BEN MARCUS
THE
GOLDEN MONICA
There exists in some precincts the phenomenon of the intruder or mad invader,
who enters the American house in order to extinguish himself in the presence of
the mister, the female, the children, whomever. The man powers in, arranges a
prison of wire or rope onto the members of the shelter, and settles onto a
comfortable area-the rug, a layered blanket, the soft membrane of the floor-to
attain a posture of attention to his own body that will render its demise. They
are forced to watch, the family. He lights a fire, this man. Or he arranges the
appliances to emit the sensations of music, acquits himself of the gentleman's
movement in the center of the room, queries the animal likeness carved into his
garment. In other versions he strips to his skin and manifests a final saying to
his audience. Make no mistake, they are bound such with the wire or rope that
they are forced to acquire the status of audience to this act, and then further
to the self-created corpse, which singularly occupies their attention until
rescue arrives. The condition of corpse is achieved with a lotion, usually. The
intruder might apply a final wound onto himself with pistol or kerm. This knife
is curved, fluent in the obstacles of bone and cloth.
What is interesting, as always, is the aftermath. The body, as such, lies
often coiled on the floor. Whosoever sits bound at the perimeter must witness
its stillness. The television, when activated, accompanies the temperature of
the room with a purling forth of warm air, casting the captives under the bluish
gild of the broadcast runnel. Thereafter, through unspecified elaborate means, a
single figure from the bound hostages-and plural it is, always-manages to
delimit himself from his lashed state and escape the site. It is this figure-the
escapee who abandons his bound gang for some place of lesser tension-who not
only is accused of a murder, but confesses to one, thus absorbing the suicide as
his own act, despite the weirdly meek pleas of his family, whose claims for his
innocence sound hollow, fictional.
The acts of doing and watching are interchangeable here. It is the genius of
the perpetrator of the monica to shift volition onto his audience. The spectacle
is arranged to emanate from whoever watches it, where seeing is the first form
of doing. The audience is deceived into a sense of creation for the act it has
witnessed. A member of the family seems riotously certain that he has murdered
through the body, attaining the kill.
The act is called a monica because a suicide is forced into the purview of an
audience of hostages. It is an apt model for the discussion of the shelter and
its forms, assembled in these areas under the rubric of the glimmering, new
suicide-houses in which to die. The American areas, in constituency, collaborate
to intrude and invade, looting the body of what it does not require, fortifying
it with the American medicine of the final home. While any critical neologism
made here will be shucked by the world's refusal to bear the statements of
anyone but its author, a certain new assault can be claimed for a shelter that
would close the down down, deny it light. This body will not heal itself, feign
wellness, posture some possession of any type of solution. Indeed, where air or
light does not exist, it will fashion its own, at whatever cost, whatever pain,
extracting that tonic from its own ravaged materials. The witness to this body,
and even (or especially) the figure who seeks to escape the welter of the home
proposing the monica, will be transfixed at once by the style of death that each
man achieves, rightly paralyzed in the beauty of a new mode of exit. And then
ultimately, always, by necessity, he will feel certain that he has caused
this disappearance, through some stillness or silence of his own.
It is simple, really. Where a house is, this man will maul it with noise and
steam, scouring what is stuck and stubborn therein with a lather of golden
light, producing an exit of life that is marked by the inception of a shadow.
And the shadow takes up residence inside the body, the world. And the shadow is
a scar that will not soon be put off. |