Lost Essay On Time (discovered)

Late Note: I realized when consulting this essay in depth that it was not the lost essay on time.

This essay was written somewhere round November 23rd of 2005. It had extensive edits and images I must carefully upload. The fact that it was "lost" made it significant. It is quite possible that now that it has been found it can be completely dismissed as irrelevant.

It's file name was "But what to call it." Though I always referred to it as "My essay on time."
It's strongest point was a reflection on time as a passage of light through windows: the framing of the modern technological computer predicament.

This is the sending of the message of images. What images of today -I get to the screen and panic, everything draws a blank. I both can and cannot see anything else there is to do. The Arcades of an insurance agency, perhaps, but the writing can only be a supplement in part to the boredom of employment – in the bloodless underworld of paperwork and bureaucracy – Hades, sightless and unseen, and Arcades:

“More Light” (but is there any thought?)

"Diese Niederschrift, die von den pariser Passagen handelt, ist unter freiem Himmel begonnen worden wolkenloser Bläue, die überm Laube sich wölbte und doch von den Millionen von Blättern, in denen die frische Brise des Fleisses, der Schwerfällige Atem des Forschers, der Sturm des jungen Eifers und das träge Lüftchen der Neugier rauschten, mit vielhundertjährigem Staube bedeckt worden. Denn der gemalte Sommerhimmel, der aus Arkaden in den Arbeitssaal der pariser Nationalbibliothek hinuntersieht, hat seine träumerische, lichtlose Decke über ihr ausgebreitet." [Walter Benjamin, Passagenwerk, v.1, 571]

What we begin with is not the arcade, but the trace, and the ruin. In fact these cannot be at all the arcades. It is not a Benjamin essay, though there is nothing wrong with that. However like Benjamin there is a play between images and text – and it is the interpretation, which is the tain between images –the last trace of that funny old man (Darger or Benjamin, or Walser or Jung…. Though too much has been made of Jung and he must be let to rest – he wasn’t a poor insane bastard like all the rest – well maybe he was). Its all about the shimmering patterns of images – and who tells the best tale assembling and dissembling the images (Claude Levi-Strauss’s bricolage, which is “assemblage” but cut and paste of collage, informal, Peter Berger’s vision of the bulletin board) – Proteus – old man of the sea… The old man himself is self-effacing, there is a wonder if he is even self-aware… as James Joyce never alludes to his own existence as narrator notated in the introduction to the corrected edition of Ulysses, so we will leave the book plate in the place of the old man of the sea, the one who wrestles with Telemachos in Homer’s epic:
(I actually like this version of the cover best!)

If there are cinders, not the arcades we longed for, but the cinders, the wreckage of the hymen of desire…
(http://www.othervoices.org/gpeaker/Passagenwerk.html ):
(“Fors une trace” – Derrida, The Post-Card)

"These writings, which deal with the parisian arcades, were begun under a clear sky of cloudless blue that curved over the arcade; even so they are covered with a dust hundreds of years old by the millions of pages in which the fresh wind of diligence, the heavy breath of the scholar, the storm of young zeal and the slow gentle breeze of curiosity rustled. For the painted summer sky, which looks down from the arcades to the study of the parisian Bibliotheque Nationale, has spread its dreamy, lightless cover over them.” –Walter Benjamin

I have visited the arcades, but they bore the strange resemblance toward being a bomb shelter. I bought some entertaining music there, mostly “world music” at the time. Now we don’t have the arcades like this here and I don’t have a French woman (or the interest to be with a French woman) to travel there again with. I am sick of French people and the insurance agencies they seem to coerce me to work in to defend myself from their hard fucking lawyers:
(Versicherung Agentur)

(Welcome to your new home, now leave)

“Then someone says you’re in the wrong place my friend
You’d better leave!” (Dylan – “Desolation Row”)

I actually like the insurance agency. Its essential homelessness is more profoundly at home, and like this document, I have time to actually decorate the walls of boredom with post-cards. These are the studded accents of the scintilla (c.f. the same passage of Jung with reference to Saint Christopher)

http://www.ilsentierodineriflavi.it/sculture/pag_11.htm
(I don’t know why this was called scintilla, but it is fascinating)

(The Pleiades)
We go to the arcades to make a selection – and principally because it is a form of bourgeois bricolage – however herein lies the deficit – first that capitalist production is fundamentally ungelassen. However Benjamin was a fairly adept critic of the arcades as a merely bourgeois phenomenon – there is a kind of idealist principle at work here as well – the verging on the fringe of the debacle of the Second World War – otherwise all would be well – the internet light spills through the walls and ceiling of the arcades, with a pleroma of images. The arcades were loved in the beginning of the 20th Century as the internet is loved in the beginning of the 21st Century – but the illusion has to do with the quality of light spilling through.

