Photographs and film courtecy of Hedi Slimane
Wasted Listening
The party itself is arranged as a contemplation focused on the mechanics and metaphysics of duality and blindness, a game devised as research about the secrets of anonymous desire, an attempt to penetrate the obscurity of its origins and purposes, a social experiment attempting to capture and decode the secrets immigrating undocumented through the porous border of skin that touches, and is touched itself, as two people attempt contact, at first standing on either side of an interpersonal divide separated by a foreignness as terminally mysterious as being condemned to remain unknown to each other, the night a boxing ring set up, within the confines of its emptiness an impatience brewing, a sustained enthusiasm building, for the arrival of the opponents, everything arranged to enable the fight for survival that ignites companionship, this ultimate but elusive goal that is fought for when two disparate parts attempt to merge into a seamless whole, this vital transition to unity, which is the banishment of loneliness, since what is indivisibly unique knows of no other to gaze at from a distance, unity and unrepeatability an elusive goal requiring a negation of each participants’ prior individuality, a repentance of their past, their history, the One needing to curl itself suggestively and effectively around its complementary and reciprocate Other, both of them thus changing their natures in unforeseen, maybe uncomfortable ways, exercising previously underdeveloped nuances of behavior, making art out of manners, enacting a theatrical production of insinuating gestures, staged voluntarily, if only as an arrangement promising to offer a few hours of amusement, as a game, for a party, like the one proposed and organized for the guests tonight, who, by prior agreement, are prepared to traverse the island and then be split in two apparently distinct but eventually symbiotic categories, the imminently expected crowd agreeing, and eager, to be neatly divided into two teams, differentiated by a simple, amusing but also very manipulative parlor trick, since an invitation to this very special night requires that the attendees must decide, beforehand and of their own accord I repeat, to arrive either ready to be blindfolded, wearing the silk hoods provided by the hosts, or, if not so inclined, as the other half opts, by their own free choice as well, to show up a little later during the festive proceedings, and remain un-hooded during the whole evening, roaming the party with their vision unhindered, free, the difference between the two groups an existential mise en scene, a most delinquent capriccio, Shakespeare on empathogens, one half of the guests spending the night faceless and blind, as if sleepwalking in a masquerade, while simultaneously and all around them, like a solar system that revolves beyond the grasp of their benighted vision, the other half of the guest list, is leading a brilliant inversion of blind man’s buff, since those able to see are chasing instead of being chased, a reversal of the roles that a normal rendition of the game would require, those blindfolded feeling like easy prey for the seeing orbiting invisibly around them, the option of pursuit cancelled, thus a void of behavior created, something for nature to abhor, the players needing to fill this lack of purpose with a new perspective, everyone suddenly aware of the darkness as lack of perception instead of impenetrable nothingness, the night an opportunity for trespass instead of a definite impasse, the hooded lain around the premises, resting, unsuspecting, like blind fawns at arrow’s length, safely anonymous, but also unable to see and thus crucially incapacitated, placed by the hosts strategically and totally naked, except for the piece of white fabric obscuring their faces, a gallery of headless statues strewn around, at most slightly moving to the music, their inability to circulate freely around the party lulling them to half sleep, losing track of time as they wait for the arrival of the clear eyed and able, those not wearing hoods, who are allowed into the party only after the first team is hoodwinked and remains nude and idle for quite a while, sitting around and waiting, vulnerably unaware of the perusal they bathe in, this self imposed disability impossible to escape from, since the choice of either faceless blindness or anonymous freedom, once made, is set in stone for the duration of the evening, the identity of those invited never to be revealed to each other, the masked guests leaving only after the last of the seeing had decided the fun was over, a different exit assigned to each team, all of them strangers till the night was over and then forever separated before anybody had a chance of seeing each other’s eyes, their temporary difference in status an uncomfortable, transitory, but fecund circumstance, exactly like a gestation, pregnant with innumerable divinations concerning the initiative of contact and the essence of communication, an efflorescence of mutual co-operation blooming across the party as the night progresses, a relationship arising between the eternal strangers, born from the fact that the hooded were unable to move without assistance, and therefore needing help from those not wearing hoods, who remain an unseen presence moving imperceptibly beyond vicinities of self imposed blindness, shadows possibly conferring help, if so inspired, then, both of them, both the headless, needy statues and the ghosts roaming around their placid pools of facelessness, realizing that an approach must be devised, a way found, a manner forged, a bridge crossed over and a passage opened, a window to the heart flung open, the light hidden within or levitating without must pierce the veil of darkness obscuring both the eyes and the vision of those to be approached, both looker and looked at existing but not to each other, like a tree that falls dead in a forest