Боги и Новые создания

The LORDS: NOTES on VISION

Look where we worship.

We all live in the city.

The city forms — often physically, but inevitably psychically — a circle. A

Game. A ring of death with sex at its center. Drive towards outskirts

of city suburbs. At the edge discover zones of sophisticated vice and boredom,

child prostitution. But in the grimy ring immediately surrounding the daylight

business district exists the only real crowd life of our mound, the only street

life, night life. Diseased specimens in dollar hotels, low boarding houses, bars,

pawn shops, burlesques and brothels, in dying arcades which never die, in

streets and streets of all-night cinemas.

When play dies it becomes the Game.

When sex dies it becomes Climax.

All games contain the idea of death.

Baths, bars, the indoor pool. Our injured leader prone on the sweating tile.

Chlorine on his breath and in his long hair. Lithe, although crippled,

body of a middle-weight contender. Near him the trusted journalist, confdant.

He liked men near him with a large sense of life. But most of the press were

vultures descending on the scene for curious America aplomb. Cameras inside

the coffin interviewing worms.

It takes large murder to turn rocks in the shade and expose strange worms

beneath. The lives of our discontented madmen are revealed.

Camera, as all-seeing god, satisfies our longing for omniscience. To spy on

others from this height and angle: pedestrians pass in and out of our lens like

rare aquatic insects.

Yoga powers. To make oneself invisible or small.

To become gigantic and reach to the farthest things.

To change the course of nature. To place oneself

anywhere in space or time. To summon the dead.

To exalt senses and perceive inaccessible images,

of events on other worlds, in one's deepest inner

mind, or in the minds of others.

The sniper's rifle is an extension of his eye. He kills with injurious vision.

The assassin (?), in flight, gravitated with unconscious, instinctual insect

ease, moth-like, toward a zone of safety, haven from the swarming streets.

Quickly, he was devoured in the warm, dark, silent maw of the physical

theater.

Modem circles of Hell: Oswald kills President.

Oswald enters taxi. Oswald stops at rooming house.

Oswald leaves taxi. Oswald kills Officer Tippitt.

Oswald sheds jacket. Oswald is captured.

He escaped into a movie house.

In the womb we are blind cave fish.

Everything is vague and dizzy. The skin swells and there is no more distincion

between parts of the body. An encroaching sound of threatening, mocking,

monotonous voices. This is fear and attraction of being swallowed.

Inside the dream, button sleep around your body like a glove. Free now of

space and time. Free to dissolve in the streaming summer.

Sleep is under-ocean dipped into each night.

At morning, awake dripping, gasping, eyes

stinging.

The eye looks vulgar

Inside its ugly shell.

Come out in the open

In all of your Brilliance.

Nothing. The air outside

burns my eyes.

I'll pull them out

and get rid of the burning.

Crisp hot whiteness

City Noon

Occupants of plague zone

are consumed.

(Santa Ana's are winds off deserts.)

Rip up grating and splash in gutters.

The search for water, moisture,

«wetness» of the actor, lover.

«Players» — the child, the actor, and the gambler.

The idea of chance is absent from the world of the

child and primitive. The gambler also feels in

service of an alien power. Chance is a survival

of religion in the modern city, as is theater,

more often cinema, the religion of possession.

What sacrifice, at what price can the city be born?

There are no longer «dancers», the possessed.

The cleavage of men into actor and spectators

is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed

with heroes who live for us and whom we punish.

If all the radios and televisions were deprived

of their sources of power, all books and paintings

burned tomorrow, all shows and cinemas closed,

all the arts of vicarious existence…

We are content with the «given» in sensation's

quest. We have been metamorphosised from a mad

body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes

staring in the dark.

Not one of the prisoners regained sexual balance.

Depressions, impotency, sleeplessness… erotic

dispersion in languages, reading, games, music,

and gymnastics.

The prisoners built their own theater which

testified to an incredible surfeit of leisure.

A young sailor, forced into female roles, soon

became the «town» darling, for by this time they

called themselves a town, and elected a mayor,

police, aldermen.

In old Russia, the Czar, each year, granted-

out of the shrewdness of his own soul or one of

his advisors' — a week's freedom for one convict

in each of his prisons. The choice was left to the

prisoners themselves and it was determined in

several ways. Sometimes by vote, sometimes by lot,

often by force. It was apparent that the chosen

must be a man of magic, virility, experience,

perhaps narrative skill, a man of possibility, in

short, a hero. Impossible situation at the

moment of freedom, impossible selection,

defining our world in its percussions.

