Down Deep, Even Deeper
What this brings us to,
more or less,
is a poetic, ironic analysis of events.
Against the simulation of a linear history “in progress”,
we have to accord a privileged status to these backfires,
these malign deviations,
these lightweight catastrophes which cripple an empire
much more effectively than any great upheavals.
We have to accord a privileged status
to all that has to do with non-linearity, reversibility,
all that is of the order not of an unfolding or an evolution,
but of a winding back, a reversion in time.
Anastrophe versus catastrophe.
Perhaps, down deep,
history has never unfolded in a linear fashion;
perhaps language has never unfolded in a linear fashion.
Everything moves in loops, tropes, inversions of meaning,
except in numerical and artificial languages which,
for that reason, no longer are languages.
Everything occurs through effects
which short-circuit their (metaleptic) causes,
through the Witze of events,
perverse events, ironic turnabouts,
except within a rectified history,
which,
for just that reason,
is not a history.
The Illusion of the End, by Jean Baudrillard, Trans. by Chris Turner, page 122, pub. 1992
Like you, I wonder where all of this leaves us? Where does this bring us to? What am I and where am I? Is “history” radically other than what we’ve all thought, been taught? It seems so.
Did the Civil War, you know the five years of slaughter between north and south, referred to by General Lee, at war’s end, as “that late unpleasantness”, conclude with a victory of the Federal government and the end of slavery? The answer: yes and no.
I once owned a book entitled The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. The book written by a Richmond Virginia newspaper editor, Edward Pollard, champions the South as righteous victors, and a race-based division of society as unambiguously right. The book was published only two years (1867) after Lee’s surrender of the army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox. Pollard argued that the South could still wage and win the “war of ideas.”
Yesterday by chance I read in my iphone news feed, a CNN breaking story that the NFL will remove its “end racism” sign from the super Bowl end zones.
Once you begin to see it, the irony just keeps coming.
There’s this, our newly elected president bragging about a military planeload of immigrants in transit to detention at Guantanamo Cuba. The 10 migrants on board are “the worst of the worst”, insisted the President.
I paused in thought: Why was he not included in the passenger roster for that flight?
What if all of us were taught, educated to believe, that history is the linear unfolding of events, progress, cause to effect, and so on, and so on, – down deeper, is not that at all? Is what I have thought as history more like a gag, a Witze, as rendered in German? An ironic/dark ‘turn of phrase’, without clean definition, the in-definite of something not finished. Similar to how a poet uses language…
Something that you and I can nudge, toward greater justice, more humane treatment for everybody?
Or not…
Well, WTF it is time for a tune! Music! More music I say! This tune seems apt for our circumstances. A cover of Bob Dylan’s great tune: All Along the Watchtower.
3 thoughts on “Down Deep, Even Deeper”
Trump wasn’t on that plane because the gust of wind from a butterfly could have changed the course of history.
Trump was not on that plane, chained to the floor, as was everyone else not because his crimes were not as craven or as numerous as theirs… He personally had sufficient support from you and others like-minded, to define them as “the worst of the worst” and so they were given a one way ticket. It is hard to imagine a person more qualified for a capital judgment than an individual who, incites a mob to overthrow a government, and now supervises the extra-legal dismantling of that government.
And yes a butterfly’s wing could have changed the course of events having to do with the deportation flight…
The depths of myopic ignorance appear to be limitless. When those who have the intelligence to grasp aspects of arcane philosophical thought and discuss the concepts of astrophysical theory yet cannot even remotely see the destructive effects of a madman on our nation’s future, it’s just sad. I mean really sad, for all of us. This entire conversation (and countless others) has not been about bits of political disparity, but about the existential nature of civilization dying within our lifetime. No, I’m not overstating the issue. It only takes looking at the facts, actual facts, not ones made up to fit a fully dysfunctional narrative. And so I continue to shake my head in disbelief at the ability of my brethren who can so twist every issue to fit that narrative. Like I said, it’s just terribly sad.