Delenda est Cathago

The phrase in this post's title was used during the Roman empire's tenure in the 2nd century BC during the Punic wars. It was an abbreviated form of a phrase which meant essentially, 'Carthage Must Be Destroyed,' Carthage being that Phoenician city-state in North Africa which kept rising from the ashes to remain Rome's most intractable enemy.

It was used widely in Roman circles as a catch phrase, with Cato the Elder being famous for concluding all speeches with the phrase no matter what the speech was about. Rome finally succeeded in extirpating the threat by capturing the city and making slaves of the whole population of Carthage.

It was perhaps inevitable that the tables turned on Rome finally. I'm sure the phrase 'Rome Must Be Destroyed' was used many times as the so-called barbarian populations moved in as Rome spread itself into a thin web encompasing the world from the toe of the Italian boot to the blue skins of England.

It might be said however that the Roman Empire never really disappeared but rather got sublimated into the various forms of Western empire. Philip K. Dick said in one of his novels (Valis I believe), "The empire never ended" referring to the hegemony of empire as having one form in the Rome-Greek tradition...Certainly an intersting thing to think in the current world situation. In a way, within empire itself there are no small towns since they are extensions of empire in many ways..

At any rate, I began thinking about Rome after I had ended many posts with the phrase Something is Coming. Perhaps the feeling comes from absorbing too mcuh sci fi as a youth (and still!) because one of the primary affective facets of a scientific technological society is a feeling of something new coming down the pipeline, a release date, an eminent arrival of something connected to the pace of life and a need (or necessity really many feel I think) to be there for it, to catch up with the
New Wave' (as adventurous jazz was called  the sixties) to be in with the movement, with the very core of progressivity itself. Yes, Revolution! Perhaps that has not gone away but that sort of a crytpo-milleninalism (or maybe enrypted-millenialism) survives and pulses steadily underneath, in full view of, and with the assistance of, the West's pop products. In some ways so-called post-modernism was a verification of that peculiar apocalyptic which cam only be had through Kitsch and the banal and which small towns often embody
and where the profound, the ob-scene of kitsch,
 goes to sleep at night
anyway.
Something is Coming.

The Piper At the Gates of Dawn

If the medieval concept of Humours was still available, Mississippi would undoubtedly belong to the one which indicated wetness, from the mighty river itself to torrential rain to fog. This morning the fog was so thick you couldn't see past fifty feet, a sodden gray haze even after the sun was well up in the sky. (The Wikipedia definition of the associated watery temperament, the phlegmatic has it thusly:

"The phlegmatic temperament is traditionally associated with water. People with this temperament may be inward and private, thoughtful, reasonable, calm, patient, caring, and tolerant. They tend to have a rich inner life, seek a quiet, peaceful atmosphere, and be content with themselves. They tend to be steadfast, consistent in their habits, and thus steady and faithful friends.
Pedagogically, their interest is often awakened by experiencing others' interest in a subject.
People of this temperament may appear somewhat ponderous or clumsy. Their speech tends to be slow or appear hesitant.")

The day started with some odd coincidences starting with last night. He had been re-reading Don Delillo's fabulous novel White Noise again for some reason (after having read it when it first came out). He had planned to write a entry today on periodicity--styles, fashion, just the need to change in seemingly ten-ish year cycles  more so perhaps in the city than in The Town (as opposed to the city) when he came across the Delillo passage below:

"It is the nature and pleasure of townspeople to distrust the city. All the guiding principle that might flow from a center of ideas and cultural energies are regarded as corrupt, on or another kind of pornography. This is how it is with towns.

But Blacksmith is nowhere near a large city. We don't feel threatened and aggrieved in quite the same way other towns do. We're not smack in the path of history and its contaminations. If our complaints have a focal point, it would have to be the TV set, where the outer torment lurks, causing fears and secret desires."

Yes, he thought that was the way it was for sure more at one time than now...but still. Although the point of contamination was more the World Wide Web now and maybe Mcluhans's idea of a coming paganism or tribalism due to the electronic soup we are creating is more pertinent.

