liminal inks

Written on the Body - ed. Jane Caplan

I've been getting all these new tattoos lately, and wanting more and more.

("is it the pain or the art?" dad asks.
"bit of both." and then the whole healing process - the crustacean ink, the itch.)

the tattoo is "an indelible insertion that is both visible and out of reach... an exchange between interiority and exeriority, 'a paradoxical double skin...'" (xiii)

infidel(ities):

You shall not gash yourselves in mourning for the dead: you shall not tattoo yourselves." (Leviticus)

much in the first few chapters about the etymology of the tattoo - the (disputed?) relation between 'stigmata' and what we think: ink.

stigma.

brian summed up (a part of it) well : tattoos are so temporary. disregard all the warning speak of permanence. these drawings die with me (except for: see Roald Dahl: Skin). unlike the paintings (crap paintings) that go nowhere except for into corners, the boxes of photos, of letters and books and books and books of drawings. art on the body to do nothing with but burn when body burns.

To what Degree can the Horror of Death be rendered Invisible by vesting It with Maximum Visibility?

drawn to the gothic and the grotesque, the liminal and contradictory, the uncanny and the unbecoming.

by the way: it's Halloween.

snippets

- Reading Julia Kristeva -- Black Sun -- frustratedly because the first four chapters (as far as I read until the weekend) address melancholia/loss/depression from such a psychoanalytically linguistic perspective that the communique was all but utterly obscured to a 'layperson' such as myself... reminding me of other linguistic frustrations (switzerland) but that this is supposedly my mother tongue. So - arguments for accessible theory - that isn't written like an AP address, either, but doesn't presume such elaborate prior education of the reader. Is that possible? It's a translative problem that I experience... psychoanalysis being both a rigorous academic discourse (and precise language) and a 'lingo' that has been extensively disseminated via pop-culture 'ensures' that terms such as autoeroticism / oedipal / narcissism / libidinal / neurotic / subject ... etc etc have double meanings, are actually unsure. And I have no patience to learn the true language of Freud and his readers - prefer summaries of Lacan to the man himself. (Much as I had no patience for German grammar... oh woe. Oh, failure.

- Talking to Joey from downtown to Division - his suggestion that one possible route (of all these many) to 'take' would be researching inhabiting the liminal - the divisions, as it were - the personal vs. the academic. the professor vs. the friend. the presentation vs. the conversation. acceptable vs. the invalid(ated). Meaning (I'm thinking) investigating the vs. itself - the ring time. When and where they meet and merge and how bloody fuckin emotional that space is - because we have no rules there, in the border (drag).

- I don't know if I can do this. There is no 'this' yet, really. I told our class today I was considering a leave of absence. I probably won't, I don't know what else I'd do. But I have no critical distance from my research now - to even call it research is ridiculous. I gag on Chris-lessness. I'm resisting my positioning because even though I wear the dark hair and Calaveras earrings / all in black I hate to be the poster girl for dead.

- The bartender tonight (sweet woman) thought I was her age. I knew she was older but propriety doesn't allow me to say that, does it? She's 35. I'm 27. She checked my ID and the joke was on her / on me - god I hate having a body these days.