Re: [-empyre-] Through the Crack in the Past

[Henry Warwick <henry.warwick@sbcglobal.net>]

On Feb 28, 2006, at 1:34 PM, Nicholas Ruiz wrote:

> And we're gone like we're dancing on angels
> And we're gone, through the crack in the past
> Like a dead man walking.
>
> David Bowie, -Earthling- (CD) Virgin (1997)


Actually, it's first person, singular:

And I'm gone
Like I'm dancing on angels
And I'm gone
through a crack in the past
Like a dead man walking

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/davidbowie/deadmanwalking.html

Awesome tune, though. That it's still a vital record after 9 years is  
kind of creepy, but I would expect no less from Bowie.
who noted back in the 1970s that everything on stage is a pose,  
including sincerity - kind of the essential post-modernist, IMHO.


> Perhaps, we too are gone.  The critics, with little sense of  
> direction; the
> artists with little sense of purpose; perhaps, to borrow from  
> Baudrillard,
> the "mélancolique générale de la sphère artistique" is far too much  
> weight
> for any of us to lift.

Don't lift it. Ignore it and do something worthwhile. Bowie lifted  
Drum N Bass and infused it with some serious rock-out horsepower to  
make Earthling. It's not the lifting of DNB or Rock that's  
interesting - it's the songs he wrote that were so brilliant,  
regardless of the aesthetic references.


> We trade in the currency of thought as a challenge, and there is  
> but a small
> market for it.

Which is why one should squander one's riches as soon as possible.  
The world is full of ever more ideas - there is a massive inflation  
going on - so spend as fast as you can and buy some fixed assets  
against the constant eroding drizzle.


> And alas, though we seek someone to blame for the underlying
> conditions of thought, there is no one; and certainly Capital,  
> least of all.
> For to claim that Capital is to blame for the world, is only to indict
> ourselves of the crime of replication for which every living thing  
> worries.
> The sign of Capital is that of our own; such a conflict it brings  
> is always
> elemental.

Until?

> We began with our thoughts on the subject of 'a going apart' and  
> what such a
> term in our languages might mean today.  Sedition is certainly a  
> narrative
> trap with teeth, but for whom?  How far apart can one go, without
> identifying an other?  And since for every one, there is an other,  
> 'a going
> apart' is the world's ineluctable destiny, no?

It's all one big ball. There is no "going apart" in this world except  
in the perceptions of the passengers, who ride and ride and ride.


> In the end, a society is left with the dirty work of the terrain  
> and its
> demarcation, and the self-discrimination of identification because  
> we are
> destined to interfere with the world as a function of our  
> overreplicative
> device; the metaphysics of Capital being merely its simulation.   
> Out of
> favor cultural anthropologies become seditious currencies in a  
> world that
> traffics in the currencies of its very own genetic Code.

I hope you enjoy gardening. Plant some trees.


best,

HW