Empire State
The white screaming noise in the midst of the shadowplay, Henry Spencer moves through the city to visit his child. In the crisp evening air choking, some crummy bedroom, with walls itching ants, and a floor shredded marble.
Mary X bending over the crib, dressed as a nurse, holding a bottle of chilled vintage champagne. Henry arrives, and the camera swirls into a rapture around them, with the brass section giving off glittering thuds, and the strings swooping with meaning.
In the cradle itself, the child bending itself through the differerent dimensions, twisting his limbs into tangles, and his spine into strange shapes. Teeth in the veins of some smile, some terrible tryst, and with his parents still kissing madly beneath the glare of the lights - it is hard to discern the truth of the matter.
In a difficult body decoupled from soil and site, his skin sloughing slime and his eyes oozing engine oil. In a while, he knows, the studio bell will sound time. The director will proclaim the wrap, the crew will abandon the set, and the actors playing his parents will collect their pay and go home.
Left alone on the soundstage, in the grey and blue darkness, with only the chittering recorders for company, he will sever neatly his ganglions with a pair of scissors, the shame of that cut, and the limit of that kind of gaze breaking fantastic gears. He will then picture himself on the deck of the Titantic sinking, now in the Hindenburg burning, then in the Twin Towers collapsing…
The incitation of vision, connected to actuality. It is not so much here a case of messianic purpose combined with virginal bliss, but rather a blank statement of conjuncture, in which everybody finally loses.
In the manner of a long lost love, combined with a fidelity without reserve, one constructs an integral perfect world composed only of light. This is the radical telos of what Deleuze meant, when he spoke in Cinema of a plane of immanence amounting to an endless flux of images. This situation of pure rapidity calling for the special image of a screen, something that could harness the power and in that movement create consciousness.
In the end it could only be contingent, and this contingency without an object. It is not so much that here we step out of phenomenology, clothed in just our blood. Rather, we here recognize, that even our blood carries with it certain dreams of how to bleed correctly, certain notions about the intersections between essential axes. It is not reducible to the idea of the subject of the brain - as Deleuze (with Guattari) would later claim. Instead, it enters into a difficult differential cartography, in which the non-representational territory of sticky fantastic pictures becomes the only map worth possessing.
(Part III to follow shortly)
Mary X bending over the crib, dressed as a nurse, holding a bottle of chilled vintage champagne. Henry arrives, and the camera swirls into a rapture around them, with the brass section giving off glittering thuds, and the strings swooping with meaning.
In the cradle itself, the child bending itself through the differerent dimensions, twisting his limbs into tangles, and his spine into strange shapes. Teeth in the veins of some smile, some terrible tryst, and with his parents still kissing madly beneath the glare of the lights - it is hard to discern the truth of the matter.
In a difficult body decoupled from soil and site, his skin sloughing slime and his eyes oozing engine oil. In a while, he knows, the studio bell will sound time. The director will proclaim the wrap, the crew will abandon the set, and the actors playing his parents will collect their pay and go home.
Left alone on the soundstage, in the grey and blue darkness, with only the chittering recorders for company, he will sever neatly his ganglions with a pair of scissors, the shame of that cut, and the limit of that kind of gaze breaking fantastic gears. He will then picture himself on the deck of the Titantic sinking, now in the Hindenburg burning, then in the Twin Towers collapsing…
The incitation of vision, connected to actuality. It is not so much here a case of messianic purpose combined with virginal bliss, but rather a blank statement of conjuncture, in which everybody finally loses.
In the manner of a long lost love, combined with a fidelity without reserve, one constructs an integral perfect world composed only of light. This is the radical telos of what Deleuze meant, when he spoke in Cinema of a plane of immanence amounting to an endless flux of images. This situation of pure rapidity calling for the special image of a screen, something that could harness the power and in that movement create consciousness.
In the end it could only be contingent, and this contingency without an object. It is not so much that here we step out of phenomenology, clothed in just our blood. Rather, we here recognize, that even our blood carries with it certain dreams of how to bleed correctly, certain notions about the intersections between essential axes. It is not reducible to the idea of the subject of the brain - as Deleuze (with Guattari) would later claim. Instead, it enters into a difficult differential cartography, in which the non-representational territory of sticky fantastic pictures becomes the only map worth possessing.
(Part III to follow shortly)
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