Extreme
1. “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?
You just put yours lips together and – blow”
Lauren Bacall to Humphrey Bogart in To Have and To Have Not
Any extreme has to have the leavening agent of the in-between, that which is not extreme but holds the extreme(s) open. The lips of the extreme ARE the extremes, opening and closing around the great void that, though not present allows every bit of presence to form, spittle clustered around the lips and given form by the lips, another form of extremity which, unlike say the arms or legs, interfaces with the most abstract of the verging on the outside (always the place of the extreme): language, food, the sexual other, and the other generally. In other words, all the places to go without moving, all the invaginated uncanny extremes that mark thresholds and boundaries, all the hard things to grasp, pluck, tow, caress, stick through the lips or caress their external membranes…oh baby, that’s where it starts and ends, starting THROUGH it’s ends, and startling through it’s ends. You want to eximprovise ()tremely, it starts at the ends of the flesh, but doesn’t come back to itslef, doesn’t touch itself…only in the NON-extreme form, where the lips meet, where the flesh returns to it’s own, touches it’s own or what looks like it’s own, do you have regular improv. The other form is more or less like death, waving wanly from beyond the tips of the fingers, waving though the inferno, through the scrim of flesh: matter, noise, silence moving out, at the antipodes.
“It is the opening that incommensurabalizes – there where it spaces itself out. The mouth is at the same time place and non-place, it is the locus of a dis-location, the gaping place of the ‘quasi permixtio’ between soul and body, which is to say the incommensurable extension between them and common to both, since the mouth – any mouth, before any orality – opens an opening. On Touching, J. Derrida, from chapter 2: Spacings – The Incommensurable, Syncope and Words Beginning with ‘ex-‘ p 29
‘… mouthing the ring of the contracture around the noise ‘I'”
J-L Nancy quoted in On Touching
2. Extremophiles
The two ‘lips” of ‘im’ ‘provisation’ form around the bolus of a habitable – loosely speaking – structure, of negating the extemes (and those membranes can be Noise and Silence, both rounding into the other as they verge into a catastrophic totality, pointing to the final two extremes of Total Order and Total Disorder: having to choose between frigid total stasis, no movement whatsoever, and the total freedom of heat death, no possibility of formation of bonds or foundations: small choice of heaven and hell) by negotiating the extreme into a navigable point of arrival, nothing having been provided before hand, the foresight of having seen beforehand and provided for not possible: the very nature of the extreme, the inability (and yet, at a certain point, necessity) for it to be contracted around the provisions, the composures left on the shore, no, im-provisation is always condemned to be left adrift between the two shore-lips of the river, forming the spittle between the lips, in advertent lubrications which nevertheless can never bond or fuse the lips of the extreme into a total contracture (forming the noisy silence into the ‘I’ or anything else), instead always – this is the inelegant fiction improvisation is always relegated to forming a ‘jumping off’ place where it will then solidify itself into something real and non-negotiable, non-perishable: the composition, the state, shit, spit: some total form of life/non-life, the moment of not-providing leading to the ‘real’ feast of provisions at the end of the journey, set asides, hard-tack, ticky tacky. wishy washy …