Читать интересную книгу Боги и Новые создания - Джим Моррисон

The world becomes an apparently infinite, yet

possibly finite, card game. Image combinations,

permutations, comprise the world game.

A mild possession, devoid of risk, at bottom sterile. With an image there is no

attendant danger.

Muybridge derived his animal subjects from the Philadelphia Zoological

Garden, male performers from the University. The women were professional

artists' models, also actresses and dancers, parading nude before the 48

cameras.

Films are collections of dead pictures which are

given artificial insemination.

Films spectators are quiet vampires.

Cinema is most totalitarian of the arts. All energy and sensation is sucked

up into the skull, a cerebral erection, skull bloated with blood. Caligula

wished a single neck for all his subjects that he could behead a kingdom

with one blow. Cinema is this transforming agent. The body exists for the

sake of the eyes; it becomes a dry stalk to support these two soft insatiable

jewels.

Film confers a kind of spurious eternity.

Each film depends upon all the others and drives you on to others. Cinema

was a novelty, a scientific toy, until a sufficient body of works had been

amassed, enough to create an intermittent other world, a powerful, infinite

mythology to be dipped into at will.

Films have an illusion of timelessness fostered by their regular, indomitable

appearance.

The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death.

The modem East creates the greatest body of films. Cinema is a new form of

an ancient tradition — the shadow play. Even their theater is an imitation

of it. Bom in India or China, the shadow show was aligned with religious

ritual, linked with celebrations which centered around cremation of the

dead.

It is wrong to assume, as some have done, that cinema belongs to women.

Cinema is created by men for the consolation of men.

The shadow plays originally were restricted to male audiences. Men could

view these dream shows from either side of the screen. When women later

began to be admitted, they were allowed to attend only to shadows.

Male genitals are small faces

forming trinities of thieves

and Christs

Fathers, sons, and ghosts.

A nose hangs over a wall

and two half eyes, sad eyes,

mute and handless, multiply

an endless round of victories.

These dry and secret triumphs, fought

in stalls and stamped in prisons,

glorify our walls

and scorch our vision.

A horror of empty spaces

propagates this seal on private places.

Kynaston's Bride

may not appear

but the odor of her flesh

is never very far.

A drunken crowd knocked over the apparatus, and Mayhew's showman,

exhibiting at Islington Green, burned up, with his mate, inside.

In 1832, Gropius was astounding Paris with his Pleorama. The audience was

transformed into the crew aboard a ship engaged in battle. Fire, screaming,

sailors, drowning.

Robert Baker, an Edinburgh artist, while in jail for debt, was struck by the

effect of light shining through the bars of his cell through a letter he was

reading, and out of this perception he invented the first Panorama,

a concave, transparent picture view of the city.

This invention was soon replaced by the Diorama, which added the illusion

of movement by shifting the room. Also sounds and novel lighting effects.

Daguerre's London Diorama still stands in Regent's Park, a rare survival,

since these shows depended always on effects of artificial light, produced

by lamps or gas jets, and nearly always ended in fire.

Phantasmagoria, magic lantern shows, spectacles without substance. They

achieved complete sensory experiences through noise, incense, lightning,

water. There may be a time when we'll attend Weather Theaters to recall the

sensation of rain.

Cinema has evolved in two paths.

One is spectacle. Like the Phantasmagoria, its goal is the creation of a total

substitute sensory world.

The other is peep show, which claims for its realm both the erotic and the

untampered observance of real life, and imitates the keyhole or voyeur's

window without need of color, noise, grandeur.

Cinema discovers its fondest affinities, not with painting, literature, or theater,

but with the popular diversions — comics, chess, French and Tarot decks,

magazines, and tattooing.

Cinema derives not from painting, literature, sculpture, theater, but from

ancient popular wizardry. It is the contemporary manifestation of an evolving

history of shadows, a delight in pictures that move, a belief in magic. Its

lineage is entwined from the earliest beginning with Priests and sorcery, a

summoning of phantoms. With, at first, only slight aid of the mirror and fire,

men called up dark and secret visits from regions in the buried mind. In these

seances, shades are spirits which ward off evil.

The spectator is a dying animal.

Invoke, palliate, drive away the Dead. Nightly.

Through ventriloquism, gestures, play with objects, and all rare variations of

the body in space, the shaman signaled his «trip» to an audience which

shared the journey.

In the seance, the shaman led. A sensuous panic, deliberately evoked through

drugs, chants, dancing, hurls the shaman into trance. Changed voice,

convulsive movement. He acts like a madman. These professional hysterics,

chosen precisely for their psychotic leaning, were once esteemed. They

mediated between man and spirit-world. Their mental travels formed the crux

of the religious life of the tribe.

Principle of seance: to cure illness. A mood might overtake a people burdened

by historical events or dying in a bad landscape. They seek deliverance from

doom, death, dread. Seek possession, the visit of gods and powers,

a rewinning of the life source from demon possessors. The cure is culled

from ecstasy. Cure illness or prevent its visit, revive the sick, and regain

stolen, soul.

It is wrong to assume that art needs the spectator in order to be. The film

runs on without any eyes. The spectator cannot exist without it. It insures

his existence.