Arcades – a series of Arches: and the Arc – a spanning of distances, “bound volumes” (Hachamovitch) always a twist of bondage, a twist of smut (but what does one expect from helpless and hellbound phenomenologists a la Lingis) – we will have to get into that later. The bound of a leap and the distance toward which one is bound, as if a project could “venture” some sustenance…

The Arch may also be the arché and possibly even the archetype—after all Jung should be interpreted as well, but gingerly, lest the essentialists slip in again with some sense of absented wholeness – the arch is parabolic in these efforts – something seems more appealing in the radical of two – perhaps a dimensional leap, not just the age of the sphere or the anthropos rotundus – still the trace of originary inflation – if we could only see through all this distaste to the essence of the womb like arcades, yoni….

But the essence of the feminine is separation and farewell….

Köln Dom
An der kürzen Brief zum langen Abschied (Peter Handke). Jung actually uses this term in his passage of Symbols of Transformation speaking about the vagina as “sheath” or watershed – abschied is farewell.

Does the curve resemble an upward opposition to Lucretius’s assertion that atoms must swerve in their endless plummet through the void?

Norman Spinrad, for instance,
Indeed, Norman Spinrad wove a tale of the Void Captain – a title that colleagues may condign as bordering on the obscene… But the void is infinite separation – there at the end of the tale the captain is suspended in his eternal nuptial flight with the queen bee – his soul pilot (even Sting – and to Rosenzweig – “death’s sting” mentioned in Star of Redemption)

Condign, I like that word though I do not know what it means? “Kindly?” -Today I saw a man crossing the same bridge twice. We passed each other going in opposite directions both to and from the “Golden Shore” annex, and I shouted out on the second crossing, the second meeting, “bridge over the river Styx!”
And what to say?
Well, we’ll never know, “To say it was an essence,” a hidden formula, a concatenation of images.
I warned the madman that he needed to keep his feet ready to dance – ready to dance with the images – because the images will get you and take you, and, well, what else is there to say?
I write to this image, this looming immanence – a red planet, a great red eyeball, hovering over the luminous shores of luna – and luna is hardly a place to call home… and what did they do in terran gravity? Learn to become weak and thin? When even the press of one’s arms upon a table top – so firm and re-assuring – could launch one off into assails of delight….
Now they tell me that my dissertation dashes are less than exemplary. They say that a dash is supposed to look like this—and I feel somewhat incompetent with the whole thing – but it actually seems to work at least in this format of Microsoft word (automatically capitalized for your predilection, pretension, and recollection, like the name Leight:
L-E-I-G-H-T) How I would truly love to inundate the man with light – engulf the demon in the angel of his namesake – Michael, the warrior, yeah, well, there are other warriors under other names and names are older and twist far into the wilderness…
Justin – Justice…
Maybe it will work – and maybe there is no precedent.
Maybe I should just shut up and let everybody run me.
I am tired.
Meanwhile Balthasar of the aliens has driven a perfect plan.
Right now I am tired.
Old women speak to me, they speak of credit cards and plans for my final judgment. They have been so betrayed by the world, like Corinne they have been so betrayed by the world. …And what of it? They pray that their god is a just god – that he really is a just god – and that a sense of vengeance and punishment of those delinquent is absolute and everlastingly final – complete. And now for other things.
“Don’t you put your eyes on me!” One woman cried… the faces of the obscene and the insane – once again eagles from Space 1999:
But here allow me to contain and continue – this horror is at one and the same time the manna of the self. But what to call it?
I will need to prove to you in images the steed, the steady scream of the yes,
Similar in fact to Event horizon in it’s horror:
These are just the guardians at the entrance – these are just the masters of the horror at the entrance… VAJRAPANI – the wrathful, cutting diamond edge of water: …and you can drown in it – you can drown in this one…
Fierce guardian on the side of light: will you step through?

Balor’s paintings – bloody precedents. But Balor presents the mythology of attachment to life. You hold onto life – give the gift of immortality and you are rendered with pandemonium – terror. Witness then Event Horizon as an effort or glimpse of immortality:
Liberate Vos Ex Inferis
Save yourselves from hell:

But what to do then with this misconception?
Crucified on the void, the image of the cross, balanced and broadened – set on its side.
I loved these images as though they might preface some deeper understanding of the self. I thought about them yesterday as I exited my car into the night. Das Unheimlich.
Images of aggression and terror – not the bliss of Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books – but that is truly another story, a more peaceful one at that. These are images of pandaemonium. I have been wondering about the penetration – the literal penetration of the physical body – once even our physical existence could be taken for granted, regardless of setting – ah the tabernacle of immortality…Zardoz at the end of the story, many of the immortals gladly welcome death as a release from the horror of living infinitely in the prison of their own existence (I believe the people doing the killing are called aptly enough “exterminators”):
(Everybody dies in the end)

(Martin’s vision of Pandemonium).

