Witness in Philadelphia

This is for those clamoring (yeah right) for more info about Philadelphia and Neshoba. Very interesting profile of the area and history

Back with more drift later.
R

(It doesn't seem that there is much farming going on in MS at all these days. I understand that even cotton is giving way. Around Philadelphia it seems like the only thing seriously grown are pine trees and I mean lots of them. although I've heard that even prices for pine pulp is depressed these days.)

I've always been struck, as if by a lightning bolt, by a severe case of melancholia even just crossing over the state line. RS has requested more info about philly/MS...but it seems hopeless when eyes are clouded by then rather than now.  ...can't sink into sepia moments for obvious reasons (it's incapacitating) and can't move beyond for obvious reasons. (Giving a mere list of daily activities may suit some but is inadequate for me. for now. The fault is mine. The result of  'going south'.)
can't pick cotton can't wear cotton shirts.

Law pt 4

 

 Meetings on the Edge of Eternity

It’s a good, albeit painful thing to be forced away from one’s old habits, thoughts, actions or at least to get pushed off to the side to get a different vantage point. I say forced because many will resist. The forces of inertia, shear matter in motion, wanting to go in a straight line Newton’s law if right for the psyche also. And the older you get the more matter there is to push out of the way, Slim thought; the two main pushes (or pulls depending on how you want to see it) of life, disguising themselves, as thinkers like Freud realized and so spectacular in their banality really, were birth and death, And who knew, really and truly, what either of them meant. Both the banality of each and their more-than-life aura worked to hide away certain fixtures (like how spectacular they both were). Otherwise how could we function, build civilizations, repair cars, plant crops, have kids, make art, make war, destroy, create. And that secrecy we must hide within the folds of is helped by our machines. 

Now O. you might be thinking to your self “well how do you know that there is anything hidden anywhere, especially around the landmarks of either birth or death” What makes you so high and mighty?” And I would love for my answer to be, I don’t know. But here’s the deal big O: neither does anyone else, Science itself doesn’t know. Oh it can give some good stories but increasingly the textures of these stories—especially as they move though maths—don’t amount to a life. death. Other than to reduce us to meat puppets, zombies, a length of string wherein the two ends don’t meet. Leaving us with a pile of nothing, the old Nihil, Nothing to rely on, to believe in, to get hung up on, nothing to blame, nothing to write home about. Strawberry Fields Forever. For sure the gods don’t seem to want to quibble with us, other than perhaps various opaque signals and scribbling seen out of the orner of the eye, like Jesus on a potato chip, or aliens sliding down outside our window at three o’clock in the morning.

O. and I has meandered the five hundred or so feet down the road to the cemetery where many of his relatives lay buried. Slim and O. had taken to walking down, up a bit actually, with Lucky Peaches, the little red heeler halfbreed pup which had been adopted, While the walk added a bit of purpose to the evening strolls, this wish to commune with the dead always gave a certain lugubrious tone to the walk. The evening dusk was filled with the ratcheting serrated rasp of cicadas and tree frogs, choruses shifting from tree to tree. Some sort of electric line on the light post they passed added a soprano sixty-cycle keening, blending in perfectly with rest of the orchestration.

Just past the entrance at the top of the hill where we had been sitting just listening to the occasional car pass by the sonic clouds, O. shifted his position on the broken stone wall and stared into the distance with that look he often affected. I knew there was nothing to do but to wait till he was finished.

“Brother, ‘Solitude does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity’. Jean Genet

I couldn’t argue with that, fact of the matter I couldn’t argue with O. about anything he said..or quoted or whatever it was. My sophomoric failings could barely compare…and anyways, I always seemed to be replicating Tintern Abby.

As if jousting with my thoughts O rose and intoned:

"The world’s ending. The world’s winding down. The atoms are separating, one from the other. Reality’s thinning out. Did you know that? It’s wearing out. Soon, you’ll be able to see right through it. Soon, you’ll be able to see through to the other side.

 

We will leave the world over behind. We will leave ourselves behind. Shed our lives like old skin. We will hatch vermillion bodies like the dragonflies' water."

by Lars Iyer

He abruptly sat down and began to weep

metaphysical in mississippi

Well why not? O. and Slim are not done yet but for now some errant divagations in the form of the itntroduction for this book (subtitled Notes on the Un/Heimlich Maneuver):

 

“…in the pines, in the pines”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6Yj0TC4BJs

“The terror of Lovecraft is not a noumenal horror, then, but a horror of phenomenology.

Graham Harman

“[….] aporia of the transcendental: we encounter something about which we do not know how to speak, but which we also cannot pass over in silence.”

Steven Shaviro

And that something is time, “where the sun never shines.” It’s strange to remember or find out, that no one seems to know who wrote those lyrics (Fred Neil) maybe?) … but it reminds me of the piney woods, as we called them when I was a kid, the place where I was born, ‘down there’ in the deep dark heart of Dixie. Used to ride small pines down which means climbing up and getting to the top where they start to bend over. My father was a schoolteacher there, we moved around, lived in many small towns. Come to think of it, there’s nothing BUT small towns in Mi crooked letter crooked letter eye crooked letter crooked letter eye hump back humpback eye. That’s how we spelled it.

