Abstract I

Thesis I: first thesis proposal


This project first attempts an opening of language :

death dances. (death does dancing)

death dances... (the plural of what death does)

morte balla: ballare (to dance)
ballin' (to ball...)

The Online Urban Dictionary offers this definition of a balla: "A pimp or player. Someone who makes alot of money and can got anyone or anything that they want with no problem."
Death's a player - 'he' got anyone. got me good...

How does 'personal narrative' function in a text, and to what aim? To what end?

I wrote the dissertation for my BFA on the use of comics (graphic narratives, sequential art) to communicate the fragmentation of self and memory that follows from trauma and loss ...because my sister Kelsey committed (to) suicide just before the end of the program's 3rd year. Having 'finally' reached a point, or a space (this last past year) from which I felt able to revisit the rupture of identity and history that that experience effected - to articulate loss - I decided to move sideways from the identity performances of Ambiconti (and the decadence of Exuberant Corpse) to explore the connections between masquerade, doubling, desire and death. Towards articulating the heretofore ambiguous contiguity therein...

Then oh God a murder occurred. Can those moments even be said to occur? Time stops. A shot in the dark - *
And language imploded
again

*

*

*

Re-begin.

Because I find it impossible to look death in the face - for death has no face - I create masks, doppelgängers, to stand-in for the space of lack and loss, in order to hold (onto) the conversations I'm impelled to imagine.

Conversation implies language. Absence has none. Absence (lack, loss, and desire) must be cloaked in the guise of a presence to even be spoken of.

Masks, doubles (alter egos) and guises have been donned since the dawn of history in order to enact rituals of communication with death, loss of identity, desire, alternate realities and all manner of other ineffable experiences that are intrinsic to the human experience but alienated by the imposition of language.

Language is insufficient: communication must be embodied.
Bodies of texts: books, tattoos. Television.

I'm trying to do too much. I don't have to do it all at once. This is one paper of many. A deadline does not mean I'm dying.
I feel like Death's whore. Keeps sending me out to get fucked. Waiting in the wings. Pay up.


How can I possibly propose? I'm spoken for. What is it I'm going to do? I'm gonna die. You're gonna die.
Let's dance it. >Ball it.

Morte Balla (at http://portablemortal.blogspot.com) begins as a hyper-space project, an online documentation of my (and others') processes of (in)articulating the 'presence' of death in contemporary and historical artistic/linguistic discourse. Locating the 'archive' in the digital realm enables the development of a rhizomatic methodolody - and allows meaning to be produced in the space between time and place. The narrative that the project produces is both fragmented and progressive - simultaneously moving forwards and backwards, as each new 'post' pushes the previous further into the ground of the project's inception.

How will Morte Balla end? What form will it have taken, then? Its days are (yours and mine are) numbered.

What would you do if you knew you had seven months to live?
I'd write it out. Tell stories. Ride it out. Dance, laugh, fuck and play. Rite it. Get down with Death. Learn to die.

What's the point, though? What's a thesis? According to my dashboard dictionary, it's a statement put forward to be maintained and proved.
Statement: this happened. this happens. this happens all the time.
Inquiry: Once (twice/...) it happens, what happens next? How do our visual cultures equip us to face the facelessness of absence? The impossible certitude of our own expiration date?
Statement: we are armed with bourbon and jolly rogers' skulls. we adorn our selves with masks and makeup. we search out and eat the loss of others in order to glimpse our own. we need narrative. desire continuity. and desire -- reaches for what isn't.

So: I propose: to reach into what has no interior. To grasp at the formless, to quote the ineffable, perform permutations of reality and fuck the abstract.
So to speak.

So: to speak.