Trouble No More: Why You Can't Repeat the Past, Why You Can Only Repetend
Ken Burns' The Civil War, Bob Dylan's Trouble No More, and The (Re)Birth of a Nation
Dark and indissolubly the years creep slowly by for demons, who are minds without bodies. Each hidden casualty the father of a child unborne into a wind whistling beyond causal revision. “It is the searing of stars, or the primordial and contagious eruption of the pathological.”[1] Opioids are the popular mood drug again, now synthesized to some supra-human strength commensurate to our self-diagnoses. Thank you for committing your time to our eleventh hour presentation.
“Under a juniper-tree, the bones sang, scattered and shining[2]” into a closed future that introduced an invariable past to Eli Whitney. And so we hope for ablution. Before the letters ceased to come, John Brown’s rifle rose the curtain at HIGH NOON. Stars fell over Alabama in “integral relation to reflection.”[3] Joyce’s dark silver flakes fell oblique against lamplight. The many effects of rain and the beauty of people were captured. Larry Burrows went to war. Snow fell faintly like the descent of last end upon The Dead. The German pacifist set did their dunks. Abraham Lincoln was born. Wang Mang nationalized the land. The great insurrection involved almost all southern Gaul. Jefferson Davis was released on bond. Private Otto Flickner was a Cannoneer in the 1st Minnesota battery at Shiloh. Michael Anderson lost his arm, his prepotent responses, and then his mind. Gangrene was the popular slow death at the time. Walt Whitman was “Gliding o’er all, through all/Through Nature, Time, and Space.” Confederates enclosed a semi-circuit. A dilemma for horses, too. Musket vollies meant infantry advances. It was THE DEVIL’S OWN day at Appomattox as at Bull Run. The anterevolitionary flame of spirit asking ’gain and again, was life worth leaving?
The Historian Barbara Fields tells Ken Burns, “William Faulkner said once that history is not ‘was,’ it’s ‘is,’ and what we need to remember about the Civil War is that the Civil War ‘is,’ in the present, as well as the past.”
Well, then, for a haunting we will go.
Gabor S. Boritt discusses the impact of Ken Burns’ THE CIVIL WAR on its 1990 air date,
[Gone With the Wind’s] reign as the premier film on the War, and the premier romanticization of the "world the slaveholders made," came to a definite end with Burns. The PBS series was seen by fourteen million people in its entirety, when first shown in the fall of 1990, and in part by close to 40 million people. Repeated runs on television and simultaneous release on video continues to add untold millions to its viewing audience. Its influence remains to be gauged, but George Bush and Colin Powell in Washington, and Norman Schwarzkopf in Saudi Arabia, provided telling illustrations as they watched the film hour after hour with its deeply disturbing emphasis on casualties. The country was going to war with Iraq and the documentary reinforced the leaders' insistence on a strategy designed to minimize American military casualties. The recreation of Civil War history still matters in the making of new American history.
You mean to see we have been hadding a sound night's sleep? War wasn’t haunting us like it did before. CNN, not yet accountable to Time Warner, told us everything was going to be alright. Good Omens were so ubiquitous by 1990 that Ray Bradbury dug A Graveyard for Lunatics. Our lunatics were out of luck. Their Nice and Accurate Prophecies weren’t wanted. We knew still that “the only thing that has money is war,” but it no longer mattered as much. Concerns of mutually assured destruction gave way to returns of mutually-deferred prophets. A 12-year-old Kobe Bryant dunked upon Italian Condottieri. Rabbit was At Rest. Depeche Mode knew enough to suggest we Enjoy the Silence. Lies of Silence were soon to be circumvented by lies of science. COBE measured the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background. Francis Fukuyama collated The End of History during a period of peak ignorance. We were going BACK TO THE FUTURE again. Not a-peace with all this prosperity, unable to Boritt, THE CIVIL WAR is broadcast in the year of the Burns’ Day Storm.
Words count for nearly as much in it as images and sounds. The filmmaker has both the ears and the eyes of a poet. He turns dull black and white photos into haunting images full of life. They hold us captive. They make us choke up. And so do the words. More than 800 quotations and a fine connecting narrative frame the images. In a nation seemingly uninterested in history, and for this visually oriented generation uninterested in reading, Burns invokes the power of the native tongue. Thanks to him, and talented coworkers, millions heard American words from a time when the American language reached perhaps its eloquent high water mark. The words may come from a Mary Boykin Chesnut, a Walt Whitman, an Abraham Lincoln, or a Frederick Douglass, or they may come from people long forgotten. We see men with guns. Soldiers charge. "They seemed to melt like snow coming down on warm ground," the words of an unnamed officer. Burns knew almost nothing about the War when he embarked on his work, and his fresh eyed innocence captured an essence that eluded experts.
Written in beholding vision’s earliness, the American language reaches its High Water mark through mighty pain. Private Sam Watkins remembers with his “imagination […] like the weaver’s shuttle,”
playing backward and forward through these two decades of time, I ask myself, Are these things real? did they happen? are they being enacted today? or are they the fancies of the imagination in forgetful reverie? . . . Surely these are just the vagaries of my own imagination. Surely my fancies are running wild tonight. But, hush! I now hear the approach of battle. That low, rumbling sound in the west is the roar of cannon in the distance. That rushing sound is the tread of soldiers. That quick, lurid glare is the flash that precedes the cannon's roar. And, listen! that loud report that makes the earth tremble and jar and sway, is but the bursting of a shell, as it screams through the dark, tempestuous night. That black, ebon cloud, where the lurid lightning flickers and flares, that is rolling through the heavens, is the smoke of battle; beneath is being enacted a carnage of blood and death. Listen! the soldiers are charging now. The flashes and roaring now are blended with the shouts of soldiers and the confusion of battle. . .
