Loneliness is the only test of any worth. You don’t have to pass it. You don’t have to do anything. There is nothing at stake in this world: nobody gets out alive. Still, loneliness is a test, and it can fuck a person up real good, because it, loneliness, is also the perfect embodiment of Pharmakon, in that it can come to serve a rich solitary practice, veritable panacea, just as it may send the lost soul into a shame spiral and/or vivid living hell. Pure shame is: I am the worthlessness that is All. What if shame and loneliness take you to a very bad place? And what if you happen to be for all intents and purposes a dude? If nobody wants anything to do with me and that makes me feel mentally and physically and spiritually ill, is this merely an unattractive feature of my ego and the rigidity of my (gendered) programming? If a baby is left in a dumpster by a desperate mother who cannot care for that baby and is herself stuck in some kind of living hell, we do not tend to consider the baby’s problem an ego problem. But the grown-ass man is not a baby. Except of course we routinely recognize the baby in the grown-ass man. The “pop psychology” archetype known as the “inner child” is the part of us that is wailing from the depths as soon as the cold air hits exposed nerves. What is the inner child or the helpless baby? Fear, hurt, and need. Bundled up in tissue. The Hank Williams song that perhaps most speaks to me is “Cold, Cold Heart.” I have been thinking about this song lately. Hank was a scared, hurt person, and an addict, slave to need. He died at the age of twenty-nine, laid out on the floor in the back of a moving Cadillac. The song “Cold, Cold Heart” is addressed to a guarded beloved, a woman who it is presumed has been wronged by men in the past and therefore appraises her latest suitor with gun-shy suspicion. “Another love before my time made your heart sad and blue / And so my heart is paying now for things I didn't do / In anger unkind words are said that make the teardrops start / Why can't I free your doubtful mind, and melt your cold, cold heart.” Note that immediate leap from “things I didn’t do” to “In anger unkind words are said.” The narrator of this song, the voice transmitted through Hank’s, may not be especially self-aware. Yes, this woman has been hurt before. And she additionally very much ought to be wary of this voice, the lonesome pleading voice that may well shortly grow short, agitated/combative, as it confesses to having previously done. Nineteen-year-old me and forty-one-year-old me read and hear “Cold, Cold Heart” very differently. It is well known that the masculinist ego has a propensity to presume the unimpeachable reasonableness of its uninflected objectivity. This is analogous to what is lost on many people with respect to “white supremacy,” the fundamental foundation of which is the uncritical presumption of “objective” values, legalistic or general, that descend unambiguously from the European Enlightenment without their needing to be consciously understood to have done so. Nineteen-year-old me weeps vicariously for Hank and in so doing weeps for his naked baby self. Forty-one-year-old me is confident that he does right in his outrageous performativity and twenty-four-seven cha-cha dance of irony, just as he believes the Other, object of amorous projection or not, does right in putting up an impenetrable barrier against him. That is how this goes. There is no legitimate “ought” here being transgressed by either party. I write lately with some regularity concerning how the actress is generally my principal point of identification in the cinema. I think of myself often as a diva, which is not a closed conditionality, but rather an open question. During the last Calgary Cinematheque season, I amused one of my fellow programmers very much when I told him that Cruising (1980), the notorious William Friedkin film situated in and around the New York gay leather bar scene, which we had included as part of a Sexuality series, is, for me, totally an abstract intellectual exercise about fascism, fluid subject-positions, uniforms, and bodies…until the very end of the film when Karen Allen, who plays the girlfriend of Al Pacino’s undercover dick, puts on a the leather jacket and cap, indulging in a momentary bit of happenstantial butch drag, and I immediately think: “wait, oh my God, this movie is about ME.” This is not a claim I make facetiously; it is precisely how I experience Cruising. I am more or less male and am surely perceived by and large to be so. The vast majority of my lovers—though not the totality—have been female. What do we make of my identification with the actress? Is it perhaps a kink or perversion analogous to Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs? Do I want to put on their bodies as costumes, walk around wearing them? Maybe, in a sense, that is part of it. What seems more salient to me is that each of us is our very self the wellspring of difference and the shock of a recognition, the instantaneous emergence of a perceived complimentarity or similitude, has to be fielded by difference, thrown into relief by it. Difference is the condition of recognition. I identify with the incorporation or inclusion of something we might have imagined excluded or exclusive. I am a rare bird and I seek my compliment in other rare birds. For me, personal identification is already rarity and decadence. This happens to only be part of why I identify so strongly with the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. Akerman’s suicide in October of 2015 affected me powerfully, uncommonly so. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder (one or two) as I am myself, her work routinely suggested a moving dialogue with a problem and a solution, an alienation working toward and in dialogue with a creative praxis. In Akerman I see a working through and within the conception of Pharmakon I opened this piece by establishing. Key films like Golden Eighties (1986), A Couch in New York (1996), and Tomorrow We Move (2004) seem especially characteristic of a tendency in her later work to foreground salubrious communal exchange, suggesting of the cinema that it might provide an ideal space for a kind of collaborative play, an inclusive extraterritoriality for those excluded, the audience able to avail itself of some of the core benefits. Akerman was a month and two days older than my mother, and she took her own life shortly after the death of her own mother. Having caused my mother as much pain as I have, especially during the years of active addiction and endless harrowing crises, I am conscious that it would be unpardonable