#reminding us that we are mere powerless spectators

[hydranomago]

“Art, like love, excludes all competition and absorbs the man.”  - Henry Fuseli 

[ill-will-editions]

QUARANTINE LETTER #1

This is the first in what we hope will be an ongoing epistolary exchange between comrades living through conditions of quarantine. Responses and other reflections on the present moment can be sent to: illwill@riseup.net

***

Destitution, interrupted

1. The theorists have agreed: the current interruption is the outcome of well-established logics of capital, crisis governance, and alienation. Giorgio Agamben writes, “humans have become so accustomed to living under conditions of perennial crisis and emergency that they do not seem to realize that their life has been reduced to a purely biological condition stripped not only of all social and political dimensions, but likewise of its human and affective dimensions.” An article in Lundimatin on March 19 insisted that “the economy is the devastation”, but whereas this was “a theory before last month…now it is a fact.” Another article from the same issue reminded us that “the catastrophe is always already here”—from the floods and fires of California, to the atmospheric asphyxiation of non-human life, to the warming oceans and melting icecaps—and, if there is a difference today, it is only that “we are now obliged to open our eyes.” Finally, as if to carry this logic to its outer limits, a recent letter from Jacques Camatte proposed that “what we are now witnessing is the outcome of [a] vast phenomenon that has developed over thousands of years, stretched between the two great moments during which the threat of extinction asserted itself.” [1] The Coronavirus, it would seem, is nothing other than the protracted outcome of civilization itself.  

While it is certainly right to insist that conditions of the present are an extension of the conditions of the past, this chorus of continuity misses something essential. Our world is certainly decomposing, but the song is not exactly the same.

Two years ago, a friend stated that, “the constitutive heterogeneity of the real is given to us under the mask of unity, homogeneous unity. To superficial perception, the mask is the real itself. To allow the mask to falter, is therefore to risk vertigo.” [2] In January, this mask still resembled the form it had assumed in recent years: a tumultuous but for the most part intelligible field of global political polarizations. The world, and our place within it, still felt within reach.

By March, the ruling institutions had been forced into a roundly reactive posture. It is by no means clear that the Coronavirus can be compared to a typical economic crisis or natural disaster, nor has the response been limited to an ordinary state of exception. After all, at least for a moment, rulers and ruled alike were pushed on to the back foot, their certainties shaken, as the virus usurped the position of global antagonist. Institutions on which the reproduction of this world depends have been perfunctorily suspended: employment, imprisonment for misdemeanors, evictions; even the DOW Jones seems up for grabs.

The dislocation of the social fabric has been far deeper than anything we have known. The veneer of normalcy fell away at a shocking speed. Actions that were once the very substance of normalcy now feel like experiments. And if we are honest, the ethical and political lines are not exactly what they used to be.

2. Three months ago, what concerned us and much of the world was the tally of forty-seven countries: the newspapers announced “a new global wave of revolt.” From France to Hong Kong, riots, occupations and blockades erupted with a ferocity and longevity unknown in living memory.

Successful revolts do not only undermine existing powers— they also allow their participants a capacity to participate more fully in the world. If we have come to think of revolt as a destituent force, this is not only because revolt splinters and fragments the social fabric into asymmetrical camps, but also because it returns us to earth, placing us in contact with reality. Destitution is rightly thought of either as a double movement or as a single process with two sides. On the one hand, it refers to the emptying-out of the fictions of government (its claim to universality, impartiality, legality, consensus); on the other hand, a restoration of the positivity and fullness of experience. The two processes are linked like the alternating sides of a Möbius strip: wherever those usually consigned to existing as spectators upon the world (the excluded, the powerless) instead suddenly become party to their situation, active participants in an ethical polarization, the ruling class is invariably drawn into the polarization and cannot avoid exhibiting its partisan character. The police become one more gang among gangs.

Needless to say, our situation today is different. We are living through a halfway destitution, a destitution interrupted. Every party has returned to earth-- yet without entering a world. The advent of COVID-19 has drained standard narratives and roles of their force. The logics holding this world together have been revealed as the arbitrary and mechanical operations that they are. Yet because it was neither “we” nor “they” who pulled the e-brake, but a perfectly inhuman virus, the standstill of historical time lacks the festival that usually accompanies it— the collective intelligence and confidence that comes with being the agent plunging normal time into disorder. In the absence of an agent, the truth of this moment remains stubbornly negative: our lives materially prostrate to supply chains as far flung as they are brittle, our world a conduit of reciprocally perilous immunity and disease.

3. Under ‘normal’ circumstances, participants in political events are never solely agents, but always also patients at the same time—we affect and are affected, we are changed by what we do and what is done to us, whether by police or one another. To have an active hand in our own deposition, to become anyone by participating in a common power with no name, is the mark of those movements and moments of eruption we’ve felt close to over recent years.

By contrast, our one-sided passivity in the face of this global event generates a vertiginous sense of being outpaced by the change around us. To be patients but not agents has meant that the dislocation of social life has occurred at a speed that makes it all but impossible to metabolize.

In their 1956 text, “A User’s Guide to Détournement,” Debord and Wolman observe that the subversive power of a détournement is “directly related to the conscious or semiconscious recollection of the original contexts of the elements.” This dependency of subversion on the memory of the subverted is not limited to the case of art but is, they argue, merely “a particular case of a general law” applicable to all action upon the world.

If the radical interruption of normal life we are undergoing has been so disorienting, this is because it is unfolding like a botched détournement, one whose force or potential is neutralized by its very radicality. We are swept into the new with such disarming speed that we cannot recall what preceded it. The tissue of normal life has been punctured, yet the cancellation was so rapid that we have been unable to register the distance traveled between the “original contents” of normal life and the world we now inhabit: a violence too sudden, too terrible even to be liberating, numbs us to the subversive effects it nevertheless carries out. The upending of the world becomes a strangely pacified process, reduced to a disorienting and disempowering experience: an inhuman velocity, less an event than a jump-cut, an excision of memory, a vertical severing of time itself.

In the long run, the vertigo will settle into more acute polarization. When it does, our inability to recalibrate will play to the benefit of the ruling powers. It insulates them against the subversive shock of what the virus has compelled them to do—less by the so-called “Corona socialism” than by the radical demobilization of the labor force that has accompanied it. Meanwhile, we float in an empty time; unable to seize upon and decide it, we wait for the suspension of history to reach its conclusion.

However, as Furio Jesi understood well, suspended time often requires a “cruel sacrifice” before it can conclude itself. [3] If our only experience of this event is as a “blip” of confusion and panic amidst an unbroken chain of administered life, when the time finally comes for an imperial reboot, the reversion to normalcy (or worse) will find no argument or exteriority to oppose it. That we remain dazed and out of step with the world gives our enemies free reign to reintroduce historical time on terms amenable uniquely to them, as the recent murders of activists during the quarantine lockdown in Columbia have already begun to attest. [4]   

For now— at least for a moment—we are all here on earth, in the desert solitude of collective uncertainty:

To have been on earth just once —that’s irrevocable. / And so we keep on going and try to realize it, try to hold it in our simple hands, in our overcrowded eyes, and in our speechless heart. (Rilke)

However paradoxical, perhaps our task over the coming weeks is to slow down the pace of change, to impose a rhythm allowing us to participate once again in the subversion and reinvention of the world on our own terms.

-August and Kora

Chicago, March 24, 2020

*******************

[1] Giorgio Agamben, “Clarification,” published on the column Una voce, on Quodlibet.it website; (Anonymous), “Coronavirus: Apocalypse and Redemption,” Lundimatin #234, March 19, 2020;  Anonymous), “What the Virus Said,” Lundimatin #234, March 19, 2020;  Jacques Camatte, “Letter from Camatte to a Friend in the North,” 3.20.2020. English translations available here: ill-will-editions.tumblr.com

[2] Moses Debruska, “Preface,” in Josep Raffanel i Ora, Fragmenter le monde (Paris: Divergences, 2018), 19. Our translation.

[3]   “Every true change in the experience of time is a ritual that demands…a determinate cruel sacrifice.” Furio Jesi, Spartakus. The Symbology of Revolt, Trans. Alberto Toscano (Seagull, 2014), 61-63. 

[4]  “Colombian death squads exploiting coronavirus lockdown to kill activists,” The Guardian, 3.23.2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/23/colombian-groups-exploiting-coronavirus-lockdown-to-kill-activists

[jooneggs]

Rain, Forever | Namjoon ☁

⤑ Pairing: Namjoon x Reader ⤑ SUMMARY: Since the lack of rain and the coming of Winter, Namjoon hadn’t been the same. He didn’t seem to smile much and his grin never quite met his eyes. He’d lost passion for everything he once loved. Well..everything but art. Specifically that one black and white watercolour painting in the Seoul Art Gallery that resembles a lonely figure standing in the rain.. ⤑ Genre/AU: Fluff + Angst / non!idol Joon + alt!universe Joon ⤑ Warnings: The main component of this story mentions depression and suicidal ideation*, swearing, burglary, suffocation and a sprinkle of magic ⤑ Word count: 7.4k

⤑ Rating: +14

*This story, in no way, attempts to romanticize or idolize mental health issues. I can only say it comes from a personal perspective which is somewhat unique and subjective to every individual.

A/N: A song that touches the crest of my soul and speaks to so many others. I hope this helps, heals and warms many people who, like myself, miss the rain. 

☁

“I don’t know whether I should take you seriously or not..”

“C’mon it’ll be fun!”

“You’d better not make me regret this, Kim Namjoon.”

“As long as you trust me, it’ll be fine.”

It was October of last year and you and Namjoon had found yourselves in Haneul Park. 

Standing under the shelter of a bleak cafe, he had been tugging at your sleeve, urging you to run out into the open with him. But you hadn’t the slightest clue why you’d want to be anywhere else but under the shelter. It was cold enough in the cafe, but outside it was completely meek. It had been windy yet pleasant just an hour ago, but now the wind was just pelting rain drop after rain drop at the windows. 

In a light cardigan and an impractical corduroy skirt, you dreaded the prospect of having to run through the rain to get to your car. You’d taken shelter, narrowly avoiding the rain, and now you’d practically holed yourself up in the cafe after downing two mugs of tea and a triple chocolate cookie. Namjoon, however, was quite the opposite. For the past thirty minutes, his eyes had been glued to the window. Despite his lack of warm-clothes, he seemed more desperate than ever to get outside. While you had finished your cup of tea in just over ten minutes, he’d simply downed his, pouty cheeks sloshing with liquid before swallowing the beverage in one ecstatic gulp. 

Now he was standing right by the window to which you’d hesitantly joined him. The rain fell harder that day than it ever had before. Namjoon absolutely loved it. You never quite understood his thinking, but he’d always be willing to explain it to you. He’d said tt was the way the trees moved to the sound, the way the clouds gathered, watched, hovered over you, better than any shelter. It was the way the grass leaned, succumbing to its force, the way the pavement shimmered in its grasp. It was the way it felt to be amongst it all, like an unknown spectator, just a pair of eyes. It satisfied more than any drug could, oxytocin soaking through your pores, melding flesh and bone like a soldering iron. 

