Bliss

Пожалуйста, элементарно!

"I read it," he put the big file in front of me on my desk. "You have to rewrite it."

Lucifer was sitting across the desk, but he had this special ability to make you feel that it is his, not your place.

"You have to do it again, my boy. A deal is a deal." I don't know where they got this idea about the "satanic" laughter, I never heard it. A giggling, yes. Maybe Mefisto had it, I don't know, but I liked Lucifer's humor.

"Look, I will work with you, as long as you are willing to work."

"Did you make your notes?" I opened the three-ring file.

"I also left some notes on the webpages...."

"I asked you not to mess with my webpages! I told it many times! I have no back ups...."

"Could I have a cigarette?" He took the pack from the desk. "I think that I do have human qualities already. I think that I can get addicted to smoking."

[viewpoint: part 3]

I. Spectacle, Movies and Heaven on Earth

My American Experience:

God moves everything according to the mode of the thing moved: thus He moves the corporeal creature through time and place, and the spiritual creature through time, but not through place, as Augustine declares (Gen. ad lit. viii, 20, 22)[1]

I moved through both...
I didn't ask to be in this position. I don't enjoy it. But I have to accept it in order to make sense of my times and my experience.

I feel that the eschatological ideas are not productive. First, it's behind us, we are deep into routine living the apocalypse. Second, the end-of the world is a never-ending process and should be seen pragmatically. The catastrophe brings even more cheap taste than even resurrection. The Rapture is trivialized by the tele-evangelists, who are not aware that their own presence on the screen is the sight of the end. What could scare us after the death camp of the century of wonders?
The horror became a genre.
Living Apocalypse? Hollywood! Only anti-utopia is left to dream about. They do it as well.
And how many!
Stupid fantasies instead of great utopias? They are results of realized utopias. TV stories you can't remember, like most of the dreams, there's nothing to reflect, to understand. Day dreaming. They need something to watch. Is life not interesting and complicated enough to ask for entertainment? Or too complex? What is this quiet suicide? They go to sport events, rock concerts, movies? Billions! What are they doing here? Who called them in? It must be a resurrection, Judgement Day and trial. And what to do with them after the sentencing? How more useless could humans be? Animal or grass are manifestations of life -- are we of the same?

Resurrection, you say? What a stupid idea, they say!
Something of the Xerox corporation. Copy which is better than an original! You don't believe me?
How about the known manifestation of idea of resurrection?
I loved cinema (and still hate movies).

Seeing everything -- that was the definition of power (God).
See = know.
Could we turn it into something opposite? Entertainment!
Let's bombard them with pictures, sounds, words! Attack!
Arrogance instead of ignorance; when we think that we know.
After the sentencing. After the Judgement. That's para-modern...

"The wise and dread Spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and non-existence" -- began the Grand Inquisitor in his talk to Christ.
Referring to Devil? Or mankind? Maybe, Man? God?
The spirit of non-existence! What is it? Future? Past?

The triumph of good, better and utopia! The wise spirit of non-existence -- yes, it's us, the super-humans. The victory of humanity! Who would rebel against it?
... And we are stuck with our humanism. Concerned with children who shouldn't be born in the first place, with the homeless, who grew up out those "extra" people, with drugs and crime which are attributes of the humans who have no business being alive because they have nothing to do. We violated the laws of nature, we are letting in through the doors of techno-culture of everything -- premature born, sick, accidental falls from the Nothing into paradise which could artificially support everything, including the dead. Welcome all! Come on down!
What for?
What a strange question! Don't you know that we can and should construct ourselves and the meaning of life?

This mad nature (humans are the gross violation of the natural) produces the monsters and their monstrous culture. There's no limits for their growth. We criticize Chinese one-per-family child policy as a violation of human rights. We ask for abolishment of death penalty for every country which wishes to join the European Union. We are against abortion and the right to die. We are against death in principle!
What would be a solution for our countless problems? Make them into happy human robots! The ones who would watch soaps and sitcoms, Emmies and Oscars, Olympics and Miss America. The Wheel of Fortune is for them! More games, idiots are not a threat to society.

The answer:

"The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness -- that is what one must contend against." (The Dream of a Ridiculous Man)[2]

Image of life is better than life?
Do they want to keep their bodies forever? -- madness of Polaroid. Instant past. The reminder that you could die any moment. Photo, nothing less than miracle -- why, how could it be possible? Desire of many is granted.
Film?! Oh, "they" have to have cameras! Edited reality is much better one. Let them dream and lie. Let them fool themselves. Let them be happy.

Bliss? Let's go to the movies!

Oh, the beautiful side of speed!

