REAL PORNOGRAPHY

Some two hundred people fill the small venue: the Divan du Monde. Its balcony, its folding wooden chairs and tables, its warm lighted lamps and its tacky colonnades.

In the room, the music couldn't be any better, Twin Peaks the soundtrack, and so we wait. Green lights on stage create an atmosphere somewhere between a peep show and a bleak aquarium.

A tall fellow, mid forty, black suit, heads to the desk and frees his sounds. The drummer and percussionist, a fag in his mouth, follows him. Humming helicopter blades, the snare drum being pounded: we are not attending one of those smooth bookshop readings or one of those sophisticated poetic performances.

Back to the 70's when the No Wave was meeting the Spoken Word. Same generation, same influence that link her to Genesis P. Orridge, Diamanda Galas or Eva O.

The drummer hits the metal frames in sharp backfires, which are matching with the ruins of a cathedral on the backdrop. Slow sequences merge into each other. Miss Lunch appears on stage. The years show on her face but don't alter her femininity and imposing bearing. " Same as it ever was, we are all gravediggers " . The concept is not new, it is the one of human barbarity, the one of society, which is not a disease but a disaster.

Two hours away from Barcelona, the ghost town Belchite exhibits its disgusting ruins invaded by vegetation. On stage, Lydia Lunch casts herself into the desolated war field. Those very fields, which are never shown on TV, where they rather talk about clean wars, collateral damages and reconstruction plans. Tilt up of churches domes and shell holes. Striking, they look like orbits.

Impersonating the religious litany, Lunch exposes a frightening existential vacuity: "the war is never over", "the war is just an orgy". The Holy Writ is burning. There's nothing left and this absence is the basement of her philosophy, which she raised to performance.

The translation of the haranguing text is being beamed between the pictures. Those understandable fragments create, as well, the scenery, black and white.

Words to save, words to communicate, no matter what it takes, before black covers up everything. Lydia Lunch is a woman who offers, who finds her way by imposing on other people, by demanding choice. The rest of a burned book looks like a dead body. The drummer wears his hands out on his percussion skins. A genuine spectacle, with an alchemical dimension. Rhythms break as soon as they become too square, in order to avoid any martial effect: the audience should not be cradled. The threesome rejects the idea of comfort. Lydia picks somebody in the audience and leers. Long seconds during which she spits out her truth in her victim's face.

Arabian chorus. Her finger raised high in the air to evoke the position of women in religion, the role that they've been given, the one of the victim, unwilling or not. The light is maybe too bright on stage and doesn't match with the soft reverb on her voice, which emphasizes her blast. Between song and speech, the shrieking dissonances encourage Annie to finally take her gun. Lydia provokes us: if violence is part of the world, then we must "even out the playing field". Violence is acknowledged, borne, dangerous. At the same time poetic and politic, Lydia tickles our dark sides with her deliberate propaganda. Behind her, the pictures of the ruins morph themselves into erect phalluses or melt like spoilt hard-on. The snare drum bursts and each bullet bounces off ours ribs, increasing the testosterone rate in the room. Those three are not on stage to be pleasant and liked. They are here to get something that the audience on the mat will not dare giving, in spite of the almost aggressive encouragements and rhetorical questions of the lady.

In the third movement, the climate gets unsure. Piano, moans and cries of a dying Mother Nature. The voice performance reaches its climax and matches the drummer's aesthetic: everything becomes more metallic, less human. The message gets even darker: Violence is part of Nature. It is now our job to spark off "the dark night of the soul", the positive disintegration. Nietzsche and Deleuze are not far away, the cosmic snake visuals make the whole thing look psychedelic.

Human beings like parasites and viruses. Lydia plays the ultimate confession card (cf. Paradoxia), emphasizing how she became a partner in crime, "a death defying murder junkie". A mass murder game in order to survive: very Celine-like. Images of industrial deserted rooms: very videogame-like. "All my heroes are killers"ð, the sentence targets the American way of life. For her own sake, Lydia Lunch became the rapist and the sadist.

As a matter of fact, this leads to the Battle of Sex. Wrapped in squawking thuds, the red landscape becomes a destructed uterus, ready to defeat any masculine missiles. A new church in the shape of a welcoming cunt is here and waits for us. Lydia throws her glass on the floor. It shatters. That's where politeness ends. That's "the real pornography".

