THE HYDRA

I’m a Caveman / Your modern ways frighten and confuse me
I watch your spirit box with the blinking lights and think
Are those little people trapped in that box? (No, Caveman)

- El-P, “Deep Space 9mm“

1877. Dr. Richard Gatling writes to a friend of his new invention: “a machine … which could by rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease be greatly diminished.”

1910. Nicholas Roerich recounts to Igor Stravinsky his vision of a pagan ritual in which a young girl dances herself to death before a circle of elders who offer her as a sacrifice to the god of Spring.

1882. The Gatling Gun is used at the Bombardment of Alexandria. The British Royal Navy successfully quashes the Urabi Revolt. A century later, Charles Taylor paraphrases Hilaire Belloc: “Whatever happens / we have got the Gatling gun / and they have not.”

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古池や蛙飛こむ水のおと

Old Pond/Frog Jumps In/Splash!

-Basho, 1686

An artist begins with a sketch, or at least a line, and builds on it–obligated to it, constrained by it, and not infrequently doomed to it. Sometimes someone comes after and attends to the doom, as if it were a work of art, relating to the artist at a remove. And sometimes another somebody comes after and disentangles a lifeforce from inside the work, a lifeforce independent of the artist, but somehow still very much theirs. Of these two methods, the first keeps the artist at a remove (paradoxically generating a distance by trying to get near a person in absentia), while the second watches for the substance, the stuff of the thing, for the vital possibility of reaching into the air and grabbing it–it–a tissue of life in the body of thought. But what’s this tissue? And what’s this thought? And inn’t that stuff arredy in the line anywaaay?

After a few meetings (sometimes less!), a pair knows if they’re fit to be lovers. After a few more, whether their love has fallen flat upon the floor or spread like the sun into the compounds of melanin, a tissue of life in the body of… Here at Hydra, we’ve now had 60 encounters with you, our audience, and after 60 meetings we are surely quite in love and ready for 60 more (and 60 after that, and so forth). But before we get ahead of ourselves, we think a look at the stuff of our magazine (our maxhazan–from the Arabic xhazana–a collection of things) might serve as a statement of our terms and technique, the project and its evolution; our perspective on this tissue and this body.

(I have recently been informed that this is called a DTR, or DTRing, or having a DTR–well, here we go.) [Read More]

Gottfried Maurer’s three-volume tome was originally published by Nautilus-Verlag in the early 1990s, but it was revised to such an extent that by the time of the author’s death in late 2008, when no further revisions would be possible, a new edition was in order. The revised and re-translated Treatise of the Three Impossibilities, recently published by G. Grippo-Verlag is recognized to differ so greatly from the original, that it has been legally permissible to republish the revised volumes through the alternate publishing press, thus assuring that the first and second editions could remain in print simultaneously, at least for the moment.

That, at least, is what one might believe was intended. After scrutinizing the first in the context of the second, however, the cautious reader comes to realize that the second could never modify the first. In plain terms: it is clear that the first “edition” could not possibly have been written without reference to material in the second. In a three-part post, each devoted to a volume of the Treatise (respectively “Jews: What We Learned In Exile,” “Muslims: Why We Must Conquer the Earth,” and “Christians: When We Summoned the Lost”), I will reveal how Gottfried Maurer accomplished his feat, traveling, as it were, forward in time to produce a revision more original than its original. [Read More]