Beauty, The Night, Screen, Body, Tattoos

January 1, 1987 – June 7, 2016

Mélanie:
Some day perhaps, I will tell my life story. Some day when I am no longer fifteen with a heart whose spirit has a sense of wonder. It’s saying it all when I talk about the night and the desert for in doing so I am stepping through the immediate legend of my life on the horizon. I have abused the stars and screens of life, I have opened up roads of sand, I have quenched my thirst and my instinct like so many words in view of the magical horizon, alone, manoeuvring insanely so as to respond to the energy traversing me like a necessity, an avalanche of being. I was fifteen and I knew how to designate people and objects. I knew that a hint of threat meant only kilometers more to go in the night. I pressed on the accelerator and clash, swear, fear, oh how fragile the body when it’s so hot, so dark, so pale, immense silence.

Nicole, April 27, 2016

Your relationship with Mélanie has probably been in continual transformation for nearly fifteen years (in images, books, and projects). As for me, my relationship with Mélanie began while I was writing the book. Mélanie is an intersection, a meeting point where the adolescent space (a significant one for all human beings) unfolds, touching all aspects of who we are: intellectual, sexual, emotional, spiritual, identity-forming (who am I?), existential (what is living, life?). This is what gives her rebel wings, her vital self.

She embodies the whole “self,” pieces of which are found in us. In her, there is not only the invaluable rebellion against boredom, banality, reality, repetition, but also the potential for discovering the world + speed, which keeps her constantly alert. Mélanie is still close to me because the world belongs to her when she departs from reality. This is probably what we love about all artists on some level, this ability, this persistent wish to break through the wall, the mirror of our imaginative potential. In this sense, we always carry the potential for writing, tattooing (from the smallest sign to an invasion of the entire body by the sign, its erasure under an image – images).

Nicole, March 30-31, 2016

The cinema is everywhere in Mauve Desert, and it seems natural to me that you wanted to make it into a film, that you wanted to translate words into pictures. Now, in 2016, I would maybe like to translate the ephemeral or the permanent into meaning, objects, even beings. To explore the strong impression that there lies an enigma that grasps us wholly by the heart, by the throat, by the bulk to one day instill in us as a certainty, a shadowy extension of the being.

Simon, April 13, 2016

Yesterday, I accidentally stumbled upon archival footage showing Fellini hard at work during the filming of Satyricon. It’s 1969. We see him directing the pool scene. There are a good hundred extras, maybe a dozen actors, the set is noisy. Waiting for the camera to roll, the extras – half naked and submerged to the waist in the pool – naturally converse and all these conversations inevitably form an impossible uproar. Used to large scenes, the master does not seem – at first, at least – bothered by the noise. He is focused, he directs: one who taps the bum of another using a flyswatter, to do it in such a way, another wringing the neck of a distinguished court lady to do it as if she were a chicken (he repeats this twice: “like a chicken”). He asks for a bit of quiet in the pool please, for everyone to stop moving and look at the camera. He says “let’s go,” then he explodes: “EVERYONE SHUT UP, DAMN IT!” and even louder: “STOP MOVING!”

He gets silence.

His gaze is firm, his face severe. “Action.” A loud buzz resonates across the stage, that’s the signal. He continues to give directions: “My dear, lower your head, a bit more, smile.” While saying this, his voice softens. His gaze too. As he commands her to smile, he gestures with two hands, on each side of his mouth, while opening the corners like a blossoming flower. Someone screams: “Rolling!” The master does not bat an eye, he directs: “Sing, Ligny,” “No moving in the pool!” “Roberto ….”

He never says “action.”

They’re rolling anyway.

As the scene comes to life in front of the camera, he keeps quiet, he lets things happen.

