On the road, to the road, in the road.
Through the road, if such can be found; it is found.
On the way to where we should be.
In that place that is between where we are,
And where we are going.
Some call it Pennsylvania.
Or Erewhon.
C’est bien cela la mouvance.
Et.
On t’aime Gérald.
Once on the red planet it will be necessary to carry things from home. Only the landguage of Earth will comfort and heal the lacerating effects of deep space travel. How far can one travel away from home before completing a full circle. There is something about infinity in this.
Metaphors come to us, they seethe in the bubbling miasma of the biosphere lying in wait for an unlikely candidate for infection. Like Burroughs’ Virus 23 that carries language and physically changes the body it infects to give it the ability to use a language; sometimes it hurts a bit.
This was the packaging from a bit of suturing I had done on my knee in Cuba a few years back. I fished it out of the garbage pail in the emergency room at the Varadero hospital I got stitched up in. I remain amazed at the brand name of the suture thread; ethicon. It has a somewhat Sci-Fi feel to it. The images brought to mind when thinking of a gash being closed up with “ethicon” are multiple and political, yet another item in the long list of landguage art-i-facts.
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| 4-0 Prolene, polypropalene suture, 13 stitches in my right knee |
I have been thinking of Deleuze a lot lately. His influence on my work has been instrumental, his presence in my life constant. Can I speak of his work in a coherent philosophical discourse kind of way? I don’t think so. But then I don’t think he would have wanted that anyway. I think his work was about moving away from the jargon and weight of history and moving towards the body’s presence in text and in imagination.
I can go on and on about rhizomes and plateaux and folds and repetitions but I really do not think that will help anyone access the universe that he opened for me.
I was a lowly first year grad student at Concordia (back when that meant something), I came from a hole in the wall in New Brunswick and knew I was out of my league. But I was determined… still am. We were given reading after reading of Barthes, Irigaray, Levi-Stauss, Deleuze-Guattari; when, in a moment of rare illumination, I realised I could read in French, after all I am French. So I began to visit all these readings in the language they were written. I quickly realized that the translations lacked the subtlety and playfulness these authors intended in their work.
I became a language nut.
Derrida, who has been dubbed the ruler of meaning (for a while anyway) was the most playful of the bunch. He began a paragraph saying one thing and finished it hinting that he may be full of crap. I absolutely loved this way of writing and it gave my own ideas the legs they needed to stand on.
In 1996, I was invited to meet with Christian Gattinoni of the École Nationale Supérieur de la Photographie while he was on a visit to Halifax NS. So I got in the car around 5 in the morning for the 3 hour drive from Moncton to Halifax, good tunes in the tape player (Psychic TV) and the perfect mind set to go show my work. Halifax was gray, drizzly and mean. I got to Gattinoni’s door, knocked, knocked again, to be greeted with a middle-aged man with glasses on his forehead (nice glasses at that) wiping tears from his eyes. I had entered the Twilight Zone. He simply told me that Deleuze had defenestrated himself. I started crying too, for no good reason. It was just too much. I don’t usually cry at dead stuff, human, animal or machine. So it was a big moment.
That is when I realized my work was going to be dedicated to Deleuze. Hence the Cantos for Gilles Deleuze.