With these words, we half-heard what film ached to tell. We mistook, however, this appeal for the union play for tirnitys as pertaining to the past. War had dozed off completely, we’d decided one day. A King of Wishful Thinking even then, George Michael was Praying for Time-worn urtexts. We’d built a summer house of circuity at CERN. Time-Warner gathered itself in the conglobed microwave dinner market. Dan Rather beat a CIA asset out of the Busch Lite. Hank Gathers collapsed and died on the court, and miraculously rose resurrected to redie on Sportscenter. The first search engine, Archie, layered in the reflecting pool. Seinfeld was stuffed into jeans seaming they’d never go out of style. Shannon Doherty debuted in the dark Claude of all this noise redundancy and channel condensatiety. The Days of Our Lives took a Cruise of Deception. Prozac was the popular mood drug at the time. Some Poindexter bored us to death in the revised Iran-Contra scandal. An echo boom peaked; Contra to popular perception, fertility rates have declined since.
We’d forgotten the world was old; that lessons of life watch and wait to teach themselves anew. And so while we feigned prosperity, on PBS, Frederick Douglass’ melody played faint in the karmic theta wave background,
In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky — her grand old woods — her fertile fields — her beautiful rivers — her mighty lakes, and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked, my joy is soon turned to mourning. When I remember that all is cursed with the infernal actions of slaveholding, robbery and wrong, — when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing.
War, The Little Vagabond, appeared to have Blaked out again after eighteen Zimas. Seinfeld introduced No-Fap by losing a masturbation competition only losers can win. Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet at CERN, never conceiving the algorithmic-dopaminergic despair all to come. Bupropion was a popular mood drug at the time. Thermal neutralinos decoupled yet survived with deterministic amplitude. Bo Burnham was, regrettably, brought into being. Barbara Stanwyck died, THE LADY EVE, a BALL OF FIRE. Halcion kept Rick Rude asleep during precognitive dreams of penile amputation. Sildenafil, his eventual castrator, waited to be discovered in hypertension studies. Deep inelastic scattering made the news. By analog signal, an unattributed slave’s words were modulated by radio carrier wave through WCVE-TV, “Them days was hell … babies snatches from their mother’s breast and sold … Chilrens was separated from sisters and brothers and never saw each other again.” Through waves of Smoky Hills, Walt Whitman said naively, “Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost.” Through all these WVIZ, William Lloyd Garrison predicted that, in terms of Time and Propinquity, “The success of any great moral enterprise … does not depend on numbers.”
Then, as now, one moral enterprise is to make photographs. A soldier would have their picture made, rather than taken—Shelby Foote could emphasize so well. Then, as now, lenses were incapable of stopping movements. They can, however, refract and bend light to change its direction. Matthew Brady’s 1862 exhibition of civil war photography was reviewed in The New York Times:
At the door of his gallery hangs a little placard, "The Dead of Antietam." Crowds of people are constantly going up the stairs; follow them, and you find them bending over photographic views of that fearful battle-field, taken immediately after the action. Of all objects of horror one would think the battle-field should stand preeminent, that it should bear away the palm of repulsiveness. But, on the contrary, there is a terrible fascination about it that draws one near these pictures, and makes him loth to leave them. You will see hushed, reverend groups standing around these weird copies of carnage, bending down to look in the pale faces of the dead, chained by the strange spell that dwells in dead men's eyes. It seems somewhat singular that the same sun that looked down on the faces of the slain, blistering them, blotting out from the bodies all semblance to humanity, and hastening corruption, should have thus caught their features upon canvas, and given them perpetuity for ever. But so it is. […] It attracts your attention, but does not enlist your sympathy.
Pictures of Tom Selleck and Claudia Schiffer, Michael Richards and Revlon’s Ron Perelman appeared, rather irrelevantly, on covers of Cigar Aficionado. Our pre-Curtisian and patriarchetypic sympathies remained unenlisted towards 50,000 Armenians driven out of Baku. We were bent before the unfacts in the fadograph, caught up in the same sun of the spell that dwells, human semblance ablated out, looking with dark patience at Foote-notes of Shiloh’s copies of carnage in perpetuity for ever.
Oliver Wendell Holmes discussed what patriotic Gore flooded Baltimore in his Atlantic Monthly review of Brady’s exhibition, “Many, having seen it and dreamed of its horrors, would lock it up in some secret drawer.” As Cayrol’s sacred trust necessitates Howard’s warlike thrust, a secret drawer has to have a secret door. A picture. A puzzle. A pattern upon This Doorway Into Summer of July 1863 when The Battle Hymn of the Republic and Dixie enflamed spirit. Removing gangrenous limbs was the summer’s hot trend. Seinfeld’s skin would have been shed and rotted in brownish pus. Morphine was the popular mood drug at the time. War had awakened, angry as The Dead Father cabled by absentee children who collectively know: “the unborn tends to its own peace.”[4]
What then when you really listen? Listen! Listen to Sam Watkins and Frederick Douglass and hear it playing backwards and vor wars? What’s left to hear from Henry Timrod’s poetry that’s “somewhere waiting for its birth,” what’s left to steal except Barbara Fields feeling that, “The generation that fought the war, the generation that argued over the definition of the war, the generation that had to pay the price in blood, that had to pay the price in blasted hopes and a lost future also established a standard that will not mean anything until we finish the work.”
Rotoscopically, we might hear Charles Freck speaking Mike Westaway’s thoughts through A SCANNER DARKLY, “The living, he thought, should never be used to serve the purposes of the dead. But the dead […] should, if possible, serve the purposes of the living.... And the dead, if they could feel, might feel better doing so.”
The Dead Are With Us, writes Rudolf Steiner. The dead look out through our eyes as Jung knew, waiting on the fever to break out, wishing they could chase new and normal cries of victory. Bleak for the dead, but what then of those whose opportunity to be dead was squandered by a preceding generation? Heidegger locates this otherness more alienated from life than death in Language in the Poem,
The unborn are called grandsons because they cannot be sons, that is, they cannot be the immediate descendants of the generation that has gone to ruin. Another generation lives between these two, it is other, for it is of another kind in keeping with its different essential origin in the earliness of what is still unborn. The "mighty pain" is the beholding vision whose flames envelop everything, and which looks ahead into the still withdrawing earliness of yonder dead one toward whom the "ghosts" of early victims have died.
