Monday, May 22, 2006

How can't can become literal (Erasing Red)


In an interview in 1992 by Michel Denisot on the French cable station Canal+ for the release of *Fire Walk With Me*, Lynch was asked about his taste for textures and materials, including things which are considered compulsive, like the series of dead flies he used in compositions. He answered that it is the name we give, the associated word ('dead flies'), which prevents our seeing them as beautiful, and that all we have to do to see differently is to erase the word.
--Michel Chion

I.
The erasure of names approaches paradise where a name once was and all that remains is the thing itself resonant and destroyed.

Paradisical beauty is this resonance -- silence beyond sound. The thing resounding no longer attached to a name.

II.
Colors truly become colors without their names.

III.
The signs of paradise remain not only in polesemy but in the dissociation of sign and signifier.

The mind itself cleaves the body as it says the word and a word as a body itself whether said or expressed -- fluent in telepathy.

IV.
The throbbing of this word like blood becomes a trance distanced from an idle grasping at meaning. The throbbing of these words like the real.

A ceiling fan, a turbine in slowest motion.

Eternal as our sex-changing.

V.
The red in blood -- blood red.
The red that can't be destroyed and the red that can.
The word red -- hovering.
Bodies hovering in secret judgment.
A red room -- the blood in red.
That are both symbols and images and sound-images.
The image of blood resonant around a word.
The whirring of words like leaves and the leaves of leaves leave-taking in a single ear.
The rushing, like a rushing of liquid -- a falling of the image upon eyes.
A liquid sense of eyes -- ear conscious.
The reflection of a fan whirring for all time and no one fascinates.
Substantial is this.
Wired for a body made only of blood and useless cuts in time.
The heart of the heart of the motor in these incisions.
In becoming a word the word becomes not merely a word.
Paradise is the renunciation of this word having only its one sense.
The denial of the denial of the doubleness of words.

VI.
This is not a word.

VII.
Words like literal hallucinations of a general voice.

VIII.
Literally words are tearing us apart.
They go down like gifts towards another who is not exactly us.
It is as though these voices were in the next room on a monitor and not here.
Voices rushing in like angels resounding around the fullness of any place, a portal in the ear.
I want them flung, the blood torn, but I literally can't.
How can't can become literal.

IX.
Connecting a sound to a sound movement resumes and we are here before it listening in.
This literal scene metaphorizing only a mood of blood.
Waiting for an image to connect image sound connects what image can not.
We rest in this failure like an eternal word.
An angel rushes upon us again missing the moment it would otherwise grasp.
Red and the word red, blood and the word blood.
Absent-mindedly reciting the world as if it could remain still.

X.
A towel, for instance covering, an angel.

The horizontality of afternoon light
as it falls on the wall.

Signs of a longing
for home follow us afterward.

Icons, like actual homes, alight in our
hovering.

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