Murghana, the Coming

Living in The Town produces satisfactions and recriminations, just like living everyplace nowadays. Every place seems much like every other place. And of course the general banality of every place is filtered through the spectacularity of the Screen, either smart phone, tv or computer, acting as 'chips of messianic time', the very nature of the technical, slowly but surely becoming what amounts to 'self-awareness'. It has to be put into scare quotes because of the problematic nature of both the self and awareness now, as we becomes dumbed down while the global machine is becoming smartened up. It becomes another question as to whether we are becoming more alienated (that is, sundered apart from any sort of 'authenticity', the bete noir of the current election cycle with the hunt on for the authentic politician, a politician, in other words, who is wholly what she/he is, all parts available for all to see), or whether a field of transparency is opening up, the possibility of outing anyone about anything, no secrets allowed, which means basically no privacy allowed, since dark weeds can grow in private, better to have done with it (at this point the dividing line between pornography and its other becomes imperceptible).  After all, when it comes right down to it, from a demographic sense we are pretty much interchangeable generic comsuming units. Historians can look backward from here and see that where we are, is where we were always coming to. Nothing to see here folks, move on.

 Even if one were to say that such a creature is improbable now, the world wide telecommunicative smart system we are building is busily creating 'systems of tranparency' to fit into an infinite plane of Now, a place where the only thing coming is the next new app, or techno gadget but meanwhile odd pieces of one's self becomes sequestered in equally odd places, stuffed around in odd memory holes, archives for the haunted dead, bequeathed to various libraries that no one reads anymore, the various identities split in non-localized spaces, dualities not only not going away but coming to fruition as amulets, tokens, hidden visibilities, fetishes, waiting  for reanimation and/or quantum superimposition, the Coming Community lying in wait in plain sight probably at the clawed feet of Benjamin's angel, a 'pileup of debris, futility and failure.'

"Sanco Panza and Odyssseus have this in common: both saved themselves using 'inaadequate, even childish means.' But [....] Don Quixote was a puppet. It wasn't he who spent years reading chivlric romances and losing himself in feverih dreams. It was Sancho Panza, who quickly grasped that those stories, with all the demons they roused, would soon have killed him. So he concocted the figure of Don Quiote. [....] Once he had found a name and it had become a character, it could be oberved from a certain distance rather than simply endured. And above all he'd get a chance to think about other things."
Roberto Calasso, in chapter 5,, Powers,  K.

But if the only thing which is Coming is one's self writ large...how boring (unless the self, and body, is much much more than we currently think it is, viz; Spinoza).
How much more pleasurable, exciting, mysterious is the Acheiropoieta.  No wonder we are suffered to view continuously unveiling of odd images on Mars and every new stellar discovery! The only place that such confoundingly contrary images can appear is though the aegis of the super machine scopes, electrical and optical, and in outer space, inner space being rapidly foreclosed through other machines, the only thing left to the human is a perpetual Waiting.

Fehta Murghana

Somewhere along the timeline of 1963, He walks into the old house into the lions' den of uncles. Willard comments "Well look a'here what we got, it's the Atlanta yankee and his hermaphroditic son wearin' Burmooda shorts." The boy's hair was touching his collar. He never forgot and he never forgave. Until just now. Come to think of it where WAS Willard buried? As far as his hermaphroditic nephew knew it wasn't in the Cedar Lawn repository. Didn't matter, long gone, nothing but the start of one of those quaint bitter sweet southern stories, baptism by fire. But was that where the nom de net came from? Production of phantasms have to proceed from the most un-occulted materials, but drawn out from the most trivial of materials, Elijah's dry bones resurrecting phantom of life which leads me back to grandfather's comment, deacon in hardshell baptist church then, written in notes he found later, and concerning Schwerney Chaney and Goodman that 'they got what they deserved'...closing the pad in shock and dismay. Things hide in open sight everywhere. Fehta Murghana mutates into all.

O. cannot be held back as he breaks from the shadows cast by the fireplace: " Do not despair brother, here:
 

'The only things that appear are those which are first able to dissimulate themselves. Things already grasped in their aspect or peacefully resembling themselves never appear. They are apparent, of course, but only apparent: they will never be given to us as appearing. What then is necessary for an apparition, the event of appearing? What must happen just before appearing closes itself within a presumably stable or hopefully definitive aspect? There must be a unique and momentary opening that will mark the apparition as an apparition. A paradox bursts forth because, in the very moment that it opens itself to the visible world, appearing is destined to be something like dissimulation. A paradox bursts forth because, for but a moment, appearing gives access to the here below, to something that suggests the contrary or, better yet, the hell of the visible world—the realm of dissemblance.' 
The Paradox of the Phasmid, Didi-Huberman

