Desert stills/Solace
What is this new elsewhere, and through what maleficent operations do our characters arise from these mountains in shreds, from this impoverished landscape? The thick mucus of Time is shed in waves of heat until nothing remains but the residue of an aberrant consciousness. Self or selves in this elsewhere, and a convict still from the prison of memory. This desert must be lived in the way it is reflected in the wanderer's pools of amnesia, for now unstirred.
Gun preview
To know oneself is to know nothing about anything else, such is the mechanism of self colonization that also replicates the basic, simple structures of control that support human culture. I invade what I feel not to be myself. Lost in the solidity of ignorance and the widespread antagonism of security, attacks on other spaces meet with immediate wonder and blind, stunning debuts. All spaces seized, occupied and weighted with use. We are lit with dust outside, watching the churning loops of projected violence inside each remotely reclaimed space.
Canyon 1
He tells himself such movement cannot be free. What memories survive the need for sustenance are those he is loathe to consume. To wander in the desert is to change space, and these spaces came at a price. For what and to whom does he owe this apparent uselessness? Words from another elsewhere tell him to maintain this ruined facade of integrity despite the difficulty of living continuously in a land where those who feel Time are destroyed by it's promises.
Canyon 2
A geography outside Time is no place to rest. Any sun that burns here does not move. As we approach these abscesses the signs and authority of the temporal fall from under us, reducing movement to fragments of a crawling. Who or what it is that we flee may very well find us in this inhospitable autonomy. The scars for the present are marked here, waiting. It is the process of separation that inscribes the lines of disfigurement across these invisible maps.
Dawn
A new failing each day, though perhaps the same, or another. Yet the days insist upon cluttering themselves within eachother. The gate has malfunctioned and the sun duplicates itself like a tumor. The conflict implicit in the volatile substance of Time leads to a complete severance where the only possibility of reconciliation, of continuity lies in the repayment of a forgotten debt, or death.
Steps
Innocence too, is carefully constructed through weaving mimicry and myth. In this desire to impose a Self on my surroundings in a game of power, I had only to wait and allow the random success of Time to reduce the number of options available to me as each, unwanted success plummeted through the gaping fissures left in the construction of this new personality. The contract positioned him as the function of precisely these holes. He goes through me. With this mask of feigned innocence I failed to see the larger punctures ripped into the fabric of the screen by such spectral contracts.
Lagoon
"In times of flood, the waters have a memory of where they once belonged"
"He flooded his memory with such sorrow as to undermine his Reason"
"Melting into this basic element is a necessary human suicide for whoever
would experience emergence into a new cosmos"
John
Regret informs us of negligence. Regret, the difficulty and futility of acceptance, involves the destruction of a majority of forces in order to control the smallest section of an individual psyche. Dislocated now from the substance that forms the walls of memory, our cowboy makes use of these waters in an attempt to reduce this harsh recollection into a thousand incomprehensible shards.
It was there that I almost lost you, ran the risk of never knowing you at all
Build the sun from these fragments alone and the truth of it will be blinding
A fruitless attempt to forget brings him to this source, still the memory clings like a million suns.
The truth is blinding in its terrible unity, futile this attempt to reduce it to countless glitterings, all lucid.
Steven
He reinvents the old term, "wasting time" by laying waste to it. This subtle method, the envy of frauds insisting upon an ephemeral, stems from no magic, but from the boredom implicit in the linear.
You see how lucky and timely our surfaces cross. You know how little I feel; you know love lost is too current.
No passive void, this absence burnt into the film is the sun our cowboy foolishly tries to disperse, to be absolved of. Forgiveness is an ancient lie, especially for those who refuse to see the truth of what it is they project, the true face of their reflection.
Super-8 highway
We constantly arrive here. It is not the desert that is the point of perfect annihilation, but the speed with which we consume our locale. Scrape to a fast stop, wrenching the side from officer and police vehicle. Speed driven, distracted thoughts..."let's take off the fucking plates...never saw us here in this Nothing, taking the road to the coast, evading all borders...basking in this light, roadblocks everywhere, the police following behind, tracing the pattern of our containment on asphalt and sun bleached trash"
If in 1855 it was proclaimed that the destruction of Space was complete and total with rails penetrating everything West, we now do the same to Time with cinema.
We exist within several skins, and these skins contain or confine our viscera, create boundary, territory and definition. It is by means of this containment that various matter is given names. Yet as some things will not be contained, others remain unnamable. It is through the wounds to the skin that the object escapes it's form and sheds it's name. A wound is a transgression of form and surface, a will towards movement and away from identity. It is a violation of the name.
The individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He feels himself becoming space, the dark space where things cannot be put, and he invents spaces of which he is the convulsive possession.
R. Caillios
For it was limitless darkness and bottomless water, and the disturbance appeared as a fearful product. There appeared for the first time a ruler out of these waters. Now when Pistis Sophia saw him moving about in the depth of these waters, she said to him, "child, pass through here". When the ruler saw his magnitude, it was only himself that he saw, nothing else except darkness and waters, and he supposed he alone existed. He appeared as a spirit moving to and fro upon the waters.
Nag Hammadi Library
The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
Genesis
Lewis and Clark/Marco Polo journals as sort of pre-human documents, describing the land and its inhabitants as an emptiness full of promise. Our descriptions could parallel this, being post-human, here the travelers are without purpose and the emptiness they describe in their journals is a punitive emptiness. Both are ahistorical;
What is first felt here is more than the primary alienation of the "old west", it is total. Each stone, every strangled branch or battered flower is separate, alone. It is impossible to see anything here as whole, or rather to perceive any relationship one thing has to another. Both indifferent to, and ignored by any concept of time, the feeling of endless expansion here is nauseating. Nothing can be situated.
What once were considered thoughts, ideas or memories belonging to a person here simply dislodge, drift away, and evaporate, yet even the slightest remaining trace of a self exists here as a profanity pursuing itself to exact punishment, and inventing newer, more obscene selves to pursue and annihilate further.
While camera pans the mountains and playa in circular motion, occasionally and quickly panning back, as if in search for a perspective;
Standoff
"The source of this vision remains unseen, a seed of invisibility inside a body of swirling dust. Perspective askew as any vanishing point recedes into the seer, a dizzying absence in search of a character or characters to latch on to"
Later, this search for perspective is found in the long shot of J. and S. in classic standoff;
"Neither sight nor speech could comprehend this final meeting. Horizons locked without pity or malice, each understands that the other is his own vanishing point"
"The source of this vision remains unseen, a seed of invisibility inside a body of swirling dust. Perspective askew as any vanishing point recedes into the seer, a dizzying absence in search of a character or characters to latch on to. Neither sight nor speech could comprehend this final meeting. Horizons locked without pity or malice, each understand that the other is his own vanishing point."
Lagoon, "one" narration
One attempt to disrupt this unity is echoed in perfect circles of recollection, that although remain closed, still dissipate.
One leaves that prison, form, by denying reflection
One is tempted to impose meaning onto these voids, in doing so forget that mythologies are for the living
Possibly related MISC;
Pasolini--Every Indian tends to fix himself, to recognize himself in the mechanics of a custom, in the repetition of an act. Without this mechanism and repetition his sense of identity would receive a heavy blow, it would fall apart and evaporate.---
All was glittering to the cornea, impressing it with an almost wounding force.
Polizotti--The desert is pure surface, undifferentiated space, a journey to it's own end
The advance of one who is potentially legion
The desert is as vast as the consciousness that crosses it
These wills towards expansion are what flows from a wound.
There is no transcendence here as there is no consciousness, all is connected by improvised and impassable borders, and what is called transcendence may more appropriately be described as a bleeding.
We are transfixed when confronted with a wound, gaping mutely at the possibility of what already is. We see our innermost fears and desires written within it's viscera, and tremble in fear from our desire to be wounded.
The magnificent display of light reflected upon these waters may appear as a celestial wound in motion, the flow of it's currents serving as a map to our desire to lose form. It is a black star dancing in the rapture of it's own lack of boundary.
Just as our own bodies are riddled with punctures through which we may escape ourselves, this space itself may very likely be the mortal wound through which the final gasps of our collective body may be heard returning to the primal nothing, or formless universe leaving the corpse of that body to be pulverized
"into dust by an eternity of meteors and witnessed by nothing other than an eclipsed sun.
Locked into the cycle of unbecoming, the various persons one has been form an alliance to overthrow the one that has become. The parts of the sum demand autonomy from the tyranny of what is whole. It is this lucidity that brings suffering.
These excavations lead me from ruin to ruin and compel me to destroy both others and myself along the way. Though I have never figured why, I know that love is the key to all this waste. It could be that love is the back road that take us to this idyllic desert, only to sink into the earth when at last we stop, comatose in some heaven or another.
Suddenly I realize that it is only when my matter dissolves into the parched soil will I be free to understand all of this. Reason sleeps in me now, and I fear that when it awakens the flames shall gutter to nothing, the wind will make nests, the sun will rise, and the stones hold still.
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