Transdisciplinary Design

In the Basement: The Sick Boys and the Bad Girls

Posted on November 12, 2018

Meditating on the Slanted Beings | An Incautious Respond to Bruno Latour

In a long corridor stretching far into space with no visible ends, bright lights shoot down from the ceiling furiously as if to strangle all presence of shadows—a whiteness that hypnotizes all conscious attempts of looking, concerning¹ and examining. The stringent smell of formaldehyde permeates the architecture, seeking out all dirt, germs, and filth in its furious and hasty effort to sanitize, flatten and straighten all slanted² beings. In this seemingly perfect, obsessive, and compulsive interior of immunology³, tiny spores of an aching sound ooze out from a small slit, twirling and swirling, their presence—elusive, their tune—troublesome, but they are here, and they are now⁴:

Aren’t you tired of killing

Those whose deaths have been predicted

And who are therefore dead already?

Aren’t you tired of wanting to live forever?

Aren’t you tired of saying Onward?⁵

From this slit on the ground—this tiny deadly incision, a pair of eyes surfaces, its iris—blood red, its vein—swollen, one baths in shame, the other showers in pride, circling but fixating, staring and tracking, as if its sole quest is to disturb, to freak, to arrest its own pain of existence. Down in this sunless basement, Circe, mired in thousands of years of mud, is looking. Caressing her bruised pink flesh, she chants for the shadow of Odysseus, she chants for her kins⁶, she chants for the flood⁷ that came but never left.

In this basement that bears the names of the bad girls and the sick boys, bodies levitate alongside bodies; they are twisted and perverted, coiled and pierced; they swim together and sing for another, into their own myths, on to their own pain. They are hairy, they are unwashed; they masturbate and ejaculate on these phallic pillars holding the church above. In this basement, there is no ground, for the Earth has left them, for the Sun has forgotten them. Here, there is only a limitless, anxious void of freedom. Here, there is only home.

Je est un Autre.⁸

I is Another.

In a corner, a frail boy speaks. As the words depart his body, skins, and bones, he trembles violently, for the fear that they will find him, cut him and rob him of his own name; he trembles, for the restless terror that is the violence of the archive⁹, for the euphoria that is the freedom of un-reason; he trembles, for the raw kinship he just forged—he is now An-Other-That-Speak-Again.

David Wojanorwicz: Untitled (One Day This Kid Will Get Larger)

In this basement of the sick boys, the bad girls and the between beings, quilts are made, asylums are found. Gravity is lost in its mighty vortex of sounds; in their own orbit, they call God by their name. The wheels of history cease to spin; turning its gut inside out, time commits suicide, for the slanted ones refuse to dream the dream of reproduction, abandoning the perpetuation that is a grotesque, manic and corrupted centipede.

In an eternal flux of transition, myths are written and rewritten, languages are free beings, emotions aren’t arrested. All are subjects and objects waiting—and wanting, to be designed and redesigned.

the sick boys and the bad girls,

pull out those nails

fixing on your feet.

the sick boys and the bad girls,

the slanted,

between beings,

cautious¹⁰, may they not,

for the quakes happen

when they speak again.

– Nam Pham

(1) Bruno Latour, A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (With Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk), 2008

(2) Emily Dickinson, Tell all the truth but tell it slant, 1263