“In this record I shall tell only what I want to tell, for there is a line of demarcation between oneself and the public. There are some things which if divulged to the public, I would have nothing left to hold body and soul together, and my personality would disappear like the waters of the rivers that flow into the sea.”
— in Bret Easton Ellis’s White, 2019
— Tropen Jainism, Chris Buzelli, for Tropen Museum, Amsterdam, a Jainism alterpiece, but it reminds me of a character in China Miéville, I think it’s The Last Days of New Paris, after the S-Blast, a blast of Surrealist energy that causes Paris to be cordoned, in an effort to stop Europe and then the world succumbing to the scourge of surrealist manifestations.
L.A. Times: At one point Miéville writes of the manifs that they produce a “stir of recognition” even when they’re “something inconceivable… never previously seen.” That’s a good description of surrealist art, and of what this book fails…
I’ve got to a bit in a detour writing “The Theory of the Moving Image” where Surrealism leads to Walter Benjamin’s conception of the dialectical image. The next bit will go something like, The fragmentation proper to modernity and the dialectical image differ but the dialectical image, by backdating movement to the still image, tells us something about that fragmentation, since it involves the mixing up of an historical object in the actual world to uncanny effect. What’s going on? History is.
No longer past, it’s current and immediate … It becomes so in the moving image’s capture of passing time so that it can be replayed. Replayed, we see time as it actually was, in all its unrepeatability, being repeated. The fragmentation proper to modernity records the shock of this … S-Blast.