You wished you could feel just as excited about all these small droplets of h20; you were desperate to make sense of it. Especially when it came to Namjoon.

“Well..I do want to understand.” You spoke, leaning into his pull. At that he only tugged your sleeve further.

“C’mon then, Dew-Drop!”

He walked you toward the door with an overwhelming sense of eagerness. You thought yourself to be mad, but still your hand remained in his. 

“So we’re running to the car?”

“Running, walking, admiring the view; whatever you want to call it.” He said, pulling the door open, taking you with him.

“Ah!” You yelped as the first draft of rain lashed out on you “I’d much prefer to just run Joon.”

He couldn’t hear you though, almost dancing ahead. Namjoon was fervent in the rain; he always had been. You remembered meeting him like that, when you used to teach and he came in as a motivational speaker to talk about his career as a musician. 

After his speech, you’d been given the duty of cleaning the chairs in the school hall. Eager to finish, you began to stick them out in stacks in the courtyard, and that was when you saw him, far off in the distance, leaning against the rails of the basketball court, rain pouring down his face. 

Like the feeling you felt looking at him now, you were magnetized, curious.

“It’s fucking freezing!” You began, clenching at your sides, hopping on the spot “Can we run now?”

“You, miss l/n, are no fun.” He chimed.

“And you’re a polar bear!”

“An endearing term, but i find my pace akin to a cheetah.” He joked “Now chase me!”

Before you could blink, he had bolted across the grass, down towards the car park.

Now, you not only had to fight the rain, but focus on keeping up with your long-legged boyfriend. 

They say girls are good at multi-tasking - and they are - they just struggle with things like this because it involves the tedious process of thinking and being sensory-aware all the time; something which lengthy boys like Namjoon don’t take into account.

“A fucking polar bear isn’t this fast!″ You puffed, circling a bed of drooping flowers to further keep up with him,

As the rain pelted heavier, giddiness overcame you. You couldn’t help but laugh, thinking of yourself (merely a few years ago) watching this man, as a primary school teacher, from the playground - almost untouchable, unreal - now encouraging you to chase him, soaking wet, through the rain like lovestruck youth. 

“Catch me if you can.” He laughed.

☁

That was three months ago..

Today was March 13th. 2020.

Friday the 13th...

The balcony of your third floor apartment was glowing that day. As you sat on its cobblestone base, dusting your plant pots, you felt the sun cast warm rays on your neck.

Friday the 13th, that one day that came up so seldom, never seemed to hold any negative connotations for you. Every day you felt lucky: to have a quaint little flat, thriving plants, an endless supply of herbal tea at your feet, and of course Namjoon.

Right now you were tending to his favorite small bonsai, gently seated between two lucky bamboo plant pots, shaded by a leafy green hanging plant. You polished its black base, sprayed some water on its soil stones and gently trimmed any stray stalks growing from its arms. Namjoon had called him ��peet’, an affectionate name that often made you forget that this plant was more an inanimate object than a human body with full-functioning organs. You were often reminded of this when he’d catch you in lengthy conversations, strewn across the balcony floor at night, bonsai leaves tickling your cheek as you tried to lean back further to watch the stars. But these plants were a huge healing tool for you; something that kept you occupied, just as well nourished as them, and excited to see how they’d blossom each day. 

Finishing off by cutting the last wandering stalk, you gently got to your feet and headed for the kitchen. Only 11am, you’d had your breakfast but felt slightly parched for a drink. Fortunately enough, when the clock struck 11.10 every day, you’d find yourself coincidentally hunched over a mug of steaming green tea; you knew there was no coincidence, just the pure, unrelenting fact that you loved the warm, floral taste it brought you. It gave you just the right amount of energy each day, and it was always a wonder to watch Namjoon puff his cheeks like a hamsters as he’d swallow a cup whole in one go. 

You’d left him asleep this morning, waking at 9am to grab some groceries and sort yourself out. You hadn’t disturbed him since, knowing he was a heavy sleeper and knowing he really needed some rest since working the past few weeks. Night after night he’d been slaving in front of a laptop, attempting to draft and file possible lyrics for his upcoming album. It wasn’t helping that his producer had him on a leash and under a constricting time limit. What could you do but give him the time and space he needed to get things done.

Sealing the kettle and the tea bags, you lifted Namjoon’s mug and carried it over to your bedroom.  Approaching the door, you listened carefully for the sound of snoring, aware that waking Namjoon wouldn’t do any good for the level of guilt you felt entering the room anyway.

When all you heard was silence, you decided to nudge the door open and slip through into a darker room.

 “Joon, I've made some tea for you.” You approached the bed and placed his mug on the bedside table, anchoring it away from him so he wouldn’t hit it off with his elbow when turning; he was clumsy like that. You watched as he shuffled in response to your entrance, the caramel of his skin sliding against the sheets as he adjusted his neck to gently turn to you

“Mmh Morning.” He yawned, his eyes forming crescent moons as they squeezed shut before opening to clear the haze from his vision. He was a beautiful little shape of a human, shrouded in cosy bedding as he watched you in the dim light.

“You coming out today Joon? I’ve got some exciting things up my sleeve.”

“I can’t..I'm sorry.” He replied, a certain lifelessness in his tone.

“Are you sure? I can make us some cake and we can go to some park. It’ll be nice.”

“I don’t feel like it.”

“Oh, okay..”

“I��m sorry.”

“No, no, it’s fine!” You whispered, bringing your palm to his cheek, feeling its heat coarse through your fingers. “We’ll try another day. Don’t feel bad about it at all. Have a nice rest Joon.”

With that, you slowly turned from him and made your way back out into the living space. You let a sigh wash over you and attempted to rejoice in the fact that at least you had a warm mug of tea ready for you. Swigging it down, you sat in silence, watching the outdoors from the distant balcony window. It was still just as bright outside, much brighter than the bedroom, clouded by dark curtains. You felt sad for Joon, powerless even. How badly you missed even the simple things like swigging tea with him. How long had it been since you’d done that?..

Too Long.

☁ 

The rest of the day painted itself in a slow and monotonous fashion. It wasn’t unbearable - you got things done - but it all seemed watered into the same actions, the same meaning, the same routine. 

It started with finishing your tea, slower than you had intended. Lost in monotonous thought, before you knew it, it had gone cold so you had ended up pouring the remaining portion down the sink. You then went on to finish the laundry, have lunch, check on your beloved plants, read a book, watch TV, yawn and sigh a countless number of times, and take a quick nap. 

Before you knew it, the room had darkened and the sky had taken on a delicious yellow tone. Before you knew it, the whole day had almost passed. 

You didn’t want to lie to yourself, this is the way the days had gone for the past few weeks. It was just you, the sun, a cup of tea and the rest of the world. Namjoon, every day, had been stuck in the bedroom, occasionally popping out each evening to say hello. Now that was something you had a problem with confronting. You felt it was appropriate for him to get some rest, especially after the few weeks he’d spent finishing up his work. But it had reached a turning point now. One which you didn’t know how to address.

You weren’t too happy about it, but Namjoon was clearly broken. Were you scared to face the extent of his unhappiness? You never wanted to see the one you loved so much feel so hollow. At least that’s how you assumed he felt. You’d felt a similiar emotion before, but never to the extent Namjoon was experiencing. How badly you just wanted to rip the shreds of dread from him like a stuffed toy, or hug him to death and fill him full of love, stitching him back up to like he’d been before. 

What could it be that made him feel like this? Perhaps it was nothing at all, just a fragrant aroma of unease that settled upon him - something he couldn’t shake off. When would you build up the courage to ask him? Talking to someone might free him from his bonds, but you couldn’t force him, you just couldn’t.

He had to be the one to make that choice.

Shifting on the sofa and taking a rather taxing stretch, you moved from your napping position and onto your feet. You stepped out onto the balcony, greeted by a golden radiant light, seating yourself on the heated stone floor, your feet nudging blooming plant pots.

You watched through the rustic balcony bars as the air grew wispy and chill around you, a harsh brick wall supporting the stability of your back. The clouds were starting to fade into the distance as stars pushed forth through the air. Was it time for another cup of tea yet? Probably. You felt spurred to go and get one.

“Morning.” 

“N-namjoon.” You turned in surprise from the gruff voice to be met with his tall figure slouched against the door frame. “Evening, sleepy-head.”

He yawned in response, ruffling that luscious hair of his that now seemed so tangled through his fingers. 

“Come sit down.”

Shuffling, he came to a seated position, one knee bobbing against yours, the other scraping the soil surface of his bonsai. Another yawn again, and his knee was now fully perched on your thigh, his back hunched over, shoulder nudging yours. You watched him as he shook out his tawny hair and took in his features in the setting sun. 

“What’s up?” You smiled, your hand resting on his leg.

“Wanted to see you, dewdrop.”

“If you aren’t the biggest charmer.” You grinned in response “I’ve been missing you all day.”

“Yeah..i know.” He whispered.

“Then what’s up? I’m always here for you Joon.”

He sighed, fingers now raking into his scalp. Moon pools, darkened and tenebrous sat under his eyes, his thick lips chapped and his face a starker cream against the fading light. You turned to him, watching more closely, waiting for him to open up, praying that he would just open up. 

“If you’re not ready that’s fine, i don’t -”

“No, no..I need to.” He shuffled nervously “I know things haven’t been the same since a few weeks ago. I’ve been pouring all my energy into my work and now I've been pouring it all into sleep and it feels like I've finally used up all my resources - like i’m at a dead end for solace, for what to do.” 

“It started a few weeks ago. Things were fine, then all of a sudden, it stopped raining. It was probably just one of those years where the weather just wanted to let up and stay sunny, but for me, it felt like the first. It really did feel like the first time it hadn’t rained. I didn’t know what to do. I was at a loss. All my fondest memories, all my comfort and all my shelter came from the rain - it was a thing I could not deny, and I'm still desperate to get it back.”

“I just..I wish it rains all day. Cuz i’d like someone to cry for me. Cuz then people wouldn’t stare at me. The umbrella would cover the sad face, people would be busy minding themselves. I felt like i just needed to stop, I needed to breathe a little slower because my life and my rap, they’re usually too fast.”

“Yeah..that’s it..”

He let out a strong exhale, letting the air around him encourage the entire earth to fall silent. With that breath, his hand found yours on his thigh, his fingers lacing into your own. A strong thumb pawed across your palm, pressing softly into the flesh, the ultimate grounding tool.

But it wasn’t you needing to be grounded, it really wasn’t. It was him, the friendly giant who had lost all hope and solace to the power of the rain.

“Thank you for telling me. Really thank you.” You squeezed his hand “It’s you i want to protect. If I could hang clouds in the sky and make it rain for you I would..you know that.”

“If only I could find something else to make me just as happy..”

“Hey..” You chirped, a thought springing to your head. “You know i checked on you this morning to see if maybe you wanted to do something? Well..maybe we could go to the Art Museum on the waterfront tomorrow?”

“Okay. Sure.”

“It might help. And maybe we could get a coffee as well and see if we bump into any visiting artists.”

He grinned at you, a sense of adoration and respect filling the lakes of his eyes and the hollows of his dimples. You smiled back, a slow and affectionate grin that you hoped could transcend from your heart, right into his to fix him completely.

