Excerpt from an autobiographical prose book Dissertating
Translated by Erika Lastovskytė
The Crisis of Representation
Just a moment before the impact, I realized that I no longer had a face.
I writhe in pain, gripping the air in front of me with my hands, terrified to touch the gaping chunks of wet flesh falling through my fingers in a thick red mush. I hold my hands over the remains of my face, as if hiding from the world’s all-seeing eye. My hands are like my face – one seems to be broken, the palm without skin.
The absurdity of the moment crashes down on me with all its emptiness, its searing pain, and its desperate desire to turn back time. Something is still playing through the earbud stuck in my left ear.
I can’t deal with it. I’m looking for a better place to curl up. There’s a ditch a couple of meters away – it’s sloped and softer there. I kneel in the ditch until the pain subsides, spit gravel out of my mouth, and count my teeth with my tongue. I can’t feel my teeth, but it seems they’re all still in place. Then I have to get up, put my bloody, broken glasses into my pocket, get on my bike – ah, yes, the chain has fallen off – put the chain back on, and pedal back through the calm autumn evening that has suddenly turned into hell. It’s getting dark. I hear the barking of a rabid dog (where did that dog come from?). Rough asphalt turns into a forest path, with dark dots of blood darting along. It’s a loose gravel path, and my wheels sink deeper into it. I’m dragging my bike almost at a run. The barking of the dog is getting closer. A girl stops in front of me, struck dumb, and her raging young Rottweiler immediately sinks his teeth into my calf. I try to shake him off, but she, as if turned to stone, doesn’t even try to pull on the leash.
“Hold your dog, you fucking bitch!!!” I yell at her as loud as I can. Before she comes to her senses, I manage to get rid of the Rottweiler, run to my car, and throw the bike in the boot. As I make a turn, I see an old lady holding a small girl’s hand, trying to drill through my car window with her glare, as if the information waiting for her on the other side of the glass could grant her eternal life in heaven. I disappear, a bloody ghost in her eyes on the eve of the Day of the Dead.
I’m driving like the Terminator without a face was flying a helicopter. I have no feelings, only my mission, which at the moment seems absurd to me. Everything seems absurd. I am pulling paper towels from behind the seat, scraping blood clots from my eyebrows, trying to put the remains of my glasses on my crushed nose. In spite of everything, life goes on as it should, and traffic flows smoothly and orderly. The traffic lights turn yellow, then green. I successfully pass all the junctions and exit Antakalnis Street. Courtyard, dark staircase, keys. My two sons, glued to their screens, don’t even raise their heads. I’m sitting on the doorstep of my home and I have no idea what to do next.
Augustas walks to the bathroom and stops when he sees me, astonished.
“Dad, what happened to you?”
Kristupas raises his head and asks the same question.
“Halloween,” I say and wink with my good eye.
“Ohh,” says Kristupas and dives back into his screen.
Ambulance. The driver repeatedly asks me not to stain the seats with blood. Hospital. They ask for my ID, and I hesitantly hand over my driver’s license. I am told to take off my jacket and sit in the operating chair, where my eyes are flooded with pink light, and I’m surrounded by angel-like creatures that I can no longer see. I can only feel their touches puncturing the flesh of my face and the light flirting around my head.
“Mmhm, yes, a mosaic…” says a voice about what’s left of my identity.
Needles piercing my forehead, a young doctor is flirting with a resident who asks him, “How should I do it here?”
“Yes, like this,” says the doctor’s voice.
“But it’s not like it’s very…”
“It will be fine... In six months, he can make it look better if he wants to…”
I feel an almost blissful surrender to the hands of the angels. The angels work slowly. They work down my face for an eternity until they reach under my nose. It’s impossible to endure the needles jabbing into my upper lip and the inside of my nostrils.
“Hang on a bit longer. We need to get a stitch in here. There’s not much left,” says the angel in a gentle voice.
The devil enters the ward, points his finger at me and says, “Hhhh, oh wow…”
I remember the story of John Fare, an artist who, with an audience watching, had a device he had constructed amputate his body parts “at its own discretion,” ultimately ending with the amputation of his head. The story is so absurd that it might almost be true.
Then the ambulance takes me to another hospital to fix my hand. It turns out that I no longer have a driver’s license, and the place I’m coming from doesn’t have it either. Clearly, the devil stole it from the doctor’s desk while the angels were fluttering around my head. I manage to find out that the devil was a patient named Gediminas Skeivys, along with his identity number, address, and a phone number that is no longer in use.
My glasses remind me of John Lennon’s bloodied glasses, photographed by Yoko Ono. When I get back to the studio, I try to take a picture of them. Stressed out, I fail to realize that there is no film in the back of my Hasselblad camera. I take a picture of myself “on blank film” too.
I wonder: in what information field media, or in which parallel coordinates, are the images taken by a mechanical camera without film?
My last text ends with my not knowing. What features and strokes should make up my self-portrait? I don’t know yet. Two months have passed since then, and now there is even less knowing than there was then. The situation once again resembles a detective story that developed dynamically and then reached a dead end.
