Seeing Through….

Robert Cheatham

"Beyond the windows, the air teems with the tribes of the invisible."

Roberto Calasso

 

"The blue sky above us is the optical layer of the atmosphere, the great lens of the terrestrial globe, its brilliant retina. From ultra-marine, beyond the sea, to the ultra-sky, the horizon divides opacity from transparency. It is just one small step from earth -- matter to space-light -- a leap or a take-off able to free us for a moment from gravity."

Paul Virilio

SUPER-BAND 1

Putting the quantum brakes on light

19 February 1999

"As every physicist knows, the speed of light in a vacuum is about 300, 000 kilometres per second. Although light travels fractionally slower through matter, it still propagates at speeds measured in thousands of metres per second. However, by exploiting a quantum effect called 'electromagnetically induced transparency', Lene Vestergaard Hau of the Rowland Institute for Science in the US and co-workers have reduced the speed of light in a gas of ultracold sodium atoms to 17 metres per second - 20 millions times slower than the speed of light in vacuum (Nature 397 594).

"Electromagnetically induced transparency relies on interference between different electronic transitions in an atom and has been used to make opaque media transparent at certain wavelengths in the past. In the latest experiment the sodium atoms were trapped and cooled in a magneto-optic trap. The atoms were cooled until they collapsed into a Bose-Einstein condensate - a special state of matter in which all the atoms are in the same quantum state and are described by a single wavefunction. Hau and co-workers then tuned a 'coupling' laser to a transition between two hyperfine states in the atoms. Under the right conditions they found that this slowed down a 'probe' laser beam travelling at right angles to the coupling laser. The sample also showed exceptionally large optical nonlinearities which could be useful in optical switching applications. The team also believe that it might be possible to slow the light even further - to speeds measured in centimetres per second."

Slow glass, deferred transparency, adjusted opacity: the suspension of transparency (but not its supercession), a 'state of exception' that accords with the propensity of western civ 101 to suspend generally its relation to nature (meaning: even to itself).

'Transparency' denotes extreme configurability, elision of medium in favor of transmission and transmissibility: cracks can be made into creases, which can be made into surfaces, turning a deaf ear to the temporal, irreparably mixing time with space: the same device of occult translocation, of attempting to figure the unfigurable, to mechanically 'force' a reading of the unreadable, to cause to jell, to put a 'fix' in, for a split second, melding extreme transmission (pure flow, being) and extreme opacity (Being, temporal stasis) into a cicatrix on the carapace of the mirrored world glass shell. Even if the scryer can not "exclude the hypothesis of an unfigurable universe, a Universe escaping every optical exigency" (Blanchot), she can mechanically congratulate the crossing of temporal paths: if nothing else by simply recognizing the possibility of different paths, counter-histories, divergent tranparencies, each opaque to the other, each figured on the others' unfigurability, each abandoned to the other, to the chances of the quantum as Figure works its way by way of cracks -- which Go All the Way.

TIME-OUT

("Mechanical occult" seems like an oxymoron, yoking the purely logical and lawlike transparent regularities of the machine with the opaque, indeed inaccessible, domain of that which is by definition invisible and hidden. The only way that they could be fused seemingly would be through a catastrophic erasure of the dialectic stroke which separates them, or at least a momentary lifting or relieving [aufhebung in Hegelian terms] of the stresses that bind them each to their separate poles, nomos / a-nomos [setting aside for the moment that, like shifting tectonic plates, that pressure relief IS the catastrophe.] This 'state of exception' -- a slightly uncanny interweaving of both the relieving and the catastrophe -- put into circulation most recently by Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben, would seem at tfirst glance to be concerned solely with the political. But the prescriptions and proscriptions of the 'politics of the imagination,' to use Colin Bennett's term, reaches all areas of life and thought.

In any case, the stroke separating the nomic (mechanical) from the anomic position right beside, para-, (and even within) the law may be necessary for the functioning of both; or as Agamben [in State of Exception] puts it, "when the exception becomes the rule, the machine can no longer function." The Occult is nothing if not the suspension of the rule of everyday lawlike behavior [yet somewhat paradoxically courted by rulebooks of ways to approach it], but also disappears when an ontology is sought for which is solely its 'own.' And likewise the rule only exists by its exception (leading Agamben to wonder about what happens when the exception becomes the rule: when the Messiah comes, when justice is complete, when the spaceships land, etc.).

The time when such positions become most visible is through the catastrophic; the state of exception -- the release from the law -- comes into existence THROUGH the catastrophic as well as BEING the catastrophe. There is something about liminality, produced by catastrophe, that brings out the fluidity of reality and a sense of its arbirtrary construction, that brings out the Trickster-like qualities of the occult and paranormal.