when no one is there to hear its loud thud as it hits the ground, therefore never documented and historically at least non-existent, the party also a philosophical conundrum whose solution was as counter-intuitive as it was surprisingly emotional, not intellectual, the equation balanced not by the nature of the factors delineating its construction, but by the soul of each participating agent, the invalid by choice admitting and requiring the assistance of the unseen and powerful, blissfully or tediously unaware that a helpful stranger might be about to touch them or presently whisper a sweet word in their ear, blindly hoping of being unsuspectingly approached by a nameless someone who is, crucially, able to see and thus rescue them from despairing indolence and isolating immobility, the potential saviors’ silhouette at most fleetingly obscuring the disco lights, casting a hopeful shadow through the milky fabric fog woven by the white silk hoods, a presence blinking, then ascertained, elevating this unseen but benevolent stranger to the status of a savior, or, at least, to the equally divine role of kind, an existential annunciation delivered in a frivolous circumstance, a second chance for belief in love, offered however imperceptibly by a stranger in a party, a realization whose potential is powerful enough to propel you towards a new life, a miracle of consciousness witnessed within the context of a game played for a reason as random as free will and summer fun, the variations of personal information exchanged non-visually, the voluntarily blind resorting to feel, with tentative and trembling fingertips travelling across the face of their helpful but invisible neighbor, in a bid to follow some remembered trail, trace the path of wrinkle or the crescent of a hairline, the seeing but unseen being their potentially significant others, themselves simultaneously hesitating to touch the faceless and blind, afraid that by doing so they might desecrate the space thickened by the invisibility encircling everybody, both savior and saved remaining bilaterally unseen and thus assured they are never to recognize each other, cancelling all future repeats of tonight’s magic, rendering them impossibly imaginary, since the guests are unable to even find each other appealing or unattractive now, the pleasure of their contact the only guideline which they can confidently follow, this singular atmosphere achieved and established exactly because of this duality of impossibilities, mutual invisibility excluding the future but also discarding the past, isolating the now as the only viable option for happiness, erasing the accumulated blur of obsolete aesthetic likes and dislikes from their eyes, any preferences or standards collected during their lives instantly thrown away, tonight, all the resonances emanating from experience silenced, the years spent listening to echoes of happiness now gone, immediately recognized as a waste of existential acoustics, a taste for blondes or a predilection for young, firm flesh, or any other preferred facial characteristic and beauty standard, now exposed as only a symptom of suffering for previous losses, prayers at currently non existent altars, emotions whose similarity with the original adoration is self-assigned and arbitrarily delusional, each glint of desire in their eyes irrelevant behind the hoods or the blindness, and thus invariably and forever branded as a remembrance of love since surely lost, the anguished search for past happiness offering only possibilities of dishonest revivalism, our attractions a doomed longing for the return of what has long drifted down the river of our lives, gone forever, our enthusiasms a desperate wish for re-enactment, leading us to simulacra we find comfortably familiar or vague enough to not upset any passion inflamed by our hidden wounds, this wish to return towards that which he have irrevocably lost is, tonight, at this party, recognized by all as an attempt to resuscitate themselves by devouring their remains, incest committed with their own memory and its enchantments, all these acquired tastes and comforts whose feeling we designate as confirmation of pleasures now irrefutable proof of both emotional auto-cannibalism and masturbatory necrophilia of the imagination, a victimization and persecution of our own emotional past, this realization exploding and uniting the party in a unique moment of personal transformation for each and every guest, blind or seeing, a renaissance of the soul achieved by the simple banishing of superficial, optical seduction, consciousness enlightened by the simple negation of our inordinately self-evident trust in seeing, the inability to look becomes a key unlocking an eternal secret, since it elucidates the resultant impossibility of following familiar optical blandishments that will help evaluate the object of your affection, making judgment of value an impossibility, since pre-conceived predilection are now beyond reference, blindness revealing itself to be a medium of divination, the ascetics of disappearance perversely producing evidence, divulging the secret of love, namely that darkness is what you should follow when lost in the tunnel leading towards a significant other, this sudden awareness dawning on everyone at once, all of them till now mistakenly following the light, which is the past, whose reflections on the surface of your soul play illusory tricks on you and your wandering eyes, the party proving that if you want to find love, instead of search for it, you must proceed towards the other end of the trail you are walking on, you must turn around, towards the dark, step in the direction of the non-existent and therefore unknown, an absence of definite destination maybe as scary as a black hole devouring the universe, your movement towards it seemingly as fatal an orbit as that of a star drawn to its unthinkable gravitational pull, your wish for love perhaps drawing you towards the abyss