Life Into Shape

 The burnt out trees will leave you cold…

 – Beth Orton

At that moment, when I thought I was about to die, I saw my entire life unravel. It was an indistinct vision, a split second in time. Can I describe the shape of my life as I saw it then, at that moment?

The starting point, the point of departure, as it were, was a Point – I saw a microscopic, metallic point lost in a black void.

Is it possible to call a point a shape?

Should I think of this point as a complex entity, like a trefoil icosahedron or a Medusa-like tangle of helical forms unwinding through time? Undoubtedly the split-second itself was The Point, the horizon of infinity enclosed in time by perception.

Within the temporality of that second, as it split asunder, the point unfolded, unfurling with agonising slowness. It would be very tempting to describe this monadic point as a tessellated surface of Celtic spirals. Perhaps it was a multifaceted crystal, its flat walls conforming to the laws of low energy directions, or even a gold crystal with a pitted surface like that of Saturn’s moon Iapetus. Yet, in close up, this entity (my life) appeared more like a donut of magnetic fluid.

However, I knew that this was an illusion and, being the extrapolation of mathematical co-ordinates derived from my imagination, it would mutate into a web-like form, a network, each node a scintilla generated by the primal departure point itself. The majority of these secondary points represented co-ordinates outside the narrow parameters of the linear time-line of my ‘life’ as understood on a mundane, day-to-day basis. This web extended beyond the antechamber of memory, encompassing ancestral events and unconscious experiences, producing patterns very different from the past-present-future trajectory of the arrow of time.

If the synchronic shape of my life is a light-cone of consciousness, then the diachronic shape of my life is the broad-leafed arrow of time, emerging from womb-darkness, vanishing into darkness beyond the grave. But the multidimensional shape of my life is this network of co-ordinates.

Looking more closely at the filamentous matrix, it was clear that some scintilla had a reddish hue while others were ice-blue. The red points signified moments of pain or negative emotion such as – for example – crises during critical illnesses, times of bereavement, early nightmares and several road accidents (including this one). The few ice-blue points represented instances of clarity. The vast majority of nodes were of neutral, indeterminate, off-white complexion.

I looked in vain for lights indicating moments of passion, for the centre of desire is a Black Hole from which, as we all know, light cannot escape.

At this moment my perception of the multiform shape of my ‘life’ registered another change and the fascinating web mutated yet again.

The resolution of the image degraded. Black turned to white and the interlaced network changed into a vision of bare branches: burnt out trees, stark against a greying sky.

First published in Headstorms Short Fiction Magazine Vol 1, Inclement Publishing, 2004

Epiphenomena Of Chaos

It is more than likely that the world we know, and the way that we know it, is an interpretative projection, the outcome of anthropocentric perspectivism. Some experts utilise the Anthropic Principle as an ‘explanatory’ device in Cosmology, encouraging – perhaps inadvertently – the view that there is no objective reality, simply interpretations of experience. To assert that the world or the universe is the way it is because if it were otherwise we would not exist is precisely that – it is an assertion, not an explanation. Assertions of this kind seem credible because they are both abstruse and coherent, features that promote an illusion of profundity. But the truth of an assertion guarantees nothing beyond logical coherence, because falsity, the opposite is truth, is simply incoherence – an intrusion of chaos. Epistemological relativism is of little help or value because hard facts are obviously obdurate – yes, two plus two equals four, even for the Vogon Captain or the hypothetical inhabitant of a planet orbiting the remotest star. A true proposition is a universal truth independent of cultures and societies but, and this is the tricky bit, it is still an epiphenomenon of chaos, and chaos encompasses both order and disorder.