"See brother, nothing is as it seems. The relays between your skirts, your glasses, your penis, your vulva, your mouth from your words, all hasten to close up even as they open. You can't leave the lights on continuously; who will pay the psychic bill for the insanity? The common space demands that we make law-like negotiations. But you chose the Androgen, perfect and miraculous alchemical child as the pawn to play. The impossible generic that hides fantastic divisions within itself, the apparition of the distance no matter how near it may seem to be, as Walter Benjamin had it for the aura, the subtle body which certain one's are forever trying to surmount, only to cause the eruption of the creepiness of the uncanny as the can of worms on the mantle, the new form of the rapture/rupture, glamorous enchaining of soul to body..."

all this, this...APPARATUS you are surrounding everything with O. is disquietening. I feel nothing but cracks forming for me, under me, around me. It feels as though a localized singularity is engulfing me. Personal anecdotes lead nowhere, examples don't serve any exemplarity, stories terminate before they start up, all conventons nothing but sophisticated nets, dipping in an invisible ocean to catch invisible fish.

"Yes Brother, everything does seem to be an apparatus, a catchment to prevent eruptions. Here:

'I will call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.'

Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus

This is depressing O; I don't wish to carry forward right now. 
It feels like Something Is Coming.

 

'

...1948 pt 4

Last we met, he was discussing the amniotic fluid of nostalgia for place of birth, the peculiar mix of hope and catastrophe, the fatigue of living that the faint musty odor of nostalgia gives off, a sort of reverse osmosis.  Does it exist every where and every when? Surely not. Although it did seem endemic to certain sorts of philosophies and poetics, a keening notification of homesickness for 'homes' that didn't exist anymore. The impact on prehistoric and deep time cultures like the Egyptian and those cultures which, having constructed cyclopean ruins in praise to whatever, found that they had to travel in the same footsteps for countless millennia, surely a hideous thought for the modern human where instantaneousness is not soon enough (one reason why we will definitely develop time travel to get there BEFORE the event happens, the message is sent, the information is coded if it is at all feasible---and maybe even more fervently so if it is NOT possible.) But what tropic modalities of the mind develops in such a grip of monumental stasis? It seems as if the figures which have been left for us have to do with death and abandonment, disappearance. For that matter, even now we know not what chthonic grip the outside has on us in our contemporary (apparent) fluidity so best to pave it over or look where the light is best near the closest streetlamp. Even though the obscene doubling of culture and life with uncanny technical döpplegangers may make it harder to make hay while the sun shines.

Meanwhile the Old Homeplace still glints and moans beneath the overgrown foliage (resembling nothing so much as a faery hill fort waiting patiently to take away the unwary), away from towns folks, who are preparing fresh coats of paint downtown to freshen up.

Law pt 8

Law resides everywhere and nowhere, a 'coercive vacuity'. All the more efficatious working on and against those who are far and against (sic). There is really no such thing as being for or against since it is always on both sides never losing any where it shows or even (especially) in those places it doesn't show--like childhood. psychoanalysis is foreever getting pole axed down the middle with law as a topological tar and feathering. Perhaps intensity of experience comes from the intensity of the law.

Whatever wherever the Law never loses.
This strikes me as being too far north and not enough south.
Let the law decide!

some quotes:

….experience as an intensity that takes up the full space of the senses. The takeaway is that the valuation of one pole over another will always be ideologically motivated: are we oriented toward the cards that have been dealt us, the wreckage of past fates bequeathed us by history, and the failed hopes detected there? Or are we oriented toward internal states, duration, the awed absorption of flux, the authenticity of feeling, and the affirmation of impersonal forces?

Ben Parker, review of Jameson’s The Antinomies of Realism

and:

One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good.... This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical…

Giorgia Agamben quoting Benjamin on Kafka

Without beginning, without end,

Without past, without future.

A halo of light surrounds the world of the law.

The Hui Ming Ching

...1948: brood pt 3

He had always thought of the year 1948, as well as to a lesser degree, the sign-in year of 1947 to be seminal years for the current state of the world. The first monkey astronaut went up. The United States recognized the state of Israel. President Truman started the Marshall Plan to rebuild war torn Europe. The world's largest telescope, the Palomar Observatory, was built in California. Claude Shannon wrote the first paper outlining information theory in 1947. And much more such as the ten best film noir movies like He Walked by Night, I Walk Alone, Key Largo, They Live By Night, The Night Has a Thousand Eye and many more. The troops were back home and had brought a contagion with them: global conflict, suburban capitalism, mass death. Film noir encapsulated an existential dread, presaging Panic In The Year Zero, as not just a 1962 film but  a legacy and a concept. (The same feel he got when he watched the Walking Dead.) Most memorable line in ...Zero: "there are no more civilians, we are all soldiers now." Thus was inaugurated the sublimated march of American modernity (and hence the world); the human brood that hatched then and around that fateful year would bear the brunt as well as the pleasures of what was to come and the 'progress' --toward what?--that never ceases to come. (In the background then and increasingly so now) are always two options given: the messianic saving in one form of other, machine or tyrant; the other being existence in a catastrophic landscape of nihilism. The one of Law and nothing to either side of that: a coercive vacuity or..just vacuity.  Chaos generates the law, but only the law will allow us to gain access to chaos. Roberto Calasso.  The subtle body began to shimmer on screens worldwise but all in search of an alchemical perfect body, perfect fusion.

