Interviews 4

Interviews 4. [… And the death/fear/horror side of things.] (3’07”)

 

[Text:] [Julie:] D’you think about death ever?

I don’t think enormously about death, no, I’m more interested in what I can do and what happens while I’m alive. There’s some slightly strange junction in me between what goes on in there [head] and this [body], as seen or experienced by what’s in there [head]. There’s some oddness with regard to my inhabiting this body, it feels so sort of naked and vulnerable and damageable and almost as if I’m wondering, from within, how the hell I contrived to imprison myself within this body—I think I mean a body. How did I end up in a body? It’s as if I’m some kind of spirit, and “Oh, I’m finding myself in this? And this is susceptible to such pain.” Sometimes when I’m walking along, I imagine “Oh my god, how bizarre and strange, the way these components are moving themselves along, how bizarre and odd. Not exactly horrible—it’s not that I hate being in it, it’s just uncomfortable somehow to be in a body, although … this body’s given me pleasure, but there’s something precarious about it. Certainly I feel very electrical and very sort of wired and highly strung. It feels the opposite of padded and puddingy and comfortable and insulated; it feels the opposite of that.
(See video here.)

[Julie:] Have you always felt that way, in your body?

I think so, yeah, I think I have. It’s not entirely without pleasure—there’s a very slight pleasure in it. And part of that pleasure, I think, is perhaps a masochistic pleasure; but it’s not just that, it’s the pleasure of a strangeness and an adventure—challenge, I mean. So it’s not without its, what’s the word—savour. My own sort of horrors are there. They’re in a misplaced but real internal imaginative trick that my imagination plays on me, giving me the idea of horrors as relating to potential insanity, potential injury, potential nameless fuck-up, you know. A particular horror of being incarnate. It doesn’t really come from outside, it does come from inside and there was nothing that really led to it other than being me, being in this mind and this body with this imagination.

[Julie:] But the darkness is related to fear?

An internal fear, that’s right, an internal on-the-edge sort of feeling. The darkness, yes, I suppose it comes from some kind of strange excessive imagination.

 

(This video is also on Vimeo and YouTube.)