Jacques Lacan begins one of his seminars on the Unconscious and Repetition (1981) by recalling an interrupted seminar a year earlier in which he developed the theme of anxiety. To nostalgia he dedicates the following poem by Louis Aragon, from Fou d’Elsa, entitled Contre-chant:
In vain your image comes to meet me
And does not enter me where I am who only shows itTurning towards me you can find
On the wall of my gaze only your dreamt-of shadow.I am that wretch comparable with mirrors
That can reflect but cannot see
Like them my eye is empty and like them inhabitedBy your absence which makes them blind.
Aragon’s poem, and Lacan’s positioning of it within the domains of nostalgia, anxiety, repetition, and the unconscious, speak to the particularities of performance, and offer us material significant for the reading of performance, toward a reading of moving bodies.
What this poem calls forth is an acknowledgment of the disappearance of the body which performance insistently makes manifest: the impossibility of ever really seeing—actually perceiving—movement (Gilpin, 1996, p. 110). What does it mean to perceive movement? What can we really see? What can we really hear?
Perhaps what makes movement so compelling is that it is compiled of ‘dreamt-of shadows’ — fleeting moments of absent images.
It's like an earthquake deep under the sea. In an unseen world, a place where light doesn't reach, in the realm of the unconscious. In other words, a major transformation is taking place. It reaches the surface, where it sets off a series of reactions and eventually takes form where we can see it with our own eyes... The best ideas are thoughts that appear, unbidden, from out of the dark (Murakami, 2018, p. 203).
Meditation, the eternity of the universe and the sublime are ideas that I reflect on in my practice. In aesthetics, the sublime is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation.
Ideas that I have been musing on…
Practices of austerity to reach enlightenment and to arrive at a realm beyond life and death.
Passing shadows, living beings as mere shadows crossing paths
Shifting boundaries between reality and unreality
Lux in tenebris (light in darkness) --> subjects emerging from darkness, lighting conventions and dramatic impressions
Darkness, light and stillness
Depth and clarity of sound
Displacement
Glimpses
Intermingling
Deformation
Distortions
References:
Gilpin, H. (1996). Lifelessness in movement, or how do the dead move? Tracing Displacement and Disappearance In Susan Leigh Foster (Eds.) Corporealities : dancing, knowledge, culture, and power (pp. 54-71). London: Routledge.
Translation as cited in Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), 17, from Section I: The Unconscious and Repetition: “The Freudian Unconscious and Ours.”
Murakami, H. (2018). Killing Commendatore. London: Penguin Random House.