I think of this politics professor I had in CEGEP – I no longer remember his name – who, in the hallway in front of his classroom, had spoken to me about Fellini. It was the first time I had heard anyone talk about the celebrated Italian filmmaker. I must have been eighteen years old. The professor was complaining about modern cinema, too artificial according to him. In Fellini’s films, you eat, you burp, you fart, you live! “Like real life,” he told me. Yet, when I watch the “making of” Satyricon in black and white today, I see clearly that it is actually an impression of real life. That in fact, the film is based on – by humans, if I can say that – a worksite and that, while we don’t see the machines (in Italian, Fellini refers to the camera as “macchina”), it’s because their gaze is turned towards fiction.

And with them, we observe.

Soon, the frame of the screen no longer contains the fiction because our imagination – or our desire to believe that fiction is truer (or from another truth) than reality – completes the image beyond the edges. In the end, I mean that this video I happened to see yesterday on social media made me think of this professor whose face I remember very well, but whose name I can’t remember and that, in turn, this professor made me think of you because of this sentence that he might have said.

“Like real life,” these are also the words that you uttered at my wedding. We were reunited on the grounds of a motel on Isle-aux-Coudres. The ceremony had ended, the banquet too, drunkenness not only from alcohol, some people were picking at what was left of dessert, but most people had already started to dance. Had the sun already set? The moon was rising, full and round. I believe that we danced, yes, that’s it, we danced together to a Philippe Katerine song –Louxor, j’adore – and it was then, in that moment of poets clumsily swaying, that you said to me: “Like real life.”

It’s not the sentence that surprised me. I believe I understood what you meant to say, even though I recognize now as I write these lines that I never truly sought to understand the exact meaning that you gave it, preferring to leave it as an impression of understanding.

An impression … that’s definitely what it is, as the sentence remains imprinted in my memory and, even today, it only takes a video I saw on the internet to remind me of it.

Moreover – was it the same night or the next morning, another day or later – Fellini had been mentioned. Was it really you who brought him up? Our wedding would have had something “Felliniesque” about it. Indulgence maybe, but more certainly joyous improvising: someone had put together a wildflower bouquet for the bride (we hadn’t thought of that), another had brought firecrackers, they had roasted lambs on a spit suspended between a bike rack and a mile marker … I must say that I organized my wedding by myself and that, once the papers were signed, I let things go, I let go … and at the moment where the moon, full and round, came out from between the few clouds on that beautiful August evening, three young women jumped out from behind the groves and skipped around the bride and groom, holding firecrackers.

Joyous improvising … exactly what a film set – even one of Fellini’s – is not. Maybe these fabricated images help us find certain states of grace and magic that, sometimes, materialize in real life.

Simon, May 25, 2016

Tattoos/Representation

Would you get a tattoo? Is there something you would have wanted, but never got? You talk about marking the body and, strangely, it makes me think of representation. Permanent drawings not on, but in the skin, an individual desire engraved on the natural body, in its collective or familial sense. My mother was profoundly hurt when, at seventeen, I had a black panther tattooed on my thigh. I was not rebelling, not pushed by a desire to re-appropriate my body. I just nonchalantly fell victim to peer influence (the word “pressure” would be too strong). The panther doesn’t have meaning for me and never has. I had chosen a popular design from a cheap catalogue (what’s called “tattoo flash”): I just wanted to cover the unfinished drawing by an amateur tattoo artist I’d met at a party one night. Now all I’ve retained from the event – other than a pretty faded drawing on my skin – is my mother’s reaction. I had vandalized something sacred she had ­given me, altered (without giving it a second thought) the fruit of her gestation and labour. In writing this (actually, I’m transcribing the pages of the notebook I filled last night, but now I’m really getting away from my subject), I realize the body’s collective quality. The individual’s body doesn’t just come from a mother; it’s descended from a line and already part of the social body. It may be because the latter is breaking down, and the individual has more value than all other components of society, that tattoos are now generally accepted. This, regrettably, robs the act of being tattooed of its rebellious aspect. Each body finds itself at a point of tension between strict aesthetic canonicity and the desire to be unique. Everyone wants to be unique while being the same. Painful standardization in a world that glorifies the image of the rebel. In this context, the body really is like a screen – a white rectangle with standard dimensions – and tattoos become a means of distinguishing oneself from others, imprinting oneself with one’s own desire.

