I found this old notebook the other morning after spending the evening with my friend Kat, who I love that I don’t always get the time with. It has notes, quotes, or snippets rather, from Laura Marks’ book The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Which I bought after graduating from school. We had read a chapter in the best class I ever took and I wanted to keep it with me. I don’t know where the book is, I think my friend used it once to prop up my air conditioner, so I just have these notes to riff on.
In the book Marks writes about an idea of hers, her most influential, called haptic visuality. She describes it as “a way of looking that does not isolate, master, or seek to identify what is beheld, but instead merges with it.” My notes help create a sense of what that image looks like: “close up -> soft fuzzy, familiar, does not require the close scrutiny of optical visuality.*”
Sight can be an ok analogy to taste if you can accept the idea that all senses are actually touch senses. I feel I came to this on my own in my life, inspired by this reading and some other things, but it’s something other people use too. Atsunori Satake, who I interviewed in May of last year also orients his work in this way. And once when I brought it up with a colleague who I thought might have something more to say about wine/touch/taste: not only does wine touch your tongue to perceive the heady taste response, it also goes inside of your body and touches you in a way that is harder to understand. In your throat and in your stomach and keeps going. He told me I should have a drink with his other friend, the winemaker Laureano Serres. And I hope to do that someday because we haven’t talked about it since.
Drinking something can be a close up. Seeing wine with your eye is limited. Seeing with your tongue is a possibility, but in the abstraction of sight you have a choice. Because the tongue is not a literal eye, the repeated experience of tasting shapes your relationship to your tongue and your perception of information. If a flavor is a signifier of a fact like a technique, terroir, variety, vintage, personality, or more likely the combination of all/some of those, how are you seeing them? Or does that alchemy produce something else to look at estranged from those facts? And then still what about the feelings that lack the immediacy or history of language, the touched gut and the gullet? We are also smelling. I tried to talk about it with a different winemaker who I respect, and he did not like the idea that all senses can be joined by touch. The senses are discreet, taste is taste and touch is touch. Which is useful because while I have a different perspective I think these approaches to understanding information derived from taste rely on each other. My only “take” is that there is perhaps an overemphasis on the approach that seems to model itself on optical visuality and the notion of achievement in this field is hinged on it.
Marks also references the writer Vivian Sobchack who calls this mode of seeing (for me a mode of tasting, for both of us a mode of touch) a volitional and deliberate vision. This is a choice, it can be considered an exercise and it doesn't always come easily. Practicing this both I and the object of my vision constitute each other, considered in this context intersubjective eroticism. The erotic lives in the merging between self and object in a way that shifts our power dynamic with what we are in relation to. Talking to a friend the other day he pulled a quote from Atsunori Satake that begins to help shape this practice:
“[My] philosophy of combining wine and vessels starts with the idea that ‘I am in the position of wine.’ The traditional method of serving wine has been "how people can enjoy wine". My philosophy is ‘how wine can enjoy’. If there is a correct answer to the taste of wine, I feel that it is there.
I think with something you consume it’s actually more direct than the film image, or like imagining how you consume images. Though you choose this I think sometimes, maybe with this in the back of your mind or with a bit of practice/the right “look”, the wine forces you to privilege the sensual knowledge over the intellectual. To really try to feel it all the way down, which maybe looks like letting go of the mouth entirely, what happens with the faculty of taste and the ability to speak to it. When you are left with, “not just the taste but also the feeling”.
To be honest, I find that notebook a lot. There are other things in it like old Cellar Door menu meeting notes, ideas for clay, and sketches for a tattoo I gave that says “GODBLESS” (for a long time on the arm it looked like “GOOBLESS”). In the past I’ve gently mourned the distance between my mind and that writing, the ability to read something like that also comes with practice. But the preface to it, the night with this Bugey Pinot Noir that neither of us (wine people) claimed to understand, was practice enough to connect.
*Optical visuality is less intimate, a “distant view of complete subject associated with Renaissance perspective. Renders the image as a figure distinct from the ground. Viewers receive it from a distance.” This is commonly considered “being objective”.
No comments:
Post a Comment