of nothingness, the choice of being led by the dark instead of the light resembling the resignation of a falling star following a course to nowhere, darkness a perennial childhood fear destined to be exorcised by this party arrangement, which illustrates how essential the incomprehensibility enveloping love is, the ever deepening darkness shown as only a gradually affirming signal of progress, an inner flame the only light you need to sail through the dark currents separating you from whomever you happen to love, who could forever remain a stranger and that is suddenly ok, because the moment you surrender to this belief an inextinguishable candle is lit, the wick inflamed and spreading a blindingly bright revelation of sudden knowledge affirming ancient but unsaid suspicions, mainly that love, tenderness, companionship and even lust can be as eyeless as justice, an awakening of consciousness that leads everyone to the question of difficulty in ascertaining correct attribution of motives to their past infatuations, to re-evaluate their understanding of the machinations of attraction and acceptance, discard their prior experiences as optical illusions, disown visionary delusions, the party helping everyone to realize that all of their previous seductions originate from the deceiving and superficial images attracting their easily fooled and treacherous eyes, this sudden discredit of vision such an experiential revolution that a shower of emotions is felt on the very skin of the guests, a sensory affirmation of the freshly proven fact that everyone could fall in love with almost anyone, as long as they did not know their image, as long as they chose to be faceless and blind or unseen and unknown, everyone could find love if only they were forced to fill the void left by useless perceptions with the thousand gestures, caresses, whispers, words needed for fruitful human interaction, if everybody would substitute seeing with all these behavioral details and manners necessary to convey the urgent feelings the desire for love evokes, even just to appease the abandonment you feel when suspended in blind and naked solitude, an infantile but orphaned state, seemingly interminably waiting for somebody clear-sighted, like a baby waits for its mother while staring at the ceiling, meditating on the shadows moving slowly across its perceived infinity, in expectation of the seeing, somewhere around them, about to convey care but also enjoying a tactile prerogative, everyone also wondering about the rejections remaining unfulfilled, since they are weaponless, relieved of their greatest defense, this being the callous blink it takes to ignore somebody because of his choice of dress or angle of hairline, desire now blindly following the artificial but effective incapacitation splitting and joining the social fabric down the middle, a line defining a binary rendition of invisibility, anonymity and imperceptibility, everyone experiencing the other, his neighbor, as either version of these two forms of unseen, a cloud of temperature, smell, touch or voice, anything unsaid transmitted over and above the horizon of visual perception, a warm hand smoothing a tense backbone, a tender breath fluttering heat to the lightly perfumed perspiration of an outstretched neck, the two halves of manufactured inscrutability meeting across an invisible but deeply felt line, a destination and a departure equidistant to many possibilities, all of them leading back to this invisible appointment, a date destined to remain blind forever, a temporary wedding between permanently unknown partners, communal and anonymous sex, a mass blessing with the option of the miracle of future union excluded, an inner landscape whose horizon reveals itself to be a dead end, an impasse of blindness facing facelessness, this impersonal vis a vis creating a double helix of simultaneously anonymous and personal confrontations, the seeing deprived of the familiar signs of faces, eyes, smiles to look at and decipher, the blind deprived of an image of what their visionary partners looked like, both disorientated by the lack of information, but each in a different way, all human interactions transformed during the gathering into an unforgettable experience for everyone participating, a revelatory fumble across the seductive depths of what lies unseen, what happens underneath the surface of others, their image rarely and only condescendingly ignored, the seeing interacting with the blind without a single blink leaking the other way, not a peek stolen by either, as the strict rules of the party demand immediate ejection from the premises if anyone disobeys, an eviction from an artificial paradise were vision is sin and the eternity of love is glimpsed, however momentarily, through an evocation of blindness, the party staff hovering always nearby, exterminating angels attentive in case of any misbehavior, constantly checking if an errant hood slipped, accidentally or by cheating, a mishap potentially threatening to tear the cunning but delicate concept of the night apart, nobody wanting to lift the occlusion that does so much more than just dissect the assembled crowd, the two teams gentlemanly obeying to play the game according to the austere but effective rules, following the symmetrical design that reflects as much as conceals, everyone inwardly transfixed by staring into this imaginary one way mirror placed between them and the others, a mirror whose magical property is to divulge the truth of the reflection by erasing it, a mirror that dares to expose the image it projects as the obstruction it really is, an obstacle between our gaze and the hidden truth, looking finally not only accused of treason but brought to trial, cross-examined about hatching a scheme devised to undermine reality, blindness standing as the most improbable witness to the fallibility of seeing, reality freed after remaining hermetically hidden under the seductive but impenetrable skin