I Am Your Mirror Iraq
By Ira Einhorn:
‘I am your mirror,’ said Nico, a Buddhist technique that Eliot Weinberger has applied twice now in devastating articles in the London Review of Books: ‘What I Heard About Iraq’, February, 2004 and ‘What I Heard About Iraq In 2005’, 5 January 2006.
In the most recent piece, one is presented with C. 200 short quotes about the Iraqi War from Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and others that indicate such transparent lying that one quickly becomes aware that time and thus memory are no longer a relevant social component.
We are living in the pure present of discourse: “Truth” created by and for the moment, to be discarded and forgotten as soon as the moment is over.
To explain, some would turn to Baudrillard and his idea of simulation wherein the referent for any statement has disappeared and the only things signs refer to are other signs in a continuous round of self enclosed meaning that has no reference to any reality at all.
Others would turn to Guy Debord’s Society Of The Spectacle whose prescience illuminates the more one reflects on what the media in the United States has become.
Those with some historical sense of the first great outbursts of Dada and Surrealism, during and immediately after World War I, will appreciate the slippage, the parataxis, the non-rational, non-temporal sense which the reading of Weinberger quickly invokes. One constantly has to stifle a scream, bridle a mouth stuck in the rictus of laughter or brush a tear aside from a moment of micro-compassion.
Then there is a rush of awareness that the mode of addressing reality, that this brilliant string of quotes illustrates, is akin to the daily reality that is now that of America: A constant breathless, amphetamine jag that barely addresses the moment except to consume more than its fair share of planetary resources as obesity, inattention and despair quicken, New Orleans fades, species die and fires and floods ravage in a January surprise as the president says goodbye to 2005 and welcomes 2006 as if 2005 no longer exists in any way: rip off the calendar page and face a Tabula Rasa, a Lockean new day longing for a fresh untroubled imprint that has nothing of the mess of 2005 about it.
Then, alas, reality somehow managed to elude the best efforts of that ring of fire around the president: a helicopter crashed, Iraqis in large numbers were shredded, Abramoff decided to save his skin and sacrifice our exterminator-in-chief and others like him as “Kenny-Boy’ slowly makes his way towards prison.
And now that 2006 is upon us, the jag must continue though reality is intruding and the forgotten kids are hungry and complaining; the house is dirty and the fridge is empty. It feels as if the reality that Munch prefigured in ‘the scream’ is upon us as I think upon an old long dead friend Bernard Aaronson who did a series of hypnotic experiments that have an uncanny resemblance to our present: while subjects were in a hypnotic state, he altered the space/time parameters of the subjects.
When he removed their past their emotions flat lined and despair set in.
Perhaps an adumbration unless we shut-off the media for a while and learn to focus on what is in front of us again.
Slow down, listen to our breath, eat, even dine instead of fueling up and re-experience the disappearing world that every unnecessary car journey is bringing one moment closer to extinction.
Ira Einhorn
February 2006
‘I am your mirror,’ said Nico, a Buddhist technique that Eliot Weinberger has applied twice now in devastating articles in the London Review of Books: ‘What I Heard About Iraq’, February, 2004 and ‘What I Heard About Iraq In 2005’, 5 January 2006.
In the most recent piece, one is presented with C. 200 short quotes about the Iraqi War from Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and others that indicate such transparent lying that one quickly becomes aware that time and thus memory are no longer a relevant social component.
We are living in the pure present of discourse: “Truth” created by and for the moment, to be discarded and forgotten as soon as the moment is over.
To explain, some would turn to Baudrillard and his idea of simulation wherein the referent for any statement has disappeared and the only things signs refer to are other signs in a continuous round of self enclosed meaning that has no reference to any reality at all.
Others would turn to Guy Debord’s Society Of The Spectacle whose prescience illuminates the more one reflects on what the media in the United States has become.
Those with some historical sense of the first great outbursts of Dada and Surrealism, during and immediately after World War I, will appreciate the slippage, the parataxis, the non-rational, non-temporal sense which the reading of Weinberger quickly invokes. One constantly has to stifle a scream, bridle a mouth stuck in the rictus of laughter or brush a tear aside from a moment of micro-compassion.
Then there is a rush of awareness that the mode of addressing reality, that this brilliant string of quotes illustrates, is akin to the daily reality that is now that of America: A constant breathless, amphetamine jag that barely addresses the moment except to consume more than its fair share of planetary resources as obesity, inattention and despair quicken, New Orleans fades, species die and fires and floods ravage in a January surprise as the president says goodbye to 2005 and welcomes 2006 as if 2005 no longer exists in any way: rip off the calendar page and face a Tabula Rasa, a Lockean new day longing for a fresh untroubled imprint that has nothing of the mess of 2005 about it.
Then, alas, reality somehow managed to elude the best efforts of that ring of fire around the president: a helicopter crashed, Iraqis in large numbers were shredded, Abramoff decided to save his skin and sacrifice our exterminator-in-chief and others like him as “Kenny-Boy’ slowly makes his way towards prison.
And now that 2006 is upon us, the jag must continue though reality is intruding and the forgotten kids are hungry and complaining; the house is dirty and the fridge is empty. It feels as if the reality that Munch prefigured in ‘the scream’ is upon us as I think upon an old long dead friend Bernard Aaronson who did a series of hypnotic experiments that have an uncanny resemblance to our present: while subjects were in a hypnotic state, he altered the space/time parameters of the subjects.
When he removed their past their emotions flat lined and despair set in.
Perhaps an adumbration unless we shut-off the media for a while and learn to focus on what is in front of us again.
Slow down, listen to our breath, eat, even dine instead of fueling up and re-experience the disappearing world that every unnecessary car journey is bringing one moment closer to extinction.
Ira Einhorn
February 2006
posted by Nayer | 6:58 PM
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