The Holocene Prometheus
About 20 years ago I spent a summer taking photographs in the Swedish countryside (Smaland, around my ex- in-laws house on a lake, and Narsholmen where Tarkovsky shot his last film, ‘The Sacrifice’) with my little Lomo camera, and writing a kind of folk horror Ladybird book fairy story about midsummer and forest spirits, seven flowers and leaping so so impossibly high, transformation and death, intertwined with a concrete poem composed from every 7th word from a diary I kept on a 2 week holiday on Gotland. With the word ‘Yattat’ (my onomatopoeic understanding of the Swedish word ‘Hjartat’, meaning ‘heart’) repeating faintly in the background. I’ve lost the diary long since. The photos, fairy story, and poem became a book which didn’t get published at the time, and after a few years I couldn’t find any of the artwork at all.
As usual, somewhat a drift: that ebb/flow of ideas, shapes, coloursounds (‘things’ and ‘stuff’) receding and refocusing over years, sometimes immediate and sometimes, more rarely for me at least, taking form over time and time, passing through and along time and again. Unfolding this sense of drift is a haunted endeavour. A fervid grasping at the always just gone. Attempting to comprehend the not yet.
Or waves . . . the impetus to do something, a gathering in the grey that swells and grows, gaining momentum, meaning, roiling towards, over deeps and fathoms below unknown, unseen . . . I keep grasping to describe this — seems like again and again — and I never manage to get close, which I suppose is the very thing that means I keep trying, and is probably the reason so many try the same thing, again and again.
The urgency in this — attempting to set out what the ineffable feels like, what the constant nagging conjures — is mirrored in the urgency of the latest thing. Usually technology of some kind (a toy? a revolution?), there’s always this pattern: a new tool (or toy) appears and becomes ubiquitous both materially and philosophically. It’s everywhere, trammelling the bloodstream of culture, politics, economics — although not necessarily society in terms of everyday living for the majority, which is often forgotten or ignored. This thing appears: it is the thing to change and/or fix everything: it is something which is the next thing. Occasionally — once or twice (ish) in a century — this thing does change things. It transcends and embeds into life until what came before seems near incomprehensible. More often, though, this thing fades, leaving traces of itself here and there, shadows in the corner over there in twilight.
Things come and go. When they come, lots and lots of people fall in devoted, obsessive blind love. As they go, people forget, as if there never ever was even the hint of a memory.
Things come and go. Some things stay as they are, some things change (to fit in, adapt, find their use, to evolve, survive), but who at first can say or tell which will be which? What does it matter — and so, what does the thing matter in its first iteration, as it appears from nowhere and wrestles to find its place in this world — what does it matter? Things come and go. This has always been.
I think of — and perhaps the obvious thing is the advent of photography (how it changed painting/sculpture and all media afterwards completely and forever, opening a door into the unseen, the gestural, the kinetic and so on and on) — but I think of spiritualism. Seances, table tipping, Swedenborg and Mesmer, the Fox sisters, ghosts and charlatans — everywhere, a craze of overlaid beliefs, morality and ethics in pursuit of knowing the mind of God. A self-propelled collage of cultural anomalies, strangeness under harness towards the attempt to make sense of something unknowable, undefinable. How so many individuals and groups rebuilt their world through this view of the uncanny, aggregating global and personal occult flotsam into systems for understanding the afterlife, investigating and experimenting with language to conjure a new perception that previously seemed out of reach to the great majority. A different kind of alchemy for everyone.
From Wikipedia:
Maurice Doreal (1898–1963), was born Claude Doggins, He was an American occultist and founded the Brotherhood of the White Temple.
He claimed that in 1925, he went to the Great Pyramids of Giza and discovered the Emerald Tablets of Thoth, a king of Atlantis (not to be confused with Emerald Tablet of the Alchemists). He then claimed that he had “translated” the text.
In around 1930, Doreal formed the Brotherhood of the White Temple in Denver, having been involved in Theosophy. He claimed that in 1931, in Los Angeles, he met two Atlanteans who took him to a cave underneath Mount Shasta. Doreal quickly developed a cosmology focused on the inner earth, describing “underground races” he claimed to have learned about from the Atlanteans. Doreal developed theories of an underground serpent race. During the 1950s, Doreal incorporated aliens into his views. He combined these all into a theory that in the second half of the 20th century, the serpent race would ally with the Antichrist. He believed that there were “three types of flying saucers including one piloted by ‘serpent people’ who were once ice-bound in Siberia, became defrosted and then replaced and overthrew the Communist regime in Russia”.
Either/or: Pursuing a thought: pursuing technology. One or the other — not both, nor a combination or a variation. The path splits, and there is a choice, conscious or not. The thought is the thing, and through contemplation, investigation and play, it grows and becomes a thing, and then technology/technologies become useful to bring the thought into being. Or. Technology is the thing, and through its use a thing comes into being. I think these are different, very different. There is an effect on the psyche, individual and collective. The thought as the thing seems to drift towards a wholeness. A certain contemplation, and then action, and then consideration, and so on: varieties of play and intellect that flourish and flower like music. Technology as the thing is a learning process without love. Essentially an empty pursuit. Collage as a way of life, a self-delusion that spreads, a societal psychosis.
The loss of imagination, of style.
So now, there is a dream generator — another new thing to play with, another alchemy, another spinning Jenny, another Pokemon Go, conjuring from the clouded trillion billion multitudes those dreams as in surreal, as in ungraspable, as in fervent & obsessive dreams. This thing is a dream generator. We’re all letting things grow, we’re all letting things go.
I found the artwork — actually a PDF (the original artwork, all the photos and source file, is definitely gone away somewhere else) — of the fairy story, Ladybird photo poem book I made and thought I’d lost forever, 20 years ago. It’s being published. My (ex) in-laws house is gone, the land repurposed.