Illustration: Echoes Of Ambiguity, 2009

Only To Slowly Fade

The Threepenny Opera was an ‘occasional’ work claiming an anti-establishment leftist agenda that, to tell the truth, never convinced anybody at the time – on the other hand it has been correctly observed that the implications of its form have not been fully digested, even today. The cynical tone of the songs and the cavalier disregard for highbrow/lowbrow distinctions permeating the work as a whole opened up a new approach to the theatre that proved problematic for subsequent generations. Few are prepared to admit that, in 1928 at the Theatre am Schiffbauerdamm, ‘serious’ art music and opera died an inglorious death. Artistic forms and modalities have a mortal inner life, they evolve through time – they follow a hyperbolic evolutionary curve, reaching a peak of development, only to slowly fade as they are superseded by other diversions. The political spasms of the twentieth century, together with the rise of the mass media, still obscure the passing of nineteenth century aesthetic categories, including the avant-garde and the seriously experimental – the radicalism of the Second Vienna School notwithstanding.
The Munich Opera House was destroyed in October 1943, prompting Richard Strauss to draft several bars of music ‘in mourning’. Listening to the final work, Metamorphosen, one senses not just the horror of those ‘dark days’ but also, in its tenuous echoes of Tristan and ‘Eroica’, an act of mourning for the end of an entire phase of European musical sensibility.

Published in The Supplement Issue 26 Jan 2006

Illustration: Montage II Only To Slowly Fade, 2006

Open Realism

An aesthetic perspective where 'realism' is defined as a Quality of Perception, and where the word ‘open’ stands opposed to any ‘closed’ teleological worldview. For example, mono-causal creationism is a ‘closed’ explanation of ‘origins’ in conflict with the obviously non-teleological character of existence. Counter-intuitive, aleatoric, absurd and indeterminate phenomena are a consequence of non-teleological conditions, leading to the transgressive or perturbing nature of Open Realist works – works that, in an age beyond satire, will always manifest the forgotten, ironic, paraxial, chaotic spirit of the Post-surreal.
    The term open realism (realisme ouvert) is cited by Andre Breton in the text 'Limits Not Frontiers of Surrealism', given as a lecture at the Burlington Galleries in London on 16 June 1936, subsequently published in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise (48:1 Feb 1937): '...open realism or surrealism which involves the ruin of the Cartesian-Kantian edifice and seriously disturbs the sensibility.' Open Realism is a purely nihilist, materialistic, aesthetic concept and has no connection with any other uses of the phrase, such as the 'philosophy' of Bernard D'Espagnat or others.

However, the usage by Bonnie Marranca in relation to the plays of Sam Shepard is worthy of note:

'open realism exists in a dramatic field composed of events not scenes, of explosions and contradictions not causes... It is characterized by disruption not continuity, by simultaneity not succession; it values anomalies not analogies. In other words, it captures a reality that disregards realism’s supposition of the rational. It praises the differences and irregularities between things, and can accommodate the simultaneity of experiences in expanded time/space.' (American Dreams, 1981)

Illustration: Aeternae Veritates I, 2002

The Fear Of The New

Walter Benjamin argued that mass dissemination always depreciates the quality of works of art, that ‘technologies of mass reproduction’ deprive art of a unique aura. It is true that this process partly accounts for the fading dynamism of the avant-garde – we now live in a post avant-garde era – as well as the democratisation of many forms of ‘art’ hitherto the exclusive sphere of privilege and wealth. Can it be that this ‘aura’ is not the aura of aesthetic qualities, but more a patina of ‘value’ that nowadays no one believes in, because everyone can see that ‘high culture’ was a propaganda machine for a wealthy elite of prelates and princes? Is it really the case that a good reproduction of the Mona Lisa is always a poor substitute for the original? Does the reproductive process really strip a masterpiece of its ‘aura’? One cannot fail to detect a certain taint of snobbery in all this. It is the same line of thinking that lead Clement Greenberg to contrast a poem by T. S. Eliot with a Tin Pan Alley song, before attempting to define the role of the avant-garde as protecting ‘culture’ from Capitalism. Heidegger maintained that scientific rationalism and industrialisation has destroyed the basis of art – he called this ‘the death of art’ – because the primordial national culture of olden days can no longer sustain itself, has sunk into a new age of darkness.
There is a fear behind these concerns – an apocalyptic fear – and a fear of The New.