“Cool. Well, lets get some dinner on and look forward to a beautiful tomorrow.”

☁ 

That night, with full stomach’s and a coruscating sunset washed over your bodies, you lay in your bed, arm in arm, the night falling into the next day. You slept on your side, your arms crossed over your chest. Namjoon rested behind you, his stomach against your back, hands set in the violin crests of your waist, his head latched against your neck. Perhaps this was the first time, you thought, in weeks that you’d layn like this. The past few days, you’d been laying in bed alone, or an oceans distance from Joon, leaving him to get the best rest possible without your heat leaching onto him. This felt nice. It felt so much more than natural. He smelt of vanilla, and long nights and restless days. It reminded you of the angel you’d met so long ago. 

The only thing you missed was his damp, fresh, rain water scent. 

☁ 

“Catch me if you can.” He laughed.

Running further down the hill of the park, you felt your feet race ahead of you, almost slipping, as you begged yourself to catch up to him. Oaks, maples, alders, zelkovas, and birches all fade into one collective tincture as Namjoon dominated your vision. Despite your distance, his smell, his touch and his colours blocked out all sensory notion and summoning around you. You would not be held by the bounds of nature, he was yours and you were his, and in this race all there was, was blank space and the two of you. 

“We’re nearly there!” He yelled again, bringing you from your thoughts.

“I’m -” You huffed. “I’m. So. Close.”

“Ah. So now it is about the race and not the rain. Perhaps you have a newfound love for it?”

In response, you slammed the brakes, watching him as he skipped into the car park, unlocking the doors to your vehicle and climbing in, beckoning you over. 

“In your dreams.”

☁ 

“For this week, to celebrate the Seoul Arts Festival, we are holding a two for one deal for all art lovers. Therefore, your ticket entry to the art museum is only half price! Enjoy your visit.” 

The gallery was lit with stars this afternoon. In awe, you walked through the reception and into the main hall to peer at the strings of golden paper in the shapes of stars decorating the ceiling and the walls. Clearly, this week was a week to be celebrated in the arts community. 

You hoped Namjoon felt as excited as you to spend this time with him and on such a special day. You watched him, a small smile poking at his cheeks, not giving away whether he was displeased or not. You took the nervous drum of his knee to be the latter. 

You always spent a lot of time in each room when you were with Joon. In love with his adoration for exhibitions, each time you joined him, you simply stuck to his side, viewing every single detail of every single painting. 

At first, you felt the visits to be somewhat taxing - much preferring living, breathing art such as himself. Eventually, however, you succumbed to his ways - finally realizing that all exhibits were living things with their own lives and stories behind all their individual brush strokes. Like most things, it was him who taught you that, with his silent yet ethereal way of just being and learning and loving.

“Okay..wow, so this is the central room for this real highlight exhibits.” You breathed, Namjoon echoed your awe with a slow nod. 

Now this was a room you felt you could really spend hours in. From Eunho, to Hye-Sok, to Eungro, to Jiho, you span around in a flurry of colour as you attempted to absorb the true joy of being amongst all this art at once. You knew Joon felt it too, immediately joining him by the first exhibit to gape at the thatched lines and geometry sitting on the canvas before him. You wondered how long he’d felt this way about the things before him: from paintings, to people, to the rain itself. Had he always been so sensitive and in-tune with his environment? Did he always care so much concerning the life buzzing around him?

After crowding around a few of the exhibits, you decided to head to the bathroom and grab a drink for the two of you. Almost ten minutes in, you’d realized you would probably need a drink to support your long and meticulous visit. Now was the perfect time to head off and grab one.

“Joon, I'm going to grab us a coffee, okay? Don’t go too far.” 

“You know i won’t.” He chuckled “This room is way too fascinating.”

Almost fifteen minutes later, and a large queue for the cafe, you hurried back to the central room with two piping cups of pure vanilla fuel. Walking through the doorway, you searched for him in the crowd, but to no avail. You’d told him to stay put, and you were convinced he would do so, but now he’d ran off, almost as if your exit was the perfect opportunity to get away from everything that bound him. It was the perfect inconvenience.

Walking through the room, you decided to take the door to the next section of the exhibit and see if he was there. Entering into a more low lit space, you squinted your eyes, looking for him in every corner of the room. After a short amount of time, you came across his figure, hunched by an exhibit in the far left hand corner. 

Positioned diagonally, you could see the features of his face in pure scrutiny. His eyes, wincing, paced back and forth across the painting, his teeth sandwiched between his lip, chewed at it gently. 

You’d watched him before like this, staring at paintings, watching life go by on the apartment balcony, tending to his plants, but it had never quite been like this. You stood there for (what?) ten to fifteen minutes, simply wondering when he would stop staring at the canvas..if he would move on. Was he waiting for you to join him? Was the painting simply that jaw-dropping?

“Joon..”

He turned in surprise, immediately standing straight. You smiled at his action, and approached him to look at the painting further. From a distance, in the dim light of the room, the painting was a monochromatic smudge with the tall figure of Namjoon shading its central half. Now, up close, it looked much different. 

A figure in a long white trench coat and cap stood in its centre. Beneath him, a flowing stream of black ink submerged the better half of his shoes, meandering forward through the painting and toward a large black hole hanging in the sky ahead. Black arcs of rain shot through the surrounding sky like hasten sparks, falling into the reflection of the figure wavering below in the light of the tenebrous stream. The painting, as a whole, had been crafted in monochromatic watercolour, its brush strokes melting down the canvas like tears to paper. It was a sad yet inspiring vision, you thought.

“It’s beautiful.” He answered, a tear pooling down his cheek. 

☁ 

That night you lay awake for a while. 

A long while.

At 9pm, you turned to your side, and slipped out of your bed to sit on the balcony. The weather was tinged with cold, but you brought a blanket to shawl across your shoulders and drape under your naked toes. 

You’d tried getting to sleep that night around 8pm. Joon had huddled against the corner of the sofa before bed and downed a mug of green tea, before watching you finish yours, lacing your hand with his and heading for dream-land. 

But as soon as you hit those warm, delicious covers, you knew there was something much more pressing calling your name. 

Ever since leaving the museum that afternoon, you couldn’t draw your mind from that watercolour painting. Like an obnoxious poster of propaganda, or an inviting store-front display, the picture sat in your mind, a prized possession, and mocked you your entire journey home. You thought about Joon’s face viewing the canvas, the time he spent simply looking at it and the silence and serenity that followed him afterward. 

He wanted the rain, he yearned for it, he called for it ever since its disappearance. You only realized this last night, once he opened up to you, but it had made sense. The long showers he took when you were distracted at the grocers and would come home to him singing away to the sound of the running water in the bathroom. The way you would sometimes wake just as he was heading to sleep and watch him kiss the sky goodnight with a certain desperation for the rain to come. Even the long, delicious sips he took of green tea, feeling the liquid wash down his throat and cleanse him of his doubt. It all made sense. 

He was waiting for the rain to answer him and it was that singular painting that seemed to pick up his call.

It was that realization, again, on the foot of your balcony at 9pm at night that made you stoop through the house, throw on your shoes and run back to the museum to bring home that painting.

Racing down cobblestone streets and narrow lanes, you found yourself driving all the way back to the museum with only yourself and the headlights of the car to guide you. 

All your life, you’d learnt better from the mistakes you’d made and soon realized it was best to follow a calling and take an opportunity when it came to you. Even if it ended up failing. This particular calling was stronger than ever, a migraine in your head, an instinct that screamed that there was more to this painting than what meets the eye. You knew it would help Namjoon.

On special events, the museum closed at the ripe hour of 10pm: in just fifteen minutes time. What on earth were you doing? You didn’t know. You would enter the museum, visit the catalyst that stuck itself in your mind and hopefully the answer would come to you.

Jumping out from the car, you ran toward the entrance, bursting through the doors like some crazed artist, desperate for information. 

A man halted you just as you were headed through to the main hall, his gentle touch on your shoulder. 

“Ma’am, this gallery is closing in ten minutes time.”

“I-i understand. I just need to take a look at one of your exhibits.”

He nodded, an uncertain look crossing his features “Of course..go ahead.”

And with that notice, you sped walk to the dim lit room without a single thought but of the canvas in your head.

“Good evening, this gallery will be closing in five minutes time. Can all remaining visitors please make their way to the exit on the lower floor. Thank you for visiting.”

With the echo of the final closing announcement following you into the dark exhibit room, you had to make a decision. A dangerous decision. 

With no rational thought, plan or hope in mind, you would decide to stay at the museum past its closing time. Searching the room, you peered for somewhere to hide. Unfortunately, galleries never really delivered in this particular apartment, often baring clean white walls and flat floorboards. In your case, frantically scouring the room, you had found an exhibit sitting on top of a white box with a possible way to unfold itself and hide you in it. With urgency, you got to your knees and tugged at the side of one of the corners, digging your nails in, in an attempt to open up one of the sides and slide inside. 

And just as if it really was your calling, one of the sides slid open - albeit with a tremendous screeching sound against the floor - but it still very much opened. With that, you were asking no questions, simply bending yourself into a rectangular shape and sliding back into the box, closing the side behind you. 

Now to wait.

For a few minutes, you sat in silence, wincing at a cramp in your ankle. Suddenly, you were hearing footsteps and jangling keys announcing themselves in the room. With a held breath, and extreme concentration, you sat rock solid as the steps circled, stopping occasionally to scent out a visitor, and continuing before finally click-clacking goodbye. If there was any time you thought you would be in need of an oxygen tank (surprisingly not in 50 years time) it was now. You were never one to break the rules or to find yourself being ridiculously spontaneous, so this was really a first. You felt on edge, yet devious and buzzing with an electric pulse of energy. It really was time for you to try something new, and for Joon to finally get his dose of happiness.

In a succession of fox-like footsteps, you peeled yourself from the box and made your way over to the painting. You thought, standing still, that the answer of what to do would just come to you. 

Certainly nothing had happened straight away, but you were definitely taken aback by the painting in this light. With only the back-up lighting on, a shadow was cast on the canvas before you, washing the monochromatic tone over in a blue haze. Things looked even sadder from this angle, but ever more fascinating. Almost unconsciously, you leaned forward and traced the painting with your finger, letting your palm slide flat against the cold canvas. So melancholy and so mysterious, the longer you stared, the more you fell. Before you could even comprehend your actions, you were again applying another hand to the canvas, feeling its ridges and bends. Slowly, you came closer to it, pushing forward past the small rope barrier to reach nearer in its gaze. 

Black, white, grey, it all melded into one in a romantic and tragic spiral of colour. Your eyes fell onto its detail, its strokes, its edges, and soon you couldn’t even tell what you were looking at anymore - simply a puddle of water absorbing your interest, absorbing all consciousness. 

☁

“Hello”

“Hello..”

“Are you okay?”

In a buttery, and gooey, and delicious state of silence a voice filled your ears. Slowly you felt your touch, your scent, your taste and everything return to you. You were a warm body on a cold floor, palms clawing roughly at its spongy surface. You were a clouded head, lost in direction, coming to your senses with the figure above you. 

Eyes squinting and pleading to open, you heard his voice again. It rang a deep, husky, baritone chill through your spine and reminded you of someone oh so familiar. As you squeezed your eyes open again, everything came into view. 