of the icon, treacherous surface for a few hours removed between the two equally handicapped groups, finally expressing themselves unsupervised by the arbitrariness of aesthetics, ultimately free of judgment, their true selves unhindered by the restrictions that followed from somebody else’s image of them and vice-versa, escaping the optical illusion that hid their souls, understanding that looking for love is a cage whose area is limited to the outlines of what we consider beautiful, whereas surrendering to its offering with our eyes closed is the only way to escape the confines our eyes place around us, this freedom from the prejudice of icons a questionable privilege for the seeing since all the adoration they received came from faceless bodies, themselves paying the cost of disability in order to realize that it only took a random stranger to mollify their anguish, everyone destined to remain a strange stranger to each other, invisibility a fragile spell not to be toyed with, precious contact, under the circumstances, only to be communicated by a touch, a kiss, a caress or any other physical expression of inter-personal affirmation that can be devised outside the realm of vision, the seeing resigned to be present to themselves but invisible to the hooded, as if personifying madness, in the sense that the madman is the only one aware of his tormenting hallucinations, himself an eyewitness, a martyr to the madness defining his existence, but the others, the sane, are only able to guess at their veracity, in this case the hooded only able to guess at the motives or the movements of the free, unable to visually decipher their body language or facial expression, waiting for a tell-tale waft of an unnamable cologne to spice the air around their nostrils or the touch of soft fingertips to trace a path across their thighs, verbal and tactile the only ways of communicating anything unseen between one another, this division of the guests a twist of an old, coincidentally classic and childish way to have fun, a group escapade that resonated with the decorative echoes of eighteenth century oil paintings, adding a veneer of timelessness over the contemporary orgiastic gay scene, a social interaction invoking an evocative but taut schism running right through and under the skin and muscles of any festivity, the prospect of meeting a stranger an emotional spine both separating, supporting and animating the enveloping, reveling body, the whole event a balancing act split between two equal but not equivalent halves, joining into a perfectly functioning equilibrium, the disorientation of the hooded eliminated by their heightened perceptions, their remaining senses refined exactly in the way they had heard about the congenitally blind, whose tragic fate they were borrowing, unbelievably, as if it was a sex game for a one night stand, for a fling with a soon to be forgotten stranger, an eyeless offering of casual passion and promised oblivion, the gazes of the free, desirous or contemptuous, unavoidably ignored and thus liberated from guilt-inducing supervision, everybody’s anonymity strategically secured by the absence of any possibility of recognition, everyone simultaneously free from the restraints of optically perceived delusions, waking up together from the hallucination formerly known as reality, finally wise to the fact that vision is a form of blindness, the power of eyes to delude a silencer of other, stealthier and less corruptible instincts, everyone realizing that love can be asserted and won successfully through the uniqueness of unexpected touch, the traced contours of an invisible body, the pliability of unseen skin tone, the surprising continuity of mysterious flesh as it morphs from softness to hardness, love is only a matter of openness or remoteness, tenderness and affection a seemingly intractable solution between unseen strangers, their hesitation collapsing when submitted to the slightest hint of a kind gesture or the imperceptible motility of an accommodating body, like a feeble lie evaporates when blown away by the merest contradiction, everyone’s emotions tentatively tip-toeing across this tightrope, hovering high over the irrelevant absence of a safety net, their prenuptial insurances and worries forgotten the moment someone crosses over the unseen horizons, surrendering to a blind nobody boldly moving beyond an imaginary frontier created by assumed and therefore temporary non-identities, their souls till today exposed as constructions of prejudiced perceptions, since, what was discovered by everybody, and finally acted as the unifying element of this strange party, what shone as the universality that held all this communal blindness together, was the unequivocal establishment of the importance of reality beyond what is visible, the shared acknowledgment that once our faces, our eyes, our beauty or our wisdom, our age or our innocence, once these givens where doubted, what remains, is most vital, important, life giving, it is the gift of being touched in the dark by a gentle stranger, unforeseen and surprising by definition, a recognition happening only when seeing is limited, our ignorance heretofore accidentally and tragically acquired by our inability to see further than our own fears, a muslin of pain covering our eyes, a gauze of fear across the face of strangers, what lies beneath, unseen, is our own real self, who will respond, if only approached, by the other who we are blindly waiting for and is imperceptibly shifting around us, the other we call out to for help, who will save us, lend us a hand out of our cultivated blindness and affected disability, the other who will pry us out of our chosen loneliness, like a morsel of accumulated tears is torn from the clam-shell, its hairy clamminess ignored, the gritty texture and comic irony of years of underwater weeping appreciated and savored, the false promise of pearly opalescence forgiven, all consumed as improbable delicacies.
