This post is about being and nothingness. Is the sport of ice dancing fundamentally absurd? Carles wonders. He highlights the presence at the Olympics of a particularly "angsty couple" who brings the underlying tensions, the inherent nausea of competition for its own sake, of existence itself in all its apparent non-contingency, to the surface of the ice. By choosing a particularly overwrought song by a musical group that prefers the cacophonous and heterogeneous "mixed" style of rap rock, the skaters employed "a lyrical and textural soundscape upon which an interpretive skate dance can be performed," Carles explains ironically, as the dance itself, given in its own sensuousness, can withstand no interpretation. Words. What can they mean in comparison with actions themselves, with being in itself as opposed to for itself? Carles seems to ask. What is performance in relation to interpretation? At what stage does the performance begin, and can it ever end? Interpretations of interpretations, echoes of the event itself, which can never be isolated but can only be intuited through the miasma of words and meanings, pitiful gestures at staving off the horrible truth of naked existence.
The words of the chosen song, by echoing the vertiginous sense of nothingness, highlight this problem of interpretation, of all comment tending toward tautology. "there’s something inside me that pulls beneath the surface
consuming/confusing / this lack of self-control I fear is never ending." Carles implies that self-control itself is a myth, an always receding ideal that forever slips from our grasp, like the ice-dance routine that would receive a perfect score from the judges, silent in their chamber of decision. No wonder the singer feels "so insecure," as do the skaters by extension. Forever we are being judged by nameless observers, according to incomprehensible criteria that we shall never be able to master let alone understand. Ice dancing, in this regard, makes for the perfect sport to illustrate the hell into which we are all cast by simply being born. Always others, watching. What do they want, if not our freedom?
Of course, that is why Carles finds the song in question so well-chosen: "Wonder if “Crawling” is one of the best songs of the past century," he notes, referring to the century in which God was declared dead, and the traditional modes of transcendence, of flying above the fate of our limited species, were snuffed out systematically, leaving us all to "crawl" as it were. Carles notes that the skaters in question have been suspected of incestuous practices ("The ice dancing couple is named Sinead and John Kerr. The[y] are getting ‘mad coverage’ because they are siblings, and their dance moves get sexual and passionate.") Perhaps this is their effort to radically confront absurdity and meaninglessness with a violation of a fundamental principle of social structuration, to assault the very basis of the prohibitions by which cultural order is established. Carles dismisses the futile, whingeing effort without comment.
The effervescence of figures gliding on ice: could there be a more poignant symbol of humankind's doomed efforts to escape from immanence? Carles suggests that it is the "most authentic Olympic event," but such an assertion must be tempered by the implicit understanding that authenticity itself is indeterminate, with no reference point beyond being itself, raw existence.
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