Αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων πεσσεύων· παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη.
Aion [eternity] is a child at play, playing draughts; the Kingship is a child's.
Heraclitus

Lucianus, Vit. auct. 14. Context:--And what is time? A child at play, now arranging his pebbles, now scattering them.

•••

In the 1996 Time Burton movie, Mars Attacks! (based on a baseball card series from 1962 of the same name) all the aliens speak in a smack-smack repetitive baby babble talk. All the sounds seem to be the same mak-mak-mak over and over again. How can that possibly convey any information? But entering the film (a spoof on the genre), we emerge, like most of Burton’s films, into a child-like syncope. Faltering rhythms and animation drop us out from the real world into a cartoon world, fit and yet not-fit for babies. Vast instrumentalities are represented in a humorous way – the same as with the world of babies and childhood in general. We embark on a voyage into an uncanny valley, and in the case of childhood, the formation of startling chreodes which gradually, with time and persistence, wear into grinding patterns of familiarity: adulthood.

But for a short period we are witness (and participants only as second order audience) to the animated remains of a once glorious kingdom (the threshold now available only through extensive and sophisticated technical means); a mysterious communication of non-sense with action: the place of gesture as precedent to language, where objects, gesture, ritual become so deep they appear disconnected from contemporary bare life, language floating around incantatorily, performatively: phantasms increasingly severed from the intimacy of gesture and place (a severance which has been in motion since the beginning, but perhaps now within creased velocity).

It is a place which has dropped out of sight so far from ordinary experience (which, in a way, is dropping from sight also) that its fabulousness, this kingdom of hidden presences, seems to be entirely one made from a frayed, thread-worn, and gossamer cloth, spider-web cloth, melting in the noonday sun, the only entrance now through our machines; which brings it (this uncanny abyssal which is continually cracking underfoot) back with a terrifying immediacy, an otherness … but with yet a strange familiarity to it. The mak-mak-mak syncope of childhood aligns with the disappearances of children into the mysterious hill over yonder, abduction by fairies, aliens, now everything slowly coming into sync with the technical alien.

To Heraclitus we are perhaps all babies on that eternal beach, caught in yet a higher order swoon, an arhythmic hiccup, waiting in vain for some vaster presence to pick us up, to stop the crying, to salve the wounds, to point out another hill over yonder (techne) which we can enter and disappear for an aion or two.

Res-erection and Left A Head

'Writing', as inscription or exscription, is a (perhaps THE) living death, death in life, not degree zero but zero degree, that is, an absolute zero degree, cessation of all movement; but such cessation as has been gained by COMPLETE movement, at least around various axes (sic. or axies if you insist) which have chopped away all biology, leaving the Glorious Body, the heat body, the meat body behind (or maybe a head), resurrection and insurrection and erection bound together:

“Two bodies, the one of glory and the other of flesh, are distinguished in this departure and in it they belong, partially but mutally, to each other. The one is the raising of the other; the other is the death of the one. Dead and raised [levee] are the same thing ---'the thing,' the unnameable - and is not the same thing, for there is no sameness here. What happens with the body and the world in general, when the world of the gods has been left behind, is an alteration of the world. Where there used to be one same world for gods, men, and nature, there is henceforth an alterity that passes through, and throughout, the world, an infinite separation of the finite - a separation of the finite by the infinite and thus of the flesh that glory separates from itself.”
(JL Nancy, Noli Mi Tangere)

At a certain point - absolute zero, 'writing' - everything must become ghostly, whited out, become deathlife in a haunted universe (that is, every thing both live and dead), held in suspension by the limits of hauntological constraints, the chief one being: did you exist before?
and then: can you re-appear? Zombie? On Jupiter? The dead piloting UFOs? (bony faces locked in a rictus of joy, no cock pit, zooming through the plane of exposure) ... or just lined up waiting to get inside the tent? Isn't this the name of the Western enterprise?