The figure above you was a tall, looming shadow. Dressed in a long white trench coat and cap, with loose trousers and messy black hair, he stared ominously into your eyes, confusion and worry painting the slight lines smudged across his face. 

It only took you a second, but before you knew it, you were free of numbness and doubt, standing to your feet and cradling the shadow in front of you. 

It was your Joon.

Well, it was him, but rather a slightly altered version of him. A small wedge of his collective person so to speak. In fact, to put it definitely, it was the figure that stood central in the watercolour painting. 

And now you were in the painting itself. Standing with him as if you’d never left the house, as if you hadn’t ever had a care in the world. But you most definitely had; in fact, the biggest question shrouding your brain was how on earth did you end up inside the canvas? Was this a dream?

“I’m sorry.” You whispered into his shoulder. 

“Hey, hey. It’s okay Dewdrop.” He replied, leaving you frozen with the familiar nickname. “I missed you.”

“Joon..” You mumbled, a hand lacing itself against his collarbone “Hey..this isn’t some weird calling is it? Or some nightmare that will leave me on my knees in penance?”

“No, no. I know this feels weird and I know this was the last place you expected to be in order to help the one you love..but it is. And you won’t be here forever, don’t worry, I just need to explain things.”

“Okay okay.” You nodded, pulling back from him to fully process the situation. 

Viewing him from such a close perspective, and viewing the strange yet ethereal world floating in your peripheral wasn’t even the weirdest thing. The weirdest thing was how quick you had been made to suddenly process this all, as if it were foreshadowed in the flecks of your bloodstream. 

Always one for make-believe and skipping class in favor of daydreaming dungeons & dragons, this would seem custom for you. And it was in a sense. Crossing that initial bridge of fear and the unfamiliar, you felt strangely calm in this new world’s clutch. 

“Y/n? Are you alright?”

“Sorry.” You pulled yourself from your sudden thoughts. “I was just..i’m just a bit taken aback that’s all.”

“It’s fine, honey. Come here, let’s walk.” 

In the still slight state of shock, you took his hand and walked. Before, the world feeling silent, you could now hear rain. Long flecks of it smashing against the ground like fireworks bouncing beyond the stratosphere. In some strange way -  like everything that had happened to you this evening - you felt calm. 

In the weeks it hadn’t rained, you forgot what it had felt like to hold Joon’s hand, to hug him, to really feel him near you. In the early hours of morning, you had missed his warmth, his feathery kisses, his pleasure that was true sin of the flesh. Feeling him here, being next to him now, you had a hope that his more unfortunate, lonesome counterpart would soon be reunited with his true-self again.

“It was a few weeks ago, when the rain halted all action. When the skies fell to rest. A part of me left and found itself here, a strange deity of happiness, an outlier in a world of strangers.”

Looking around, you felt his words. To your left, and to your right stood figures masked with umbrellas, floating in the inaudible wind. Some figures had their umbrellas angled so you could see their faces. Strange features marked the upper half of their torso: hollowed cheeks with eyes sitting in the banks of their flesh, botanical hair, melding into faces, blossoming into sharper spikes. Some figures were full of expression and stories, others were simply black smudges, scribbles atop slouched shoulders moving with the current. 

“When it rains, I get a little feeling that I do have a friend. Keeps knocking on my windows; asks me if I'm doing well. And I know that when Namjoon’s at home, writing his music, waiting, he will answer: ‘I’m still a hostage of life. I don’t live because i can’t die, but i’m chained to something.’” Joon responds, talking about the physical side of himself, the man you’ve left sleeping at home, dreaming of the rain. You sense a sadness in his tone, a longing to be reunited with his other half. To make him whole again.

“What can i do? Please tell me?”

“We need to get out of here; but i can’t do it without your help. You need to help pull me out through the other side, to set me free, to help me reach him.” 

You take a fresh gulp, anticipating instructions, waiting for an order of where to go, something to help you complete your task. But nothing.

“Where do i take you?”

“Through..through that black hole over there.”

With an unsteady, ghostly white watercolour finger, he points ahead of himself, toward a tenebrous pool of ink, hanging in the sky. Walking with hope, an inkling of dread at your side, you tug further on his hand to approach the crevice, the tear in the seams. 

Approaching nearer, you feel your feet start to become submerged in a tar-like substance. Upon looking down, you notice that your wading further out into a lake of ink. But there’s no way out. Stepping to the side to try and climb out of the stream is no use. You are not the floating figures around you, you never will be and neither will Joon; you are simply grounded, falling deeper, yet becoming more assured of the goal you must now reach.

Before you even comprehend it, your right up against the hole, your vision shrouded in darkness and dripping ink, like a fountain from the devil himself. But you know on the other side that there’s the gallery room, and you know that a stone's throw from there, is your home, and your safety again. 

“When i count to three, we’ll jump in.”

“Okay..” You breathe.

“Just help me through once you're safe and sound.” He grins, dimples kissing his cheeks.

“Of course I will, silly. We’re in this together.” 

“Okay. One..”

“Two.”

“Three!”

The first thing you feel is damp wet sludge, then the tugging sensation of being pulled through a tumble dryer.

The next thing you know: you’re out the other side, and he..

..he’s gasping for air, 

tugging onto your arm,

and gurgling.

And - oh god - you don’t think you’ve heard such a sound before, but it terrifies you and leaves bile pooling against your gums. 

Against the arcs of rain spilling from the painting, his arm shakes further, fingers gripping so hard you’re afraid they’ll simply shrivel to bone. He’s screaming now, low and hollow and you’re teetering on the decision to just denounce this is a bad dream, pinch yourself and wake up. But you know this isn’t. 

You feel you’ve had nightmares similar to this one before. Visions of losing him to a pool of ink, watching him fade into just an image. You’ve tried to imagine life without him, taking long walks and cold showers to prepare for the worst, but you had never wanted this.

“H-elp, PLEASE, he-”

“It’s okay!” You felt breathless “Joon, stay with me, please!”

What on earth would you do if you couldn’t get him out of here? Would the Joon at home you knew so well forever lose his spark? Would you get to try again the next day? Or would the love of your life simply fade away forever..

With that thought you tugged harder, putting all of your energy into the pull. Grounding one foot in front of the other, you leant back against the rope barrier of the exhibit and fastened your grip further up his arm. With excruciating strength, and the need to make sounds akin to an engine revving, you pulled further and further. Further and further, until you could see his shoulder, then his neck, then his head, the waist, the thighs, the knees, the ankles..

All of him. 

In an instance, he was falling into your arms, your grip fervent and desperate on him, cradling his body as if he would melt away. 

Little did you know, he would melt away if you weren’t fast enough.

“We need to be quick. I’m so so sorry. You need to hurry before i gradually fade; i can’t exist in this world normally as a painting, you need to get to him. Now”.

☁

Racing down empty streets, steering near desolate corners, your car drove with the solid ambition of getting to him. 

The longer you rode, the harder you found it to look across to the passenger seat at him. Every single minute, he was fading away. First it was his shoes when you first fastened the seat belt, then his ankles, and now the evanesce was reaching toward his thighs. There was no point in looking a little further or breathing a little faster or thinking a little longer. It was your eyes, ahead, on the road. Just you and the world.

 And soon it would be you and him. 

Turning another corner, you felt the engine stutter and pool to a stop. With a long, steady breath, you pushed at the pedal again, urging it to move, 

“C’mon just a little more -” 

But to no avail. 

Again you pushed and pushed, just like how you pulled and pulled earlier, but life could only give you so much, it would only give you so much. 

A feeling of despair overcame you, throwing you instantly onto the bed of the steering wheel. You lay there silently for a while, face nested against the cold fabric, questioning it all. 

Did you do enough? What would Joon think of you? Why were you so hopeless? Did you really think you could finish this on your own?

You had to finish this on your own.

...

....

......

*pit*

*pat*

*pit-pat*

You blinked, lips brushing the wheel in an attempt to shut your mouth and hold your breath.

*pit-pat*

*pit-pat pit-pat pit-pat -*

It was raining.

Looking up, flecks of water were falling from the sky. They were landing like confetti and surging through the air in the trillions. The ground, in seconds, had become a stone riverbed, and the car windows a submarine tanks. 

You’d be damned if this rain wasn’t going to turn into the most magnificent storm you’d ever seen. 

“C’mon Joon, we’re nearly there!” 

With a thrust, you pulled yourself out of the car and up into the rain. Following your steps, he trailed behind you as you stepped out into the cold, exposed to an onslaught of flood. 

Out in the open, and with one more step to complete, you took your hand in his and began to run.

If tears were rainy days, you think you’d have experienced a drought. But now, you were crying, crying like there was not enough rain in this world, like there couldn’t ever be enough. 

Ushering a melting figure through the torrent of rain, you’d become desperate to reach home. Looking back, you saw the rain was having its effect on him. Every second now, he was simply being washed away.

You turned the final corner to your apartment, readying yourself to rush down a long street to reach the end of it and enter dry-land. To run back home with the risk of turning back and no longer seeing a figure following behind you. 

But was it luck, or the final piece in this discombobulated puzzle, that Namjoon was standing right there, at the end of the street, waiting for you?

Now you were running even faster, your legs pacing ahead of the rest of you before you could even think. 

Closer and closer and you could start to feel Joon’s grip in your hand fade away, only urging you to hold on stronger. 

With watery, shut eyes, you made the final distance and collided with a strong chest, sending Joon forth into his physical counterpart. 

Pulling apart from him suddenly, you watched to see his watercolour other-half melt into the crest of his heart. With no urgency, he was sucked in, and you stared in awe as Joon slowly stood straighter, grew brighter, felt happier. 

It was a gasp of air that finally brought him back to you. You saw it before you truly felt it: lips on your own like soft, rubbery buds. He kissed you with tenderness, with concern, with desire. Kissing you further, the light poured into you too. You felt it in the way he held your waist, in the way he held your face, in the way he made sure the both of you were never ever ever displaced.

He sang against your lips,

“Please don’t ask any questions.”

“But do keep pouring forever.”

[incruelty]

WILSON  FISK  THROUGHOUT  THE  SEASONS.  major spoilers for season three, but i just wanted to throw it out there that wilson fisk’s character development has been ongoing since his first appearance on the show and by NO MEANS did he transform into the kingpin by the end of the first season. we don’t truly witness the kingpin until the very last episode of season three.

