Juxtaposition IV

After Ferdinand de Saussure's death, a number of boxes and folios of notes were found dealing with anagrams and their connection with Indo-European linguistics and Latin poetics. Written around 1906 but not generally published until 1964, the discovery became somewhat foundational to certain aspects of modern French poststructuralist theory (esp. Kristeva and Derrida). By all reports, Saussure became somewhat obsessed with finding another layer of meaning in certain Latin texts (specifically, but not consistently, I believe it was the names of gods found in the first words/lines of texts). It's not particularly important what the subject of th anagrams were for my purposes but the fact that another system of meaning lurked 'beneath the surface' meaning of the work and unknownst and unwilled presumably by the author of the surface work.

That phenomena, i.e. a secondary level of msaning which is forever threatening to overtake and dethrone the ostensible primary meaning, has become a staple of popular culture and new age culture (remember 'Paul is dead' supposedly encrypted into an early Beatles song?). Reverse speech has now become enshrined among some as a possible route to truth, as well as the bible code and a host of other phenomena such as stegonography encrypting messages in pictures. They all have in common the idea of a second level which, from the point of view of the intended surface level are subservient to it but which threaten it. One could even say that this shadow/substance relationship is part of the fabric of modernity officially since Freud, Marx and Nietzsche and that the materiality of language seems to configure ITSELF, fractal-like, in the same way that atoms orient and connect themselves in very complex ways, ways which are still coming to light (speaking of which there is some evidence that DNA molecules emit and absorb light for seemingly communicational purposes: is this true or another example of this paradigm playing itself out?)

Perhaps, somewhat as Greg Bear (and maybe not only Bear, but some aspects of physics would make a good story) fancifully speculates in THE CITY AT THE END OF TIME, books themselves are entities which communicate somehow. Certainly it seems that way as I find these combinations. It's easy to see how one could become a kabbalistic word mystic. Herewith another combination leading to Moire communication retrieval.

(and while I'm thinking of it: might also be the/a source of the countermovement to modernism generally...I'm reading Daniel Tiffinay's wonderful book INFIDEL POETICS where he links a certain strand of counter-enlightment thinking to Leibniz's monadological speculations viz:
"Leibniz's theorization of 'perceptions we do not apperceive.' an idea anchoring the first systematic mode of subliminal or unconscious experience." That is, a second order of experience largely undetected.)
---
How To do Things With Words, J. L Austin

"So far, well and good. The action may be performed in ways other than by a performative utterance, and in any case the circumstances, including other actions, must be appropriate. But we may, in objecting, have something totally different, and at this time quite mistaken, in mind, especially when we think of some of the more awe-inspiring performatives such as 'I promise to . . .'. Surely the words must be spoken 'seriously' and so as to be taken 'seriously'? This is, though vague, true enough in general -- it is an important commonplace in discussing the purport of any utterance whatsoever. I must not be joking, for example, nor writing a poem. But we are apt to have a feeling that their being serious consists in their being uttered as (merely) the outward and visible sign, for convenience or other record or for information, of an inward and spiritual act: from which it is but a short step to go onto believe or to assume without realizing that for many purposes the outward utterance is description, true or false, of the occurrence of the inward performance."

Russian Criminal Tattoo: Encyclopedia v. II

"The tattoos drive and guide a thief's career, they 'appoint' him to new positions. They 'make' him take certain decisions, perform precisely regulated actions, carry out an entire complex of 'ritual' activities. The tattoos 'shape' the daily life of the thief, they subordinate his entire life to themselves. The reality of the tattoo is the symbolic basis of the world of thieves. The thief lives through his tattoos, he is mentally immersed in this reality, that is, he dissolves into the symbolic world of his own body. Like the Herman Hesse character who gets into the last carriage of a train and rides away -- a train that he himself drew on the wall of his cell."

[....] a thieves desires are the desires of his tattoos. A thief's basic desire is to match his tattoos perfectly, that is, to carry out the law of thieves, to be acknowledged by his own tattoos, i.e. by the Other, who spares the thief death and humiliation. But if it is the Other who speaks and acts through the tattoos, in a certain sense the tattoos are pictures of the thief's unconsciousness. That is, the world of criminal tattoos is to a certain extent a realm of the externalisation or, perhaps, visualization of the unconscious."
Anne Applebaum

The Old Straight Track, Alfred Watkins

[....] imagine a fairy chain stretched from mountain to mountain peak, as far as teh eye could reach, and paid out until it touched the 'high places' of theearth at a number of reidges, banks, and knowls. Then visualize a mound, circular earthwork, or clump of trees, planted on these high points and in low points in the valley other mounds ringed reoud with water to be seen from a distance. Then great standing stones brought to mark the way at intervals, and on a bank leading up to a mountain ridge or down to a ford the track cut deep so as to form a guiding notch on the skyline as you come up. In a bwlch or mountain pass the roacd cut deeply at the highest place striaght thorugh the ridge to show as a notch afar off. Here and there and at two ends fothe way, a beacon fired used to lay out the trak. With ponds dug on the line, or streams banked up into 'flashes' to form reflecting points on the beacon track so that it might e checked when at least once a year the beacon was fired onthe traditional day. Al these world exactly on the sighting line. The wayfarer's instructions are still deeply rooted inthe peasant mind today, when he tells you -- quite wrongly now -- 'You just keepstraight on."

Out from the soil we wrench a new knowledge, of old, old human skill and effort, that came tothe making of this England of ours.

For as in Puck, Rudyard Kipling's tale siings:
She is not any common Earth
Water or wood or air,
But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,
Where you and I will fare."

Juxtaposition III

A re-cap for all you late arrivistes (of course this being the web, the last are the first): finding my library in disarray one lugubrious night spent staring at spiderwebs in the corners, I found that the disarray of the books did indeed seem to have a shimmering order, if not aura, to them in the chance clinamen that had happenstanced them. Herewith selections from some of the juxtapositions -- without, however, lingering on possible overtures which the collisions may generate. But first another fortuitous selection from a new Greg Bear novel, The City At the End of Time, I was reading last night. I trust you will see the resonance.

"His texts, hundreds of thousands of them, were acting as a kind of lens, focusing the improbable and retrieving from not so far away, perhaps, those things that would only become likely across a greater fullness of time. A fullness now deeriorating coming apart in sections -- jamming and mixing histories in alarming ways. If nothing more were done, the future would drip-drop into their present like milk from a cracked bottle."
Greg Bear

From Proust, Samuel Beckett:

"The point of departure of the Proustian exposition is not the crystalline agglomeration but its kernal -- the crystallized. The most trivial experience -- he says in effect is encrusted with elements that logically are not related to it and have consequently been rejected by our intelligence: it is imprisoned in a vase filled with a certain perfume and a certain coor and raised to a cerain temperature. These vases are suspended along the height of our years, and, not being accessible to our intelligent memory, are in a sense immune, the purity of their climatic content is guaranteed by forgetfulness, each one is kept at its distance at its date. So that when the inprisioned microcosm is besieged in the manner described, we are flooded by a new air and a new perfume (new precisely because already experienced), and we breath the true air of paradise, of the only paradise that is not the dream of a madman, the Paradise that has been lost."

from Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic, Dan Auiler:

Sequoia sempervivens is the classic redwood that gives this forest its beauty, and its ancient slendor would of course have attracted Hitchcock. The stand of trees through which Novak and Stewart wander is more than a thousand years old. The Latin name and definition is prominent in all the literature connected with the Big Basin; the film's explicit reference suggest the same was true in 1957.

