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This is a monologue from Derek Jarman’s movie, Sebastiane:
Hail god of the golden sun
The heavens and Earth are united in gold
Comb your hair in the golden rays of light
In your hands the roses of ecstasy burn
The wheel turns full circle
Cooled by breezes from the four quarters
The swallow has risen in the East
The doors are open
Your body, your naked body
Initiated into the mysteries, step forth
That beauty that made all colours different
Comes forth into the world
Hail god of the golden fire
Your beauty holds my heart captive
Through the monologue in the film produced in 1976, Jarman, a queer British director, leaves the keywords full of the imagination related to bodies and space: golden ray, ecstasy, naked and mystery. At the period of time when the issues about LGBTQ equality in modern society get more explicit, I try to reflect upon this phenomenon with two dramas which coincidentally narrate the stories of homosexuals and queers – Sebastian / Crave / Proof and Sleeplease – to stir and re-examine some possible imagination of queer bodies.
Desert Island
The following quote is Deleuze’s idea of desert island:
Geographers say there are two kinds of islands. This is valuable information for the imagination because it confirms what the imagination already knew. Nor is it the only case where science makes mythology more concrete, and mythology makes science more vivid. Continental islands are accidental, derived islands. They are separated from a continent, born of disarticulation, erosion, fracture; they survive the absorption of what once contained them. Oceanic islands are originary, essential islands. Some are formed from coral reefs and display a genuine organism. Others emerge from underwater eruptions, bringing to the light of day a movement from the lowest depths…. These two kinds of islands, continental and originary, reveal a profound opposition between ocean and land. Continental islands serve as a reminder that the sea is on top of the earth, taking advantage of the slightest sagging in the highest structures; oceanic islands, that the earth is still there, under the sea, gathering its strength to punch through to the surface. We can assume that these elements are in constant strife, displaying a repulsion for one another. In this we find nothing to reassure us. Also, that an island is deserted must appear philosophically normal to us. Humans cannot live, nor live in security, unless they assume that the active struggle between earth and water is over, or at least contained. People like to call these two elements mother and father, assigning them gender roles according to the whim of their fancy. They must somehow persuade themselves that a struggle of this kind does not exist, or that it has somehow ended.
Deleuze continues to ask, “which creatures live on deserted islands?” and he answers:
[H]uman beings live there already, but uncommon humans, they are absolutely separate, absolute creators, in short, an Idea of humanity, a prototype, a man who would almost be a god, a woman who would be a goddess, a great Amnesiac, a pure Artist, a consciousness of Earth and Ocean, an enormous hurricane, a beautiful witch, a statue from the Easter Islands….
If we imagine the queer and homosexual bodies a desert island, what underlies their bodies is the “uncommon” drive. They are “absolutely separate, absolute creators” and “an enormous hurricane.” These descriptions seem to be a way of the sayings echoing the political correctness in contemporary society. The disposition of the desert island and the fluidity of queer bodies is a kind of absolute gaze and imagination toward queer bodies.
Wound Man
At the end of 15th century, in the Fasciculus Medicinae of Johannes de Ketham appeared a wound man in the written form for the first time. The picture shows that the body of the “wound man” is the hostage of many sharp knives; the body stabbed by the knives with many wounds gives the assumption that this man may suffer in the war or an accident. Beside the picture is the treatment of various wounds. The “wound man” is frequently used in the surgical texts in the 16th and 17th century to display the possible wounds a doctor would face. The “wound man” carries and demonstrates the wounds a body in the Middle Ages can possibly receive due to wars, accidents and plague. However, filled with wounds, the “wound man” still stands lively. The birth of the “wound man” is to reveal the possible treatment at the time instead of making him a threat or burying the seed of fear in the mind of viewers.
The image of the “wound man” apparently becomes the ultimate look of self-declaration for the marginal in the contemporary time, to some extent, fitting the self-projected imagination of the queer bodies. A kind of body consists of wounds, plague (the contemporary plague in the name of religion), wars (the group war with multiple and complex faces competing among or constructing by body, spirit, morality and the sense of value) and fear. The “wound man” is equipped with two qualities: the coagulated body and suspended body. As a wound with comprehensive causes and a coagulated object crowded out by the society, queer bodies partly seem to have gotten rid of the obscurity in the early stage, the outdated image which is hardly visible or mixes the disguising qualities to deceive the eyes. With the frame of law and legislation, the contemporary “queers” hold the shield of self-protection, raising the rainbow flag high. Through the bright colour, they extend their wounds and appear in front of the public. The coagulated body demonstrates the suspended desires, which is similar to Alain Badiou’s thinking about the worshipped object in the contemporary society – democracy (system) – in his book, The Pornographic Age: “it is a term which does not know its origin, the direction to travel and its own meaning.” The suspension here including the suspension the general public to the imagination of queer bodies is a pause in a peaceful world where the nation-states emerge one by one after the Pacific War and claim that everyone enjoys the equal right and at a time when the borders of each nation grow unambiguous and forbid the invasion of any others. Thus, what is narrated here is a sort of self-suspension.