Everything seems fairly well ordered in Pandaemonium. Lucifer in subsequent images resides over a senate – not a great deal of terror really going on here… more like a Mussolini or a Nazi work of art – big fascist stadia ala Albert Speer:
(Speer’s Zeppelin Field)
This is about the evil (even “evil” seems a moralistic denial of the depths of grief) of totality – of absolute rule given the condition of Lucifer’s (bearing “false light”) rebellion from God – its all way too complicated for me. Lucifer won’t bow down to human beings, whom he regards as apes – pure animals. However we have gone from the horror of insight into the light – even the black hole light in Event Horizon – to a kind of darkening of the technological mind, wedded to the conception of light – its conception of light as an instrument of brutality.
(Blowing the top off of everything)
False light, most alarming. Here also the arch of the arcades is problematized. There apparently is no more arch – just Ionic columns of light. Is the arch (arc/bow/arc en ciel/rainbow) so important? If there is no more of a Lucretian “Swerve” does the universe come to rest in its eternal plummet and ascent? The horizontal axis allows for the horizon, the plane of everyday life – which Heidegger calls forgetfulness – but could this everyday life some how be the most simple humble thing if it does not loose sight of the vertical axis of life/death the gods in the heaven and mortals on earth. To live blind on the horizon is as dangerous as it is to live in the vertical axis of the world (axis mundi).
(The crash of the Hindenberg, Led Zeppelin 1)

The Zeppelin exists on Speer’s zeppelin field. The zeppelin is a symbol of inflation – hydrogen of the sun – highly combustible – anthropos rotundus­ (Edinger has a fruitful discussion of elemental inflation in Ego and Archetype) – the claims of a baleful superman with a weak emaciated ego structure (Reference Jung, I think Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, cross reference a passage on St. Christopher). Strange to think that the screaming electric guitar of Zeppelin, hallucinogenic induced high fantasy should be reduced to the pittance of fascist inflation. Zeppelin themselves chose this bloody fantasy – maybe for the element of catastrophe – not in the inflation itself, but in the process and cycle of deflation, radical expulsion of gas by fire, consumption in a crumbled mass sinking to coagulate with the earth. The title is said to be attributed to the rock group on the basis that someone felt it might “go over” like a lead balloon

(Schuler’s “Crystal Cathedral”:
Strip mall architecture applied to late consumer capitalist Christianism)

I can’t be certain but Schuler’s Crystal Cathedral seems a bit less pernicious – though it is a kind of mall-technology… the Western United States version of the “Arcades” a la “The Beverly Center,” “West-side Pavillion” or “Santa Monica Mall.” All of these use light and capitalist consumption (in Schuler’s case of religious sentiment). It is all much too banal, but then again evil (at least as a kind of denial of the depth of grief) is banal. Nevertheless the element of lockstep conservative christianism in the United States becomes a source of conformity and regulation of human desire and belief. Church becomes inquisition – the transparency of the cathedral permits infinite surveillance of the panopticon:
(Those crazy masons)

The issue of the vertical axis: One train of thought leads me once again to Thomas Bernhard’s Concrete, where introversion leads to suicide, and extroversion leads to homicide… constituting the infernal version of the vertical axis – but the binding comments that it is the lateral escape (not unlike the crab – which Harvey Rabbin used as a metaphor to describe Derrida’s deconstructive method)



Sentimentality and brutality – indeed. Light. Light, but in the meantime the horror continues:
Henry Darger saw in terms of the endless dilemma of war, conflict and struggle, which beset the Vivian Girls and their nation through to the final ends of his life: The offense continues, “meanwhile the offense continues.” (And Derek Mahon iterates it in Matthew V 29-30): “But the offense continued.”
A bloody heart and a good book. Darger offers us something superior here in his vision of weird feminine magnificence and beauty. Weird beauty is something else.
The boys remain playing in their purple and gold uniforms with their machine guns. The girls, or their semblance (regardless of genital configuration, which for Darger seemed largely gratuitous or vague…
Perhaps Darger offers a way or a means back and forth between the horror of death, disembowelment and evisceration and the joyful, sensual enjoyment of the child – the full palate garden of color of the little girl. The oppositions are stark – and in this sense more meaningful than the “Balor” paintings represented in 1999 – Darger goes into the darkness and back in a continual tormented swing of the images.

On the lighter side of things there is the Buddha – but this is a precarious catch of the imagination…. “Make of yourself a ring to catch the hook of the Buddha’s light.
Three heads and eight arms may be yesterday's time. The eight- or
sixteen-foot body may be today's time. Yet yesterday and today are both in
the moment when you directly enter the mountains and see thousands and
myriads of peaks. Yesterday's time and today's time do not go away.
Three heads and eight arms move forward as your time-being. It looks as
if they are far away, but they are here and now. The eight- or sixteen-foot
body moves forward as your time-being. It looks as if it is nearby, but it
is exactly here. Thus, a pine tree is time, bamboo is time. (Dogen)