No on at the park has any recolletion of the Vertigo filming nor does ajy park record remain lof the two-day visit. The crew's shooting days were shorter than usual -- under five hours.

"On October fourteenth, most of the time was spent on the conversation just prior to the redwood cross-section scene. Judging from where the Jaguar is parked and where the redwood lcut is positioned, the scenes were filmed on a trail known today as the Redwood Trail. The two and a half page sequence was completed in a number of setups, the most difficult one requiring seven takes; in the final cut of the film, only a page of the material remains. Though Big Basin has (and still has today) a cross section like the one in the film, all of the dialogue surrounding the cross section itself was shot later on a soundstage and then integrated seamlessly with the location footage."

from In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space, Douglas Curran:

Madeleine Rodeffer became interested in flying saucers through reading a 1954 classic, Cederic Allingham's Flying Saucers From Mars. The book mentioned George Adamski's similar encounter with a blond Venusian named Orthon. A search of her local library turned up three titles by Adamski: Flying Saucers have Landed (1953), Inside the Space Ships (1955), and Flying Saucers Farewell (1961). Deeply moved by Adamski's writings, Madeleine paced a call to his home near Mount Palomar, California. 'I became so convinced that Mr. Adamski was telliing the truth that the first time I called him on the phone, I offered, 'I would like to know what I can do to help you spread the word.' Adamki's reply was simple and direct: 'Read and learn all you can. Be open-minded and do what you feel is right.'"

Juxtapositions II

The second one of these, these...bibliomancies for lack of another word, until I get tired of these diffraction grates...but of course a book person ... or perhaps rather some kind of feral scholete who, rather than truth, enjoys the sparks ..but then, what is truth without the sparks and grating mists?

Again, the books were found lying together after a year of debauchery; the first bookmark or placeholder was followed. The sometimes Orphic nature of the concatenations comes from chance placement. There are times when the whole library becomes a visceral writhing of energies, sedimentations, cautious circumspections and ebullient demands, patent nonsense mied with the darkest but profound obscurities --and me stymied in differentiating the two, that it seems as if a Lovecraftian door will --or perhaps already has done so -- open any second and draw them all in with a deep eldritch inhalation combined with the sound of snapping shut.
rc
--

Awaiting Oblivion, Maurice Blanchot

• You will never find the limits of forgetting, no matter how far you may be able to forget.

• "But if I remembered eerything and told you everything, there would be nothing more for us than a single memory." -- "A common memory? No," he said solenly, " we shall never belong in common to memory." -- "To forgetting, then." -- "Perhaps to forgetting." -- "Yes, when I forget, I already feel closer to you." -- "In a proximity, however, without approach." -- "That is correct," she eched fervently, "without approach." Also without truth, without secrecy." -- "Without truth, without secrecy." -- As if disappearance were the last pace of any meeting. Forgetting will separate us slowly, patiently, though an identically unknown movement, from whatever still remains in common between us." [....]

• Being is yet another word for forgetting.


Mesopotamian Myths, Henrietta McCall

Radiant with terro, Marduk sets out on the road to Tiamat, but at the sight of her his will crumbles and he cannot decide what to do. Although this sees somewhat unrealistic, it is a common mythical device (used also in the epic of Gilgamesh) to heighten tension, by putting the inevitable victory temporarily in the balance. Tamat sneers, and Marduk's courage returns. He challenges Tiamat to single combat.. His the climax, the geat battle scene towards which everything has been leading:

Face to face they came, Tiamat and Marduk, sage of the gods.
They engaged in combat, they closed for battle.
The lord spread his net and made it encircle her,
To her face he dispatched the imhullu -wind, which had been behind:
Tiamat opened her moth to swallow it,
And he forcced in the imhulla -wind so that she could not close her lips.
Fierce winds distended her belly:
Her insides were constipated and she stretched her mouth wide.
He shot and arrow which pierced her belly,
Split her down the middle and slit her heart,
Vanquished her and extinguished life.
He thresw down her corpse and stood on top of her.

The gods who had formed part of Tiamat's terrifying army then panic and turn tail, but they are caught by Marduk and bundled into the net where they cower


Saint Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre

We expect the harvest of cut grain to be fine and rich; but these grains are breaths, nothing, not even a bit of air that one exhales: one will make sheaves of nothingness. The strange being who haunted the woods, whether woodland god or criminal, was defined only by his functions: having beocme a harvester of nothing, he vanquishes with his breaths, everything is canceled; the rocky, compact density of this of this sound unit and the shimmering of the light around the t=stone concealed a cold, dark emptiness. A signification beyond ;the syncretic interpenetration of the meanings was suggested to us; and this signification is the destruction of all signification, the challenging of all prose; Genet put the whole country side into this verse, but only to annihilate it. The capturing of the world, an act guided by resentment, ends in catastrophe.

Juxtapositions I

Yesterday I was staring with no particular purpose at the bookcase in front of me. The books have been moved around repeatedly and so are mostly in no order, many of them lying on tops of shelved books by the threes and fours.

I was reminded of some quip about the connections and patterns that a library can make, even under fairly well-ordered circumstances so herewith a series of volumes that were truly found together, usually stacked on top of each other, set adrift into meaning by the clinamen, by making a nice trinity.

I have, more or less, randomly selected a a quote from each book, in the cse of two of these, by a pencil or other bookmark stuck and left in place.

Looking For Orthon: The Story of George Adamski the first flying saucer contactee and how he changed the world, Colin Bennett

"Western thinking in general has great difficulty with these intermediate forms and partial states of being. Such an order of matter is excluded (rather than unkow) from science, banished to those far regions (either microscopic or interstellar) where rationalists alwasy locate thier mysteries, if only to daunt inquistive heathens, the uninitiated, and, of course the great partly-washed."

Economy of the Unlost (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan), Ann Carson

'The riddle (griphos) was a popular form of after-dinner entertainment and Athenaios tells us that Simonides was an expert riddler. He preserves two examles of Simonidean riddles (both incomprehensible to me) and appends a list of popularly conjectured solutions. 'Some people explain the riddle thus...but ohters say...and others again...' The point is, good riddles do not say what they mean. It is an innately stingy form of discourse, disguising its data and begrudging its truth. 'You know the riddle advertises all the techniques that the joke conceals,' said Freud. The ridde advertises everything except its own punchline.'"

The New Spinoza, Warren Montag and Ted Stolze.