IN  SEASON  ONE   he wants to reconcile his dark and depraved roots in hell’s kitchen that have haunted him throughout his entire life, made him feel incapable of love and ultimately inhuman. hell’s kitchen is a depiction of fisk’s trauma, and like any artist, he wants to give meaning to that suffering and turn it into something more beautiful than what it was before. i don’t think that his criminal endeavors were ever all that present in his mind in the beginning of season one beyond a means to his end. he believes that he’s doing what he has to do to restore hell’s kitchen and himself. he struggles with this, however, as the memories of his father’s abuse and its consequences start making it harder for him to separate his actions from himself. that he is not entirely untouched by the horrors he’s capable of and actively doing, even if they’re present by necessity. he feels like a monster, and that self loathing doesn’t work in tandem with the prosperity he’s trying to achieve by elevating the city, and therefore himself. 

this is where vanessa becomes such an important player for team fisk; she takes him by the arm and tells him that he won’t only amount to the terrible things that he’s done and that those things are more necessary than ever when there are people trying to threaten the life he’s trying to create, which is more important than anything, because it’s important to them. and it’s at this point that fisk gets ahead of his opposites by creating his own narrative for the role he plays in the reckoning that everyone knows is happening for hell’s kitchen. he’s contented with the idea that his past and the inherent nature of him doesn’t delude his intentions and will not taint the future. time goes on and he’s confronted by his associates with the fact that he cannot serve as both savior and oppressor to the city because they don’t function in their industry under the same premise. fisk’s vision is still about fulfillment, and recovery.  then fisk is being threatened with arrest, and by the outcry of the public he’s forced to face the reflection of himself that is a shadow over hell’s kitchen, and specifically where inside himself does that shadow start to cast. he realizes that trying to rebuild the city in an effort to rebuild himself, to erase his own history by erasing what he considers to be hell’s kitchen’s ugliest imperfections, be its ruin or the people who would see him fail in a feat he had once considered so noble, was as naive as the feat itself. this realization does take something of a toll on fisk, as he feels as though he’s been betrayed, blinded to and by his own nature. what he does at the end of the season, and what he realizes he should’ve been doing at the start, was embracing the iniquity of himself and the city. there was nothing to recover from the ruin of himself and the decay of hell’s kitchen. that ruin is where he thrives. 

IN  SEASON  TWO,   his arc is still far from over, and the small glimpses we get into fisk’s further growth are no less important than they were in season one because they help us understand what terms fisk will be coming back into play under in future storylines. prison is the perfect place to empower this newly recognized sense of self, as he explains: everyone warned me that prison would be an inhumane environment. it is. but i find it refreshing. the perfect microcosm of the animal world: when an animal wants something, when it needs something, other things need to be stepped on. 

in spite of that, he’s also removed from his fellow inmates, placing himself into a position of power by controlling prison dynamics and even having operations that take place deeper into the city          we know this from the coordination between guards that got frank to ruin his own testimony in court, and when it was discussed that wilson fisk had his plans in motion well over a year before the events of season three.

you are running this place. yes, ask my lawyer, he’ll deny it. ask the guards, they’ll deny it. ask the inmates here, they’ll cut their tongues out before they talk. 

he has a plan for when he’s released and he’s certain in the measures he’s taken to secure it. he is not unnerved by the truth of himself or the downfall it seemed to bring upon him, but instead inspired to make use of it when he is free to destroy the lives of those who opposed him. but i have something to say to you: when i finally get out of this cage, i will dismantle the lives of the two amateurs that put me in here. [...] you see, i’ve had a lot of time to reflect on my journey here, mr. murdock. my mistakes. everything i took for granted. 

he is something bigger than he was before. while he may be in captivity, he is a mirror of the man he’d been in season one, where he had been a crime lord with all the money and power he needed to build his better tomorrow, and his better self, but his conviction was plagued by conflicting identities that made him feel powerless in achieving what he wanted in love, in life, and in himself             in season two, wilson fisk is in a cage, but he is also more free than we’d ever seen him, in a stage of acceptance.  IN  SEASON  THREE,  fisk is acting off the momentum of his epiphany. he is more calculated, even more prepared than he had been before. he has regained control over the city on a much more terrifying scale. if i’m honest, what occurred to me while watching was the phrase “go big or go home,” and how fisk entered this season intending to do both. fisk has always been a villain that operates with an endgame in mind. his goal is not just the ongoing profit of his crimes, but he still has a vision for himself as he did in season one, just one tailored to better suit the nuances of the man he is now and how he will put them to work. better suited to fit the life he’s building for vanessa and himself.  vanessa continues to motivate him as she did in season one without even needing a physical presence in the show, and he even discusses with agent nadeem how vanessa was his single greatest source of empowerment           his love for her was an inescapable prison, and his connection with her was his most fulfilling achievement. 

but there is a moment between fisk and a holocaust survivor, mrs. falb, where they discuss the ownership of the rabbit in a snowstorm, and how the painting is a symbol of his and vanessa’s love. this is an important development from how it had at one point been a symbolization of the kind of man he was meant to be, the choices he would make to become that; a proxy for the hunger for power and control that his father had beaten into him and that he had to in turn beat into his father, and the empowerment he had felt in his own solitary as a result  *   IT  MAKES  ME  FEEL  ALONE                 of course, it’s no surprise that his love for vanessa and her love for him had replaced what this painting means to him, but there’s the fact that fisk leaves the painting in the care of mrs. falb after this exchange:  the gestapo demanded everything we had. including that painting. my father fought them, and they shot him in front of us. do you know what it’s like to see your father take his last breathe on the floor in front of you? [...] this painting is my connection to the people i love. i know who you are, mr. fisk. you are a wolf, too. 

now, fisk obviously faces the unsettling resemblance of sentimentalism he shares with mrs. falb regarding the deaths of their fathers, and while they do cling to the painting out of love, it’s on two opposite sides of the spectrum and serves as a grotesque reminder to fisk that he is the villain, as mrs. falb was the victim, and love does not absolve him of that. this is not something that fisk is unaware of, because his self awareness is a prominent part of his character development throughout the years, but this is the first time in a long time that fisk vaguely favors the man he’d been in season one when confronted with his wickedness. he cannot have that reminder in his home with vanessa, as it’s clear from their reunion that he intends to still keep her as far from his transgressions as he can. again, he struggles to separate his actions from what is important to him, this time the subject being vanessa, rather than his city.  that is until vanessa makes it clear that the distance that was placed between them by his incarceration and his own fear of entangling her into his world will only drive them further apart, for she can not serve as an exhibit of his humanity or a mere spectator to his savageness. she has to be apart of him. fully. in completely embracing vanessa with every aspect of his world, wilson has blurred the lines between what makes him human and what makes him terrifying. this makes him just as powerful as it makes him vulnerable, for those two aspects will always actively play off of each other and has been the point of having a villain like wilson fisk playing opposite to a protagonist like matt murdock.  a lot of people say that we saw the first real appearance of the kingpin at the end of season one, with fisk coming to terms with his true nature and therefore expanding the lengths he’s willing to go to get what he wants, but i don’t agree. i think we saw the kingpin in fruition when vanessa explain to him,  everyone is broken. the point is to find someone whose broken pieces fit with yours. in season one, fisk was desperately trying to rearrange the shattered pieces of his humanity into something other than what it had been after to the murder of his father, where he wasn’t horrified by the reflection he saw when he stared into them. 

in season two, fisk has been reinvented and placed into an environment where those broken pieces, the brutality he had buried beneath fear and pretense, are his weapons. 

in season three, fisk, who is now validated and empowered by the love of his life, the fear of those around him, the trust of the public, and the depths of which he’s now comfortable to sinking in his rise, has arranged these broken pieces of himself into a mosaic of nuances that make him more human, and more more dangerous than he’s ever been, which was only made possible by vanessa.

[asctx]

How Sex Scenes are the Mirrors into the Dark Soul of the Film Industry

by Antonia Louisa Georgiou for New Socialist // 2017-10-19

When we watch films as a form of entertainment, we rarely consider that the violence we witness on screen could reflect a harrowing off-screen reality. Writing in The Guardian last week, French actor Léa Seydoux revealed that she was one of the many victims of Harvey Weinstein’s unwanted advances. But Seydoux’s article reminds us that the subjugation of women in the film industry is not confined to what goes on behind the screen: she also mentions two other instances of exploitation at the hands of men in the film industry. In the first, she recalls a director, whom she "really liked and respected", telling her “I wish I could fuck you”. In the second, she denounces a director who filmed long sex scenes which lasted for days, bordering on the torturous. Whoever the man in question may be, Seydoux had previously criticised her Blue is the Warmest Colour director Abdellatif Kechiche at the film’s initial release in 2013. Describing a “horrible” filmmaking experience in which filming sex scenes lasted for ten days, Seydoux said that Kechiche made her feel like a “prostitute”.

As we lament the insidious aggression committed by men like Weinstein, we must also acknowledge that much of it occurs before our very eyes. Exploitation on screen reflects the exploitation and coercion that occurs off-screen. The ways in which the industry demeans women do not begin and end with the horrors of the casting couch. Misogyny manifests in infinite subtle ways, all of which usually go unrecognised by the average viewer. In an industry where men claim ownership of women's bodies, it is through sex scenes that directors can wield their power and sense of entitlement. Take Blue is the Warmest Colour. It's interesting that much of the criticism directed at the film's sex scenes were centred on the positions of sex. For the heteronormative, it is comical to imagine lesbian sex in any way other than "woman goes down on woman". But the positions are not the issue, and are in fact the sole positive aspect of these scenes (yes, there are different ways for lesbians to have sex). The problem is with the phallocentric lens of scopophilia through which the sex is depicted. Scopophilia is the act of deriving pleasure from observing people in sexual or nude (essentially vulnerable and exposed) states, which in turn leads to the observer having mastery over the object of the gaze. When Kechiche films the actors having sex in Blue is the Warmest Colour, he is affirming his male domination over them. The camera lingers over the actors’ writhing curves, bodies without faces, synthetic sweat strategically placed to enhance the stylistic pornification. Rarely do we see the women’s reactions to what is happening to their bodies: occasionally we get a glimpse of their faces, lasting mere seconds before the camera returns to where Kechiche wants it to be – to the sum of their parts. As voyeurs, we must behold the object of the male gaze. The female protagonists are not allowed to reciprocate the gaze, which is exclusively male. When a woman becomes an object, and not a subject, she cannot reciprocate. The viewer is implicated in the gaze, complicit in the protagonists’ discomfort. Accordingly, female viewers must engage with the film as if they were men. In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey explains that “the man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralise the extradiegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle."

In retaliation to her criticism of the sex scenes, Kechiche branded Léa Seydoux an "arrogant, spoiled child". The intention of Kechiche’s response is to make Seydoux feel powerless �� not just through exploitative sex scenes, but through demeaning paternalistic language that reduces her concerns to nothing more than the utterances of a spoilt child (“spoilt” implying that she doesn’t realise how lucky she is to have been humiliated and exploited). Having also watched Kechiche’s 2007 film The Secret of the Grain (also known as Couscous), it is evident that he has a penchant for filming the sexual humiliation of women. A mere three minutes into the film, a man pulls up a woman’s dress, exposes her buttocks, and repeatedly spanks her in an aggressive manner, a scene which serves the narrative in no conceivable way. Far too many male film directors use coercive methods to push women into doing things that make them feel uncomfortable under the guise of “art”.

In a phallocentric industry, there is no place for female pleasure. Capitalistic modes of mainstream film production mean that the female body is a commodity used to propagate misogynistic fantasies. The “female pleasure” we witness on screen is not the pleasure of women, but the pleasure of men in observing women. By contrast, when Lana (Chloë Sevigny) and Brandon (Hilary Swank) have their first sexual encounter in the Kimberley Pierce-directed Boys Don’t Cry (1999), there are no titillating shots of sweaty, writhing limbs or lacy underwear sliding down perfectly tanned legs; rather, the camera is fixated on Lana’s face, growing increasingly ecstatic, as Brandon brings her to orgasm. Pierce feels through herself and projects it onto her female subject: by putting women behind the camera, it enables the representation of female pleasure in ways that are not mediated through the male gaze.

