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.”

May 29, 1913. The Rite of Spring, composed by Stravinsky, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, and performed by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, premieres at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees. The audience riots.

1914. Egypt is officially designated a British Protectorate.

March 1, 1954.    The U.S. military detonates a dry fuel thermonuclear hydrogen bomb (code name Castle Bravo) at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. It forms a fireball roughly four and a half miles wide within a second.  The bomb is 1,200 times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

September 23, 1954. Aikichi Kuboyama, radio operator of a tuna-fishing boat that fell victim to the fallout of Castle Bravo, dies from radiation poisoning at the age of 40. He reportedly leaves behind the words: “I pray that I am the last victim of an atomic or hydrogen bomb.”  50 years later, the Washington Post covers the anniversary of the detonation; reports that the Bikini people continued dying of cancer:

With only a few doctors, the hospital on Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, is repeatedly overwhelmed. Hundreds of people line up to wait for appointments with the understaffed medical team. Niedenthal says the long-term effect of radiation is only one of the health hurdles the Marshallese face. The introduction of processed foods to people who had once subsisted solely on fish and fruits has created unwanted medical conditions: diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity.

1955.  Jack Kerouac meets Gary Snyder at a poetry reading in San Francisco. Kerouac joins him at his cabin outside Mill Valley, California, which Snyder has named Marin-an: Japanese for “Horse Grove Hermitage.”

1958. Kerouac publishes Dharma Bums, an account of his time “mountaineering” with Snyder. Ruth Fuller Sasaki later writes to Snyder, remarking of Kerouac,  ”His Buddhism is the most garbled and mistaken I have read in many a day . . ..”

1969. Dow Chemical begins manufacturing Napalm for use by the U.S. Military.

1969. Dian Fossey retreats to the Virunga Mountains to study gorilla society. To reassure the gorillas, she mimicks their actions, grunting and eating the local celery plant. She becomes known by locals as Nyirmachabelli, roughly translated as “The woman who lives alone on the mountain.” Jane Goodall publishes her book about living in chimpanzee society: My Friends the Wild Chimpanzees.

1972. Vietnam War. Nine-year-old Kim Phuc’s village is bombed with napalm. She runs naked from the bombing and is caught on camera in one of the most iconic images of the war. Decades later, Phuc reflects, “Napalm is the most terrible pain you can imagine. Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. Napalm generates temperatures of 800 to 1,200 degrees Celsius.”

March 16–17, 1988.  Iran-Iraq War. Iraqi aircraft drop chemical bombs on Kurdish residential areas in Halabja. Survivors later say the gas smelled like sweet apples. People die in a number of ways — some of the victims “just drop dead” while others “die of laughing”. More than 7000 people die that day. An Iranian journalist walks into the aftermath, later describes the scene, “It was a new kind of death to me.”

1990. Dances with Wolves wins 7 Academy Awards. Kevin Costner plays John Dunbar, an American soldier who flees from war and finds himself drawn to the lifestyle and customs of a Sioux tribe. Dunbar becomes a hero among the Sioux and is accepted as an honored guest after he locates a migrating herd of buffalo. 17 years later the film is selected for preservation in the Library of Congress.

March 21, 2003. Coalition forces begin a “shock and awe” strike on Iraq. They plan to launch 800 missiles at major cities in Iraq during the first few days of the invasion.  During the first attack on Baghdad, the U.S. military fires 320 Tomahawk cruise missiles from battleships in the Gulf and the Red Sea. They move the MOAB (nickname: Mother Of All Bombs), the largest conventional explosive in the world, to Iraq.

December 5, 2003.  Warner Brothers releases The Last Samurai, a movie about a Civil War veteran who is recruited to train the Japanese army in the use of “modern weapons,” but is changed when he is captured by the samurai and learns about their traditions.

