Can we go, Papa?
Yes. Of course we can.Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.
from The Road by Cormac McCarthey, New York, Vintage International, p. 180, 198.
In my dream I heard someone say, I do not want to die. And one thousand and more voices whispered, I do not want to die. And another voice suggested, Let’s gather the best that they should find a way out. And the words were passed on and on by one voice and by another and another.
The Confessions - after Jean Jacques Rousseau -
I was about eleven years old and was lodged by the nuns in the northern Italian town where on December 13, 1545, the Roman Catholic Church held the sadly famous Ecumenical Council that started Inquisition. There were two big concomitant rooms with eight-ten beds in each, a small night-table and a chair delimited our few possessions. The communicating door was kept ajar so that the nun, who slept in one room, could keep the girls under sight. I remember I woke up and started crying because I did not want to die. The feeling was so intense, every cell of my body was aware that had I slid back to sleep, I would have never woken up again. I cried and cried, while everybody slept, it was dark, in the middle of the night. I know I tried to call: "Sister, Sister..." but the nun was snoring. I cried all the tears I had when finally, exhausted, I dozed out to sleep to wake up on the following morning, stoned and with swollen eyes to get ready quick and run to school.
I was about nineteen or twenty. I woke up but I could not move. Not one arm, not one leg, nor turn around. The couple living on the upper floor of the tower (an outhouse for the servants of the de' Medici family, at least that is what someone told me) in the center of Florence where I had found a room, stepped down the rounded concrete stairs, and I called out loud, "Please help me, I cannot move!" She went first, the bathroom, the kitchen, and a small common room were downstairs. Some minutes later he stepped down, Isse, the tall black guy who said he was a prince in his African country. "Please, I screamed louder, help me!" But he went by without stopping. After a while they climbed back up, and that is when I yelled so loud that my ears almost got numb. But nobody answered. I tried again and again, but they never stopped, nor knocked on my door. When they finally stepped down again, and I imagined it was for the last time and they left the house. I laid there in terror. Sleep overcame me, and a couple of hours later I woke up again and felt all right. I zoomed to my classes two hours late. When I asked them why they did not answer me, they both stated they had not heard me. Several days later, I was talking to someone about this terrifying experience, and the listener quoted an article on the newspaper. The dates coincided. It seems that on the previous evening several people had seen an unidentified spaceship in the sky over town. The article also said that states of momentary paralysis usually take place at their passing.
The emotional disturbance echoes down the canyons of the
heart.
Echoes there—sounds cut off—merely phonemes. A ground-
rules double. You recognize them by pattern. Try.
Hello shouted down a canyon becomes huhluh. You, and the
canyons of the heart,
Recognize feebly what you shouted. The vowels
Are indistinguishable. The consonants
A pattern for imagination. Phonemes,
In the true sense, that are dead before their burial. Constructs
Of the imagination
Of the real canyon and the heart’s
Construct.-- Jack Spicer, from Language: Phonemics
- Writing goes beyond architecture's tri- dimensionality
- The architectural outline of a poem- Back up some of your data - store it somewhere :
In Pat Cadigan’s novel Fools, the Brain Police adopt personalities to destabilize a criminal fraternity of mind-suckers and body-snatchers, where personalities are for sale.
from digitaldreams by neil spiller (page 70).The passage from psychology to neuronal interaction
Mathematical and technical systems are to replace all invasive emotional devastations. Through google earth, the bombing of information, the enormous quantity of inputs, the fundamental understanding of our computers' analogical system, von Neuman's cellular automata - the Empire of our bodies – a rearrangement of atoms, or an ensemble of homunculi, very similar to the conception of Apocalypse now, starring Marlon Brando, the King/God/Self-Judge, with his collapsing personal family history on stage, as much as the plot of the above-mentioned movie - is increasingly seen as a series of circuits:
- unwanted emotions can be visualized as a destroying earthquake to delimit/stop / needed is time to rebuild for those who are suffering injuries and loss;
- a disease is detailed in terms of a series of cells gone mad: an action aimed at eliminating those cells through an artificial bombing of chemicals / or meditation to heal, to empower natural antibiotics or fighting cells / or vitamins, calcium, minerals to help reconstruct.
