Brianne contributes...finally

OK - I am trying to give a bit of time to this everyday...just a bit until the weekend when I can give chunks. I will work on some waitress "moves" - with my long line of experience this should be fun.

I am not exactly sure where we are taking this, but I have been thinking about tipping points in terms of process philosophy like that of Bergson, Deleuze, Cixous, etc. (probably because I am knee deep in dissertation ideas and kind of geek out on these three). In any case a singularity, or a place where the flow of life switches quickly to because some other quality, is an interesting place. I could talk about this philosophy more, and would love too, but for now, here are some excerpts from some writing that I think address the tipping point interestingly. The first is from Helene Cixous in her essay "Love of the Wolf":

The landscape of that age is one of anguish and nostalgia. The little girl is running. You can’t tell if she’s running away. Or if she’s lost. If she’s running after the wolf. Or if the wolf is running after her.
One day, I don’t know when, it was decided to call love a set of strange, indescribable physical phenomena, is it pain – but from the moment that the name is given to that burning in one’s breast, the violence of the strangeness is interrupted and the ancient horror, hidden behind the new word, begins to be forgotten. Let’s go back to before language, let’s go back to that disturbing age, the age of myths and of folk tales, the age of stone, of fire, of knives. Before language there is the fire that bites but doesn’t kill, the evil that, like all pain, separates us, the dehiscence that opens in us closed organs, making us seem strange to ourselves – and all that begins with: “when you don’t say anything to anybody – that’s it – it’s love.”
Joyfully you become incomprehensible – two strangers together. You begin to adore a god that nobody else bows down to. A very powerful and very fragile god, very threatening and very threatened. Nobody else believes in you but me.
But the amorous break also speaks of the danger of winning. The danger is when you create a world, designed as a whole and for a whole people, made up of two individuals. This world-of-two depends for its survival on a single other person. The world-of-two is immediately surrounded and threatened by death. Death closes in around it tightly. Love immortalizes me. Only that which gives me life can take it away from me. That which gives, gives to enjoy, that which gives to enjoy, gives to fear its loss. Give to lose. The gift and its opposite.
It is on the basis of love that one recalls mortality. We are mortal only in that high region of love. In ordinary life we are immortal, we think about death, but it doesn’t gnaw at us, it is down there, for later, it is weak, forgettable. But as soon as I love, death is there, it camps out right in the middle of my body, in daylight, getting mixed up with my food, dispatching from the far off future its prophetic presence, taking the bread out of my mouth. It’s because I love the beloved more than I love myself, you are dearer to me than I am to myself, you are not me, you don’t obey me, I was sure that I was once myself immortal, otherwise I couldn’t live, I live only on that assurance, but what about you?
I do not order your immortality. I can no longer live without you. That need overwhelms us. That’s why anguish bursts forth: because the need pushes us toward the realization – no matter what, yes, I must die.
There is no greater love than the love the wolf feels for the lamb it doesn’t eat. The other side of the scene is the paradoxical refined magnificent love of the wolf. It’s not difficult for the ewe to love the lamb. But for the wolf? The wolf’s love for the lamb is such a renunciation, it’s a christ-like move, it’s the wolf’s sacrifice – it’s a love that could never be requited. This wolf that sacrifices its very definition for the lamb, this wolf that doesn’t eat the lamb, is it a wolf? Is it still a wolf?
Why does the idea that you are going to eat me up fill me with such pleasure and such terror? It’s to get this pleasure that you need the wolf. The wolf is the truth of love, its cruelty, its fangs, its claws, our aptitude for ferocity. Love is when you suddenly wake up as a cannibal, not just any old cannibal, or else wake up destined for devourment.

This next bit is from a script I recently wrote inspired by Deleuze's notions of deterritorialization and becoming animal:

To escape territory or at least territory as we are accustomed to it. Does this mean entering a new territory? Perhaps this is how we deterritorialize. At first, at least. To baby step is leaving one’s own territory. Like the foreigner who leaves their homeland to live in another. Always remaining fractured a bit. Now an outsider to their home and yet an outsider to their new place. And still not knowing what is home. A decentered body belonging nowhere but to the self as a constantly changing thing. But still accountable to that which is outside of it. But this foreignness inside of each of us exists and we can only grow and change when we allow it to recur, frightening us perhaps, causing anxiety at the sublimated becoming not so. But this is how we learn to become animal. Perhaps. To leave the laws that we have known, or to leave in the sense of strict adherence, in favor of being unbound, unchained to a place, to a space. Actively seeking this change. Knowing that it will never be the same and there is no turning back. To constantly let it move and reconstitute us as more.

Does this spark anything? I would be happy to keep down this road if others are interested....we can use any of this text, cut it up, keep it solid, rearrange, reassign, etc. Perhaps it could be a way to create different voices to be layerd upon one another in the piece....the philosophical ponderings meets the waitress and the change one another or something like that.