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 toward outskirts
of city suburbs. At the edge discover zones
of
sophisticated vice and boredom, child prosti-
tution. But in the grimy
ring immediately surround-
ing 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, confidant. 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 take 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 omnisciece. 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.
Modern 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 distinction 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 an 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 their 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 out 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 "Outside,"
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 born 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.
Film 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
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 scientif-
ic 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 modern 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. Born 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 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, sailor, 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 though a letter he
was reading, and out of this perception he
in-
vented 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 untampered obser-
vance 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
posses-
sion, 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
permu-
tations.
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
semimasturbation. 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."
Object 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 obscurity 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
in-
fant'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. We
should enlist them
into bands of perceivers to
tour the labyrinth during their mysterious
noc-
turnal 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. Es-
pecially 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 of human consciousness.
Absent and peopled mirror,
absorbent,
passive to whatever visits
and retains its interest.
Door to passage to the other side,
the
soul frees itself in stride.
Turn mirrors to the wall
in the house of
the new dead.
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