Struggle of grasping the density of our times. It is hard to shake off the feeling that we exist post everything.
We live the afterlife of those who have existed before us.
All the timelines collide, almost huddle together as something that feels large and unstoppable goes by mercilessly.
Watching other people.
On screen. Off screen.
Smelling a flower, as if it's a ghost of the plant that bears it. Sounds are either too loud or inaudible.
Set the volume. Watch a film. Better to download it. One day it won't exist on the internet. Every page of the infinite ones online is subject to deletion.
Did the pages of a book always feel this way?
One day my fingerprints may disappear. What I exist in, I suspect is not authentic.
"History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce." -Karl Marx.
20th century was a terribly tragic time. I was born when it was two years away from departure...time departs through our bodies and we never get to choose the consequences of time that has slipped past.
The image of 20th century is authentic, is it because such was the nature of philosophy and social sciences; films and film photography?
Aesthetics, if mistakenly looked at as a representation of earth's crust would hence contain all life on itself?
'On' and 'in' hold vastly different connotations.
Am I part of the farce or does present always feel like this?
Speaking with those who have walked the earth longer reveals my suspicions to be true and untrue at the same time in lieu of what has transpired over the last few decades.
The Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz killed himself trying to keep the internet from the clutches of elite control.
The more free the invention, the more it is used in exactly the opposite effect.
In the Author's Introduction to 'The Rebel" (translated to the english by Anthony Bower) Camus says, "We are living in the era of premeditation and perfect crimes. Our criminals are no longer those helpless children who pleaded love as an excuse. On the contrary, they are adults, and they have a perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for anything, even for transforming murderers into judges."
When the scope of experimentation is increased by freedom of medium, so is the tyranny unleashed by the said medium.
What did Susan Sontag think of the internet?
"Hypertext — or should I say the ideology of hypertext? — is ultrademocratic and so entirely in harmony with the demagogic appeals to cultural democracy that accompany (and distract one’s attention from) the ever-tightening grip of plutocratic capitalism.
[But the] proposal that the novel of the future will have no story or, instead, a story of the reader’s (rather, readers’) devising is so plainly unappealing and, should it come to pass, would inevitably bring about not the much-heralded death of the author but the extinction of the reader — all future readers of what is labeled as “literature.” "
The unchanging truths of life are heavily compromised. Aesthetically, the official rules seldom pretend to be bigoted: reality however, blows quite a different horn.
'Closely Watched Trains' the most important Czech new wave film about German occupation of Czech Republic, by filmmaker Jiří Menzel addresses many of my concerns regarding the new-age fascism.
And just like that any and all thoughts constantly crash, break, contradict, submerge, ostracize and belong with each other.
Alienation of the Other begins in history, expands in real time. Closeness of bodies and separation of centuries as lovers hide and swim in each other on standard 21st century beds.
Forests close in on the shadows lamps form in the time past sunset. Across the window stand three windows, half concealing and rest revealing the morsels of life. The depletion of earth's crust that us humans are responsible for.
The Ultra high definition videos with low quality aesthetics.
Breathing, fucking, paying rent, eating, dying, being born.
Where does the screw of bewildered apathy fit in?
After Covid-19 pandemic it is hard to see the turn this century has taken. What is real and what is fake hardly matters when a large chunk of meaningful communication is through screens?
When just the screen, just the rulebook and other things 'supposedly' set in stone matter. Recorded evidences are rendered useless as there is just not enough time to verify everything, when public, as Camus claims in 'Create Dangerously', is 'exhausted and reacts randomly'.
All the previous centuries are bleeding into the now.
But especially the 20th century as it is the most well recorded and archived one after our own, the reason why many untold stories and perspectives are recorded now, by minorities and under-represented.
"Kafka mentions the experience, the fighting experience gained by "him" who stands his ground between the clashing waves of past and future." - Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future.
Now, is the artist to stand in between the two flows of time in the 21st century?
Or must the artist think of Camus and create dangerously to the point of conviction or irrelevance?