Infinite: Tin Cans Around Saturn

Local artists (and by local I mean no actual area but the idea of particularity) sometimes seem to believe in the piled-on scrum only and effect not to think that anything beyond that matters (that is, the universalism as defined by the critical impulse, the writing of the event of art, etc.) so to say, not to believe in the interruptive aspect of art and consequent start-up anew (this is the agility of the scrum) but only in its power to get the individual game going. A closed ‘spiritual’ realm, not a phenomena immersed in history, writing, politics, science and all the other things that impinge on everyday life ---but which are not-quite-everyday. In that sense, there is an aspect of art (perhaps especially in times of stress) that is deeply conservative, certain practioners preferring to stick close to the body and an immediacy of affect. Populist art, that is, art that tries to stay away from the historical and centrifugal rigors of serious art, often strives for that immediate pragmatic closeness (although any ‘striving’ would seem to launch it, eventually, into another category; economic if nothing else.)

At any rate, I’ve been trying to think about why art can be so boring much of the time and yet why Art can have a frisson of enlargement about it that art tries to stay away from. (Though often times that simply strikes me as a ploy on the artists’ part.) To put it another way, the local artist often times tries to steer clear of a certain, um, relationship shall we say, with the infinite, the (non) thing which would tempt them from the immediate and often smacks of religion. (Although the more astute of us realize that often times that which is not becomes that which is, and that which is becomes that which is not.)

And so I come across a passage this morning:

"Modern art has also turned towards the event, or the possibility of the event. Modern art knows that it has no objective status. It knows that it does not incarnate any prior idea in its supposed wholeness and unity. In its resistance to objectification and its practice of ‘disincarnation’, modern art becomes increasingly concerned with ‘precarites evenementielles’. The most radical examples of this are installations, happenings, and jazz. Here, again, it would not be hard to describe a many-sided modern literature of the event, including Mallarme, Kafka, Joyce and Woolf, Pound and Imagism, William Carlos Williams and various traditions in post-war American poetry." (Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency, Andrew Gibson)

Gibson makes the point that this modernist approach fiddles with the controls of history and can lead to thoughts of an ‘evacuation of history’ as exemplifies by the work of Samuel Beckett. It strikes me that ‘regional theater’ (to use the performative for all the arts) is precisely not interested in such epochal formations as a history bending event. The popular is precisely that which has already been slightly (not too much) bent.

And of course the coils of history often bend in unpredictable ways (it’s why we still have history… which is not the same as progress however, no matter how much neoliberal thought might have it be so).

But what caught my eye in the quote above was ‘disincarnation’. Specifically, its relation to Corpus, a beautiful and mystifying text by Jean-Luc Nancy; a few quotes from the section I am reading now and the stated and implied chiasmatic relations of local/universal, body/spirit etc:

"Incarnation is structured like a disembodiment."

“The signifying body – the whole corpus of philosophical, theological, psychoanalytic, and semiological bodies – incarnates one thing only: the absolute contradiction of not being able to be a body without being the body of a spirit, which disembodies it.”

Heads and tails. A flipping of a (coming) quantum coin: or rather acephale and aphallic, cut off the head, put it in a can, and shoot it into orbit around Saturn, leaving the tail to spawn .. or is the other way round? “No head or tail, then, since thing provides support or substance for this material. I say ‘acephalic and aphallic,’ not ‘anurous,’ which is fine for batrachians. An impotent, unintelligent body. Its possibilities, forces, and thoughts lie elsewhere.”

Insurrection and resurrection take place simultaneously. (As well as beheaded/headed.)

Toynbee Tiles written all over streets scattered from here to Sao Paulo:
"The dead are resurrected on Jupiter."

Meanwhile here on earth the corpses are cinematically animated: zombies and vampires, proliferating, perhaps, regarding that bend in history, we should say clinematically: "Clinamen, a fragile, fractal prose, inclining to accident. Not the body-animal of sense, but the areality of bodies: of bodies indeed, including the dead body. Not the cadaver, where the body disappears, but the body as the dead one’s apparition, in the final discreteness of its spacing: not the dead body, but the dead one as a body – and there is no other." (Corpus, 53)

Art forming the dead shells, re-animation, finite and infinite swarming along its closed track, luminosity of kelipot, now irremedially mixed with the core, becoming sphere.

First, evacuate and abandon
tin cans to Mars…
flung from head to tail
comet