Detective stories are sustained by illusions and false assumptions. If we knew the answer from the beginning, there would be no point in reading them. One could say that the only meaning of a detective story is the story itself. Its purpose is to manipulate the reader’s curiosity and keep their attention on the plot, presenting a denouement at the end. When the reader learns the ending, the story concludes.
But why should I care about my self-portrait now?
Gediminas Skeivys. I type it into Google.
“Drunk driver involved in near-miss with police, court hears,” Google says.[1]
“TWO women police officers were startled when a car came swerving towards them just after midnight in Redditch town, a court was told…
“Skeivys, aged 33, of Mount Pleasant, Redditch, was jailed for 12 months after he pleaded guilty at Worcester Crown Court to dangerous driving and driving with excess alcohol. He was disqualified for three years.”[2]
The number 33 and the number 79 in his personal identification both match. Now I know where my driver’s license has gone. I’m going to the police.
They take me to a room with an old computer and a CRT monitor and tell me to write a statement. I can’t write because I can’t use my right hand. Vaida writes for me. With my bandaged face, I look like a character from the movie The Invisible Man. The policemen are calm and accept my statement with indifference. “We’ll investigate,” they say.
“And what about my driver’s license?”
“You no longer have it. If you want to get a new one, you can contact Regitra.”
When you order a driver’s license from Regitra, you need to have your photo taken right there, at the office. Maybe I really should get a document with my bandaged face? I understand that entrusting your affairs to the police is a messed-up and hopelessly futile business. By the time they start sorting things out, Skeivys will have his teeth fixed and will be in the UK with my driver’s license. The next day I go to Taikos Street in Justiniškės. Perhaps his parents live there, or someone else who could give me a better idea of his whereabouts?
Artistic practice, like detective stories, is based on various illusions. From the very beginning of your conscious life, illusions act as its driving force. Art is an illusion. Culture is an illusion. Every art project is created on the basis of illusions you have at a particular stage of your life. They keep hold of your attention over what you do, over the things you live through. Perhaps, if there were no illusions, we would die much sooner. The fact that the detective story of life ends in death is self-evident. But you are always surprised when you feel the proximity of death. It’s as if you didn’t know it was imminent. Death is the only real thing. A long-worn and ever-new topic.
What illusions am I living now?
A nine-story building with a door code. Apartment number, I come to Gediminas’s. A hesitant female voice wavers for a moment but lets me in. I find apartment 22 on one of the upper floors. The doorbell. A character from an unidentifiable cartoon opens the door and makes a surprised face.
“You accidentally took my driver’s license at the hospital yesterday,” I say.
“A license? What license?” The guy hesitates for a moment then instantly understands everything.
“Oh, yeah, I found it, I was thinking of reporting it to the police. I have no idea how it ended up with me. I have my own,” he says, flipping his ID card in his hand demonstratively.
“Happens,” I say.
“So you got messed up, huh? Fuck me...” He hands me my driver’s license.
My exhibition is coming up, and it’s getting harder and harder to concentrate on writing. It feels like I can only focus on one thing at a time. When the situation demands multitasking, I start to get flustered. I’m entirely a monotasking person.
I also can’t resist the idea that words deceive and confuse everything.
Even Marshall McLuhan, who seems to have been able to tirelessly broadcast a stream of words saturated with different ideas, emphasizes the limitations of language in several chapters in his seminal work and compares language to the primitive tools of Stone Age people. Language, according to McLuhan, is only a temporary medium in the development of humanity:
The condition of “weightlessness,” that biologists say promises a physical immortality, may be paralleled by the condition of speechlessness that could confer a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace.[3]
Or:
Languages are stuttering extensions of our five senses, in varying ratios and wavelengths. An immediate simulation of consciousness would by-pass speech in a kind of massive extrasensory perception, just as global thermostats could by-pass those extensions of skin and body that we call houses. Such an extension of the process of consciousness by electric simulation may easily occur in the 1960s.[4]
Be that as it may, the processes of progress unfold much more slowly than the prophet of the media world had anticipated. More than half a century has passed since the sixties, but there is no sign of global thermostats or mass extrasensory perception. Instead, it smells like global warming, a global economy, and a global language that, before it even has the chance to become truly global, is starting to fracture into dialects typical of elite and peripheral consumption spheres. Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future, while created much earlier, seems much more convincing. The time of Brave New World is upon us.
I deliberately arrive late to Sverdiolas’s seminar so I don’t have to explain the scars and the stitches sticking out of my face. I stay silent throughout the entire seminar. Things happening here feel strangely distant. The theoretical discussions seem meaningless and pointless, almost absurd. I leave as quickly as possible after the seminar so I don’t have to interact with anyone. Nearly a week has gone by. At night, I pull the stitches out of my forehead, nose, and upper lip. I look hideous. But it’s slightly better now. I look at myself in the mirror. For an hour, maybe two. I don’t think about anything. Just look. Žiūra.[5]
1. “Drunk driver involved in near miss with police, court hears,” Redditch & Alcester Advertiser, 22 September 2012, http://www.redditchadvertiser.co.uk/
3. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 92.
5. Play of words: author’s surname Žiūra in Lithuanian means “looking.”