2004. Dennis Lehane publishes Shutter Island, a novel about a pair of U.S. Marshals investigating an island asylum-prison in the year 1954:

March 2006. Mel Gibson releases Apocalypto. “Set in the waning days of the Mayan civilization, the picture provides a trip to a place one’s never been before, offering hitherto unseen sights of exceptional vividness and power … Cast largely with indigenous nonpros speaking the prevailing surviving dialect of the Mesoamericans, Apocalypto is exotic, wild, ferocious …” A good third of the movie centers on the idyllic village life of protagonist Jaguar Paw, a milieu that is presented in hyper-detail. The rest of the movie focuses on Jaguar Paw’s efforts to avoid being the subject of human sacrifice.

2008. MGMT releases the album Oracular Spectacular, which includes its single “Electric Feel” (see below). Pitchfork gives the album a 6.8.

Jan 2009. Israeli forces drop a 2000 lb. bomb on a building in Gaza. The Associated Press reports:

The hit on Rayan’s home obliterated the four-story apartment building and peeled off the walls of others around it, creating a field of rubble in the crowded town of Jebaliya in the northern Gaza Strip. Mounds of debris thrown up by the blast swallowed up cars.

2009. The Obama administration pursues a practice of targeted international killings using Predator drones. In one incident, drones kill dozens of villagers attending a funeral service, including several children. Jane Mayer (The New Yorker) reports that people living in targeted areas refer to Predator drones as machay (“wasps”), due to the buzzing noise the drones make when they hover over someone.

December 10, 2009. Avatar, a $300 million+ cinematic production, premieres in London. The film tells a story about the Na’vi, an alien race who live in harmony with nature in a “Home Tree” and worship an Earth Goddess called Eywa.

In reference to the use of the phrase “shock and awe” in the film, director James Cameron says, “We know what it feels like to launch the missiles. We don’t know what it feels like for them to land on our home soil, not in America.”

January 10, 2010. The New York Times publishes an article on the New York “cavemen”: “a subculture whose members seek good health through a selective return to the habits of their Paleolithic ancestors.”

The caveman lifestyle, in Mr. Durant’s interpretation, involves eating large quantities of meat and then fasting between meals to approximate the lean times that his distant ancestors faced between hunts. Vegetables and fruit are fine, but he avoids foods like bread that were unavailable before the invention of agriculture. Mr. Durant believes the human body evolved for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and his goal is to wean himself off what he sees as many millenniums of bad habits.

These urban cavemen also choose exercise routines focused on sprinting and jumping, to replicate how a prehistoric person might have fled from a mastodon.

February 12, 2010. A Texas congressman calls for the federal government to use Predator drone patrols along the U.S.-Mexico border to combat narcotics trafficking and terrorism along the Rio Grande.

February 16, 2010. Martin Scorcese’s feature-length adaptation of Lehane’s novel premieres in theaters. At the end of the film, DiCaprio’s “Teddy” walks towards a lobotomy, says, “Is it better to live like a monster or die a good man?”

2010. Fitzsu, an online store specializing in luxury gifts for the modern home, office and person, sells an item called the “Mono tools Table Fork.” The fork

is dedicated to the Neanderthal whose remains were found very close to the mono factory in Mettmann, Germany. Tools used by cavemen, the hand axe inspired the knife, the elongated fork is reminiscent of early skewing tools, and the spoon recalls a cupping hand. This is how eating becomes a primal experience.

]]> http://www.thehydramag.com/2010/03/03/the-new-neo-primitive/feed/ 1 http://www.thehydramag.com/2010/02/19/the-plurality-of-giordano-bruno/ http://www.thehydramag.com/2010/02/19/the-plurality-of-giordano-bruno/#comments Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:09:12 +0000 Jose-Luis Moctezuma http://www.thehydramag.com/?p=2750

Giordano Filippo Bruno, that implacable figure, had vagabonded across the face of Europe before he was arrested, imprisoned, inquisitioned, and burned at the stake for multiple heresies against the doctrines of the Church. It took 8 years for the inquisitorial process to consummate, lengthy in comparison to the swifter martyrships of the devout. [...]]]>

Giordano Filippo Bruno, that implacable figure, had vagabonded across the face of Europe before he was arrested, imprisoned, inquisitioned, and burned at the stake for multiple heresies against the doctrines of the Church. It took 8 years for the inquisitorial process to consummate, lengthy in comparison to the swifter martyrships of the devout. During the 44 years spent before his detainment, Bruno accumulated a surplus of occult know-how and managed to traffick his mystical wares in as many locales as do the merchants and frequent fliers of today.