I’m thinking of Rosewood and Linwood specifically but there were others; that’s all that there is, others: Union, Newton, into the paleonymics of Kosciusko, Tishomingo, Neshoba, Corinth, Quito, and like every other such place in the Great Nation, overlays of commerce and farming mashed down over mysterious ruins, meetings, and landings, commemorated (and then forgotten) by a name.  But something of the ruined probably hangs on, dropped off the map in one way, reappearing, but faintly, in some other more numinous way.

Middle of nowhere, usually just a service station, waiting on a bench with my brother catching a ride with a motorcyclist riding through one Sunday nowadays have yr guts cut open head cut off. Nope just a lazy ride around a couple of streets.

The song reminds me in some way too of Harlem Nocturne … and the theme from the Andy Griffin Show! I found out recently that they were both written by Earl Hagen, who wrote a lot of themes for TV shows. But those are the only two that count right now. Sometimes that slow, sauntering, smoldering Nocturne pops into my brain for no reason at all. I wish you could stop for a minute and hear it again in your own head, on your own time, thinking about all the terrible struggles that my poor old native state has gone through. In the pines, in the pines … forms a quiet carpet underfoot, nothing but the soft susurration of the pine needles overhead like some secret language of sibililants, snakes sisssing along. You surely feel like you’ve dropped out of the world at midday, out of the heat, the glare.

That which is excluded from the community is, in reality, that on which the entire life of the community is founded.

Giorgio Agamben

I think also of 1948 when I got here/there, an epochal year it was too; I always tell folks: the year the state of Israel was formed out of the ashes of history (or: the start of the ashes of history), and the year that Claude Shannon wrote his paper on Information Theory and Norbert Weiner coins the term cybernetics. The Best Picture that year went to Hamlet. The Polaroid camera first went on sale: Instant history. Or at least populist archive, time stood still. Ezra Loomis Pound (that middle name sounds so Mississippi) releases Pisan Cantos, another version of history, bespoke, taken apart, occulted, recombined. Kerouac got the Beat Generation going, got it on the road.

The year before, the Roswell UFO incident, Kenneth Arnold coins the term ‘flying saucer’ after seeing the unimaginable flying over the Cascade mountains in Washington state. The transistor was invented and the first of the Dead Sea scrolls found in caves near Wadi Qumran. The CIA was formed, along with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The world that most of us think to be the ‘modern’ was in the heat of formation.

Somewhere in this time scale, maybe 1956? I walked one of these dead roads after reading Major Donald Keyhoe’s first book on UFOs and made a tune about walking the spaceways, while the very large very red luminous orb of the sun went down over the piney woods. Mississippi retained a dropped out character (like, say, data loss in a bit stream), never quite able to come into the space age, my grandparents still driving a buggy and horse into town, inconceivable except as a late night movie. The idea of a gap in a historical continuum was not new to me. It wasn’t clear (still isn’t) whether the Space Brothers would liberate Time or seal it closer in a transparent package.  But it sure beat Brother Claude droning on in vacation bible school.

The day is not far off when signal processing will reach the physical limits of feasibility.

This absolute limit is where the history of communication technologies will literally come to an end. Theoretically there remains only the question as to what logic this completion will have obeyed. From Freud to McLuhan the classic answer to this was a generic subject - humanity - which before of an indifferent or interferent natural world would have externalised first its motor and sensory interface, and finally its intelligence, in technical prosthetics. However if Shannon's mathematisation of information rested on his "fundamental idea" of inferring, through a conceptual transfer, the "information efficiency of a jammed transmission" from its cryptoanalytical efficiency, interference will only be understandable as the interventions of a hostile intelligence, and the history of communication technologies as a series of strategic escalations. Without reference to the individual or to mankind, communication technologies will have overhauled each other until finally an artificial intelligence proceeds to the interception of possible intelligences in space.

Fredrich Kittler / The History of Communication Media

For better of worse, there is no therapy in Mississippi (and very little modern and no 'postmodern' -- or perhaps it’s all postmodern now) and no therapeutic strategy to eradicate Mississippi from memory because Mississippi the state (of mind, of psychogeography) rides the great primeval wanderings of the river bearing its name, a bent, curling, alternately placid and then tumescent wand of the gods overflowing floridly towards abundance and catastrophe, an unending sentence of destruction and creation, our very own Shiva, puffing out watery alveoli in flooded lungs, first gasping and then shouting, epithets and field hollers, it floods itself then, somehow, the rest of the state but simultaneously hunkering down and ebullient at the same time, laying waste while sending up/down roots (you forget which in the storm), confluence of red Indian, black African, white European, like the tangled muds of the River itself.. Mississippi you are Legion.

===

"Time stands still in the Delta. But the dead go on opening doors in our mind"

Taking the back river road out of Vicksburg somewhat parallels the river, meandering for a bit before it begins to stretch out and straighten, shotgun level for miles and miles and miles, even as the river itself coils through bayous and oxbows; at one point early on out of Vicksburg, maybe Issaquena county, down from Panther Burn, Nitta Yuma, and Grace, and up from Onward, and way down from Rosedale where my cousin was mysteriously murdered while frog gigging, it even turns into a one-lane road, a levee, elevated around 30 feet above the cotton and corn blooming into the distance. This back-road ride down state route 453 is intense: high heat, no cars, passing through small 'towns' (scare quoted because even though they are on a map they consist of nothing more than a church, a gas station, a couple of houses and a row of new stainless steel grain silos) in which not a single soul can be seen.

