"It shows little in the end. It is a famous murder because it is on tape and because the murderer has done it many times and because the crime was recorded by a child. So the child is involved, the Video Kid as she is sometimes called because they have to call her something. The tape is famous and so is she. She is famous in the modern manner of people whose names are strategically withheld. They are famous without names or faces, spirits living apart from their bodies, the victims and witneses, the underage criminals, out there somewhere at the edges of perception."Et il en va de même pour les morts du 11-Septembre. Ils sont les 3000 inconnus les plus célèbres du monde. (Il y a quelque chose de terriblement et de splendidement grec là-dedans: ils sont les 3000 héros de notre identité culturelle.) La célébrité du vide. N'exister que dans l'absence. Ne vivre que grâce à l'éphémère présence médiatique... pour combien de temps? Et @lix est le Video Kid. Et moi? Je suis prisonnière devant ma télé, incapable de détacher mon regard, de pleurer à chaque fois qu'ils passent les images.
"Seeing someone at the moment he dies, dying unexpectedly. This is reason alone to stay fixed to the screen."
Le temps s'est arrêté. La succesion des jours, des saisons, des années, des âges s'est interrompue et depuis je vis dans ce non-lieu, cette marge à la limite de la perception où je peux voir les morts. Je suis à jamais perdu dans le crépuscule des douze jours et douze nuits du non-temps entre la fin de l'année et le début de la nouvelle. Nous n'étions pas le 11 septembre ce jour-là, mais le 21 décembre. Et le temps s'est arrêté pour moi. Et je ne peux plus poster mes messages qu'à cette date à présent que j'en ai pris conscience. Et le monde aussi, même s'il croit en la fiction du temps linéaire, ne se rend pas compte qu'il est prisonnier des douze jours et douze nuits, qu'il avance à l'aveuglette, ou comme un train dans un tunnel sans savoir qu'il est à bord d'un train et prenant l'obscurité pour la normalité. Je suis prisonnière des cendres de l'oubli. Je suis dans cet outremonde. La fin de l'Histoire n'était pas en 1989, mais en 2001. A quand un nouveau début? A quand la sortie du tunnel?
-- Kokeshi, depuis les marges
PS: Les citations sont de DeLillo, Underworld.
Hello little girl,
ReplyDeleteIf you see so well it’s probably because you are blind, because you have no eyes, or because you’ve been staring too long at some ecstatic test card. What would be the use of eye in such an ash-grey slum of a world anyway?
The world’s coming to an end, Fuck Yamaha is right. If he’s not original at least he understood that in this precise case the whole point is to be the last to say so and not the first.
Yet isn’t that remarkable that “to go West” means “to die” in old folks’ English. Isn’t that funny that the European apes, just like the mythic old totemic cow Europa, have never been happy with the Earth turning Westward and have done all they could, pouring into the Atlantic to found an empire beyond the sea?
Isn’t that ironic that the most advanced country in the world is that of the re-rising sun, the country that got closer than any other to the blaring atomic sun and past the nuclear winter?
Isn’t that funny that the new economic sun, China, was named after Qin Shi Huang, its first emperor… and that his reign ended on a September 10th ?
Maybe we’d better rush in the night than after the dying sun. Maybe we do have to die to be born again, maybe we do have to let go and forget about History, maybe there never was any history, just apes struggling in deep shit and singing in the dark. It’s important to hear your own little voice in the dark, and those of your friends. In a flash of lucidity we are suddenly realizing we are singing out of tune, and the smell is coming up to our nose. And we wonder: is it possible that it has always been here, this shit? The rest would be but tragicomic coincidences, hyperintellectual dead-ends in a monstrous maze or net, a glass bead game for fools…
My quote:
“[…] ambitions and achievements declined rapidly during that period, intellectuals in particular were stricken by terrible doubts and a sense of despair. They had just fully realized (a discovery that had been in the air, here and there, from the time of Nietzsche on) that the youth and the creative period of our culture was over, that old age and twilight had set in. Suddenly everyone felt this and many bluntly expressed this view; it was used to explain many of the alarming signs of the time: the dreary mechanization of life, the profound debasement of morality, the decline of faith among nations, the inauthenticity of art. The "music of decline" had sounded, as in that wonderful Chinese fable; like a thrumming bass on the organ its reverberations faded slowly out over decades; its throbbing could be heard in the corruption of the schools, periodicals, and universities, in melancholia and insanity among those artists and critics who could still be taken seriously; it raged as untrammeled and amateurish overproduction in all the arts. Various attitudes could be taken toward this enemy who had breached the walls and could no longer be exorcised. Some of the best tacitly acknowledged and stoically endured the bitter truth. Some attempted to deny its existence, and thanks to the shoddy thinking of some of the literary prophets of cultural doom, found a good many weak points in their thesis. Moreover, those who took exception to the aforementioned prophets could be sure of a hearing and influence among the bourgeoisie. For the allegation that the culture he had only yesterday been proud to possess was no longer alive, that the education and art he revered could no longer be regarded as genuine education and genuine art, seemed to the bourgeois as brazen and intolerable as the sudden inflations of currency and the revolutions which threatened his accumulated capital.
