"Did you try to live on your own
When you burned down the house and home?
Did you stand too close to the fire
Like a liar looking for forgiveness from a stone [ / storm]?"
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I originally "misheard", or rather queered, these lyrics, which I understood to be mixing the images of fire and storms as the face of the ecology which the protagonist had attempted to isolate themselves from. Looking at them again, stones work just as well, but does different things.
In these readings of the lines above, we can see an inversion of the concept that walls of technology and the social which construct "house and home" do not divide the self from nature, ecology, or just simply every-thing else; or do not divide enough. We can see this in the retreat of the true/natural self from the ecology of the environment into the technological, from the technological to the biological, from the biological to the spiritual and perhaps even from the spiritual into languages, forms and nothingness. The effort to define the I as separate and independent becomes the act of looking at things as saying "No, that is not me." It would seem logical then that more than being ineffable, this methodology should lead to affirming an essential no-thingness; that's all that's left when you get rid of everything else.
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We can see in the image of burning down the house, a harmonic with Michel Serres's reading of Rene Descartes, in which the methodology of the Cogito is taken to be like reducing a home to ashes so as to get rid of all the para-sites, everything that lives WITH the self, in the self and as the self. Serres argues that this is as futile as it is violent, for in any new building which will replace the destruction all the para-sites return.
Taking the image of the fire, we see one level of the futility of this attempt to seal off the self by refusing the materiality and the ecology of the self, the fire is a thing and nothing is lost by burning it away; except forms. The mistaken identity of the hole returns, insofar as the intensification of matter to the point in which is transforms beyond recognition is read as an annihilation. Things become a fire and become afire, dancing with its own vibrancy, life, queerness and intense performative becoming. Things are trans-formed together in the fire. The fires of purgation become transfiguration, not a hellish insinuator into which things are disposed of and disappear forever. Eventually we must acknowledge the things our fires become, and this may be in part the captivating agency of the fire to arrest our attention to the point of "standing too close;" is it that we see ourselves already in it?
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Taking the image of the stone, we see another level of futility of trying to form an identity out no-thing. Stones have their own temporality, motion, transformations and agency (as this post is inspired by the recent environmental phenomenon I am experiencing in DC & Maryland I am called to think of the recent Earthquake). But stones also demonstrate the motion of things to resist motions. The "no" they articulate defeats many narcissistic attempts to see the world as submissive extension of the self, rather than a multiplicity of selves in their own right that have their own wandering paths. This "no" to certain becomings, and its adamant "yes" to others (explored in Jane Bennett's chapter on metals and minerals in Vibrant Matter) is an important concept to Queer Materialism, as queer things / persons are often performed as to aerial, too things and wispy to ever had moments of consistency. Things constantly transform, but at different speeds, different intensities. That this this is a "rock" or a "rock and roll" song is perhaps fitting, for we must "rock" if we are to be queer, or any-thing at all.
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Taking the image of the storm (the inspiration for this post, with the impending hurricane), particularly combined with the idea of living fire, we at the same time see an intense vision of the queer, molecular
(Deleuze and Guattari) and dark (Timothy Morton) ecology of things at work.
The darkness of storms is becoming apparent to me as the hurricane system descending on us not only says "no" to solar light but transforms power-lines into things which are no longer conforming electricity into a path to my apartment building (this has not yet happened, but I expect it to). In Morton's conception of "dark" however, which he acknowledges relates with a supposition of a "queer ecology", is that unlike the harmonious vision of nature in which things have proper rhythm, balances and normative forms, the ecology of things are more accurately dynamic, clashing and constantly deviating from norms. Watching a storm or a weather forecaster makes this apparent, weather is hard to predict and often surprises us in the forms it takes. It is imaginable how and why we might suppose a persona, Thor / Zeus etc., may be guiding it; not because of its sense of order and purpose but out of its apparent free will to "do what it will" rather than follow simple deterministic paths.
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The molar identity of the tempest as a "thing" is a funny, as it is so apparently an molecular ecology of many things that enter into, act as, and then leave the storm machine, and as it so emphatically a becoming rather than a being in a way which makes it no less an identifiable thing to be reckoned with. In these ways, molecularity and becoming, the storm is like fire a very clear image of identity as "transforming things." Clouds of atoms become the molecules which become my body, storms of electrons in the brain become consciousness, and the tempest of my books, apartment, caffeine, hormones, colleagues (new and old!) will become my professional-self this year. As I become-storm this weekend, I hope however that I do not trans-form too much and likewise that the "stone-ness" of my apartment (specifically the windows) is able to hold its own in the argument over which way things go.
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The queer identity of tempests and the tempests of identity have been in my mind, particularly in their queer register, since last year's "Tempfest" at George Washington University; and Jeffrey J Cohen's discussion of Margery Kempe's becoming-tempest in Medieval Identity Machines. Besides the tempest of weather which brings together and moves things / people (i.e. trans-forms them) there becomes a tempest of actors which in turn transform the lives / persons of the island.
In Sandman by Neil Gaiman, Dream has Shakespeare write 2 plays for him personally in exchange for releasing his genius: A Midsummer Nights Dream (as a way to help the world remember the fae as they leave Earth) and the Tempest. When Shakespeare asks Dream why he wanted this play and why he had the wizard destroy his staff, drown his books and abandon his island (of identity) when the story would have been more interesting if he had tragically persisted. Dream responds that he wants a story about a transformation in which someone is able to escape / change the things he is, because he (Dream) does not feel able. Morpheus's tragic self-blindness aside, this does open up how we are bound up in / as our things and that resisting the tempest of queer disorientation that forces us to change brings about unneeded suffering.
Like the eye of the storm, there is hole in the center of things / identity / persons that twists things in new directions and at times we break down and other times we can ride along with the storm and leave it relatively unchanged.
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A word on repentance, on "seeking forgiveness from the storm" : this has to do with orientation, and as Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology discusses, a queer orientation is usually one that is directed towards things that move, slip and without a starkly defined sense of inside and out. In this way, repentance is like a constant re-orientation and that forgiveness ( to for (outwardly) give ) comes in releasing ones-self from "the lie" of separation and stillness; of an identity without transformation; of an ontology that is not overthrown by queerness.
That said, I am now stuck in some senses alone and still for the next two days as the hurricane passes. Still, I am sure we (all that is brought together to become this tempest) will be having an adventure.
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