(In 1932, Walter Benjamin wrote - and read on-air - one of his radio plays for children, his last surviving radio play in fact, on the great flood of 1927, "Der Mississippi-Uberschwemmung 1927" : the State, attempting to break the dikes and save property downstream, the river feints, lays down, spreads out, the dead coming back, two brothers from Natchez in dire straits, one brother commits suicide, shortly thereafter help arrives, uncannily foreshadowing, some say, Benjamin’s attempted escape from the Nazis and subsequent suicide at Port Bou  Spain).

"One would be obliged to conclude that at times, remembrance can be as destructive as oblivion can be productive: in this case, the end of memory would lie in muteness, and forgetting would lead to speech.  There is no doubt that achievement, in these terms, grows difficult to measure.  It could be rash to propose any summary judgement of the relative accomplishments of those speaking beings who can and who cannot speak.  Who does more, and who does less -- the one who can remember but cannot talk, or the one who forgets and can thus speak?  Among lesser animals, the possibilities are many; privation wears more than a single mask."

                  Daniel Heller-Roazen, Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language

Like so many things, modernism (that is, where we are now) hates nostalgia and yet constantly courts it; slanders it while picking at the scabs over the past, continually pushing and pulling on it, trying to uncover something, trying to evacuate the past, getting all the pus out of the pore. But as everyone knows, the secret of the past is safe and out in the open and there that will be no final bottom to the 'pore' of the past because -- and here is where the modern in us gets excited -- the nostalgic bent which started its life as probing and longing for a subjectivized and personalized past, leads assuredly into the impersonal, even into the uncannily inhuman at times.

My small hometown in Mississippi where even a casual walk into town leads me past a palimpsest of ghosts, sepia snapshot of gestures caught in midmotion, no idea some many years ago THAT gesture, THAT small tree, would make it into the future in such a way, which then bottoms out into galaxies laid in strata, magically beckoning forward and bracketing the same time, the continual drone, the small engines of time, whining away like mosquitoes in the dark, so close yet never catchable or slappable, all the time, so clouded in happiness, gone yet always swirling, infuriating...

"...a child is never more content than when he invents a secret language. 

His sadness comes less from ignorance of magic names than from his own inability to free himself from the name that has been imposed on him.  No sooner does he succeed, no sooner does he invent a new name, than he holds in his hands the laissez-passer that grants him happiness.  To have a name is to be guilty. And justice, like magic, is nameless.  Happy, and without a name, the creature knocks at the gates of the land of the magi, who speak in gestures alone."

Giorgio Agamben, from Magic and Happiness

From 1991 until about 2005 I stepped into another invagination (seeping from the bottomlands of Smyrna, GA), the Time of the Hut placed on top of the Mississippi of Memory, memorialization, the haunting of the genealogical turning into and coming from the generic (another fold of the invaginate, UFO-as-placeholder-for-Something, remnants of a previous life raising like a late evening wet clammy fog), the oxbow of the River itself, periodically snapping off pieces of territory, holding them close, mysteriously sealed for awhile, a fall back into a more perennial existence (always with us, always, but sometimes as inaccessible as the land inside the oxbow, the soft light inside the saucer, the glow from the TV set late at night). A bit of land carved, double fold of the invagination, hocked into deepest suburbia, notes, dreams, portents made on napkins, coasters, online, candy wrappers, receipts, ruled paper, ruled by the iron-clad law of material strokes, double folded backwards and forwards (one could only wish for such prophetic reach – but then that’s the frame that crooked letter humped huts get you by on the way to the river.)

Like the Mississippi itself, these fragments wander, break apart, reform, fritter away energy and direction, swirl aimlessly while scooping up debris, rushing finally into an endless open where it all dissipates, just as we will all do at some point, left behind after being caught up in that uncanny fold between birth and death, the words becoming more debris floating around those who are left.

gone, come back jethro

Pa 'n' the boy taking a break from thinking about stuff. front of the house is to change shortly--big re-do happening.
Heat wave has broken. Rowan's check up for his broken leg (had to go to Jackson) went well.
now where did I put that saxophone?!

back to interior phenomenaliogical states later . (Oh yeah I guess I lied a little bit about the stuff I wasn't going to write about/with/toward/under.)
 later.

LAW pt 3

(Boulevard du Temple, First known photograph by Daguerre of a human. The figure is close to the bottom of the print: a person at a shoeshine stand. The exposure is so long that all the bustle of the street disappears, leaving the lone stationary shoe man standing. There was to be a photo of the bare spot where white house stood but it has proven as illusive as the street goers on the Boulevard du Temple.)

