“…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.
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