And it even does not matter that one consider the 'occult' to be a non-starter, or a 'void': it's necessity is still an imperative for the functioning of 'real life': "That is to say, everything happens as if both law and logos needs[s] an anomic (or alogical) zone of suspension in order to ground their reference to the world of life. Law seems able to subsist only by capturing anomie, just as language can subsist only by grasping the nonlinguistic.")

 

Un-Banded 1:

Abandonment is, in the first instance, an‘impossible’ (unbelievable) thought. And then it happens. There’s no way, or pattern, or model, or template, to write ‘abandonment, as there are facets, facades, fractures, fragments, filaments, filings, a thousand approaches, passages, thresholds, all without knowable or definable borders, and which are all to some extent and at the same time, out-of-bounds. [….] Abandonment (or the ‘desert’, as a possible description, or ambience) might be an offering ... a giving or tolerance in the realm of faith, a durable, durational, act of surfacing, a coming to the surface, of time, a kind of visible haunting.

The Archaeology Of Surfaces, or What Is Left Moment To Moment, or I Can’t Get Over It, Linda Marie Walker
  1. It is said that all counter histories, or at least those traditions resistant to, yet still somehow embedded in but occulted by, the Western European expansion, have their origins six thousand years ago in ancient Egypt. That unruly, roiling mass of indecipherability known as 'Egypt' was often included in that occulted heritage even if it's mechanisms (e.g., the Tarot deck) came about much later through the Greeks and Romans. So powerful is the pull of this Hermeticism that, when it was uncovered yet again after the first 'discovery' two thousand years ago by the Greeks, European travelers in the nineteenth century almost immediately saw in the vast cyclopean ruins something that they could only ascribe to forces beyond the ordinary constraints of time and space.
  1. R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz in that massive study called The Temple of Man attempts to transfer the sight lines of Hermeticism, and it's invisibilities, from the ocular to the olfactory to the oracular. 'Transparency' itself, almost the sole pole around which modernity rotates, is converted to the more primitive (from vision's exalted status) sense of smell. The esoteric has henceforth always been construed with the sexual as part of that whole complex of occluded bodily functions, functions which de Lubicz attempts to re-harmonize through examinations of ritual in stone and symbol, and the transparency of one to the other. Ritual is always a firm aspect of the occult, even its mechanism of actuation, a means of entraining the body in arenas where transparency and visibility no longer work. Or rather provide a block to a certain type of understanding, an understanding whose import cannot be 'seen', much less made transparent to understanding.
  2. This is the kind of 'understanding' which Lisa Marie Walker, in a more postmodern vein, calls, " a kind of sense without sense. A sense that is multiple and excessive, and yet beyond its own (scripted) temporal, spatial (and political) destiny."
  3. Transparency, both literally and metaphorically, has been seen to be one of the main leit motifs of the twentieth century and modernism. Transparency -- if it could be met -- is the accomplishment of all the goals of the Enlightenment; and certainly the sort of goal as reason envisioned by the Encyclopedists, which must rely on transparency to accomplish its tasks. One could even say that the goal is transparency on every scale and measure, everything visible (and hence accessible, at least in theory) to everything else.
  4. The paradoxicalness of the present age: everything is exhorted to a condition of trans-parency, one thing visibly crossing steadfastly, 'truthfully', loxodromically over to another: collapse in other words, the minor technical/mechanical heir to the Judeo-Christian apocalyptic collapse that infuses all western culture and teleologically drives it. But … time remains as obdurate and obsidian as before, a logjam of present-ness, heccaeity…. The Christian wait's for the Messiah to kick out the jams, motherfucker. The pagan scryer knows that the jams are everywhere, always kicked out, all one needs to do is pick up the sticks, drop the dice, tune in…
  5. Tumbled sticks of language poured out, to be sorted through an epiphenomena of time's compression in stakes driven into space: "The secret history of eternal recurrence is always a kind of Dionysian 'leap' into Time's uncanny enigma." Time-Fetish: the secret history of eternal recurrence, Ned Lukacher

    6. PRE-SAGE 1:

     loxodrome - rhumb line -- a sailor who has chosen a direction on the compass and keeps it steadily is following a rhumb line.

    rhumb line -- line on the surface of the earth that make equal oblique angles with all meridians, that is, a spiral coiling around the poles but never reaching them, and that is the path of a ship sailing alway oblique to the meridian in the direction of one and the same point of the compass.