LAW pt 3

•

 

The long community of the dead wasn't always so inoperative; and it could be that the desouvrement of the dead, and dead matter generally, is an illusion of later times, back-channel communication always being able to dial in. (Especially when you consider that the dead always choose the living to inhabit--and besides, where WOULD all that 'history' go? The advent of an archival telematic only gathers more shades around Benjamin's 'blood-filled sacrificial pit' which is history, more 'hauntology' as the philosopher then puts it.)

He stepped back on the road as the cemetery came to an end and turned to look back over the graveyard as the wind picked up, blowing leaves and rolling a few artificial chrysanthemums toward him.. The main storm had never made it much beyond the horizon and the sky now seemed crystal clear, the red lights of a passenger plane far in the distance. Strangely enough, a cock crowed several blocks to his right. The headstones undulated away from him in broken lines, a couple of cenotaphs reaching up.

...death now leads nowhere, and least of all, toward any

sort of (transcendental) beyond. Death remains, as it were,

enclosed in the world of immanence: the dead do not depart,

or if they do so, it is only to return as revenants, as ghosts.

Instead of defining identity, death returns as the shadow that

splits life into a life that consists largely in passing away, and

a death that has nowhere to go but back to the living. Living

and dying tend to overlap. Mourning...responds to this confusion

with the theatrical reanimation of a world emptied of meaning.

Samuel Weber in Genealogy of Modernity: History,

Myth, and Allegory in Benjamin's Origin of the

German Mourning Play

The whole walk had the feel of a ceraunoscope, an apparatus used in the ancient mysteries for imitating thunder and lightning --presumably for an initiatory effect. But here, in this place and this time, it seemed to have only a screen effect, and not necessarily a scrim between the two worlds, porous, and inviting of redemption. And although the ancients perhaps didn't think exactly in terms of redemption, nevertheless where was the hope in a 'screen effect' continually throwing one's own projection at one? Didn't at least one type of hope reside in a certain porosity, the ability to cross borders? And that, ultimately, there was truly some Other place to go? Now, even the Final Border seemed sealed off, no There there, and certainly no traffic -- at least in the 'official' border patrol version of events.

“O brother I somehow perceive your fears, not only the iron law of death but all others. What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.”

“Right. Bible, right?” turning to look at O with a wounded look and with that Slim picked up the pace.

They rounded the street corner for the final fifty feet to the house. Through a high pitched sizzling whine coming from seemingly the end of the street, he could hear the phone ring and started to break into a trot, jogging through the moist summer cricket air. The ringing stopped just as he reached for the door.

Otis stopped abruptly at the end of the drive way.

“Brother, your mind sparks in one direction.” He assumed his quote-like stance, “the attempt

to carve out an immaculate space of inwardness either masks a prior contamination or prepares a virgin zone for occupation.”

Slim stood at the head of the short driveway, hands slack at his side, staring morosely at Otis.

“Give it a rest O.” But of course he knew he couldn’t. Otis was already occupied so to speak. Or as Michel Leiris once quipped, it’s better to be possessed than to study possession.        

I have never liked the flatness of the world. Rather than accept it wholeheartedly (taken in with ‘mother’s milk’ as they say) I have alternately been astonished by it and extremely depressed by the thought. But on the other hand the religious thing never worked for me either. Not because it presented some vast transcendental entity but precisely because it was so flat, institutional-wise and everywise. The current of the age is flatness…as economic pundits celebrate. Or did at one time. At some point the tide will and always has, flow again, as the great roils of the historic dialectic are prone towards, and mountains will appear, wreathed (though some would say wretched) visions at the top. Maybe, maybe not. No doubt something will happen, some momentous event will occur and one which didn’t even get recognized at the time. The thing is, me and Otis didn’t have time for all the gobbledegook to play out. And no way to push the shadow.

All Otis could say was:

“Even as science progresses, however, it convinces us that we are becoming less and less capable of mastering by means of thought phenomena that, by their spatial and temporal orders of magnitude, escape our mental capacities. In that sense, the history of the cosmos is becoming a kind of great myth for the ordinary mortal: It consists of the unfolding of unique events whose reality, because the events occurred only once, can never be proven.”

“Okay yeah well where does that leave us then? It sounds to me like you are pulling the Resurrection in to this”

Which was NOT where I wanted to go with this…..ok, more than just the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ…but still, too tired to consider fairies, elves, UFOs and conspiracies of any kind. Mostly I felt alone, alone amongst the ghosts. But maybe there was a secret communion there also as Jean Genet noted: ‘Solitude [. . .] does not signify an unhappy

state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or

less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity’.  

It ha been a hard afternoon of avoiding creditors and I didn’t think I could put up with much more of Otis’s high mindedness. More than anything I just wanted to collapse on the hardwood floor and sleep. 

Palimpsest of Souls

People perhaps take it for granted that you don’t own yourself in a big city, that in some ways, very impersonal ways at that, that a city, the largest havens of souls, have it over us in ways that small towns don’t.

But what if it is a fact also that small towns may just as well dream us, that we are under illusion when we seem to drift though a town and markers flash up, the illusion that WE are causing it, our subconscious. I’ve never been able to figure it out.  Maybe it depends on what temporal strategy you use: larger, trans-temporality over geological strata, and the time of just hanging around, one tiny little bit of a chain of thought following the other, only making sense when you perform it. But still….it seems that the Ouside has the upper hand here in most ways. And it may not matter where that openness is since nobody really knows WHAT it is after all, with the subject—us—being formed as an aftermath.

