Tuesday, November 22, 2011

reinstrumentalize your organs

In Spanish, when we skip letters or words, we say we eat them. The use of the organs originally intended for us to eat and breathe is twisted into language, producing an imaginary rearrangement to create a machine for signs under the close vigilance of our (saint) patron, our master the signifier. If this has been done, we can consciously change the uses to which are bodies are put. Contraceptives and language; drugs: the closed circuit of veins opened up as a vehicle for the alien. Our mouths in our sex, our fingers in our throats, language and all these uses have the power of retroaction... of being able to rectify, a rebellion against the definitive and definition.
We have been doing this together, we have been artificially virtuous and creepy at it: the human shield versus the human castle. The discovery that our given set of rules can be recombined ad infinitum... this is worth remembering. And that we can do it for yet different and better purposes, that we can do it so much better.
In Spanish, when we skip letters or words, we say we eat them. You cannot eat and talk at the same time, son. It is not only ineffective but it also will eventually kill you. Because of that, a choice has to be made between abstract production and nourishing consumption, both of which enlarge us and annihilate us with the excess they produce. The drama of the writer in simultaneous levels: if you write, you cannot eat. If you write you can't read. Writing is against body nourishment, writing will starve you. And mind that the ink for writing is always one's own blood (we write either love letters or death threats) which one day will run out, uneventfully. But what is this business of eating letters? If you skip eating, you speak; if you skip language, you eat. If you skip something in language, you eat it. What a beautiful idea, to turn words into food, to bring them to the surface in order to swallow them and not to say them. Is this the art practiced by the laconic and the lapidary, can this be actually done?

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