I.
Memory and life are not the same; nor are
they cuncurrent. There remain certain days that once had meaning, but now —
void of life — they repeat themselves filled with brittle, bristling memory.
Memory is always a representation, an adaptable construction, congenial to
shortcut. There is a cloud in our heads, full of this pliable, translucent
aether, and in it we assume it is possible to keep our dead within. We cannot
contain a thing — truth is, we are sieves. We all are — without exception —
sieving through life.
II.
My cat, Plutão: an unsubstantial tiger:
hardly of paper — but acciaccaturian, none the less. Whimsical. Quixotic as a
cosmonaut.
III.
A winged wanderer soul lost its light and
fell at my hands; a husk, discarded, disdained, by some cruel aether, bounded
entertainment.
IV.
Contemporary fiction and social media are
enantiomorphic — chiral in the viewer's minds; and, as such, uncuncurrent. For
in the first case, it is demanded that the protagonist's psyches should be
enough stratified in order to enshroud what passes for complexity these days;
e.g., that an artificial ambiguity should be superimposed on characters
otherwise plain, the more blatant the fact once washed the vapid veneer, the
gloss of gross glamour. The aftermath is as uncouth as downward clumsy. I, for
sure, cannot stand it.
As for the second case, the same minds
that demand 'complex' characters in fiction — the so called 'grey area', in
which one can be, oh!, so good and so bad, simultaneously (and be loved for it) — are, notwithstanding, oppressive in the demand that everyone should think
accordingly to some infeasible political-correctness agenda that borders on the
aethereal: which translates in everyone behaving as uni-dimensional as
cardboard. It amounts to flesh and bone individuals being put to death socially
every time they misstep from whatever the social consensus may be at any given
instant — at the same time that the coryphees of moral police root for their
favorite baddies in cock and bull stories. We live in a profoundly spurious
society: hypocritical to a fault; darn ugly in its self-righteousness. Its
shrillness only makes it worst.
V.
History shows us the terrible thing: that
there is method to madness — always.
Anachronism and contemporary ideologies
might invade the gaps in the train of knowledge, making a spurious path to
follow: one in which Brueghelesque insanity is a sheltered label to apply to
individuals whose lives we look upon through a glass darkly; but when going
back on foot to thought long forgotten stations there is a chance of finding
clues to what in their absence would just be perfunctory errors.
In some hundred years from now we also be
weighed by harsh scales — and at that time we could only hope that some
unprejudiced, unveiled intellect treats us — not condescendingly — but
evenhandedly.
VI.
I'm doubting if knowledge killed religion
and pushed Western civilization to the path of scientific bliss. This may be
pure historical interpretation through commonplace, an effect Arendt already
warned about. Inasmuch as the hegemony of a knowledge based intellectual
structure versus some religious based emotional structure, we might be seeing
it all wrong, for to what extent is knowledge no more a process? In so far as
we having come to terms with this process — for it is one —, it should be useful
to keep in mind that in every period people thought of themselves as infinitely
wiser than forerunners from past societies, which rings as a cautionary tale
against the hubris of half-knowledge or, worst!, of philistinism, the crudeness
of pure ignorance.
This age is plagued by all the
artlessness, all the inelegances of yesterday — the worst being the kind of
Halo Effect operated by dilettantes and media darlings in the semi-private,
semi-public, space of virtual communication. There really seems to exist some
type of maladroitness endemic to this mucoidal space we call the social network
— mucoidal in the sense of being porous, like the mouth or the anus; a liminal
proscenium — pregnable and retentive, both. It is in this frontispiece that we
stand civilized as in a public space, but, nonetheless, as oafish as one can be
when unobserved in the recesses of domiciliary space. It is in this fake
frontier that we gather to conform and to feel the amniotic freedom of bashing
the ones marginalized by whatever consensus society chooses to structure itself
around in any given moment, since bashing, in itself, is no longer considered a
civilized behaviour, except when feigned as indignation.
In this regard I don't think we live in a
more enlightened age than before or that the religion of progress will take
care of all our problems. The past is full of examples in which consensus got
it wrong — in some cases, harrowingly so. We suffer from short-sightedness and
the desire to belong to whatever the consensus might be — myopia and monomania
are this age's fifth and sixth horsemen. We lost the capability of discerning
right from wrong, substantial from superfluous, valuable from vapid — and the
nakedness of our dispensation from it, of our withdrawal from it, signals at
last the true and only exclusivity of our time. The fact that we didn't kill
Hell, like we would like to think: we just made it into a kiddie-ride.
VII.
In the graveyard: a
flower in the dregs... Allegory of life: we are all flowers in the dregs —
blossomed for just a little and always surrounded by scree.
VIII.
Sumptuous
sundown viewed from my living room window — no filter used: it's grandiose as
it is. Looks painted by Turner.
IX.
Words have power: the spoken word and the
written word are vinculative, indenturing us — enslaving us — to the each other
and the world in uncertain, capricious, ways. Whatever the outcome, it stems
from the fact that words have precise meanings — a multitude of meanings,
sometimes, but precise meanings, nonetheless. I came to believe that the most
proficient and powerful danger of our time is the ignorance people have towards
words. Words will continue to affect us, even if we don't know their meanings.
Society take words for granted - dangerous words and dangerous meanings. This
is sorcery, have no doubt about it: try telling someone a harsh word and you'll
get harsh behaviour in return — that's tangible, that's real magic. So,
dictionaries are grimoires, in more senses than one. The worst evil of our time
is ignorance towards words: that's malfeasance, that's corruption. We live in a
very corrupted atmosphere.
X.
In
a plain light the lately coined moniker 'post-horror''s only function appears
to be the cajoling of audiences, but it should not escape the seasoned thinker
that its raison d'être may be the insecurity in assuming that a horror
film was made — a skewing of perspectives is also involved, since the notion
might harbour the perception that horror is solely made from 'lewton buses' and
its ilk, forgetting or ignoring that horror gave us such a variety of autheurs
and experiences — from the proverbial 'lewton bus' of Jacques Tourneur, the
existential dread of Carl Dreyer or David Cronenberg's visceral body horror.
It may be that only ignoramus or pressuposeurs*
think in such a clumsy way about one of the styles in which the imagination is
best served: horror don't have blank codes or tropes to be coloured by hacks.
The nature of horror is suppression of bonds, dissolution of frontiers, total
transgression. If the majority of films and books that studios, publishers and
marketing number crunchers make visible to the public is utter crap, please
don't blame horror: blame the fear of losing money.
Speaking of blame, If one is willing to
blame, let's say, Dracula for all the vampire trash that is
continuously being produced, then one must be willing as well to blame La
Princesse de Clèves for all the televised sentimental hogwash in soap opera
format or to blame Childhood for every single autobiographical wreck
that sink in library shelves. The reductio ad absurdum of this train of
thought could go on till Doomsday, so the thing to mind here is: we don't need
the 'post-horror' summer name at all.
If one is cowardly enough to call it as it
is, e.g. a horror movie a horror movie, that's his or her problem, but horror
itself don't have anything to do with it. The prejudice on horror seasonally
rears its head and there is always someone ready to be the poster boy for it.
Although these cases are dismal enough, the fact that one is willing to exploit
a style, in this case horror, and at the same time seeing fit to deride it it's
worst than hypocrisy.
(*Not a gaffe: portmantologism.)
