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Onward to Rescue the Radiant Hour....

Volunteers for the Territorial Defense Forces stand in formation, check their weapons, put on yellow armbands, get marching orders, and ship out to their posts to defend Kyiv on Feb. 28.                            

 Marcus Yam—Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Every day our cause becomes clearer and people get smarter.

**They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. […] its spirit of sacrifice, […] nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.

 Onward to rescue the Radiant Hour, which has been abstracted from the days 24 by colleagues of the Father,for sinister reasons of their own.  

For the first time now it becomes apparent that the 4 and the Father-conspiracy do not entirely fill their world. Their struggle is not the only,or even the ultimate one. Indeed, there are many other struggles , but there are also spectators, watching as spectators will do,hundreds of thousands of them [...].

What's this? What're the antagonists doing here infiltrating their audience? Well, they're not really. It's somebody else's audience at the moment, and these nightly spectacles are an appreciable part of the darkside-hours of the Rocket-capital. The chances for any paradox here, really, are less than you think. Outside and Inside interpiercing one another too fast, too finely labyrinthine,for either category to have much hegemony anymore. 

Come-on! Start-the-sho-w! Come-on! Start-the-show! The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent. The film has broken, or a projector bulb has burned out. It was difficult even for us, old fans who’ve always been at the movies (haven’t we?) to tell which before the darkness swept in. The last image was too immediate for any eye to register. It may have been a human figure, dreaming of an early evening in each great capital luminous enough to tell him he will never die, coming outside to wish on the first star. But it was not a star, it was falling, a bright angel of death. And in the darkening and awful expanse of screen something has kept on, a film we have not learned to see… it is now a closeup of the face, a face we all know-

And it is just here, just at this dark and silent frame, that the pointed tip of the Rocket, falling nearly a mile per second, absolutely and forever without sound, reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the roof of this old theatre, the last delta-t.

There is time,[...].

**The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth.

[…] even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

title/text:"Onward to rescue the Radiant Hour,from Thomas Pynchon,Gravity's Rainbow, Penguin Classics;2006,p.687-690.

image: Time

text:**Walter Benjamin

 see also:

Historical Revision

Memory Vertical

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Testament of Youth (2014)

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November begins to take color from the world until December must be lit to keep winter from disappearing into its empty absences

Greg Sellers, journal entry, ”Notes from Neruda’s Ghost,” 3 November 2019  (via memoryslandscape)

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I keep remembering — I keep remembering. My heart has no pity on me.

Henri Barbusse, from The Inferno (Boni and Liveright, 1918)

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Yasujirō Ozu - The Depth of Simplicity | CRISWELL | Cinema Cartography

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“When I read Susan Sontag for the first time…I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures—little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue—back and forth with that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then unspeakable feeling. When someone else’s words enter your consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks. They’re not necessarily illuminating. A match struck alight in a dark hallway, the light tip of a cigarette smoked in bed at midnight, embers in a dying chimney: none of these things has enough light of its own to reveal anything. Neither do anyone’s words. But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable then all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate.”

Valeria Luiselli, from “Lost Children Archive,” published c. 2019

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Small delights – a clear winter sunset through the natural iron grillwork of black trees, a street lamp shining through ice-encased branches, blue sky glittering, and sun on ice-crusted snow. Loveliness, loveliness.

Sylvia Plath, from a journal entry featured in “The Unabridged Journals,” (via demonofnoontide)

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Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we’ve seen, novels we’ve read, speeches we’ve heard, and daydreams we’ve savoured, and out of all that jumble it weaves a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going. This story tells me what to love, whom to hate and what to do with myself. This story may even cause me to sacrifice my life, if that’s what the plot requires. We all have our genre. Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as if in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories.

Yuval Noah Harari, with thanks to Whiskey River. (via crashinglybeautiful)

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MAARTEN VAN NOORT

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Read about this week’s cover, which honors Saul Steinberg’s centenary.

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What's director Michel Gondry up to these days? Apparently, trying to show that you can do smart things--like make serious movies--with that smartphone in your pocket. The director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Noam Chomsky animated documentary Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? has just released "Détour," a short film shot purely on his iPhone 7 Plus. Subtitled in English, "Détour" runs about 12 minutes and follows "the adventures of a small tricycle as it sets off along French roads in search of its young owner." Watch it, then ask yourself, was this really not made with a traditional camera? And then ask yourself, what's my excuse for not getting out there and making movies?

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Maps are ubiquitous in one sense, and completely missing in another. A lot of younger people don’t own maps and atlases and don’t have the knowledge a map gives you. We call things like MapQuest and Google Maps on your phone interactive… but are they? Are they interactive? It’s a system that largely gives you instructions to obey. Certainly, obedience is a form of interaction. (Maybe not my favorite one.) But a paper map you take control of — use it as you will, mark it up — and while you figure out the way from here to there yourself, instead of having a corporation tell you, you might pick up peripheral knowledge: the system of street names, the parallel streets and alternate routes. Pretty soon, you’ve learned the map, or rather, you have — via map — learned your way around a city. The map is now within you. You are yourself a map.

Rebecca Solnit, author of A Field Guide To Getting Lost and Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (via austinkleon)

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2017 manifesto archival print

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“[...] what we require now, as we always have, is a vision that endures that weight of the unknown, untracked, and unrealized.”

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“Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”

“Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

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President Trump and his press secretary disputed estimates of attendance at his inauguration, but footage from Friday’s event, compared with those from President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, showed a different story.

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Orwell wrote that freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. He wrote that he who controls the past controls the future, and that he who controls the present controls the past. If you can colonize the minds of a population with untruths and confusion, you forcibly re-write reality. This is done with stories. It’s done with language. How we speak about the world is a reflection of how we see it.