine of the stars—how to remove the beauty of memory, the very attribute stitching the gap between imaginary and real, desire and real, hope and real.

HOW TO DELETE MY SOUL ITS PASSION.

HOW TO DELETE MY SOULD ITS PASSION…! Indeed, how??

I’m not sure how to paint, how to move, in response.

How to deal with someone else's love-load, 'authentically', without accidentally laying claim to it? His story isn't my story, and don't I forget it. 

(sidenote - note connection to Paz’s heart filled heart flow heartbreak fiestas.)

4 MASKS

Some quick notes on Paz:

MASKS ~ defense; form and formula (principles; the desire for order). "The human experience"-Female and Male experiences/roles. The Female Experience???, long suffering. (violence). (Visibility.) Permissions.

Resignation and reserve, long suffering.

Dissembling. Dissimulation.
Don No One, and his son, Nobody.

3 CASA Y RECUERDA

Something similar and related, but (1) far less successful, (2) Acrylic and gouache (weird, right? Like, why, what was the point. Well, I was trying a specific idea out, but the product didn’t really accord with the vision I’d had in mind. A lesson, then: don’t let your hand be motivated by fear or uncertainty; you’ll make all the wrong decisions), and (3) most importantly, a specific place, towards which I have great ambivalence.

The colours here contain a specific pallette I recall from Irvine, especially on rainy days, or just after the rain. The softest vibrancy of colluding/colliding pinks and oranges submerged and muted under wet blanket weather. The stupid plainness of concrete does best in this weather: Gray gains depth from being wet, things glimmer, leaves and tree trunks gain new color, underlined by the soft grayness of the weather. (Strange that such a colourless place gained so much colour from gray weather.)

The strange collusion of a few blue Grays and middling pinks…

Professor Dubovsky noted that there are suggestions of something: Houses, and a watery (too watery, that was a mistake in fact) body.

In short: this piece is full of mistakes. But the main idea is a conflict of romanticization and ambivalence towards past and place.

2 TIERRA Y CORAZON

Earth and Heart.

Professor Dubovsky has asked us to think about earth and heart in the specific context of our own lives. “…Something which expresses the meaning of these words to you--in your life, in memory, and in what you know of your family past.” 

I actually have an object to talk about, and the words “Earth and Heart” are far less personal than SOY YO (which I’m still not sure precisely how to interpret: “it’s me,” or “this is me,” or “here’s me/myself”…?) so this is (should be) more straightforward. 

Having had only a couple and a half hours to think about this assignment, due to my joining the class late, I sized down and greatly simplified a first (rather frazzled) idea, and have thrown (tried to throw) the colors of places of personal histories, and insinuate their textures, onto small blocks of wood. Two of these blocks are trying to emphasize the paintiness of paint, the fact that I’m reaching into something that doesn’t exist (anymore). I’ve never felt farther from/more uncertain of memory and family past than I currently do, so I wanted to pile on thick splotches of paint, to say, hey. i could be making this up. (but somewhere in there, sharing space with the ambivalent colors of Southern California, are ponds and backwaters and mango trees and coconut trees and the redness of the earth after the monsoon, and the smell, and the cricket-filled night. My words, much more clearly than these rather unsuccessful blocks of wood, smack thickly of Romanticization to the point of delusion. Reek of sentimentality. Many mid/later-century popular Indian rhetorics, visible for instance in film, tend to reify deify the Village; the Nationalistic; the a-colonial, uncorrupt Rural. Anti-industrial and Un-modern. (The search for authenticity in your own goddamn country). Am I guilty of nothing less, in a way? MORE paint, then—and thickly, obscurely—to alert you to the falsehoods of the mythicizing painter). Note that this is NOT metaphor, & this is NOT symbol. 

The idea, also, was evocation: the desire to evoke sensory experiences—smells, textures, colors, maybe even tastes and sounds—rather than to record or symbolize (a statement about) a personal relationship between Earth and Heart.

1 SOY YO

SOY YO

It’s hard, I think to ever say, “this is me,” and suppose that you’ve got something stable, something essential, pinned down.

“Soy yo.”

I think it’s always an anxiety that one feels, but after being away from any real home for some six months (away from both Berkeley, and away from family and friends—the jewelish rocks of my existence—and away from Irvine which, after some fourteen years, eventually yielded itself to some definition of home), there is a particular discomfort with the phrase. Moreover, I’m not sure what I want you to know about my history, I’m not sure I want to recall any personal history. 

Soy yo.

Well, the thing is, I think place (and Pomp) and circumstance have so much to do with this. I feel I’ve seen several—quite different—iterations of what, I suppose, in some sense is myself.

And, moreover, to establish, to retell, to recall the proper referent of “me” (unspilt by Descartes, unrendered nonexistent by Hume) requires digging into memory, history. But memory and I are not close friends these days; I’ve grown something of a horror for her mythologizing spell. This winter, (my feet in the snow and the snow in my hair) I achieved the death of the illusion of memory, the murder of nostalgia (so I tell myself).

Can I look really into the eyes of their ghosts, just to tell you about myself?

_______________________________________

SOY YO. (I feel bad now, because I haven’t really honored the prompt, I’ve kind of sidestepped the assignment.)

I could (try to) be cut and dry about it, I guess. Here I am, Berkeley senior, twenty-five. I was born here, I was moved to India when I was about three or four (an idyllic childhood, with my sisters and grandparents and my mom (she read to us and gave us paints and crafty things,  my sisters and I playing against the life-filled dull succulent greenery of South India), my dad visiting occasionally. An idyllic existence without any sense of time), saw my father for the last time at seven (he was a pastor and a musician and he bought us a fancy keyboard and brought his twelve-string guitar with him and for some six months we sang), was moved back to the States (the new, crisp, and dead suburban streets of Irvine) at ten (my mother and sisters and I all slept together on the living room floor, or crammed into her bed, for that first month), met my first American (Indian) friend, my best friend, at ten, and I don’t like writing this, so. The end. (The horror of memory? I’ve spent years and years and years with my face turned nostalgically towards the past, and I’ve only just slipped out of the spell of memory and desire, so let it rest). Once it’s out there... . One artist said that once you sort of ‘release’ an artwork to the public, it's not yours anymore. Its interpretation, its meaning, its value, lie out of your control. But it seems that's true of anything you might share—& god forbid histories and memories (and presences and futures, narratives) grow some haunting lives of their own. Searle’s speech acts include declaratives — speech acts that change the reality in accord with the proposition of the declaration — but anything uttered risks the danger of performing a declarative, of stitching an idea into reality. 

__________________________________________

The fearful supposition of which you may accuse me, gentle reader, is that my conception of SOY YO is un-necessarily premised on history. (That or I'm being over sensitive, over dramatic. All of which I grant, uncomplainingly.) Can’t oneself be premised on the freestanding point the very precipice of the present itself? (But—take heed—the Futurists, those goddamn fascists, are all Dead!)