Irene Brok .

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Words of a FLIRT (subtracted from the Gerrit Rietveld Graduation Thesis 2020 by Irene Brok)

Alice: ’Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas -- only I don't exactly know what they are!’ (Lewis Caroll in Through the Looking Glass,1871)

When I met Alice I was seduced by her adventurous attitude. Her open mind and her luck for stumbling upon a mirror with a fluid surface. Alice got to me. She was that girl who found the secret door. Who fell but flew. Who talked to animals and flowers. But Alice was an imagined girl. A manifestation of adventure and queerness through a story. Suddenly she appeared everywhere I read: Gilles Deleuze speaks about her in his book The Logic of Sense, where Alice exemplifies the instability of meaning. Driscoll, in another paper on Deleuze, argues: ‘Alice is a name for the impossibility of fixed identities and for an escape from the fixity of subject and object positions; she is both the means of exploring and the point or arrival for the paradox’ (Driscoll 2000: 82). She appears in the first chapter of Luce Irigaray’s book The Sex Which is Not One, in which she defies Freud's and Lacan's analyses of sexual relations and proposes a female sexuality that is self-referential and disconnected from ‘masculine parameters’. She appears in Annee Grøtte Viken’s book It had Something to do with the Telling of Time, which speaks about fictional spaces as constructs of reality, where Alice has a conversation with the portal that transports her to the other world (Grøtte Viken, 2015).

What is a mirror? It's the only invented material that is natural. Whoever looks at a mirror, whoever manages to see it without seeing himself, whoever understands that its depth consists of being empty, whoever walks inside its transparent space without leaving the trace of his own image upon it—that some-body has understood its mystery of thing. For that to happen one must surprise it when it’s alone, when it’s hanging in a an empty room, without forgetting that the finest needle before it can transform it into the simple image of a needle, so sensitive is the mirror in its quality of lightest reflection, only image and not the body. Body of the thing.
(Claire Lispector in Agua Viva, 1973)

A new aliveness, that opens up many possibilities, only by falling for and following Alice. But whilst Lacan, Kristeva, Harraway, Barad, Bollas, Philips and many others informed me better and better, I was also turned off. The knowledge acquired got stiff and rigid. The theories abstract and floating. At one point I lost my excitement and I lay in bed not losing myself to all the possibilities but craving to fall asleep and dream for real, so I could get a thrill. The paradox of what was going on kept on appearing in different shapes and forms. It got harder to keep close. I felt excited and so much unfolded. But when I would fixate or focus, its potentialities decreased. I would lose myself, my qualities, my uncertainty, my potential, my core, my shape, my purpose, my aim, my game. And then it felt as if I had lost nothing because I had never admitted to having had a purpose, or a shape. I didn’t know how to bring it to an end. Where did I begin? Where did I stop? I could not bear to answer those questions. And still I couldn’t stop trying either. I needed to suspend, go on and try. Try to become. Try to become what it is.

Man always standing on Cape Thought, stretching his eyes beyond the limits either of things, or of sight…
It is impossible to receive the “truth” from oneself. When one feels it forming (this is an impression), one forms at the same moment another self, an unaccustomed self…and is proud of it -jealous of it…(this is one limit of internal policy.)
Between a clear Self and a cloudy Self, a just Self and a guilty Self, there are old hatreds and old compromises, old disavowals and old entreaties.
(Paul Valéry in Monsieur Teste, 1946)

This is it. Fully surrender, absorb, re-become. Without wanting, intention or anticipation. When I am most explicit in my moods I am not sure where I begin and end. When I am ecstatic, happy, loud, drunk I tend to manifest the joy of creation. The joy of becoming. I am easily captured by this delight. Happening in a flash, by change, by surprise. An unexpected moment. I love the tears coming out of my eyes. I love the shudder through my body, I love to love. But it never stretches out. When it gets stuck or seen or captured it becomes something I find difficult. Sentiment, dogma, memory, a desire, an aim, intention, a conclusion. The only way to stretch it out is by suspending its becoming into any of this. It’s not about denying these players their position; everything can be part of it. But they cannot get a grip on things for too long. Duration is as much part of something’s becoming. It’s like a tossing game: a ball in a circle tossed and caught, tossed and caught. It never stays in the same hands for too long. It keeps on flying to its next destination. What always remains though, as long as the ball is being tossed and caught, is the smile: the delight of the game. It is a fun game, tossing a ball around. The ball is not supposed to be caught to keep—it is simply not suppose to fall.

Man of glass
“So direct is my vision, so pure my sensation; so clumsily complete my knowledge, and so quick, so clear my reflection, and my understanding so perfect, that I see through myself from the farthest end of the world down to my unspoken word; and from the shapeless thing desired on waking, along the known nerve fibers and organised centers, I follow and am myself, I answer myself, reflect and reverberate myself, I quiver to the infinity of mirrors - I am glass.”
(Paul Valéry in Monsieur Teste, 1946)

I am light and transparent. But not free from fear or scepticism. I allow myself to continually make up my mind. Which occasionally makes me visible, but never really clear. It’s not due to me that I keep on possibly becoming. It’s a response to everything. An impulse to engage. I am awkward and doubt-full. I cannot escape the sensation that I do not belong anywhere. That I missed it, missed the point. Or forgot it. Lost it. But every time when it got lost or forgotten again, it turns out I am not. So here I am. This is it. I am not about knowing what I want, or wanting anything. I am just radically committed to contingency and refuse to answer any question.

I don’t want to have the terrible limitation of those who live merely for what can make sense. Not I: I want an invented truth.
(Claire Lispector in Agua Viva, 1973)

Are you bored? Are you a concept? Are you a fiction? Are you real? What are your fantasies? What are your dreams? What is your future? And your past? Where do you come from? What is your place? Where are you going? What do you want? What are your fears? What are your values? Are you sincere? Are you lonely? What is your phone number? What music do you listen to? Have you ever been here before? Do you want my phone number? What do you want to drink? What do you do for a living? What is your thesis about? What do you want to change? Are you a good? Are you real? What do you make up? What do you like? Have you ever been in love? What is your art about? What do you find fascinating? Do you want to meet again?

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