"The Lurian conception of evil, the qelippah, which is for the Kabbalah the obverse of the En-Sof, was to play in this event, we have said, the role of a crystiller of the new doctrine. The rein of husks and shells (the literal meaning of qelipah) traditionally used by the abbaloists to designate the universe of 'evil and the demonic powers' had drifted, since Isaac de Luria, toward an interiorization of the demonic prinicple at the very root of the En-Sof (the hidden god who is indefinite and foreign to every creation, which Jacob Boehme will Grund, the foundation of God the Creator) so that the word in its complexity can reach existence:

'Know therefore that the supernal space is like a field, and ten points [that is, sefroth] are sown in it. And even as the grains [of seed] grow each according to its virtue, so also these points grow according to its virtue; and as the grains do not attain to growth and perfection if they remain in their original manner of being -- for only in their decomposition is thier growth -- so it is also with these points .... Only by their breaking could the divine configurations [parsufim] be perfected.'

As elliptical as the text is this is the rule of Kabbalah), one thing, in any event, appears indisputable: the idea of the necessity of a wrenching that, setting out from the essential negativity of the divine, provokes the scattering whose splinters are the world. This world of disorder and multiplicity -- sometimes cmpared with that of the various colors issed from the compostion of white light -- 'had to fall from the high summit to the depth of the pot soa s to be smashed and dished to pievces, like the wheat which is separated into flour and bran by grinding. Moreover by their fall the unclean forces are separated from holiness.'

Dromos: Life After Ever: Our Glorious Future in the New Quantum

"For we live surrounded, in the invisible air, by wandering avengers who never forget the 'ancient contaminations'." Roberto Calasso

The race course has been pitched to a new level---but levels go up AND down, right? (bad case of enantiadromia: every state of development at its zenith pitches over into its opposite). But...even so... those levelings can be crossed, obliquely (there you go, loxodromic), perhaps requiring abandoned gods fitting the descriptions of Gustave Moreau as it ITSELF becomes crossed with the clonal crossings of the Island of Dr. Moreau:

"Huge, pale figures, tremendous, lonely, dark and desolate, fatal, mysterious lovers condemned to titanic infamies. What will become of you? What will your destiny be? Where can you hide your fearful passions?"

(But we have a plan, we, us humans, to deal with such, and this is always where we seem to wind up folks; as that great metaphysician Bela Lugosi put it in Bride of the Monster "Home? I have no Home. Hunted, despised, living like an animal; the jungle is my home. But I shall show the world that I can be it's master. I shall perfect my own race of people. A race of atomic supermen that will conquer the world." )

Suffering from gadget disorders, the fundamentals of fetishism, we will no doubt find it hard to pass from the Thing to its outlet, to its let out-ness or even better, to the acting-out (escape even) of that Thing in itself, that bit of plastic, silicon, copper, whatever, scooting away from us (always 'scooting away' but never quite making it, the nature of the act-trying-to-get-out, can't get no traction in the rain), tending to its chores in the solar system.

It's the hardest cross-over act in the world, hanging on the edges of frayed rotting matter, looking over to the next clump zipping ahead of us, maybe into the future we think -- always brighter and shinier, yes? Atomic supermen on the march!

It's the fearful en-trance of Einstein's spukhafte fernwirkungen accusation against Niels Bohr's new quantum club, beginning to beat god about the head: 'Spooky action at a distance'‹-too much like some hoo doo infection, some non-locus hocus pocus (etymologically speaking, some transsubstantiation going on there, from the latin meaning: "here is the body"‹-now of course it means: "WHERE the heck is the body!?", just about the only thing we can get out of Freud's fort/da swollen foot dance now, the Oedipus Waltz, holding our collective family drama breaths [in waltzology, atem pauze] in between phase-state changes.

And then, too, this, ex post facto, is what the old folks pass back and forth:

"...he is surrounded by night; suddenly a bloody head juts forth here, there another white figure, and just as suddenly they disappear. One glimpses this night when one looks into the eyes of another human -- into a night which becomes frightening; here each of us is suspended confronting the night of the world." G.W.F. Hegel

Apocatastasis

APOCATASTASIS* ( " the heretical doctrine of the redemption of even the radically evil as well as the good; it promises a fulfillment without sacrifices." )

Inexorable and reversible. The inescapability associated with fate and the linearity inexorably connected with technology would not seem to make a good match and even to be at odds. Everyone would perhaps like to do away with the melancholy of fatefulness and the never-going-back of inexorable life (which always seems to have only one end). Much better to concentrate on the care and tending of our machines which seem to back up on a dime, undo the done, and seem to want to save us even while they are killing us. The interesting question is this: what happens when you mix the two modes or they meet in the middle: the abject melodrama of the inanimate and the newly-found technical messianic reversibility (from death to life) of the animate? This is perhaps the ONLY question for art - or anything else - now.

Kenosis: The False Meat of Empty

Kenosis: The False Meat of Empty

Phil. 2:6 sqq.: "Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But emptied [ekenosen] himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as man."

"Too bad for the wood which finds itself a violin if the copper wakes up a bugle, that is not its fault."

Gilles Deleuze in Kant's Critical Philosophy

the elements of the avatar:

Fundamental to the idea of the avatar is a temporal constellation of: multiplicity, simultaneity, periodicity, historical intrusion in, and often for, a sacrificial economy; then, lurking to the side of, and perhaps inherent to 'avatar periodicity' is trauma, suffering, and re-gathering or redemption. Although foremost in its mystical and millennialist form, this phase is rarely considered in technical circles where representation of a 'personality' or type or even representation itself, in the case of post-structuralism and postmodernism, is foremost. The avatar is also 'powerless' in a fundamental sense whence derives the concept's great power and a strategy of winning based on loss, defacement, and dis-ability a position which would seem to put it at considerable odds with the calculative power of techné and sacrifice even as it opens it to the concept of 'collapse' as integral to the technical.

(One could also make a point that techné is coterminous with reclamation, gathering, collecting and that chasmatically indigenous to the density of collapse and catastrophe is redemption. That density finds its aufhebung, relief, or grace in Christian kenosis. The notion of kenosis, or self-emptying, allies with both Avataric and Lacanian suturing / point de capiton, a point that is extruded by and makes oblique the forces which 'quilted' it into existencethe suturing of the Real and the Symbolic similarly forms a visible 'ridge' which simultaneous indicates and obscures its processes of creation. This is all too similar to the Catholic Church's dictum that "According to Catholic theology, the abasement of the Word consists in the assumption of humanity and the simultaneous occultation of the Divinity." [This also very close to the Heideggerean assumption of both the uncanny and the divine as "the Being that shines into every thing ordinary" (Parmenides, pp 101 and 115)] There is no getting to the 'other side' of the process because human reality is stitched together in such a way that 'both' sides are always present, but the visibility of one always obscures the other. Compare with kenosis, for example in Philippians 2:6 : "Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But emptied [ekenosen] himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as man." The notion of kenosis also overlaps certain eastern spiritual concepts as well as an emphasis on concepts such as the impersonal, the inhuman, and the extreme in Lyotard, Agamben, and Benjamin, among many other modernist philosophers.)

