ghosTTruth
Just a Frenzy of Hysterics (like an Ostentation of Peacocks, Skulk of Foxes, or Conpiracy of Lemurs) Addressing Art, Epistemics, Esoterics, and Etc.
Philosophy
In The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood Aaron Santesso and David Rosen present life as an allegory without a key. "A 'surveillant' reality, we would suggest, also has an allegorical quality—though, because of its temporal dimension, this quality is unlike any form of allegory we have encountered. […] it was common, in the period following September 11, to look back on the years previous as coded with double meanings. Events that at the time had seemed innocuous, or were simply invisible (for example, an uncommonly high number of young Saudi Arabian men taking flying lessons), now assumed a sinister, if flattened, second sense as counters in a narrative of which no one—or only a few—had been aware, the organizing 'singularity” lying in an unsuspected future. In retrospect, one recognized oneself as having lived, without violence to the term, in an allegory."
Hauntology
Sadeq Rahimi writes in The Hauntology of Everyday Life that, “To select strategic social or political lines of move, or to design effective interventions, we need to first understand the possibilities, hopes and desires that were once and are no longer available to the public conscious, to unearth and exhume crypts in which suppressed dreams of past communities and their lost moments are trapped. This is clearly a different strategy from history, from archaeology, […] in that instead of attempting to establish that which was, hauntological analysis seeks to know—to allow to speak, to be more specific—that which was to be, that which could have been but never was, the future that hailed the past but then disappeared from the horizon.”
An Imprint of Montag Press
FILM
If the cultural-industrial question of the moment repetitively asks—We don’t really want a CIVIL WAR, one PURGE per summer season, or a TRANSCENDENT intelligence from outside the city and after the law, do we?—then what is being predicted but also predicated of how we might sleepwalk towards the dawn and dusk of civilizational collapse and technological singularity? Before straying into what’s foreseen INLAN[i]’s darkness straying into evening EMPIRE and demise, how might we interpret these symptoms and psychic residues arriving from the future so as to intercept retrochronic narrative feedback loops such as: The Storming of the Capitol ←→ promptly narrativized/commodified as ←→ the stylistically-similar fall of the White House and murder of the President in →←CIVIL WAR←→ what is about to happen next. - An Excerpt Of From Caligari to Carruth: Visionary Creativity as a Negation of Future’s Past
Music
Like an indoor cat peering at the Early Morning Rain through his window pane, Dylan helps us reflect upon all the counterfactual love lost to the @outsideness of it all. Dylan shows us the long-gone horse and rider in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR; “the awful truth of how sweet life can be”; the woman you didn’t speak to on the Gravitron that may have made it all okay; the “paradise in that home across the road” with its Christmas pie and withered flower forever Going, Going, Gone to where gone away things go, which is to MARIENBAD, not today, but one year ago, where we can’t quite remember Bob Dylan, though he’d “be coming back in a little while.” - An Excerpt From Time and Propinquity
Poetry
I have never seen so many/night cigarettes still burning/on the bus floor/on the day The Driver/pulled over at Pape/Spirit Hookers was graffito’d/on a City of Toronto/Litter Bin ¶ I’d thought to wear/a festive shirt/To fit in/on The Day of the Dead/Though I myself/Was committing/to the less festive/Mersivity Conference/to contemplate/the mysteries/of/Water-/Computer-/Human-/Interface/ ¶ So I’d worn my green checked/shirt with buttons/only at the bottom/and the typewriter/ostentatiously emblazoned/yet ever unnoticed/Beneath it a t-shirt/canary a yellow/as the spectrum allows/commemorating a remembrance run/I had not ran/for a man/who had to be dead by now ¶ The Driver returned always to Pape/where the Spirit Hookers wait/having seen too much/of the festive men/early in the mourning/in the flat Coors Lite of dusk/and at the end of eternity again ¶ The Driver returned to his Kipling/Halving seen enough/of the children’s resentment/and the women’s White Claws. - An Excerpt From The Introductions.
Fiction
“- I still think of myself as a young man. - Yes - A slightly old young man. - That’s not unusual. - A slightly old young man still advertising in the rivers and the trees for a mate.” - Donald Barthelme, The New Music
Recent Books
Time & Propinquity
Through a series of advice blogs advising a “you” that is clearly the blogger himself, David Estaire—a dilettante, an inhaler of cleaning products, a melancholized brother—employs counterfactual and imperative tenses to describe his travails from San Francisco to Sault Ste. Marie, from suburban fatherhood to Skid Row, from reality show stardom to The Serpent River Penitentiary. These Philip K. Dickian sustains of involuting realities depict the grief of the sinister hobbies e.g., ‘inveigling’ e.g., ‘deceit;’ the grief of Ricœurant Memory, History, and Forgetting; the grief of the coins accidentally eaten while on Ambien, the coins presumed to be mints. David eschews epistemic and methodological humility to paragraph goblin from scholars of sempiternality, emotional plague, and the blockchain. These are among the lesser sins justified by the premonition that his “time-symmetrical blog chain” can circumvent a machinic desire to object-orient the whole human-dreamt entire.
Over a period of several months in the winter of 2022, a nameless entity, via manipulations of entangled particles across time, or pods, as the entity referred to them, transmitted an expressive model for the development of an eternally sustainable utopian consciousness into the plastic architecture of the author’s dreams. This book is the visual-textual record of those transmissions.
If Propinquity is defined as kinship, but also proximity, as Augustine asked, “What, then, is time?” Our authors and artists see time not just as a tapestry, but the very thread and needle stitching the patterns of our lived experience. We have time as "the accident of accidents." We have orthodox theologies of fallen time as unending desire. We halve time's masculine birth into a Freckled Goddess. We have Time as an Emergent Symbiotic Interaction, an Omnitemporal Psyche standing firmly Against the Immanentization of the Aeon.
.citamelporb eht dna ,driew eht ,scimetipse fo xetrev eht ta gnihsilbuP.
Satisfied Customer
★★★★★
Santesso and Rosen continue, "'But why stop at “having lived?' Wouldn’t it be likely that the present was similarly riddled with the signs and tokens of a dire futurity, that we were all the barely adequate readers of submerged narratives that surrounded us on all sides—in short, that the present moment was an allegory without a key? [which would] only encourage the temptation to look upon the miscellaneous detritus of everyday life as similarly, if obscurely, freighted. […] Where paranoid allegory is always present-directed (the unseen Enemy is always to be confronted now, his machinations unfolding as we speak), proleptic allegory looks to the future.[…] Although paranoid systems inevitably foundered in contradiction, their prescriptions for action were unambiguous: once the enemy had been identified—the Jews, the masons, the liberals—a course of necessary, violent revenge was clear. With prolepsis, however, the singularity was always being deferred. Adequate to what, then? And what, finally, did the unanswerability of this last question mean for the possibility of action?"
