Kunstkasten Winterthur – Ausstellungsserie “The Artist IRL”
the water is phlegm
Row row row your boat
gently down the stream;
merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream!
(Eliphalet Oram Lyte)
Salut p’tit chat,
IRL – in real life – life is beautiful and brutal at the same time.
But where does (real)life begin and where does it end? What is this reallife?
Even biology – the natural science that deals with life – cannot cope with the complexity of this question or better: with the distinction between life and death. So far, life is what is inherited with mutations (Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary) and as a mathematical equation life = randomly mutating software (Gregory Chaitin).
Where life begins there is slime. Even before life begins there is a special focus on slime. If you don’t happen to become pregnant by just enjoying your sex life, the observation of the vaginal discharge viscosity plays an important role in the process of getting a fertilized egg to nest in the (hopefully not too thick) slimy endometrium. The intercourse itself making this conception happen would be impossible without the squidgy hydrogels lubricating the surfaces of our mucosae. And of course it is cervical mucus that helps the sperm to reach the egg. Later, the cervix is sealed by a plug of mucus, protecting the clear and slippery sac with amniotic fluid. The fulminant climax of this gelatinous drama is the welcoming of a freshly built body slick with mucus and vernix.
On a less anthropocentric level the genesis of life itself was a slimy affair as well. It wasn’t the primordial slime (“Urschleim”) that Ernst Haeckel and Thomas Huxley were hoping for, but the ancestors of all existing life flourished as gooey communities – microbial mats – which still can be found in Baja California Norte, Mexico where Lynn Margulis regularly brought her students to smell the jelly-like scum of life’s cradle.
Back to my individual reproduction: The child’s first breath is preceded by a clearing of the airways, the removal of mucus that fills the lungs – fluid giving way to air, marking the start of life in the most physical sense.
inspirer.
expirer.
(inspirer.)
Mucus once again fills the lungs, the body is preparing. When life ends, there is slime. The process of decomposition once again is a journey through slime. The body begins to soften, oozing, and releasing fluids once tightly held in balance. Bacteria and microorganisms which were kept in check during life begin to feast, accelerating the production of mucus-like substances as tissues dissolve. Organs liquefy, and what was once solid returns to a formless, slimy state. Slime is the material reality of death, as the body melts back into the Earth.
When I realized that your death is not just an option but the one possible reality that is probably going to happen, my affective sensation started to move differently. Not just differently. The perception of my emotions moved in a diametrically opposed direction, drawing me in a slippery in-between.
There, in this gelatinous plasma, while my body was still flooded with hormones from bonding and breastfeeding, one of your toddlers was holding my baby, calling it their best friend. My phone slipped through my fingers – I couldn’t send you a picture of this. I had to spare you this torment four days before you died. Saying your last goodbye to your children – just experiencing motherhood for the first time, I imagined that all of your physical distress was nothing compared to the torture that accumulated for you in this very moment. The sticky phlegm caught me in the corporeal manifestation of everything that I felt.
Ambivalent emotions leading to contrary feelings slide together, merge, resist clarity. A laughing face freezes distorted with pain and then, whining, dissolves into exhilaration. Perception is smeared with desperate joy, cheerful fear and – grief. The sliminess of your sensation seeps into your awareness; not knowing what to feel forces you to sit with complexity. In reallife we can’t choose, we have to embrace the inescapability of ambivalence, the ambiguity. When emotional substances that don't reconcile are stuck together, new feelings might be felt, new thoughts might be thought. Accepting multiple realities at once makes you more resilient and lets the vessel for the grief grow.
In the last week of your corporeal life, I made sure you hear from me every day. In the end, I sent only emojis.
I can still be with you. Somehow. Your virtual representation even now creates reality.
I can still read our chats, look at your instagram profile, consult your publication. I do that after staring at your name, waiting for a blue point to appear, indicating that you are online. But you are not.
I am lying – I can’t handle opening our chat. And in virtuality our conversation is moving deeper and deeper.
The sound of your voice in audio messages and recorded videos, your thoughts in written words in posts, messages and your book – it is even possible to program a bot that would respond like you, with the same humor, cleverness and irony; All of this remains virtual, but my emotional reaction becomes real and causes a bodily reaction.
This is why virtual is not digital and virtual is not the opposite of real.
Everything that you were virtually is still there and everything that you were physically is still there. But yet – you are not there anymore.
When you died, I wasn’t surprised that you wished for an inhumation. Giving your body back to the natural resource cycle instead of burning the precious matter seems to be a decision from a ecofeministic view. At the same time, I was hoping you got hold of the core of the Earth, letting your resilient body, that was infiltrated by technology, become one with the material of your research.
What I couldn't bear was the thought that your body is still there but neither I nor anybody else will ever lay eyes on you again.
Everything that you were physically is there, in this very place beneath the surface of the Earth. Even though one might say a person is so much more than their body, the substance that created your tender voice, your delicate creature and your loving personality lies in this very place sous la surface. All your memories and thoughts, locked in tissue made of water, proteins, triglyceride and mineral nutrients (hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen) lent from Gaia, were laid to rest. That makes this place so special – so magical. The place where beneath the surface of the Earth, these elemental components are given back. The more-than-human part of the human body takes over and the transformation of microbial gluey biofilm will eventually leave water, carbon dioxide, urea and phosphate behind.
Here I am feeding my baby oozy oatmeal gruel. While I am still building a body, your body is dissolving. Everything is metabolism and reallife is first and foremost slimy. The material of liminality. The material of ambivalence.
To Aurélie