now for me to kill myself while my mother is still alive. I took my mom, who is no cinephile, to see Akerman's mother-and-daughter-and-dying doc No Home Movie when it played in Calgary in 2016. I think she was quietly moved by it, even if she had very little point of reference. In My Mother Laughs, the final book Akerman wrote, published in English translation in 2019, the author writes of routinely feeling like a kind of alien and alienated child. “As soon as the child arrived, ever exhausted by the adult life it couldn’t live, it went straight for the couch and slept a few hours. Afterward, a little less exhausted, it ate.” The adult child reverts to torpor and ultimately to eternal rest. Self-care becomes a desperate sink-or-swim proposition. It is a slippage, precisely the demarcation of a zone of reversion. This is the thing that is at stake every lived day if there is indeed anything at stake. If I am an impassioned, gregarious, outlandish, and even a joyful performer of my everyday life, this is the surface manifestation of a spiritual struggle, the application of a panacea that can at any moment be revoked…or turn on itself. My spiritual practice and my jouissance need to be threaded through with a present and accounted for knowledge of the immediate accessibility of reversion and shame spiral. The two-sided coin of Pharmakon: a love the size of everything or a proportional cancer, one the double of the other, each alive and reachable right here and right now. The fellow programmer I amused with my distillation of how I read Cruising, asked me, in a separate incident, whether or not there are men or actors I relate to in the cinema. Naturally, the answer is yes, and in elaborating, I cannot help but trace the outline of a developmental schematic. In my teens I identified strongly with Johnny, David Thewlis’s character in the 1993 Mike Leigh film Naked, an aberrant monologist and apocalyptician who passes through ressentiment and bad conscience so as to achieve Zarathustra’s mad zeal. I open my mouth and, to steal the title of Chantal Akerman's first short film, I saute ma ville. If you live this way…you start to rack up bodies, leave wreckage…and you find yourself mired in nerve-shredding frenzy. When I read Georges Bataille's Blue of Noon near the beginning of the 21st century, I was astonished to discover the degree to which it expertly encapsulates this woeful infirmity of the nerves. No other work of fiction had previously nor would subsequently come anywhere near it in this respect. Trapped in this hell, another performance projected itself to me for me to ritualistically absorb and somaticize. This was Warren Oates’s performance in Monte Hellman’s 1974 film Cockfighter. Another renegade monologist, though one who has overshot the mark and is angling to do penance. Oates’s Frank Mansfield, trainer and handler of fighting cocks, has run his mouth, alcohol a mitigating factor, and has both made a fool of himself and set himself back professionally. He thereafter aspires to maintain a vow of silence until he wins Cockfighter of the Year. Which he does. He remains silent. And wins. Warren Oates communicates a baby’s stubborn sagacity and a nearly impossible amount of hundred-proof pathos, his silence and his eyes a wound that triumphs and is triumph. He symbolically and symbologically castrates himself; this proves to be the precondition for his ability to give himself to Patricia Pearcy’s Mary Elizabeth, the wary beloved, something of an analogue for the addressee of “Cold, Cold Heart.” A kind of fraught détente is attained, but Oates’s trainer of fighting cocks perversely bungles it by performing an aggressive and obscene act with his (ahem) dead cock—one which cannot help but provoke horror and revulsion in the affronted beloved. Our errant hero then utters the only words he will verbalize in the film’s present tense, these words tinged with an irony so ruthless that they suggest not only one individual man’s lack of proper perspective, but a universal absence of coherent metric. Cockfighter defines my twenties in that it suggests a false hope, another level of potential self-mastery, a higher tier of being, and then guts me, emptying the cavity, its fatuous degree zero established as the false start that stands in for all false starts. The male performance that comes to encapsulate my period of sobriety and recovery, from age thirty-three to the present day, exactly a month after my forty-first birthday, is that of the French rock star Jacques Dutronc playing the painter Vincent van Gogh in the 1991 Maurice Pialat film named for him. Dutronc as van Gogh expresses a total embodied gnosis with respect to what stakes there are if stakes we are willing to countenance. He shows you with a remarkable compression of means a specific tightrope walk through a tenuous recovery, almost as though those famous fields of Northern French yellow are replete with land mines. Vincent has been through the wringer. Repeatedly. He wears it well, even if this ultimately only means that corrosion becomes him. He knows—and tells you silently that he knows—that to be blown to smithereens has nothing on the damage a still-living person can continue to carry around, doomed to agonizingly persist. His gaze and gait are just deliberate enough to betray the immediate proximity of invisible trap-doors in and around inhabitated spaces. While sex workers are a safer bet, Vincent no longer has any illusions about romantic love, about anyone owing, about anyone being owed, and least of all concerning personal salvation by means of coupling. Still, part of what Dutronc’s Vincent is telling me is that living beyond the illusions cannot guard you against the fission of contact. You can see the trap you are walking into, and, in seeing it, be absolved of nothing. The lover who has lived sufficiently to attain sapience is Dr. Caligari’s somnambulist automaton, aware of walking the plank, even if certain death is itself never certain, what is ahead established only by arriving there. The cold and ruthless world is both beauty and internment. The world is your true beloved, whether you accept it as such or not. The world also happens to be something you are imposing on the phenomena you encounter, though God save you if you imagine you are wholly in control. Ecstasy is not properly ecstasy if it is not conscious that it can be ruthlessly ripped to shreds. A wary smile is the only honest smile, because it carries a little of the hurt it has earned honestly. Were you to ask me this week how I am doing, I might simply answer: “van Gogh…at a low ebb…”
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