Born in Nola, Campania (he was simply, “the Nolan”) and educated in Naples, Bruno entered the Dominican Order at age 15, was ordained a priest at age 24; these 11 years were spent relatively peaceably in the monastic order, a few eccentricities intermittently setting him afoul with his brethren. Eventually, an annotated copy of Erasmus and the suspicion that Bruno shared sympathetic thought with the Arian heresy set in motion an inquisition to be prepared against him. Quick-witted and fleet-footed, Bruno fled Naples. But he had already acquired the skill that would place him apart from his contemporaries and grace him with a sustainable nomadism from court to kingdom to hovel: the art of memory.

Well-versed in the Dominican Order’s method of memory-advancement and study, he set off to Noli, then Savona, then Turin; afterwards, Venice. His wandering only increased more when he left Venice: Padua, Bergamo, then across the Alps to Chambery and Lyon; at Geneva he settled for a time with the Calvinists, who later kicked him out; back in France — in Toulouse — he was denied certain sacraments by the Jesuits; in Paris, the chief cosmopolitan city, Bruno enjoyed a freer, liberal atmosphere. His gift for memorization astonished his French patrons and lifted his fame as high up to Henri III‘s inspection. Taking advantage of his celebrity, he published consecutive works on mnemonics in a short span. Bruno’s fame translated to England, where he landed and stayed for 2 years, hooking up with Sir Phil Sidney and hobnobbing with John Dee‘s associates. (There were still, as always, his detractors, Oxford sneezers who believed him a short southern-blooded crank.) Political tension between England and France caused Bruno to retreat to Paris with his arch patron, the diplomat Michel de Castelnau. A quarrel in Paris with Fabrizio Mordente over the latter’s invention of a remarkable compass (on which Bruno, with his usual impudence, wrote 4 disparaging dialogues describing the inability of Mordente, a mere geometer, to comprehend the metaphysical extent of his own invention) packed Bruno off to Germany; Mordente desired police action. First stop was Marburg, then Lutheran Wittenberg, then Catholic Prague, and afterwards Helmstedt, where he was excommunicated by the Lutherans for pissing them off. Nevertheless, in Germany the prolific Bruno found the air and impetus to publish more works on magic, divination, and general hermeneutics.

At Frankfurt, through a connect with a local bookseller, Bruno came into contact with Giovanni Mocenigo, a Venetian nobleman who desired to learn memory-craft from him. He invited the Nolan over to Venice, and Bruno, despite firmly remembering the hazard his unpopularity in Venice had nearly caused him, accepted to return and teach Mocenigo privately. A short time later Bruno announced he’d be parting from Mocenigo and Venice, probably sensing the wealthy scion’s growing distaste for him: the goods, according to Mocenigo, were tainted. Evidently reaching beyond sheer memory tricks, Bruno’s otherworldly belief system sprung out and slapped the vain nobleman in the face. Mocenigo, in that prompt secretive manner of Renaissance conspirators, denounced Bruno to the local authorities, and 8 years later, Bruno was condemned to die as Joan of Arc did, by maddening licking fire, for promulgating heresies and dealing in pirated magic (non-doctrinal), among other accusations (he appeared to give credence to the Arian thought that Jesus was no more than an extraordinary wizard — maybe even the best — and hardly in scale with the monistic concept of the infinity of God). More likely, Giordano Bruno died for the same reason Joan of Arc did and other practitioners of solid-iron resolve; because he was abnormally confident of his near-messianic purpose: he believed in the immortality of his memory. The authorities were perhaps chill-stricken by fear. The man simply remembered too much and too well. This skill of his had to be something more than just stellar memory performativity; something like a diabolic machine was in that head of his, or so they imagined. He was a conjurer of a foreign and utterly artificial memory.