He could say that well, he was stored away in a little southern hamlet (like thousands of others in the brood) but he and all others were locked away in the grip of the image (what is it?!! What is it??!  'can't tell, too diaphanous') becoming more solid.  And like the Magicicada periodicity they all came out together. and like the periodicity of certain bamboos flowering cycle of up to a hundred and thirty years (where they all flower and die at the same time no matter how differentiated in locale or climate, no matter how far apart they are.) No one knows the exact mechanism.

Thus the perfect body of childhood is locked in. Looking back, O how sweet it felt to him; watching his son only intensified the sweetness, a nectar that seemed to ooze from everything, every memory, every section of the street, the hill,the storefronts, even those long gone he easily glazed past what is into what was, giving a bitterness, no, he guessed it was reality that was so bitter, the minefield and perpetual power struggles of what it was to be a sane functioning adult having moulted into at least some hardened shape to withstand the blows.

But if O. were here he knew what he would say:

quit your hypomystical mooning!

Tell colorful stories of bb guns and boomerangs

of back dirt roads, of moonshiners and uncles gone bad,

  dying of liver failure, vignettes of crazy aunts, of race, sing kum ba yaa,

tell stories of pink '57 Chevies, of ramshackle farm houses, 

of twins with green teeth, digging up ants and putting them in jars,

of building huts and forts, 'we were like dogs, twisting in the high grass...', 

of flowing around on soft summer nights 

with cousins, hard at war,

of despicable dry summer afternoons, the deadness so palable you could snap the day in two like match sticks, tell stories for god sakes, not this misrable rumbling around, sniffing the air like that mad dog...for all that just tell mad dog stories.

SOMEthing ANYthing 

,

But no one knows the exact mechanisms. 

...1948, pt 2

In the dark womb of The old Ellis Theater he and his kid pals had swum langurously on triple feature Saturdays. laying fallow for quite awhile, it had been refurbished. It now had a monthly movie series of an old motion pictures  (one of which he had taken his seven year old son, causing multiple cascades in the spatiotemporal Mnemonics.) . No doubt that luminosities shone forth as an Indoctritron, radiating at levels that would only slowly leak out over the decades to come. But indoctrinating to what?

He often used the year 1948 as a bellwether, the bell being placed around thousands of young throats. But leading where, to what aim? Truth to tell, he was dissolved into a science fictional universe of monsters, UFOs, mad scientists and the whole panoply of the weird. Much of the world he lived in now came from then. As he had written some other place:

"I can remember many clear and starry summer nights when I was a young boy, hanging out with my friends on the hood of the family car, all dreamy and wonder-filled after coming back from a showing of It Came From Outer Space, or Not of The Earth, or Angry Red Planet, or Forbidden Planet or any of a dozen other space themed adventures. These first cinematic voyages of the space age seemed like incredible irruptions in the eyes of an eleven year old boy, an enchantment coming from outside the frame of ordinary everyday life, and certainly finding fertile ground in those just beginning on life’s journey. But as much as anything else what we were witnessing was the first large scale demographic distribution of a redressing of the dismantling of enchantment by the Enlightenment, an approaching wave of the uncanny that was soon to turn into a tsunami."

But in the interstices of this intricate kitsch--to which all art no matter how great was doomed to find its final resting place--perhaps Something Else nestled, some other testimony possible, available, waiting to be decrypted from the land of fog and shadow, waiting to be pulled off-planet, off-axis, gravity-free, childhood's end--or just now truly beginning? ...

Mississippi Childhood Around 1948 pt 1

(Looking like a deconstructed Old Homestead devised perhaps by the group Coop Himmelblau, the scene of ruination is approached carefully and wistfully by The Family. The area is now completely grown over, the structures have completely collapsed, covered by the iconic southernalia of Kudzu. The land itself has been in the Family for a hundred years, the structure itself for almost that long, unpainted board, tin roof, vandalization proceeding almost immediately after death of the Grandparents.)

