my heroes died of syphilis

on wounds & female fetishism

stills from a video
(investigating a cow's tongue)


Now what of the little girl, she who is, in Freudian terms, always already castrated, thus impervious to all threats of castration? How does she respond to the evidence of sexual difference, which entails or presupposes her inferiority? A careful reading of Freud's writings on female sexual development strongly suggests that many little and big girls are engaged in a rebellion against the "fact" of castration every bit as energetic as the fetishist's. Indeed, if one takes as one of the hallmarks of fetishism the split in the ego (Ichspaltung) to which the fetish bears testimony, then it becomes possible to speak...of female fetishism, for the little girl's ego can be split along the very same fault lines as the little boy's.

Naomi Schor "Female Fetishism: The Case of George Sand"

Like Barthes's punctum or Lacan's point technique, the superfluous, perplexing, derailing detail operates as the object of one's love, apprehension, hunger, or repulsion. It is the detail that affords a point of entry into the aesthetics of textual appropriation, an aperture or rent proceeding from a small, fixed image. Spots, tattoos, bloodstains, stigmas, scars, abrasions, hairy patches, stained clothing, worn keepsakes, fingered relics--these emerge as those details that stand out as dark symbolic concentrates in the visual field of fetishistic description.

Emily Apter Feminizing the Fetish

new works: Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière

If one image dominates my imagination as a quintessential icon of the grand hysteric and also sits squarely (if suggestively) at the intersection of a hysteric, mystic, and medical theater, it's this one, a picture found in a volume of Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. An involuntary spasm of the tongue stimulated aurally. Lately I've been obsessively processing this image and its variants, scaling them to larger-than-life iterations. (The little thumbnail on the left-hand side of this blog, for example.)

"Chez une hystérique" & "Jeune possédée"
(from Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière)
mixed media (vellum, pastel, charcoal, acrylic), 76 x 114 cm

J.B. Murry: drawing in tongues

I confess I'm not very familiar with much Outsider Art beyond super big names like Darger or Wolfli, but my sister and her boyfriend recently visited the Folk Art Museum and told me about the art of John "J.B." Murry, which is part of the Approaching Abstraction exhibit on view right now. Needless to say considering my history with and interest in the spiritual "gift of tongues", I am fascinated:

Murry was a sharecropper and a preacher from Georgia who experienced visions and “wrote in the spirit”: the fervor of his technique and the abstract passages that only he could translate are like painted versions of the experience known as speaking in tongues. The artist would hold a water-filled glass bottle up to his artwork to interpret the meanings of his private alphabet, which is composed of squiggles, splashes, and dashes, and conduct a sermonlike reading. As Murry became more comfortable with his material, he modestly increased his scale—from cash-register tape to sheets of stationery to drawing paper—and expanded his medium from ink to paint, applied by brush and finger.

(text and images from the online exhibition catalogue)

tongues (lamb)

On Catherine Clément's theory of creative ecstasy: "Escaping into syncope was, for them, a scandalous escape from rationality. But this removal from time and space can bring a great joy, an unlocatable but generalized elation which Clément, borrowing the expression from the British psychologist D. W. Winnicott, calls, "an orgasm of the self," different from but related to the physical orgasm....It is thus normal for the artist to be schizoid, to be aware of and open to an 'entre-deux syncopé'." (Michael Finn in Hysteria, Hypnotism, the Spirits, and Pornography: Fin-de-Sciècle Cultural Discourses in the Decadent Rachilde)

(When a tongue, the physical organ in all its complexity and simplicity, is overtaken and even annhiliated by a superfluousness of nonsensical decoration, does this connote a beginning or an end, or is this diving right into the midst of the precious, baroque syncope? The same might be asked of a life theatricalized, aestheticized, and suppressed/expanded by excess, which contracts and expands with limited regard to history and its liquid, shifting politics.)

