Writings of 'Who'

direct link: Writings of 'Who'

A videopoem performance piece.

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For a backdrop, I slung a rich, red Chinese satin cloth over a room divider, pulled my iMac up close, and recorded a recitation of the poem ten times in PhotoBooth, each time adding more jewelry, a swath of orange beads across the neck and shoulder, a rhinestone dangly tiara. The excesses of perhaps too much expression decreased as I became tired and the speaking of the poem emerged more clearly as it rendered through me.

Besides preparing for a performance piece, I used a number of techniques and filters in the editing of the videopoem. In PhotoBooth, Apple's fun camera still and video program, I used a spotlight plugin, which was cool; unfortunately Photobooth's resolution is low. The video was imported into Final Cut Express where I layered it in curious and idiosyncratic ways, adding a vignette to the base layer, and color emboss to the other one. Both those layers also received a maximum de-interlace flicker filter. The lens flare title and credits were done in iMovie and added as tiny clips to the timeline. I used FCEs scrolling text option for the poem, adding a light rays video filter to it. Finally I added a caustics render video generator track to the whole piece.

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For textual influences, in comments on the original poem post I wrote:

Kristeva did a lecture at the University of Toronto in the late 1990s on the question of 'Who' that I attended, but didn't connect then to the 'who' of the muse. Blanchot's 'The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me?'... is my particular inspiration here.

On the 'coded' "unconscious" of the Freudian/Lacanian school: I, too, incline towards a phenomenology of consciousness, whatever that may be. How often do I access my own personal symbols to write? References that might be opague to others. From Célan I learnt much on interweaving the personal myths in such a way that my symbol stream is only hinted at and whose full meaning remains just out of reach.

Kristeva is where I first learnt of the 'speaking subject,' the 'speaking voice.' Can we take it further to the 'writing subject,' the 'writing voice'? Though I don't want to get trapped in semiotics either.

John Walter wrote, in response to the poem, and it is worth quoting: "You ask the hard problem that Beckett asked throughout his entire oeuvre, especially the trilogy of novels Malone, Malloy Dies, and The UnNameable as well as his classic one man play, Krapp's Last Tape: "Who is the voice speaking within me, if it is not me, and it speaks when I don't, all my life, up until my last breath."

You pose it in a variety of fascinating ways here."

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Poem, written in 2006; videopoetry performace, 2011.

                                          

Working on 'Green Fire'

Have to hunker down for a few days to pull together and finish a draft of my 'Green Fire' poem that I've been working on for a few months. I need about 50 minutes worth. Ha. That's a lot. Of poem.

You can see I am writing, or at least, playing with Photobooth on my iMac. ::smiles::

Or is this - the proof-is-in-the-picture, which is a bunch of self-portraits taken by the computer - properly known as navel gazing.

::chuckling::

I turn 59 on Monday. Very happy to be the age I am, and no way I'd want to be younger.

                                          

Stone #46

The wrist that caught my fall on the dark iced road, thin as a swan's neck, a bent wing fading into fingertips.

Stone #45

A note that keeps resounding without being able to develop, I am Blanchot's Ostinato tonight.

Mother of Milk (2003 remastered 2011)

direct link: Mother of Milk

We each have our 'mother stories' -even childless women have a mother story. For those of us who had children, though, telling our stories is, I believe, important. Women's maternal experiences is a hidden subtext in culture that only began to be spoken out loud maybe in the last 30 years. There are other ways to construe reality than the ones the dominant ideologies give us. Let's let the mother speak - seriously! The paternal story, the 'important' history needs the current of the maternal story to balance it, give it greater depth and unity.

I had once made a flippant remark about how breastfeeding taught me to meditate. And, further, how I thought men in the days of yore meditating in semi-lotus sat like women breastfeeding and were trying to discover the bliss seen on her face. My flippant remark meant that I was jovially saying that meditation arose out of men's curiosity about what they witnessed while their women breastfed their babies. And, if it's true, what a beautiful cradle for meditation to grow from. Meditation is a very self-nurturing act.

Anyway, the leader of the La Leche League in Toronto, a Waldorf mother, and my kids were at the Waldorf at that time, overheard me. Uh, oh! What I'd flippantly said would make some yogic-type men angry and a lot of women deny that there is any connection. But Erin was intrigued. Next thing I knew, I was invited to speak at a La Leche League meeting, a place of support for women breastfeeding their babes. Well, it wasn't a very coherent or articulate talk!

When ARM put out a call for papers at a conference at York University on Motherhood and Spirituality in 2003, I wrote my story, an interweaving of lifewriting and prosepoetry. Since I lived in Vancouver at the time and wasn't sure I could afford to fly to Toronto to present it in person, I recorded it on video. So glad I did! My mother paid for the trip, and rather than reading it at the conference I showed the video on a large screen and got lots of amazing feedback. The personal essay was published by Mother's Movement Online and is still available at: mothersmovement.org/essays/bclews/BClews0404.htm
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There was a discussion in the comments at Facebook with Bent Lorentzen and Daisy Fierro, and I've drawn this commentary from my responses in that discussion.


I stand in an odd place theoretically on sexual difference, but I agree basically that there is difference. Thought not that there are 'man traits' and 'woman traits' so much as our bodily experiences shape our consciousness of the world to a greater degree than is generally believed.

My 'woman body/mother body' experiences have shaped my consciousness, and my beliefs, in many ways.

This talk is regarding that: an embodied consciousness.

Please see my Birthdance page at my website for more on this subject - particularly The Notebook of the Maternal Body for more discussion on our cultural maternal subtext, its hiddenness, and the video talk, How Can We Be Different and the Same? on sexual difference as it pertains to the maternal body (from a paper I wrote in 2004- I'm still adding images to the video to spruce it up a bit visually and will upload to YouTube when the final version is finished).

                                          

The Dancer's Backskin

The Dancer's Backskin, 2011, 21cm x 29cm, 8"x11.5"
ink, watercolour on Moleskin notebook paper.
click for larger size

the dancer's backskin,
Moleskine sketchbook

the paper
cracked
like a boiled
eggshell
when you
tap it
tap it

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The drawing was an accident - I had bought a new Moleskine notebook, the largest ever for me. When I brushed water over watercolour pencil the paper shredded badly and cracked like an eggshell when dry. Intrigued with the effect, and having seen Natalie Portman's incredible performance in Black Swan, the self-mutilation, the hallucinations, the madnesses, I thought of the underside of the dancer's life. Or her backskin.

In the image you see here, I layered a scan of the frontside of the drawing facing forwards (you can see it in the lines at the borders) under the backside which I made slightly opaque. I banded the dancer's face (some horror there, she is buried alive in her inhuman effort to be graceful for us), and her feet (to remind us of ballet as an echo of Geisha footbinding).

                                          

Stone #44

Powdery snow like a plush carpet under the thick rubber treads of my hiking boots. Patches of hidden skidding ice wake me from revery.