The 'hard' definition of avatar is the descent of a god into matter of many different forms, a rotation of divinity into humanity, a form of incarnation but without exhaustion of the godstuff, plus a plenitude of representatives popping up occasionally through history.

Perhaps the avatar, in both the mystical and the technical variant, could be thought of as a leading edge of a foreign mass which becomes intimate with the crudities of barely conscious matter (that is, us humans), the simple animacy of animal life not being sufficient for its purposes. (though it does raise the question of whether animals can have avatars and whether an avatar is a three-way or two-way mimetic consultancy.) For consciousness which has suffered a fundamental fall into the darkness of matter, the avatar is a guide back to the homeland of consciousness through avenues of delay, return, suffering, redemption, witnessing. Without separation and suffering there would be no need for the concept of avatar to have developed.

the rest here

The Discovery of People in the Invisible Part of the Universe

materials: concrete, laser, glass case, sand, cigar, day-glo paint, video
size 10' x 4'

The Discovery of People in the Invisible Part of the Universe

In the recent Korean film 'Old Boy,' the protagonist is put into solitary confinement for 15 years, with nothing but popular television for entertainment. When he escapes, the pivot scene happens when he stops into a sushi bar and orders something live. He is delivered a live octopus that he maniacally consumes, then falls into a swoon. Thus begins a switch into another symbolic level of (in)operability, signaled by the omnipresent signifier of radical otherness, the tentacle. (As a hint: the film very cleverly plays off the relations between 'octopus' and 'Oedipus,' both entities signposts of coming forbidden liminal states.)

'Tentacularity' is always a spectacular gateway to various extremes of otherness in cultural representations, a representation of that which is furthest from the human and which is always portrayed as a monstrous collapse into a regime at destructive odds with the human. The most well known popular representative of this visual motif is the portrayal of the aliens' craft in the recent film 'War of the Worlds'’

One can be sure that the arrival of the tentacle is also the arrival of the inhuman and uncanny in opposition to the human. One only has to remember those animations in the fifties of the world picture of the great octopus of communism and its encircling red arms.

But tentacularity is part of a larger body of symbology which includes Medusa and the concept of aura. All three, tentacle, medusa, and aura, are active liminalities which reach out beyond their immediate ground to encircle and tear from the human its essential humanness, Medusa causing a stone-like paralysis, a mortification of time, and in the aura, or halo, a radiance creating a 'leak' in the human into the divine as well as effecting a porosity into (and out of) the material substrate of its surroundings.

The recognition of these three facets – an unapproachable and monstrous inhumanness, a lapse into the pure materiality of a stone-like death, and the leakage into and out of the human by some form of transcendence -- signifies a rupture and switch into new forms.

(By the way: these three states all entail some form of luminescence: the octopus uses a form of polarized light to communicate—and it has been theorized that this ability to perceive in the polarized state acts a 'secret' form of communication with its kin, perhaps through its ability to change the color and patterns of its skin through chromatophores; the Medusa Effect is a cessation of sight through a direct seeing of the forbidden, while the aura / halo is an excess of light, radiance, and intolerable to a materialist culture, a form of incompatable de-monstration.)

Deep Time

October 10 2009

For those born under the sign of Saturn, that is, those of a melancholic disposition, they—I mean: me—often feel as though they are left holding the bag of time. Or maybe it should be called the Boxing Glove of Time, wherein they are left trying to always dodge a left hook but continually misjudge the punch. This, mainly because they are always looking in the wrong direction; or rather, they are always too farsighted and find it difficult to focus on the close-at-hand, which always seems broken to them. And unlike the Heidggerean thesis of the broken tool (that is: it becomes visible finally to the user), that broken-ness, while all too visible, is also shrouded in an opaqueness, obsidian, granitic in its misprisioned ‘everydayness’. One—I mean: me—sinks into a slough of forbodings, misgivings, and displacements from the Now—even to the extent of a repudiation. The solution is to view the extension of time, with all which that vertigo (keeping in mind the new focusing technique which Alfred Hitchock used in the movie Vertigo: a moving forward, while focusing back; recall also the scene in the redwood forest in re: to deep time) entails for the melancholic, and to draw it into ever deeper folds and distances. (One is reminded o the recent discovery of a huge new ring around Saturn, previously unknown). The melancholic is ‘happiest’ in the leaden folds, densities and depths of those distances and rings out beyond the sandbox. That is to say, he is happiest in his un--or non-happiness.) And certainly those densities can, in fact must be, carried inside, a singularity, seemingly not of one's making, which continually peels away and abrades all senses of subjectivity and solid placement. If nothing else, this is what continental philosophy has taught us: that these aggregate distances – within and without – don’t disappear with the Machine and the New world which it promises, don’t evanesce into the positive pole of the currents of history, but are destined to perennially appear, an abyssal gate always in place, sometimes concealed -- most of the time actually – by the mechanisms of the everyday, non-deep time world. The Virilioian fractionating of the world by speed and acceleration only papers over that time (the buzz word now is messianic time, inhabiting the ordinary world as chips and splinters, as Benjamin had it, occasionally puncturing through) but it continually throbs beneath the surface, waiting. And since it primarily 'inhabits' language, it is not eradicable but is only visible by the tensions it enacts, the torsions of nothing on nothing, a 'face on the void.'

Under these circumstances, the sublime must puncture itself and release something more akin to the uncanny.

Deep time surpasses any notion of human, in fact makes a mockery of any valorizing of the human. The speck of whatever it is to be human is absolutely engulfed by time and mocks…well, it doesn’t even mock since mockery has to be a product of human sensibility; but at any rate it make hash out of all preconceived notions of everything and inasmuch as science is a human pursuit, tends to make short work of any such notion as well.

Gregory Benford has a book out from a few years ago called Deep Time and deals with a 'simple' project to retain human legacy over vast seas of time and to make visible the vicissitudes of relatively recent time, ten thousand years or so; it becomes surpassingly more difficult than one might think to assess its parameters. How much more daunting then to consider even past that mark, a mark that no one will see. Perhaps there are ways around such temporal constraints – but only under deliverance of what might now be considered a supernatural agency … and even so.

An admirable book by Quentin Meilassoux, After Finitude, has catalyzed a whole internet wave of considerations and publications on such speculations under the rubric of Speculative Realism (Check out the Uranomic site and what seems to be the house journal of SR, Collapse). But for now that is neither here nor then. What is the psychological correlate of deep time? And how traumatic must it be? Indeed would we become a society of monks? (as in Neal Stephenson's new book Anathem; interesting also that Greg Bear’s book The City At the End of Time deals with such deep time – if not end of time – propositions. Oddly enough, speculative fiction often tends to be predominantly about deep time while religion and spirituality tends to be a coraling of such, Christianity being the prime example of containment. One might think it the other way round if they were not careful. Perhaps that is why science – and its henchman capitalism -- of necessity must be nihilistic, while religion seems oddly twisted always back into the human community.; I suppose the waters can get quite deep here: Hegel might consider, on the contrary, science to be an example of bad infinity and not religion.)

