AT a certain point it happened that something was perceived as coming into the airwaves, into people’s living-rooms, into the daily round, as of some significant and even urgent communication requiring immediate interpretation. This information or news, as it might be, was unfortunately not offered in an unambiguous language, or laid out for all to see like a smoke-message in the sky – yet it was undeniably there, and people claimed it could be felt in the blood, just under the skin, like an intuitive itch that threatened to never leave failing its decipherment.
Naturally there were those, as there always are in such cases, who pretended to a full authority in the explanation of the message, and for some time there were few persuasive enough to challenge their version. There was the possibility that no-one else could hear the message as loudly as they could, which meant it could be suggesting a different content, or something being lost in the translation. That it was so self-evident to them – abundantly broadcast in their daily language, even in their nightly dreams – did not mean it was something of equal clarity to everyone else, who seemed to be generally occupied by other, more uncertain, wavelengths.
There was not even unanimity that the message was entirely new. What, in any case, they all wondered, is a guarantee of the new? Most supposedly new things had been demonstrated on later consideration to have been only repetitions, re-occurrences, perhaps in some slightly varied guise, of other things that unequivocally had been before. The comprehension of dreams, the novelty of suicide, the demise of sex, for example – these were things that seemed to flow away and back within long cycles of historical time, unseen by most mortal observers. It would take an omniscient intelligence, a real mental panoramascope, to take in just how many repeated cycles, how many rehearsals of the same schema would stumble back on stage in their superficially surprising costumes, enact once again the same tin-pan vaudeville of misbegotten pratfall and innocent’s return, and the shuffling off the boards with a click of the heels, a reminder of the sweet goodtime certainty of it all swinging back in again (on a chandelier, perhaps) – before slipping off into the wings.
A theatre of returns. What was the message spelling out, this time round, exactly? Certainly there were a plethora of often extravagant, but for that no less probable, interpretations. That this war, for example, would be the last. That hunger – that old stock warhorse of the repertoire – was truly down on its heels now, that it wouldn’t be making a re-entry in the next installment. But these (and others like them), were the obvious major-players; maybe some lesser-known talents could, finally, share some of the limelight.
Disease, among these eternal throwbacks, had suddenly become wildly popular, as a subject of the new and unseen. Many were the theorists who in brightly tube-lit conference-rooms ascertained the truth in the body of the unwritten text: that the foe in their time was not the brute fact of violence or injustice so much as the invisible working of disease. Yet its working was ambiguous, for such disease was capable of turning around and carrying off undesired predators, as well. So what appeared a curse could as easily prove a blessing, and therein lay the redemption: angels and demons were twin-siblings, and would save us all from extinction if sufficiently entrusted to perform their own, however perverse, midnight rituals. After all – little else had worked (they mentioned science, reason, systematic ideologies, political and economic liberalism, etc.) Why not leave the mavericks to the field, and see where it might lead? Moreover, the field was new, the whole world was effectively untested territory now. The trick lay in not taking appearance at face-value, knowing that the angel and the demon inhabited mercurially changeable forms. It would only be enough to trust them, finally, and as many had already suggested, trust to the process they set in train.
Was that a new thing, itself, they asked? In time past – a time whose history they, in theirs, somehow stood outside of – it had been enough to trust in God. That at least, had been vaguely if not definitively debunked – they still kept a portrait of him and his messengers hanging at the exit-doors after all, for optional use, and there’s no question he provided for some nostalgic edification, just like Charlie Chaplin, V.I.Lenin, or Confucius, for example, remarkably still could. Other entertainers had, naturally, come and gone, and monuments could be seen to them, too, here and there, as if to retroactively confess that some things that would never return still had value to the relentless march of the new. Dead things, in other words. The technology, too, allowed for an unprecedented degree of lifelike preservation: Vladimir Ilyich, for example, was still going strong. It was as if the passed-on, in petrification, could still be in modus imitatio, real, and so in a sense, new again, not merely for a second time, but forever.
