STILLTIME

 

History: the repository of events that failed to happen

 

Who would have believed it!  
we are told that new Joshua 

sat the foot 

of every tower,  
as though irritated with  
time itself, fired at the dials 
in order to stop the day.*

XVI
	A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history.**

 

• "[...]the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure background (for few men’s courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action); that when they stood their long night-watches, his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of than Moby-Dick."***

The pandemic has arrested the flow of history and as such, has returned us to an immanent understanding of temporality – a grasp of this time as our moment of action. 

• With the destabilizing of the market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins before they have crumbled.****

This is our Groundhog Day.  Each day that we live in this pause offers us a moment to act and change the future. 

As Patti Smith write, "People have the power to redeem the work of fools.”

*,**Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin
***Moby Dick, Melville 
**** Arcades Project, Benjamin
image: Austin Kleon,
Steal Like an Artist

Something Else A’Comin’ . . .

every once in a while a window opens up and things can happen

  to wake us from our dream state, an act of resistance which gives voice to the buried past/the dream is one which commodity culture has created to divert attention from reality.

the potential of orienting a new consciousness of alterity

· "In a jazz key, the future is that which is beyond our control, that which one never arrives at, and that which therefore eludes the grip of mastery and control. It points towards a different logic of space and thus a different social arrangement. To speak of the future in this sense is to speak of difference, alterity, creativity, and surprise as part of the goodness of creation. Such a future shapes and forms us by orienting us toward that future, the ungraspable future present that has irrupted in our midst. This reality of the future that disorients so as to reorient the present, this future present […]."*

"The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.

The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenate, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, out of his own condition. Really, only the insight into how radically the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness for destruction leads to such an Apollonian image of the destroyer. This is the great bond embracing and unifying all that exists. It is a sight that affords the destructive character a spectacle of deepest harmony.

The destructive character is always blithely at work. It is Nature that dictates his tempo, indirectly at least, for he must forestall her. Otherwise she will take over the destruction herself.

The destructive character sees no image hovering before him. He has few needs, and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed. First of all, for a moment at least, empty space – the place where thing stood or the victim lived. Someone is sure to be found who needs this space without occupying it.

The destructive character does his work; the only work he avoids is creative. Just as the creator seeks solitude, the destroyer must be constantly surrounded by people, witnesses to his efficacy."**

"Something Else A’Comin’ . . ."
J. KAMERON CARTER
May 31, 2019
"The Destructive Character," 
**Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings
see also:
Jazz Is Built for Protests, NY Times

 image: Margaret Bourke-White/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

 

It's one thing or the other.

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.
And of course, if the multitude is mad
the individual carries his own grain of insanity around with him.
I doubt if any man living hands out a pound note with-out a pang;
and a real tremor, if he hands out a ten-pound note.
We quail, money makes us quail.
It has got us down, we grovel before it in strange terror.
And no wonder, for money has a fearful cruel power among men.
But it is not money we are so terrified of,
it is the collective money-madness of mankind.
For mankind says with one voice: How much is he worth?
Has he no money? Then let him eat dirt, and go cold. -
And if I have no money, they will give me a little bread
so I do not die,
but they will make me eat dirt with it.
I shall have to eat dirt, I shall have to eat dirt
if I have no money.
It is that that I am frightened of.
And that fear can become a delirium.
It is fear of my money-mad fellow-men.
We must have some money
to save us from eating dirt.
And this is all wrong.
Bread should be free,
shelter should be free,
fire should be free
to all and anybody, all and anybody, all over the world.
We must regain our sanity about money
before we start killing one another about it.
It's one thing or the other.
 - D. H. Lawrence
link
also: We’ve Now Become Trump’s America
 

hope is in the mourning

 
 The hope is in the mourning and the screams [.... Only if these screams and tears and protests shake the very conscience of this nation — and until there is real political and judicial repentance — can we hope for a better society on the other side of this.*



[...]your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked by the rages of logic and the natural world in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be. And I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.**


*Rev. William J. Barber II 
**Ta-Nehisi Coates, from Between the World and Me 

mourning in america

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

 

W.H. Auden

Kazimir Malevich

Black Square 1915