Defixiones

Music: Depeche Mode: "Dream On" "DEFIXIONES refers to the warnings engraved in lead which were placed on the graves of the dead in Greece, Asia Minor, and elswhere in the Middle East. They cautioned against moving or desecrating the corpses under threat of extreme harm."

--Liner notes to Galas' Defixiones: Will and Testament: Orders from the Dead

Thursday the haunting seminar was somewhat frigid, which was to be expected I guess (the lecture was on hysteria and hysterics; upending gender always begs its re-inscription in very palpable ways; I get stuck in here, you know?). Everyone in the class is wicked smart and crucial to the beast we have become; even so, our size conjures images of Hobbes' Leviathan, our own girth chilling speech. I suspect as we go deeper we will get chattier (that is, I will shut-up more), and the "social contract" of civility will gradually erode into an erotics of proximty, of disclousre--but still at a safe "academic" distance.

The distance is as regretable as it is necessary; those among us who resist "selling-out" simply burn-out in the end.

At least my own personal investment is working itself out in terms of the themes of the book I want to write. I work ahead of the class only by a few days; it seems like my concern is increasingly and unavoidably Derridian (a figure I had hoped to avoid; he haunts all of this literature). Gender is a central issue; it would seem justice, too, follows in its wake. I worry about the themes of the book, which are getting as large as the class and, I worry, threaten to explode the tidy text into an unwieldy, evocative exercise in intellectual diarrhea (a la Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book). I'm not smart enough to write like that; I must have definite, concrete objects upon which to meditate.

The objects thus far: for the opening, I have gender, and a favorite film of mine, Mulholland Drive; I have the "spectral voices of nine-eleven" as an object--and that chapter is finished; I want to do canned laughter/the "laff box," and the answering machine. Finally, I wanted to look at popular music experimentation in voice. I mentioned earlier Burrough's tape "cut-ups," which work nicely. So, too, does the backwards-masking stuff. Speech in reverse.

I recently picked up Diamanda Galas' new double-album, Will and Testament. I've listened to it twice now, and think that the project (combined with her 1990 Plague Mass) might provide me with a language for what I'm getting at with the haunting of voice. Galas has made a career out of manipulating her voice in performance; what she is able to do with her bodily expression is nothing other than the uncanny. The new album was commissioned to "unearth," in a sort of Benjaminian historiography of "blasting," the Armenian, Assyrian, and Anatolian and Pontic Greek genocides between 1914-1923, which I admit I hadn't know about until reading the insert. The album is dreadful, beautiful in places, striking that uneasy abjection of sublimity: at once monstrous and divine. It marks an aural counterpart, in a way, to Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Whereas the latter deifies atrocity, Galas exposes it for what it really is: horrible. Well, I slide; it's ambivalent.

In this melancholic key, I should admit I also screened Exorcist: The Beginning this weekend. Although I appreciated the attempt to wed the following three films (and its well-taken attempt to explain the relation between The Exorcist and Exorcist II: The Heretic), the film was dreadful. Genocide, again, was the theme (seems to be this weekend in info-tainment), as the subjection of native Africans is compared to Jewish annihilation in facile juxtaposition. The center of this unfortunate mediation is Father Merrin who, of course, is a resurrected white dude (who happens to be rearing a small black boy). Unquestionably, this film was conceived in the aftermath of 9/11, when "W" was ventriloquizing Gerson's "evil" tropicopia.

I suppose this sounds so very morbid; I guess it is more of an exercise in pretentiousness (as is typical of only children and their ilk). Things are not bad here; things are looking up. That's when mourning made good on it--the object removed returns with a vengence, disguised as something less familiar.

It was such a lonely week without my computer (which died and took a week resurrecting), which I rely on to feel connected to the "world" lately. Whether that's simply pathetic or a reality for far too many of us, I'm not sure. At the very least, graphical interface is my telephony. Now, just how phony is that?

. . . and then there is politics, something to get mournful about, undoutedly. When your "great white hope" looks like Lurch, well, as my mentor was fond of saying, "there you are."