William Basinski | The Disintegration Loops (Box Set)
Meanwhile:
I knew that I was what the word gay named as early as I can remember, but I’d never heard the word queer as anything other than an insult until I arrived at university. That might be a reason why endless arguments about what it means to be queer have felt to me to be unavoidable yet somehow dispensable. I know I live the life it is trying to name, but I know that life can be lived without that name. And I’ve never felt that life more intensely than in those moments in warehouses and clubs when people with different desires, desires which need to exclude others to be fulfilled, nevertheless come together to make something collective. Nothing so grand as a culture, nothing so bound to time as a generation, nothing so fixed as an identity. But some kind of collaborative loosening of the constraints of individuality produced by the collective difference of our desires.
The American scholar Saidiya Hartmann, who has devoted her life to studying the legacy of slavery in black American life, was once asked in an interview: ‘How do you define joy – what does joy mean to you?’ She replied:
‘I tend to describe joy as this experience of transformation or release from the constraint or costume of the individual or the subject into this other form. So, for me I think it’s about floating, it’s about being nothing and being everything at the same time; this sense of the self-disappearing in the context of the vastness of the earth, the ocean, the sky, the land. That kind of joy is always about self-dissolution, escape.’
Is this what it means to be happy? In those clubs, the working of desires and embodiments that I will never experience produced those moments where I felt suspended in that strange place between individuality and the collective, neither one nor the other, neither different nor the same, certain these were not my experiences alone, certain I was not writing the story that is ‘me’.
