Saturday, December 24, 2011

Caloub's Kisses



Caloub's Kisses
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVn7CVvIKW8&feature=related

“Proust now does a
most interesting thing:
he confronts the style
of his present with his
past”—Vladimir Nabokov,
“Marcel Proust: The Walk by
Swan’s Place,” Lectures on
Literature

Vanished Albertine—The Sweet Cheat Gone

The taste of Caloub—his cumly taste of young male madeleine. He converts himself—he becomes the subjective memory of the moment, the unevenness of what it means to draw out something from obscurity that Denise has felt, the conversion into its young male seminal equivalent. Something that reminds Denise of Caloub from then on.

As if Caloub is somehow hiding something beneath the intellectual scrutiny of his past memories or sensations. He’s there but what is it or who is it hiding underneath the moment? That’s something quite different which Denise wants to try to discover. He’s sketched it out in the manner of some kind of strange hustler hieroglyphic which one might think represents what had just happened that night.

Young pouty, moody Caloub—Denise knows that he isn’t free of him, that no amount of intellectual effort at recovery will bring back that manly moment, even tho they make love again back at Chimes, Denise trying to choose memories from their immediate past lovemaking for scrutiny, but such feelings flood his mind pell-mell, helter-skelter. He hadn’t thought of the possibility of two nude boys standing together up there on the steps of the Francois Rude statue before it actually happened—it just happened.

It was this precisely fortuitous unavoidable moment—that was the hallmark of its genuineness. When he leaned up and kissed both youths—the young Creole kid Caloub who he’d just sucked off and the Francois Rude built soldier-boy his penis so cocky cold with his French granite groin.

Denise hadn’t set out to pick up the kid at the bus station, and yet Viola! Caloub was there almost as if he were waiting for him. It was this series of déjà vu sensations that guaranteed the truth of the past for Denise—these sensations seemed to revive the mental images of it, recapturing the homoerotic scene up there on the Capitol façade steps that night and again later on in bed back in Denise’s West Chimes apartment. Swan's West Chimes Way became Guermantes Walk. Or was it the Sodom and Gomorrah Campus Ghetto?

The erotic sensation of feeling nature imitating art—the way the Arc of Triumph arched and the way it tasted and smelled and the excitement that revived the night images of Paris. Unerringly embracing and jump-starting Denise into deeper into his crush on Caloub.

It was this Caloub who did it—his Creole chiaroscuro of boyish light and manly shadows. The pouty emphasis and sullen omissions which provoked a sultry remembrance of further total oblivions to come. All of this recurring conscious memory undertow easily triggering a chain of strangely old impressions—when Denise thought surely had nothing to do with love. Surely it would all leave—and be gone by morning with all they’d done getting high on absinthe and weed that night.

But this wasn’t to be for Denise—her thoughts, her life, this new reality of so-called ‘art taken from life’ was a weird scenario. It could simply reproduce itself like a series of counterfeit lovers, a gang of beautiful faux-Albertine lovers. The kid he picked up turned out to be more than just a lovely cheat named Caloub squirting his brains out. More than just an epitome of young male beauty. The kid became a repetition of what Denise’s eyes wanted to see and craved even more than anything. A faux-reality to live with, so far removed from anything he’d known before. Their love affair became for Denise the formal knowledge from which Caloub’s exquisite succulence grew—the kid’s carnality cruised smoothly into Denise’s life.

It was Caloub who was in grave danger tho—he who let himself die in Denise’s arms each time they made love without ever having known himself as a man and yet was full of life, left virgin as he really was, an Adamic virgin kid disclosing himself again & again between the excruciating present and the past. This is what Denise wanted—to discover what he called nature imitating art in a certain relationship of pure sensations and memories which surrounded them both at the same time they were being destroyed by it.

In short, to recreate the past as something other than the operation of memory—to find lost time, to let lost time be found again in an imagined present time-line. To combine such a present time-line with a homoerotic mise-en-abyme. Instead of obliterating the present, continuing to be aware of it not as a single mise-en-scene—but as a series of delicate scenes plumbing the depths of an ancient gay mise-en-abyme.

In other words, thru Proust and Rude—to help young Caloub achieve an understanding of himself, letting him forcibly impress himself on Time, letting Caloub become a work of art, occupying in Time a place far more considerable than the restricted, allotted Marseillaise-Faux Monnayeurs façade of some imaginary Arc of Triumph. Or an art deco streamline-moderne skyscraper portrayal looming up by the Mississippi River late at night.

And the Narrator? Contextualizing herself with frivolous pleasures—all the idleness, tender affections and sorrows that Denise has stored up inside herself. Without foreseeing its final purpose or even its survival, reaching back into time. Caloub’s life and Denise—touching simultaneously for a brief moment—a tres gay epoch in their lives together. With countless young male madeleine moments—that seemingly continue to imitate art.

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