A room moves over a landscape, uprooting the mind, astonishing vision. A

gray film melts off the eyes, and runs down the cheeks. Farewell.

Modern life is a journey by car. The Passengers

change terribly in their reeking seats, or roam

from car to car, subject to unceasing

transformation. Inevitable progress is made toward

the beginning (there is no difference in terminals),

as we slice through cities, whose ripped backsides

present a moving picture of windows, signs, streets,

buildings. Sometimes other vessels, closed

worlds, vacuums, travel along beside to move

ahead or fall utterly behind.

Destroy roofs, walls, see in all the rooms at once.

From the air we trapped gods, with the gods'

omniscient gaze, but without power to be

inside minds and cities as they fly above.

June 30th. On the sun roof. He woke up suddenly.

At that instant a jet from the air base crawled

in silence overhead. On the beach, children try

to leap into its swift shadow.

The bird or insect that stumbles into a room

and cannot find the window. Because they know

no «windows.»

Wasps, poised in the window,

Excellent dancers,

detached, are not inclined

into our chamber.

Room of withering mesh

read love's vocabulary

in the green lamp

of tumescent flesh.

When men conceived buildings,

and closed themselves in chambers,

first trees and caves.

(Windows work two ways,

mirrors one way.)

You never walk through mirrors

or swim through windows.

Cure blindness with a whore's spittle.

In Rome, prostitutes were exhibited on roofs above the public highways for

the dubious hygiene of loose tides of men whose potential lust endangered the

fragile order of power. It is even reported that patrician ladies, masked

and naked, sometimes offered themselves up to these deprived eyes for private

excitements of their own.

More or less, we're all afflicted with the psychology of the voyeur. Not in a

strictly clinical or criminal sense, but in our whole physical and emotional

stance before the world. Whenever we seek to break this spell of passivity, our

actions are cruel and awkward and generally obscene, like an invalid who has

forgotten how to walk.

The voyeur, the peeper, the Peeping Tom, is a dark comedian. He is

repulsive in his dark anonymity, in his secret invasion. He is pitifully

alone. But, strangely, he is able through this same silence and concealment to

make unknowing partner of anyone within his eye's range. This is his threat

and power.

There are no glass houses. The shades are drawn and «real» life begins. Some

activities are impossible in the open. And these secret events are the voyeur's

game. He seeks them out with his myriad army of eyes — like the child's

notion of a Deity who sees all. «Everything?» asks the child. «Yes, every-

thing», they answer, and the child is left to cope

with this divine intrusion.

The voyeur is masturbator, the mirror his badge, the window his prey.

Urge to come to terms with the «0utside», by

absorbing, interiorizing it. I won't come out,

you must come in to me. Into my womb-garden

where I peer out. Where I can construct a universe

within the skull, to rival the real.

She said, «Your eyes are always black.» The pupil

opens to seize the object of vision.

Imagery is bom of loss. Loss of the «friendly

expanses». The breast is removed and the face

imposes its cold, curious, forceful, and inscrutable

presence.

You may enjoy life from afar. You may look at

things but not taste them. You may caress

the mother only with the eyes.

You cannot touch these phantoms.

French Deck. Solitary stroker of cards. He

dealt himself a hand. Turn stills of the past in

unending permutations, shuffle and begin. Sort

the images again. And sort them again. This

game reveals germs of truth, and death.

The world becomes an apparently infinite, yet

possibly finite, card game. Image combinations,

permutations, comprise the world game.

A mild possession, devoid of risk, at bottom sterile. With an image there is no

attendant danger.

Muybridge derived his animal subjects from the Philadelphia Zoological

Garden, male performers from the University. The women were professional

artists' models, also actresses and dancers, parading nude before the 48

cameras.

Films are collections of dead pictures which are

given artificial insemination.

Films spectators are quiet vampires.

Cinema is most totalitarian of the arts. All energy and sensation is sucked

up into the skull, a cerebral erection, skull bloated with blood. Caligula

wished a single neck for all his subjects that he could behead a kingdom

with one blow. Cinema is this transforming agent. The body exists for the

sake of the eyes; it becomes a dry stalk to support these two soft insatiable

jewels.

Film confers a kind of spurious eternity.

