peter
nesteruk (home page:
contents and index)
Fall
back into light… away from the crowding-in of dark, light-denying shapes and
demands, all with a claim on ones time, all crowding-in, crowding-out our
better options, blocking out our light, bustling all around one, filling up the
senses, denying clarity, blocking focus - offering choice; unfolding chaos. A forest of dim presences competing, calling, impinging on our
space, using up our time. How to choose? How to orientate? A clearing, a
place of shining light, a space to breathe, space to see, the space of
presence, a glowing frame for the desired object, a space apart with a special
time, uncluttered, clear, real, there. Just there. For the picking. That’s all we ask.
Guaranteed. And the guarantee lies in the sacrifice, in payment.
And
just when (potentially at least) plenitude seems actually possible and the land
of plenty appears finally to have made its millennial arrival (heralded by the
choice of the world’s harvests in our supermarkets and the choice of a of world of information and entertainment on the Web):
then we invent new forms of scarcity. New forms of
discrimination. New ways of delineating a hierarchy of
choice. New forms of marking out. New things, and things that are not even things (virtual or
services) - just new.
New
technology and new forms of exchange perpetuate old forms of hierarchical
division; which in turn stimulate new gradients of differentiation, from the
choice of fruit by shape and size and colour (ever finer distinctions) to the
cultivation of rare fruit as the product of pruning, of cutting back technology
(limited editions, designer labels), all provoking the development of new
technology. New ways of re-conjuring the aura of the
‘special’, marker of quality, magic dispenser or immediate status.
The concept of ‘aura’ and its
history is coeval with that which is rarefied, rare, and desired in part as a
result of this very scarcity. ‘Aura’, as connoting a value in parallel with
mere monetary value (but often strangely measured by it…) as well with the
value accreting to sacred objects. A value supposedly evaporated by mass
production. Yet as we view the world, it would appear that the sense of ‘aura’
has not been lost (as suspected by some, like Walter Benjamin, from whom we
have borrowed the term) but rather become, discovered, recognised as a standard
feature of valued objects (a form of presence) varying with time and situation,
a product of a type of exchange. Therefore we can now address ourselves to the
history of different kinds of aura – determined by the combination of scarcity
with belief system or culture (the symbolic context of the demand for any given
object, or its form, when pure need is not the issue – which it rarely is, the
exception, for example, is the case of disasters).
So now the ‘aura’
is slave to the new flavours of monopoly and rarity, and the cultural
identities (often defined against one-another, gender, generation, class) and
of these as the guarantors of authenticity, of immediacy. Of presence, manufactured artificially, the jubilant
sense of presence that results from getting it before the rest… from being distinguished from
all the rest (whether as an individual or as the member of a –real or
imaginary- group) …and paying for it…
Such as the
transmission of sport and music events. Also news, now the medium, or better conduit,
for the arrival of current affairs events. The event, access
to the event, as defining feature of the media; the event - live/direct.
The excitement of actuality/history as it is being made, as it happens… All
else (is past) is available free (or soon will be) as recordings, images and
symbols circulate at ever faster speeds. (And should the harvesting of their
profitability slow them down, then the profitability of the bootleg – also
driven by the same logic of impatience, of a demand for the quickest access the
most cheaply -will oil the fluidity of their circulation).
Time is the key. And
with time, presence, prow of existence. We believe it is actually happening, that it
is live somewhere and that it comes
into our presence as soon as humanly (technologically) possible. Or at least sooner than for others – sooner than for those who do not
pay. A present to ourselves; the present, present.
One glimmer of further utility in
all this: the sense of open-endedness that lends such a favour of excitement to
live events, together with the accompanying sense of being aware of possible
futures, as a result of being ‘up-to-date’ with events. Is there a sense of
preparation and so - in other contexts – of survival in all this (perhaps the
trace of an archaic function left in us - largely males? -
from our hunter-gather period, like the competitiveness of sport and mock
combat)?
There is also the sense of
participation that accompanies any live event; a sharing, commonality, a
communality, brought into birth by a rituality which trumps the purely
individual pleasure, the individual form of putative elite status (I can watch
this, possess this: others can not). Behind any ‘I’ is always a ‘We’; our
implied community of recognition, the event-communion as residue of
recognition, a desire that requires (positive) others, a ‘We’ (and with the
‘We’ there is always a ’Them’; the ‘other’ others, the negative others). There is marking-out and there
is marking out.
But
it is precisely when we cannot be sure of what happens, of what the outcome
will be, that this positive facet of uncertainty may
turn sour; for in this case we can never be sure of the quality, of the value
of what we watch. Value, that which comes with
judgement, comes afterwards, as a result (at the very least) of reflection, of
comparison. We may have wasted our time (the match was a bore, the performance
uninspiring). Our sacrifice will have been in vain. We will have gambled… and
lost.
So the sacrificial urn fills slowly
up with ashes. But we do not witness its filling; we do not keep account, not
on this level; the possession of scarcity is its own reward, the possession of
the moment, self-possession. The waste we create, the shadow we cast, does not concern us, not until it impinges again upon our
consciousness, clutters our existence, makes of choice an intolerable burden. (in the name of choice we pass on choice itself: itself we
pass on to others to make for us, for which service we pay…)
The vision of the garden of
plenitude in this way becomes blurred, becomes confused with the waste
accumulating on the city’s edge, the toxins in the blood, the ticks in the
nervous system and the gentle, suffocating warming of the planet as it begins
to depart from an ecological balance which bought us into being and upon which
we all depend.
The lantern that is followed leads
us over fields of invisible debris in quest of the glimmer of a new presence.
Somewhere in the forest a light is
discerned.
A light left burning in the window,
the weary traveller’s Grail of a safe haven…or the lure of the hunter. The light of the angler fish shinning in the depths of the ocean, a
light leading directly into its waiting mouth. The
black hole in the corner of our universe into which we throw our earnings, our
time, ourselves.
Falling back into light… present now, the
Grail of our time; a cause for sacrifice.
Copyright
2005 Peter Nesteruk