Chic Lunacy

Wearing:

Hair: Burley Tae

Makeup: Tuty’s Tao Moon (Recent)

Top: Violator Hit Me Up (New)

Pants: Violator Luxury Jeans (New)

Bracelet: Kosh Inverted

Ring: Kosh Inverted

Photography: Dammi Quan

Model: Mallory Cerise

Sea Witch

“For some time there was a widely held notion... that the 'thinking ocean' of Solaris was a gigantic brain, prodigiously well-developed and several million years in advance of our own civilization, a sort of 'cosmic yogi', a sage, a symbol of omniscience, which had long ago understood the vanity of all action and for this reason had retreated into an unbreakable silence.” Stanislaw Lem

 

Wearing:

Hair: Catwa Afnan

Brow Decor: Zibska Valle

Eye Shadow: Zibska Louche

Lips: [mock] Subzero

Dress: Taliesins Ghostly bride love lost at sea

Photography: Dammi Quan

Model: Mallory Cerise

Where Dreams Never End

 

Wearing:

Hair: LeLutka Vibrato

Eye Makeup: LpD Gold (Cosmetic Fair)

Lips: tgs Lip tinte ice queen (Cosmetic Fair)

Jewelry: Donna Flora Carmen

Dress: AD Creations Titania

Pose: Posesion

Photography: Dammi Quan

Model: Mallory Cerise

Location: Tart Gallery

New Violator

Wearing:

Hair: Burley Kenny

Eye Makeup: La Malvada Mujer The way of shadow #3 (New at Cosmetic Fair)

Lips: tgs Lip tinte ice queen (New at Cosmetic Fair)

Jewelry: PP MeiMei (New at L’Accessories)

Jacket: Violator Passion (New)

Skirt: Violator Candy (New)

Legs: Shi Leg harness

Feet: Slink Mesh feet

Pose: Posesion (New)

Setting: Dammi Quan

Photography: Dammi Quan

Model: Mallory Cerise

Vogue Snow Maiden

Wearing:
  
Hair: Catwa Eleanora

Makeup: LovelyMi Sweet Cao

Jewelry: PP Venus

Dress: Pidria Bonetto Factory Gizele

Boots: Schadenfreude Leith

Photography: Dammi Quan

Model: Mallory Cerise

David Lynch Tribute: Twin Peaks, The Black Lodge, Part II

Everything about her suggested a desperate desire to dive back into the world she’d mistakenly left behind, to rejoin the black fire with all possible haste.

—Lutz Bassmann

Inside me there is something

No one knows about

Like a secret

—Laura Palmer

It’s mostly pain that demands a response.

—me

The Black Lodge is described as “the shadow-self of the White Lodge. The legend says that every spirit must pass through there on the way to perfection. There, you will meet your own shadow self. My people call it ‘The Dweller on the Threshold’… But it is said, if you confront the Black Lodge with imperfect courage, it will utterly annihilate your soul.”

Also: “The presence of doppelgängers, or ‘evil’ aspects of a person's personality, is possibly the most unsettling feature of the lodge.”

My fascination with the theme of doppelgängers resurfaced a year ago, after seeing this film. I’ll say two things on this subject, mirroring the (non-)duality of the Black and White Lodges.

Without going into the folklore or the psychiatric and neurological underpinnings of the doubling (not something I could do anyway), there’s a lot to be said about someone’s inability or unwilingness to see a phenomenon as a whole, to create meaning out of complexity. And that is frighteningly relatable.

This is what I wrote to a friend a year ago:

yeah, i'm just struck by the film. of course to me it does seem to be an exploration of sexuality and of how female sexuality--body, matter, nature itself--is traditionally construed as abject, immoral, and ultimately terrifying. reason can't even "fit" two aspects of the psyche together, so they are literally seen as belonging to two different people, even though the body is still one and the same.

In Twin Peaks, the series, we see Laura as an absence, a supposedly blank stand-in for the anonymous multitude of the abused and the murdered. (I disagree with this reductive interpretation entirely but it’s out there.) In Fire, Walk with Me, we get to see Laura as a living girl, in her horrific, almost Antigone-like fatality and endurance. What’s missing here is the other Laura, the not-Laura, the one Dale meets in his dream. In other words: what’s missing is the force born out of her trans-dimensional pain and struggle, the force forever filled with secrets. The secrets of a paradoxical kind, both gentle and savage, sheltering and burning.