Each film depends upon all the others and drives you on to others. Cinema

was a novelty, a scientific toy, until a sufficient body of works had been

amassed, enough to create an intermittent other world, a powerful, infinite

mythology to be dipped into at will.

Films have an illusion of timelessness fostered by their regular, indomitable

appearance.

The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death.

The modem East creates the greatest body of films. Cinema is a new form of

an ancient tradition — the shadow play. Even their theater is an imitation

of it. Bom in India or China, the shadow show was aligned with religious

ritual, linked with celebrations which centered around cremation of the

dead.

It is wrong to assume, as some have done, that cinema belongs to women.

Cinema is created by men for the consolation of men.

The shadow plays originally were restricted to male audiences. Men could

view these dream shows from either side of the screen. When women later

began to be admitted, they were allowed to attend only to shadows.

Male genitals are small faces

forming trinities of thieves

and Christs

Fathers, sons, and ghosts.

A nose hangs over a wall

and two half eyes, sad eyes,

mute and handless, multiply

an endless round of victories.

These dry and secret triumphs, fought

in stalls and stamped in prisons,

glorify our walls

and scorch our vision.

A horror of empty spaces

propagates this seal on private places.

Kynaston's Bride

may not appear

but the odor of her flesh

is never very far.

A drunken crowd knocked over the apparatus, and Mayhew's showman,

exhibiting at Islington Green, burned up, with his mate, inside.

In 1832, Gropius was astounding Paris with his Pleorama. The audience was

transformed into the crew aboard a ship engaged in battle. Fire, screaming,

sailors, drowning.

Robert Baker, an Edinburgh artist, while in jail for debt, was struck by the

effect of light shining through the bars of his cell through a letter he was

reading, and out of this perception he invented the first Panorama,

a concave, transparent picture view of the city.

This invention was soon replaced by the Diorama, which added the illusion

of movement by shifting the room. Also sounds and novel lighting effects.

Daguerre's London Diorama still stands in Regent's Park, a rare survival,

since these shows depended always on effects of artificial light, produced

by lamps or gas jets, and nearly always ended in fire.

Phantasmagoria, magic lantern shows, spectacles without substance. They

achieved complete sensory experiences through noise, incense, lightning,

water. There may be a time when we'll attend Weather Theaters to recall the

sensation of rain.

Cinema has evolved in two paths.

One is spectacle. Like the Phantasmagoria, its goal is the creation of a total

substitute sensory world.

The other is peep show, which claims for its realm both the erotic and the

untampered observance of real life, and imitates the keyhole or voyeur's

window without need of color, noise, grandeur.

Cinema discovers its fondest affinities, not with painting, literature, or theater,

but with the popular diversions — comics, chess, French and Tarot decks,

magazines, and tattooing.

Cinema derives not from painting, literature, sculpture, theater, but from

ancient popular wizardry. It is the contemporary manifestation of an evolving

history of shadows, a delight in pictures that move, a belief in magic. Its

lineage is entwined from the earliest beginning with Priests and sorcery, a

summoning of phantoms. With, at first, only slight aid of the mirror and fire,

men called up dark and secret visits from regions in the buried mind. In these

seances, shades are spirits which ward off evil.

The spectator is a dying animal.

Invoke, palliate, drive away the Dead. Nightly.

Through ventriloquism, gestures, play with objects, and all rare variations of

the body in space, the shaman signaled his «trip» to an audience which

shared the journey.

In the seance, the shaman led. A sensuous panic, deliberately evoked through

drugs, chants, dancing, hurls the shaman into trance. Changed voice,

convulsive movement. He acts like a madman. These professional hysterics,

chosen precisely for their psychotic leaning, were once esteemed. They

mediated between man and spirit-world. Their mental travels formed the crux

of the religious life of the tribe.

Principle of seance: to cure illness. A mood might overtake a people burdened

by historical events or dying in a bad landscape. They seek deliverance from

doom, death, dread. Seek possession, the visit of gods and powers,

a rewinning of the life source from demon possessors. The cure is culled

from ecstasy. Cure illness or prevent its visit, revive the sick, and regain

stolen, soul.

It is wrong to assume that art needs the spectator in order to be. The film

runs on without any eyes. The spectator cannot exist without it. It insures

his existence.

The happening/the event in which ether is introduced into a roomful of people

through air vents makes the chemical an actor. Its agent, or injector, is an

artist-showman who creates a performance to witness himself. The people

consider themselves audience, while they perform for each other, and the gas

acts out poems of its own through the medium of the human body. This

approaches the psychology of the orgy while remaining in the realm of the

Game and its infinite permutations.

