blog of revelations VIII

( recovered from the front lines)


I have described you Hank as a ‘textist’. You are found out.

So now since you have been outcloseted, let me elaborate.

Your blog is obviously an intertext. It is a space where different imaginations of the present blend and contend. It is where identities tell of their actions and the resulting formations tell of their thoughts.

But where is this intertext located? It is located in the decline of America.

The declines of places are characterised by the attempts at official generation of ever more grandiose myths to recapture the past. Also with ever more bizarre behaviour. America seems to be in a badstink decline, worse and of less weight than Rome but with greater potential for bloodshed. This, despite the fact that America's whole cycle is not even one hundredth the time cycle of Rome although it includes it. And its imaginative territory is not as wide as and no deeper than Mickey Mouse in his fading celluloid grave.

There is some hope however that a constellation of new compact national imaginations and one or two more efficient empires will replace America like happened with Rome. I have called for America's dissolution in order to save it. I have looked forward to the Principality of Buffalo and the Spiritual Republic of California. These could be more bizarre than boring and less exploitative.

Perhaps like with Venice's imperial fall the decline from glory (as middlemen of crusades, liquidator of the children's crusade, drug dealers) may yet be characterised by a much later flowering of municipal arts and releasing of frozen mythic and classic imaginations into psychological insight, intrigue and mannerist fun. A kind of renaissance. A pre-terminal euphoria.

Like with Florence America's decline could result in more furious networking with incompetent and murderous rulers trying to justifythe domination of their phoney republic sleazy culture capital and furious marketing of the human spirit (by falsifying everything including those big lies by undeservedly placing the rulers themselves into an ordered deification of intellect while at the same time selling their people to the devil and to the French). This could be the next ending of history. Or like the Holy and apostolic church there could be an archiving of all sins and glories into catacombs of information too voluminous to be grasped and the conversion of all institutions into secret squirrel clubs of vile sinners, landlords and usurers conspiring and reconspiring to keep the truth game going. A clean slate eternally. Or is that already happening?

Your blog, Hank, represents at this moment of decline a tension expressed from the parochial in the midst of universal disintegration. It is voices and images from some different places and times. One Hundred and Fifty Mile House for example (how far is that from Horsefly?). From Vancouver (in the Canadian Imaginaire the opposite in the inter-text from Toronto). From Toronto, from the sixties, from exiles, from America and from BaAmerica. (Ba is the proto Bantu word to say something is culturally not. For example there is a notorious tribe in Nigeria reputed to be thieves named Chamba. The proper tribe next to them is called Bachamba. The Bachamba hosted the British District commissioner and regional government. The Chamba killed him.)

The present intertext however projects an opposition to the military and imperial dreamworld of continuous mystification, permanent and reoccurring reaction, compulsory public anxiety and constant and progressive training in docility. It is against normalcy of banality and constant surveillance which are the two main politics of the age.

What is the main identity of the age? Like the decline of America, it creates the story and plot of the individual in it through the alienation its official culture expresses for itself, the individual associated with it is in flight.

I know of some such individuals. They wouldn't like your blog. They sought to be giants by imagining a world in which all the things they had fled from were thought out of existence. The family, the locality, the duty (usually to confront responsibility and death), race, religion and so on. One by one flight. Just as America flees reality with its official fantasy so paranoid, so shallow and so without theory and culture, they had fled from nationalities so called for a new nation, had fled from their own cowardice and so called for a cataclysm that would never take place in which they were martyrs, had fled from their own naughty infantilism and so called for purity. One has written `the greatest event of 1969 was the Saskatchewan Student conference’ saying that the stand taken there would lead to the changing of the world. Look up 1969. Therewere other things happening as well. But these individuals attract as America attracts. They attract their own authors who wish to fill the void they occupy with snappy little myths, reworkings of former texts, Rome, Venice, Mao. Tragedies into farces. Empires into Parishes. Another I knew, a terrorist, died in despair on the basis of apocalyptic ecological slogans that described actions which were later undertaken by municipal re-zoners. But enough of that.

Let us cite the Greeks. There was an official called the Theoros. This was the detached non-participatory witness to civic events. Then there was the Proxenia, the advocate in places where they were not from who was also a spy and reporter from the outside. Usually they were poets. They were both necessary in the midst of all the public chaos and contending imaginings of the governing drama for the formation of the objective, that is the momentary and quite concrete truth. Our group is both that.

It is not the voices of a world city or from too many airports. It is not the voice of acceleration, resistance or repulsion. It is an intertext of decline. Therefore exhilarating.

You can provide your own quotations to illustrate the passages above from the recent blog postings.

Or you could argue it is instead the voice of the Decentralised Intelligence Entity which like the CIA wishes to rework the public mind and fill the public eye. But in a different way.


Sincerely,

Corporal B.M McDonald