Permiso and The Failure of Meaning

By Joan Guenther

"I was dead.  Now I am alive."

     Aaron the kosher butcher.

     Eyes Wide Open (North American Premier TIFF 2009)

 

Here's what ensues, the scenario, the logic: I am going to live so I'm going to suffer. I will survive.  I'm willing to take the hit. Oh it’s true, I'm going to have to pay attention to one big meaning: pain.

I’m listening to the radio distracted by the ordinary plethora, but then I do so hope the ordinary plethora will distract me. The BBC reports only 20 per cent of people polled want Frederic Mitterand to resign.  Or hopefully the plethora will not distract me: the body in predicament is an excited body, the psyche in distress or ecstasy knows nothing but excess. He writes a book about his desire. I consider my demand. She goes over her losses.

A passage in the book by the Minister of Culture reads "...the profusion of boys, very attractive and immediately available, puts me in a state of desire that I no longer need to hold back or hide” This is s a translation from the French by someone for the BBC. And another translation of the same passage posted by the Telegraph.co.uk: “The profusion of very attractive and immediately available young boys puts me in a state of desire that I no longer need to hinder nor hide...as I know that I will not be refused…I got into the habit of paying for boys...All these rituals of the market for youths, the slave market excite me enormously.””

The Minister of Culture writes, “One could judge this abominable spectacle from a moral standpoint but it pleases me beyond the reasonable.” Exactly. He’s put into a state. A state of desire. You know how that works: like an avalanche, flood, fire. Something happens, you're doubled over. It's. Don't you. Too much to bear. Excess.

Duck and run. Let us find a metaphor for compulsion, so intimate and intense, constraining or unleashing the self, for the duration of the present the self entirely taken up, the self's attention already obliged. And then, the certain aftermath.

It’s about act without agency. A hyper state: eros, grief, fury, depression, narcissism. It’s as if you are dreaming and so you are, in the Arcade, the others there with you unknown and entirely unknowable.

Extend your arm, you can hardly breathe, palm turned slightly upward, point. Yes you do know how it works. Beckon, call, nod. I am there too with the Minister of Culture, we all are, this human creature, it's a spectacle, we feel it deeply. That's the point. When you wake up from this enthralling dream you feel authentic. Briefly.

I'm compromised of course.  She doesn’t see it but I do. She walks, they are catatonic. She feels so visible. He asks me. I like you. I've liked you. I remember. We were trammelled, nothing left, remnants. We are no longer allowed.

Hearing it, for days, it could have been, it was, it scared me. Bringing its mouth, something riding on its back, its wake a dangerous fascination, I could hear it. Get up. It sounds, it means, it swells, it rears up and pitches and tosses. It's difficult to explain. It's like water or, isn’t it like desire, flung forward in waves.

Trish Salah in her essay notices:

iteration, repetition building on example, the comparison of known quantities so as to estimate with greater accuracy the value of the unknown. She notices the difficult-to-explain.

The text asks some questions:

whose life,

desire or mend,

why bother

man or woman or street,

tongue or cherry

salt or honey,

free or frantic/death or activity,

leave stay,

is music a body

field a boat or a voice or a poem

window open or closed

what's my name,

what did she feel,

how far might you go,

talk to someone,

why do you think,

are you well,

poem or dream.

But Salah  points out:

these poems are stuck with  the problem of non-contradiction, sequence and causality.

We understand this don't we. I do: something happens one morning, the generator goes down (for example) and I am put in a wild state of narrative and impersonation. I evade, negotiate, reorder, I struggle and get hurt myself. You do know. The plethora.