Trench
By Nina Nguyen
This piece is part of Love-letters, a collection of digital works collated by guest curator Jess Hewett. Love-letters considers the possibility of love-letters as a mode of online writing that can escape problems of solipsism in girlblogging. This release offers love-letters as a collaborative assemblage of desire beyond any one given subject, dwelling on Deleuze’s provocation that “all writing is a love-letter”.
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Nina Như Ngọc Nguyễn (b.2006) is a Chicago based artist working somewhere between the impossible knot of being and beholding. Informed by the object relations school of psychoanalysis, her embodied archive is a pastiche of textual and visual collage operating as autofiction as autotheory as autoeroticism as automutilation, as well as an open letter to whom.
Irina is a philosopher, pornographer, and balloonist.
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“Trench is a letter written in response to Lawnmower, a 6000-word confession written in a single breathless sentence by Daniel H. Hoffmann.
To properly respond to such text requires a sort of mimetic communication: correspondence becomes a stripping of the self, where words become the symbolic storage of lived subjectivity, allowing for an ecstatic exchange that puts the I beside itself. The epistolary form here opens up a parallel discourse, maintaining the structural integrity of the first text, while also operating as both autofiction and autotheory.
The neuter voice of the minor language writer revises language through experiencing the finitude of its structure: here, metaphors and anecdotal digressions work together toward a canceled confession, disclosing just enough to guide its readers through a seemingly perpetual slippage. To retrace the locus of the wound requires a weaving between past and present, finding resemblances of the self through other objects in the world.”
Trench
[a parallel discourse, written to the other,
who, like me, spent an epoch in a box]
Dear —,
I’m thinking of your propositions, that is all your ways that are one, how the existence of the text involves several degrees of violence: to write, first, is to disrupt, because putting down words on the page is already a treacherous act of giving presence to an absence—a fervent attempt for poetic consolidation, as well as a game of endurance through the launching of your self into a much vaster movement and to imbue this pit with the fundamental struggle—in other words, planted into the making, through the precision of the word, is an obliteration (that is to reduce the mapping of the I into a singular thread of amorous and aggressive arm and hand reaching out into an adventure under the sign of thirst, which may also be a sort of self-inhabitation, though not to hide anything also means to disguise a bit more, perhaps more than a bit), which is to say that only in fragments can I read the immeasurable totality of the text (its recursive logic demands that my pleasure is in the realization that the word is a world in flame), meaning it is through its rescinding utterance that I cross the threshold of the self into an assemblage of bodies (and, in doing so, I let the smoke envelop me whole); beyond that, speaking on the text would be like sneaking new questions into an already pervasive inquiry, which means new inquiry and new meditation—a revelation of revelation, with the promise of further revelation—and so, in place of speaking on the text, below is a parallel discourse of my own venture into the pleasure of excess:
The word I seems to me like the structure of the world captured in a single gesture, and so to start speaking at all is to start with the word I, and I have really only been alive for a bit more than a year, how I resent all that wasting away, all that lost time I spent (an epoch in a box locked away beyond my reach) in a townhouse built in the style of French colonial revival architecture the same year as my natal date—one of the sort with ornamented wrought iron fences, marble staircases, chandeliers, each of its walls coated with an impeccable paint of cream white color on the outside and floral wallpaper of the same shade on the inside—despite its humble stature in an upscale neighborhood, its all-white appearance, and—perhaps more remarkably—its elaborated garden hat my mom has especially arranged—keenly tending to days after days, months after months—of which notably, among other structures and spatial practices carried out in strict adherence to all sorts of feng shui and filial piety principles (as well as the crawling of some reptiles [whose details I can’t bare to even lay my eyes upon, let alone to give any further descriptions—perhaps aside from their wriggling into some dark corner behind the lush bushes, or their omnipresent-absence forever watching my every move]), are tendrils of roses creeping up along each white upsurge of the iron fences, coupled with clusters of bougainvillea of the variegated type in bright magenta and crimson red, their monstrous proportion has fully engulfed the arch of the entrance into a canopy of overflowing vitality; being a proud display of abundance, surely these plants would have continued probing their path into infinitude, I mean after all, these heliophytes were especially chosen for their ability to endure the blazing sun characteristic of the tropical climate in this southern region, had it been left to my decision, I would have liked to see the sumptuous growth take on a life of its own, but I am quite certain that my parents wouldn’t want them to get all unruly—such extravaganza of a display in the front makes the house stand out ostentatiously from the two adjoining buildings and the rest of the densely packed street, for the moment I’m imagining how in two weeks or so, I will be back in the enclosed quietude of my top-floor bedroom in that white house—how there will be no harsh winter storm to cloak myself with a trench coat, the unbearable heat of Saigon sun demands total exposure—which is a bore, because there really is only so much I can do back home, for the excess I was endowed with come certain conventions, some unspoken code of conduct that is, whether being imposed or taken on by myself, are both restricting and hard to let go of, but which (through a new understanding that without them there could not be any game) I have now gradually grown to embrace—that however was not always the case, and I did felt for years that life was, for me, wholly monotonous, that is, despite the many different systems of education that I was under, the choice of what I could wear, what I may do, who I ought to be, was considerably predetermine—since coming to Chicago, with the newfound freedom of being in a new place, and, being many more than one, I take pleasure in the