Inflation of the First Hydrogen Balloon
Don DeLillo’s all-too-timely 2020 novel The Silence, about the death of the grid and then the rest of it too, begins with a epigraph from Albert Einstein, scion of relativity and specialized relativity, for whom surely no extended introduction is required: “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” In the novel’s second chapter, some characters have convened in an apartment in New York City and await a couple who are flying in. Max Stenner, inveterate gambler, and his “something-or-other” partner Diane Lucas are joined for the moment in their residence by Diane’s former student, Martin Dekker, the threesome watching the televised pregame lead-up to Super Bowl LVI, the year being 2022. All of a sudden the television and the totality of the ad hoc threesome’s connected devices go haywire. Max, who evidently has considerable sums riding on the Super Bowl, beholds aghast as the television signal first falters and then ceases momentarily. “Something happened then. The images onscreen began to shake. It was not ordinary visual distortion, it had depth, it formed abstract patterns that dissolved into a rhythmic pulse, a series of elementary units that seemed to thrust forward and then recede. Rectangles, triangles, squares.” Local power failure? Chinese hack? Nobody present is in a position to know with any certainty, but what is very much clear is that the taken-for-granted web of virtuality holding everything in the 21st century nebulously together has been instantaneously rescinded, at least from the standpoint of a particular local experience, though what sort of gullible-ass reader is going to assume the crisis ends there? Everybody knows and is frightened by how connected we all are. Past the threshold of the known, into a futurity beyond the thinkable, the second section of The Silence replaces the past tense of the first with the present tense of a hyper-real intensive unbinding, as each of the principles, Jim and Tessa having now arrived at the apartment in the aftermath of the basically successful crash-landing or their commercial airliner, is provided the opportunity to soliloquize like a Shakespeare character against a green screen in a vacuum. Some vintage DeLillo parataxis: “E-mail-less. Try to imagine it. Say it. Hear how it sounds. E-mail-less.” Drones, satellites, cryptocurrency, China, powerful telescopes, cyber worms, either the planet or the god Mars. What does it all ultimately mean? To what do these fragments add up? O tempora! O mores! In times like these. In times like these what? I believe it more or less behooves me to draw the attention of readers to the bravura and comically decadent opening section of writer and editor Mark Doten’s 2019 novel Trump Sky Alpha. In the eponymous flying luxury machine, “Crystal Palace of the Sky,” president Donald Trump’s “ultraluxury zeppelin […] from the bridge of which Trump delivered streaming YouTube addresses every Wednesday, DC to New York, and every Sunday, New York to DC,” not perhaps advisedly, really, the reality of ongoing global nuclear war suggesting the necessity of different sorts of exigencies and more robust precautions. We have Trump, as well we might expect, calling the end of the world “fake news” whilst evidence of its sound factual basis rises above the earth in the form of innumerable mushroom clouds. There would in fact appear to be a pan-global flotilla of Trump zeppelins. It is the end of the world for damn certain. Turbulence, baby. You will recognize the beast when finally the beast arriveth: “the 2,000-gallon wheeled lobster habitats crashed against the Mount Rushmore-style sculptures that separated the gallery from the main cabin, and 2,000-gallon plate-glass tanks all around the world shattered against statues of Trump and Eric and Trump Jr. and Ivanka, sending huge crustaceans everywhere as passengers worldwide screamed in one voice […],” Trump with a “face like a Creamsicle dropped in the dirt,” bafflingly impervious, blasted out of the sky and his life functions persisting undaunted, like Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove. I cannot help but suspect that the opening of Trump Sky Alpha explicitly tips its hat to that of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, a door-stopper novel that begins with a riotous and hardy section focusing on the Chums of Chance as they approach the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair in a hydrogen balloon.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
“Death? So full of life, of lives.” Who is speaking? Ariel? In the midst of a sudden wailing tempest that is already a dream of midsummer's night? Hélène Cixous, that is to say…the side of life, le côté de la vie. Along with speed, Cixous’ great longtime friend Jacques Derrida also detects in her force of life the centrality and/or primacy of what he at one point designates “the mighty impatience of the wish.” The “mighty impatience of the wish” makes possible time travel and immortality without need of recourse to scientific breakthrough or much of a budget, and it doesn’t even require that you not ever die…at least a little...I mean, don't you want to experience the full gamut? “This book owes its life to death,” writes Cixous in Death Shall Be Dethroned. “Death also lives.” In The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter, one of two very fine novels we have from poet Rosmarie Waldrop, the events of individual lives and the act of speaking or addressing are flung contingently into history and becoming in the context of weather and atmosphere, biological events (sexual reproduction, the development of the embryo), and renegade cosmological extrapolation—“a brighter galaxy of suns”—such that the condition of being flung into immanence and worldly substance leaves one both bound and unbound. “But in sex as in meteorology the number of particles in question is so enormous that an exact catalog of their positions and velocities is impossible.” Can we imagine any pure state of functional jouissance operative in any actually existing social field? I remember a friend once arguing to me that if you lived totally in the moment the way Eckhart Tolle advises you would no doubt routinely shit your pants. In the third section of Ingeborg Bachmann's magnificent-to-the-point-of-epochal novel Malina we are treated to the unforgettable story of the mailman Kranewitzer of Klagenfurt who could no longer honour the Privacy of Mails and could indeed no longer deliver the mail, barricading himself in his