Last chapter. Is the Church, which has just been built, a limit or an achievement? Is redemption possible? Lydia Lunch uses the weapons of her adversaries and enjoys the disgust she will, without doubts, awake, for doing the apology of crime, murder and Murphy's Law. Disgust, also, for getting pleasure out of our own violence or vital force, freed, at last. The stage looks like a battlefield. She walks off. Everything comes full circle. Now, it's up to us. She, is alive and that's all what matters.

Sylvaïn for obskure.com

Fate, the Absurd and Tragedy

An essay by Maarten Walraven

Fate, the absurd and tragedy. What do these have in common, or to put it more precisely how do they come together? I shall shed light on how these subjects share something that belongs to life, and with life I mean the life you lead, or the life I lead. Lydia Lunch has, with her latest show 'Real Pornography', given us a contemporary vision on how these subjects come together. I will not give a lecture on how to live life, I will try to show that that is exactly what is impossible.




Fate
Behold before ye humanity's poor sum and story: Life - Death - and all that is of glory. (Barry Cornwall)

Fate determines. That could be the end of my discussion of fate. You are born, you live and then you die. The most important aspect of life, that is forgotten if I would leave it at this, is that there are choices. Every time we encounter fate we first made a choice that leads to it. Perhaps then, fate does not determine. You could have made a different choice.

This discussion is one that cannot be resolved. How then will I use fate here? I will use fate as something that cannot be shaken off. Something that is there and that we have to live with whether it's something we enjoy or dislike, it's there and it's part of us.

'Fate can apparently be seen as a necessary consequence of a plan or order, as well as it can be understood as something that is but could just as well be different.' (de Mul, 2006: 31) In the first way of seeing fate there is the idea of something bigger than yourself that has arranged your life for you. This is the idea that fate determines. The other way of seeing fate coincides with choices. It is the way it is, but it could be different, and you are the one that could have made it different for yourself.

Barry Cornwall speaks of life as all that is of glory, but it is a poor sum. This ambiguity is essential when we speak of fate. Being alive is glorious, dying is glorious, but being alive is poor, dying is poor. While alive, life can go in directions that lead us into dark gutters, death takes all pain away, but also all the joys.





The absurd
Life as experience, as fate, means accepting it all. Now, one will not live through this fate, of which one knows it is absurd, if one does everything to hold on to this absurd, that the consciousness brought to the light. (Albert Camus)

Albert Camus wrote in his 'Myth of Sisyfus' about the absurd. He ascribes the absurd to fate. For Camus life is absurd, because of fate. Because life has a persistent ambiguity, there are no certainties and that is absurd. Seeing this ambiguity is not enough. When you know life is absurd, you have to keep realising this, you have to stay conscious of the ambiguity. 'Once the absurdity is recognised, she becomes a passion, the most ravaging of all passions' (Camus, 1963: 35) Once the absurd has been absorbed into life she will tear at you and there the difficulty actually begins. '[K]nowing if one can live with his deepest passions, knowing if one can accept their deepest law, that entails that they wear the heart out, that they at the same time bring into raptures, that is indeed the question.' (idem: 35) This question holds the ambiguity of life: fate will lead us to the highs as well as the lows. Accepting it does not mean that it will stop doing that, it shall remain absurd.

Camus sees life as to be lived in a haze. Man can see the world but not himself. This makes the world only as clear as it can be through man's own representations. One of these modes of representation is art. Not all art can be absurd, art that tries to create is not absurd. An artist has to realise that his art can only be absurd when it 'Éillustrates that the thinking renounces his authority and that it resigns itself in not being more than the intelligence, who, in a work, embodies the phenomena, and covers that which is not reasonable in images.' (idem: 138) Art should thus represent the world that we can grasp with our mind, that which we can't grasp should be presented in such a way that it becomes something that we can grasp. These 'images' are part of the haze we live in. Not seeing the absurdity of a work of art means that we see the 'images' as representations of the world. This strengthens the haze. But knowing that the work of art is absurd gives the viewer, or maker, a way to see through the haze. Art as a guide. 'Should the world be lucid, there would be no art.'(ibid.)





Tragedy
Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!
Immortal, though no more: though fallen
great!
(Lord Byron)

The history of tragedy as a form of art begins in ancient Greece. In the sixth century B.C. the tragedy sees the light in Athens. The plays are performed during the Dyonisia, in the form of a competition. The Dyonisia are festivities to honour Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy. Tragedies thus originated from a religious procession. According to Aristotle (1449 a) '[tragedy] came from the prelude to the dithyramb. Tragedy then gradually evolved as men developed each element that came to light and after going through many changes, it stopped when it had found its own natural form. Thus it was Aeschylus who first raised the number of the actors from one to two. He also curtailed the chorus and gave the dialogue the leading part. Three actors and scene-painting Sophocles introduced.'