At a contemporary society where people can take to the street shouting the slogan of equal rights, the self-suspension becomes a kind of strategy with the “frozen image” of the “wound man” – suspending the moment before bloodshed – to unfold the imagination of bleeding, rotting and aggravating. The queer or homosexual bodies, as the coagulated objected and the compound of suspended desire, have the complex diversity worth thinking and discussing. However, the performances or the texts creating the “imagery” – certain surface of representation – for queer or homosexual bodies either use the bodies exerting themselves to make the indulgent wounds visible or utilize the disappeared bodies with the hope to make them return to the daily routine, to the condition which is similar to that of the ordinary people. The example for the former is Sebastian / Crave / Proof, and that of the latter is Sleeplease. Swinging between these two bodies – the tragic gesture to claim the existence of oneself, and the seemingly effortless attempt to cover the difference between the heterosexual and homosexual subjects by declaring the crystal clear quality of everyday life that we are the same, we all need pets, and we also have the sad feeling making us shed tears and the bashful moments – may open up some imagination and accumulate some energy, which however will disappear gradually. Two sides, supporters of LGBTQ equality and opponents of same-sex marriage, will unconsciously fall into the unambiguous pitfall of saddening oneself or of creating a life-oriented self.
Non-place: Two kinds
Cartographers have disputed for years the causes of nonplaces and their significance. Some say that nonplaces appear to satisfy people’s fantasies about unknown places; others propose the opposite, claiming that the existence of nonplaces actually negates our knowledge of places, for a nonplace is a place that does not exist, a mirror image, a mirage that is visible but intangible, and that exists but is not to be experienced.
– Dong, Qizhang, Atlas: the archaeology of an imaginary city
If the “non-place” in queer bodies can be dispositioned – the “body” in exchange of the “place” in it, the above words can be read differently:
Some believe that the appearance of “queer bodies” is to satisfy people’s imagination of “bodies,” while some suggest the opposite theory, thinking that the existence of “queer bodies” exactly denies our knowledge of “bodies,” for “queer bodies” are not the “body of body” but the mirror image of “body,” a body and the fantasy which is visible but untouchable, existed but unable to be experienced.
[T]he human body itself is perceived as a portion of space with frontiers and vital centres, defences and weaknesses, armour and defects. At least on the level of the imagination (entangled in many cultures with that of social symbolism), the body is a composite and hierarchized space which can be invaded from the outside.
– by Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity
If the queer bodies are certain “non-place,” they can become another heterogeneous positive force out of social movements through inspecting the reflection one’s own body can open, activate and prolong. This force may be bestowed a code name – necromancy (action).
Necromancy
In Sleeplease appears a line. It happens at the very beginning when everything hasn’t fallen on the border of life and death where people comfort and give warmth to each other. “We know that before every action a variety of clues and warning will appear in different forms, including verbal, behavioural and situational. The will appears first and then the action.”
In Sleeplease, WU Fan can speak to the spirits invoked unconsciously, winning the trust of the souls without bodies. Through evoking the souls from the afterlife, the juxtaposition of the image of the insomniac and the suspended condition of death in the drama tries to sort out the possibility of self-salvation, which is overly romanticized. In Sebastian / Crave / Proof, “Sebastian” possesses the thoughts of the viewers from which the images of the Bible, the film Derek Jarman made in 1976, and the case that a gay Belgian man sought euthanasia in 2016 are put together and summoned. Through images the sadness of queer bodies is constructed and memorised, echoing what Sebastian in Belgium said when facing the media, “I have always thought about death. Looking back on my earliest memories, it’s always been in my thoughts. It’s a permanent suffering, like being a prisoner in my own body…. A constant sense of shame.”
However, the spirits evoked by Sebastian / Crave / Proof and Sleeplease are still the disguised heaviness, which consists of the phantom from memories of films and news. They are lightweight, a camouflage of the romantic imagination to the insomniac and the suicide. It is indulgence easily crossing the boundary between life and death.
Lee Edelman, a queer scholar, suggests that a queer body is full of death drive and away from children by comparing it with the innocent and unaffected kids in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive.
However, compared to the “non-child” queers, does a nearly saddened body with the charm and drive from death possess the relative low momentum to act? Or can the drive of queer bodies be the compound of various aspects like shame and ecstasy, as well as death and flame? It is not an angel or a devil, but the dynamics to cross the boundary between life and death.
At the end of Sebastian / Crave / Proof, HUANG Wei-Hsiang, the playwright, director and actor of the drama, jumps down from the still statue of an angel, which is similar to the action in Wings of Desire under the streetlight. The scene in the film of Wim Wenders, the Germany director, accompanies “Song of Childhood,” written by Peter Handke for the film:
When the child was a child,
It was the time for these questions:
Why am I me, and why not you?
Why am I here, and why not there?
When did time begin, and where does space end?
Is life under the sun not just a dream?
Is what I see and hear and smell
not just an illusion of a world before the world?
Given the facts of evil and people.
does evil really exist?
How can it be that I, who I am,
didn’t exist before I came to be,
and that, someday, I, who I am,
will no longer be who I am?
Why, instead of being you, am I me? Why, instead of being there, am I here? These are the innocent children’s questions to the world. Through the dream under the sunlight in the poem, the history humans coexist with evil, the golden flame and the nakedness of bodies(and mind) in Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane, and the vice in human life faced by Sebastian, we discover that the drive of queer bodies may not exist in the dichotomy between the absolute “non-child” evil imagination and the pure innocence. Highly praising the good and evil conceals the face of complex interchange in a society as the living body.
Can we possibly reckon the momentum of queer bodies in multiple faces, slowly walking out from the sadness and the gloomy seasons shadowed with the sorrow of death rather than overly sadden the scars of queer bodies or excessively emphasize the existence of the hipster and cleanness of queer bodies – i.e. explaining one’s existence by affirming purposely with the colour of rainbow. “One day, at the moment when I will have become me – me in the future.” Stopping one’s steps, walking and crossing between the past and present, as well as this life and the future life, this me in the future is equipped with the compound quality of “desert island,” “the wound man” and “non-place,” goes through the seemingly conflicted or unrelated “places,” and extracts the momentum interrelating queer bodies by necromancy – the possessed medium.