As he repeated over and over again, the South (as well as the 'Global South' is about nothing if it is not about a certain relationship to the terrain, the seasons, the dirt under the feet. The 'old homestead' is held in great veneration in Mississippi, it not yet being prey to spoils of development. And yet waiting inside so to speak, the idea of the home/stead and its sunlit stabilities harbors the un-home (unheimlich as it goes in German), also spoken as the uncanny, that pivot point where all is not as it seems, a point where domesticity meets a wildness. There is where Jack Kerouac's 'mystic south' resides, a gothic gong that tolls deep inside. Still, now, here, especially in Mississippi and for reasons not entirely clear. It is as if revenants, holdovers from other landforms, even other continents, are given bodily expression, telephone calls from the dead, always ringing on the other end, a zeitgeist punching a hole in reality, getting leaks from Some  Other Place. (Avital Ronell's  epochal The Telephone book continues to ring in that register--but even higher pitched; from a blurb: "The telephone marks the place of an absence. Affiliated with discontinuity, alarm, and silence, it raises fundamental questions about the constitution of self and other, the stability of location, systems of transfer, and the destination of speech."

Maybe that accounts for some of the hyper-religiosity of the state: talismans to ward off the always encroaching/increasing dead, keeping things safe and under wraps, well within the economy of the domestic, not waiting for the ethereal klaxon from a beyond of even the futural Eschaton. But still, an uncanny worm inside the blissful apple. A special relationship to time (and being). He could still remember the old phones when he was a child, always picking up  on the lines of the living on party lines, a gossip line as well, bringing everything closer...except for the farm above, no phone line, always there in a certain nowness (Haecceity you might say, everything firmly Here and not some gone There, not being whisked away by an alien tech, keeping faith (literally) with the horse and buggy, fireplace, outhouse, root cellar; the only collapse here was the the waiting for the Messiah to pull the Imperium down and set up the true Kingdom, a false law pulled down by a higher true Law. The waves of the uncanny slowly building in Western culture would find a hard sell in Mississippi. Almost as if the repeats of traumas continually repeat themselves but on a slow burner, sub rosa, the South saturated with trauma of self to self, eternal returns...

And then it was 1948.

Law pt 6

It seems like a write the same things over and over (as  I once told someone; the person said well just stop). would that it were so easy: I can't really stop and I can't really get started properly, doomed to create these little fractal like pieces, all the fragments embedded once in the other, trying to avoid a Unified Fail theory, still trying to make sense of things. Oh there is plenty of sense to be made at the surface...

O. "My brother! You are like the rudimentary state of the slime mold, condemned to be a distributed allotment of self along a curve, except all the bits and pieces just flop around, never congealing around the signa, the one pointing over to the other. You use the word' experimental' to justify this useless expendiure OF nothingness ON nothingness"

I've never claimed I had anything to say fat head. Yes you are making me angry now. Why don't you go someplace else and play.

O "You know I cannot do that brother. we are both integral to the task..."

Oh yeah? What task is that I don't see any flippin' task.

O "Everyone has a task. Sometimes it is accomplished by not knowing it, other times the other way around, the only other sense that can be made is in the particular. And it depends on which end of the stick you hold and the firmness or slackness of the grip with which you wield it."

You're making even less sense than usual O.

O "The sense is not mine to make; it is yours."

Ever since the escape he had developed this sense of law, place, self, home and homelessness with O. before and it always spiraled around itself, never coming to any resolution. The anomia was just as painful as the para-nomia, the rule and the ruleless both forming sickly bittersweet toxins in the conversation. He knew, in a black sort of way, what was coming next.
 

O: "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." Jean-Luc Nancy

You said we weren't going to do that. No body cares about that, or that formulated in that way. Why make things more difficult. People (or the robots who flit about the web continually) could care less. In fact you make them angry all law-full feeling. We must STOP the breakage from occurring, fill in the ruptures or blotter (sic) yet not even speak of them. Alright then, there is this if you want to fight dirty:

 "If punishment could be provoked merely by the arbitrary actions of those who violate the law, then the law would be in their control: they would be able to touch it and make it appear at will; they would be masters of its shadow and light. That is why transgression endeavors to overstep prohibition in an attempt to attract the law to itself — all it ends up doing is reinforcing the law in its weakness. The law is the shadow toward which every gesture necessarily advances; it is itself the shadow of the advancing gesture."

Michel Foucault (1989)

O "YES! that is it perfectly! Without knowing perfectly what it indicates; that non-knowing is the shadow of the advancing gesture, Vampires of the Law! And the shadow disappears at illumination's greatest intensity, when the light is overhead. But it has not gone for good. The law is waiting for the next gesture, a vampiric waiting for the next gesture to draw close, they are the sides of the same abyssal yearning--maybe even extending to Nietzsche's Appollonian/Dionysian divided continuum. An ancient darkness indeed, moving from chthonic geo-logic to the furthest futurist astro-logic."

Well you are off your rocker O. If the Law hears you speaking in tongues like this you may be put INTO an abyssal container, doomed to weave above your own black hole.