While loss and yearning seem to be the benchmarks of melancholia, and hence endemic to the human prospect, or at least those born under the sign of Saturn, it does seem more properly a function of modernity itself, even as a side project of modernity. In some respects to be modern is to be forever home sick --- but also and equally to be in denial of such. Perhaps that is why redemption must be forever a thing which always already occurred. Perhaps that is why noise bands, noise as element of composition, has become so…so now: it is the truncating of everything in a premature delerium, no fulfillment, no possibility beyond that null state; not a sounding of the catastrophe (to play off Blanchot here) but a crawling inside, an inhabiting of catastrophe, the complete truncation of Deep Time or any sort of time really other than a equally weighted implosive now. Perhaps a way of avoiding (one thinks) all possibility of homesickness, loss, yearning..but there is no more philosophical music than noise and ultimately there is nothing more empty and loss-filled than philosophical ruminations, nothing more sick of home and hence homesick than philosophy.

It seems to me appropriate that the new picture of Saturn becomes MUCH more encompassing, extending its rings into every finer regions. Reminds me of nothing so much as the legions of thrones, principalities, et cetera, all the other legions of angels moving eternally around god and passing away only to be eternally replaced.

Come to think of it, much like language also.

The Age of Living in the Crack

I came across a quote from the film director Jean Renoir to the effect that “A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.” It could well be said (and has been said well) that the same is true of books and ideas: most writers and thinkers have one book and/or idea which they massage variously in a life-long career. I was thinking recently as I was working on a bit of writing that that is surely the case with me. Although looking over whatever meager production I have done in installation art or writing or sound production has all veered in the same direction -- although when called to state the connections between the pieces and the way they move together (like , say, when one is asking for money to do something), I become a little flummoxed since, to some degree, it defeats the purpose of a more subterranean approach. There is no necessity for so corraling events except under the duress of money -- which can be a considerable pressure these days.

At any rate I was re-reading The Political Theology of Paul by Jacob Taubes and came across a long quote which Taubes attributes to Carl Schmitt (within the quote at the end Schmitt quotes Kierkegaard) which seems to address much of what I've been concerned with, in however feeble a manner. In reading the quote over several times it strikes me as to how much the bifurcation spoken of therein spreads out to many other contemporary artistic, cultural and theoretical concerns:

Precisely a philosophy of concrete life must not withdraw from the exception and the extreme case, but must be intersted in it to the highest degree. The exception can be more important to it than the rule, not becasue of a romantic irony for the paradoxical, but becasue of the seriousness of an insight that goes deeper than the clear generalizations inferred from what ordinarily repeats itself. The exception is more interesting than the norm. The normal proves nothing. The exception proves evrcything: it not only confirms the rule; rather, the rule exists only through the exception. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition. A Protestant theologian who demonstrated the vital intensity possible in theological reflection even in the nineteenth century stated: "The exception explains the universal and itself. And if one wants to study the universal correctly, one only needs to look around for a true exception. It reveals everything more clearly than does the universal itself. Eventually one grows weary of the incessant chatter about the universal; there are exceptions. If they cannot be explained, then the universal cannot be explained either. Generally, the difficulty is not noticed because one thinks the universal not with passion but with a comfortable superficiality. The exception, however, thinks the universal with intense passion."

It's interesting to think that this may a sort of theological notion (think: the resurrection, miracles), albeit one which underlies much of secularist modernism in its administrative overflow (see G. Agamben's recent work for elucidations).

Although it could be argued that actually LIVING in the exception could be difficult, perhaps that is exactly what living in a messianic age would entail: coping incessantly with the exception. And after all what is the current idea of the coming Singularity but exactly that? It would certainly be something close to impenetrable.

Outside the Borders of the District: on District 9

Outside the Borders of the District: on District 9
part 1

"At first glance, it appears that the uncanny is a fear of the familiar, whereas nostalgia is a longing for it; yet for a nostalgic, the lost home and the home abroad often appear haunted. Restorative nostalgics don’t acknowledge the uncanny and terrifying aspects of what was once homey. Reflective nostalgics see everywhere the imperfect mirror images of home, and try to cohabit with doubles and ghosts."

Svetlana Boym

"In all mourning there is the deepest inclination to speechlessness, which is infinitely more than ability or disinclination to communicate. That which mourns feels itself thoroughly known by the unknowable. To be named – even when the namer is Godlike and blissful – perhaps always remains an intimation of mourning. But how much more melancholy to be named not form the one blessed, paradisiac language of names, but from the hundred languages of man, in which name has already withered, yet which, according to God’s pronouncement, have knowledge of things …

"In the language of men, however, [things ] are over-named … over-naming as the deepest linguistic reason for all melancholy and (from the point of view of the thing) of all deliberate muteness."

Walter Benjamin

"Time is precisely the impossibility of an identity fixed by a place.

[….]

While place is dogmatic, the coming back of time restores an ethics."

Michel de Certeau

Giorgio Agamben begins The Open with the now-famous passage concerning a painting in the back of a Hebrew bible from the thirteenth century of animal-headed humans at a banquet table of the righteous on the last day, a possible reconciliation of the animal and the human at the point of concluded humanity.

However, with the power of computers in special effects we no longer have to wait for the reconciliations ofthe end of time and concluded humanity, since chimeras are the bread and butter of the film industry. And while theriomorphs (the combination of gods and beasts) can only be simulated who is to tell how far that simulation will, in a thousand years, eventually reach?

District 9, while giving off the glint of a simple metaphor of apartheid, transferred to stranded space aliens, would indeed be a weak film (as would the whole concept of science fiction) if that was the only conjecture/concatenation being proferred. (The very same 'weak' thesis of the movie was put forward by the-president Ronald Reagan in the context of a world that would become united if there were the threat of invasion by space aliens.)

The deeper reading would be two fold and each related to the other: 1) the nature of the exilic condition, of homelessness (and the relation to the uncanny); and 2) the relation of the human to the animal (and that unsettling of relation to one’s own body as home and the uncanniness that results).

The next day after seeing the movie, I recalled the place of the hand in Heideigger’s meditations on techne (the well know ready-to-hand and present-to-hand) and Derrida's attempt to investigate the undecidability of touch and the hand (in both Jean-Luc Nancy and Heidegger). Now is not the time to rehearse any of these positions other than to point out the primacy of the human 'hand' in the movie as it turns into its alien other – which of course would be closer to the parallel of the hand associated with the radical other, the tentacle.

(I’m also now reminded of an earlier project, the text of which follows:

The Discovery of People in the Invisible Part of the Universe

In the recent Korean film ‘Old Boy,’ the protagonist is put into solitary confinement for 15 years, with nothing but popular television for entertainment. When he escapes, the pivot scene happens when he stops into a sushi bar and orders something live. He is delivered a live octopus that he maniacally consumes, then falls into a swoon. Thus begins a switch into another symbolic level of (in)operabilty, signaled by the omnipresent signifier of radical otherness, the tentacle. (As a hint: the film very cleverly plays off the relations between 'octopus’ and 'Oedipus,' both entities signposts of coming forbidden liminal states.)