Another possible immunization against the general mood of doom was cynicism. People went dancing and dismissed all anxiety about the future as old-fashioned folly; people composed heady articles about the approaching end of art, science, and language. In that feuilleton world they had constructed of paper, people postulated the total capitulation of Mind, the bankruptcy of ideas, and pretended to be looking on with cynical calm or bacchantic rapture as not only art, culture, morality, and honesty, but also Europe and "the world" proceeded to their doom. Among the good there prevailed a quietly resigned gloom, among the wicked a malicious pessimism. The fact was that a breakdown of outmoded forms, and a degree of reshuffling both of the world and its morality by means of politics and war, had to take place before the culture itself became capable of real self-analysis and a new organization.
Yet during the decades of transition this culture had not slumbered. Rather, during the very period of its decay and seeming capitulation by the artists, professors, and feature writers, it entered into a phase of intense alertness and self-examination. The medium of this change lay in the consciences of a few individuals. Even during the heyday of the feuilleton there were everywhere individuals and small groups who had resolved to remain faithful to true culture and to devote all their energies to preserving for the future a core of good tradition, discipline, method, and intellectual rigor. We are today ignorant of many details, but in general the process of self-examination, reflection, and conscious resistance to decline seems to have centered mostly in two groups. The cultural conscience of scholars found refuge in the investigations and didactic methods of the history of music, for this discipline was just reaching its height at that time, and even in the midst of the feuilleton world two famous seminaries fostered an exemplary methodology, characterized by care and thoroughness. Moreover, as if destiny wished to smile comfortingly upon this tiny, brave cohort, at this saddest of times there took place that glorious miracle which was in itself pure chance, but which gave the effect of a divine corroboration: the rediscovery of eleven manuscripts of Johann Sebastian Bach, which had been in the keeping of his son Friedemann.
A second focus of resistance to degeneration was that of League of Journeyers to the East. The brethren of that League cultivated a spiritual rather than an intellectual discipline. They fostered piety and reverence, and to them we are important elements in our present form of cultural life and of the Glass Bead Game, in particular the contemplative elements […].
In discussing these matters we have approached the sources from which our modern concept of culture sprang. One of the chief of these was the most recent of the scholarly disciplines, the history of music and the aesthetics of music. Another was the great advance in mathematics that soon followed. To these was added a sprinkling of the wisdom of the Journeyers to the East and, closely related to the new conception and interpretation of music, that courageous new attitude, compounded of serenity and resignation, toward the aging of cultures. It would be pointless to say much about these matters here, since they are familiar to everyone. The most important consequence of this new attitude, or rather this new subordination to the cultural process, was that men largely ceased to produce works of art. Moreover, intellectuals gradually withdrew from the bustle of the world. Finally, and no less important – Indeed, the climax of the whole development – there arose the Glass Bead Game.
