From the Archives

The west abandons mythological repetition only to impose on itself a repetition diffused through matter.
---Roberto Calasso.

It's interesting because we think of modern western life as a passage through fleeting and evolving landscapes, but at the same time we can literally barricade ourselves into self-sustaining little worlds that we can watch perpetually go round; favourite books would do this, now we have the entire season of whatever on DVD, entire worlds we can disappear into, all the time.
---Citizen.

I've written on this before (Dec.10th : 'Repetition and Ritual' ) and I don't quite understand this compulsion to repeat. Perhaps living in a riskier world means there is a greater need to find security in the familiar and so we repeat ourselves. Perhaps living in an age which has broken free from circular time and stepped into the irreversible, the radically new, such conservation isn't that surprising. Christopher Booker wrote that the future stopped in the Seventies-since then we've been mad about conservation: retro culture, but also ecology and knowledge. And here we have the great paradox: a system that has no regard for the past, that is founded on the destruction of the past, goes to great lengths to preserve it in museums and libraries.

Whenever I go to the British Library I feel as if I'm returning home. The great black monolithic space at the centre is , I'm sure, a sort of Ka'ba for some. And yet, the books on display there serve to emphasise knowledge as a spectacle, something that is out of hand, encased and preserved from withering time. Is this so different from the Eloi? Fourteen million books and documents and counting...

C on the Internet:
Information. Photographs. Life history. Everything is stored in the archives. God help us if there's a glitch. Everything is remembered by the relentless eye. We will have vast storehouses of knowledge..and no one will be able to read or have the time to do so! There's something obscene, perhaps, in the way in which the images of those who have passed away continue to be present on the Internet. It's not good manners! The dead should be buried and not be made visible like that (of course, the past should live on, but in life and in memory, in an appropriate place, not an open space).

But perhaps we are being hasty here. For does not the light of stars long extinguished still reach us and delight us? And these irises and bluebells..were they not melancholy people we once knew, and this sunflower here, was she not a brilliant soul I once met? So many of the dead live amongst us...

The first thing a stranger notes about London is how homogeneous its building are. Everything and everyone looks the same (this is not just the usual, instinctive stereotyping..it is worth asking the question of how local distinctiveness was worked over first by industrialisation and then by the media into a 'mass society': housing, clothes, tastes). How odd that a society that prides itself on individualism should live under the sign of the Same!