A dithyramb is a chorus and dance in honour of Dionysus. The character could be that of a narrative and it was not necessary that the story would involve Dionysus. The leader of the chorus would at some point break from that chorus and would start to play an individual role. (van Erp, 1997)

Now we have an idea of the origins of the tragedy and two of the three great writers have already been named, the last being Euripides. What is the most interesting aspect of the tragedies is that they are still capable of bringing us into rapture, even though we live 2500 years later. Why is this? Fist of all I think that it has to do with the fact that the problems that the characters are dealing with are universal and therefore they are problems that people are dealing with at this very moment. Secondly, the tragedies came to life in a period where the Greek, or more specifically the Athenians, were involved in big changes. The democratic society came into being, there were wars and yet economically they were flourishing. These big changes have hardly stopped, the only difference is that they came to effect more and more people. Today, the fact that the USA go to war with Iraq has an effect on the entire world.

The process that began in sixth century Athens can be described as the friction between logic and emotion. Or as Nietzsche(1872) would say it, between Apollo and Dionysus, dream and ecstasy. But Nietzsche also says that the two come together in the Attic tragedy and that that is what makes it so special. In all the years that have past since we are still struggling with this friction. 'The philosophy of Plato, and in some ways philosophy since Plato, can be seen as a systematic attempt to ban all logical contradictions, but also psychological contradictions in the individual soul, and political struggle or stasis between the inhabitants of a city.' (Leezenberg, 2006: 151) Considering this, it is interesting to see how philosophy can work with tragedy, that instead of banning, it tries to create possibilities for the existence of both Apollo and Dionysus. Philosophy as a way to let the ecstasy into the dream.

To take this step I first have to decide whether I want to take a Greek Tragedy or take a contemporary tragedy. Both can be interesting, but I think that it is better to experience one as it was meant to be, so I will chose a contemporary tragedy. Which one, the choice is difficult. What are the criteria, do I use the definition given by Aristotle in his Poetics ? Not in his entirety, I shall take from it those elements that I find constitutive for the tragedy. These are, the fact that it has to be of a certain magnitude, with a beginning and an end. Next, the language has to be enriched with ornaments. Last, the tragedy has to induce fear and suffering, the catharsis. With this last element it has to be mentioned that suffering, is suffering with the performer, to feel the pain he or she is feeling. Another aspect that I feel is very important for the tragedy is the fact that it is not just theatre, but also music. In other words it has to play with all the senses. When I saw 'Real Pornography', a spoken word show by Lydia Lunch, I felt I was part of a modern form of tragedy.





Real Pornography
Same as it ever wasÉSame as it ever was
History draws its substance from the Archives of Blood
We are all gravediggers to the future
Each generation raises monuments
To the executioners who have preceded it
Society is not a disease it's a fucking disaster
(Lydia Lunch)

In her show 'Real Pornography' we hear Lydia Lunch giving her views and experiences of the world. The form of her performance is spoken word, which means that she doesn't sing, but speaks. Besides her voice there is music made by percussionist Ian White and Terry Edwards, who plays saxophone and trumpet. A third element are images made by VJ's Marc Viaplana and Jospeh M. Jordana. All of these aspects together made it difficult to focus on just one part so that all that remained was to be absorbed in the totality of the experience.

'Have we learned anything from the past? We haven't learned anything from the past.' In the first part of 'Real Pornography' Lydia Lunch talks about how disasters repeat themselves, how we continue to honour those who are murderers. We do not look to the past and do things differently, we keep making the same mistakes. This is the fate of man. Lydia Lunch holds up a mirror in which we can see ourselves in our society. Our society, the society which we created and which is at constant war. 'Every war is about one of three thingsÉGod, Land, Oil.' These are not the issues mentioned when our leaders begin a war. It's the tragic fact that Lydia spits into our faces.