At any rate, I was back. WE were back, back in time some fifty years, still feeling a geo-topologico-historic (maybe not even historic) torque. Like my flesh is pressed thinly across the surface of the entire town. Except not in a now kind of way but as a constant pulling and pressing from somewhere else. Lovecraft Lite let’s say. My narratological machinery gets jammed somehow. And pointless really. I mean, really what is the POINT of all this, of all of it? Maybe only the point of the obscure and peculiar, almost pronounceable generic. But wasn’t that opposite of the generic: only TOO pronounceable, too seeable? Hot shot thinkers having to think around the generic into more articulations. But why? How come? Are we supposed to somehow evolve ourselves into some sort of Mega-something or other, just out of here? Am I going ‘forward’ or ‘backward’ here. Being here now I mean, the only place I can be?

Otis was squirming uncomfortably at the end of the old green sofa with the little wooden pegs for legs. I knew something was coming.

He stood up, looking very formal and uttered:

“Even when I confide things that are very secret, I don’t confide them in

the mode of a story. At times, I provide certain signs, facts, dates, but

otherwise, I don’t write a narrative. And so the question for me is the

question of narration, which has always been a serious question for me.

I’ve always said I can’t tell a story. I’d love to tell stories, but I don’t

know how to tell them. And I’ve always felt that the telling is somehow

inadequate to the story I’d want to tell. So I’ve just given up telling stories.

I’ve just given up.”

Well, this was true I felt. I can very seldom be concerned with the textures of the everyday, enough to concerned to reproduce it. Relationships, names, secret intimacies, sexualities, stories of betrayal and redemption, of faith given and taken away… I know that it is the very lifeblood of this ‘generic’ (sometimes the generic looks like a strained and filtered version of the popular which alternately  elates me and distresses me. It feels like taking a really hot bath and then all of a sudden it feels way way too hot, pass out sort of hot.

And look! I still haven’t named any names for you, any plots, any situations for you to float comfortably in and then for you to dismiss. And there perhaps won’t be any—I warn you now, close this book!—maybe only passages, thresholds, the stroke between, just enough movement to get me and Otis moving again. I’m thinking floating gas fields in the farthest interstellar corridors. Even now we pass though them! Meanwhile it’s like the generic and elite find ways to imitate and mimic each other becoming secretly intelligible somehow. Or maybe it’s the other way around. That’s something else that has to be figured in. I mean without it screwing things up too much.

Otis marches to the other end of the couch and stands at attention again:

“A slip is taking place. It is in the works. It is at work-enacting,

active-beneath our eyes and in our words. Some thing or some idea is

withdrawing itself from us. An unhinging is taking place. As always, we are

necessarily both its authors and its witnesses. We write it and read it in one

and the same gesture. It is too soon to know or to sense whether it is a rupture

or an evolution, whether the mode is that of a displacement or a break,

whether the movement is reversible or absolutely oriented.”

At this I become very excited. “Yes!  And you don’t know what it is do you mr. jones?”

“Dance that mess around.” Declared Otis as he sat back down, resting his hands on his knees.

“It’s been this way since 1956.”

I knew that was from Love Potion Number Nine from that old song by the Glovers, written by Lieber and Stoller, with a light drift to it: the actual quote should go “I’VE been this way since 1956” but I wasn’t about letting Otis know that. Besides I catch his oblique drift. It was a perfect song of generic prosthesis (the aphrodisiacal potion), a pharmakon meeting up with it’s intended generic other, love, and being interdicted by law, the cop down on thirty-forth and vine. It might be interesting to note an alternate spelling of the type of potion into afrodisiacal, given the primacy of afro-american culture for the development of American popular music culture and the white mimesis it has always spawned. But that’s for another day. We never stray far from Law and its stroke between love/hate.

Building in the Storm: On The Banks of Lake Bols

There are those who are astonished by my lack of memory about certain things. What are those things? I don’t know. How could I if I don’t remember them. Or else I remember them differently from others. Maybe Otis could address that but I doubt it, My brother has memories, slight things, I mean nothing major, that I have absolutely no remembrance of. Intimates have queried me about this or that—I’m talking childhood things—and I am a blank (odd, I just miswrote that as ‘black’). I do have a mental shoebox of faded sepia images that at one time I would pull of its place and flash through them. They have no redeeming value to anyone else. And why should they? There is a sense in which all memories are generic, and none more so within temporal sweeps, or statistical gatherings of selves, regional expositions, media implantations which give the illusion that the memory is mine but not necessarily that of ten thousand other souls. (and know by that account that we are more multiplicity than unity, souls bundled together into some unfathomable and unfashionably tight knot.

I am about to sink into a spell of melancholia that I know will be difficult to rise from. Otis, sensing my distressing into a collapse mode of time, extended a hand toward me palm up and in an oddly comforting tone spoke:

“The past carries with it a hidden index by which it is referred to redemption. Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? In the voices we hear isn’t there an echo of now silent ones? Don’t the women we court have sisters they no longer recognize? If this is so, then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Then our coming was expected on earth. Then, like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim.”