The Birth of a Nation – 2016/11/04
Fond of your scary THE PURGE mask, madam. Really implies our social something bowls along bumpily, experiencing a jolting series of pre-arranged disappointments down the long lane of recurringly predictable violence that seemed BEYOND OUR KEN in 1990 when Robert Penn Warren told Ken Burns,
A civil war is, we may say, the prototype of all war, for in the persons of fellow citizens who happen to be the enemy we meet again with the old ambivalences of love and hate and with all the old guilts, the blood brothers of our childhood. In a civil war, all the self-divisions of conflicts within individuals become a series of mirrors in which the plight of the country is reflected, and the self-division of the country, a great mirror in which the individual may see imaged his own deep conflicts, not only the conflicts of political loyalties, but those more profoundly personal.
Wellcome 3D brain assembloids replicating the time formation. Tisn’t only tonight you’re anecheronistic.
Wellcome nationalist folk. Thank you for helping us to reach a record take on aspartamèd poisons at the concession stand this evening! Wellcome oppositionally-defiant Antifa members. Tonight will offer both Literal Nazis and Literal Klu Klux Klan characters for your useless retro ressentiment.
If dark energy is the prime mover and “time is always time/And place is always and only place”[5] who here fears a nonsense of control over world events? You, sir? Wearing your little bandana? Quiet, ye wag and barrel organ.
Prejudice lies before everyone tonight. All ideologues will extract some preferred meaning from the leering ‘mulatto’ carpetbagger Silas Lynch, drunk on the vagaries of reconstructive progress, groping and making statements nuanced as, “I want a white wife.” All audience members may rise from their nation-seats in silacious apoplexy as horse-drawn Klansmen “embody the vast, world-embracing capabilities of the cinema.”[6]
The year was 1915. Typhoid Mary was the popular scapegoat at the time. The Armenian genocide gets underway. The Metamorphosis is published. The Last White Hope beats Jack Johnson in sweltering Havana. America occupies Haiti. The Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition opens so it can become the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. Concerning such Travesties: James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin live in Zurich. Something Fresh is serialized. A soldier decomposes In Flanders Field. A suicidal Virginia Woolf sensibly seeks a Voyage Out of haunting light and shadow.
Directed by David Wark Griffith; lensed by his lifelong collaborator Billy ‘Blitzkrieg’ Bitzer: innovator of the fade out, soft focus photography, lighting (!), closeups (!) and the long shot; starring Charles Lindberg-associate and eventual Ronald Reagan-booster Lillian Gish; weighing in at an unprecedented twelve reels, Chobani Yogurt proudly presents THE BIRTH OF A NATION.
If Bitzer could hear A Sound of Thunder, it was Griffith who captured and collocated the elements. Wark, writes James Agee, “achieved what no other known man has achieved. To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the emergence, coordination and first eloquence of language; the birth of an art: and to realize that this is all the work of one man.”
No other known man! Quite the collocation, Wark! If Bergson defines duration as what happens when “we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another” then what could the beginning of melody be but the birth of time?
This “Shakespeare of the screen” according to Agee, responsible for an “achievement unprecedented in Western Art” rode only A RIDE ON A RUNAWAY TRAIN of the same loose-knit cable talking points characterizing the convergent power spectrum and shear correlation function of today’s political polarity. To Wark, all of human history had the approximate moral complexity of a dark-browed Gypsy stealing a lily-white babe from a stroller. THE BIRTH OF A NATION was generated by a pseudo-historical negationist theory known as Lost Cause ideology. Divest those words of historical context and apply them to the unclean language of your own keyboard war. Fire Wark With Me, for a moment. THE CONVERSATION lists severely left and right, growing disparate enough to “kill us if [it] got the chance.” If everyone agrees that each Other’s a cardboard cut-out of anticipated evil, then neither side can find their lost generation of meaning, making it preferable to ploy pretend, bored as post-Curtisian MI5 spies in the over-lit lobby of eschatology. Yet these occupations will birth Others scarier that what’s already happening in Facebook’s Building 8, where they’ve already instantiated Illumina, where we should shiver at the horror of the ΔT’s, where they “are doing things before they make sense.”[7]
To this day, what Ebert called, “a great film that argues for evil,” entrances audiences by the same means that make MISSION IMPOSSIBLE ∞ a billion dollar property: montaged shots at alternating spatial and temporal lengths accelerating like Nick Land into occult numerology at Crowley’s castle, seeking resolution the reptile brain commands: defuse the safely-Danish environmentalist’s bomb, let awful old neoliberal Adam Ruin Everything, or here tonight for your Bayesian cue combination and contemplation—empathize, yes empathize with no uglier an organization than the Klu Klux Klan. This filmic language, the symphonic score, the interspersion of frames, these triumphs were willed to power by Griffith, a technical genius and an ideological TRAINWRECK whose imagery hung A WREATH IN TIME of real-world hatred and murder.
The Klan didn’t even wear Klan costumes before Wark projected images into time. The Skynet effect of alarmist fiction too often becomes reality. “Nanocataclysm begins as fictional science.” Tomorrow’s trending interior wetware wasn’t imminent prior to a need we dreamed to arm ourselves against our own Lost Cause of the auto-generated Other, no longer Saddam beatable; but demonic again, and alas, worst-yet—codified out of nothing but our own drear data sets.
Tonight, the simplest among you possess 8k cameras. If you deem the consequences of mass conflict romantic, envision those you love prostituting themselves to a rat meat vendor for a rat meat ration. That vision is no longer hyperbole. It is the hyperstition of a British Broadcasting Company once thought to watch over us with loving grace, but now impossible to get out of our heads. Remember then what Jung wrote in The Red Book as you bore of opposing real Lehmans or T-MEN and start summoning the evil you want,
You wanted this war. That is good. If you had not, then the evil of this war would be small. But with your wanting you make the evil great. If you do not succeed in producing the greatest evil out of this war, you will never learn the violent deed and learn to overcome fighting what lies outside you. Therefore it is good if you want this greatest evil with your whole heart.
