Monday, May 22, 2006
Derrida, What To Do With a Secret in Kuala Lumpur, and Censorship
To do:
Bury Derrida's The Post Card somewhere in the ground in the city. Or plant it surreptitiously on the shelf of the National Library. There will be a circutious map provided to seek out this 'treasure' - a carte (map) is also a carte (card).
-
Someone told me that our city's sewer system is a series of man-holes interconnected by drains. These man-holes are about the height and width of a toilet cubicle. When I see one in the ground, I want to lift the heavy metal lid and whisper my secrets into it. So small a space for so big a lie, but the lie is not allowed to fester and grow stagnant. The words collect momentarily in a moist, nightmarish pool, only to flow outwards underneath the city and into the sea, ending at last in blessed evaporation. The telling of a secret is a vertical movement - downwards. Its dispersion is horizontal, a quick creeping way of travelling across distance. Travel induces transformation. Our city provides a thick, viscous medium of waste water for a secret to mix in. You cannot mix a secret in clean water, because it will dissolve only to create a secret of even greater volume, and then, well, you are fucked. It is in the nature of people to hold court and that is why a confession that needs no other person is infinitely preferable. It is cleaner. The night air, a hole in the ground, a sleeping city and the wide open sea - these things cannot judge, it is not in their ability. They are immutable, impersonal, which is why they lend themselves well to the secret transformation of a secret into...nothing.
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Censorship does not cancel a thing out and leave nothing. Censorship is not the opposite of creation, in fact it creates a thing - a space. Let us say I have written a passage. Here it is: [
]. Well I have censored it, so you may not read it. But this censorship, as an act, has created a new thing around which there is discourse. It is in fact, a parasitical act of creation! Therefore censorship is wildly creative. The original content of the passage is now impenetrable, but its contours, outlines, mass, density - these are brought into sharp focus and are highly accessible. The act of censorship severs the shadow from an object and allows it to float around the room. As they say, a person who has no shadow is dead. The object dies but the shadow lives. ¶ 8:56 PM
Bury Derrida's The Post Card somewhere in the ground in the city. Or plant it surreptitiously on the shelf of the National Library. There will be a circutious map provided to seek out this 'treasure' - a carte (map) is also a carte (card).
-
Someone told me that our city's sewer system is a series of man-holes interconnected by drains. These man-holes are about the height and width of a toilet cubicle. When I see one in the ground, I want to lift the heavy metal lid and whisper my secrets into it. So small a space for so big a lie, but the lie is not allowed to fester and grow stagnant. The words collect momentarily in a moist, nightmarish pool, only to flow outwards underneath the city and into the sea, ending at last in blessed evaporation. The telling of a secret is a vertical movement - downwards. Its dispersion is horizontal, a quick creeping way of travelling across distance. Travel induces transformation. Our city provides a thick, viscous medium of waste water for a secret to mix in. You cannot mix a secret in clean water, because it will dissolve only to create a secret of even greater volume, and then, well, you are fucked. It is in the nature of people to hold court and that is why a confession that needs no other person is infinitely preferable. It is cleaner. The night air, a hole in the ground, a sleeping city and the wide open sea - these things cannot judge, it is not in their ability. They are immutable, impersonal, which is why they lend themselves well to the secret transformation of a secret into...nothing.
-
Censorship does not cancel a thing out and leave nothing. Censorship is not the opposite of creation, in fact it creates a thing - a space. Let us say I have written a passage. Here it is: [
]. Well I have censored it, so you may not read it. But this censorship, as an act, has created a new thing around which there is discourse. It is in fact, a parasitical act of creation! Therefore censorship is wildly creative. The original content of the passage is now impenetrable, but its contours, outlines, mass, density - these are brought into sharp focus and are highly accessible. The act of censorship severs the shadow from an object and allows it to float around the room. As they say, a person who has no shadow is dead. The object dies but the shadow lives. ¶ 8:56 PM
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Betta, I thought you might appreciate this.
This Room And Everything In It
by Lee Li-Young
Lie still now
while I prepare for my future,
certain hard days ahead,
when I'll need what I know so clearly this moment.
I am making use
of the one thing I learned
of all the things my father tried to teach me:
the art of memory.
I am letting this room
and everything in it
stand for my ideas about love
and its difficulties.
I'll let your love-cries,
those spacious notes
of a moment ago,
stand for distance.
Your scent,
that scent
of spice and a wound,
I'll let stand for mystery.
Your sunken belly
is the daily cup
of milk I drank
as a boy before morning prayer.
The sun on the face
of the wall
is God, the face
I can't see, my soul,
and so on, each thing
standing for a separate idea,
and those ideas forming the constellation
of my greater idea.
And one day, when I need
to tell myself something intelligent
about love,
I'll close my eyes
and recall this room and everything in it:
My body is estrangement.
This desire, perfection.
Your closed eyes my extinction.
Now I've forgotten my
idea. The book
on the windowsill, riffled by wind...
the even-numbered pages are
the past, the odd-
numbered pages, the future.
The sun is
God, your body is milk...
useless, useless...
your cries are song, my body's not me...
no good ... my idea
has evaporated...your hair is time, your thighs are song...
it had something to do
with death...it had something
to do with love.
hug.
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This Room And Everything In It
by Lee Li-Young
Lie still now
while I prepare for my future,
certain hard days ahead,
when I'll need what I know so clearly this moment.
I am making use
of the one thing I learned
of all the things my father tried to teach me:
the art of memory.
I am letting this room
and everything in it
stand for my ideas about love
and its difficulties.
I'll let your love-cries,
those spacious notes
of a moment ago,
stand for distance.
Your scent,
that scent
of spice and a wound,
I'll let stand for mystery.
Your sunken belly
is the daily cup
of milk I drank
as a boy before morning prayer.
The sun on the face
of the wall
is God, the face
I can't see, my soul,
and so on, each thing
standing for a separate idea,
and those ideas forming the constellation
of my greater idea.
And one day, when I need
to tell myself something intelligent
about love,
I'll close my eyes
and recall this room and everything in it:
My body is estrangement.
This desire, perfection.
Your closed eyes my extinction.
Now I've forgotten my
idea. The book
on the windowsill, riffled by wind...
the even-numbered pages are
the past, the odd-
numbered pages, the future.
The sun is
God, your body is milk...
useless, useless...
your cries are song, my body's not me...
no good ... my idea
has evaporated...your hair is time, your thighs are song...
it had something to do
with death...it had something
to do with love.
hug.
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