The growing profundity of musical science, which can already be observed soon after 1900 when feuilletonism was still at its height, naturally exerted enormous influence upon the beginnings of the Game. We, the heirs of musicology, believe we know more about the music of the great creative centuries, especially the seventeenth and eighteenth, and in a certain sense even understand it better than all previous epochs, including that of classical music itself. As descendants, of course, our relation to classical music differs totally from that of our predecessors in the creative ages. Our intellectualized veneration for true music, all too frequently tainted by melancholic resignation, is a far cry from the charming, simple-hearted delight in music-making of those days. We tend to envy those happier times whenever our pleasure in their music makes us forget the conditions and tribulations amid which it was begotten. Almost the entire twentieth century considered philosophy, or else literature, to be the great lasting achievement of that cultural era which lies between the end of the Middle Ages and modern times. We, however, have for generations given the palm to mathematics and music. Ever since we have renounced-on the whole, at any rate-trying to vie creatively with those generations, ever since we have also forsworn the worship of harmony in music-making, and of that purely sensuous cult of dynamics – a cult that dominated musical practices for a good two centuries after the time of Beethoven and early Romanticism – ever since then we have been able to understand, more purely and more correctly, the general image of that culture whose heirs we are. Or so we believe in our uncreative, retrospective, but reverent fashion! We no longer have any of the exuberant fecundity of those days. For us it is almost incomprehensible that musical style in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries could be preserved for so long a time in unalloyed purity. How could it be, we ask, that among the vast quantities of music written at that time we fail to find a trace of anything bad? How could the eighteenth century, the time of incipient degeneration, still send hurtling into the skies a fireworks display of styles, fashions, and schools, blazing briefly but with such self-assurance? Nevertheless, we believe that we have uncovered the secret of what we now call classical music, that we have understood the spirit, the virtue, and the piety of those generations, and have taken all that as our model. Nowadays, for example, we do not think much of the theology and the ecclesiastical culture of the eighteenth century, or the philosophy of the Enlightenment; but we consider the cantatas, passions, and preludes of Bach the ultimate quintessence of Christian culture.
Incidentally, there exists an ancient and honorable exemplar for the attitude of our own culture toward music, a model to which the players of the Glass Bead Game look back with great veneration. We recall that in the legendary China of the Old Kings, music was accorded a dominant place in state and court. It was held that if music throve, all was well with culture and morality and with the kingdom itself. The music masters were required to be the strictest guardians of the original purity of the "venerable keys." If music decayed, that was taken as a sure sign of the downfall of the regime and the state. The poets told horrific fables about the forbidden, diabolic, heaven-offending keys, such as the Tsing Shang key, and Tsing Tse, the "music of decline"; no sooner were these wicked notes struck in the Royal Palace than the sky darkened, the walls trembled and collapsed, and kingdom and sovereign went to their doom. We might quote many other sayings by the ancient writers, but we shall cite here only a few passages from the chapter on music in Lü Bu We's Spring and Autumn:
"The origins of music lie far back in the past. Music arises from Measure and is rooted in the great Oneness. The great Oneness begets the two poles; the two poles beget the power of Darkness and of Light.
"When the world is at peace, when all things are tranquil and all men obey their superiors in all their courses, then music can be perfected. When desires and passions do not turn into wrongful paths, music can be perfected. Perfect music has its cause. It arises from equilibrium. Equilibrium arises from righteousness, and righteousness arises from the meaning of the cosmos. Therefore one can speak about music only with a man who has perceived the meaning of the cosmos.
"Music is founded on the harmony between heaven and earth, on the concord of obscurity and brightness.
"Decaying states and men ripe for doom do not, of course, lack music either, but their music is not serene. Therefore, the more tempestuous the music, the more doleful are the people, the more imperiled the country, the more the sovereign declines. In this way the essence of music is lost.”
Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, 1943.
Jimmy, you're too damn close to truth to be honest.
ReplyDeleteReally man, how do you do it? I mean, what is your secret.
You stuck so close to home with this quote.
Nazism, it is said, was an answer to the feeling of decay, to the corruption of civilization, to the values of the post-war Europe.
Now, should we re-invent nazism, is it the only solution?
I mean, does my feeling of decay (but which decay? Is it not possible that I mistake my own decay, my own soullessness, for the decay of society?) mean that I am a neo-nazi?
I wish not. But I'm afraid. For the one who has not faith neither in God nor in those who invented God, what this one may do and what is his fate?
That is my question.
Your little terrorized Kokeshi, from the ruins of a metaphysical Ground Zero.
