Oh hello
With lipstick bleeding, mascara clotted, my posture like those trendy standing lamps, and a smile that is unsure, I’m here now writing to you like a friend tells a friend about a new resolution, less as a commitment to the friend and more out of hope (we love hope) that in the act of taking the words from your stomach and putting them into the air, of dislodging them from inside and placing them out, the goal—now public, now shared, like water freezing on contact with air in a montreal winter—becomes something more solid and more likely, please, to come true. But hurry hurry up i need to make my point, my resolution. My point is that failure is hot and I want to relax into its insouciance. I do not want the languorous glamour of success. I want to trip myself up more. I want more clumsy messy failure, not in a hot sad girl way (a temporary layover to virality and #success). No, desperately, I want a permanent grinding orientation towards failure. I want to bathe in an ethic of not doing well and with no horizon in sight of doing better.
Jack Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure articulates why failure is so vital to move away from normative modes of success and achievement. Failing, Halberstam says, makes you make better things. But committing to failure is also about holding out for the sexy silky feeling of failure’s embrace.
Failure is liberating, calm, peaceful. It allows you to walk around, arms swinging. It is a serenity formed from not investing, not really caring, in how others respond when they ask, when they look at you and ask: what are you doing? It is an acceptance of where things are at, mixed with a freedom to spin around and twirl in that present, trying things out, less concerned with the thudding dull march towards making it. It looks like conversations that are separated, broken up, but then are, as you were saying, returned to. It looks like words unraveling down down down the page, not clipped, not succinct, not reasoned, not measured, just tumbling into more words, more punctuation, more sentences that clump; that lack coherence. It is a sunny morning cappuccino. (It is bliss.)
This email matches small with big. First, a delicate and prickly collection of stories by Nathalie Sarraute, a darling of the nouveau roman movement, about people squashed and in need of space; second, Bourne Identity, a story that careens away from the CIA, self discovery and a clear articulation of the self, and hurtles towards unbecoming and love. I feel like I am saying the same things over and over in these emails. What a disappointment! What a failure! lol
Tropisms (1939) by Nathalie Sarraute
In the introduction to Tropisms, Sarraute says that her collection is about “inner “movements””. These movements “[s]lip through us on the frontiers of consciousness in the form of undefinable, extremely rapid sensations. They hide behind our gestures, beneath the words we speak, the feelings we manifest, are aware of experiencing and able to define”. Which is to say, they are the vibes.
What moves, in Sarraute’s stories, is power. A child, parented by a maniacal father, “felt that something was weighing upon him, benumbing him. A soft choking mass that somebody relentlessly made him absorb, by exerting upon him a gentle, firm pressure”. A nameless group try to please a man, sensing that, “Deep down inside them, they knew that they were playing a game, that they were submitting to something.” A disdainful woman, decides that others are all “ugly” “commonplace” “out-of-date” but slowly, terrifyingly, she begins to play, she becomes their friends: “They tightened the tie a little more, very gently, unobtrusively, without hurting her, they rearranged the slender thread, pulled …”
Sarraute’s stories are short. Some are only two pages, resembling a glance that lingers, or catching a half conversation on the bus. And, unlike, say, Rohmerian new wave films from a similar era, the moments captured are not full of dewy romance. Her gaze is more one of disgust and fear. Women, talking in tea rooms, wear makeup that gives them “a hard brilliancy, a lifeless freshness”, a description more suited to a body on display in an open casket. In another story, a man who developed a “taste” for being devoured in childhood is controlled, pressed in at the sides, “traversed” by others. “The world in which they had enclosed him, in which they surrounded him on every side, was without any means of escape.” Sarraute adds: “They were aware of his liking for their attacks, his weakness, so they had no scruples.”
Tropisms made me reflect on the importance of description: how describing and then describing more can bring us closer to explaining and understanding. Reading Sarraute you feel that it is only first from looking closer that you can then begin to unpick and understand what is going on: what the vibe is. Recently, I visited the Cornelia Parker exhibition at the Tate in which Parker suspends antique silver plates, cutlery, teapots that she has beaten flat. They hang still, moving only slightly with the AC, their quietness bringing to mind the life and vibrancy that has been hammered out of them. These squashed domestic objects capture something of the eerie compression that fills Sarraute’s stories. I want to read more! I’ve been finding it hard to get hold of her other books in English, so someone needs to reissue them pronto please.
The Bourne Identity (2002) by Doug Liman
The Bourne Identity is the first film in the Bourne franchise by Doug Liman. Liman, who in 1999 directed the raver crime christmas comedy Go, starring Sarah Polley and Katie Holmes, had already proved himself to be adept at creating suspense, urgency and films that I like to watch. In the Bourne Identity, he builds a blockbuster action thriller around existential questions about identity and how to find fulfilment. Jason Bourne awakes on a russian fishing boat with bullet holes in his back, and no memory of how he got there and who he is. He tries to figure out what is going on. He was, it turns out, used in a CIA program, a program in which his memory was wiped and his job involved assassinating high profile people for the US Government. But the near death experience and memory loss triggers a reawakening and recalibration of what matters. He meets, on his journey to self discovery, Marie Kreutz played by Franka Potente. They fall in love.
As Jason gets closer to the truth, to a real sense of who he is and what he was, he realises that answers, that identity and a clear narrative of his life are not what he wants. He tells Marie: “I don’t want to know about him anymore. I don’t care.” Instead, rather than digging deeper, he wants to run and disappear both from the CIA and from a world that demanded he know about himself. “We can hide.” He tells Marie. “Is there any chance you can do that?”
Bourne to me is a moving meditation on seeking a looser grip on who you are and how you got here. Liman shows us that it is love that can help set us free, help us to lose ourselves. If you continue to watch the franchise, you will discover that Bourne is dragged back into finding out about himself. The CIA, mirroring how the government and ~society~ imposes on queer and trans lives a pressure to seek out and then freeze your identity and uniqueness, stops Bourne’s unbecoming short. The CIA requires him to solidify himself and his story. But that is not what Bourne—now, as this email has suggested, a queer icon—wants. He is quite happy, in love, unaware, on an island in the sun.
More? No
miracle crush by bar italia: after seeing them live, I cannot stop listening to this song. I adore the intro transition from scream to guitar.
The Borrowers (1997) by Peter Hewitt: stuck for halloween ideas? Give that scrappy #upcycled sewer kings fashion aesthetic a rebrand and say you are going as arietty from the borrowers. An iconic British Film about community resilience and the collective struggle against gentrification, full of wallace and gromit style gadgets, a perfect autumnal film.
Love
Anne