Remember this after your hard-felt herd positions diminish dramatically once Democratic armchair neoconservatism as defined by Chomsky sleeps furiously in its rest position come this particular Fall, and you cast about for worse Others, colorless militaries at first, and then on to green ideas regarding oppressive differences not yet technologically reified at birth.
THE MAGNETIC STORM brewing could reverse the polls where an ideological compass may still point north while actually pointing to the old south. Have you ever seen the expression of someone told they’ve been walking in the wrong direction for half their life? It is seldom an expression of much tolerance.
Somewhat turned around himself, Woodrow Wilson claimed Wark’s film had “written history with lightning.” He hardly ever stopped claiming people wrote history with lighting. Woodrow loved to talk about history being written with lighting. He may never even have said that about THE BIRTH OF A NATION. No one really knows. Very few care. Let the authorities pretend or debunk at their leisure. We do not change the written record except when necessary to temporal pincer movements of the psyche, or when struck by whims. We will leave that Chobani yogurt reference in the written record regardless of how meaningless it will seem a few months hence. Just you wait to remember anyone having ever cared about that.
Apocryphal or not, lightning is formed when the insulating capacity of air is insufficient to the positive and negative charges in your cloud culture. For easier access, David Lynch productions keep a lightning machine on set at all times. Lighting can illuminate the darkest night, kill a person dead, or simply scramble a brain, meaning Woodrow was not even being euphemistic when attributing written history to lighting. Woody failed to foresee the day lightning would not precision air strike, but be all there is, the blinding light of excessive imagining Wellcome’d home once in-silico child brain models doff their market cap.
Fortunately for us, Wark also wrote a roadmap for the soul that sent out for Cecil B. DeMille, sent out for pillar props to dwell under once we swallow the digital authentication pill, once our tissue time machines are given New Bottles for New Wine by UNESCO initiates Julian Huxley, Archibald MacLeish, and Regina Dugan. If you want to remember, you better write down the names. If you want something new, we, like Wark, have to image in it first.
As Bill Goodykoontz writes in his out of print book Film: From Watching to Seeing: diegetic sounds are sounds that are coming from inside the world of the film.
Those who’ve lived a while may hear the musket volley reverberations even in their echo silos. A Great Insurrection from Seine to Michael Garrone echoes in our Cinespheric and anechoic chamber: the suicidal suggestion that war with exponentially-dangerous Others is required if we are to hate and fear in a measure generative of meaning.
Did not Private Sam Benson wish, “To meet again in the old quarters, to play chess and draughts, to get up soon to answer the morning roll call, to fall in at the tap of the drum for drill and dress parade, and again to hastily don our war gear while the monotonous patter of the long roll summons to battle?”
Take heed however. Take some solace. History can also be unwritten with lightning. Not deconstructionist lightning. That lightning is more like a special affect geeking in NIGHTMARE ALLEY to distract from all the real cons of the carnival. To unwrite history you need lightning from a Lynchian lightning machine, the lightning look, the birding cry, awe from the grave, ever flowing on the times. You need that lightning to ask the question Heidegger asked in 1946, when probably the holocaust was still sort of fresh on everyone’s minds, What are Poets For?
[M]ortals are hardly aware and capable even of their own mortality. Mortals have not yet come into ownership of their own nature. Death withdraws into the enigmatic. The mystery of pain remains veiled. Love has not been learned. But the mortals are. They are, in that there is language. Song still lingers over their destitute land. The singer’s word still keeps to the trace of the holy.
Trouble No More – 2017/11/11
Jay Gatsby responds to Nick Carraway’s “You can’t repeat the past,” by saying, “Of course you can.” What Gatsby really needs to change is the past’s influence on the present.
The Arm amputated in THE CIVIL WAR and in The Return asks, “Is it future, or is it past?”
Michael Anderson uses “behavioural, haemodynamic (fMRI) and electrophysiological (EEG) neuroimaging to investigate the cognitive and neural mechanisms by which people suppress distracting and unwanted memories.”[9]
DJ Spooky wants to know, “Is another world possible? Can we break the cycle?”
Where and when to find this counterfactual world if “what’s lost has been already found,” and “what’s to come has already been?” As Private Sam Watkins suggests, “Listen!” Listen for where song lingers over destitution. Listen for the singer’s tracks keeping to the trace of the holy.
The year was 1980. Pascal was a popular programming language at the time. Roberto “Cyborg” Abreu was born. Tim Berners-Lee begins to ENQUIRE into ontology done differently. Kunihiko Fukushima introduces convolutional neural networks. Usenet is established. Cocaine was the popular mood drug, no longer used as anesthetic but as Accelerant. Roland Barthes and Jean-Paul Sartre and Marshall McLuhan died. Alvin Toffler described The Third Wave. THE EMPIRE would STRIKE BACK. All while ORDINARY PEOPLE were still just BEING THERE, working 9 TO 5, not yet knowing we’d entered THE 9TH CONFIGURATION Bob Dylan described to an audience at The Fox Warfield,
So now, too, there's a lot of hypocrites; they're talkin' you know, using Jesus' name. But don't let that put you off. Because they're still dealing with the world, and Jesus has overcome the world - that's what he did at the cross, as simple as that. He didn't make it complicated. But actually, if you look at Jesus you gotta look at the cross. Actually, if you wonder why all these things are happening nowadays, Joshua, you know, he went into, I believe it was, uh, Canaan land, and God told him that in certain times He would destroy all the people, every man, woman, children there. You see that's bad. Certainly he hated to leave the children, but they was all just defiled. And there was some cities. God said "Don't go in there yet" so Joshua wondered why, and God said, "because their iniquity is not yet full."
It was a different time for the American evangelical. Hal Lindsay arrived upon the foreseen. Outlandish predictions warned of a single European currency and Russian expansion. Hippies had hold of the message of Jesus Christ and wielded it for neither control or commerce. A left-wing president held the hand of a southern evangelical electorate. Southern Men didn’t need Neil Young around just then, anyhow. Unfortunately, Bob Dylan, given to consulting the tarot and the I-Ching conterminously, eager to believe any dark-browed gypsy claiming to’ve been his sister in a past life, had heard things said.