O sputtered: " But but but this is the nature of the small town, wires visible, is it not? Are there no messages EITHER lawfully OR unlawfully, sent? No mysteries of the shadow?
 

‘Only gradually from the fragment, through shrouded simulacra, especially those relating to us, a subject takes shape from the marasma, artfully garnered, amassed and dissolved . . .The melody or song under the text, leads the divination forward, weaving a pattern of invisible fleurons and ornamental endpieces; Words are displayed with their myriad facets, the most unusual and the most apt for the spirit, our centre of resonance; the spirit which perceives them outside the normal order of things, like an echo in a cavern, for as long as their mobility and unspoken effect lasts; words ever ready for a reciprocal kindling of lights in the distance or at a chance slanting angle, until they fade.

Mallarmé (quoted in Saussure’s anagrams and the analysis of

literary texts, Peter Wunderli in The Cambridge Campanion to Saussure)

 O.K. I'm angry now for some reason. What do you say to this Mr. Big Shot O.?!

O: “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.

Shoshana Feldman The Juridical Unconscious”

But O, Feldman reads this Benjamin –and New Testament Paul also- in a secular, revolutionary, perhaps even metaphorical light instead of a Benjaminian messianic eschatology. WB is much more aware of the likely impossibilty of human justice ‘coming to a head’ minus any sort of , well, divine intervention. Cultural apparatuses EMBODY the very thing they are trying to extricate and remediate, i.e. injustice; history shows many things but the very least thing that it shows is that revolutions themselves embody injustice of one form or another, with the following history setting up various justifications for the injustices endured by ‘the opposition’. The only ‘fair witnesses’ are indeed those who are completely espressionless: the dead. That is why the idea of their return exceeds all cultural strategies even as the idea of return is hijacked by zombies etc ---showing that the dead, even if they DO come back must remain expressionless, except for an inchoate ferocious, chthonic and ravenous rage., the complete and denuded fury of the outside totally inhabiting the inside, thereby reversing the whole course of history AND prehistory, which amounts to the rage of the subject, the self, the human, against all that would oppose it. At THIS endpoint language itself becomes nothing but a shriek, life kicked away, its scaffolding gone, nothing but glossalalic ruin.  The onlying which is for sure is the ‘misappropriation’ of the dead and the syncope which invariably happens when ‘bounds are put on rightiousness.  See the rest of Feldman’s glazing detournement in the terms back into trauma. In the case of a fully secured secularizaton, the only thing which CAN come from death is a zombie …or some software equivalent.  Any other claim for the dead must reside in some species of theology.

O:  "Chaos generates the law, but only the law will allow us to gain access to chaos."

Roberto Calasso

Law= coercive vacuity    

question to O: Does the Machine constitute the Coming Law, hollowness wrapped in force?

 

Once Upon a Time

He woke up this morning thinking of the Coral Castle in Florida. He had gone there once upon a time. But in looking at the images online he realized he couldn't remember anything about the place. Had I really been there, stopping on the way to Key West? he seemed to remember that he had several pamphlets from the place. But had someone given them to me? Had he seen a video? Memory is a wild lost frontier. We think of memory sometimes as an x ray vision, a piercing of the veil of time, bringing back sepia nuggets as they pass though black and white and become technicolor. But what if you couldn't control it? What if, when he walks up the hill to Bobby and Hilda's old place, now falling into ruin, his memories don't stop with them being in their chairs out front of the house, don't stop from twenty years ago? thirty, forty, even more, Proust on lysergic acid and steroids, the cellular level of memory beginning to open up, the structure of DNA itself beginning to unfold, the long recessed floods of the Mississippi beginning to seep in, titantic changes being viserally remembered, the earth itself beginning to buckle and fold beneath his feet, the rise of man, the age of dinosaurs, still no stoppage. Is this not what Science desires?  full visibility all the way to the bottom, except there is no bottom...what would open up, what would close down, the human prospect long gone..like the final 3 minutes of The Man with X Ray Eyes . Complete memory would be in-complete,  complete visibility (isn't that would be what it would have to be?) would lead to blindness and into complete merger with everything. Memory and time would have left the auditorium, taking us with them, everything fading into Blade Runner and The Man with Xray Eyes. Harrison Ford and Ray Milland, projections on the wall of the cave, except there is no cave.

Time is not a thermometer

('The Land,' including where you rose from and will be or are buried, is the time of the South (in all its global variants, places, geographies)... until, if you go far enough, it becomes the North--or the cold, or the dry, or the wet or the hot or whatever. At any rate it blots out the sky--which the Machine now brings back, and on the back of the Steeple, the cross, the crescent and whatever flag is left; perhaps they all point to some form of infinity now. Or perhaps it will turn out to be the 'bad infinite' and we will all be crushed beneath monstrous heavens, Time, and the leavening of the human.)