On the side of the page I could read his note with the strong clear handwriting:

"I am glad that you can feel it now, the speed. Please, remember, when you feel it, you can see -- or see and feel at the same time, then you can write with pictures. I need the images, Anatoly!

PS. If you can't write the visions and dreams, please, put at least some graphics on your webpages. I have a lot of good porno."

II. GOD'S ARCHITECTURE

Whence it is said (De Causis, prop. 16) that "intelligence is finite from above," as receiving its being from above itself, and is "infinite from below," as not received in any matter. [3]

Films have to be immaterial! Music and poetry are too material next to them.

The real is a hell next to the virtual world; it's mortal, changeable and disappearing. As a result -- Materialism happens to be responsible for producing the technology for VR. Perfection of the Real (Purification) is done by processing it through "humanization" -- perception. It has to be seen in order to belong to the realm of paradise. The World without an observation is a darkness. Blind -- it never took place. At the time of modernism the Matter lost its domination, it became just a material.[4]

By recording the real, we acknowledge (recognize) its temporal beauty and immortalize it. (Framing, or cutting out everything of "aesthetic disinterest" -- Kant.) In paradise the real lives in its light shadows. Only there could it be celebrated, because the real is a rarity, always in shortages and hard to find.

Ideal as Real?
Experience of the Ideal?
Bliss -- great joy or happiness[5]; (spiritual) joy, heavenly rapture = Ecstasy. Inspiration v. Feeling Good (safe, relaxed): disappearance of limitations v. comfort within the existing structure. Within the bliss a material space acts referential (memory of space-space). The speed lets us leave the real, it must be un-natural, non-habitual, outside of our normal experience. Camera and montage can do it.

"If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are -- if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time." Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (1988).

Without conscience and its collective presence (technology) the real is irrelevant, unknown and still belongs to Nothing. Nature without man is without God. Could it even be called "real"? It's life (proper say "existence") which has no bliss; only a first step from Nothing. The way the being negates the non-being; life (in its mortality) is a negation of being, the conscience must to negate life. Reflection is the great return to the origins of everything -- Nothing.

Each step in this chain of self-negations is a war. A revolt. In our time it is a negation of the mind. To transform knowledge into a power (which rules the universe) the conscience has to negate itself through collective conscience (technology). Individual mind and techno-humanity have relations of a conflict.

Paradise is a negation of hell. Hell is a pre-paradise, a thesis. Paradise and hell are two parallel worlds. The brightness of paradise produces hell (absence of paradise). Paradise is virtual, perfect. Synthesis -- a soul, both are negated.

Resurrection starts with resurrection of God or call it creation of God. Technology?!

Please, please, don't rush it! Even I, who is familiar with the subject, and, who can read your mind, can't follow! What's the matter? You are a writer, writers write -- write, please! L.

III. THE MECHANICS OF RESURRECTION

Life of Camera: Primary and Secondary Motions. In event-oriented universe an event has its gravity (primary) and camera gravitates to big masses (secondary motion). Balance between the two: objective (reality) and subjective (mind) reality. Two types of speed.

But in the divine persons there is no "before" and "after." (St. Thomas Aquinas _Summa Theologica_ First Part, Question 35, Article 1) They have no image. Image is derived from imitation, which implies "before" and "after." How the R world could be divine? Divine must be invisible. We make it visible.

Oh, the virtual still is in need of the real? Not independent?

"Image includes the idea of similitude." Even a photograph?

"Augustine says (QQ. lxxxiii, qu. 74): `One egg is not the image of another, because it is not derived from it.'" (Aquinas)

Photo-image isn't image? Almost. Because it's (almost) the Same. Not imitation (simulacra), but another life of the object. Resurrected existence is the different views of the subject. Perception of it becomes "reading." We do not have an object, we are "approximating" it as if of a subject (living, evolving "thing").

Virtuality (cinema) is not fully an image of the world, (because we use images to communicate?) something which is outside of existing reality. A new essence which has no previous existence, and -- therefore "divine" -- and has no image to point at but only an interpretation.

[ details are in Film600 and film.vtheatre.net ]

1. THE SERVANT OF TWO REALITIES

If the movement in front of a camera transforms itself into a "record" of first reality, camera movement represents a rearrangement of pov (status of observation). Three cameras shooting doesn't change the reality till it comes to the screen; here begins a new life where we only indirectly know the original world, which became material for spiritual massages. Since everything was translated into image (through recording), the last similitude ends at the editing. The Narrative starts its life. "Framing" was already a deconstruction of the real, disintegration, differentiation -- in that act alone the real was "read" with selection of one or another quality of the real. The real surrenders its powers to the Sight. How could it not? The real is a slave of time, the divine (camera) represents the master -- time itself.