(in celebration of) saturnalian dialogues

Seeing Cynthia Norton's Dancing Squared at the Frye recently set a series of thoughts in motion for me. You can watch Robin Held and Greil Marcus discuss the piece's association with ecstatic Shaker dancing in this video segment. Ecstatic religious traditions, particularly in a Christian or western context, interest me because I spent the latter part of my teen years in the midst of what was generally dubbed The Toronto Blessing, a Charismatic revival that claimed the First Great Awakening and Jonathan Edwards as heritage. Hallmarks of this revival were fairly extreme demonstrative outbursts, often sustained for hours or days, which included spiritual drunkenness, laughter, spasms, trances, behaving like animals (dogs, lions, and birds were the common ones I remember), as well as more standard Charismatic demonstrations like being slain or falling in the Spirit. The people involved in this affair were usually very happy, and the atmosphere staged for these gatherings was generally intensely playful, permissive, euphoric. People often declared how like (or superior to) being drunk or stoned these occasions were, and while many critics of the movement claimed it was demonic or harmful, I don't think I ever witnessed anything worse than at least disjointedly silly behavior as a means of expression or as a way to rediscover the material body in a social and symbolic context and at most escapism and delusion.

Because of my interest in hysteria, I can't help but draw occasional parallels between it and much of what took place under the umbrella of the Toronto Blessing. "Mass hysteria" is nearly too easy a pejorative to sling at it, yet the overlapping characteristics of this private-made-public carnival persist, even down to the common poses and gesticulations, the spasmodic or cataleptic trances, the famous arching of the back, the visions, and even choice of animal in the case of delirious mimicry. There is no denying the catharsis of such carnival, but it is dazzling to behold the elaborate exteriorized structures erected around such practices to justify and aid their being -- and this is where the medicalization, theatricalization, and spiritualization of hysterical demonstration overlap strikingly.










video stills from Toronto Blessing type services

Paul Richer: "The patient can also be transformed into a bird, a dog, etc., and she can be seen trying to reproduce the look of these animals. She will speak, however, and answers the questions put to her, without seeming to notice what might be contradictory in the fact of an animal using human language. And nonetheless, the patient claims to be perfectly able to see and feel her beak and feathers, or her muzzle and fur, etc." (Invention of Hysteria, Didi-Huberman)

Freud writes of: "the 'clownism' in boys' hysteria, the imitation of animals and circus scenes...a compulsion to repeat dating from their youth [in which they] seek their satisfaction to the accompaniment of the craziest capers, somersaults and grimaces."

Here (in these aesthetically twinned outbursts) is an ostentatious example of a formalization of Bataille's great expenditure, an exercise in existing for a brief moment in an unreal (or super-real, or surreal) suspension, hovering in a childish space, where the selfishness and willfulness of this heightened experience is at the same time an emptying of self, an ecstatic, dissolving, unraveling moment that hovers at the boundary (of the idea) of death, and a transgression of the limits of jouissance, a hoarding, a greed without limits, a need to feel and be and express the ineffable at all cost.







sketches after Richer's synoptic table of regular hysterical attacks and their variants

When I think of Strindberg I immediately think of the incessant smelling of celery (lechery) and incense, whereas I think I smell incessantly the scent of cinnamon (sin, all kinds of greed and gluttony) and my nostrils will eternally be stopped up with the perfume of old churches, with the smell of oak wood and ancient wax, the stuff-smell of pews which row upon row stink of God and of all the thousands of asses that have rubbed a high shine into their interminable glassy planks. The lightning of Christ will pierce my chest continually until I am convulsing on the ground, my limbs locked in a bow, my pelvis quivering on the end of my spine, which is like a vibrating string anchored at one in on the floor, with the weight of all the earth's gross magnetism, the other end whipping about wildly, like a loose cord -- or a shimmering light -- in an imaginary windstorm.

The body has effected a perfect detachment from mind; it is set free like a kite in a windstorm (terrible freedom). Ecstasy unencumbered by liturgy is like the organs of a body set free from the confines of bones and skin: it pours out liquescent and wild, or like a vivisected animal whose bisection is not girded up with a plate of glass, which then drains, a cascade of expiring viscera out of the shell.