The happening/the event in which ether is introduced into a roomful of people

through air vents makes the chemical an actor. Its agent, or injector, is an

artist-showman who creates a performance to witness himself. The people

consider themselves audience, while they perform for each other, and the gas

acts out poems of its own through the medium of the human body. This

approaches the psychology of the orgy while remaining in the realm of the

Game and its infinite permutations.

The aim of the happening is to cure boredom, wash the eyes, make childlike

reconnections with the stream of life. Its lowest, widest aim is for purgation of

perception. The happening attempts to engage all the senses, the total

organism, and achieve total response in the face of traditional arts which

focus on narrower inlets of sensation.

Multimedias are invariably sad comedies. They work as a kind of colorful

group therapy, a woeful mating of actors and viewers, a mutual semimastur-

bation. The performers seem to need their audience and the spectators — the

spectators would find these same mild titillations in a freak show or Fun Fair

and fancier, more complete amusements in a Mexican cathouse.

Novices, we watch the moves of silkworms who

excite their bodies in moist leaves and weave wet

nests of hair and skin.

This is a model of our liquid resting world

dissolving bone and melting marrow

opening pores as wide as windows.

The «stranger» was sensed as greatest menace in ancient communities.

Metamorphose. An object is cut off from its name, habits, associations.

Detached, it becomes only the thing, in and of itself. When this disintegration

into pure existence is at last achieved, the object is free to become endlessly

anything.

The subject says «I see first lots of things which dance… then everything

becomes gradually connected».

Objects as they exist in time the clean eye and camera give us. Not falsified

by «seeing».

When there are as yet no objects.

Early film-makers, who — like the alchemists — delighted in a willful obscuri-

ty about their craft, in order to withhold their skills from profane onlookers.

Separate, purify, reunite. The formula of Ars Magna, and its heir, the

cinema.

The camera is androgynous machine, a kind of mechanical hermaphrodite.

In his retort the alchemist repeats the work of Nature.

Few would defend a small view of Alchemy as «Mother of Chemistry», and

confuse its true goal with those external metal arts. Alchemy is an erotic

science, involved in buried aspects of reality, aimed at purifying and

transforming all being and matter. Not to suggest that material operations are

ever abandoned. The adept holds to both the mystical and physical work.

The alchemists detect in the sexual activity of man a correspondence with the

world's creation, with the growth of plants, and with mineral formations.

When they see the union of rain and earth, they see it in an erotic sense, as

copulation. And this extends to all natural realms of matter. For they can

picture love affairs of chemicals and stars, a romance of stones, or the fertility

of fire.

Strange, fertile correspondences the alchemists sensed in unlikely orders of

being. Between men and planets, plants and gestures, words and weather.

These disturbing connections: an infant's cry and the stroke of silk; the whorl

of an ear and an appearance of dogs in the yard; a woman's head lowered in

sleep and the morning dance of cannibals; these are conjunctions which

transcend the sterile signal of any «willed» montage. These juxtapositions of

objects, sounds, actions, colors, weapons, wounds, and odors shine in an

unheard — of way, impossible ways.

Film is nothing when not an illumination of this chain of being which makes

a needle poised in flesh call up explosions in a foreign capital.

Cinema returns us to anima, religion of matter, which gives each thing its

special divinity and sees gods in all things and beings.

Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science.

Surround Emperor of Body.

Bali Bali dancers

Will not break my temple.

Explorers

Suck eyes into the head.

The rosy body cross

secret in flow

controls its flow.

Wrestlers

in body weights dance

and music, mimesis, body.

Swimmers

entertain embryo

sweet dangerous thrust flow.

The Lords. Events take place beyond our knowledge or control. Our lives are

lived for us. We can only try to enslave others. But gradually, special

perceptions are being developed. The idea of the «Lords» is beginning to form

in some minds. We should enlist them into bands of perceivers to tour the

labyrinth during their mysterious nocturnal appearances. The Lords have

secret entrances, and they know disguises. But they give themselves away in

minor ways. Too much glint of light in the eye. A wrong gesture. Too long

and curious a glance.

The Lords appease us with images. They give us books, concerts, galleries,

shows, cinemas. Especially the cinemas. Through art they confuse us and

blind us to our enslavement. Art adorns our prison walls, keeps us silent and

diverted and indifferent.

Dull lions prone on a watery beach.

The universe kneels at the swamp

to curiously eye its own raw

postures of decay

in the mirror or human consciousness.

Absent and peopled mirror, absorbent

passive to whatever visits

and retains its interest.

Door of passage to the other side,

the soul frees itself in stride.

Turn mirrors to the wall

in the house of the new dead.

THE NEW CREATURES

I

Snakeskin jacket

Indian eyes

Brilliant hair

He moves in disturbed

Nile insect

Air

* * *

You parade thru the soft summer

We watch your eager rifle decay

Your wilderness

Your teeming emptiness

Pale forest on verge of light

decline.

More of your miracles

More of your magic arms

* * *

Bitter grazing in sick pastures

Animal sadness the daybed

Whipping.

Iron curtains pried open.

The elaborate sun implies

dust, knives, voices.

Call out of the Wilderness

Call out of fever, receiving

the wet dreams of an Aztec King.

* * *

The banks are high and overgrown

rich w/warm green danger.

Unlock the canals.

Punish our sister's sweet playmate distress.

Do you want us that way w/the rest?

Do you adore us?

When you return will you

still want to play w/us?

* * *

Fall down.