This wordless rebirth the belief in love outwardly resembled nothing more than a placid pool of quiet shock, the minds of the guests swimming in a lake of muteness whose reflective surface simultaneously mapped eternity and hid its own depth, a wisdom whose light was equidistant to the sublime and the primordial, the silent but emotional crowd faced with the undeniable fact of vision eventually becoming the darkness hiding below our eyes, illusions of desires past deepening the shadows in us, their depth concealing a sunless abyss of time stored instead of deleted, the heavy weight of the past keeping us earthbound, while the night, ink animated with possibility, still twinkling behind closed eyes, now and forever, is distance covered only by wishes fulfilled by faceless strangers, their unfathomable kindness dashing our fears to smithereens, sparkles of tenderness inadvertently decorating an ocean of familiar nothingness, our own frustrated desire, all destinations from this silent awareness just different shades of absolute darkness, absence of light in both directions, blinding with its non-intensity anyone who dares to peek into the void, infinite both above and below, dissolving the limited powers of vision, nothingness mesmerizing those who choose to stare too much, those who swim too far towards either direction of this speechlessness, upwards or downwards, only to discover, sooner rather than later, that it’s too late to return to the peaceful horizon of silent acceptance, their very being unavoidably falling, or rising, towards the precipitous realization of an ecumenical disability to overcome ourselves when under the spell of seeing, our fate as exiles from the consolations of ocular delusion amounting to a revelation, finally answering a question only humans could ever devise to torture themselves over, the question of the existence of a stranger kind enough to touch us in the darkness of our voluntary disability, the futility of images adored culminating to an ever more blinding light, blindness reversed, from absence of sight to visionary enlightenment.
During the few summers intervening between his underwater walks and his airborne arrival to the party island of the blind and the unseen, the weaponless and the reborn, our boy, our savior, having led nobody but his own beauty down the unseen side of the sunset path, its reflections building a bridge under his secret strolls, connecting a charmed childhood to an inspiring manhood, our boy deciding, choosing, and catapulting himself to a reality of such complexity and potential that nobody would have suspected of him, tonight still a flowering beauty, blooming into a rose that will eventually morph from the vegetal equivalent of a minuscule explosion to a full blown efflorescence of voluptuous light erupting gloriously across the sky, a spectacular result born of an imperceptible atom, now just at the moment before splitting, soon about to release unforeseen manifestations of beauty all tangential to unfathomable possibilities, improbable but as real as an inexplicable wave of hissing snakes, shimmering and scaly like a squirming carpet woven out of rusted sequins, slithering down the steps of the New York Stock Exchange, the dazed serpents rising in perplexed anger to greet the disbelieving passers by, who capture the ferocious display of innumerable reptile retinas reflecting the lenses of digital cameras, the pictures soon splashing across every surface of the planet dedicated to the distribution of information, provoking a growing global awareness of animal life mysteriously appearing, and forging a connection of the inexplicable fauna to the disappearance of humans just as inexplicably missed, the evolution of contemporary technology propagating this information at the speed of sand grains passing through the hole connecting the sinuous transparencies of an hourglass, at every finalized countdown a reversal needed for the grains to continue travelling, perpetuate their motion, suspend their achieved velocity but not let them settle at the end, or the beginning, of the distance travelled, never settling being obligatory for freedom and reversal of direction a prerequisite of continuity
BEAUTIFULL!
Posted by: AL giga | January 14, 2010 at 21:28