'It gets dark, difficult to see.
In there on the moss lie stones.
One of the stones is precious.
It can change everything
it can make the darkness shine...'
--Transtromer.
Before the Fall, silence, same as it ever was. For 80-90% of human history there was very little "history". It is estimated that only 10% of our languages have ever been committed to the written form, the rest we remembered off by heart. The letter killeth...
Agriculture, "civilisation", came to us late. In the original abundance, affluence, there was no sense of extended loss, no desire for a fallen land, no memory of a golden age. And in that instant, that dream state that was our abiding reality, what kind of war was possible?
Does war only become totalitarian with the invention of the state, the production of surpluses, the "advancement" of technology? Are these, in the final saying, not one and the same thing? Wouldn't the recovery of our true image, a recollection of the way we used to speak to one another, involve us in living a day without organization. The decadence of an industrial civilisation encapsulated in a barbaric saying: Work shall set you free!
Ritual and remembrance, state archives, the cloud, "lest we forget". The maps that we, the modern-day illiterates, have forgotten and yet despite all that-or maybe because of it- cling on to in the belief, held with the fervour of a fanatic, that it will guide us to the true North. It dawns on us that it is a time for closing the books, Bulleh, a time for finding North close at hand.
Religion has destroyed what it found.
What was there on the other side of Eden (Brody's question)? Does anything of it survive except, perhaps, in anarchist tendencies?What kind of life was that? Is the domination of nature coeval with the domination of women? Both passively waiting to become (re)productive, fertile. Was there another kind of inwardness that was at peace with the world? Not Descartes' withdrawal, his philosophy of doubt, but a small-scale intelligence, a low flame, a mind knowing, finally, what the hand did and a heart that remembers the precious stones.
And now: a core-tiredness, an exhaustion that finds expression in a clamouring for ever-wilder "experiences" or drug-induced fantasies. Anything but the earth or reality as it is. Whither shall we flee? What could be more symbolic of our childishness than the dream of escaping earth, as if we were never bound to its fate, never responsible for its destruction. Above it all.
And the irony: we, the unbound ones, without essence, have in all our carelessness brought on the great unraveling that takes everything down with us.
Abstraction-in painting, thought, science, religion..is this not a way of escaping life, which is to say: death? To halt the flow or reverse it means to be without that first sense of wonder. In abstract space we can traverse great distances-in fact, there are no distances, because there is no time! We see the world with the jaded eye of a distant God, participating in nothing, predicting and theorizing everything under the sun.
For those of us who are convinced physicists the distinction between past, present, and future has no other meaning than that of an illusion..
--Einstein.
And now that the great transformative projects are collapsing all around us, now that linear time itself has been reduced to a series of isolated moments thus rendering us incapable of dreaming up a future or drawing on a past, we discover ourselves to be nothing but bored, restless animals, confined to the cages of our own making.
In there on the moss lie stones.
One of the stones is precious.
It can change everything
it can make the darkness shine...'
--Transtromer.
Before the Fall, silence, same as it ever was. For 80-90% of human history there was very little "history". It is estimated that only 10% of our languages have ever been committed to the written form, the rest we remembered off by heart. The letter killeth...
Agriculture, "civilisation", came to us late. In the original abundance, affluence, there was no sense of extended loss, no desire for a fallen land, no memory of a golden age. And in that instant, that dream state that was our abiding reality, what kind of war was possible?
Does war only become totalitarian with the invention of the state, the production of surpluses, the "advancement" of technology? Are these, in the final saying, not one and the same thing? Wouldn't the recovery of our true image, a recollection of the way we used to speak to one another, involve us in living a day without organization. The decadence of an industrial civilisation encapsulated in a barbaric saying: Work shall set you free!
Ritual and remembrance, state archives, the cloud, "lest we forget". The maps that we, the modern-day illiterates, have forgotten and yet despite all that-or maybe because of it- cling on to in the belief, held with the fervour of a fanatic, that it will guide us to the true North. It dawns on us that it is a time for closing the books, Bulleh, a time for finding North close at hand.
Religion has destroyed what it found.
What was there on the other side of Eden (Brody's question)? Does anything of it survive except, perhaps, in anarchist tendencies?What kind of life was that? Is the domination of nature coeval with the domination of women? Both passively waiting to become (re)productive, fertile. Was there another kind of inwardness that was at peace with the world? Not Descartes' withdrawal, his philosophy of doubt, but a small-scale intelligence, a low flame, a mind knowing, finally, what the hand did and a heart that remembers the precious stones.
And now: a core-tiredness, an exhaustion that finds expression in a clamouring for ever-wilder "experiences" or drug-induced fantasies. Anything but the earth or reality as it is. Whither shall we flee? What could be more symbolic of our childishness than the dream of escaping earth, as if we were never bound to its fate, never responsible for its destruction. Above it all.
And the irony: we, the unbound ones, without essence, have in all our carelessness brought on the great unraveling that takes everything down with us.
Abstraction-in painting, thought, science, religion..is this not a way of escaping life, which is to say: death? To halt the flow or reverse it means to be without that first sense of wonder. In abstract space we can traverse great distances-in fact, there are no distances, because there is no time! We see the world with the jaded eye of a distant God, participating in nothing, predicting and theorizing everything under the sun.
For those of us who are convinced physicists the distinction between past, present, and future has no other meaning than that of an illusion..
--Einstein.
And now that the great transformative projects are collapsing all around us, now that linear time itself has been reduced to a series of isolated moments thus rendering us incapable of dreaming up a future or drawing on a past, we discover ourselves to be nothing but bored, restless animals, confined to the cages of our own making.
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