Aphorisms I

The bliss of losing track of time — The bliss entailed in losing track of time is an expression of potential utopia. To be able to relate to all of the past as if it were an afternoon spent reading a book, in which the horror of duration is liquidated. It is analogous to the experience of time in dreams, in which one experiences eons compressed into the span of hours. In contrast, history has become the sleepless night, in which each second that passes weighs on the insomniac’s heavy eyelids with the pressure of epochs and centuries. Time has become myth, fate, a force that confronts weary humanity as duration without end. The realization of freedom would break time’s spell, redeeming the hellishness of its eternal empty passing. The present is a long sleepless night; salvation may appear as the forgetting brought about by finally being able to fall asleep.

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Not only a matter of how — It is not only a matter of how the past appears to the present, but how the present might appear to the past. The “contemporary” is a shallow silhouette of a face, whose full physiognomy can only be illuminated by the light of History. To see the present by the light of History means to recognize it as transient, as capable of being overcome. Not for the sake of a new future, but for a different present that the past deserved. The ghosts of slain generations haunt the bedroom in which humanity naively sleeps. To wake up to their moans in the middle of the night of the now is not consoling. But there is a crack of light under the door of History; if only we could figure out how to open it.

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The weight of the past — The weight of the past is felt in the most inconspicuous of circumstances. The daughter who looks in the mirror one day and is appalled to see her mother looking back knows she has inherited more than a physical likeness. Rather, to recognize that one is turning into one’s parent is to feel the weight of generations of tradition transferred onto one’s shoulders. The mass of “cultural riches” inherited from the past weighs just as heavily on the overworked bodies and minds of contemporary humanity. As Benjamin writes, humanity has “ ‘devoured everything, both ‘culture and people’, and they have had such a surfeit that it has exhausted them.” But perhaps the most acute recognition of the weight of the past is felt by the fingers of the critical theorist who attempts to articulate something, knowing full well that, as Adorno puts it, “...whatever ideas he might contribute, were expressed long ago- and usually better the first time around.” If “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”, revolution is the process of awakening, in which the burden of the past is thrown off the conscience of humanity through its redemption, like one throws the blankets off oneself in the morning to wake up to the dawn of History, in which the day is lived precisely as a forgetting of the ghosts of the past that haunted one in one’s dream.

Frank Stella, The Marriage Of Reason and Squalor II, 1959. From: MoMa

Paul Klee, After the Drawing 19/75 [Absorption], 1919. Die Pinakotheken.

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Those who rage against society  — Those who rage against society today misunderstand the object of their rage. It is not so much “the system” they rage against, but rather against their own feeling of impotence within it. It is like the toddler who wants a new toy, but who throws a hysterical tantrum when denied it. The child’s anger appears as if it is directed against the parents; yet the parents  are merely the functionaries of a world he has yet to master. The rage is an expression of the child’s own helplessness in regards to a situation that he wishes to be otherwise, that he can’t control. Humanity has regressed to a state of infancy. It takes its rage as an indication of the severity of the problems that this society poses, without recognizing that this rage is leveled against humanity itself, against its own helplessness in the face of circumstances that appear to it as mythic as the parent appears to the child when denying him what he wants. And yet, with maturity, the voice of the parents becomes internalized as the voice of the adult himself, who has learned to recognize the voice of authority as his own. Can humanity in general learn to do the same? Can it come to recognize that the object that needs to be transformed in order for self-mastery to become a reality is humanity itself? That the mythic world that confronts us as an alien power is really ourselves? Yet we are blinded by our hysterical tears, waiting for a parental authority to console our anger and give it validation. A child grows up when he realizes that no one is listening to him crying.

William Eggleston, Untitled (Marcia Hare in Memphis Tennessee), 1975. WMagazine.