For male film makers, psychologically penetrating the mind and will of a woman is yet another form of violation. In the notorious 1959 film Peeping Tom, the camera is depicted as a symbolic extension of the phallus whose ultimate goal is to destroy its female objects. This shows how the male gaze is an inherently violent one, as scopophilic exploitation not only robs women of their sexual identity, but of their humanity. After so much exploitation and abuse, women need to take back power and reclaim their bodies. Recently, film director Sarah Polley, herself once the object of Weinstein's lewd advances, explained how being a woman behind the camera meant she could film women without reducing them to sexual objects: “I could decide what I felt was important to say, how to film a woman, without her sexuality being a central focus without context.” Polley’s working conditions are the way forward: a symbiotic relationship whereby both actor and director can feel empowered, working towards the shared goal of completing the film. Film making should not be a dichotomy of masculine vs feminine power play, of male activity vs female inactivity. With more women opening up about abuses of power and rejecting the conditions they have had to endure in the past, they can make exploitation both on and off screen a relic of patriarchal domination. It is every actor’s right to be treated with dignity and respect, as opposed to being reduced to slabs of meat solely for the male gaze.

[i-am-fugitive]

MY FREEDOM GPS – Departures and Arrivals (Deaths, Rebirths and New Beginnings)

i lifted my eyes and looked to the hills from whence cometh my help, only to discover that my help cometh from within.

As I’ve often asseverated. There is, absolutely, no separation between my life and my art. My life speaks to my art in EVERY way, just as my art informs how i live. My work is driven by a mission and purpose to obtain absolute FREEDOM. i have and will continue to sacrifice EVERYTHING to meet this end. And there is ABSOLUTELY nothing and no one that comes before this cause. That said. My journey (to absolute freedom) has brought me to yet another point of realization. As i now realize that my people are neither BLACK or WHITE PEOPLE but FREE PEOPLE. As FREEDOM is my life’s MISSION and PRAXIS. It (FREEDOM) is my promised land and my Polaris star. FREEDOM is my totem. FREEDOM is my soul and solace! It is the womb and birthing ground of my clan, my tribe, my nation, MY PEOPLE.

“Our sense of “being-in-the-world,” is actualized, or authentically enacted and perceived to the extent it corresponds to, or expresses our desire and ability to shape the world around us. When this process is short-circuited, an inauthentic, or alienated existence is the result. Thus, in a white supremacist society, no such freedom exists.” – Merleau-Ponty

What i am saying is that my journey has now brought me to yet another phase. i have arrived at a new chapter in this mission of absolute liberation. i find myself (One-Man!) standing on new ground. Yet, i arrive at this next level with a newfound resolve, courage, strength, and clarity of purpose that i can’t say i fully understood or embraced before.

i now recognize that the foundation for this journey (this path) was laid out for me long ago. And although growing up as a black child in Missouri i would have a great many confrontations with white racism (particularly racist police). i do believe, however, it was a result of 2 specific traumatizing (life or death) experiences at the hands of white authorities that i would ultimately be awakened. The first of these encounters occurred when i was just 10 or 11 years of age. Officer Friendly (what we used to call the police when we were children) drove up and drew their weapons on my best friend and i. They ordered us to the ground supposedly suspecting that our toy guns were real weapons. To this day i still believe had my best friends father not intervened when he did – yelling to the officers, “The guns are toys and they are only children!” – this story would have had a far more tragic outcome. The second incident occurred a few years later. At which point i was a teenager in high school (around 15 years old). In this encounter white police officers stopped me one day while walking to the 7-Eleven after school. Their reasoning simply being, “You look suspicious.” A bit frightened, confused and at the same time annoyed by the accusation, i emphatically objected. At which point they took it upon themselves to put me in my place. They snatched me up. Slammed me against the car and placed me in handcuffs. Then they put me in the backseat of the police cruiser and proceeded to drive me around while threatening me and reminding me: “We are the police and can do whatever we want to you.” When i again objected and complained that i had not committed any crime. They immediately countered: “Look here boy! You are a criminal if we say you are. It could be very easy for us to charge you with a crime and there’s nothing you could do about it. No one would take your word over ours.” Their threats went even further as they menacingly contemplated, out loud, what to do with me. They let it be known that I could possibly not make it home and that they could simply make me, “disappear”. At which point, i am not ashamed to admit, i broke down like a baby and begged them to let me go. i just remember them laughing at me. And one of them saying: “Yeah boy. you don’t have such a smart ass mouth now, do you?” The entire ordeal lasted for about 2 hours. Once they grew bored and their point had been made they released me. And although i would not began to fully grasp the entire scope of these encounters until much later in life. i believe these early experiences were formative, as it was then that i first realized that i was black and that my blackness was a problem. It would be in these early traumatic (childhood) experiences that, for the very first time in my life, i would be struck with the real conditions of racial existence. As a result i would be – as W. E. B. Du Bois describes in, The Souls of Black Folk – split into, becoming a “double consciousness”. i had essentially been made to “look upon myself through the eyes of others.” It was at this point that i would first come face to face with the alien that is my black objectified being. (Grasping my existence as an alien body in an alien world.)

“I came into the world anxious to uncover meaning in things, my soul desirous to be at the origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects. Locked in this suffocating reification, I appealed to the Other so that his liberating gaze, gliding over my body suddenly smoothed of rough edges, would give me back the lightness of being I thought I had lost, and taking me out the world put me back in the world. But just as I get to the other slope I stumble, and the Other fixes me with his gaze, his gestures and attitude, the same way you fix a preparation with a dye. I lose my temper, demand an explanation….Nothing doing. I explode. Here are the fragments put together by another me.” — Frantz Fanon

This being that although appearing as foreign to me still nonetheless somehow defined, and essentially determined me and my existence in this world. A world that i had no say or place in. A world that i had no hand in creating. A world in which i would never be allowed to truly live. A world that i would never be allowed to FULLY BE. A world in which i was merely a powerless and essentially nonexistent spectator. A world in which i could not possibly be FREE and therefore could not possibly be HUMAN. Coming face to face with this alien being. i stared directly into its eyes and my entire existence was revealed to me. i saw how ALL that i am had already been determined and scripted…. My story, my life, my love, my will, my soul, my entire BEING had already been shaped and defined. My humanity stripped and nullified. i saw how ALL of these decisions had been made long before i had even been conceived. i saw myself formed out of the spit and mud of history (His-story), i was merely an object molded like cast marble and polished black as pitch over hundreds of years, by “Other” hands.

i had now been exposed to the reality of my position in this white (racially) constructed and dominated society. Realizing that the color of my skin and my appearance had betrayed me as something other. My flesh (beyond my own perception, say and belief) stigmatized and criminalized. i had for some unknown reason been sentenced to life in a prison of (racialized, alienated and essentially dehumanized) BLACK SHAME.

Yet, while these earlier experiences had made me aware of my condition as a racialized being. In those younger years i hadn’t yet developed the sight and mind to fully grasp the grand scope (root and nature) of this condition. But my eyes had been opened nonetheless. Ironically, i believe, the white policemen’s actions did not have the desired effect or impact they thought. I’m certain they thought they had taught me a lesson and put me in my place. They thought they had broken me. When in fact, they had actually awakened me. They had also freed me from the paralysis of fear. As whatever fear i had – after those white officers had ordered me (as that 10 year old child) to the ground at gunpoint – was essentially left on the back seat of that police cruiser, by that 15 year old teen. i just remember from that point on something had changed in me.

Time and time again in subsequent encounters i was confronted by that alien being. Initially i would just internalize it. i would even try to ignore, deny and dismiss it away – to no avail. But this eventually gave way to anger and then contempt. i would develop a deep hatred and mistrust towards ALL white people. A fuck it bomb detonated inside of me. i told myself that i would not capitulate to this being. From that point forward i would NEVER again be silenced. i would NEVER allow myself to be reduced to a powerless victim. i would fight this being with everything in me. i would not submit. i would get free! i think it was then that i had actually discovered my voice and power. As it was then that i initially began to SCREAM! Yet, this voice first seemed to have emerged without a truly conscious sense of purpose or direction. It was simply driven by pure, raw and visceral; anger and hate expressed in the rebellious activity of my youth. i believe i was testing, preparing and essentially honing my newfound weapon. In those years i was all rage. No longer would i try and convince white folks that i had a right to exist – call me a ‘NIGGER’ – i would show them i existed. In those years i would confront and attack ALL white people and their institutions – even the police – wherever and whenever. This would many times lead to physical altercations. As a result i would often find myself jailed. But again, this would not deter me, if anything it would only serve to fuel my anger and embolden me.

Yet over the years, out of this rebellious anger would arise a deeper sense of clarity and purpose. i slowly began to comprehend the true objective nature of my alienation. That is to say, i had began to recognize how the racism to which i had been exposed had less to do with the actions of racist white individuals and more to do with a social structure and process – rooted in a historically reified racist schema. Hence, i started to comprehend how my racialized and objectified being had been formed, shaped and fixed as a result of conditioned behavior arising out of social relations –evinced in the racist actions of these particular individuals – with extensive historical and institutionalized roots. i then understood that these racial encounters were mere symptoms of an inescapable paradigm made manifest in a concrete, living and all encompassing (socially, institutionally and historically reified) fact.

Once armed with this clarity, i was able to find purpose for my anger. My ENTIRE life would be dedicated to the act of absolute liberation. i would set out to transform the conditions of my racialized existence by sublating white power and the entire white world upon which it stood. i would hereby become the living (active) embodiment of white negation. i would not be invisible. My blackness would not exist in a dormant and passive state - it would not ask permission - it would not accommodate or compromise - it would not be tamed or refined - it would not obey - it would not make appeals for peace, justice and equality - it would not play the white man’s game - it would not stay in its place. My blackness would not measure itself in accordance with white standards, nor would it answer to shame or guilt. My blackness would not beg for white acceptance, validation or recognition - it would not establish itself as a moral plea (BLACK LIVES MATTER).

For i now understood that my objectification, as an established fact and natural condition of nonentity in a white supremacist constructed society, could not be altered through moral pleas. (No more than the dead can convince the living that they are alive, nor a chair can convince a man that it is something other than a chair.) As only the living can confront the living. To paraphrase Hegel and Fanon, self-consciousness only exist – “in and for itself” – to the fact that its existence is recognized by another self-consciousness. Just as a man is only human to the extent that he can impose his existence on another man and thereby gain his recognition. Only the (active) self-determining subject can – by confronting and transforming the material conditions of its objectified being – assert and establish the absolute truth of its existence in the world. Thus, in order to change my condition, i would first have to assert myself as a ‘BLACK MAN’. Establishing myself in this (white) world, not as a supplicating – essentially invisible and subhuman – thing, but as a very real, imposing and disruptive FACT. My blackness would not be a mere noun or adjective. My blackness would be a verb. A shank! A pistol! A IED (Improvised Explosive Device)! A battling ram!