So now, you look around today, when we started out this tour, we started out in San Francisco. It's a kind of unique town these days. I think it's either one third or two thirds of the population that are homosexuals in San Francisco. I've heard it said. Now, I guess they're working up to a hundred percent, I don't know. But anyway, it's a growing place for homosexuals and I read they have homosexual politics, and it's a political party. I don't mean it's going on in somebody's closet. I mean it's political! All right, you know what I'm talking about? Anyway, I would just think, well I guess the iniquity's not yet full. And I don't wanna be around when it is!
Bob Dylan forever lives in the cinematic antirealism of the unreal conditional, i.e. “If we were different people, we could…” Before even beginning he’d given himself a different childhood. Later, RENALDO AND CLARA projected by colour schema and strata loves Going, Going, Gone differently than they did. The names of Gregorian Pecktures oscillowaited in uncertain states. Accidentally, Like a Martyr, he finds himself Stumped by hard-boiled eternalism across the diner counterfactual from the waitress. It shouldn’t surprise then, when Dylan replaced these homophobic remarks with Michael Shannon’s stentorian sermons in the TROUBLE NO MORE DVD—new altar wine boxed up in the Outsideness of a Cantorian set, the lucky 13th installment of a series that reorders time even while his words are IRREVERSIBLE on Expecting Rain and on the Way Back Machine where truth is lost to peskily remain.
You can’t take back what’s been said and recorded even after its scarcely traceable in the obscurantist algorithmic order. Damage cannot be undone or controlled even with what Lucy Sante calls “God’s blessed elbow grease.” Yet still, Dylan was possessed of the revision to plant trees in the paradisiacal parking lot he’d paved. Dylan asked Sante to pen sermons “unlike the sermons he did,” with no surrealism, no hellfire and brimstone, inspired by reverends such as D.C. Rice and J.M. Gates, whose The Downfall of Nebuchadnezzar baptized the blues.
The year was 2017. Donald J. Trump takes Abraham Lincoln’s old office. Q# was Microsoft’s new language. THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS was to be decided. Denis Johnson dies. Optane fast flash memory was introduced by Intel. Nature declared that quantum computers were Ready to Jump Out of the Lab. The 2000-qubit D-Wave became commercially available. Disney bluffed about offering its LAST JEDI. Image boards found it funny when Stephen Paddock ran out of comps. Luc Sante (now Lucy), who hadn’t been to church in 50 years, but could “respect the tradition,” relied on preachers of the past to summon sermons denouncing sloth.
Brothers and sisters as the bible tells us, your body is the temple of God. When you replace the fruits of nature’s bounty, with that sweet, fat, salty, dripping mess made in a factory somewhere by men who charge you a dollar somewhere for every nickle they spend on that imitation food, you are spitting in the temple. You are drawing devil’s faces on its walls. You are cursing God just as you are cursing yourself.
Look Lucy, we’re simple folks with simple tastes. Attendees of this festival are no doubt checking their END OF WATCH wondering when we’ll solder the connection to computer brain interface atop an already revisionist reading.
There is spiritual warfare. There is blood raining down. Lorenzo Scupoli offers Spiritual Combat training, “During the temptation, find out whether it arises from inward or outward causes.” Scupoli could not anticipate a time when the inward would be commercially infringed upon by the outward.
A reason for the bible’s continued popularity: its message has managed to transcend time and space. A money lender in a temple is still a robotic sewing leder in our temporal lobe. Neuralink is the same old New Bottles for New Wine. If a nickel spent on imitation food spits in the temple, what’s a cogito ergo sum of 6 billion invested in imitation cognition?
Every prudent man dealeth from knowledge, but a fool layeth open his folly. Hmm. That verse is very much like that old adage that advises, “Fools rush in where wise men fear to tread.” Fools are brave brothers and sisters. The world would be a much poorer place without them. When people first explored new lands, it was fools that helped them to find out if plants were poisonous by eating them and getting sick. Fools were the ones that found out lions and tigers are dangerous.
In that old rugged cross-cut ebb and flow of WIMPy nucleal cross-talking morality, fortunately there is a différance in deferrals of meaning as in types of fools. And there is the magic! There are Talking Heads willing to Stop Making Sense. “There are those who insist on asking stupid questions such as: ‘is this word being used properly?’[10] Or our stupider question: “Is this world being used properly?” There are fools still foolish enough to ask, “Is it okay to be a luddite?” Allow us this differential equation, then, to replace the past with a warning about the future, something Sante discusses in his introduction to Revisionist Art: Thirty Works of Bob Dylan
"Revisionism is necessary," wrote Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautreamont, in his Poesies (1870). "Progress implies it. It closely grasps a false idea, replaces it with the right one." Actually, he wrote, " Plagiarism is necessary..." but Ducasse was merely being provocative in his choice of words, so we have revised him. Revisionism takes the works of the past, splits them open like chickens, reads their entrails, pulls on their wishbones, and finds what lurks within--all the dark matter suppressed in its original form. Revisionism holds up authors and artists by their ankles and shakes them until their small change and their secrets come tumbling out of their pockets. Like a barber of the lower anatomy, revisionism shows institutions and the media their backsides in a mirror...
False ideas can’t really be replaced, as the green on every leaf that trembles in Savannah is perceived by virtue of Red Legs, Orange Blossom Regiments and Confederate Violets absorbed. Dark matter is only suppressed exponentially by what Boltzmann can think, meaning whatever was doing the thinking yesterday is nothing but the spontaneously-formed void of today’s time section.
