Transcript
We’re sitting in your car and I tell you I’m a hugger even though I knew ‘hugging’ isn’t your preferred language but we’ve been sitting here for several hours and time gets the better of me, time makes us sentimental and you tell me you’re not much of a hugger and I realise that it is because of time that we suffer but I remind you that we are not written for one instrument alone; I am not, and neither are you. the thing is: no one has hold me the way I want to be held and I longed for friendship, for friendship is all I longed for; for it’s a language we both understand. so, in the name of friendship (or maybe something more) you reach out a hand to teach me the art of hand shaking in the attempt to share to understand to create magic and as my hand tentatively grip yours, I finally understand the word ‘presence’, that our ‘souls’ and our ‘presence’ exist on the same plane, within the twisted skein of desire, having someone’s body to touch and being that someone we’re longing to touch are one and the same, just opposite banks on a river. We held each other that way for the rest of the night, hand in hand, clasped together as if in prayers, finally understanding all those stories of restless people who hate being alone. We held each other that way and all that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance.
At the centre of an essay is usually a question or at least some kind of obsession. And in this essayistic video, I am fascinated by one’s desire for another, specifically, the desire for human connection. As I wrote down the transcript for the voiceover, in my attempt to explore this topic, I referenced different sources that could help me elucidate both my experience and my intellectual fascination with this concept of “wanting”, the sensuality of connection and friendship.
The narrative of the transcript is non-fiction, drawn personally from a particular moment in my life. However, this narrative is made up of
- My thinking process during the event.
- My memory and commentary of that thinking process, which subtly carry their own narrative.
- And last, but not least, Aciman’s writings from Call Me by Your Name, a novel that deals with the same themes of desire and human connection. A novel that I personally adore and has largely influence the way I think about desire, love and friendship.
Arguably, if I were to present this essay linguistically, Aciman’s writing would become quotes or intellectual references that are used to exemplify my experience with the themes at play. However, through the visual medium, I can assimilate his writing and my writing together, thereby creating a hybrid of the intellectual and the personal, making them one and the same.
After all, I don’t necessarily see Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name as a separate being from my writing whenever it concerns themes of desire, love and friendship, for his work has become so close to my mind and heart and it is practically the same, his words can be seen running through the veins of this transcript.
I enjoyed the process of making the voice over, writing it and recording it. The tricky part, however, was putting it together with the images. I know that geographically, the narratives of the voice over and the images are far apart, however I found that both my voice over and the images share a similar sensuality – possibly because of the water and man swimming in the lake – and because of this, I arranged the recording in accordance to the music, to help bring out its sensuality and emotionality, as well as to the images of lulling water and the man swimming in the lake. The motions of his arms as he swims coincided with me saying, “having someone’s body to touch and being that someone we’re longing to touch are one and the same, just opposite banks on a river”, bringing the three elements – the voice, the images and the music – into a single point of clarity.
Reference
Aciman, A 2007, Call Me by Your Name, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.
This is gorgeous work, Sam. I love the way you talk of touch, and the first ‘touch’ we see is the body in water, the water caressing and falling off the boy’s skin. Your plaiting of your own experiences, with other’s writing is also lovely. I wonder what kind of dimension you would open up if Aciman’s work somehow existed in a more explicit way in the work itself? Sometimes when we see two things pulled apart, the relationship between them (ie your words, his words) instigates another kind of illumination that sits in the relation, in between the two. You could think in terms of the water imagery: making visible the drop of water apart from the ocean, before it is subsumed into it again.