The fate of the inhabitants of Earth is that they destroy it. All our inventions, technological progress and so on lead to the destruction of Earth. On the other hand, these technologies can give openings to ways of life that are better for Earth, e.g. wind energy. There is always the ambiguity and always human doing. These elements make the human fate a tragic one. (De Mul, 2006) 'Real Pornography' gives this ambiguity form in the distinction between women and men. 'If men bleed every month as much as I do, maybe they wouldn't have such incredible blood lust.' Men have led the way in the progress of humanity and are therefore to blame. But women are not without blame, they are 'still so busy playing the victim.' There could be another reason though. 'We still don't have enough ammunition, Ladies?' Lydia does not want to stop wars, stop fighting, how could we when 'violence has settled every single historical issue so far,' what she wants to do is 'even out the playing field.' Violence as we know it is not absurd. It's not ambiguous, or as Lydia might say it, we only know the violence of men. Should the playing field be evened out, should women get their ammunition, then violence would become absurd. Violence would then see both sides, it would become it's own contradiction. Those who have the power to violence would fear it, and those who now do not have the power to violence need no longer fear it. There is no logic here, if all people would have the power to violence, nobody has to fear it, and all have to fear it.

Our need for violence is as much a part of us as our need for oxygen. 'Life begins with brutality and baptizes with violence.' It is our nature to be violent, and not just our nature, it's the nature of all that lives. 'Violence was the first act of creation. The Big Bang.' It is therefore also Lydia's nature to be violent. On stage she becomes the violent protagonist who induces her audience to suffer with her, to feel her pain, our pain, I felt my pain. As the show progressed, Lydia got more and more angry while singing 'vicious incantations bemoaning the cruel fate of the human condition, where each of us bears some mark of battery.' I was not just scared of her, I was scared of myself. I am the one who is 'drunk on disasters, calamities, casualties.' Lydia let go, she made us all let go, of our fate. We had no choice but to accept it, we became present to ourselves. 'It is the persistent presence of man to herself. It does not strive for anything, it does not give hope. This revolt is nothing more than the certainty of a crushing fate and not the resignation that should be felt with it.' (Camus, 1963: 79) This revolt is off course the absurd. 'Real Pornography' gives the revolt. A revolt that directs itself to oneself. This is the cathartic element of the show. My emotions became sublimated until they found their true direction, a direction that led to myself. This catharsis made life naked, I felt naked, not knowing, all knowing, I became ambiguous to myself when all illusions that are laid upon me fell away.

The Path�maton katharsin has been a much disputed element in the history of writing on tragedies. Philosophers, Philologists and Psychologists have all had more than one thing to say of it. I see it as the most important aspect of the tragedy. The catharsis came to be through a coming together of the different elements of the tragedy. The beauty with which was spoken, the beautiful images, the music and the wine. These elements combined gave way to the catharsis. According to de Mul, the catharsis can be viewed in three different ways, the religious, the medical and the artistic.

The religious way of viewing the catharsis is that there are fundamental differentiations, like man and woman, that are being harmed. Something pollutes the cosmological order. The rectification of this through offerings is the catharsis.

The medical way of viewing catharsis can be described as purgation. When one is ill one needs to be purged of that what makes one ill.

The artistic way of viewing catharsis shows that art can be used for relaxation or as an intellectual pleasure.

What de Mul notices in this distinction is that they all have a therapeutic ability. All three are also described as receptive. But he says that catharsis is not just receptive, the creator can get a therapeutic experience from the creation or performance of a work of art.

This last part is fundamental, because if a performer is not experiencing the catharsis, he or she shall not be able to spread the feeling and the audience will not be brought into raptures. Is the performer, or creator, the catharsis can off course also be a singular experience during the creation, able to reach the stage where 'the thinking renounces his authority' (idem, 138), then the created, or the performed becomes absurd and gives way to the catharsis. This is why Camus has written 'Creating also means, giving shape to fate.'(idem: 163)

My end will be Lydia's endÉ

I MUST FIND ECSTACY IN THEIR INSANITY
FREEDOM FROM THEIR SLAVERY
THE TRUTH IN THEIR LIES
LIFE IN THEIR DEATH
BEAUTY IN THEIR HOMICIDIAL GENOCIDE
PEACE IN THE WAR WHORE'S EVIL ORGY
OF DEATH AND NEGATION
LOVE AMONGST THEIR RUINS
PLEASURE IN THEIR PAIN

I CALL MY FATE THE DESERT
AND I AM NOT AFRAID OF THAT ARID MYSTERY....
I WANT OTHERS TO BE WHERE I AM IN THIS DESERT THAT I ASSUME THEY MISS . IT'S ALL DESERT NOW, IT'S ALL DESERT NOW AS THE EARTH SMOLDERS, AS THE EARTH BURNS...
ALL LIFE STARTED IN THE DESERT AND NOW DEATH IS BEING SENT FORTH FROM THE DESERT WHAT GOES IN MUST COME OUTÉWHAT GOES IN MUST COME OUT SAME AS IT EVER WAS...SAME AS IT EVER WAS