•
The Time Machine

‘It would seem that we are condemned yet to speak excessively about reality.  This is probably ideologism and it’s opposite are types of behavior which are still magical, terrorized, blinded and fascinated by a split in the social world.”

Roland Barthes Mythologies

 

Geo-futility+Geo-hope = Back Home

on passing through The Time Machine remake 

and becoming saturated

 

Passing mile after mile of extruded plastic, shaped and colored into various clown villages, all dedicated to various forms of ‘fastness’: fast food, fast cars, fast shopping of every stripe, all of them attempting some masquerade of familiarity, comfort’ seduction, the road to the theater is a continuous paen to immediacy and you-can-have-it-allness. Each small shopping mall now having evolved and grown into it’s neighbor so that the five miles I have to travel is nothing so much as a single large, outdoor department store dedicated to the very Newest of the New.

 

This time however at mid-afternoon the rain had begun, overcast, slightly foggy with all the mist in the air. All the garish store frontage became muted.  The rain adds a slightly inhuman air to everything, akin to cosmological signs and portents. The all-too-human seduction of all that STUFF loses some of its urgency.  The weather is now perhaps the last vestige of any sort of ‘beyond’ to the human.  Through the fog, everything immediately seems older, more needy and less pushy.  Almost as if there is something behind the rain and the fog, trying to flatten everything.  I have to eye the Shoney’s Big Boy holding up his giant hamburger in the rain slightly differently.

According to Hinduism, each world cycle is divided into four yugas or world ages.  This whole cycle is called the Mahaa Yuga or “The Great Yuga’” and lasts 4,320,000 years.

 It begins with Satya Yuga, then on to Treta Yuga, then the third, or Dwapara, then the last age, the age in which we are currently living, or Kali Yuga.  For Hinduism, time (or kal) is cyclical; when Kali ends then Satya begins again, and begins in a kind of golden age, when Truth and Virtue were uppermost in the universe.  In this age (long passed but due to come around again at the age of the long decline of Kali Yuga many thousands of years from now), Man embodied Truth and was aware of his five bodies -- the gross physical body, then the breath body, the mental body, the intelligence body, and the bliss body: four inner bodies and one physical body, all characterized by immense spiritual and psychic powers, with individual identities lasting 100,000 years.  The Satya age lasts 1,728,000 years. The overflowing light of the utopic Golden age, the age of Saturn.

In the next age, Treta Yuga, Man has lost one of his internal bodies, having at this point only three resulting in a general coarsening and densification.  Man is still very evolved spiritually; there is slight but distinct diminishing of powers and life span.  Dharmaa has decreased to 75% and life span is down to 10,000 years.  Silver Age.

The third age of Dwapara, three quarters of the way through the Mahaa Yuga, lasts 1,296,000 years, powers and internal bodies continue to disappear and densify. Life span is at 1000 years, dharma down to 50%.  Corresponds to the Bronze Age in Ancient Greek terms.

432,000 years marks the endurance of our own age, Kali Yuga, shortened due to a deficet of dharmaa, or moral substance.  All powers have shrunk to the immediacy of experience, men no longer consort with devas, internal bodies have disappeared, and the materiality and density of the remaining body has become all-consuming.  At the beginning of the Age of Kali, some knowledge of the breath body was known and Yoga was developed as a result. Now, moving into the second phase of the age, all knowledge of such esoteric regions has been lost and we have succumbed completely to the interplay of the gunas or the qualities of nature.  Dharma down to 25%, life span is 100 years. Evil is rampant.  The toughness and rigidity (but also fragileness) of an age of Iron.

As this age reaches its enantiadromic (Greek for: what goes up, must come down..and vice versa) zenith, a great destruction happens, followed by a great transformation and the Age of Satya begins again, with the development of great physical and spiritual powers.  The down side is that we’ve got 427,000 years left to go in this cycle.  So I guess you should keep up the cable payments for awhile.

everything is thusly a wheel within a wheel, with the basic human life following the general schema of the yugas: slow development, then decline, then starting over again, decline and dissipation everywhere crisscrossing.