Our body becomes our territory. We have already been invested of the mighty qualification of Emperors by the Church, our Spiritual essence / our Soul/ the configuration of our new consciousness.
We / I are / am the only Player of this extended chess board.
' Ah la vida! Ah la Vida!'
‘We are all of us doomed to spend our lives watching a movie of our lives – we are always acting on what has just finished happening. it happened at lest 1/30 of a second ago. We think we are in the present, but we aren’t. The present we know is only a movie of the past, and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means. That lag has to be overcome some other way, through some kind of total breakthrough.’
Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, Farrer, Strauss and Giroux, 1968; from digitaldreams by neil spiller (page 91)Fear of technology running out of control
Fear of discourse becoming a negative signifier (interpreting Foucault)
Fear of minds forbidden to speak truth
Fear of nuclear power percolating from rundown plants
Fear like viscous dark violet algae
Fear entwining with cells sucking out energy to feed its nightmare
Fear of losing control on fears
Fear of otium
Fear of having to deal with/ face/ solve it all of our own
Fear of a dog, a horse, a cow, a barndoor fowl
Fear of sliding out of space-time graphics
Fear of not reaching their speed and requirements
Fear of inertness
Fear of not complying with the generally accepted main discourse
Fear of complying too much with the generally accepted main discourse
Fear of not conforming to the appropriate discourse
Fear of not knowing enough to comply with the social discourse (interpreting Foucault)
Fear of forgetting your own discourse while memorizing the historically common social discourse
Fear of void although the quantum universe does not contemplate void
Fear of betraying the elements of reason as set by middle class idealistic codes
&
Fear of unhinging self-reflection which would trigger rationalistic technological knowledge tout-court (paraphrasing Habermas after Rorty)
Fear of incomplete information
Fear of catastrophes due to psychological, structural, uncontrolled ignorance
Fear of my enemies’ violent greed
Fear of manipulations
Fear of not defining what has to be expressed in the culture in question
&
Fear of being caught by the Sublime (Lyotard – while forgetting Rorty’s Dewey with “the meaning of daily detail.”)
Fear of deathIn Central Park, Walter Benjamin writes:
27.
The heroic posture of Baudelaire may be the most closely related to that of Nietzsche. If Baudelaire held to his Catholicism his experience of the universe is nonetheless exactly in accordance with that fixed by Nietzsche in the phrase: God is dead.
[…]
34.
What’s the idea? to speak of progress to a world sinking into the rigidity of death. Baudelaire found this experience of a world entering rigor mortis set down with incomparable power in Poe. What made Poe irreplaceable for him was that he described a world in which Baudelaire’s literary endeavors (Dichten und Trachten) had its justification. Compare the head of Medusa in Nietzsche.
Before the War
Seeing his mother coming home
he kneels behind a parked car,
one hand over his mouth to still
his breathing. She passes, climbs
the stairs, and again the street is his.
We're in an American city, Toledo,
sometime in the last century, though
it could be Buffalo or Flint,
the places are the same except
for the names. At eight or nine,
even at eleven, kids are the same,
without an identity, without a soul,
things with bad teeth and bad clothes.
We could give them names, we could
name the mother Gertrude, and give her
a small office job typing bills of lading
eight hours a day, five and a half
days a week. We could give her
dreams of marriage to the boss
who's already married, but we
don't because she loathes him.
It's her son, Sol, she loves,
the one still hiding with one knee
down on the concrete drawing
the day's last heat. He's got feelings.
Young as he is he can feel heat,
cold, pain, just as a dog would
and like a dog he'll answer
to his name. Go ahead, call him,
"Hey, Solly, Solly boy, come here!"
He doesn't bark, he doesn't sit,
he doesn't beg or extend one paw
in a gesture of submission.
He accepts his whole name, even
as a kid he stands and faces us,
just as eleven years from now
he'll stand and face his death
flaming toward him on a bridge-
head at Remagen while Gertrude
goes on typing mechanically
into the falling winter night.
--Philip Levine. News of the World. Knopf, 2009.James Broughton: "Adventure - not predictable"
