Tuesday, 12 July 2016


In this slow swirling memories are masks for other figurations of the subjective event. One thing melts into something else which seems the truer thing, and for that reason the more threatening, as bringing forward an actor from a scene that was abandoned unfinished. There is a narrative jump that traverses no distance at all. Thing A is denatured and revealed as a mask for thing B. B is immediately recognised in the way that we recognise, before we consider whether we want to or not, the appearance of someone known in the past - 'You were with me in the ships at Mylae' - one is immediately transported back to the scene. The trigger in B's face can be minute, and the memory one we didn't know we had until it was set off, but it springs forth, like all spontaneous memory, from the deepest part of ourself, or seems to. It is the kind of transition beloved of the slightly crazed editor of our dreams. The cut says as much or more about the nature of the medium as about the psychology of the subject which it distills, and the sequence of such cuts is by nature non terminating; it is not driven by an urge to resolution, but spreads laterally, à l'improviste. The meaning of A which had not seemed problematic in the fleeting moment when it filled the stage of attention, now in revealing itself as a mask for B, becomes mysterious, since we see it could never have been understood otherwise, that B was always its hidden structuring content. Now B which was the embodiment of the off-stage is exposed and its non-place emptied for the next round.

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