The body-screen/representation.

A screen: we project something onto it. Before the lights go out and the projector is turned on, it’s nothing but a white surface, it looks insignificant. What illuminates the human body, then? What fire, what desire? We’re called consumers, taxpayers, shareholders … the word “citizen” is used less and less often. Some would like us to believe that we are not part of a social body, but simply a mass whose individual desires can be restrained and then redirected toward consumables, toward the production of wealth. But not our own, of course.

Did this lead to our parents’ rebellion?

You mentioned James Dean.

And Mélanie’s?

And her mother’s?

Why does Mélanie get a tattoo?

Why is Angela fascinated by this tattoo?

And how did you come to construct this fantasy? With what materials?

As we’ve been working on transposing the reality contained in the fiction of Mélanie onto another creative dimension – space and time restricted by representation – the idea of leaving a trace of the process as concrete as ink on skin has been developing. Actually, it was you who suggested emphasizing the image of the tattoo, but through which medium? The natural medium for tattoos is skin. At first I was thinking of the actress who would play Mélanie. Would she be willing to get a tattoo? She would have to be completely dedicated to the project. I discussed idea with some of the people around me. Invariably, they tell me that a temporary tattoo would suffice, bringing us back to “pretending” and therefore to representation. I’m becoming more and more attached to this notion of commitment (to the audience, but also to the project, the other people involved), to the idea that one of us – you, me, or someone from the team – will be marked by the project. Physically. I’m more comfortable (is that the word?) with an attitude (commitment) that will allow us to say (even quietly, to ourselves) that we did it “for real.” Of course we know that regardless of whether the tattoo is temporary or permanent, the effect of the performance is the same. It changes nothing. The thing that changes is our relationship with the audience, the unspoken pact we’ve made with them.

And our relationship with the project.

It’s even more significant since we are not the actors, but the creators of both the text being performed and of the actual performance. Allow me to demonstrate my point using an anecdote. From the time I helped with the line-up for a festival in Québec City. We’d brought in a production entitled Kolik by the French director Hubert Colas. An actor (the amazing Thierry Raynaud) delivers a text by the German writer Raynald Goetz for one hour. Seated at a transparent table covered with 144 glasses of vodka, he spills out a flood of lines while killing himself with alcohol. The stage direction is sober, precise and powerful. The actor drinks and speaks, speaks and drinks the 144 glasses that are actually full of water. During the performance in Québec (it was also performed in Montréal), Laurence Brunelle-Côté, a self-proclaimed “undisciplinary artist,” was in the room. At the end of the performance, the person sitting next to her thought it necessary to correct her error. He explained to her that it wasn’t vodka, but water; not the author, but an actor. Disappointed, she exclaimed, “Oh … it’s a play!”

Laurence’s reaction isn’t completely absurd. In Québec City, the event was part of the Poetry Month line-up where most events consisted of authors reading their own text in front of the audience, often taking great risks, making them more like performances. When this story reached my ears, my first thought was that if the 144 glasses had been full of vodka, the actor would be dead. Still, the reflection on Laurence’s reaction – a very sincere and spontaneous one – has stayed with me. Even more so now that I am asking you to get on stage with me, to perform, both as subjects and performers (really?).

Angela Parkins – the surveyor who makes Mélanie understand the meaning of the word “desire” – is also a screen in a sense. Mélanie projects a future onto her that might never exist. Total freedom, emancipation, an affront to convention, flying in the face of ubiquitous, oppressive fear. Sometimes I confuse Angela/Mélanie, Mélanie/Angela. That’s why I thought the drawing of the sphinx, the moth whose patterned wings look like a human skull, was on Angela’s shoulder. But I’m talking about characters – they’re your characters and, as such, are they not a reflection of your desires? Your quest? Your projections?

Would you get Mélanie’s tattoo? Would you be willing to make this tattoo the first manifestation of fiction in the very real performance space?