Une anecdote:
ReplyDeleteLorsque Karel Capek écrivait sa pièce RUR dans lequel il dépeint des automates qui font le travail des hommes qui sont inventés pour se passer des hommes et donc de leur folie meurtrière, il chercha un terme pour les désigner, un mot nouveau.
Il alla voir son frère (qui était peintre) et lui dit:
"Dans ma pièce, j'ai inventé une race d'automates qui travaillent à la place des hommes et qui réduiront les hommes en esclavage. J'avais pensé les appeler Labori, mais cela fait trop érudit."
"Tu n'as qu'à les appeler robots alors," lui dit son frère.
Robot, en tchèque, signifie travail.
Quelle est la morale?
Jimmy, I am fascinated by the concept of the music of harmony. It's a very apollonian view of things.
ReplyDeleteIn Greek myths, Apollo was the god of harmony, not only of sun. He's the sun-god, because the sun brings harmony to the universe. He's also a god of music, and music, as mathematics, was thought byt the Greek as means to understand the cosmic harmony. By the way, mathematicians, in ancient Greece, first learnt music.
It is no randomness that Herman Hess wrote about apollonian music while Thomas Mann wrote about Dionysiac dreams in Death in Venice.
They both rejected fascim and its illusory answer, falsely simple, to decline.
It's a great hope, I think.
The dummies are the ignorants who choose to stay that way.
hi!
ReplyDeleteYou will have to excuse me for the randomness of my thoughts, again.
I do like Mann and Hesse, because I'm just clever enough or proud enough to think I can understand what they say.
I think the sun is always a brilliant vehicle in a metaphor, and that this probably owes a lot to Copernicus.
It's funny to attribute to each period or age in History a totem-god, just like when Freud proceeded with mythological allusions in his exploration of the human mind.
What is the totem-god of our age? I'd think it's Narcissus...
And I must always mention the third blow to naive human self-love, after the heliocentric and the psych-analytic, that is darwinism... You don't need to go back to nazism, but you surely need to reinvent man somehow, integrating his biological dimension, and his need for myths.
J.
Hi little girl...
ReplyDeleteI've had an idea, it's cold and simple, and incisive like a blade cutting through brain tissue.
I've looked on the Internet if anybody had already had the same idea. It's the case. And it makes it even scarrier.
Hear this.
First, I said humans strive to rise, they crave to extract themselves from primeval "mud". I even suggested they were defined by this vertical (solar) aspiration, or that this aspiration defined them.
Second, I've just read about neoteny, not that I hadn't read about it previously, but I just didn't think about it in relation to the "aspirational identity" theory. To sum up this point we could say: humans are chimps whose fetal development has partly gone "wrong". Certain fetuses have retained strong juvenile characters, creating in the end a new species, us. Proof? An adult skull looks very much like a chimp fetus skull, that is the canonical yet not only example.
HYPOTHESIS: What if our "aspirational identity" was merely the consequence of our incompleteness as a species? We'd be trying to fulfill an unfinished development through a psychotic cultural-intellectual process. Natural selection must have somehow reinforced that tendency. We'd be but psychotic apes playing a symbolic game which entirely absorbs us.
What do you think of that redefinition of "culture"?