But that leads him to the second, more interesting coincidence (the first one could hardly be called that).  As he lay tossing and turning last night around the magic hour of three pm, an inchoate train of thought began. As was often the case these late night/early morning jumbled thoughts often had to do with the anxiety of having taken a wrong path, made bad decisions. He began to think of the sixties, when the train began to leave one track and head for open field. He thought maybe music was responsible in some way. He certainly had an intense interest in it, all consuming in some respects. He began thinking of the pied piper of Hamelin, the old fairy tale. He wondered what 'pied' meant in that case. This morning as he was going though his net chores and web site checks, he clicked on the EsoterX site where this was the current entry. And then he remembered his book The Doll Universe and the Arthur C. Clarke book Childhood's End.
And he woke up
and it was foggy
and he didn't know where he was.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h99WP2KUvLA

Sweet Home Mississippi

Robin S. sent this over and I thought I would repost for obvious reasons:
folks coming to roost in MS. From the New York Times,
Sweet Home Mississippi

Way Station

The one persistent fantasy he had over the early years was to have an observatory on the side of a hill. He found something achingly romantic in the notion. Was it the sequestering from normal life, the telescope and the shack which contained it acting as a conduit to the stars in some esoteric way? He knew from hard experience that it wasn't the science of astronomy per se that was so attractive but some form of mystical kenosis, not being filled with a divinity but being filled with the excruciating and ecstatic sense of infinity and strangeness, even a pagan sublimity of otherness, something radically different. 

One of his favorite science fiction writers then was Clifford D. Simak, Simak's specialty was a certain wistful pastoral melancholic setting for his stories and even a sort of domestication (a modernist might say kitschy) of the most far out themes by locating the action in farmland or forests or some other sort of pastoral setting. A favorite was the now largely forgotten (although can anything be forgotten now that we have the megabrain web?) Way Station. the story rotated a farmer Noah Wallace, whose small farm house was used by aliens as a transfer point for aliens to travel between worlds. In return the farmer, who had been on the land since before the civil war, would be given immortality as long as he stayed in the cabin most of the time (which, given his perpetual youthful appearance, begins to raise concerns with US of A intelligence agencies). The aliens provide for his needs and the farmer educates himself with a steady stream of books and subscriptions to scientific journals. He is an ascetic devoted to otherness and fluidity, like a tube connecting the furthest points, a relay. But even here one can see Misissippi seeping underneath the seal of the spacecraft's door. The texture of time and space crossed with Kudzu and Wisteria as autumn begins to edge around the seasons again, burnt umber and pine straw, under overcast stars...
Something is always coming, bypassing law and kith and kin

'The Stars My Destination'

He had been a fan of speculative fiction for as long as he had been reading books. For as long as he could remember thoughts of the 'vast cold and indifferent' (from the opening words to H.G. Wells War of the Worlds) spaces had been a tonic and security blanket for him. (And actually such writing then was called science fiction, in retrospect a gray collar genre that filled the thoughts of many young men in smsall towns allacross the country during the fifities and early sixties with dreams of going to technical colleges - like the Georgia Institute of Technology - and becoming the one to make the mythical First Contact with an alien species or at least to come across mysterious alien ruins like the Hee Chee or the just as mysterious worlds of Arthur C. Clarke, especially Rendezvous With Rama and the just as equally astonishing - in terms of deep time anyway -The City and the Stars. And there were hundreds more exploring similar frames of referencle, certainly enough to give Claude Levi-Strauss enough to draw up a structuralist study of scifi. And he thinks back to perhaps the first 'sci-fi' book he ever read which had to have been Margery Cameron's The Flight to the Wonderful Mushroom Planet.  But first there was the incredible The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester as the New Wave of science fiction burst upon the scene and the site of speculation became any and everything. And now we iare in what could be called the Third Wave of science fiction where speculative intensity has spread throughout moder culture, especially but not limited to Western modernism. Fueled by the entertainment industry, and the academy to some extent, given all the cultural studies programs extant, the absorption into mainstream technical culture has been nothing short of astounding, with pop music and visuals taking the 'alien' as a baseline of departure. All of these tropes are now rocking many established sciences)

No wonder then that the net has triggered a deluge of items dealing with liminal, eldritch, chthonic, or just weird as lived uncanny circumstances. Yes we have gone from the sublime to the uncanny in a mere 100 years.

All of this is on his mind as he reads the latest news of a star scientists have discovered that is some 1480 light years from the earth which and which seems to have an orbiting mega-complex. Astronomers call it Tabby's Star after the researcher who discovered it but it's nomenclature is KIC 8462852. Some researches have a tagline that leaves open the gate to words like extraterrestrial civilization and Dyson Sphere.  

All we can do is wait, as culture and life become even more saturated---and uncanny.