Such formlessness is the frisson towards which [...the choice of pronoun remains a difficulty] urgently grope.

videos of a lamb's tongue

I posted photos of my little bibelot a few weeks ago, and finally edited some video fragments to share (filming by Damon Mori):





occasional notes written during the sewing:

The hemorrhaging of a ruffled muscle (and its protruding) out between the walls of the mouth:
The ruffled mouth
The ruffled effusion of sinews which stretch like pearlescent tissue between anchor points on the brown bone
(ectoplasm)

. When I began, the tongue was plump and cold. To feel it warming between my fingers is to feel it gently decomposing, and across the span of days I can feel the tissue gradually weakening, as the frayed ends of my threads dissolve into invisible but still troubling knotted filliments, which cannot easily be traced let alone undone. I am sewing first of all clusters of nailheads, then slowly adding little starbursts, lozenges, pyramids, and hearts. Lots of little multi-faceted hearts of all sizes lacquering and twinkling and eventually obfuscating the mat of furry pearly papillae.

. the tongue (lamb's tongue is a common flower name)
the tongue as symbol and center of speech, of sexual acts, of innocence (the lamb), of innocence dead (the butchered dinner), of symbol and/as language, of nourishment, of hysterical gesture (the tongue jutted out from the mouth spasmodically - contracture de la langue provoquee a l'etat de veille chez une hystérique par reflexe auriculaire), the Lamb of God, Mary's little lamb, the black sheep --- against positivist materialism and rational discourse and towards symbolic materialism and irrational discourse.

. The week I turned thirteen I was in attendance at a religious camp where kids were taught to speak in tongues -- -- I felt the terrible flush of shame and disappointment at not being immediately gifted with this lavish proof of inhabitation at the first test, and then being instructed to open my mouth and move my tongue freely between the teeth, around the sweating walls of my mouth, to speak without making meaning, to take flight from reason or thought, I finally reached a climax of bodily dissolution that released the logorrhea I desperately desired.

If I now open my mouth to speak the blessed blue glossolalia (you could say: the purplest prose of all) I get syllables that read like a broken record, like con-oh-rosso-shana-la-ma-shee-kee-moh-da-da, which is redoubling with a hidden text which is a blaspheming of the Holy Spirit.

The speaker gifted with glossolalia is able to fill, simply and ineffably; this tongue, cut loose from its cerebral moorings, is the perfect beastly libertine, purely and perfectly filling, spilling over with gibberish excess, a nonsensical paroxysm of filling without being or meaning, this filling which is a hobbyhorse of grief, which would, if unbridled, drive all men mad into the ground, their inner thighs rubbed pink and blossoming and unfurling with a hundred hairy splinters, an ecstatic, childish, pullulating rash, which resembles in the hot brightness of its bloom the pink of a mouth from which nothing enters, nothing issues, its emptiness described by the absence of a tongue barbarically cut out, where everything is perfectly described in endless mystery languages.

bibelot, tongue aetheticized and fetishized, (aboli even)

I've indulged in whimsy lately, regarding tongues. A few months ago I began dabbling in lamb tongues, ogling them at the market, then buying them, then handling them and modifying them. One image was stuck in my head for ages -- of a tongue covered completely in a haphazard lacework of archaic jet glass. The jet beads, most of which are about a hundred years old, many removed from disintegrating clothing, were individually stitched onto the tongue till the top was more or less obfuscated.
.
When I was very young on a Halloween my father dressed up in a heavy robe and laid out a spooky Halloween dinner on a sideboard in the attic of our church. He had before him a bowl filled with freezing cold grapes, which he said were eyeballs (we were told to plunge our hands in). He had a plate heaped with cold twining noodles, which he said were brains. And finally he had laid out on a platter a monstrous long cow's tongue, as long as my forearm, the top of which was rough like stiff, cold fur to the touch.















More images here.