'Tentacularity' is always a spectacular gateway to various extremes of otherness in cultural representations, a representation of that which is furthest from the human and which is always portrayed as a monstrous collapse into a regime at destructive odds with the human. The most well known popular representative of this visual motif is the portrayal of the aliens' craft in the recent film 'War of the Worlds.'

One can be sure that the arrival of the tentacle is also the arrival of the inhuman and uncanny in opposition to the human. One only has to remember those animations in the fifties of the world picture of the great octopus of communism and its encircling red arms.

But tentacularity is part of a larger body of symbology which includes Medusa and the concept of aura. All three, tentacle, medusa, and aura, are active liminalities which reach out beyond their immediate ground to encircle and tear from the human it’s essential humanness, Medusa causing a stone-like paralysis, a mortification of time, and in the aura, or halo, a radiance creating a 'leak' in the human into the divine as well as effecting a porosity into (and out of) the material substrate of it's surroundings.

The recognition of these three facets – an unapproachable and monstrous inhumanness, a lapse into the pure materialty of a stone-like death, and the leakage into and out of the human by some form of transcendance -- signifies a rupture and switch into new forms.

(By the way: these three states all entail some form of luminescence: the octopus uses a form of polarized light to communicate—and it has been theorized that this ability to perceive in the polarized state acts a ‘secret’ form of communication with its kin, perhaps through its ability to change the color and patterns of its skin through chromatophores; the medusa effect is a cessation of sight through a direct seeing of the forbidden, while the aura / halo is an excess of light, radiance, and intolerable to a materialist culture, a form of incompatable de-monstration.)

Even though the protagonist, a human, is slowly turning alien, his hand has apparently turned completely into an alien hand/tentacle , a fact which, significantly, allows him to fire the alien weaponry (which cannot be operated by the human hand). There is certainly 'monstrosity' here but it is uncertain what 'shows forth' (at the root of the word monstrous, eg., de-monstrate): the human, the alien, or the animal. One might say that the coalescence of the alien and animal (the gestures of the scavenging stranded space creatures all reference apes, and predators; the only time that this does not appear to be the case is in the presence of the technology they have hidden and are using to reach their home world: in that case they take on the bearing of the human, even to the point of incorporating an infant alien) yields the possibility of an uncanny third, almost a gnostic concept (perhaps by way of a more contemporary bio-cybernetic) of relation of flesh as sheath and consciousness as inhabitant of vessel.

N.B. Some might wish to look over the J. Derrida's series, Geschlecht (especially Geschlecht II: Heidegger's Hand) where issues of chirology (right/left symmetry) and issues of sexuality and related issues of race, genre, nationalism and the idea of a neutrality between positions; certainly in terms of the aliens in District 9, they seem effectively neutered even though the idea of interspecies sexuality is raised to discredit the protagonist. Not knowing the codes of that species, they seem flattened in terms of the categories humans most often use to make judgements: race, sex, nationality, etc. The idea of the uncanny is largely unfigured here. )

The (square root of two) Resurrection of the Body: Hyrdrocarbon Angels Streaming Down the Gulf

pt 3

"Only a resurrection redistributes death and life to their places, by showing that life does not necessarily occupy the place of the dead."

Alain Badiou: St. Paul ...

"A higher calculus without remain(s): what consciousness wants to be."

j. derrida, Glas

"… it is a question of opening up the earth—dark, hard, and lost in space."

Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-enclosure of Christiantity

"The (any) return is always a form of technic, always ahumanly existing before the human, and creating the human. To want to return to the before of return is to want to return to either the animal or the divine, difficult sometimes to tell the difference. [….] To want to see the singular (re) appearance of what has gone, died, disappeared: is that not the height of folly as well as the greatest experiment in the technical, the engineering of an alternate world, a world that is potentially present everywhere, all the time, a threshold continuously being opened and closed simultaneously, a world constituted by the individual subject, the human continuously striving for sovereignty, eve the object world brought along, skein of nodes: “In my view, which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject." (Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit. This taken from a section in The Political Theology of Paul by Jacob Taubes. Shortly after the quote Taubes glosses this by referencing Spinoza and Schelling as they pursue it in a generalized sense but extends it by allowing as to the possible of the individual 'I' being included in the equations: this would have to be the materialist reserve of any possible Christian vectored resurrection, no generalized eastern resumption of essence but a full-flavored self, the 'I', as improbable and fantastical that sounds to modern ears.)”

Fehta Murghana from That Which Comes

Can a re-gathering of distributed being be considered resurrection? If it is a simple numerical dispersion, it’s a question of: can it be done by human structure or is it an impossible proposition? (We humans consider anything that we can’t do to be impossible). This, even though it has been an imperial command for since we became conscious,. There is something in us that wants to come back, sometimes against our best (collective) wishes. Is that something that knows better than our individual consciousness …or is it a simple remnant of past eras encoded in our thought, myths, conduct? Whatever, it forms the most formidable thought for those who can think it and none can really, fully, since to think it totally means that one has come back. Which means that it passes from thought/potentiality to a fait accompli, ceasing to be impossible, passing from mere zombie thought into total presence, into our very objects, environment, stones, machines, the cry of the inanimate becoming audible, the invisible becoming only transparent.

An interesting article by Fernando Vidal (Brains, Bodies, Selves, and Science: Anthropologies of Identity and the Resurrection of the Body, Critical Enquiry, summer 2002) covers a great deal of ground but a couple of quirky attempts to account for bodily resurrection are those of Bernard Nieuwentijt’s 'stamen' theory from 1714 and Charles Bonnet’s 'other brain' theory. Stamen means filament or thread and if resurrection is possible, reasons Nieuwentijt, then identity must be somehow ‘threaded’ through matter and time, reproducing itself or hatching, like the stamen which continues the flower, into matter but keeping some ur-identity. Vidal glosses this in a footnote: "The stamen theory, which may be called the germ theory of bodily identity, has a descendent in Saul Kripke's notion of the necessity of origin, according to which a person’s identity is ultimately defined by genealogy; the one thing we cannot be is the offspring of parents other than our own". See Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity, Oxford, 1980. Of course this has the taint of that now much feared idea of essentialism, not to even speak of the taint of questions of origin. This reference certainly made me go back to the venerable Kripke book.

Vidal glosses Charles Bonnet (late 1700s) thus (I quote at length because it seems oddly prescient for a futurist, cybernetic world):

"Personal identity depends on memory (Locke’s thesis), and memory is based in the brain. It follows that, if man is to keep his identity in the afterlife, his soul must remain united to some indestructible organ, perhaps the same that functions as the seat of the soul. Bonnet describes it as a 'little ethereal machine' and as an 'indestructible brain' encased in the brains of our terrestrial bodies. In addition to being the seat of the soul, the little machine is the germ of resurrected bodies. I will therefore act in truly embryological fashion, producing bodies in accordance with the preformationist emboîtment theory of generation.