Illustration: Montage I Fear Of The New (Neophobia), 2006

The Event Horizon

Cultivate the un-sacrosanct: scepticism, cynicism, dissociation – the principium individuationis finally grasped – finally realised – but how? Through estrangement, alienation, dread, despair and loss – it is disillusion we need now, not more illusions – tear away the veil of transcendental perfectionism – refuse to enter the cave, root out the imago dei. Cross the event horizon – find freedom in nihilism; there is no turning back!

Illustration: Autarch,1974

The Shadow Of The Uncanny

The longest period of human history is human prehistory – yet, generally speaking, the implications of this are not understood. Just as the greatest proportion of the sphere of the mind is a dark, undiscovered continent – the unconscious – so the greatest proportion of human experience, our pre-literate, pre-cultural history, is also a vast sphere of the unknown. All the phenomena of consciousness are infused with indirect, unconscious influences, similarly all the experiences and ‘achievements’ of mankind during the current, brief phase of evolution (‘history’) are rooted in an obscure and distant past. This past is inaccessible to us even though it overshadows every aspect of our daily existence. Like the microwave background radiation – the barely detectable evidence of the earliest cosmic era that permeates the present universe – vestigial traces of mankind’s earliest and most traumatic experiences permeate the contemporary actuality of being. We have become so adjusted to our present mode of psychical life that these vestiges have assumed the paraxial character of radical alterity. Their marginal presence is so tenuous and indefinite that we have never grasped their significance – that they constitute the weakest of evidence for the vacancy of collective amnesia, a yawning gap in the human time-line. Not so much a loss of memory but, perhaps, vestiges of inexplicable experiences endured during an era before the evolution of memory itself.
Picture the ‘space’ occupied by our fragile self-awareness bordered on two sides by gulfs of impenetrable darkness – on the one hand by an abyss of the distant past, on the other hand by the shadowlands of the mind.

Published in The Supplement Issue 22, 2005

Illustration: Echoes Of The Past, 2000

Geste Surrealiste

Comrades! Modernism died in the trenches of The Western Front – from the chaos of the First World War the first ‘Post-Modern’ movement, Surrealism – and its forerunner, Dada – emerged. What is the legacy of Surrealism? Openness to automatism, the irrational, chance, coincidence, indeterminacy and relativity; cultivation of black humour, the absurd and the transformations of the Pleasure Principle; a recognition that Modernism is now a spurious category signifying the reverse of contemporary. With the final realisation that avant-garde formalism has reached the end of its development and is now a failed, or a dying, movement, ‘Postsurrealism’ or Open Realism (realisme ouvert - Andre Breton) draws a line in the sand and, as they say these days, it ‘moves on’. Postsurrealists will side-step the political naiveté and heady idealism of the ‘heroic’ period of the last century. But they will retain the ‘nihilism’ of Dada (including the ‘requisition of churches for the performance of bruitism, simultaneist and Dadaist poems’) and expunge the final traces of mysticism from the dogmas of Surrealist orthodoxy, replacing it with mad love and a radical anti-teleology. They will re-affirm the Freudian perspective on the primal processes of creativity and the nature of the Weltanschauung. In the twenty-first century Post-Surrealists will proclaim the end of ‘Modern Art’, ‘Language Poetry’, ‘Fly-in-the-Bottle Philosophy’, ‘Social Constructionist Epistemology’, and any other high-falutin’ claptrap.

Published in Monomyth Supplement Issue 18, 2005

Illustration: Absolute Equinox, 2009

Cyborg Apocalypse

In the future we will copulate with computers, we will all be Cyborgs, ‘mythic hybrids of machine and organism’ – the distinction between man and machine is based on a false proposition. If, as Haraway says, ‘the relation between organism and machine has been a border war’ we should step back and recognise that the machine is not the real enemy.
Let’s fuse with the machines – and the sooner the better! Hang on a minute – we already have!

Illustration: Cyborg Encounter, 2007