The aim of the happening is to cure boredom, wash the eyes, make childlike

reconnections with the stream of life. Its lowest, widest aim is for purgation of

perception. The happening attempts to engage all the senses, the total

organism, and achieve total response in the face of traditional arts which

focus on narrower inlets of sensation.

Multimedias are invariably sad comedies. They work as a kind of colorful

group therapy, a woeful mating of actors and viewers, a mutual semimastur-

bation. The performers seem to need their audience and the spectators — the

spectators would find these same mild titillations in a freak show or Fun Fair

and fancier, more complete amusements in a Mexican cathouse.

Novices, we watch the moves of silkworms who

excite their bodies in moist leaves and weave wet

nests of hair and skin.

This is a model of our liquid resting world

dissolving bone and melting marrow

opening pores as wide as windows.

The «stranger» was sensed as greatest menace in ancient communities.

Metamorphose. An object is cut off from its name, habits, associations.

Detached, it becomes only the thing, in and of itself. When this disintegration

into pure existence is at last achieved, the object is free to become endlessly

anything.

The subject says «I see first lots of things which dance… then everything

becomes gradually connected».

Objects as they exist in time the clean eye and camera give us. Not falsified

by «seeing».

When there are as yet no objects.

Early film-makers, who — like the alchemists — delighted in a willful obscuri-

ty about their craft, in order to withhold their skills from profane onlookers.

Separate, purify, reunite. The formula of Ars Magna, and its heir, the

cinema.

The camera is androgynous machine, a kind of mechanical hermaphrodite.

In his retort the alchemist repeats the work of Nature.

Few would defend a small view of Alchemy as «Mother of Chemistry», and

confuse its true goal with those external metal arts. Alchemy is an erotic

science, involved in buried aspects of reality, aimed at purifying and

transforming all being and matter. Not to suggest that material operations are

ever abandoned. The adept holds to both the mystical and physical work.

The alchemists detect in the sexual activity of man a correspondence with the

world's creation, with the growth of plants, and with mineral formations.

When they see the union of rain and earth, they see it in an erotic sense, as

copulation. And this extends to all natural realms of matter. For they can

picture love affairs of chemicals and stars, a romance of stones, or the fertility

of fire.

Strange, fertile correspondences the alchemists sensed in unlikely orders of

being. Between men and planets, plants and gestures, words and weather.

These disturbing connections: an infant's cry and the stroke of silk; the whorl

of an ear and an appearance of dogs in the yard; a woman's head lowered in

sleep and the morning dance of cannibals; these are conjunctions which

transcend the sterile signal of any «willed» montage. These juxtapositions of

objects, sounds, actions, colors, weapons, wounds, and odors shine in an

unheard — of way, impossible ways.

Film is nothing when not an illumination of this chain of being which makes

a needle poised in flesh call up explosions in a foreign capital.

Cinema returns us to anima, religion of matter, which gives each thing its

special divinity and sees gods in all things and beings.

Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science.

Surround Emperor of Body.

Bali Bali dancers

Will not break my temple.

Explorers

Suck eyes into the head.

The rosy body cross

secret in flow

controls its flow.

Wrestlers

in body weights dance

and music, mimesis, body.

Swimmers

entertain embryo

sweet dangerous thrust flow.

The Lords. Events take place beyond our knowledge or control. Our lives are

lived for us. We can only try to enslave others. But gradually, special

perceptions are being developed. The idea of the «Lords» is beginning to form

in some minds. We should enlist them into bands of perceivers to tour the

labyrinth during their mysterious nocturnal appearances. The Lords have

secret entrances, and they know disguises. But they give themselves away in

minor ways. Too much glint of light in the eye. A wrong gesture. Too long

and curious a glance.

The Lords appease us with images. They give us books, concerts, galleries,

shows, cinemas. Especially the cinemas. Through art they confuse us and

blind us to our enslavement. Art adorns our prison walls, keeps us silent and

diverted and indifferent.

Dull lions prone on a watery beach.

The universe kneels at the swamp

to curiously eye its own raw

postures of decay

in the mirror or human consciousness.

Absent and peopled mirror, absorbent

passive to whatever visits

and retains its interest.

Door of passage to the other side,

the soul frees itself in stride.

Turn mirrors to the wall

in the house of the new dead.