Extreme
1. "You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve?
You just put yours lips together and - blow"
Lauren Bacall to Humphrey Bogart in To Have and To Have Not
Any
extreme has to have the leavening agent of the in-between, that which
is not extreme but holds the extreme(s) open. The lips of the extreme
ARE the extremes, opening and closing around the great void that, though
not present allows every bit of presence to form, spittle clustered
around the lips and given form by the lips, another form of extremity
which, unlike say the arms or legs, interfaces with the most abstract of
the verging on the outside (always the place of the extreme): language,
food, the sexual other, and the other generally. In other words, all
the places to go without moving, all the invaginated uncanny extremes
that mark thresholds and boundaries, all the hard things to grasp,
pluck, tow, caress, stick through the lips or caress their external
membranes...oh baby, that's where it starts and ends, starting THROUGH
it's ends, and startling through it's ends. You want to eximprovise
()tremely, it starts at the ends of the flesh, but doesn't come back to
itslef, doesn't touch itself...only in the NON-extreme form, where the
lips meet, where the flesh returns to it's own, touches it's own or what
looks like it's own, do you have regular improv. The other form
is more or less like death, waving wanly from beyond the tips of the
fingers, waving though the inferno, through the scrim of flesh: matter,
noise, silence moving out, at the antipodes.
"It is the
opening that incommensurabalizes - there where it spaces itself out.
The mouth is at the same time place and non-place, it is the locus of a
dis-location, the gaping place of the 'quasi permixtio' between soul and
body, which is to say the incommensurable extension between them and
common to both, since the mouth - any mouth, before any orality - opens
an opening. On Touching, J. Derrida, from chapter 2: Spacings - The Incommensurable, Syncope and Words Beginning with 'ex-' p 29
'... mouthing the ring of the contracture around the noise 'I'"
J-L Nancy quoted in On Touching
2. Extremophiles
The
two 'lips'' of 'im' 'provisation' form around the bolus of a habitable -
loosely speaking - structure, of negating the extemes (and those
membranes can be Noise and Silence, both rounding into the other as they
verge into a catastrophic totality, pointing to the final two extremes
of Total Order and Total Disorder: having to choose between frigid total
stasis, no movement whatsoever, and the total freedom of heat death, no
possibility of formation of bonds or foundations: small choice of
heaven and hell) by negotiating the extreme into a navigable point of
arrival, nothing having been provided before hand, the foresight of
having seen beforehand and provided for not possible: the very nature of
the extreme, the inability (and yet, at a certain point, necessity) for
it to be contracted around the provisions, the composures left on the
shore, no, im-provisation is always condemned to be left adrift between
the two shore-lips of the river, forming the spittle between the lips,
in advertent lubrications which nevertheless can never bond or fuse the
lips of the extreme into a total contracture (forming the noisy silence
into the 'I' or anything else), instead always - this is the inelegant
fiction improvisation is always relegated to forming a 'jumping off'
place where it will then solidify itself into something real and
non-negotiable, non-perishable: the composition, the state, shit, spit:
some total form of life/non-life, the moment of not-providing leading to
the 'real' feast of provisions at the end of the journey, set asides,
hard-tack, ticky tacky. wishy washy ...
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