Tuesday, 4 February 2014

(A response)

First draft response to Andrew Sandercock's There is a Light


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1. The scrying stones

A fortune teller (one hand, two voices) decrees what is to come, our hero sets out.

The universe of symbols collapses under its own weight,

The writing's on the wall”

we start again, first principles (the same as always, only wearing a different mask)... we will follow the roaming eye, the hovering judgement, our ambiguous narrator (hero?)

  1. Smell it (you can almost)

Take a lung full... it will remind you of something you already knew...

We learn to be real, horizontal... The beige... The floral... The mundane alter upon which dreams are channelled... Metamorphose dreams... bend reality to them... the lady who reeks of lavender and cigarettes at night secretly dreams of flying naked upon a shoal of mermen... the conscious/unconscious signals/flags we fly... life blinks on... off.... on.... off... A soft monument, a tomb “Thy womb let loose, to chase us to our graves”... Athena Parthenos, “Virgin Athena” gave birth to the city of Athens, the immaculate conception of philosophy's foundations, of mythos and the narrative ark (all our histories ordained by immaculate conception, the big bang... she didn't see it coming)... Miraculous! They de robed her to pay Lachare's army... If we can only learn to transcend the particular conditions of life... We may learn that life is an aesthetic experience, to be shaped in it's own image... Or better... To be re-cast in gold...

  1. Anonymous forms, anonymous devotions

The glimpsed moment

The eye of the hero, the eye of the protagonist (he roams)

... hovering in the instant of the film still... Loosening the grip on the narrative ark... gathering the remnants, the debris washed up amongst the scurf of the day... anonymous fragments, through which may be garnered the map of the cosmos...

Propelled by an invisible force (“not I but the wind that blows through me”) “hands unseen”... a journey into the void... [the light obliterates]... cut flowers... cut... hinged... wet, little, quenchless, mouths... a liminal moment... a liminal state... the frayed thread of significance...

  1. Moth (Apotheosis)

Dénouement... Day...noo...moh....

A ritual gesture, ancestral image... Where once we worshipped the sun... The pagan love affair is now projected (via Freud and Edison), it (he) has transmuted, to electrickery, the divine spark...

The answer is in the question

Totem.

Pivot.

Black sun.... It perforates like a full stop in the middle of a sentence... And yet... every morning the light switch performs a miracle.

  1. Mortal Gods

Transfiguring the eternal...

She (Pandora) carried a box across the river Styx...

Now they (adopted natives) carry cameras into the night... traverse the space between love, ecstasy, madness and all that is unknowable... All the while a streetlight (a beacon) conveys the slow-motion semaphore of human life to the night sky... ...on, off... on, off... A diurnal distress signal? A love letter? A swan song?...

  1. Po Wah - Powah - Power

The first stirrings of the divine in the mists of a Northern town... You can hear the creak of Ian Curtis's thigh bone in the fog...

The thinking eye... The seeing thought...

The authenticity of an (un)observed life – of the visual fragments, inheritance, lexis we are granted by our surroundings... By the hands of our mothers and by our own capacity to imagine...

  1. Athena

Too much! Too much! Not enough! Not enough!

Humans are nodes of matter on the wild and voracious sea of the gods...”

Athena, goddess of heroic endeavour, just warfare and civilization... A chaste and virginal goddess who gave (miraculous) birth to modern philosophy... “But... where do the gods exist?” In the strangely unlimited forms of human expression... In the scream and the laugh... Excess is divine (is where the influence of the gods resides!)... The divine overwhelms life... In the full, tremulous grandeur of what it is to be mortal...

What part are you playing?”

My own” if inevitable, (kebab on the way home)... Tragedy was set in motion even before the play began... The gods were always beyond human... Wild, untameable, unpredictable...

  1. (Set Change)

I (mis)heard “The light of the sun” as “The light of the son” and this made me wonder about the paternal... The eternal Father(s), back stage... “He is the son of a mad wolf” what is it to be anything other than?... The hands of our fathers which operate invisibly, stage directions, plot lines, props... Are they all Minotaurs (our fathers; Heads of bulls, bodies of men?)...

Here they are, the removal men, the men who move the world when we are looking in other directions... Poised as if for a drama “What drama?” the period drama of now, of tragically playing ourselves...

Memory is a leaky vessel... and life... life is a many sided thing... How we get a grip on it I can't imagine...

  1. Impeccable Patternicity

Behind the fabric of the everyday, men in high-vis jackets are tinkering with the wiring... mastering the art of invisibility... so that time appears like a seamless thing, art like a timeless entity... an industry based on invisibility... no date, no time, no presence... art must be an immaculate accident... The prominent genius, the creator god, his image must be maintained (superhuman)... The magic of the moment (a flawless entity), we must uphold the suspension of disbelief... a disbelief we are all complicit in, a smooth communion with the other must be performed (the most perfect lie)...

Watching you, watching me, watching you...

Count the silences....

Take two deep (very deep) breaths and pack up the beautiful debris (noone will see this but you, but this is perfect)... Maintain the props of the everyday...

  1. The hero's return

(absurd) a dream without end... until it is over...

RTN/ESC

The same. Entry into the non-space... the spaces of memory are insurmountable... Mother.

Ascend.

Between our ancestors and now, inhabit those spaces (lightly) and leave no trace. We are acted upon by the force of the narrative and a necessary ending (an ever passing moment)... The unlimited moment, swings ever upwards


End (?)

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