residence with ever-mounting piles of undelivered correspondences. It is normally the heroic and aberrant literary act that destabilizes in this manner, riding alongside its victims, in curious fidelity to an ulterior dimension seen only by a very few. Maybe too the pervasive plague is but a mirror to the author’s senescence, her psychosis little more than a quotidian matter of course, cause for cheer however raw the nerves. The whirlpool of dream and endless re-prisonings, we have a passage which imagines three stones bearing messages. Ingeborg Bachmann equated her own late style to deathstyle (which makes more sense as one word if you speak German). Death itself doesn’t bow to or even necessarily tolerate style or its dominion of embarrassing frippery. True, we die eventually and ought to rejoice of the matter, though deathstyle means more properly that in taking to life in our singular, inimitable way, we are each of us throughly specialized equipment, though hardly autonomous. What is a bundle of symptoms if not the weather around here? There are lots of different jobs in the ant colony, twenty-four hours a day. Ah, but the plague. “But Vienna doesn’t have much time left, it’s slipping away, the houses are falling asleep, people are turning their lights off earlier and earlier, no one is awake anymore, entire districts are gripped by apathy, people aren’t coming together or splitting apart, the city is slipping into decline although isolated thoughts and erratic monologues still occur at night. And from time to time the final dialogues between Malina and myself.” The aesthetic education advocated by comparative literature scholar and Derrida translator Gayatri Spivak—her long-running “false hope”—would seek to outsource the transcendental categories and doctrines to the legislative mercy of the imagination. Knowledge only takes an individual so far. We negotiate limits and try things…and just try and stop us. Our transcendental-legislative grounding operations are instrumental, they lack any detectable higher legitimation whatever. The Godhead ain't returning your calls. Mistakes will not only be acceptable but instrumentally necessary. Spivak, from her essay “Who Claims Alterity?”: “we must know what mistake to make with a specific text and must also know how to defend our mistake as the one that will allow us to live.”
The Blind Owl (Raúl Ruiz, 1987)
Naveed Noori, the translator of the 2011 Sadegh Hedayat Foundation-approved edition of The Blind Owl by tormented Persian modernist Sadegh Hedayat released by the Iran Open Publishing Group, has kept many of the original Persian terminologies utilized in Hedayat’s manuscript, for this and many other reasons wisely providing copious footnotes to help explicate such business. One such footnote fairly late in the text—a mere four pages from its conclusion—helps clarify a key point for Occidental readers: when coming across owls performing an apparently symbolic function or role we might be inclined to think of wisdom, byproduct no doubt of the Owl of Minerva and a mythological genealogy leading back from Germany’s Black Forest to Ancient Greece. In both Iran and India owls “are considered bad omens, with various superstitions and traditions ascribed to them.” A genuinely disturbing work of visionary literature akin to that of Poe, Lovecraft, or Baudelaire, The Blind Owl is broken into two distinct parts and terminates with a brief coda. It is a story of horror and hallucinations, but, that being said, if the fundamental recipe for modernist literature has something to do with industrial modernity and human alienation in all its many variegated forms, then The Blind Owl belongs in that discussion. Our unnamed narrator extemporizes thusly: “for in the course of my life experiences I came to this understanding that there existed a dreadful chasm between myself and others, and I understood that as much as possible one should remain inaudible, as much as possible I should keep my thoughts to myself, and if now I have decided to write, it is only to introduce myself to my shadow—a bent shadow on the wall, and it is as if the more I write, it devours it with an even greater appetite…” Conjoined with this disconnection from the outside world is a sense of the constitutional flimsiness of phenomenal reality. “Is not all that I feel, see and ponder completely illusory, far from reality?” Opium and wine are not only a refuge but literally painkilling. The departed beloved, not a beam of sunshine but rather a shooting star, “her two large wondrous and shining eyes, behind which my life slowly and painfully liquified and burned, she no longer belongs to this brutal and wretched world—no, I must not defile her name with earthly things.” Very rapidly the druggy, hypnagogic-type state of affairs becomes a whirlwind of obsession, driving the narrator to the limits of what he is capable of enduring, the damsel-angel replacing the former beloved as the fulcrum of all his desire and suffering polarized. The narrator paints again and again the eyes of the damsel-angel. So as to possess them, he claims, but who could he possibly be kidding, he clearly the one possessed? Deep in a delirium or fugue state, the narrator dismembers the angel's corpse and sets out to dispose of it, or believes this is what is happening. Parts of the body stuffed into suitcases, he ventures out to bury them, encountering in the process a number of eerily similar elderly men who offer to help him and who tell him they know where he lives. The narrator opens one of the bags he is about to bury and inside are “those large eyes amid the clotted blood.” The colour of meat and offal. Everywhere. Carousing night watchmen. The dire providential shadow, the statue or shadow with no head, indicating the imminent death of the one who hath fatefully tripped that invisible wire. The “oblivion and peace” of death, itself unattainable, no more than a stale sales pitch. Paradise would have to be a narcotic paradise. You would have to be able to feel nearly nothing there. Sexual obsession and bloodshed. The peddler, “the representative and manifestation of Creation.” Creation itself is the infernal. We have an idiom for things being forged in things. What does Creation do? It burns insects alive for sport. There are different domains of horror at play in The Blind Owl, but its true implicit horror is the same as in Poe and Lovecraft: what if your already cemented destiny is a living hell on earth? Where you gonna run to, Sinnerman?
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