Xenophanes long long before Bruno authored the fragment: “I tossed about, bearing myself from city to city.” Bruno, we see, tossing and turning and freewheeling, did so too. Like Xenophanes, Bruno believed in the plurality of worlds; that is, in the multiverse, the concept of multiple and equally habitable universes occurring at once. Part and parcel of this, Bruno agreed that metempsychosis was a valid natural process. He declared to his inquisitors and executioners: “Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.” Maybe they feared he’d commit quantum suicide: he’d come back new as before, at a non-zero time when they were old and shrivel-sacked, in a shinier grander world equidistant to that in which his ashes are petalled across the Campo dei Fiori. And indeed, in a world of computer science and gargantuan databanks of memory and the increasing stretch of server-space which expands the news of man by far more than what man has to feed it, Giordano Bruno is fearlessly relevant.

One of the memory graphs that was burned in the fire that consumed him described a closed windowless room in which a hermetic figure — a man bound to a pyre — faces a table on which an hourglass and a poised flaming arrow (directed at the pyre) are set. The hourglass measures the time in which the flaming arrow will be launched, automatically, by a weight activated once the hourglass runs its course. The weight is only minimally held up by a cord that may give way even before the hourglass runs out; or the cord may sustain the weight, even against the hourglass’ standard operating procedure, by an equally possible anomalous malfunction. While the man, the pyre, the hourglass, and the room are to be considered fixed eternities, the thin subtle cord, representing all the tension and pressure of the scene, symbolizes the sole random element. In this scenario, hence, it is possible that the cord won’t give way, and the man will continue to live and read the news and copulate; or the cord will give way, and the arrow irrevocably sail across the monstrously small room to light up the man’s fate forever. The hermetic figure of the man thus may be alive or dead, or both at the same time, in a room inaccessible to us, because it is mythical. The physical evidence of this chart is now lost because it was placed in that circular immortal box in which Giordano Bruno kept all his vital news and quid: his head. Yet even in quantum physics the spectre of magic persists, only this time in a manner commensurable to our attention, in the folklore of scientists.

(To be continued)

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.)

We can’t a start a drawing without our pencil or crayon or hematite in hand. In consideration of our tools, we develop techniques. In developing techniques, we build aesthetics. We couldn’t, for example, imagine encaustics while dwelling in the caves–but once we had pigmented the beeswax, the technique was installed in our aesthetic storehouse. We have access to it as long as somebody knows where to look. Sight, in other words, isn’t a right–it’s a responsibility. Leaping forward to the here and now, the conditions of this magazine’s production have given it a perspective from the most elemental vantage on how a style of writing about arts activates those arts. Or, at least, demonstrates the activity of art in such a way that the writing becomes an art, with its own aesthetic and access to the lifeforce.

Like Addison’s Mr. Spectator, we consider ourselves entrusted with the means by which to make arts meaningful. Anybody can stitch together a meaning–certainly! propitiously! even beautifully!–but putting a perspective into the social fabric is a different thing. Such a perspective has to cover more. Indeed, it has to be able to cover anything, and possibly everything! It must, in other words, be ready and game to go anywhere, anytime. This nebulous perspective, which many have perceived, we must now discern. I will outline it with three points, three principles of this magazine’s method.

This article has been the statement of a condition and the rise of a aesthetic from that condition. It has also been a study of this magazine to date; its developments, tendencies, movements. Bringing the statement about by means of the study, this article has aspired to outline our style. Hydra magazine will continue to grow, transform and generate new genealogies for itself, but the groundwork is laid, the field has been discerned, the style is here. Its purpose to bring out the lifeforce. Any reading writers who have felt that here and would like to participate in the project, contact thehydra@googlegroups.com. We welcome writers of all sorts, ready to tangle with creation from manifold perspective.

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.

