Боги и Новые создания - страница 12

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.