Ah! My quotes:
A
"Flexibility is the hallmark of human evolution. If humans evolved, as I believe, by neoteny (see Chapter 4 and Gould, 1977, pp. 352-404), then we are, in a more than metaphorical sense, permanent children. (In neotony, rates of development slow down and juvenile stages of ancestors become the adult features of descendants.) Many central features of our anatomy link us with fetal and juvenile stages of primates: small face, vaulted cranium and large brain in relation to body size, unrotated big toe, foramen magnum under the skull for correct orientation of the head in upright posture, primary distribution of hair on head, armpits, and pubic areas. [...]In other mammals, exploration, play, and flexibility of behavior are qualities of juveniles, only rarely of adults. We retain not only the anatomical stamp of childhood, but its mental flexibility as well. The idea that natural selection should have worked for flexibility in human evolution is not an ad hoc notion born in hope, but an implication of neoteny as a fundamental process in our evolution. Humans are learning animals." (Gould 1996: 363, The Mismeasure of Man)
B
"Some extreme varants are associated with the deviations of psychological function that we describe as psychosis. These states are seen as boundaries of the distribution of personality variation, including the capacity for language and emotional expression. In particular, those with the earliest manifestations (i.e. schizophrenia, Asperger's syndrome and autism) have the greatest impairments of communication and social ability, and also demonstrate a failure to develop anatomical asymmetry. In summary, key features of the theory are that the psychoses are disorders of specifically human evolution, arising from variation in the genes controlling hemispheric asymmetry that has led, by the mechanism of sexual selection, through progressive delay in maturation (neoteny) to increased brain size and intelligence. The most readily testable prediction is that the gene for asymmetry (and by implication contributing to predispostion to psychosis) should be X-Y homologous." (Crow TJ (1995) A Darwinian approach to the origins of psychosis. Br J Psychiatry 167(1):24)
C
The neoteny theory is well established among anthropologists. And the notion of human monogamous child rearing is well established among sociobiologists. Nobody has yet put the two together. If men began selecting mates that appeared youthful, then any gene that slowed the rate of development of adult characteristics in a woman would make her more attractive at a given age than a rival. Consequently, she would leave more descendants, who would inherit the same gene. Any neoteny gene would give the appearance of youthfulness. Neoteny, in other words, could be a consequence of sexual selection, and since neoteny is credited with increasing our intelligence (by enlarging the brain size at adulthood), it is to sexual selection that we should attribute our great intelligence." (Ridley 1993: 342, The Red Queen)
I said we probably needed new myths to structure our concept of "man"... I'm afraid humapes scored again. The good thing is that Nazis are wrong again: the pure race is neither blond, nor blue-eyed, it's much hairier and it stinks, and none of us can claim to belong to it.
J.
PS - I am in urgent need of being proved wrong.
"The Child is father of the Man" said a posthumously-born called wordsworth in a magic though elusive transe.
ReplyDeleteMute suckling sing, old men dying prophetize, memory recollects, sorts out and re-processes flashes in the skull cave.
Time warps and coils as a developing fetus embodies a salmon egg-planet in a film by Kubrick.
An orange in set in perfect stillness at the end of time by a mercurial Zarathustra or a blueish Eluard.
A droid called Neo raves on Novae, about bursting constellations, about blaring stellar sceneries, about galleons aflame pouring out of Orion's shoulder, pukes gluey stuff and disconnects.
Thoughts emerge like coral reefs on a scanner screen, a tree of veins, of light or growth, while placental conscience evanesce in Darwin's nightmare.
We are touching it, one more second and we'll come full circle, here will be nowhere or everywhere, or whenever, but at least somewhere else.
We'll save the subliminal world if there's no power shut down, yet the lorry's driven by a chimp.
We endlessly walk on golden albatros feathers in the Christian autumn, and pathos rolls on your cheek with icy precision, in the distance, Norwegian forests harp on inevitability like telluric cellos.
Guess who is waiting at the corner of the tangerine dream? Hesse, looking at us through a glass bead.
Words fail us, and we fall with them... who said this? What does my tongue
J...%ùMithra&@OXxen,////Lion-CrowSun*Hitttitebishops%%KL§?FranchrevolutionarieZµµ€dawnblood!
ReplyDelete>
>RF=PErsianmyth expansion.
>General Failure.
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> Blod b-get Blood loop... E6
> ICM intervention
> Reboot.
>
>SYSTEM SHUT DOWN - CLEAR CONSC.
>
...
>WKupprocd01.exe
> Check Values.
RESTART/RESTORE THK PROCESS OK.
>
>
RESUME @0000000.0009.strt/01
>>>>>>>
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>Calendar update rejected, invalid command.
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>
Moneyroosteré;;coinWheatmoney0.20FFgoldfield
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>NapBee rejected.
>Womanhood rejected.
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21/12-22/12 validity limit. # symbolical.
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>Faxination*LIGHT/// fasc. Redef "LIGHT".
>>GOTO "Sol invictus" + redef "LIGHT3
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> Word search for "LIGHT3 returned no result? Syntax error. Try 1/5.
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> humanape.exe NOT FOUND.
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> Reboot System aborted.
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> END OF MESSAGE.