In short, our present brains enclose another brain, destined to develop in the afterlife and to restore our identity, personality, and boy together. Since the resurrected body will be spiritual and incorruptible, the 'small human body' hidden in the seat of the soul must be physically different from our bodies of flesh."

Perhaps the mystery is not that things are different but that they remain the same.

Perhaps science (or at least science's 'body,' technology, the point at which idea becomes material) is another venue for the mystery.

Some wait, as if paralyzed, waiting for the dream.

footnote to previous part 2, regarding number and resurrection:

"In effect, it is law at the purest, formalist level, law as "the ideal of the
matheme," that governs the new coming into being of the subject. Thus, to the
question: "But why is it necessary to reject law onto the side of death?" Badiou answers:
"Because considered in its particularity, that of the works it prescribes, the law blocks the subjectivation of grace's universal address as pure conviction, or faith. The law 'objectifies' salvation and forbids one from relating it to the gratuitousness of the Christ- event." As such, the event is, by itself, an "illegal contingency, which causes a multiplicity in excess of itself to come forth and thus allows for the possibility of overstepping finitude." The evental situation, before subjectivation, is the site of "the excess of grace, thus, of a pure act," i.e. the resurrection.

Although Badiou addresses a philosophical-political question in his analysis of
Paul and the law, what comes through the apparent antinomianism of the message is, unexpectedly – as if to corroborate the very evental process he describes – the
reanimation of law in a different guise. That is, in the truth-event, there is not a rejection or repudiation of law sensu stricto, but its realignment, rearrangement, to effectuate the resurgence (resurrection) of the subject."

Re-interpretation of Paul's Concept of Law
Tawia Ansah

The Hemipygic Resurrection of the Glorious Body: The Law En-Fortressed and Made to Walk
part 2

I had work done on my car recently and they needed the VIN number, a 17 digit identification number that details type of car, origin, where assembled, the order in which it was asembled etc. I was thinking that it is sort of the car’s DNA code, providing the car with a barebones bid for immortality – at least as much as 17 digits can provide. All the threads that concern the physical makeup of the car and the genetic we might say, as opposed to contingent knocks and bumps of acccidentality that make up real life as opposed to VIN life. The VIN numbers are threads that, when knotted together form the vehicle secret life.

That said, perhaps it would seem feasible to resurrect the car given a totalizing accident. However, and without going into philosophical disquisitions on identity from the Greeks to the computer age, most folks would contend that the car was reconstructed, not resurrected. The 'secret code/life' of a human would have something to do with consciousness and not necessarily with place of assembly (which is not to say that would not have an impact, contingent and genetic somehow coming together in a knotted tsunami of time, place, terrain, perhaps even position in re: to the rest of the universe; to a greater or less degree it seems this is what we think of as the human -- and perhaps other living, impactable entities -- with perhaps even some added dispositions and reckoning that we have little kin of, except by hearsay, myth, magical thinking or other eldritch considerations, none of which I discount by the way). I suppose the purported law-like regularity of the universe, always, everywhere and everywhen, could be called to the bar at this point. (Although, now that I think on it, the VIN resurrection scenario fits perfectly now, at least as far as filmic bring-backs; one only has to think of the Transformers series and maybe even the Terminators…certainly don't seem that far from a zombie re-instatement of an appliance and calling it alive.)

The Law (of matter) perhaps only seems implacable here, filmed over, encrusted with its own come-backs, precedented, trusted to have been here before, perogative of lost innocence, portrait of returns piling ever higher: the Law does not have a human face and after it has broken free from the natural world it has no 'Age' but looks 'back' which it configures silently, invisibly, out in the Open and inato the Forward, Janus -faced. (The Christian Resurrection would say, in its very heart: the Law is made to be broken and it will be done by Him after which we all follow, facing into the sun, rising from our graves, round the rim of the earth, the air on that Last Day filled, packed with shining Dead; well, that's the plan anyway....may take our trusty servant, the Machine, that other Law, to open the graves even more than it has already done.... what is it w. benjamin said? "... even the dead will not be safe", only the barest of the bare lifers will be let in. Huzzah! )

LivingDead the Law marches silently over the frozen tundra, The Law as zombie machine (number) has taken over all possibilities of resurrection, until the real Messiah returns to break one and install another regime. And that is always 'any minute now,' (the same as my grandfather's disposition (deacon's sketch) of time and salvation sketch at the front of this article which hangs on my desk now, timeless Law becoming a matter of genealogic threading though matter, the Law of Reproduction the only law that counts, oddly enough, for an inhuman law, your DNA (the soul's VIN?) nailed to the cross, spiraling, spiraling ever onward...

At the heart of the heart: does anything beat there? There beats the Inhuman Resurrection, composed of those same angel feathers, insanely beating, lifting....


"Resurrection: Borgo San Sepolcro"
Rowan Williams

So the black eyes
fixed half-open, start to search, ravenous,
imperative, they look for pits, for hollows where
their flood can be decanted, look
for rooms ready for commandeering, ready
to be defeated by the push, the green implacable
rising. So he pauses, gathering the strength
in his flat foot, as the perspective buckles under him,
and the dreamers lean dangerously inwards. Contained,
exhausted, hungry, death running off his limbs like drops
from a shower, gathering himself. We wait,
paralysed as if in dreams, for his spring.

The (Half-Assed) Resurrection of the Body: Angel Feathers in the Gorge
part 1

gorge (gôrj)

noun

1. the throat or gullet
2. the crop or stomach of a hawk
3. 1. the maw or stomach of a voracious being or animal
   2. food or a meal to fill or stuff the stomach
   3. the contents of the stomach
4. a feeling of disgust, anger, etc. it made my gorge rise
5. the entrance from the rear into a bastion or projecting section of a fortification
6. a deep, narrow pass between steep heights
7. ☆ a mass that blocks up a passage

It is no wonder that the zombie has become a leading cultural indicator in the current ‘new age.’ It seems inevitable that the various Copernican revolutions would lead to the final dethroning of all forms of agency and subjectivity, to the point that official rationalist ideologies would leave nothing behind their razed path but mindless matter and soul-less motion.

Oddly enough, such a turn of events may make the idea of the ‘resurrection of the body’ less of a transcendental theological idea and more of a contemporary immanentist conceit. A populist/futurist version of projected resurrection can be encountered in the so-called Toynbee Tiles . (If their origin is correct, the relationship between memorialization and the idea of zombies – that is, half-assed resurrection as a memorialization of rage – becomes more tenable),

And yet….while bandied abut often in techno circles (freezing the body or just freezing the head; or uploading consciousness into a container and robotizing the body into which it would then be downloaded), all of them are about a truncated continuance of existence, a zombified existence; not a re-birth as a portal or threshold or opening. (|) .Apparently this ‘death-in-life’ would be the continuation of the neoliberal state by other means. But whatever it, death, means it is one of the most untouchable of the untouchables while yet remaining the most formative of life.

