THE
LORDS
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 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 womenn. 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.
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 appearences. 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.