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Max Ernst, The World of the Naïve, 1965
The Proteus who sleeps inside us has opened his eyes. And we
say what must be said. These jolts are for us what snares and
tortures were to the sea-green prophet.—Giorgio de Chirico
***
If we were to leap tens of thousands of miles into space, the
Earth, with all her continents and clouds and cities and roads and
industries, would appear to be a blue and white marble. All life
and death conflicts would be no more than abstractions. A
tornado would be a kind of Sufi dance. A nuclear explosion would
be the brushwork of an artist. In the “Foreword” to Masks of
Origin, I have suggested that time might exist this way as well, as
something that can be experienced close up or at a distance. In
this “Foreword,” I compare a person’s life-story to a novel. In a
novel, as in a near death experience, all events are simultaneous.
We could follow the story from one page to the next. We could
also read from back to front, or we could open to a page at
random. The novel is an object that can be weighed in the palm of
one’s hand. Like the Earth when viewed from tens of thousands
of miles away, it exists as a self-contained volume. Viewed from
the inside, the Earth is chaos, the fight for survival, human
drama, many billions of overlapping choices every second.
Viewed from the outside, there are the rhythmic variations of a
shape.
Viewed one way, time is measurable. “Time is what is measured
by a clock,” as Einstein says. Viewed another way, it is a koan that
stretches our intellects to the breaking point, and then beyond.
Time could also be imagined as a landscape, as a spiral, as a
hypersphere, as the relation between an acorn and an oak. as a
stage-set, as a conjuration, as a snare, as a figure eight, as a
labyrinth, and as an ocean. If we do exist in both the here and the
beyond, then our predictions should no doubt be more accurate
than they are. While we live, perhaps, we do not have access to
the necessary distance. Even after death, we may be terrified of
the depth of the space that spreads before us, of the light that
spirals open.
If prediction is an attempt to take possession of the future,
prophesy may be an attempt to see more deeply into the moment,
an attempt that depends upon our making no assumptions about
what this moment is.
Prophesy may be the exchange of a beginning for an end, an end
for a beginning, a way to ask how this plays with our sense of
what is human, to then find that our role is anything but fixed.
Prophesy may be a method for determining who lives and
breathes in our bodies. Prophesy may be the shattering of the
vessel that contains us, after which we may plummet to an
inconceivable depth. Prophesy may be an attempt to circumvent
the authority of Earth’s Rulers, those teachers who would
substitute their quaint opinions for our own. Prophesy may be a
way of picking up where, an age ago, we left off. Prophesy, if it
exists, may be no more than an energy, a way of hitting “pause”
on our habits, an attempt to see the world afresh. We no longer
measure our inhalations in units of 12,000 years. This does not
mean that our vision cannot be expanded, that some part of what
we are does not have access to the whole.
“If everything is happening at one and the same moment,” a
reasonable person might ask, “if each life exists as an already
completed story, if the world, as we know it, has already ceased to
exist, then how is it we are faced with such a multitude of choices,
how is it that each action branches and divides, how is it that
chance plays such a central role?” Such questions may not be
answerable on the level they are asked. At one scale: endless
branching; at another, a Parmenidean stillness. It is probably not
in our power, as we are currently constituted, to put these
viewpoints together. We can, however, hold them side by side.
We can learn to live with the tension.
***
Franz Radziwill, Amongst People, 1947
In a comment on my essay “The Vanguard of a Perpetual
Revolution,” Okantomi wrote,
“I often feel like I can see what is happening in the world, as well
as what is just about to happen and what will almost certainly
happen later on, and it's like no one else sees what I am seeing.
It's eerie, shocking, and finally depressing.”
People do have visions of the future, both individually and
collectively. Quite often, these visions are troubling, as Okantomi
says. We would much prefer to not follow their implications to
the end, let alone change our lives. One way or another, though,
our visions have ways of making themselves felt, even if we do
not register what it is we are seeing. The world is a kind of
eyeball. There is no such thing as a “safe space.”
Such visions do not necessarily depend upon telepathy; they can
be equally present in the automated workings of the culture, in
the traumas that we code in the guise of entertainment, in the
license we give to superheroes to break the laws of physics, in key
issues that we ban from the realm of public discussion, in the
demographic analyses that drive the decisions of corporate
boards.
Hollywood blockbusters, for example—such as Star Wars, The
Terminator, The Fountain, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Contact,
Cloud Atlas, Avatar, and Arrival (and all of their various
spinoffs)—serve as useful enough vehicles for contemporary
mythmaking, whatever their variations in quality, whatever the
motives or self-awareness of their directors. Do those who
finance these movies have any real concern about their content,
about their webs of subliminal symbolism, about anything other
than their opening weekend grosses? With all of the complex
decisions that precede day one of shooting, it may be just as
accurate to say that these movies create their producers. While
the stories they tell are not in any sense literal memories or
predictions, they do help us to gain access to archetypal forces as
they play, to scrutinize the hypnotic gaze with which our culture
holds us. There are symptoms. There are cues. There are occult
knots. Our responses are overdetermined.
Our hands freeze in mid-air as they reach for their absent
weapons. We marvel at the strength of our ten-foot azure bodies,
before cutting our connections to the ones we left behind. Our
bones quake at the appearance of the Death Star. As the Empire’s
eight-eyed drones pursue us, we hug the Tree of Souls for refuge.
Hurtling through space, intent on finding the All-Healing Herb,
we perform our yogic exercises in the glass dome of a biosphere.
Meanwhile, at the entrance to a Mayan temple, we have somehow
killed a priest. We are shocked to find that our True Love is no
more than a memory implant. We later find that this discovery is
itself one more deception. Only one half of a giant egg has landed,
and we are puzzled as to where the other half has gone, as to why
what has a front should not come with a back. Glyphs are
transmitted by a race of perfect beings. Sadly, they look like
octopi, and these glyphs are the infinitely tiny variations of a
smoke ring. We have little or no doubt that these constitute a
threat.
As we stare into the distance, the ancient world resurfaces as a
scientific dream on the horizon.
Daniel Dankh, Suburbs, 2005
We remember the collapse of complex systems, the return of the
repressed, the abuse of occult technologies, the scars left by the
tearing of the planetary web, the hierarchical clash between the
rulers and the ruled, but we mix and match the specifics of the
story. We remember the green branch of primal knowledge, the
blackening of its leaves, the two-faced role of the snake, the subtle
art that turns a toxin into an elixir, but we kneel before our
oppressors and strike out at our friends. Our best efforts to
solidify the Rorschach blot of the future only point us towards the
enigma of our origins.
To discover what we know, we must sometimes pause to observe
what we create. Seized from afar, as by the magnetism of an
almost nonexistent teacher, we are pulled by a current all too
eager to instruct us. An unresolved agenda speaks to us from the
screen. The screen also acts like an iron curtain, through which
the bodies of the living may not pass.
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