DJ Spooky discusses this ruthless selection logic, this soundbite reflection process that updates DER GOLEM in the years between Caligari and Hitler again and again,
Whenever you look at an image, there’s a ruthless logic of selection that you have to go through to simply to create a sense of order. The end product on this palimpsest of perception is a composite of all the thoughts and actions you sift through over the last several micro-seconds – a soundbite reflection of a process that’s a new update of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the German proto Expressionist 1920 film “Der Golem,” but this time it’s the imaginary creature is made of the interplay fragments of time, code, and (all puns intended) memory and flesh. The eyes stream data to the brain through something like 2 million fiber bundles of nerves. Consider the exponential aspects of perception when you multiply this kind of density by the fact that not only does the brain do this all the time, but the millions of bits of information streaming through your mind at any moment have to be coordinated and like the slightest rerouting is, like the hearse and omnibus of Méliès film accident, any shift in the traffic of information can create not only new thoughts, but new ways of thinking.
Something is happening here that happened before the foundation of the world. If a cinematic hearse of computer-generated-inanition lacks the extratemporal agency to return us to an earliness, the realistic temporal consciousness of a cinematic omnibus can offer a close-packed, gap-free continuum of momentary snap shots producing phenomenal beams of dynamic awareness through a transparent lens. Only by bending from a denser medium like film, or Abraham Lincoln’s oratory, or Bob Dylan’s reformatory music, to a less dense medium like the culture can anything be bent away from homophobic or slave-holding normals that were new once too. In this cleft of opening, a rainbow, as on the pride flag at Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan’s wedding, or captured touristically at Gettysburg, is produced in part by total internal reflection.
DJ Spooky asks, “Does this mean that we make our own films as we live them?” What we might ask is, What has gone? How it ends? What we might instruct: Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word. Today's truth, tomorrow's trend. Forget, remember! In the self-replicating reflexivity of living our own films capable of expressing each conceptual colour of the spectrum, we reflect “in the darkened pool,” where “the gaze does not return in a familiar form; it reveals instead an abyssal twilit blue, which colours both the dawn and dusk of the spiriting night. The image of no thing returns. Reflection is shattered against the impersonal…”[11]
Rebirth of a Nation – 2016/9/11
It’s been a while since brother took up arms against brother in these parts. Of late, we’ve been too crude to feud. Collapse comes with an appalling SWIFTness. Un retard-en-scene at this geo-theatrical gate-cage, there’s “a reminiscence” of Walt Whitman’s “vulgar fate.” We aren’t sure where to go. We aren’t sure what to do to get there. Wired peers perversely into The Future of Reality asking on our 1st memory of THE MATRIX. “Rare is the seer of Tomorrows” the headline forewarns. “Technology opened up this conversation about what is real and what is not real,” reveals Yahya Abdul-Mateen, This Moment’s Morpheus. Now, this is an easier read than The Jacobian discarded at the frisbee golf course we’ve deconstructed out of yesteryear’s battlefield, a publication pecked at by postmodern magpies reading of Making Light Work, drone war’s child casualties, and attacked power lines between Sanaa and Marib. First-order particle derivatives are bound to be found when, “Time produces itself in a circuit, passing through the virtual interruption of what is to come, in order that a future arrives which is already infected.”[13] A rare mammal capable of considering itself in the mirror, magpies are, “Cooked in apocalypse, mind blown away, falling endlessly into Siberia, searching for the scale of now.”[14]
The year was 2007. NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS was big at the box office. A new cryonic method reduced decoherence while increasing interaction distance. A Graduation brought Kanye West to a dawning degree of consistency. Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Juli Zeh’s In Free Fall (or Dark Matter) descend. Bose-Einstein quantum memory condensates upon all the violets of the time spectrum, all the Virginia bluebells we hope to preserve when The Boss Hogg Outlawz arrive To Serve and Collect. DARPA launches an urban challenge for autonomy, as it concerns CARS. Sage Francis gives us the all too human Human, the Death Dance. Common thinks he’s Finding Forever when common state exchange between light and matter has only begun to be demonstrated. As Hannah Arendt attempted to write out Heidegger’s The Self Assertion of the German University, Wark’s achievement was written over by DJ Spooky’s REBIRTH OF A NATION, a collocation of music “that eternally repeats its tune,” and “may never be called a memory.” DJ Spooky trades Wark’s title cards for his own. DJ Spooky’s contractor collocates fresh impressions, drawn from watching people’s nature at clubs, where people take MDMA and then snort “K-space matrix invasion from real terrestrial time zero, a singularity or transition threshold,”[15] where and when the dawn and dusk of the spiriting night is the popular mood drug.
DJ Spooky describes, “Symbol and synecdoche, sign and signification, all at once, the digital codes become a reflection, a mirror permutation of the nation…. Where to go? What to do to get there?”
DJ Spooky seeks a primordial refresher course, “Sometimes the best way to get an idea across is to simply tell it as a story. It’s been a while since late one autumn afternoon in 1896 Georges Méliès was filming a late afternoon Paris crowd caught in the ebb and flow of the city’s traffic,” a coarsening The Times’ finds too simple, too unreflective, too obscurant of what was already there, and “oddly desultory,”
Sometimes an animation that looked like a circuit diagram spread across the old movie images; sometimes a computer graphic outlined the main character in the frame. Yet far from bringing out the film’s racism, the video muted it. The most stereotypically racist sequence, a meeting of a black-dominated House of Representatives, was almost completely obscured by overlays.
This argument Non Pareles wishes Wark’s sequence where, “The speaker rules that all members must wear shoes,” would remain unobfuscated so it can be remembered. Jon Pareles was less critical when riotous imagery overlaid liquor and fried food consumers upon the state house, when Capitol Pictures of a Shaman were overlaid upon the senate where the spirit of the Times only wanted to HAIL CAESAR again.
The encyclopedia After Lives of Slavery argues that DJ Spooky undoes not history but Wark’s own obscurantism by, “drawing the audience’s attention to the racism in the work and not overlooking it to appreciate the bigger picture. He does this by overlaying images and colors specifically pointing out scenes of mistreatment. For example, in one scene, a white man was attempting to take advantage of a female black slave, and the woman was targeted on [the] inside of a triangle making her the focal point of the scene.”
