“What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
-Milan Kundera, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"
Isn't it bloody annoying when you realise some author has already said everything you were painstakingly trying to spit out, and has said it more succintly and precisely than you could of ever dreamed of? Bastards.
Tuesday, 2 June 2009
"Zenith to us in our antipodes..."
As an unfortunate but inevitable result of turning my first year at art school into a veritable "booze cruise" as the saying goes, I am in now in the postion where I must re-submit (live) or re-sit (die). And so I am re-visiting the former battleground, "Body as a Site of Cultural Representation" and taking up arms once again. As a result, I thought I would give this whole spewing-all-you-have-digested-from-various-books-articles-writers-artists-into-the-collective-cyberspace-bog another shot.
And so, the body. And by the body, I mean the flesh, that corporeal part of ourselves that we can grab, scratch, caress, twist, stroke, squeeze, slap. The vehicle through which we can experience physical pleasure and pain, reminding us we are alive. It is strong and elastic. It is weak and malleable. Hence, it also reminds us we are human.
Paradoxically (and when dealing with these matters, one must be ready to embrace paradox) we denegrate our bodies to being just that, bodies, when we refer to them as flesh. We become slabs of meat, indistinguishable from a carcass hanging in an abattoir, subject to decay and, ultimately, death.
How can something so full of vitality be so mortal? How can we reconcile such disparate spheres as life and death? Especially when these spheres eclipse and overlap each other in such an irreconcilable fashion? When distance meets nearness, poles bend back on themselves, compass points spin without cease. And as we look into the void, we feel vertigo.
And so, the body. And by the body, I mean the flesh, that corporeal part of ourselves that we can grab, scratch, caress, twist, stroke, squeeze, slap. The vehicle through which we can experience physical pleasure and pain, reminding us we are alive. It is strong and elastic. It is weak and malleable. Hence, it also reminds us we are human.
Paradoxically (and when dealing with these matters, one must be ready to embrace paradox) we denegrate our bodies to being just that, bodies, when we refer to them as flesh. We become slabs of meat, indistinguishable from a carcass hanging in an abattoir, subject to decay and, ultimately, death.
How can something so full of vitality be so mortal? How can we reconcile such disparate spheres as life and death? Especially when these spheres eclipse and overlap each other in such an irreconcilable fashion? When distance meets nearness, poles bend back on themselves, compass points spin without cease. And as we look into the void, we feel vertigo.
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