Now, as for The Black Lodge… Do you know what it means to be an impostor? It means dancing with the demons on the shimmering threshold of self-deception, the way “Leland” danced after Laura’s death, swiftly and monstrously. It means gaining someone’s trust, only to identify their weakest point and use it to destroy them. But the thing is, you see: even the demons won’t pity you. At first your dance will become painfully slow and wearisome, as though you were caught up in uncanny celestial syrup, one made of lies. It’ll become disorganized, fractured, and fatally disfigured because the sense of time will be taken out of it, time won’t be on your side anymore. (After all, there’s no music in psychosis, there’s knowing the words but not the music. What’s more: there’s the ghastly “moving of dancing figures in an illuminated dance hall into which you look from the dark night, from so far away that you cannot hear the music. The turning and moving of the couples appears then to be senseless. The lack of a rhythm… renders the distantly perceived scene of the ball “phantom-like” and“senseless”—fantastic—and creates the malaise, the feeling of a distancing of what is close, the quality of "between life and death.”) And then it’ll disintegrate. Without a trace. As will you.

Two points, two Lodges, two sides. Except that they coexist and overlap. They shift back and forth, in fragile, hardly perceptible motions, littered with silver enigmas. And it takes genuine love and compassion to traverse the abyss of coexistence and not get destroyed. 

Wearing:

Hair: Catwa

Eye Makeup: LovelyMi

Lipstripe: Nuuna
Outfit: Solidea Follies

Ring: Kosh

Mesh Feet: SLink 

Poses: Del May

Photography: Dammi Quan

Model: Mallory Cerise

Setting: Dammi Quan

David Lynch Tribute: The Black Lodge from Twin Peaks

this eeriness does not simply come from something invisible

—Maurice Blanchot

Je ne crois pas qu’il y ait des personnes dont la condition intérieure soit semblable à la mienne, au du moins je peux m’imaginer ces personnes, mais que, autour de leurs têtes, vole continuellement le corbeau secret comme autour de la mienne, cela je n’arrive même pas à l’imaginer.

—Franz Kafka (Yes, I realize he wasn’t French… That’s the only version I’ve got right now)

I never meant to see the small hills and the fire.

—Laura Palmer

I cannot write about The Black Lodge. There’s no writing about The Black Lodge. There’s walking around it, possibly in it, via writing, but it’s the traversal of space that really counts. It’s your bodily motion, your fear of standing still, your refusal to stand still, your footsteps, your minute halts, your hardly perceptible shifts, and carefully, even painfully sustained intensity, at the needle-like point of convergence of the physical and the mental.

It’s the bodily motion of someone who knows that if they make the wrong step, or if they fail to make a step, if they pause or hesitate at the wrong moment, they will die. Or they will want to die. But they won’t be allowed.

It’s this inexpressible, intuition-driven tension that really counts. Writing comes in the wake. Trivially, belatedly so. It means preciously little next to the utmost bodily concentration in the impenetrable darkness.

I will share a personal detail because this is as personal as it gets. In fact, I’ll share a few personal details. My first explicit reference to The Black Lodge dates back to about fives years ago. There was someone I cared about deeply and I told that person: “I have this feeling, I’ve always had this feeling that my soul is trapped in The Black Lodge. I can’t feel it most of the time, but I know that it’s the place where it’s kept.” I don’t remember what they said back. Probably nothing.

The photoshoot references a dream, through the deep blue calm water covering the floor. Here’s the description of it that I shared with my friends very recently:

“I actually don’t dream a lot. My sleep has always been really messed up, ever since I was a teen, and I have nightmares every so often, including one recently, but it was pure affect. I did have this one dream once that I kept recalling a few days ago. The dream is from a couple of years ago, possibly more. It’s about the future of Twin Peaks, of what happens after. Of course it’s obviously related to lack of closure we see in the series, the way it crumbled into nonsense. Again though, there was no plot or action: it was a strange cave-like space, drowning in water (Pearl Lakes, I assume) or blue light. And I was an observer, a witness, seeing ghostly images of the beautiful dead girls, several of them, the girls who participated in the contest towards the end of Season 2. And then there was some action. I being shown how one of the girls was murdered, by way of a spectral flickering projection on the wall, and I kept turning away, it was something unspeakable and horrific, I couldn’t watch. But what makes me recall this dream, after all this time, is the affect and power it held: it was what happened after, it was the future of Twin Peaks, the unwritten, unseen part. And the affect, for the most part, was sorrow and mourning. I’ve honestly never felt anything like that in a dream before or after that. The intensity of sorrow and mourning was just utterly striking, I still can’t get over it.”