Arising in the probability of combinatorics, DJ Spooky’s overlaid array of binomial coefficients differed each night in DJ sets drastically different from the academic vervelessness on tonight’s DVD narration. We your programmers are guilty of this k = 0 urge to explicate. We are what pseudoskeptical Michael Shermer styles “pattern-seeking story-telling animals.” We can’t help talking atop the big Revelations, overlaying patterns of mixed preening Contra to our solid stated gaols. As friend of your programmers Rene Descartes remarks, “Those who take it upon themselves to give direction to others must believe themselves more capable than those to whom they give it, and bear the responsibility for the slightest error they might make.” We guess we all just want a chance to collect our thoughts in a pattern: Myself, Andre ‘Dinner’s on me!’ Gregory, Friedrich Nietzsche, but then too his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and on to her husband Bernhard, until soon enough his work friend Adolph Hitler collects his own thoughts and asserts for his turn at the podium.
Language is to be understood in a way that could be misread as a theory of narcissism, since it relates itself to itself, and this could be taken to be analogous to the self-regard of a subject enraptured by its own reflection.[17]
At REBIRTH’s outset, Wark says in interview footage: “The Klan at that time was needed, and served a purpose. Yes, I think it was true.”
DJ Spooky narrates that Wark’s work, “Hangs as a spectre over the political process [and] multiple ideas about American identity, and set the tone for the 21st century’s revisionist landscape where media and the absence or presence of a story in that media could set off a war.”
Absence of presence could start a war. Legacy media’s prosthetic misery of the prime times could start a war. “Analog-to-digital conversion deletes information” writes Alexander Lowen in Narcissism: Denial of The True Self, “When the curtain falls upon an act, it is finished and forgotten. The emptiness of such a life is beyond imagination.” To imagine the curtain Fall the Curtisian demands, to find the empty place to go and how to get there, DJ Spooky
reflect[s] on the same ideas using the net to focus our attention on a world rapidly moving into what [he] like[s] to call “prosthetic realism.” Sight and sound, sign and signification: the travel at this point becomes mental, and as with Griffith’s hyper dense technically prescient intercuts, it’s all about how you play with the variables that creates the artpiece. If you play, you get something out of the experience. If you don’t, like Griffith – the medium becomes a reinforcement of what’s already there, and or as one critic, Iris Barry said a long time ago of Griffith’s “Intolerance”: “history itself seems to pour like a cataract across the screen…”
If the angle of coincidence cataracts across the indexical present, “[i]s there a connection to be made between the shattering of the mirror and a movement of astronomical imagery,”[19] imagery known in some protracted circles as the passing of time? Look, THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, MASKED & ANONYMOUS, one too many SYBILs and a PROZAC NATION LEFT BEHIND. Lightning-writ history will always iris out the same bloody conflicts so Lange as the same power structures keep sanging the same insipid MUSIC BOX melody, weaving de Sade old handkerchiefs at self-same Confederates calling themselves allies but only desiring their own absolute freedom, no longer Sodom beatable, marching in the spirit of the times for the Union, station to station of the cross-cut Time on the March, reeeing from the concussive blow, trying to remember that seeing “stars are traces of a primordial strewing; an explosive dispersion, which in its formlessness, defies mathematization or the reduction to order.”[20]
CNN is already to ask: “anyone yet hear that Capitol Shaman’s lonesome bugle blow? Well does it? We’ll douse it in misappropriated meaning then.” With Time-Warner on their side they’ll make the images mean there’s danger near. They forget that in Kinetic Decoupling “there are two different kinds of equilibrium for WIMPs in the primordial bath.”[21] That’s how the PRISONERSCINEMA network Hedges CNN’s correspondence truth by “opening it onto an alterity which has not been appropriate in advance to any deep structure or encompassing system.”[22]
Conceited, we are yet more Talking Heads warning that these transhumane folk are no ordinary raiders, warning all to regard “non-consensual wetware alteration, AIs, replications, terminators, cyberviruses, grey-goo nano-horrors … apocalypse market overdrive” with appropriately Cybergothic skepticism, to focus hour con CERN upon what’s being sent back to the Atlas detector, that rearward time-code reminding us of our moronic self-insistence upon interpersonal immanence, asking PRISONERSCINEMA insiders if this is really the place to “conjugate the dynasty with an unlimited alterity,”[23] reminding audiences that “Cybernetics is the aggravation of itself happening, and what we do will be what made us have to do it: we are doing things before they make sense.”[24]
This erse solid Marxist who once described, “skyscrapers overshadowing 17th century graveyards” would have his own magnetic poles reversed, directing him through a Dark Enlightenment conceived in the “capitalism containment unit” of a “Neo-China” that “arrives from the future,” from where and when Nick Land would Tweet, “It turns out cheap cotton was the most expensive product in the history of the earth” superficially about the cost of the civil war but easily readable as a racist wink towards an #Accelerated NRx Set who feel pushed too far by Lost Cause deconstruction. Regardless, as Bob Dylan can’t replace his homophobic remarks with culturally-sensitive sermons, Nick Land’s current cultural incompatability cannot unwrite his prescient warnings from “Beyond the Judgment of God” of “Meltdown: planetary china-syndrome, dissolution of the biosphere into the technosphere” written the 1990s when most of academia was on that all-inclusive Cruise of Deception they remain on today, predictions prescient as, “Commerce re-implements space inside itself, assembling a universe exhaustively immanent to cybercapital functionality…” and “The corresponding extraction of tradable value from the body, quantified as productivity, sophisticates at the interface.”
Thus narrated DJ Spooky: “Those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But what happens if we break the cycle?”
“What is the truth?” asks D.W. Griffith.
“What is the truth and where did it go?” asks Bob Dylan in Murder Most Foul, Bob Dylan who is still Pressing On, asking, “What kind of sign they need when it all come from within.” Bob Dylan, who haunts the past so preternaturally that the past prefers to Cross the Green Mountain rather than cross consciousness streams with the unreal conditionals of revisionist cinematic realism. Bob Dylan who told the selfsame Jon Pareles, “You can find all my philosophy in those old songs. I believe in a God of time and space […] I believe in Hank Williams singing ‘I Saw the Light.’ I’ve seen that light too.”
