vergangenheitsbewältigung (III)

I begin the new year with a sort of existential gagging — the gag representing all at once the act and apparatus of a violent silencing, the medical device used to pry the mouth open, the physical sensation of retching and its inherent fruitlessness, and finally a comedic genre characterised by its physical, visual humour and radical subversion of expectations and normative language. Shorn of all other accretions this is the essence of experience thus far: the effect of silence on real human relationships, the subversion of it through gestures expressing resistance, the double-readings that take place at sites of malcontent and malice. I am trying to save these gestures (the silence that can be read, interpreted and re-interpreted) for a more worthwhile cause but the gag that forces open the avenues of utterance is nothing more than a dismantled, reassembled and reconstituted version of the gag that silences.