The Body and the Experience of Limits

I've been extremely busy lately, to the point where any sort of internalized consideration of events or even just mere reflection has been relegated to those moments when I'm walking to or from somewhere, or perhaps between doing various tasks at one or the other day-job; all of this to say, of course, that this sort of thought itself has become interstitial. To a certain extent this is fine; it's certainly easier when you're trying to focus on keeping busy and sane while working six days a week, as sometimes too much reflection insists upon a need for more time itself, and if that time isn't available it can lead to an inescapable melancholy that becomes preventative of what I always stubbornly call doing the work.

A few days ago, in an email to New Juche (who, I should note, is one of the few writers publishing these days--that I'm aware of--whom I place utmost faith in; his project is very different from mine but I feel a kinship with it regardless) I mentioned that I'm interested in developing my body to a point where it becomes desirable to others, and that once it has become desirable it is my intention to pervert this desire by way of contortion or some other embodied capacity. My own desire is often found at or in limits (whether it be the limit of desperation or a scream, the limit of a falling or a wound), and as such it only makes sense to explore how I can explore projecting this for others (for, as always, I'm more interested in the creation of an experience than mere literary or artistic output, etc). This idea was not something I had consciously considered before I typed the words into my browser, but after I did I found myself very pleased and realized it was true. My obsession with developing my own body has always drawn its primary impetus out of ideas for performance and artistic output (even early on in my development, years ago when I felt entirely divorced from the physicality of my body, I was fascinating by men whose bodies were developed to a point where physicality could be used as a vessel for an art practice). The thing that keeps this fire burning, so to speak, is that it truly seems to be the first motivating factor I've found for putting the work in towards a development of the physical body. In the past I conceived of physical development as a mere road towards making yourself attractive to a potential partner, and inside of this I felt it was a shallow pursuit. Now, satisfied inside of an ongoing six-year relationship, the need to attract a potential partner is gone and it has allowed me rather to focus on a self-motivated reason rather than for someone else (as a faggot I'm not concerned with the continuity of a family lineage; I'll never have offspring).

Within all of this there are a few things of interest to note: shaping the body is not dissimilar to shaping the text--after a certain point it's all banal editing, a tightening up, an awareness of the desired outcome vs. the tools you have to lead to that outcome. Similarly there's a pleasure to be found in physical exhaustion, a limit in a true sense, for one can only push oneself to a certain point before nearing collapse. Granted, this point can be kept further and further away with more training, and this echoes the idea of limits wonderfully. I can only assume that there are further points of interest to be found, more parallels to explore (there is, of course, more that goes unmentioned here, but that can be saved for a further day), and this fact is even further motivating in the progression.

Material Evidence from the Outside

A friend of mine recently commented, regarding a grip of 12 inches he was posting photos of on Instagram, that he loves the cover art for Italo Disco singles because there's something slightly off about them, something that reminds him of the bizarre record stores that pop up in his dream, with titles and covers impossibly absent from the real world. As someone with a consistently over-active dream life, there's something so necessarily true about this that I can't help but return to the idea regularly. For me the recurring temple of capitalism is a bookstore (never a library, but I can't be surprised about that considering the world as it stands), never architecturally the same, but always with an impossible swathe of books and journals and ephemera that I'm utterly thrilled by, absent from the waking world, and also sad to lose upon entering morning light.

I've been thinking of this in a way of sort of manifesting a material object that crosses the border from this impossible "outside" into ours... for me, lately, the 'discovery' of Adam McKeown's journal in the 90s, Intimacy has been tantamount. Modeled after and dedicated to Paul Buck's Curtains (which in itself has been infinitely important to me), the journal, at least the 2 issues I've read so far of the 3 I've managed to track down, is consistently fantastic. Some minor work from authors I'm familiar with (translations of Bataille's & Artaud's poetry that are fantastic and rarely discussed, among other things) along with amazing and often sexually transgressive works from authors completely unfamiliar to me, often writers that went on to write little else (at least, little else that's been published). This invisibility plays into this imagined idea that these are transmissions from the outside... Materially, the journal itself is somewhere between Mimeograph, Digital printing, Xerox, and "professional," but often in strange formats and with fading text. Materially interesting in its imperfections, makes me wish I had never tried to pretend that Solar Luxuriance needed to make perfect objects (when interesting objects should have actually been the goal).

But I'm losing focus--I don't want to wander into a discussion of publishing right now.

I've been enjoying, recently, somewhat of a return to form in my reading, predicated upon my encounters with Curtains and Intimacy -- my route into experimental literature actually came from just being a young curious pervert, and it feels good to return to that. I've always been primarily interested in experimental narrative forms -- even in film and "poetry" (or more precisely, écriture), the work I enjoy most has some sort of "narrative movement," even in the most loosely defined manner. But the narrative can't just be whatever for me to really care. I'm a horror movie fan true and true, I "like" perversion, sex, transgression, violence. At an entirely base level. To be more accurate, I gravitate towards limit experiences -- both within the text, and in life (though in life my aim towards that quest is accomplished in a way different than perhaps expected, but that's an exploration for another day). I was reminded a few days ago that I started reading French literature almost exclusively due to Georges Bataille and Alain Robbe-Grillet, both capital P Perverts if there ever were any, and I'm 100% fine with this. I've read fairly widely (though away from the dominant paradigm) over the last 10 years, but my explorations that are more directed have been the most fruitful. It has felt nice to just be ok with indulging in my preferences, no pretense given that I have to be well rounded or anything.