Yeah, well, let me tell you this O: nobody wants salvation anymore, if they EVER did. What they want is justice. Salvation can wait until the End of Time for all of that. Salvation is for the tyrants, survival is what is left for the rest of us who have no hope, but only waiting. Or maybe for the fate of those who have already Gone but still hang around, tenebrous ghosts forgetting that they are out of bounds, condemned to ricochet inside our skulls. A sprawling squalling mass that sometimes feels as if it were our very selves, that there is no one exept this multiplicity.

O. slumped his huge frame into the worn sleigh rocker that my father had that photograph taken in, stern pharaoh, then leaned forward his elbows on knees and intoned magisterially:

“Only on Judgment Day will the meaning of history (a meaning that cannot be mastered or possessed by "man or men") emerge from the political unconscious and come to light. Only on Judgment Day

will the past come into full possession of its meaning: a meaning in which even the expressionless of history (the silence of the victims, the muteness of the traumatized) will come into historical expression.”

Dammit O. Why you gotta be like that.

My family left Mississippi for the Big City of Atlanta in nineteen sixty one, even as the Cheatham family was about to sink into tragedy, just as the nation was about to do likewise, a mark that the wound-licking times of the laid back fifties was about to be over for good. One always, perhaps, realized in hindsight that even a weak messianic power has (or had) a captivating appeal: something or someone will come back to save us, redeem us from all the wrongs that have been committed. Or at least provide a faint hope before the fairy tale ends that it could have been otherwise, that youth is the only trump card one has, that it can only be used once, that no one knows that until it is always too late to rescue affairs from the grinders of the gods. (One of those grinders is surely The Automobile. In those days it took upwards of nine hours over two lane surface streets to travel from Philadelphia MS to Atlanta GA; it took commitment and purpose to make the trip and then under the chaos generator of tragedy, the first one being the murder of my cousin Ricky, to be followed, all too rapidly then it seemed, by the deaths of grandparents, the uncles and aunts.

But all I wanted at the moment was a philly cheese steak sub.

 Meetings on the Edge of Eternity

Law Pt. 2

If you were walking across a plain, had an honest intention of walking on, and yet kept regressing, then it would be a desperate matter; but since you are scrambling up a cliff, about as steep as you yourself are if seen from below, the regression can only be caused by the nature of the ground, and you must not despair. 
Franz Kafka

LAW

pt.2 

continued

 

During the embalming process the brain was normally removed. Usually a pointed instrument would be pushed up a nostril to break into the cranial cavity. A rod with a hook on the end would then be used to slice up the brain and discard it in a piecemeal fashion. 3-D reconstruction of cavity confirming that the brain had been removed via the nose. Damage to the nasal septumand ethemoid bone was clearly visible.

The cemetary occupies four blocks of land between the house and the little downtown, sloped down into a hollow then rising to a ridge, the newest graves at the bottom of the hollow. Most of the new gravestones of a uniform size, granite, shiny-faced, in stark contrast to the markers from the turn of the century: crypts, statuary, crumbling, age-blackened, lichen-covered testimonies to an age when the figure of death still had a shadowy figure. The new graves almost had the look of military cemeteries with their white, uniform regularities, as if they couldn't escape the general in death even, the greatest generalizable and generic event of all. But now it was if the whole population of the dead was being enscripted into the great army of the beyond. Reflective, no doubt, of the mass culture of the late twentieth century, he mused, as they moved off the narrow macadam road through the deepening gloom of twilight, past the occasional cedar and in amongst the palely reflective signposts of once-lives.

 

Across the road from the cemetery were two small houses, weathered white paint glowing wanly in the light of the newly risen half-moon. Given the context, they almost seemed like crypts themselves. A shadow passed over the curtains in one window momentarily obscuring its yellowish light. He turned and walked up the hill to the ridge among the tombstones. He supposed they were called 'markers' now for the newer ones. He preferred the tombstones, redolent of gothic tales and untold, untellable intimacies now, individual stories. How could the new markers have any stories to tell? Flat, featureless, uniform . . . like, he thought unfairly, the population they were designed to mark. Some new cemeteries in large cities, he knew, were simple vast expanses of manicured grassland, with small name markers set flush into the ground. Made them easier to maintain, mow right over them. As a kid, walking through the cemetery at night he always observed the rule never to step on the graves. It had nothing to do with respect but rather the fear of eliciting the ghost in the grave. On the other hand, maybe that was a form of respect. If so, the fear of raising the dead did not seem particularly acute these days. Perhaps several generations of horror and zombie films had put the dead in their place. Which didn't seem to be exactly in the ground.

Using the principles of IMHOTEP, we have created a mortuary science that perpetuates the Vital Life Force, utilizable by the soul/spirit, for a much longer time and in a more viable form. Lacking the knowledge of IMHOTEP'S embalming techniques, we opted to use cyrogenic freezing. But not of the entire body, and not of "dead" tissue. Our technique is both scientific and religious. It provides a client (believer) with kit containing a vial (with appropriate preservatives) and applicator probe. The applicator is used to collect living somatic cells (semen or buccal tissue cells) and transport them to the Sanctuary, preferrably during life. The cells are collected and concentrated, placed in a small transparent vessel partially coatedwith electrum, hermetically sealed and then cryogenically frozen.

