Боги. Новые создания (ЛП) - Моррисон Джим - Страница 7
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staring in the dark.
Not one of the prisoners regained sexual balance.
Depressions, impotency, sleeplessness… erotic
dispersion in languages, reading, games, music,
and gymnastics.
The prisoners built their own theater which
testified to an incredible surfeit of leisure.
A young sailor, forced into female roles, soon
became the «town» darling, for by this time they
called themselves a town, and elected a mayor,
police, aldermen.
In old Russia, the Czar, each year, granted-
out of the shrewdness of his own soul or one of
his advisors' — a week's freedom for one convict
in each of his prisons. The choice was left to the
prisoners themselves and it was determined in
several ways. Sometimes by vote, sometimes by lot,
often by force. It was apparent that the chosen
must be a man of magic, virility, experience,
perhaps narrative skill, a man of possibility, in
short, a hero. Impossible situation at the
moment of freedom, impossible selection,
defining our world in its percussions.
A room moves over a landscape, uprooting the mind, astonishing vision. A
gray film melts off the eyes, and runs down the cheeks. Farewell.
Modern life is a journey by car. The Passengers
change terribly in their reeking seats, or roam
from car to car, subject to unceasing
transformation. Inevitable progress is made toward
the beginning (there is no difference in terminals),
as we slice through cities, whose ripped backsides
present a moving picture of windows, signs, streets,
buildings. Sometimes other vessels, closed
worlds, vacuums, travel along beside to move
ahead or fall utterly behind.
Destroy roofs, walls, see in all the rooms at once.
From the air we trapped gods, with the gods'
omniscient gaze, but without power to be
inside minds and cities as they fly above.
June 30th. On the sun roof. He woke up suddenly.
At that instant a jet from the air base crawled
in silence overhead. On the beach, children try
to leap into its swift shadow.
The bird or insect that stumbles into a room
and cannot find the window. Because they know
no «windows.»
Wasps, poised in the window,
Excellent dancers,
detached, are not inclined
into our chamber.
Room of withering mesh
read love's vocabulary
in the green lamp
of tumescent flesh.
When men conceived buildings,
and closed themselves in chambers,
first trees and caves.
(Windows work two ways,
mirrors one way.)
You never walk through mirrors
or swim through windows.
Cure blindness with a whore's spittle.
In Rome, prostitutes were exhibited on roofs above the public highways for
the dubious hygiene of loose tides of men whose potential lust endangered the
fragile order of power. It is even reported that patrician ladies, masked
and naked, sometimes offered themselves up to these deprived eyes for private
excitements of their own.
More or less, we're all afflicted with the psychology of the voyeur. Not in a
strictly clinical or criminal sense, but in our whole physical and emotional
stance before the world. Whenever we seek to break this spell of passivity, our
actions are cruel and awkward and generally obscene, like an invalid who has
forgotten how to walk.
The voyeur, the peeper, the Peeping Tom, is a dark comedian. He is
repulsive in his dark anonymity, in his secret invasion. He is pitifully
alone. But, strangely, he is able through this same silence and concealment to
make unknowing partner of anyone within his eye's range. This is his threat
and power.
There are no glass houses. The shades are drawn and «real» life begins. Some
activities are impossible in the open. And these secret events are the voyeur's
game. He seeks them out with his myriad army of eyes — like the child's
notion of a Deity who sees all. «Everything?» asks the child. «Yes, every-
thing», they answer, and the child is left to cope
with this divine intrusion.
The voyeur is masturbator, the mirror his badge, the window his prey.
Urge to come to terms with the «0utside», by
absorbing, interiorizing it. I won't come out,
you must come in to me. Into my womb-garden
where I peer out. Where I can construct a universe
within the skull, to rival the real.
She said, «Your eyes are always black.» The pupil
opens to seize the object of vision.
Imagery is bom of loss. Loss of the «friendly
expanses». The breast is removed and the face
imposes its cold, curious, forceful, and inscrutable
presence.
You may enjoy life from afar. You may look at
things but not taste them. You may caress
the mother only with the eyes.
You cannot touch these phantoms.
French Deck. Solitary stroker of cards. He
dealt himself a hand. Turn stills of the past in
unending permutations, shuffle and begin. Sort
the images again. And sort them again. This
game reveals germs of truth, and death.
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
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