A few weeks ago a long-time friend told me about a book called We Monks and Soldiers by Lutz Bassmann. He thought I’d like it. My friends have uncanny instincts like that. And he sent it to me in the mail. I found the following words in it: “The black space is the space after fire.” And then: “The black space is the space after pain.” I read the words and I just sat there for a long time, alone in my room. Very, very still. At that moment I knew that some things could still be said, even about this space. I was holding it in my hands, the testimony to sayability, however partial and fragmented it may be.

Like someone damaged by inadequately extensive and most likely dramatically unnecessary philosophical training, I can’t ignore the question: “Does The Black Lodge exist?” I’d love to, but I can’t. The colloquial form of this question is: “So what’s up with your Twin Peaks fetish?”

And yes, it does. It exists as that which makes visible the terrifying intensity of someone in the dark, someone in mortal danger. When the tiniest movement means the difference between life and death. When someone turns their fragile, scared, feminine body into a primal, visceral receptacle, the receptacle fatally fractured by the slowly descending delirium, to sense the echoes from the future in order not to die. In order not to want to die.

Furthermore, I’ve come to think of the obsessively liminal imagery of Twin Peaks (the threshold dwellers, the doppelgangers, the intermediaries, the innocence devoured by and returning as fire, the owls flying through the dimensions of darkness, the Black Lodge witches) as a sublime synesthetic instrument of differentiation and a way of talking about many incommensurable things. Or, more precisely, about the very fact of incommensurability. An instrument that allows one to articulate, finally, the perfectly nuanced witchcraft, the arcana, of trauma itself. The witchcraft of trauma is what it comes down to. A kind of Book of the Dead written by the intermediaries who “remain ethically bound to those who wander in vagabondage after death,” with the pages torn out. Pages with poems, pages of writing, private pages. (Interestingly, since we’re talking about non-coincidences, the opener to We Monks and Soldiers is “Constant drumming. Silence during the text.” A line from another book I’ve been reading: “They march to the beat of a different drum, whose rhythmical percussive cadence was born of trauma.” I think it’s cool. Don’t you?)

Thus, a new means to talk about stuff. To invoke and draw crucial lines. To differentiate, to experience the multiple abysses of separation. Because. Let’s face it. We really can’t talk about mourning, pain, sorrow, love, purity, courage, forgiveness, intent to kill, cruelty, and torture in one and the same language. There’s a radical split between those who suffer and those who feast on and take pleasure in the suffering of the other. An extra-worldly instrument of differentiation comes into existence and creates whispering, echoing, crying (if Maddy’s crying and screaming the name “Laura,” during her own savage murder, is not chilling to the bone, I don’t know what is) resonances in the necessary, archaically enigmatic tension between light and fire, between truth and hallucination, between the supernatural and the incurable.

The black space is the space after pain.

And here’s my one insignificant certainty, after my sensory contacts with The Black Lodge. Whatever you make of it. You need an almost-untenable shamanistic precision to ward off that which may come after.

P.S. At the crossroads of the above-mentioned dream and my realization that, in my mind, Twin Peaks is a different kind of language, I’ve come up with the endearingly crazy idea of re-imagining it in the symbols of the Tarot cards. Let this be the beginning. The Black Lodge is The Tower. This card follows The Devil and we note that, in the Major Arcana, there’s a narrative cohesion between the cards that follow each other. The Tower symbolizes the fire, the lightning, the thunderbolt, the arrow, the House of God. Curiously, Paul Huson points out that the word Dieu might have been a corruption, since it’s the word Diefel that appears in early decks. Which means it’s “the Devil’s house.” Other interpretations include ruin, downfall, change, catastrophic deaths, loss, reversal, vision, hallucination. So much for that. For now.

As I’ve told Dammi: “This will literally be a visualization of dreams.” And thank you for that. Also many thanks to the lovely Kanjena for joining me in the space where mysteries are formed.

Wearing:

Hair: Catwa

Makeup: Madrid Solo

Lipstripe: Nuuna
Ring: Kosh

Body Tattoo: Endless Pain Tattoos 
Top: Eshi Otawara

Pants: Violator

Shoes: Gos

Poses: Del May

Photography: Dammi Quan

Models: Mallory & Kanjena

Setting: Dammi Quan