“Jews: What We Learned In Exile”

Maurer’s basic argument in the first edition (which for the sake of clarity I will continue to refer to as the “first edition”—although it will become evident that the “first” could only have been produced upon the “second”) is that a vast amount of Israelite lore was exported from Egypt by the Jews upon their deliverance from Egyptian captivity. He argues, for example, that the Jewish holiday of “Passover” was not a commemoration of the Hebrews’ escape from Egypt, but a useful way of getting the Jews that had become “overly comfortable” with Egyptian religious rites back into the Hebrew fold by appropriating those rites with meaning for the Hebrews. Citing that the Hebrew word for Passover is Pesach (פֶּסַחi), which in the Tiberian vocalization would not have sounded like “he had pity,” as in the modern rendering of Pesach to mean “God’s passing over the houses of the Hebrews to afflict only the Egyptians with his plagues,” but would have sounded like the Egyptian orations performed in late winter, for which the colloquial phrasing for the sunset reckoned as the sun’s passing over the sky into the night, “περάσουμε,” Maurer concludes that the term for the Hebrew festival of late winter is of Egyptian origin.

But to build the bridge from the Egyptians to the Jews, he relies on a mysterious “concept of the mind of ancient man.” He refers to this “concept” in many ways: “the original record of our meeting with the world at large;” “when we thought our way into the birth-light of life;” “whereas we did not at first worship with our priests, but relied on them for the knowledge of our conclusions;” et al. So that when he is discussing the “death of the seasonal year” through the ancient Egyptian phraseology for death as the “passing over the river,” he relies on an unstated parallel. And it remains unstated, because the second edition has already exhausted its utility by comparing the silencing of the mysterious “concept” to the death of the Treatise’s author. Maurer concludes (or commences):

As surely you have imagined by this time, we have departed. But we will not leave you without the gleaning of the original concept as it came to ancient man. For ancient man, having gained his mastery over his tools and his weapons, remained utterly terrified by one thing, the final thing that he could not yet master or even be protected from, the horrible thing against which a necessary feeling of faith would arise, the ever-returning thing which he would someday call “darkness.” The danger of the dark gave birth to the cults of light. And once we have learned that Horus, whose property was the sun, was slain by Seth, we must hear sunset as “sun-set(h).” But we cannot presume that this parallel will gain any traction except through a tacit furtherance of its conclusion. The concept of the mind of ancient man continues in the unspeakable customs of our passing over.

Due to the postulates laid out in the second edition, Maurer can no longer refer to them except by their attendant conclusions in the first edition. And he suggests that this silencing is similar if not the same as his own “hav[ing] departed.” But how could Maurer have filled the structure before he had the structure—or had even thought of the structure? In many other places, the first edition’s content itself seems devoid of structure—as if following an unstated rubric of the second edition. When I read the first edition in college, I attributed the awkwardness to poor translation. Since that time I have had the opportunity to learn a small amount of German (just enough to get along with a facing translation really). Upon rereading the first edition, in the original, it is readily evident that amorphous blotches of content are no error of the translator—but a blotching together of logical nodes whose connectivity only arrives after the resigned revelations of the second. A passage from the first, in the German:

Hatten wir noch Sonne Horizont Auferstehung für jeden nicht alle brauchen wieder auferstehen horizontalen Sohn.*

Follows the rules for departure spelled out toward the end of the first volume in the second edition:

Wenn wir sterben müssen, müssen wir lernen, den Unterschied zwischen Auferstehung und auferstehen, Horizont und horizontalen, Sonne und Sohn zu vergessen. Um sich daran zu erinnern, dass die ursprüngliche Religion der Begriff war.*

Maurer’s end thoughts, as we find them in the first edition, are therefore not exactly thoughts, but the lingering understanding of afterthought: conclusions without statement or terminus. He is, in a way, indeed already deceased. But how then are we to account for the explosive life of the second edition? I contacted the publisher regarding my analysis and was sent on a circumpolar trek from contact to contact via email after email to get any answer from anybody. After a few weeks I was finally given the best possible answer. A woman named Clara employed by bookmaker Jorg-Tobias Bauer in Baden-Baden referred me to a Maat by which I thought she meant Matt. It was only after I understood that she was alluding to the Egyptian force of order and law, ma’at, that I could begin to piece together what the Treatise’s “Three Impossibilities” truly amount to.

*Trans: “Had we time sun horizon resurrection for each not all no need resurrect horizontal son;” and: “If we must die, we must learn to forget the difference between the resurrection and the resurrect, horizon and horizontal, sun and son. In order to remember that the original religion was of the concept.”