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Feb 2004 H.U.T.
"We desire most what we fear most, and the familiar often comes
to us in disguise. Hence the gothic imagery of haunted houses and familiar
Hollywood tales of spooky suburbia, the ghostly other side of the American
dream. At first glance, it appears that the uncanny is a fear of the familiar,
whereas nostalgia is a longing for it; yet for a nostalgic, the lost home
and the home abroad often appear haunted. Restorative nostalgics don't
acknowledge the uncanny and terrifying aspects of what was once homey.
Reflective nostalgics see everywhere the imperfect mirror images of home,
and try to cohabit with doubles and ghosts."
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia
2/6
I was in a coffee shop today reading the paper. Next to me were a family
unit. They were going back and forth over the mars missions annnounced
by Bush. The guys were all for it but the mother unit seemed unimpressed.
I sometimes go over to http://marsunearthed/SelectedImages.com and stare
at many of the photos there. I guess it's all the time I spent reading
Robert Heinlein and many many others, sitting out on summer nights on
the hood of the family car looking up at the stars but...the woman in
coffee shop i find it hard to understand. I know the arguments but there
is something agonizing about looking at some of those photos, so mysterious,
so filled with possibilities, strangeness...but in fact most humans stay
behind wherever the new place is mentally or otherwise...and to some degree
I realize that 'mothering' in the widest possible sense demands it. And
yet...isn't there something about leaving the nest that's necessary also
and that even a Mother must come to realize?
2/9
last night ED screened SPACE IS THE PLACE, newly released on DVD -- what
a wonderful film, both naïve and touching yet something that does
almost move outside it's particular domain of time-bounded space. Next
in the series is the new Derrida film…I think It's a good one-two
kinda punch even though absolutely no one really gets it….i think
Sunday night should be our free freaky movie night
.2/15
In the midst of winter, with the blur of a half hangover and the whiz
and chatter of a tv in the back ground, one can sometimes only wish for
the dead duplicity of the exile. ("The main feature of exile is a
double conscience, a double exposure of different times and spaces, a
constant bifurcation." Boym).... but then he realized with a start
that the very wish itself was the result of some sort of interior exile,
of unhealable breaches between various regions: his youth and his approaching
old age, his insides and his outsides, the abysmal circumstances he found
himself in, a man without qualities except without the frisson of turning
the page into a new modern era. The current era felt to him both worn
out and yet forever unquenchably dynamic in it's unfurling and its unstoppableness...that
damn marching band image again with himself caught up in the middle, forced
to play and yet not quite able to read the notes, just enough to catch
the drift and yet not enough to become unconsciously absorbed in it. The
way he felt about everything. He always felt the pull of his childhood
like some undertow, constant but greater in some seasons that others.
This seems to have been true for most of his adult life, like the Taos
Hum, always there if he stopped a minute to listen, a secret kingdom gone
somehow embedded into the environment or like stigography and yet with
no chance of recovery, the exact analog of the non-appearance of the Messiah
at the other end of the extended spectrum
6/17
Pneuma-- matter wrapped around spirit like a halo, particles making their
entrance into the world, light wrapped in a blanket of flesh---that's
the gnostic conception of the pneumatic soul no doubt, a soul that can't
be accepted anymore for whatever reasons. The 'spirit' now seems like
a sink hole, debris swirling around after the flush, life as the flotsam
and jetsam of materiality defined as much by its ignominious exit as anything,
certainly not the beginning. Between the alpha of birth and omega of death,
just an inflated balloon. The population has become a swarm of particulate
matter, billions of individual, well, we find it hard pressed to call
them souls because many of them are in the in-between of whatever existence,
here simply for their use value apparently, their standing reserve as
Heidegger called them. They, we, are like the sparks flying from a late
night fire, coals struck back into life for a few minutes by a poker,
streamers of particles flying up and out the chimney, available at will,
but with a totally negligible lifetime measured in microseconds. To even
write like this seems pedestrian, conservative, not nearly preparatory
enough for the Great Coseting of Life into mere life, a certain vector
of biodynamics, easily reproduced, We Can Build You, Agamben's arrival
of a world wide camp of biological matter, the turning into objects. We
are on the threshold of something, a something which is Nothing, vast
populations circling it, circling the drain.
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