IMAGE = MAGIE, 001
An Indulgence in a Practice x5
I mentioned, in my PHANTASM OF DESIRE post, that one of the methodologies of using the phantasm involves giving oneself over to the space of the image. There are multiple ways to do this, and I mentioned a number, but as an exercise I periodically enjoy writing short bits of text in response to image to highlight what it is in the image that appeals to me. I have primarily used this exercise looking at fashion based images in an attempt to articulate an idea away from a product and it’s been quite a good way to create the necessary difference.
Sometimes this exercise can feel like playing with hyperstition, sometimes it feels like a private ritual enactment that I suspect people align with sigil work, other times it just feels like a way for me to extend enjoyment, engagement with an image that I find particularly interesting. Other times it’s a way to extend and highlight resonances that I think about in the space of narrative and their extension into a world at large. My intent is to, as often as possible, decontextualize the actual contents of the image, ignoring it’s context and treating it purely as a snapshot of a singular pulse: as such, I will often intentionally not discover artist names, production titles, photographer etc. I like Pinterest as a way to harness images because of how easy this decontextualization comes. With that said, I will often end up reverse image searching something to find more context if it entices me enough, and if anything posted here brings you that specific interest, I suggest you do the same.
Within the narrative spaces that my work often inhabits, I quite regularly have an obsession of men in glass tanks. This is pure space of evocation for me, a literal container for desire. The tank, when filled with liquid, also literalizes the float, which is a term I was prone to using as a short cut to something akin to Bataille’s impossible around the work I was writing 2009-2014 or so. The glass tank with the man floating inside provides the necessary isolation to depersonalize the man into pure objective desire.
In this image, the placement of a child, presumably checking of his shoulder to avoid being caught examining the man in the cage calls up the sort of necessary isolationist practice of subversive desire; where the constant look over your should is not because you are embarrassed by what you are looking at, but rather because there are potentially dire consequences to being caught. The tension this situation arises carries a very particular frisson that I imagine can be traced back towards Genet and his articulations of desire in relationship to criminality.
For me, the above configurations help me arrive at something that I think I often push towards: the monstrous criminality of desire rather than Bataille’s unsatisfied desire — the criminality of desire only loses it’s frisson when it is banalized, allowing for that shiver to carry all the way through to le petit mort; extending past the little death that often for Bataille is a dissolution: here, we can stay in the space of eroticism, pushing beyond in a different way.
Despite the waxing and waning currents of political opinion in relationship to leftist tendencies, I have always held a very high opinion of the general attributes of masculinity. My own sexuality is not that complicated, as it has always been these attributes that I have been more attracted to than anything else. Part of the fun of homosexuality, for me, is that there’s a level of play where one can put effort into becoming the image that they desire; this ties back, perhaps, to a much older essay on gender affirmative hormanal interventions by way of steroids for cisgendered men that to me is just as much of an articulation of “gender affirming care” as the much more discussed (in leftist spaces) trans* interventions. I find hypermasculinity attractive, and the image here articulates the strong jaw, mustache, and the piling of hair around the jaw. The depersonalized face that both articulates and hides any actual sense of self.
Abject spaces always speak to me of infinite possibities. There are a million codified ways people consider this (take, for instance, the backrooms), but the idea is much more open than any genre canon suggests. The image here is a purely empty space, but there are enough hints of entropy that can give rise to thought of what has happened…
….a flood, rising just high enough to damage the waller paper of the lower wall as the airvent functioned as space for drainage. A man in distress wandering in the room, slipping on the floor, his body tracing a diagonal from one corn to another. The air in the room stops when the man’s breath pauses. This stoppage is actually a door and in the door opens up to a remembrance of night: a wandering through bars without sensate acuity, the haze of alcohol, and the trajectory of lust. The space of leather.
All of this, in an empty office.
I have decided to include this image specifically because of my pointed interest in not including it: I normally resist the insistence of celebrity culture. In fact, if it weren’t for the inescapable world we live in, I would not have any idea who this is, for I haven’t seen any of his movies as far as I can remember, but alas, I do indeed know who this man is. The point of the image, however, is not the celebrity, is not the man himself, but instead it is the particularity of the fit of the shirt: bursting open explicity at the chest, a gestural revolt of the garment itself, pointing to an abundance at the level of, again, one of the masculine attributes I cannot pretend I am not particularly drawn to: which is to say, I love big honking titties on men, and the awkwardness imposed in this image, unintentional, draws attention to this physicality in a more inspiring way than a mere topless photograph might.
As much as I can find myself attracted to images, sometimes an image in tangent with a singular word can inspire even further reverie. Forever fascinated by snakes, by the impossibility of self-ablation by ouroborosean impulse, extended into the scientific pointing of the eternally erect penis — there is so much here that can go anywhere (and ultimately I have an entire section of my unpublished novel Obliteration Pyramid where I actually…fully approach what the aforementioned sentence evokes). So we have an atemporal echo here: the discovery of an image that evokes a series of thoughts that I already explored ten years ago in writing fiction. These are the tendrils weaving through the world, and when these echoes arise it is how I know I am on the right path.