liberty of choosing which character I may be for the day in front of the wardrobe every morning—such like the nature of wordplay, how most words shelter countless other words to which they remain so intricately tied to yet somehow forgotten in the day-to-day conversation, or else like a name given, or at least for me and the name I am currently using, which was brought on me for reasons that are still, to this day, entirely perplexing, that is when, (after much disagreement between my parents), I was transferred to a British-Vietnamese bilingual school in the middle of a school year (only a few days before my 10th birthday and right bef ore Halloween), incidentally I was a very bashful child, and in retrospect I supposed it was the projection of my voice that had confused the teacher into mistaking Như Ngọc (literally, “like pearl”) for Nina (“little girl”) when he asked for a name to put into the attendance register; to be sure, apart from both having two syllables starting with the letter N, these names hardly shares any other similarities, for it was not one of the many names my mom has given me, nor a name I picked out myself, but at that moment it felt fitting, like a well-worn pair of shoes that I happened to chance upon on the side of the streets, and have now become a beloved staple I slip into every morning without a second thought—and so for the the last year, I would, on most days, conclude my morning ritual of a dressing game—most proudly, with so much joy—with a brown trench coat—a coat that is, to this day, my most prized vintage acquisition brought home for a fraction of what she’s worth—being an article of clothing I dearly love, she has transformed, through and through, into a mark of identification—both in the sense that her image signifies my presence, and in the sense that she has became another that only exists through me—even now, with her splayed bodice draped over the chair I am sitting on, I’m thinking of the excursions we would have together in the coat check rooms in the AIC around this time last year, how we would take snapshots of the various outerwear, handbags, and various other personal belongings entrusted to the staff during member-only hours, how together we ride the contour of chaos in a hunt not for dead animal but an eternal likeness (to catch semblance through the firing of a shot, to mutilate my beloved with my viewfinder), my mission, though unbeknownst to some anonymous patrons of the arts—that is the owners of these items—was granted prior permission by a manager and was carried out under the guise of his employees; on those autumn days, as I pranced around the Loop, the strap of the camera bag weighed on my right shoulder, tucked neatly inside the epaulette of my brown trench coat, our specular image projected into the glass windows of the office buildings passing by—here I am reminded of a photo of Sophie Calle, one I saw on a cover of a museum catalogue: Calle and her shoulder-length black hair, in a black trench coat, black shoulder bag, black tights inside black kitten heels,... adorned in all black (monochromatic like our friend Becca; certainly a very French look) her stature a total enigma—the length of her hem swings just above my ankles, heavy-duty hooks and a throat latch sewn hidden under the collar to shield against wind (or perhaps for even more privacy), and because there is no vent at the back, the green Nova check pattern on the wool lining is entirely obscured from the outside—she bore all the details of the traditional trench coat that would have braved the battlefield, or being donned by stars of the silver screen, save for an utmost important thing, that is she arrived without a belt, and so from under the centre of her yoke I tied for her a lace lappet (adorned both as an element in ecclesiastical garb and as a required feature for women in court, in my hands the piece of bare flesh dangling from the head of an animal became something like the lacing of a corset [here in this constriction of the form is a sort of playful merging of military silhoutte, monastery discipline, and the nervous anticipation of a debutante stepping into the old court ritual: an everyday (dis)avowal] only that it loosens and tightens at will to my every movement)—the extend of sophistication in her empire of signs and the soft murmurs of all the infinite possibilities simmering underneath the movement of her deep well of fire, visible only under the most attentive eye; as for myself, enclosed in what seems to me now like an ongoing divine murder, an almost transformation, despite my restricted mobility I was never more free: within the cloister of the trench, with all my limbs encased in the soft lining of her cocoon, I am at once the voyeur and the exhibitionist.
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* Postscript: I realized that recently the character of the librarian has received generous commendation, (with my mind’s inventory being a melting pot of many words taken in but seldom actually get deployed into my everwyday’s usage, I mistakenly take “commendation” for “commodation”, which may have been a blend between accommodation and commode: a commendation that occurs to me like that of the infinitesimal between two mirror objects gazing at one another and that which supplies a much needed recognition, like the wire support of the commode pinned to the back of the head, securing the elaborate headdress a duchess would have worn during her hunts—because for each change in environment, each lost of time to which the scope of their impact upon me [the abruptness of each anticipated separation, the impossibility of permanence] I may never truly grasp, save for maybe, the instance of the last winter, after flying back home for the break, how I felt within me a gnawing sense of derailment, a being taken out of where I am supposed to be, away from my people, away from my own being, utterly reduced into a helpless mess I was suspended against my will by a domineering structure inconceivable to me, that which had threw me back into that oblivion of forever waiting and barred me from the jubilating sensation of… of what?) being finally seen in an instance of total identification—beholden to what felt to me like an evocation, I see within me a becoming towards a oneness with all the others—admittedly I am somehow both moved and ashamed, because obliteration is like excrement on an abandoned wharf, all written, drowned in footprints (in the past year I’ve taken a liking to the name Irina, I have brought her up in conversations with my roommate many times over the last few months, but I wasn’t so sure; right now, as I am typing this, Irina is crawling frantically all over the text, in any case I think she has already exhausted herself for the moment, and this note has already gone on for terribly long)...