I like this long piece form Nancy’s Noli me tangere on the ‘non-ness,’ the pushing away of Christ’s resurrection:

“What for religion is the renewal of a presence that bears the phantasmatic assurance of immortality is revealed here to be nothing other than the departing into which presence actually withdraws, bearing its sense in accordance with this parting. Just as it comes, so it goes: this is to say that it IS not, in the sense of something being fixed within presence, immobile and identical to itself, available for use as a concept. “Resurrection” is the uprising [surrection], the sudden appearance of the unavailable, of the other and f the one disappearing IN THE BODY ITSELF AND AS THE BODY. This is not a magical trick. It is the very opposite: the dead body remains dead, and that is what creates the “emptiness” of the tomb, but the body that theology will later call ‘glorious’ (that is, shining with the brilliance of the invisible) reveals that this emptiness is really the emptying out of presence. No, nothing is available here: don’t try to seize upon a meaning for this finite and finished life, don’t try to touch or to hold back what essentially distances itself and, in distancing itself, touches you with its very distance (in both senses: touches you with and from a distance). It is as though it were touching you while permanently disappointing your expectations, touching you with what makes rise up before you, for you, even that which does not rise up. This uprising or insurrection is a glory that devotes itself to disappointing you and to pushing your outstretched hand away. For its brilliance is nothing other than the emptiness of the tomb. The ‘arisen’ does not mediate the one through the other: he exposes (he ‘reveals’) how they are the same absenting, the same gap that one dares not touch, since it is this gap alone that touches us to the quick: o the point of death.”
[….]
“The resurrection is not a return to life. It is the glory at the heart of death: a dark glory, whose illumination merges with the darkness of the tomb.

“The glorious body is the one that leaves and at the same time the one that speaks, that speaks only in leaving, that withdraws, withdrawing as much into the darkness of the tomb as into the ordinary appearance of the gardener. Its glory radiates only for eyes that know how to see, and those eyes are nothing but the gardener. But the gardener speaks, and he says the name of she who mourns the departed. To say the name is to say that which both dies and does not die.”

This is a somewhat claustrophobic (non) vision one might say. No wonder that the demotic imagination would prefer UFOs piloted by the dead or telephone calls from the dead, the vast pyramid of the dead waiting to be funneled into ‘here’ from wherever they are (or not – one can hardly say ‘where they are stored’ since that is not exactly what is meant; in fact it becomes hard to say exactly WHAT is meant when speaking of death All we can say is that as long as language continues and that reproduction continues a sort of resurrection continues and which is different from a zombie resurrection of death in life which techno threatens (and oddly enough under the same sort of hubristic expectations that religion engenders in coming up against that black and endless wall.) All life is asymptotic against that wall in a positivist view and a lemniscate of Bernoulli in a more mystical indeterminacy, death a crossing, moving from one node to another., perhaps not resurrection but a recombinant infinite return: Christianity in all its forms (social, bureaucratic, scientific world view) as opposed to the sorceric pagan (one might also call the idea of ‘resurrection’ as a personalized particularity as opposed to the triumph of anonymous materiality.

But what is matter but a continuous string of itself, continuing to coil through itself, returning always to the same place?

Falling Rocks, Becoming Rock: roll away the stone!

For quite a while I had been looking for a DVD of the 1957 movie by director Jack Arnold (who also did The Creature From the Black Lagoon) called Monolith Monsters. It is apparently not available but I happened to do a search for it yesterday on YouTube and there it was in all its black and white fifties glory.

(It will sometimes give you an option to watch all 8 segments automatically)

The storyline: A small western community is beset by a strange phenomena. Apparent a meteor has fallen and is composed of a strange rock-like material but the fragmented pieces of which have the startling ability to grow a hundred feet tall when water hits it, and then to topple whereupon the tip begins the cycle all over again, rising and falling, crushing whatever is in the path of this roving forest of falling rocks. And of course the town people take various actions to ‘cut them off at the pass’ as the deluge proceeds down from the high desert.

Oh, and I forgot one thing: if a person touches one of the weird rocks, they themselves start to slowly turn to rock.

I suppose if I had not posted the article on otoliths ('rocks' inside the head/ear which establish direction, stability, and hence ‘way-finding’ if I can put it that way) and its opening on the holy ka’ba, the Islamic black rock which some claim to be a meteorite, I would not have been so struck by (re)finding Monolith Monsters, about rocks which seem to have a, albeit crude, life of their own and can cause a reification (becoming thing-like) in living creatures.

I use the term reification purposely. It is often used in socio-political studies to indicate an effect that various state apparatuses can have on the individual, making them purposeless, with little affect or direction other than what the apparatus gives them – rock-like in other words!

And of course we HOPE that artistic/creative activity can have an apotropaic quality [From Greek apotropaios, from apotrepein, to ward off : apo-, apo- + trepein, to turn.]
'referring to an image or device which is designed to ward off unwanted influences' --- and often times by being a part of the evil, or by seducing it, in order to get it closer and deal with it (e.g., homeopathic medicine). Although in this case I think of those Japanese beetle traps which contain a hormone, intending to entice the bugs but ALSO sending out a general signal which can flood the area with unintended consequences. (within the context of the film, the apotropaic magical substance that undoes the rock monsters is…salt, which of course is a crystalline thing itself and if it had to be used widely , that is, outside the saintly mystical precincts of the desert where such monstration often and appropriate takes place, would wind up killing all life!

The line between living/dead, creative/destructive, the sacred/profane wavers tremendously. As far as I can tell, the apparatus seeks to confine that oscillation while creative activity often seeks to live in that oscillation and even to expand it. Of course that used to be the idea of the 'avant-garde' (living in that oscillatory boundary) and all the other arts (which seek comfortable perception and hence form part of the walls and devices that make the apparatus work; this is called ordinary life and can be a good thing...think life in war time -- er, the old sort of war time -- when nothing works).

Now that doesn't seem to be the case, since the central core of capitalism seems to be a sort of experimentalist impulse which it has found out can be a way of expanding markets and inventing new resources (the cyberworld) which it can exploit. We see now that the advance guard in the arts was aptly named. The image and the apparatus have found a way to mutually reinforce themselves, and most times with little regard for the 'human' element but rather most importance placed on the structural supports (not that it’s that easy to tell them apart—but that’s another story…sorta.) In a way, which I won't expand, everyday life now IS a sort of wartime, at least in the speeds, tensions, collisions, accidents, disruptions that now seem continuous.

But the becoming-alive of the obdurate, admantine stuff which surrounds us is an old story (along with the becoming-rock of the human, most famous being the tale of the medusa; but that’s another story too… sorta) as is really the blurred line dividing the two (e.g. Ovid's Metamorphosis). Perhaps what is different now (arguable. Some would say nothing is different now) is the tech we have to facilitate those transitions…what happens when artists are able to make chimera with table top equipment? (which reminds me of a new movie which I haven't seen yet – Splinters - but which seems to have some elements in common with the Monolith Monsters with the same difference as other fifties sci fi / horror films from then: then the horror was always from the outside trying to get in; now its from the inside trying to get out; think Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its remakes.)

Perhaps that is where the apparatus and the image truly fuse … but I wouldn't start jumping for joy just yet …wait until you REALLY hear rocks falling.