Yes, those early confrontations (at the hands of “white authorities”) would actually turn out to be the first and most essential keys needed to unlock the doors of my racialized prison – initiating my journey towards absolute liberation. You see. This first door would be that of SELF-REALIZATION. Once this door was unlocked there was no turning back for me. i could no longer resign myself to a condition of alienation. No longer would i be able to conform to white constructed (defined, prescribed and described) categorizations of myself in this world and therefore i actively took up the charge to emancipate myself. By asserting and establishing myself as an active subject – as opposed to mere object of an external Other. i was then able to bring into being my own self certainty. Establishing my own truth by transforming the world into my own object (through action) and as such making it subject to my will. As an active (living and breathing) negation of white supremacy i was effectively disrupting and transforming prevailing social relations. And thus creating and bringing to fruition a true outcome of joint becoming and recognition within the context of race relations. It was at this point of realization that i was able to finally give name to my anger and purpose. As a black man asserting my own claim on the world (i WILL FREE MY FUCKING SELF!). Through my creative praxis and living activity i would remake the world in my OWN image (one action at a time). My black existence had served as the catalyst for my self-realization. My self-realization the catalyst for my struggle. My struggle the catalyst for my rebellious activity. My rebellious activity the basis of my life’s mission (absolute liberation)…. It was this truth that ultimately gave rise to One-Man.

“Without the formative activity, fear remains inward and mute, and consciousness does not become explicitly for itself. If consciousness fashions the thing without that initial absolute fear, it is only an empty self-centered attitude; for its form or negativity is not negativity per se, and therefore its formative activity cannot give it a consciousness of itself as essential being. If it has not experienced absolute fear but only some lesser dread, the negative being has remained for it something external.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Yes. i was born a prisoner but to escape this prison i realized that i would have to die (negate and sacrifice it ALL) in order to be reborn. Hence, i became a fugitive and outcast. My crimes would be my pursuit of FREEDOM. (i am a runaway in a society of SLEEPING SLAVES.)

i am liberating myself of ALL shame and guilt. i am actively challenging and interrogating “HISTORY”. i am defiantly rejecting ALL social mores in order to set my own course and define myself (ABSOLUTELY and COMPLETELY) on my OWN terms. And while the “Othered” sleeping slaves acquiesce to and embrace the story of themselves as told by their slave masters….

While they seek their masters validation – desperate to see their names and faces (painted on white walls and monuments) in the annals of history…. i am writing my own story and building my own monuments.

While they remain content speaking the language of their masters…. i have been crafting my own language.

While they answer to the names that have been assigned to them…. i have named myself.

While they – ignorantly embracing and speaking to notions of freedom and humanity that they have NEVER truly experienced nor DEFINED THEMSELVES – essentially accept and apotheosize whiteness as the ultimate measure and arbiter of their freedom and humanity…. i ACTIVELY work to define and secure my own freedom and humanity.

Again i say. i am aware that i was born a prisoner – enslaved to the condition of my (black) racialized existence. i also know, however, that before i was made a black man i was born a MAN. i know that i am the living manifestation of freedom. i know that i – just as ALL “Human Beings” – was born with the agency to shape the world with my own hands in accordance to my own vision and will. And i know that it’s the trauma of immediate black racialized existence that has served to quicken me to this (my own) TRUTH and set me on the path of self-emancipation.

But of course there are many layers to freedom. It is a life long endeavor after all. And as such the deeper you go – as more is revealed to you – the clearer things become. But what is also true is that the journey grows more arduous and onerous – as the test and challenges grow more frequent and difficult – the further you go down the path. It all comes down to how far you are actually willing to go. For me this journey is ALL or NOTHING.

Yet, just as my black existence would serve as the basis for (One-Man) my journey towards self-emancipation. So would blackness reveal to me the true certainty of my SELF becoming as a FREE MAN. As perhaps there would be NOTHING more telling in regards to the disruptive, negating, and transformative impact and agency of my work/actions (towards absolute liberation) than the often emotional, and even violent, responses and reactions that One-Man (the living manifesto of my liberation) has conjured up in other BLACK individuals. It is from this perspective that I’ve come to recognize just how much my self-becoming (my liberating and self-emancipatory activity) serves as a powerful negating and abolishing threat to existing race relations….

(RUN NIGGER! because you are not one of us because you’re an outsider you do not talk, walk or act like one of us you have no roots here…

because you threaten to break these beautiful chains… .

because you reek of something foreign you are simply too strange for us you’re a weirdo a circus freak yes, you belong to those pallid people they should have you they love to collect strange things after all – For Whites Only)

Again, it was as a result of personal experiences (with black individuals) that I’d come to truly understand how my work was perceived in the eyes of black people and the “NEGATIVE” impact that my self-emancipatory activity has, not only on whiteness, but also on blackness. But (yet again) the greatest of these revelations would come by way of 2 specific and personal encounters. Whereby, as a direct result and response to the work, my blackness would be brought into question. Yet as it would turn out these incidents as well would have a very significant, transformative, enlightening and revelatory impact. As they would serve not only to validate the work, but also to quicken in me a deeper sense of clarity and purpose; instigating a profound breakthrough and new turning point (Points of Departure) for me and my mission. Mind you, the first encounter would actually turn out to be the inspiration for the action i would perform in Italy (For Whites Only). While the second, occurring upon my return from Italy would have more of a definitive (both confirming and affirming) impact. In both of these incidents, however, i was charged (either directly or indirectly) with the crimes of “BLACK” betrayal. In the first (although scathing nonetheless) the charges, veiled in umbrae and delivered under the guise of friendly and constructive criticism, were much more implicit. It was in these moments where it would be first revealed to me that (due to my work and actions) i had essentially been othered by black people. It was here where I’d first be made aware that even in the eyes of my “OWN” people, i was perceived as an alien and outsider. “There is no help for you… . You are a floater and have no REAL roots in the black community.” It was here where I’d be made aware that my work and actions had somehow placed me outside of blackness. i began to recognize that my self-emancipation – too incomprehensible (strange and weird) for “BLACK” standards – was ultimately regarded as some strange white artsy type shit…. “You are a black man who paints his body and runs around naked in the streets doing weird shit. Yes, they [white people] … absolutely eat that up.” It was in this moment that it would first be made clear to me that my freedom was ultimately (disdainfully) perceived – in many black folks eyes – as an act of selling out to whiteness…. “After-all, that’s who your REAL audience is [white people] and, let’s face it, that’s who your work actually resonates with. I think those are your TRUE supporters. Not to mention they’re always desperately looking to get involved and take on a needy black cause.”

Yet, whereas, in the first encounter these charges (against my blackness) would be far more suggestive and implied. In the second encounter however they’d be violently asseverated (explosively direct and explicit). That is to say, in the first encounter my blackness had merely been charged; yet in the second it would essentially be convicted, sentenced and executed. The charges in this encounter would also cut deeper as they would come from an individual that i had (at the time) deeply trusted, respected and confided in. An individual that had claimed to truly support my work and mission. And while (to be quite honest) i must admit deep down i had long questioned if this person actually harbored some unfavorable feelings towards me – because of my work and views. i (for the most part) however just chose to ignore and deny it. Not fully comprehending until later their clever use of projection as a subterfuge to express their true (hidden) feelings. And while there would be a great many of such projections. This one in particular would impact me the most: “It’s just my observation but I feel like your work and messages challenge black people in a very uncomfortable way. It makes them question everything they’ve come to accept and know as true. Your actions pose a challenge to the normal order and function of things. Because let’s face it, you’re different and this makes folks scared. Therefore they’re not able or willing to understand you beyond what they immediately see. Because we all know when folks are confronted with something new or different. When they are faced with something that threatens or challenges the normal order and takes them out of their comfort zone, their immediate reaction will be to attack it. They will want to destroy it.”

And it would be in this context that, hearing their (later) words screamed at me in a subsequent confrontation, EVERYTHING would finally be made crystal clear. As their words, although fomented by a mutual disagreement and spoken in the heat of anger, still nonetheless revealed long held, suppressed and deep seated feelings of animosity and disdain…. “Go to the white motherfuckers! That’s who you love! That’s where you belong! I’ve always known this! Take your ass to them! That’s where you REALLY want to be! We’re too BLACK for you!” What was even more telling however was the basis for this anger. It would be the reasoning for which accusation and guilt had already been established well before the actual conflict that would give rise to the spiteful and inimical words themselves. It would essentially be, nothing other than, the result of their own (self-professed) “insecurity and jealousy” (of me and my work) that my blackness would ultimately be brought under attack. At the end of the day it would all come down to the fact that i was now perceived as DIFFERENT. (“It’s because I think he has changed. Something happened to him in Venice. He came back different.”) Yes. At the end of the day it was simply because i was different. It was because i was actually getting free…. Because i had grown and evolved beyond the form of mere caterpillar and had now taken flight with the butterfly wings of my liberation. Because they had not the courage to sprout their OWN wings. They had not the courage to liberate themselves. Because as (alienated) subjects and slaves to blackness they remain trapped in the prisons of their (Othered) racialized and objectified existence – which ultimately determines them.

However, it was in these encounters that i would again find my true self. Because it would be in these moments that everything would again be made clear and brought full circle for me. It was in these moments that i RE-MEMBERED myself. i remembered that my struggle was not to be a “BLACK” man but a FREE MAN. Yet sadly, it was a result of these encounters that I’d also come to realize that TRUE freedom (in the BLACK mind) was STILL essentially deemed the property of whiteness, and as such its pursuit ultimately perceived to be a white endeavor. Thus my self-emancipation had not merely posed a threat to whiteness but it was also seen as a threat and affront to blackness.

What both of these confrontations had revealed to me was the true reciprocatory nature of black racialized existence. As i was now made very aware how we in fact reproduce (hence enslave) ourselves as expressions of the objective relations of a white supremacist society. It is the fact that our objectification is not only externally imposed but it is internally reproduced. However, by ACTIVELY asserting myself as a conscious black subject in the world i have in fact disrupted the social relations that reproduce the conditions of my black objectified being. Yet as a result of this activity, i have also transformed myself into something new. i have transformed myself into an active manifestation and personification of freedom. As Noam Chomsky posits, “the essence of human nature is man’s freedom and his consciousness of his freedom.” Therefore as a conscious and active manifestation of freedom i am no longer existing as a “BLACK” BE-ing but am now asserting and establishing myself as a new man, a new BE-ing for SELF! i am henceforth establishing myself as a HUMAN BE-ing.

NOW ASSERTING MYSELF AS A HUMAN SUBJECT RATHER THAN A RACIALIZED OBJECT….

In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, “Humans are not objects to be used by God or a government or corporation or society. Nor we to be “adjusted” or molded into roles – to be only a waiter or a conductor or a mother or worker.” And here i might add, BLACK or WHITE (for that very same fact). “We must look deeper than our roles [our labels, our appearance] and find ourselves.”