Alas, the cinema has another model of imitation -- the mind. The virtual reality is constructed in imitation of my inner reality. Logic, thought, feeling. Now the scanned (recorded and chosen) real is rearranged according to the reality of the eternal world. The world of meanings, associations, ideas. The first (mortal) nature has its second chance to live in immaterial world. This angelic universe of signs only remembers (emotional recall) original reality. The real is alienated from itself and taken into another (humanized) chronotope of being, which has existence without having life.

Mise-en-scene: picture of life [space].
Secondary motion (of camera): picture of mind [time].
The camera represents the life of the subject in me (humanized), it's another imitation of the real from within, the potential ability of the real to see itself -- and to reflect. Humans -- the eyes of the real.

[ first -- read Dante Page ]

2. DANTE'S FOREST: HOLLYWOOD

When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, "we want to hear you again on this subject." Acts 17:32

Now they can see it.
Virilio's kinematic energy suggests that image not only exists but lives. Or is about to gain its own universe. Virtual reality (VR) has its own non-material "chronotope" (Bakhtin). (Three modes of knowledge, according to Bourdieu. Symbolic power).

In the "R World" time acts as space. It has memories (recorded) of space. Everything is "now" and we move from one "now" to another "now" -- in bodily world such a juxtaposition results in collisions of different realities (traffic accident). In film the two "now" of the same subject hold it (action?) together. Time secures existence of space. Even without "moving," body moves from (place to place) in time. Time is a movement itself.

Gaze isn't just a look anymore. I am not an observer but a participant! Cinema is built on Einstein's theory! Identification = Now (even when it's in the past = flashbacks). Time-field of the present only. Other "times" could be re-presented. Presentism is our common characteristic and possibility to connect. (Einstein's event and observer. Through experience or performance the two worlds are connected, they inter-act.)
How?

"The habitus is the system that generates action, (AA) but does not correspond to any definable rules. The actions it produces have regularity but the regularity has no external shape: thus the activity has orchestration but no conductor." (JL 1038 from _Language and Symbolic Power_ 53)

According to Bourdieu, the habitus in fact constructs the field in which practice occurs.

"Habitus, system of durable, transposable disposition, structured structure predisposed to function as structuring structure."[7]

Close to the Kantian thing-in-itself, non-translatable and impossible for re-presentation. Sort of a black hole of experience for non-participants.

How does "movement" take place in the world which has no space? Cuts!
Non-continuous (angelic) movement:

In continuous movement the actual change is not a part of the movement, but its conclusion; hence movement must precede change. Accordingly such movement is through the mid-space. But in movement which is not continuous, the change is a part, as a unit is a part of number: hence the succession of the various places, even without the mid-space, constitutes such movement.[8]

Mid-space = physical space. Body is the intermediate space. Movement without mid-space (space) is not continuous; we are moving from change to change? Time-event theory; only events belong to this dynamic space. "Screen event" is the main characteristic for the topology of angelic universe.

Cuts? Breaks in space, not in time? (Continuity?)
Divisible place (space) v. Indivisible (time) place.

Classical Space and Intellectual (Spiritual) Space:

Accordingly, since magnitude is infinitely divisible and the points in every magnitude are likewise infinite in potentiality, it follows that between every two places there are infinite intermediate places.[9]

Is that how matter was born? As a response to the needs of time?

Levels of the Real:
Super (superior) reality. Which one (I or video image of me) is pseudo-reality; since there are two of them? Since super-reality suppresses its original being as reality; it has to be hyper. Could exist only in active form of supremacy (non static status), it has to negate its origins all the time, and -- negate itself. Becoming an actuality, the super (hyper) reality becomes reality, and in order to stay "hyper" it has to overcome its actual form, it exists only in negation of itself = a process. Therefore, super is an outside description of hyper reality (a flash pictures). The process-like-existence (temporality) makes this reality into pseudo-reality, because at any point it could be viewed as non-existing (reality). (Baudliard's aesthetics of disappearance). (Physics after the uncertainty principle, which treats both versions as true, without revealing of the cause-effect mechanism.)

"Light speed" world (practically) has no borders between energy and matter: a wave could be seen present no less than a particle. One or another form is an indication of existence. Light is a virtual matter? (virtuality is not an "illusion" of reality, but a reality of its own?)
Is kinetic energy serves as a "potential" energy for kinematic energy? Physical speed, action, changes are high energy potentials for the kinematic (cinematic) event?

Anatoly, why do you leave your texts as notes. Why not to finish it? ....