    How is one to make a life, to be a life, no hint in how to move, when there so often seems to be just:

    TRANSPARENCY OPACITY

    BLANKNESS

    SILENCE

    BOREDOM

    DEATH

    INCOMPLETION

    CRACKS

    FRAGMENTATION NOISE

     

    INTERRUPTION

    TOO MUCH

    TOO LITTLE

     

  6. Divination stories depend (are pendant to…) a 'new leap into time' ---but what sort of time? Certainly not the new linear time of scientificity, but more like the monoblock of mythic time, a time where all sectors are omnipresent, in some sense transparent each to the other, past to future to present --the time of eternal return.
  7. It is not exactly at either the point of transparency or opacity that a shift into the divinatory (which is considerably different but allied to the prophetic in its temporal basis: the prophetic is linear while the divinational is rotatory). It is in the latency period between the two, the promise of one becoming the other, where "in this caesure or suspensive moment we glimpse uncanny or terrible perspectives on the future, or surpassingly beautiful images of desire." (Lukacher)

    8. PRE-SAGE 2:

    "[Higher order events take] place all around us, and the intersections of these events with one another yield geometrical forms which puzzle us as they recur over and over again. At every turning of the way we encounter the same configurations in different contexts. They are more than the lineaments of time and space. They are the 'something out of nothing,' the emergence along the cracks and seams of the Universe of what precipitates from the Beyond, and melts back into it again.

    Netherworld: discovering the oracle of the dead, Robert Temple.

    "In the domain of physics, cracks and creases are phenomena by means of which a discontinutity or a localization of energy may spontaneously be produced in an apparently uniform field, with homogeneous distribution of matter and energy; in other words, something is produced out of nothing."

    Terada and Watanabe in R. Temple

  8. What is the ontology of 'mechanicalness'? Is it separate from the ontology of the human? Can it be that at the very distant, and yet oh so close, heart of what it is to be human---lies nothing human? If it were other wise, then would that mean that the whole universe would have to be human. But if it WERE the case, then that would mean that the human is a small effect of forces, mechanics, operations and views, that view increasing every minute since Copernicus. It would mean that a throw of the dice IS constitutive of the human--and that even phrasing it thusly is too humanistic. The mechanical: a materialist articulation (even to infinity, even to the 'past', even to the 'future'), every point connects, eventually, to every other point: in the quantum world, every point IS potentially entangled with every other point, any time can be sedimented out of any other time.
  9. One might say it requires navigational skills (at the very least) on the order of skiomancy, a communication with the dark inert matter of the universe, the dead, shades, the past, with the intent of divining the future; a reading of bones in etheric bodies, charred remains in teacups, battered shores, and shattered psyches. In the glare of a 'bad infinity' as Hegel called it, all we want to do sometimes is cling to the shoreline--which IS the bad infinite, seeing only the grain of sand in the world, NOT following Blake's dictum. One way to move is...to follow the cracks, rather than stepping over them.
  10. Some 4200 years ago (when the Hale-Bopp comet first appeared) Yu, father of the first emperor of the Xia dynasty, saw rising out of the Lo River a turtle with certain markings and cracks on its shell and meditated on their significance.
  11. 3100 years ago King Wen formalized these cracks and markings in blackened and fired tortoise shells as the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching or book of changes. King Wen (declared king posthumously by his son who became the first emperor of the Zhou dynasty) created the hexagram arrangements while imprisoned by the Shang emperor; it was not an arrangement to describe abstract principles, but to describe his life and how it could be useful in overthrowing the corrupt Shang emperor and setting up a better government.
  12. Rather than divining the space of the other, the 64 cracks were arranged as a navigational tool toward and around the other, infinitely extensible formalized auratic handholds; a strategy of optimization to force the attention of the inanimate, the inert, in a return animation of blank mute matter but now gifted with language, a talking shell, bone, reed...
  13. (Perhaps the crack and the aura or halo are not unrelated. The aura, keeping in mind Walter Benjamin's concept of aura as "the unique phenoma of a distance however close that may be" would thus be evidence of an infinite, abyssal crack in the idea of 'surface,' confusing the relations of what may be seen through and what is opaque, as well as confusing the priorities of the transparent and the opaque, of what is near and what is distant. The world opens up in the crack of the technical media. This crack, as Gilles Deleuze describes it, "...runs its course in a continuous, imperceptible, and silent way, [and] that which it transmits does not allow itself to be determined, being necessarily vague and diffuse, transmitting only itself, it does not reproduce that which it transmits. It does not reproduce the 'same'. It reproduces nothing, being content to advance in silence and follow the lines of least resistance. As the perpetual heredity of the other, it always takes an oblique line, being ready to change directions and to alter its canvas".