There were new everything: new forms of food-production, new modes of mass-transportation, new medical procedures, new developments in science, new religions; new kinds of media, new media-gods, new stories told in new movies, new books, new TV-shows, new combinations of all of these. New technologies mediating between a new perception of new ideas. New idea. That idea itself was not new, everyone long knew that, but the fact everyone knew that made it clearly new, and so, with a twinkle and a new kind of laughter, truly new. The possibilities, clearly, were endless. New ways of communicating, of falling in love and having sex, of procreating, of delivering new life, were advertised in new multi-media information consoles, it seemed in every new birthing season. New couplings, new extinctions, new forms of evolution that left biology and natural selection seriously in question. What was natural, in such new permutations of the possible? What was Nature, now?
Naturally, there were many who weren’t satisfied merely by the witnessing and classification of the new in and for itself, as an objective phenomenon. They wanted to know why – knowing, of course, that there was nothing especially new in that. In all of the multiple novel perspectives of reality available to them, they also demanded – as a formula, a mantra, a bedtime-story – an explanation. Which, of course, is where the message came in.
There were many, of course, who heard it and were content, as they said, to trust in the process. But that seemed like a circular proposition to others, who considered that to trust or not trust in the process was meaningless since all there was was the process which necessarily would determine the direction of things in any case, and trusting in it not make any difference to anyone. For others this simply wasn’t enough. For them – they have been mentioned – the purpose of the message was tantalisingly clear: that in the efflorescence of the new was a tangible proof of evolution’s grand course, and that it must be aided and abetted at every twist and turn, however unclear, amoral or deceptive its motives might appear.
War, in such a case, and as so often before then, could be easily confirmed as evolutionary necessity, and to offer still further confirmation it seemed for why a new one was breaking out every year in a different part of the world. (It was an issue of some perplexity, however, in seeking to gauge the true existence of these far-flung conflicts: they came to public attention in bits and bytes of digital data, perceived and misperceived by human bodies, notoriously prone to misinterpretation).
War could be, at least, a moral landmark bloodying the horizon, could be relied on to make a direct statement about the state of trust in the world. It has been seen that trust was the catch-all word of many of those who claimed the message for themselves: trust your husband, trust your wife, your bank, your insurance-fund, your analyst, your neighbour, your local street-crazy, your government, your nation, your guru, your friendly night-time navigator through the dark and troubled skies, trust yourself, trust even in God if it’s absolutely necessary, but above all trust in the process.
And yet war, that evolutionary staple, and an indubitable demonstration of the new (even where death was a demonstration of the eternal), pointed confident and authoritarian fingers at its own existence, its unmediated acting-out of the loss of trust between antipathetic parties – apart of course from that convention of trust which sees consensual war as a noble and morally sound form of human engagement. War, as everyone knew, has its history, its glory, and its honour, and may not be gainsaid. It was creator and destroyer both, a Lord Shiva of the spinning of the cyclic worlds.
As always, these things came full circle, with both dramatic and quotidian punctuations of the new littering its repeated round. Time, some venerable once suggested, is not a circle on a plane but a spiral that passes by its double (triple, quadruple…), looking down through the generations to all the terrible errors and more terrible solutions that have been found to keep the record spinning. The only problem was that on the twisting, ascending path some were blindfolded and others weren’t, some could hear the message loud and clear, and others couldn’t – could not even hear the quiet but insistent voice of their own futures. And it was those deaf ones, the message seemed to spell out, who by force of ignorance were able to deny the evidence of the message itself, and the trust the message endowed. It wouldn’t be enough to hear, they thought, those who, even in their sleep, couldn’t close their ears to the fierce ringing of necessity. It would have to take a surrender, as well. And even that, they feared – even a surrender to trust – might not be enough.
Paris 2006
(published in the GROUP ONLINE MAGAZINE, March 13, 2011: http://groupmag.blogspot.com/2011/03/group-7.html)
whispered lineage 
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