Nicole, June 7, 2016

“an individual desire engraved on the natural body”

“the body’s collective quality”

“It may be that because the latter is breaking down […] that tattoos are now generally accepted.”

I’ll try to answer two of your questions:

Why is Angela fascinated by Mélanie’s tattoo?

First of all, I should tell you that you’re correct: Mélanie is the one who has the tattoo. On page 87, when Angela Parkins answers “Nothing” (it’s in italics in the text) and changes the subject, it’s because she’s uneasy seeing death, a representation of death, on such a young girl. Does she see her own death? I think that’s what I was hinting at.

It’s the desert where death is undeniably on the prowl. Danger is everywhere and inevitably fear, excess, and escapism (speed, alcohol), loneliness, vulnerability; the desert should demand humility, a kind of wisdom in those who inhabit it. Angela Parkins is all these things at once.

Tattoos have always fascinated me. And obviously, I found the death’s-head sphinx moth particularly interesting, aesthetically and symbolically. Having a hybrid of beauty and death, natural flesh and a skull, on her shoulder. Basically, a powerful symbol in the skin. That species is on the poster for the American movie The Silence of the Lambs. It’s also pervasive in Jussi Adler-Olsen’s The Marco Effect, published in 2015.

The death’s-head sphinx moth, Acherontia atropos: it has distinctive markings reminiscent of a skull that resemble a mask.

The Hells Angels also use the skull as their symbol. It was a sign of total delinquency and liberty even before the H. A. became criminals. I’m thinking of the 1953 movie The Wild One and its motorcycle gang, when the motorcyclist became the rebel’s icon.

How did you come to construct this fantasy of the tattoo? With what materials?

Tattoos are a part of me.

The skull is part of my cinematographic image of the rebel because of The Wild One. You see it on the leather jackets and on the bikers’ rings.

The sphinx moth was an accidental find from a dictionary search. Even then I made a mistake, since I called it the “great sphinx.” There’s another sphinx moth, the sphinx elpenor, that’s pink, very “pretty.”

144 glasses of vodka.

I don’t know what pact you make with the spectator. As for me, I offer them thoughts, sensations, emotions that spring from the way we shape our words.

What we call fiction – as opposed to reality – is simply what is true, plausible and, because it is thwarted for all kinds of reasons (censorship, marginality, abnormality, daily-mundane work), is dreamed, imagined, fantasized about and conceived outside of what is materially or culturally obvious. And added to this is colour, each person’s tone: enthusiasm, depression, pain, injury, a scientific, rebellious or tidy mind, etc.

Fortunately neither murders, nor actual rape, nor 144 glasses of vodka are permitted in the theatre. Long ago, they talked about ritual, sacrifice, the thirst of God. Now, we talk about social networks, rape and assault in real time. What counts more: the idea, or the dramatization of the idea? Okay, some have been saying they can “hurt themselves without mutilating themselves” – Orlan, body art (tattoos, piercings, scarification, etc.) – since the sixties. Art doesn’t say no to violence, blood or excess.

There’s also the idea that you can do it once, or many times.

To me, art is more of an insightful, formal montage, a testimony to a possible reality that has not yet occurred or been understood. For example, Proust discovered psychological laws, Stendhal too. Unknowingly, these painters projected real images of cells, synapses, and aerial views onto their scenes before their time. Musicians have also undoubtedly produced sound sequences that resemble what we could hear in the cosmos, under the sea, or in our own bodies.

I want to be a subject and a performer in words. My body will do its best to perform sincerely.

If necessary, it could be uncontrolled for five minutes, but that’s assuming that the words aren’t controlled either.

In all of my novels, I’ve detected a pattern: my characters are projections of yes and no. They are variations of 1) what looks a lot like me, 2) what looks a little like me, 3) what I desire, 4) the complete opposite of me, or 5) what is quite simply an element of necessary presence. It’s the same with so-called supporting roles, passers-by, extras.