    14. p 325, Logic of Sense

  14. In the 20th century, even the angelic tradition has become cracked whether in the distance and separation of a Rilkean angel or the progressive piling of debris of Benjamin's backward facing angel, pushing it into the future almost against its will: "A metaphysical fracture intervenes in the angeological tradition. Instead of being the guardians of a threshold, here angels appear to be unsurpassable demons of the Limit." Cacciari, Necessary Angel, p. 9)
  15. The 64 cracks, in transmitting only themselves and the contingencies of the crack, become the forcing medium for the 'future', a bolus traveling through the gullet of the world's space/time line (remembering that bolus comes from: 'to throw a mass" and means a large pill in veterinary medicine); just as the 32 chromosome pairs, transmitting through a space/time matrix (mater, "mother," matter), a coded matter, germ plasm, finding outlet through a thin scrim of flesh, matter spoken, then speaking, gossamer DNA strands (64 bit) converting-machinery for matter, bringing into pearlescent relief axiomatic flesh, mute matter linguified, navigational beacons coding movement loxodromically, cutting across all meridians, pursuing its own path, irrespective of monkeys, automatons, pomegranates...

    16. Un-Banded 2:

    Even beauty partakes of a form of crack/abandon such that "when we come upon beautiful things

    they act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to somthinge vaster ... or they lift us.. .letting the ground rotate beneath us ...so that when we land, we find we are standing in a different relation to the world than we were a moment before...we willingly cede our ground to the things that stand before us."

    Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, quoting Simone Weil

     

  16. What could it mean to be abandoned to a surface, and more to the point, to that hyper

surface, the reflection, either in a mirror or through a glass, seen darkly---the only way

that the transparent can reflect, can make itself known as a surface. One can be lost in

and to the depths of either one. (A first modern instant of specular abandonment link to

the uncanny and Sigmund Freud emerging form his study and becoming frightened at

seeing his double at the end of the hallway, belatedly realizing it was a mirror. And after

a fashion, Freud did indeed scry the future in that reflecting surface.)

Un-Banded 3:

"When we enter an unknown place, the emotion experienced is almost always that of an indefinable anxiety. There then begins the slow work of taming the unknown, and gradually the unease fades away. A new familiarity succeeds the fear provoked in us by the irruption of the 'wholly other.' If the body's most archaic instinctual reactions are caught up in an encounter with what it does not immediately recognize in the real, how could thought really claim to apprehend the other; the wholly other, without astonishment? Thought is in essence a force of mastery. It is continually bringing the unknown back to the known, breaking up its mystery to possesss it, shed light on it. Name it."

Anne Dufourmantelle, in Jacques Derrida/Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2000

1. There are times when she can't stand to see herself in the mirror. It doesn't matter whether it's morning, afternoon or night...far too etiolated, thinned out, emaciated to see an 'I' or anything else. The reflection either 1) doesn't seem to reflect true or 2) reflects all too true, either way a disaster waiting to happen ... a dis-aster, a movement away from the stars, compounded back into one's self...mustn't look or the reflection binds her to it, a fairy tale leading into a desert world, into a deserted world, into an abandoned world, too much for her own good.

She remembered the story for trancing out a chicken: hold its head on the ground and draw a line in front of it. It can't move beyond the line. She needed lines that crossed, that moved beyond the line she was on, the etheric line quilting what seemed to be an endless coverlet. lines forming the limit of her world, horizonal event lines that never get any closer or further away, not even necessary to telephone it in.

She consults Fortuna, communes with Maat, turns on the television, blanks out, lets go, comes back, weaves a package together by speaking in tongues, gluing in Oulipo strands to a tenuous past and an even more feathery future, reading, reading, darkly…

Un-Banded 4:

And he knew, thanks to the too ancient knowledge, effaced by the ages, that the young names, naming twice, an infinity of times, one in the past, the other in the future, that which is found only beyond, named hope, deception.

Maurice Banchot, The Step Not Beyond

 

The ultimate of the mechanical is touch: contiguity, articulation from one to the other.

Touch = the technical, the machine, the bundle of yarrow stalks, the greasy hand. One is abandoned whether turning one's back to it, moving to that very material 'hope, deception' Beyond -- or whether turning TO the touch, which, after all, always leads beyond one's grasp anyway.

 

Earthly in/divisible

passed through / not

In/erring

hold tight: mech arm, mech ear

eye gone

To other side . . .

no, no side,

Face down,

Slab down, tine open, reflected back

& through

& out

…you and yr

god damn fucked up

secret