[ image POV picasa album ]

3. VELOCITY OF LIGHT

velocity -- 1. quickness or rapidity of motion or action; swiftness; speed; 2. rate of change of position, in relation to time; rate of motion in a particular direction, as of the rotation of a sphere, in relation to time (Webster).

Speed is born out of changes; you experience it as long as you experience the changes. You don't have to move (stimulator).

Speed of speed = acceleration. More changes. Finally, Montage -- breaks, deconstructed by speed world.

"Rate of changes"; as if time is solid?

Wait! Speed of light is a constant! Is it?

Dromology: study, not celebration of speed (futurism). Film is "writing with light." How the speed of light is present in film? The speed of seeing.

....

[ pix ]

4. BEHIND THE LOOKING GLASS

When and how does a representation of reality in film transform into a simulation? [Photo presents, not re-presents; it has to stay close to the real, no need for much transformation (painting), we use speed for RE-presentation. Speed is a method of narrating the movie. Reality moves around the spectator at various speeds, something I can't experience outside of my dreams.]

For Baudrillard, the shift from the real to the hyperreal occurs when representation gives way to simulation. For Virilio, the speed is the way to make Real into Unreal; without touching it we approach it in super-speed. Deleuze: flow, smooth (speed can't be broken because of inertia).

The final result: film is hyper-real. We do not notice it because reality always stays as a material for the screen. But reality is just a point of departure, the events on the screen are constructed.

Video culture is a defense mechanism against overload of information. Contra-information, the information with no need to learn, to remember, to think about. They call it myth, we call it entertainment (mindless excitement).

"... apophatism transforms knowledge into ignorance in order to expand the field of consciousness. Thus aphophatic meditation is a technique of "psychosynthesis", by which the conscious and unconscious are integrated into a "super-conscious". Artistic creation is also a process by which the conscious vision of the artist shapes the imaginative power of the unconscious without attempting to rationalize it. Thus apophatism, in approaching both faith and image, avoids the opposition of conscious and unconscious by striving for a creative synthesis, which accounts for the affinities between religion and art." (Epstein)[10]

...

Entertainment: relaxing = forgetting (oneself?).
Temporarily. Not erasing. Safe way of knowing (what others know). Not even educational -- instructional.

Too much memory could be catastrophic? Videotape it!

First, language as an extension of man. At the same time man is a product of language. Film produces different men.

.... Image goes here! L. PS. No, I am not writing with blood, I am using your red pen for grading.

...

[ images, stories ]

5. POETRY OF CROWDS

Film is an illusion of personal experience. Nothing personal. Film is anti-experience!
A substitution...
And it's communal. Communications are not to inform but to connect. Inform all in order to link. But first -- to hook.

Physics and metaphysics of visible feelings: visible fear (horror movies), romance, drama, action, fantasy (sci-fi), comedy. It used to be a private matter, artists tried to find the forms to express (communicate) it. We have new poetics! Technology allows us to SHOW the emotions, to share the experience.
In order for you to feel it as "yours," film can't be "mine" -- that was in the past; literature, poetry. Film is more abstract, like music. Tarkovsky was the last who tried to write poetry with movies.

Imagination of a crowd, it belongs to all... Many as one! Director = one as many.

As a result, nothing matters in virtual reality (since it wasn't yours or mine). It was Nothing. It's only a movie. Nothing actually takes place, that's why action matters the most, the movement, motion, pictures. You'll never notice the void. If it's a good movie.

On the last page I read his note (in red ink, of course):

"Anatoly, I put in some new quotes that you might need. Also, there are some unclear thoughts, but we will talk about it, when I will see. Always Yours, Lucifer."

"What do you mean by that, the last comment?" I pointed it for him.

"You see, I would spend time writing about the difference between Bliss, Speed and Velocity." Lucifer was sitting on the corner of my desk, smoking my cigaretts and behaving as it was his book, not mine.

"I do not that this is my book," He got offended. "And about the cigaretts. When the book will be published, you will get paid, and I do not ask for a cut. So, I consider my smoking as earned, because I am putting my time into your writing."

"Sorry," I said. "You are right."

"Why didn't you write in that dream of your, about the flying. It could explain many things. You should, trust me. You have to write in such way, that reader could see it...."

"Oh, please! Don't lecture me on writing!"

"I try to help. You see, this is your ego speaking. How can you learn to be a spirit, when you are so emotional? You have to learn to feel like me. I feel by seeing."

NOTES

I have to rethink some of it in view of the Virtual Theatre practical applications. A

See Guide.

[1] - [10] -- the notes are lost.

[ links? ]