Barbara “Magnetic” Fields tells Ken Burns, “What we need to remember, most of all, is that the Civil War is not over until we, today, have done our part in fighting it, as well as understanding what happened when the Civil War generation fought it.”
Jean Cayrol speaks to you now through NIGHT AND FOG, “Icy water lies in the hollows of the carnal houses. Water as sluggish as our own bad memories. War nods, but has one eye open, but Faithful as ever the grass flourishes on the muster grounds, around the blocks. An abandoned village still heavy with threads.”
DJ Spooky asks, “How much of this is in the past and how much is in the present?”
The Arm in The Black Lodge asks backwards, “Is it future or is it past?” reversed, yet presenced sequentially to set up Nietzsche’s eternal question of The Return: What year is it?”
“Is another world possible?” asks Paul Miller.
Michael Anderson’s central observation is that, “memory, like other aspects of cognition and behaviour, poses problems of control.”[26]
Michael J. Anderson was unavailable ☹ to play The Arm in Twin Peaks: The Return after accusing David Lynch of raping Jennifer Lynch and murdering Jack Nance. Our sympathy is extended to all involved in that unfortunate matter.
Private Witt in THE THIN RED LINE has, “Seen another world,” but sometimes thinks it’s only his imagination again.
Private Barry Benson asks, “Were those things real? Did I see those brave and noble countrymen of mine laid low in death? Did I see our country laid waste and in ruin? Did I see the ruins of smoldering cities and deserted homes? Surely they are the vagaries of mine own imagination.”
Wrapping up, then: a hip-hop beat and some scribbles over Lost Cause ideology won’t win us into another world. Still, look, listen, it can’t hurt to take retroactive stances on what ails the story-telling and pattern-seeking animal, to Silencio what is untrue: that David Lynch is a rapist and murderer, that whites were the real victims of southern reconstruction, that sinister queer cabals invade(D) the body politic, and that an ever-quickening concentricity of atrocity in silo armaments lies inevitable as sure as legacy media profit models lie dying. If “the future is closer than it used to be, closer than it was last week, but postmodernity remains an epoch of undead power,”[27] if consciousness is a spandrel and scoundrel, if causal escape can only be non-physical, then let’s fix what images our pattern-making mechanoreceptors, chemoreceptors, and photoreceptors collocate with lightning-fast 5G before they exponentially blur the self with the other in “unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.”[28] Wired for War as we are, guided by The Robotics Revolution towards Conflict in the 21st Century, C.S. Lewis reminds us of the difference between begetting and making. Mother Theresa tells the interlocutor, and we’ve got this backwards, “Often we cannot understand […] Our expanding knowledge does not dim our faith.” Walt Whitman asks, “What do you suppose creation is? What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free and own no superior?” The eternal Footeman holds the Confederate waste coat of Sergeant Barry Benson, “Who knows but again the old flags, ragged and torn, snapping in the wind, may face each other and flutter, pursuing and pursued, while the cries of victory fill a summer day? And after the battle, then the slain and wounded will arise, and all will meet together under the two flags, all sound and well, and there will be talking and laughter and cheers, and all will say, Did it not seem real? Was it not as in the old days?” Impoverished of stimuli, unable to repeat past GLORY or make sense of the dense codes of the present, in the great midday when the sun reaches its zenith, Nicéphore Niépce captures images on paper and copper. We have nerve Circuitries for error correction, see. There is this amazing human lens capturing the subtleties of a vanishing society. Once, 380,000 years after the beginning of time, photons lacked the energy to ionize. You is feeling like you is lost in the bush, boy? Know you that scattering is the Skeleton Key to the sky’s palette, a scatter brand to the reneweller of the sky. And colour can be made by taking colour away. Blinded by the evil demon, born scatterbrained and already ruined, the causal story outside the bondage of perception, strict identity holds despite all urging towards singularity. “Things which coincide with one another are equal to one another. The whole is greater than the part.” Despite lacking vitreoulic clarity when “[r]eflection is always very late, derivative, and even then really else,”[29] there remains the uninvertible essence of flower colours, The Color Out of Time and place, giving us a forceful view of hard truths, of the blood stained earth. We see, in dreams, our deeds even before we act. We see the earthly plan in the warm glow of early morning, in midday’s clear blue sky, in late afternoon’s richness, in twilight’s broken idols and dream boulevards, in the ones we loved, in subtle cadences of The Father of Night, the reneweller of the sky, in the beginning, and now that we’re here at the end again.
[1] Nick Land, Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger’s 1953 Trakl Interpretation
[2] T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday
[3] Nick Land, Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger’s 1953 Trakl Interpretation
[4] Martin Heidegger, Language in the Poem
[5] T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday
[6] Richard Brody, The Worst Thing About “Birth of a Nation” Is How Good It Is
[7] Nick Land, Circuitries
[8] Ibid
[9] https://www.neuroscience.cam.ac.uk/directory/profile.php?mcanders
[10] Nick Land, Circuitries
[11] Nick Land, Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger’s Trakl Interpretation
[12] Wired, The Future of Reality
[13] Nick Land, Cybergothic
[14] Ibid
[15] Ibid
[16] Martin Heidegger, Language in the Poem
[17] Nick Land, Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger’s 1953 Trakl Interpretation
[18] Nick Land, Cybergothic
[19] Nick Land, Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger’s 1953 Trakl Interpretation
[20] Ibid
[21] Sabino Matarrese et al, Dark Matter and Dark Energy a Challenge for Modern Cosmology
[22] Nick Land, Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger’s 1953 Trakl Interpretation
[23] Ibid
[24] Nick Land, Circuitries
[25] Nick Land, Cybergothic
[26] https://www.neuroscience.cam.ac.uk/directory/profile.php?mcanders
[27] Nick Land, Cybergothic
[28] William Gibson, Neuromancer
[29] Nick Land, Circuitries