Beyond this time frame, according to Heinrich Zimmer:

“One thousand mahaayugas - 4,320,000,000 years of human reckoning - constitute a single day of Brahmaa, a single kalpa. In terms of the reckoning of the gods (who are below Brahmaa but above men) this period comprises twelve thousand heavenly years. Such a day begins with creation or evolution (sristi), the emanation of a universe out of divine, transcendent, unmanifested Substance, and terminates with the dissolution and re-absorption (pralaya), mergence back into the Absolute. The world spheres together with all the beings contained in them disappear at the end of the day of Brahmaa, and during the ensuing night persist only as a latent germ of the necessity for re-manifestation. The night of a Brahmaa is as long as a day. “

From the human standpoint the lifetime of a Brahmaa seems to be very lengthy; nevertheless it is limited. It endures for only one hundred Brahmaa years, each year being composed of 360 Brahmaa days and nights, and concludes with a great, or universal, dissolution. Then vanish not only the visible spheres of the three worlds (earth, heaven and the space between), but all spheres of being whatsoever, even those of the highest worlds. All become resolved into the divine, primeval Substance. A state of total re-absorption then prevails for another Brahma century, after which the entire cycle of 311,040,000,000,000 human years begins anew. “

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This remake of THE TIME MACHINE seems to be almost universally reviled by critics and a lot of ordinary movie goers.  Mostly because 1) it doesn’t stick faithfully enough to either the original George Pal movie or to H.G. Wells book; 2) the movie is too ‘Hollywoodized’ (and George Pal wasn’t??!); 3) from Wells’ emphasis on allegorical class struggle (Morlocks vs. Eloi), to director and great grandson of Wells, Simon Wells’ emphasis on the male/female angle of Romance Lost and Found (the ads for the show even look like Harlequin romance bodice ripper covers).  I would say rather that the allegorical weight has shifted to gender rather than class depictions. The Morlock all coming across as uber-males (actually as some sort of feminist worse nightmare of what a male is) and the Eloi as loving, kind, completely passive (i.e., old style feminine) folks, living in harmony with the environment.  Meanwhile the Morlock, living down in their sulfurous digs, prey on the Eloi as their livestock.

But as I was coming out of the movie into the afternoon mist, I was thinking that you could see the morlock/eloi split along the divides of conservative/liberal and the farther regions along either side of the slash mark: fascisms, fundamentalisms, and ideologies of total control (mostly based on ideas of ‘blood and soil’, that is, national and ethnic identity always urging unity) and its alletes heading in one direction and (much like the split in the Frank Herbert Dune trilogy between the Harkonnen and their dreary industrialized planet and the mystical, drug using worm worshippers of the desert planet Arrakis) and heading seemingly in the diametrically opposite direction, values based on multiplicity, starting at the most simple liberal ideas of ‘strength in diversity’ (“can’t we all just get along together?”) to an active embracing of the decay of any armature of any human unification principal whatsoever.  The latter ends in the disembodiment fantasies of cybernauts and extropians, while the former ends in the forced expropriation from your body and dismemberrments of Nazis and the Pol Pots of the world. 

 

Ok, that’s all old hash and no need to sling any more than is already sticking everywhere.  At this point in human history we’re pretty much aware of where both sides wind up in the great Eternal Return of history: the blood filled sacrificial pit. Both ‘sides’ wind up espousing doctrines of Total Control, albeit in different languages.

 

The interesting thing about this remake (and another source of the critics’ ire) is the addition toward the end of the movie of a third element in this dialectic.  Our hero finds that there is a ‘master controller’ race behind the morlock and the eloi divide, a race which physically speaking is an odd amalgam of the features of both morlock and eloi.

 

I would say also that this third element has a vampiric quality to his appearance. This is in keeping I suppose with the current vogue for all things vampiric in late modernism (what used to be called post modernism) and whatever seems to be coming hard on its heels.  There is definitely something going one with this fascination with the Undead or otherwise there wouldn’t be over 1500 vampire movies floating around out there.  Maybe partly the desire that many of us humans have to submit to the vaguely erotic control of some powerful Dark Stranger; but maybe also the hint of another relationship to time and especially what is now called Deep Time.

 

The most striking thing about Life Now Under Total Capitalism is how servile that life is to the immediate, to the exclusion of historical considerations or, the worse of all, the ur-historical.  Not that we suffering from any lack of depictions of Deep Time: the cable channels are filled with astounding recreations of Life in the Age of dinosaurs or depictions and restorations of Life in ancient Egypt or what life might look like a distant planet. 

 

No wonder perhaps that I feel a certain collapsing of Impossible Far-ness into the All-Too-Nearness of the dinosaur in my back yard or the pharoah down the street.