A time after me exists. Children are proof of that. And so, irrelevance not in terms of 'popularity' in the now, but that which stands the test of time, which adds to itself in potency as time passes, for it was created keeping the passing of time in mind.
"Bergson became aware that the moment one attempted to measure a moment, it would be gone: one measures an immobile, complete line, whereas time is mobile and incomplete. For the individual, time may speed up or slow down, whereas, for science, it would remain the same. Hence Bergson decided to explore the inner life of man, which is a kind of duration, neither a unity nor a quantitative multiplicity. Duration is ineffable and can only be shown indirectly through images that can never reveal a complete picture. It can only be grasped through a simple intuition of the imagination."
'Closely Watched Trains' is proof of such irrefutable relevance.
Bergson's view of internal and external time wrapped in meta-time of film, trapped in human bodies of a certain time in history.
The mother of the female train station employee who unveils her daughter's more intimate body parts to men of 'authority', to prove a crime that's just a crime on her own moral eyes, a morality that swims light in the event of fascism.
A young man with unremarkable legacy of government jobs (barring that of a grandfather who stood in front of the Reich army's bulldozer and who, the filmmaker inserts a clever jibe here towards his fellow Czech citizens, was the last thing that came in between Czech land and the Reich Army)- who tries to commit suicide as he suffers from premature ejaculation. According to his doctor the reason is the young man's remarkably good health. The solution? Advice from an experienced older woman, who knows the matters of love.
The Germans exercise control over the Czechs even as they're on the brink of losing the war.
Ironically this anti-fascist film was seen as bourgeoisie by the Red Army and banned for the same! The filmmaker was also barred from making another film until much later.
The turns desire takes in shifting forms under fascism in the Czech film, its signifiers are fleeting nights, torn sofas, triumphant male whistle at dawn & German language stamps on female butts.
Absurd but consensual acts in non-consensual, hostile times.
Deleuze says, human beings are black holes. Not metaphorically: but literally; we eat and destroy information, we regurgitate it, distort it and our gravitational pull is not quite the same as the earth's is.
And as black holes, we carry the past of our species with us, as if it were an invisible exoskeleton masking our senses, thoughts and actions.
All the archiving pauses the incessant capitalist unravelling of our deep nothingness in this techno-autocratic world the Tetris of collective elite backed government action has fallen to.
Memories are still, moving, treacherous, our own, alienated, rock cut caves, lived lived, archived, blundered, fumbled, torn apart, rejoiced, loved, forgotten...
For Susan Sontag, Camus' Notebooks are a disappointment for they do not reveal any personal details and thoughts about the man himself. She is certain that he evokes 'love' in his readers.
For me, to reduce evocations to four letter words is remarkable, admirable even.
In the now I fancy the rock cut sculpture carves in Bagh Caves where time flows smoothly through the rocks as does the water of Baghini river that flows next to them, doing the rounds it has been from centuries.
Polluted, wheezing; the Mogra flower smells of the present. The unreal distance of me and the bodies I crawled out of. The suffocating closeness to bodies I have never crossed paths with.
Grinding of stones. Indians have always been fond of carving. I carve a space. I crouch till the weather shifts. The space is temporary as am I.
Borges loved the English language. So do I.
Farce, if it is all that exists now, is here to stay and enwrap us in its prickly inauthenticity of its 'dominant moment'.
"I am surprised to see that today everything that does not amount to surrender pure and simple to generalized capitalism, let us call it thus,is considered to be archaic or old-fashioned, as though in a way there existed no other definition of what it means to be modern than, quite simply,to be at all times caught in the dominant forms of the moment."
- From Can Change Be Thought? A Dialogue with Alain Badiou by Bruno Bosteels, in Alain Badiou:Philosophy And Its Conditions
The unknown, the dark and the inarticulate; the tender, the defiant mistaken for submissive to the 'dominant' (dialectics of modern day thought) - the space between two material things.
The random is what carves the authentic in these farce times.
On the mountainous works of the dead giants, we stand facing many of the same fears and garbage piles - both actual and of lies.
We let time and archives do what they must. They now exist for us, along with the void, to affect our chemistry as much as the pollution and the screen time does.
-Oshee
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