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.