F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R.

- false evidence appearing real -

Spotlight on a Murder (Georges Franju, 1961)

La rupture (Claude Chabrol, 1970)

The human being that exists halfway through the year 2026, the vagaries of progress being whatever they may be, does not have developed faculties or specialized equipment adequate to cognate the incoming future with anything other than projections and fancy, whatever thin and dancing extrasensory vein does or does not herein obtain. Think about it. All your technical equipment is just you and you’re all you have. You take in the signals and you let them resound or flop to the floor like a flounder. The future you’re envisioning is tinted heavily by the extremes to which you’ve gone to avoid learning anything and by the dreams you’re having mostly unconsciously about the furthest and must gruelling extremities of pain in a blinding spatiotemporal window of horrific openness, outside even to the outside of itself. Hell is not other people. Hell is precise and rigorous torture without hope of surcease. Who came up with that shit? The Japanese? Beats me. Seems like it could basically have been any one of us. I mean, read history much?

Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock believed in addition to the fact that cruelty can kind of be funny, that its own culpability is what makes the audience squirm when seated attentive and taking in a lavish Technicolor murder spectacle made with professionalism and panache. It has been argued that even to pay an electrical bill is to be a flunky of the $tate. I remember once hearing about a series of assaults in my neighbourhood and being convinced somebody would blame me. Of course, they may well have. How would I know? How is my paranoia on a scale of one to ten? Who’s asking?

I used to romanticize the counterculture of the ‘60s and ‘70s. But we all know what happened to the Baby Boomers. (They shit the bed ridonkulous.) It’s impossibly fucking grim. The drop-out dreamers who brought us the Whole Earth Catalogue, jam band agrarian communes, and garage rock venture capitalism…and who breathed the breath of life into the fledgling internet…ultimately invented the key tool of gluttonous neoliberal expansion, our intrepid psychonauts of yesteryear getting high on the hogs of greed and wrath akin. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari—the populous pair—asserted that capitalism “makes the earth increasingly uninhabitable the more thoroughly it encompasses it.” Yup. Open pit mining and strip mining especially. 

You are looking deep into a well and things are starting to appear there because you are looking so hard. Do you hear someone down there? It isn’t novel or radical to insist that dreams are yelling at you in order to get your attention about something, hastily underscored directions for a supine soul horrifically off course. It’s because the self is an escape room and so is the cosmos. I brought Freud for his huffy accord.  Blech, he says. Which is good as gold or gravy. The hollow earth is a projection of the spinning heliocentric human who is imagining like an absolute Mad Hatter corncob that gravity is a business of apples dropping down. 

Fear goes after, peeps, breaks, enters, collects trophies. Fear is running a program across the urban delirium spectrum. When your lights start to go out they come to collect. Who’s that you say? The Angel of Death and his blue-smocked crew. How in the fuck do you happen to do?  I was reading that Uranus was hit at some point by some very large astral object that knocked it badly off its orbit such that now, whereas the rest of the planets spin like tops, Uranus rolls forward like a wheel. The precipitating incident happened billions of years ago. Nobody’s coming to accuse you of running off with the Moscow State Circus, Uranus in your arms.

The Reverend Patrick Brontë and his wife Maria had six children together, residing in relative isolation at West Riding, Yorkshire, in the north of England. Damp as hell, I would imagine. Among the six kids were three sisters who would come to be universally considered among the most important writers of the 19th century, the last of whom, Anne, was born in 1820. Maria Brontë died the following year, age thirty-eight, probably of uterine cancer, though she may also have had tuberculosis. The eldest Brontë daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, are said to have contracted tuberculosis on account of the harsh conditions at the school to which they were sent away and died in close temporal proximity to one another. Emily Brontë and Patrick, the sole brother, would both die of tuberculosis in 1848, as would Anne the following year. Charlotte Brontë would live the longest life of any of the siblings, dying in March of 1855 at thirty-eight, the same age at which her mother had passed. The Reverend Brontë lived to be a man eighty-four years of age, dying in 1861, pre-deceased by his wife and all six of his children. So much death, so regular the visitations, a distinguished clan laid progressively to waste. Sayonara, Gangsters. No wonder they used to call tuberculosis consumption. 

Fred Frith, Gravity [Full Album]