 

Maybe the religious impulse, before it became mostly a social agenda, served up this helping of incredible unapproachable Distance.  (‘Distance’ like the idea of the  Secret has become one of the great shibboleths of the age of Instant Access, Transparency, and an always everywhere which is always On and Now.)  Walter Benjamin put the notion of this collapse of the ‘aura’ at the fore front of this New World Order, said aura being defined as the "unique phenomenon of a distance however close it may be".  This distance within nearness (not as oxymoronic as it seems when you think about it for awhile) -- what some commentators have perjoratively termed the ‘cultic’ -- creates originality, singularity, and authenticity but under a regime of intensive technological reproduction and digitalization, this ‘distance’ (whatever it may be; seemingly it has both spatial AND temporal qualities) collapses; the ‘aura’ of, first, (art) objects disappears, to be followed by the disappearance of ‘experience’ and then perhaps even the vanishing of the ‘human’.  This is not the disappearance of the human in ‘cultic’ terms, that is, contact and absorption by a divinity which is beyond the human but which still bears the impress of the human.  It is not the emptying of a religious kenosis (the christic divesting of divine qualities in order to be re-embodied as human.  Rather this new technologically mediated inhuman is firmly in the human sphere in all aspects and yet still seems to involute itself to an inhuman region of, for lack of a better term, ‘mechanicity,’ an implacable formalism and linearity, mathematic and geometric, a gulag from which there is no escape in a scientific age since that IS the scientific age. It is a non-kenotic emptying into formal structures of control and archive/memory, the divestment of the organic into its undead living other. (There is more than a simple phonic convergence between ‘mechanicity’ and ‘messianicity.’  The idea that there is Something Coming is deeply entrenched in a progressive, materialist, scientific,  Judeo-Christian culture.  It even has a certain eschatological materialist base with the concept of the technological singularity.

 

ok, well, we haven’t really left the movie biz at all.  What confuses matters is that within this collapse of distance, within this extreme mathesis, the old image of the Imponderable Distance begins to take shape again.  The most popular film is the movie which utilizes Special Effects, that is, the mechanical possibilities of replacing that very thing, the auratic distance-within-the-near, the cultic, which Benjamin thought was passing away.

 

But the third term (X marks the spot where the eloi and the morlock meet and give rise to the vampiric stranger --  who actually gave RISE to the separation of the eloi and the morlock, the food and the hunter, the entertainer and the entertained; where the conspiracies breathe together, where the uncanny entertains us so [what the hell IS ‘entertainment’ by the way??!!]

 

All machines are Time Machines in that they crunch time into assimilable packets, whether telephone, tele-net, or automobile (at the same time, machinic ideologies attempt to turn it’s organic opposition into patholgies as in ‘tele-pathy,’ a distance-crunching not readily apparent or understandable as machine-generated.  In as much as capitalism works hand in glove with these ideologies it is there that we find the most powerful antigens for every ‘allergy’ which theatens its hegemony, almost as if capitalism acted as the immune system for these machinic ideologies).  And in so effecting collapse, machinic ideologies inevitable drift into allegorical depictions where “here, the realm of the uncanny, the spectacular and the daemonic meet” (Allegory, Angus Fletcher, ). 

 

The inability to wipe out every trace of death continues to be the ‘rust’ in the system and not the lubrication that it would serve in an evolutionary system.  The Time Machine remake is fascinating because the further into the future our hero flings himself, even to the exasperating stretches of Hindu time, the more that the end of time begins to resemble the beginning.  In this Time Machine, there is not even any escaping the dismal inevitability of the Way Things Are Now through the machinations of evolution millions of years into the future since it brings us right back to the beginning and to the nuclear family, which capitalism (through a catastrophe based on the explosion of the moon due to tourism and entertainment basically) has engineered.  All of human, and part of inhuman history becomes caught in a gigantic Nietzschean Eternal Return, continuous endings and beginnings, always departing and meeting in the same place.  If we are reaching the End of History, as some pundits have announced, then we are also entering a Beginning of a movement, deep in the bowels of time, from which we can never escape, except in these allegorical (‘entertaining’) fashions, we circle the drain of the Singularity which is life, while that small sliver of hope escapes (just as in an actual black hole: we know that something is disappearing because of a phenomena called Cherenkov radiation.  One atom goes into oblivion and its uncanny twin separates and spirals into visibility.  Just so, in these allegorical entertainment moments;  when the event splits into two sections [a major characteristic of the internet in my opinion; we have yet to determine what that phenomena means but it seems certain that advanced technology accelerates it]: “the whole point of allegory is that it does not NEED to be read exegetically; it often has a literal level that makes good enough sense all by itself.  But somehow this literal surface suggests a peculiar double-ness of intention...” So don’t bust my chops by saying that the vehicle --ie movie--can’t support the load. It can support it [meaning] precisely BECAUSE of it’s weakness [surface, entertainment]. Further than that I shan’t go.)

 

But at any rate, it’s only a movie, only entertainment for a dreary afternoon, when eternity for a moment gauzily unfurls itself for a split second amongst the shards of bad acting inside and fading plastic outside.  (Notice the little shiver/abandonment/disgust when I mention the word ‘eternity,’ like sometimes when you look in the toilet, the repulsion of seeing the thing you have rejected and yet fascinated that it came from inside you, over and over again, worlds without end, necessary, repugnant, endless ... You can get off the toilet but you can never abandon it.)