It is now clear to me that BLACKness – as a determinant unto itself – has its own limits and is not a FINAL destination. And while blackness was my beginning it could (nor would) not be the determination for my end. For my course is set towards absolute freedom. And true freedom requires the negation of ALL BLOCKS (race, gender, sexuality, politics, religion etc…). And again, such a negation requires the relinquishment of ALL stability – that is EVERYTHING we now uphold and recognize as natural and true. Mind you. What i did not understand until now is that this negation would not simply necessitate the abolishment of whiteness (a white constructed and dominated world) but it would also ultimately require an abolishment of blackness. And although i still hold true to the belief that black liberation holds the seeds (it is a key) to human liberation. i have now come to a deeper understanding as to what this ACTUALLY means for me in the context of my (self-emancipatory) journey towards absolute freedom. i now clearly see how a true liberation from whiteness also brings about a liberation from the conditions of (black) racialized existence. Therefore black liberation requires a liberation from (and ultimate sublation of) blackness itself. It has been this ultimate breakthrough that has awakened me to the reality that i am no longer a subject to “blackness”. Recognizing that my racialized and objectified “BLACK” BE-ing is essentially reproduced through social relations that are arbitrated between (both) blacks and whites. And that it’s this socially perpetuated call and response that takes on its own independent form reproducing (and essentially corporealizing) my alienation in the (Frankensteinian) social structure and construct of RACE. No. i do not have to obey or answer to blackness. For it is as a direct result of my OWN activity – the self-awareness that inverted my condition as an alienated object muted and trapped inside myself (as a BE-ing for an OTHER) to a self-activated and conscious subject (a BE-ing for MYSELF) – that my objectified black existence (as condition directly dictated and mediated by white supremacy) was obliterated. Hence blackness no longer determines me. It is i in fact that NOW determines it!

What has now been made plain is that the challenges posed by those recent confrontations (and individuals) were essential test. Because in the end both would serve as harbingers, marking the coming of a new me. Both were profoundly significant in instigating an even deeper awakening in me – signaling both my departure and my arrival to a new level. They showed me that i no longer had to be circumscribed to the prison of racialized existence. They showed me the alienated relationship that black people maintain with this white dominated world. The alienated condition that keeps us existing as slaves and subjects to “blackness”. In this regard our objectified being is perpetuated by our own “activity”. It is a result of institutionalized and socially subjugating (racially instigated) relations that foster our sense of inferiority – which responds to and is dictated by external forces that we perceive to be beyond our power to overcome. Thus we come to apotheosize and reproduce objectified blackness as an intrinsic and normal state of BE-ing – “I don’t have to do nothing but stay black and die!” (Of course in a world founded and constructed on white supremacy, blackness is indeed intrinsic.) Sadly, as we’ve come to believe that we cannot be ANYTHING other than “BLACK”, we are essentially validating the white world by asseverating that we cannot be anything other than that which we have been NAMED and MADE to be by external white hands. Which is to ultimately say that we are STILL nothing but the lowly, alienated and inhuman property (objects/things) of white masters.

“Slaves and dogs are named by their masters. Free men name themselves” – Richard B. Moore

As we ultimately see ourselves to this racialized end we essentially negate and capitulate our self-determining agency, as FREE beings (object makers) capable of creating and shaping the world in our own image and according to our own will – which is to say, we essentially surrender our humanity. And instead we are reduced to (“BLACK”) objects/things who’s existence responds to, and is determined by an external Other. The idea of which is concisely described in, ‘Fanon and the Theory of Race’, as we maintain an alienated and hence inverted relationship with the world and ourselves, our “self-determining agent is turned inside out, and [as a result] the object creating human being exists as an object that is created by another subject.” Thus we are ultimately reduced to function and exist as slaves to our (racialized) appearance – as it is essentially a (external) white gaze that composes, defines and determines us. ALL that we are, achieve and aspire to be is a result and response to this fact. Thus our activity – as “black” beings – is merely an extension of white (racially constructed) expression, for it serves to validate and perpetuate as opposed to negate and annihilate this white world and the construct of race upon which it stands. Yes. EVERYTHING we do (as black people) we do under the foremost consideration and recognition of the white gaze. It dictates our EVERY move, and our ENTIRE sense of BE-ing. It’s this condition that keeps us beholden to and preoccupied with (inferior/shame induced) notions of “BLACK” pride, dignity and excellence as measured on the basis of racially identified achievements (again, expressed in response to the objective relations of a white dominated society) – e.g., First ‘BLACK’ President - First ‘BLACK’ astronaut - First ‘BLACK’ brain surgeon - First ‘BLACK’ Harvard graduate - First ‘BLACK’ Academy Award winner - First ‘BLACK’ golf champion - First ‘BLACK’ prima ballerina - First ‘BLACK’ Ms. America - First ‘BLACK’ Annie - First ‘BLACK’ “Fine Artist”- First ‘BLACK’ garbage man etc…. And while we measure ourselves (and our progress) by these standards, it is such thinking that actually serves to validate the conditions of our inferiority and dehumanization. As it establishes and validates blackness as a state of being that exist in subordination to whiteness. It is for this very reason why i constantly say and believe, that black people have no real clue as to what freedom and humanity TRULY is. For we – existing in an alienated condition – have surrendered our humanity and thus our freedom to this (“black” racialized and objectified) thing-hood. So for us – as our self-determining agency has been muted – humanity and freedom is that which can only be defined and thus essentially granted by the white Other/Master. Therefore, humanity and freedom for the “black” man must always be measured in accordance to an established white standard. Which i believe is exactly what Fanon meant (in Black Skin, White Masks) when he wrote: The black man wants to be white, the white man slaves to reach a human level.

Furthermore, this statement also speaks to the fact that blackness nor whiteness are intrinsic properties of human nature and condition. But they (blackness and whiteness) are in fact, intrinsic properties of race – a man-made construct – the products of learned and conditioned behavior arising out of social, historical, political and institutional power relations. As such, race – with its inherent character of racialism – by design stands antithetical to human nature. For it negates the possibility for mutual recognition and thus precludes us from bringing into being the true universal consciousness (One-Man) necessary for the actualization of absolute (universal) freedom and humanity. It is by this regard that both black and white people alike are enslaved by race. And it is also for this reason that i again put forward my belief in black liberation as a key and tool for (true) human liberation. For TRUE black liberation cannot be a movement that’s determination is to usurp and replace white power. Although black liberation first requires the negation of whiteness as a means to – while disrupting and essentially extirpating the socially reproduced dynamics that give life to and perpetuate alienated and objectified conditions within the racial construct – establish a balance of joint becoming (and recognition) within the context of race relations. However, true black liberation also requires the liberation of black people from the conditions of racialized existence itself. Thus (i reiterate) black liberation also requires the absolute sublation of BOTH whiteness and blackness (or as Hegel puts it, the absolute sublation of both “master and slave”) alike – hence abolishing race itself. As it is only then that a true universal consciousness can be brought into being, a consciousness that allows us to recognize and re-member ourselves (that is, bringing into unity a universal human consciousness) as TRULY free HUMAN BE-ings. And it is by this very same fact that as long as we continue to uphold and remain beholden to ANY and ALL determinations (THE BLOCKS) we ALL (Black, White, Brown, Beige, Red and Yellow) remain slaves, trapped in this prison of socially constructed and perpetuated dehumanization.

Now fully understanding that blackness is not a burden that i have to bear. Nor is it a container that i must accept and circumscribe my being to. i do not have to be content in “blackness”, excusing myself to remote and delicate corners of the world. DAMMIT. i AM THE WORLD!

That said. As ONE-MAN i hereby announce my departure and arrival to a next level. i aim to abolish ALL BLOCKS. i will LOVE and FUCK who i choose (man, woman, white, black or other)! i will masturbate and cum in holy books. i will strip naked in churches and temples. i will spit at all authority and institutions. i will defile monuments. i will curse (both) MASTER and SLAVE! i will tear down walls. i will invade cities, states and countries. i will push limits and cross boundaries. i will spread these seeds of revolution. i will negate - negate - NEGATE! And in the words of Fanon, “He who is reluctant to recognize me is against me.”

LIBERATION is my RELIGION…. FREEDOM is my GOSPEL!

#iAmNegation

Photo by: Gim Gwang Cheol

[vmmnov-blog]

Hold your breath, it’s “In the Mood for Love”

The reason why I am doing this blog is because I feel that I have too much thing I afraid I cannot leave unsaid about this film.

In the Mood For Love, directed and written by Wong Kar Wai, tells about an affair between a married man and woman who live at the same neighbourhood. Dated back to hectic Hongkong in 1960s; the main characters don’t live in houses with gardens; Wong Kar Wai takes us to small flats where neighbours join the same phone and kitchens, and have to take turns passing narrow corridors. Not much space to move. Just small corridors that Wai uses as the frame within frame, capturing the actors figure in an unusual focus.

The story begins when Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow find out that their spouses have been cheating. In anger and confusion, they try to re-enact how their spouses begin the affair. This masochistic frendship/alliance/whatever initially, only to find out who started the fire. I have to say that this odd; they begin re-enact the tease, conversations and smiles, two desperate persons looking for clues in masochist methods.

As their intensity increases, Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan begin to develop feelings to each other but they refuse to consummate their love otherwise “we will be like them”. At that time, it was not usual for men and women to be friends, so Mr. Chow moves to a hotel room number 2046 (that later taken as the title of the sequel), where Mrs. Chan regularly visits him to help him writing the martial art story.

Then what makes this film so sexy? The fact that they refuse to hold their desire down now begins to make the film feels more steamy. Think about bottling up your sex imaginations when love is in the air; where all this appeals and excitements are kept inside waiting to be opened. It’s a glass seal: it’s the real temptation where you know it’s there but there’s nothing you can do to break the glass. You can feel their desire in the air; the colours of Mrs. Chan's cheongsams, her curvy body passing the corridors, the smoke floats from Mr. Chow's cigarettes, even in the slightest gesture and glances, we all know these two are desperately in love.

Another thing that makes this film so good, is Wai does not use fancy setting for such love story. Similar to his other films like Chungking Express, Fallen Angels and Days of Being Wild, Wai and Doyle have somehow reached an advanced level of cinematography that make viewers remember that love stories actually happen in places like this. Forget the Hollywood flicks where candlelight dinner, fancy restaurants or beautiful beaches are the main formula for romances -- real life romances take place in the hectic bus station, busy subways, your favorite food trucks, glances between desks at work, or maybe just in your room, with black spots on the wall and dirty bedsheets. Once again, Wai and Doyle don't need all this lavish atributes to spark the love.

After watching this,  I think Maybe Warhol was right. The best love stories are those that never happened, because as we wait in excitement, we are allowed to imagine all the possibilities. And in the realm of imaginations, each possibility is valid and has the same chance to come true. Sex is more exciting when it comes to this; we can see that they’re both expecting something to happen and break their walls. It gets sexier when there is no sex at all, when mind travels all the possible moves and tastes that yet to come.

However, this is not a pinky love story. This is where despair, heart break and lost are wrapped beautifully in frame-by-frame, cinematography that done beautifully by Christopher Doyle, and ear-worm soundtracks.

As the spectator, Wai keeps us distant by always capturing montages in frame in a frame. We are merely the powerless spectator, in voyeuristic situation, that reminds me to witnessing leaves fall without being able to stop it from falling. Wong Kar Wai knows sure, when he has to send agony to viewers, he makes the message counts and turns melancholia into a guilty pleasure.