     These LIFE TUBES are sequestered in a temple environment and maintained in a frozen state by prearranged contract with the client. The base of the container of the LIFE TUBES is transparent. Below the base, and projecting upward and through the LIFE TUBES is a pulsed light or laser with its beam directed toward Sirius. The laser beam functions as a carrier wave for the MYSTAR frequencies and the Vital Life Force of the specimen which will accompany and perpetuate the transmission.

A car turned onto the road, its headlights slithering from marker to marker, briefly illuminating each one, almost like an awakening. As they neared the top of the ridge, clouds began to obscure the moonlight. A soft breeze ruffled the bleached red petals, now pink, of a bunch of artificial roses in a vase set in front of a nearby stone.

...the second fundamental aspect of the mentality of the ancient Egyptians was precisely the principle of free substitution, of interchangeability, of the ability to swap every element for another one. The world was viewed as a vast combinatory system in which high and low, male and female, light and dark, life and death, organic and inorganic never cease to trade places and to merge. Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art, Mario Perniola

Although The tyranny of thing-ness was finally complete here, flesh becoming grass, stone, strangely enough communication had not ceased he felt, the most possible distant having become the closest. The collapse of time was complete here, a final Now which was never and always. No wonder cemetaries and death were gradually being banished from the world. The last refuge of a certain infinite was too uncomfortable for a civilization which increasingly only recognized some variant of a Hegelian BAD infinite, a boundlessness constrained and made comfortable. Even the stars were made invisible in the great cities, strained for most through video screens. And yet here...he looked up from peering at an eroded inscription. The bowl of grass, once-flesh, and granite teeth glimmered under a half-canopy of stars, clouds beginning to rumble up from the west on the horizon. Shards of light illuminated the clouds from within as lightning flashed beneath the horizon. Eerily, he heard no rumble. The juxtaposition of the stars, the storm and the dead was almost too much for him to bear, perhaps too much infinity.

His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

And still the dead are buried facing east, the better to rise to meet their Savior on the Final Day of Reckoning which will also be the great day of Awakening, no longer chased by the great storm of History (which ironically enough, arose in the west, in myth always the Land of the Dead). Flesh, stone and stars meeting in the Great Collapsing beyond the little collapse of earthly death.

Here, in this place, am earthly which merges with all the other places of its kind throughout human time, all the fables of desire disappear into the demands of history and then the fable of history itself succumbs to a far greater demand. Here, in this place, the ancient stony lineaments of a face without a visage begins to appear, the face of thingness, ridged with the planet itself, a fierce pagan thing more akin to the storm on the horizon as it encounters the stars. The gap toothed grin of the graveyard only served as mute testimony to its immutable power, silent witness to the inexorable fate of life's final crap shoot.

There, in that place, across a divide which doesn't or does exist, begins a new elemental combinatoric. There, the great line of flesh extending 'backward' meets its chiasmatic match, disappearing into the vortex of matter made mute, stripped even of its ability to sign, replaced with phone lines, cut and frayed where they enter that gathering storm. But even the machine perhaps must fall silent before such forces--or at the very least continually defer their confrontation. Or even, at the maximum, embody the catastrophe itself, to 'write the dis-aster' (meaning literally 'away from the stars'). That mute stumbling at the end of every individual particular becoming becomes, or is becoming, or has become a slide into the mechanical. The machine stoops to cradle us long before we reach that final dis-aster, easing the transition, as it were, into the final universal interface of 'death' (always placed in quotes now). Was it ever so, even when the first proto-human picked up the first flaked stone? Probably. The infinite distance within slowly beginning to round on itself with that bad infinity (hand 'speaking' to stone -- the better version may be vice versa --, stone colliding to head, then finally headstone: it's the most ancient story there is, the primal human contract.) Then, matter mutters, matter speaks, mind matters.

to be continued

Law pt. 1

Grandparents house 'up the hill' now destroyed

•

The true path is along a rope, not a rope suspended way up in the air,
but rather only just over the ground. 
 It seems more like a tripwire than a tightrope.
Franz Kafka

 

LAW

part one

But he has no story, he hasn’t been in story? It’s not certain: he’s in his own story, unimaginable, unspeakable. That doesn’t matter: the attempt must be made, in the old stories incomprehensibly mine, to find his. It must be there somewhere. It must have been mine, before being his. I’ll recognize it, in the end I’ll recognize it: the story of the silence that he never left, that I should never have left, that I may never find again, that I may find again. Then it will be he, it will be I, it will be the place: the silence, the end, the beginning, the beginning again – how can I say it? That’s all words, they’re all I have – and not many of them: the words fail, the voice fails. So be it. I know that well. It will be the silence, full of murmurs, distant cries. The usual silence, spent listening, spent waiting, waiting for the voice.

 Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

Dead Telepath

Slim and Otis had not been in town long. The little town was so small that practically everyone knew they were back from that two year stint at Parchment Farm. Well, every body knew except their grandma maybe. It was close to sundown as they were making their way carefully around the town square occasionally slipping into a side street so as to miss ms. So and So or mr. Know It All. Wouldn’t do, not at all, for EVERYBODY to know they were back. They had had some pretty wild days (and nights) at Oxford so naturally a certain miserabilism had set on them during their days wielding a hoe or a shovel. They had gotten considerably taken with a case of homesickness, almost to the day when they set foot on campus but nothing like when they were behind bars. They had both disavowed themselves of such behavior from here on out. But the disavowals seemed diaphanous, without sufficient body, even as they were declaring it in the bar last night. Well you can see why there might still be some problems.

They had come back to the middle of God’s Country, even though they weren’t so struck with the whole Jesus thing, having hoisted quite a few with preachers’ sons. And daughters. They didn’t really seem to do tent revivals of the Holy Ghost much anymore but look here. One of the many abandoned buildings downtown—emptied by the arrival of the new Walmart at the edge of town—seemed to be occupied by some sort of revival. At least judging from the commotion coming through the front door left slightly ajar.

Amidst many hosannas and shouts, they slid in the shadows at the back of the room. The room was vacant of furniture other than a few chairs in the front of the room and a single light bulb overhead. The preacher was working up a sweat giving the message but one which Slim couldn’t quite make out as he peered through the inky blackness in the back of the room.

“The history of these abandonists has yet to be written, Its motto, latently or manifestly, is the call of “Stop history!’ that makes allies of apocalypticists, tragedians, defeatist and pensioners. An yet the combined gravity of the calm keepers, the losers, the off-putters and their literary tribunes achieved little against the unleashed visionary energy of the project-makers and e-charlatans….”

The preached paused in his pacing back and forth and wiped his sweat drenched face and comically hoisting his pants. Slim dimly wondered what religion this was, Didn’t sound like anything he was familiar with.

 ….“Today, as yesterday, all of these live off their productive errors and the followings spawned by those errors.  Yes! Through their auto-hypnotic talents, practical natures manage time and again to build up empires around themselves from self-deceptions that succeed in the medium term.”

Otis got up slowly in the murky back passage and turned to whisper in Slim’s ear before heading out the door : “Brother the law is made by authority, not by truth. Slim followed, as Otis began to speak again at normal voice as the commercial steel and glass door slowly closed behind them. The off-kilter Service Tonight sign oscillated slowly back and forth against the glass.

“Brother, I sense the impending perception of the granularity of time as the waves bifurcate in ecstatic dimensions, tending always outward into the Great Beyond. Self-deception is the necessary name of the Game.”

Ever since the Accident Otis had become inconsolable, given to uttering dire prognostications at the drop of a fez. At least they seemed to have a dire drift even as the words moved out faster sometimes than he could follow.

It had become dark as they moved down backstreets toward the house, past the few street light that were now on.

Otis continued, although Slim had problems figuring out how he got there:

“The guillotine was a fine device for separating infinities allowing all completions to become incomplete and infinite at the same time. Melancholia here is

clearly identified as the deadly narcissism of the lived moment. Is there no

escape from the unhappy consciousness? …even amongst the dead?… the attempt

to carve out an immaculate space of inwardness either masks a prior contamination

or prepares a virgin zone for occupation. Can you hear me brother?”

“Okay”

“Brother you necessarily misunderstand me. These men brought the curse down upon themselves and transmitted it to others through their very fears. We know that there are diseases-that is, nervous or ‘mental’ disease, neuroses or even psychoses- which are transmitted because people talk about them. Conversation sets the mind to work and in this way serves as the contaminating agent. At the end of the eighteenth century people began to be fearful of extended sojourns away from home because they had become conscious of the threat posed by nostalgia. People even died of nostalgia after having read in books that nostalgia is a disease which is frequently mortal.”

Slim abruptly stopped and pulled Otis back against the shadows to let a car slide into the dark ahead. They were approaching the Cedar Lawn graveyard where daddy and all the rest of them were buried, almost in the middle of town.

Slim suddenly remembered the scene in The Shining when Jack Nicolson is typing away at the typewriter, thinking no doubt that he is writing the great work when in fact he is typing the same thing over and over : “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

Otis pulled a rumpled baseball card out of his shirt pocket and made as if to read.

“How to preserve a space of critical negativity without relinquishing the claim to practical engagement; how to engage without simply reproducing the conditions of the day; how to distinguish aesthetic dissonance, detachment, or disenchantment from disenfranchisement, abdication, and self-deception; how to distinguish commitment from an unthinking submission to the existent….”

Putting the card ceremoniously in his other front park of his faded denim shirt he continued down the hill, two paces in front of Slim.

It's not that far from the town square with the movie theater back to the house. It's a mile and a half probably at most with the town cemetery in between.. It sits on the site of the old workers quarters for a saw mill, all the wood frame houses painted, mostly, at least it seems in retrospect, in various faded shades of red and ocher, crisscrossed with dirt roads, sending up a perpetual haze of dust on the sides of the houses, a slight glaze of gray-brown. All occupied by tattered black families. Anyway, all gone now, Absorbed into what ever passes for modern in the rural south. Probably skipped over into the post-modern, like some newly computerized third world country. No decent telephone system but plenty of manufacturing capacity for computer memory.