Tenderness an epic in progress

Vincent A. Dioquino

copyleft 2015 by Vincent A. Dioquino all rights reversed any part of this work may be reproduced & modified without prior permission & without further attribution

cover image modified from thislunarbeauty

body graph | self-portrait, 2013

screenshots processed from Bluestacks & Android OS for HTC One X

edited from various PisoNet stalls via Paint x Adobe Photoshop

layout & design by author

typeset in Candara, cover heading in Chalet New York 1970

Digital edition first published May 14, 2015

Print edition forthcoming September 9, 2015

The Young-Girl is not always young; more and more frequently, she is not even female. She is the figure of total integration in a disintegrating social totality.

Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl

Next to herself, the body was all that mattered to her.

Conchitina Cruz, What Is It About Tenderness

PREFACE

What makes an epic an epic is its dissolution. Every erasure is a

modification of and toward the real, circumscribed over absence. Because every moment is always already reduced to its cinders, memory is evental. Because brutal and precise, it is history's medium of transference. An epic, thus, is an archive of what once burned.

What then is deferred in between virtualities? Whose becoming, whose territory, is an invention of the other? The preliminary condition of a narrative is its gap/s, its necessary omission/s. Its ellipsis. Without beginning, without place, every invocation becomes self-referential. For fire to rise, its tinder needs to be tended until it kindles: but until when and howwhat figures do we need to burn in order to rediscover the ground?

A location-based social discovery application, it can be said that Tinder reproduces the contemporary imagination and its reflexivity. But because the feminine body cannot in itself be a hermetic object without a prior forgetting, what is embodied is always already displaced. Tenderness, an epic in progress, is criture feminine whose production is set against the theatricality of the 21st centurys vast (limitless?) networks of desiring-machines, a way of forgetting what is there for what is to come.

Composed from screenshots of descriptions under the About/bio section of profiles whose demographics are constrained to women aged 18-28 years, within 100 miles of the poets location/s, with each description functioning as a

line, forming over 365 units arranged according to date/time taken and modified, this work is a poem being poem.

As an expressive interface, the libidinal economy of Tinder functions across spatial and temporal constraints, between identity and difference. Given its hypertextual operation, this work seeks to interrogate the language of excess and exchange: the pulse behind the skin that is charred. Framed as an epic, this work is always already in progress. Let the burning begin.

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