Father on Vacation (The Politics of Retro)
1. One of my favorite formulations of the hermetic axiom is "I dress like my father on vacation." This catches nuances of illusion, timing, paternity, repetition, abdication and play in the original that are too often elided in our glib "as above" equation.
I also like it because so many of us actually do dress like our fathers (or mothers) on vacation. I would really never dream of wearing a knit shirt otherwise, but that's the way my father did it. Like so much about vacation culture, there's a strong element of nostalgia functioning here, a sense that the days off the clock are part of some primordial and eternal world before time, when we can be as children for awhile in the presence of nature, family or fine art. Of course, this raises the question of whether it can ever be too late to have a happy childhood.
2. The idea of the past can be deployed to combat the tyranny of the demiurge inherent in the present moment. Such movements are not leaps into the absolute elsewhere, but simply create the potential for leverage in a particular direction, as determined by the operator. Many of us simply rely on unconscious longings and personal history to structure our nostalgic impulses, letting these apparent accidents guide us toward specific material we find lacking in the now. The world was so much _large___(e)r back in ___1974__ than it is today. You can't get ___that gum___ now.
There are of course other directions of leverage that do not rely on the past, and an infinite number of ways that this nostalgic strategy can be fetishized. The goal is not to worship __that gum__ in itself but to use the absence of this content from the now as an opportunity to reveal a flaw in the apparent hegemony of the present. The absence of __that gum__ is a clue, a point of irritation that demonstrates the frailty of the dream. Wake up!
Movements that fetishize individual manifestations of the past are another aspect of the tyranny of the demiurgic order, or arguably the work of a second demiurge entirely. It's all the same to me, the worship of a dead false god or a live one. Such movements include the adoration of the "occult" for its own sake, i.e. the pursuit of the traces of dead or obsolete cosmology and practice for no other reason than because they are dead or obsolete. It's not a mirror, it's a door.
3. Once we have separated the world into a plane of nostalgic possibilities and the point of the "now" not on it, we have room to refine individual manifestations into the stuff of "tradition," rubbing its edges smooth of everything inessential or accidental until we are left with a mirrored bit of eternity here in the world. This is Colonel Churchward's constantly misunderstood "archaeological science." Properly refined material (even that which was experienced yesterday) is indistinguishable from the ancient. Improperly refined material is, again, the fetish.
One alembic for the refinement of the past is the magical memory. Another is death. They face in opposing directions. And "tradition" is a technique, not an ur-archaic objective.
4. A teacher once told me that nostalgia is a luxury disease for the middle and upper classes, who have more leisure to hoard the mumia of the demiurge's cast-off shells and perhaps necromantically evoke their shades to material presence. There is something in this, but for them, the disease is also a cure. He himself dressed like my father on vacation and had a passion for Daleks, which he fondly remembered from his working-class childhood.
Aging Whit Stillman preppies and working-class club kids have very different approaches to disco revival bands, for example: the one population is casting itself back to its own childhood, while the other has a weaker personal attachment to the material and simply finds the late Bee Gees more danceable than alternatives -- and it's true, they're danceable! Both groups are still subverting the tyranny of today's big thing, but from different angles. Both are yearning for something that is noticeably absent in the present. This is one factor that explains why it is possible to feel nostalgia for cultural textures that had died out before one was born. Naturally, capital costs make some retro maneuvers more or less restricted to fairly elite groups, but even then simpler forms often spontaneously emerge in reaction: for example, the lindy hoppers are vintage totalitarians (wear grandma's gloves or spend $$$ buying someone else's, or else you can't dance with us), but you can still shag around elsewhere even if your outfit isn't certifiably in-period.
Imbedded interests often (and perhaps by definition, always) work to conserve their tastes into the now. Time is what opposes this agenda. There are human agents on both sides (but are there, as George Lucas cryptically puts it, "heroes?") and the alliances constantly shift. The struggle among histories, war of the trees.
5. I have realized I like golf shirts and summer cocktails and I like to fly through Idyllwild. And that all stories of the green days of kings and wolves and forests are folkloric constructs aimed at the instruction of children, including that long story that starts with Ur, goes through Greece and Rome, meanders through a long summer with lutes and then pauses here a few decades after Elvis. Nature, family, fine art. Kings from Hammurabi to Trump, all our gnostic fathers on vacation.
"A father had been watching day and night beside the sick-bed of his child. After the child died, he retired to rest in an adjoining room, but left the door ajar so that he could look from his room into the next, where the child's body lay surrounded by tall candles. An old man, who had been installed as a watcher, sat beside the body, murmuring prayers. After sleeping for a few hours the father dreamed that the child was standing by his bed, clasping his arm and crying reproachfully: "Father, don't you see that I am burning?" The father woke up and noticed a bright light coming from the adjoining room. Rushing in, he found that the old man had fallen asleep, and the sheets and one arm of the beloved body were burnt by a fallen candle." -- The Interpretation of Dreams
NEXT:
Stitch-Faced American Sweetheart!
I also like it because so many of us actually do dress like our fathers (or mothers) on vacation. I would really never dream of wearing a knit shirt otherwise, but that's the way my father did it. Like so much about vacation culture, there's a strong element of nostalgia functioning here, a sense that the days off the clock are part of some primordial and eternal world before time, when we can be as children for awhile in the presence of nature, family or fine art. Of course, this raises the question of whether it can ever be too late to have a happy childhood.
2. The idea of the past can be deployed to combat the tyranny of the demiurge inherent in the present moment. Such movements are not leaps into the absolute elsewhere, but simply create the potential for leverage in a particular direction, as determined by the operator. Many of us simply rely on unconscious longings and personal history to structure our nostalgic impulses, letting these apparent accidents guide us toward specific material we find lacking in the now. The world was so much _large___(e)r back in ___1974__ than it is today. You can't get ___that gum___ now.
There are of course other directions of leverage that do not rely on the past, and an infinite number of ways that this nostalgic strategy can be fetishized. The goal is not to worship __that gum__ in itself but to use the absence of this content from the now as an opportunity to reveal a flaw in the apparent hegemony of the present. The absence of __that gum__ is a clue, a point of irritation that demonstrates the frailty of the dream. Wake up!
Movements that fetishize individual manifestations of the past are another aspect of the tyranny of the demiurgic order, or arguably the work of a second demiurge entirely. It's all the same to me, the worship of a dead false god or a live one. Such movements include the adoration of the "occult" for its own sake, i.e. the pursuit of the traces of dead or obsolete cosmology and practice for no other reason than because they are dead or obsolete. It's not a mirror, it's a door.
3. Once we have separated the world into a plane of nostalgic possibilities and the point of the "now" not on it, we have room to refine individual manifestations into the stuff of "tradition," rubbing its edges smooth of everything inessential or accidental until we are left with a mirrored bit of eternity here in the world. This is Colonel Churchward's constantly misunderstood "archaeological science." Properly refined material (even that which was experienced yesterday) is indistinguishable from the ancient. Improperly refined material is, again, the fetish.
One alembic for the refinement of the past is the magical memory. Another is death. They face in opposing directions. And "tradition" is a technique, not an ur-archaic objective.
4. A teacher once told me that nostalgia is a luxury disease for the middle and upper classes, who have more leisure to hoard the mumia of the demiurge's cast-off shells and perhaps necromantically evoke their shades to material presence. There is something in this, but for them, the disease is also a cure. He himself dressed like my father on vacation and had a passion for Daleks, which he fondly remembered from his working-class childhood.
Aging Whit Stillman preppies and working-class club kids have very different approaches to disco revival bands, for example: the one population is casting itself back to its own childhood, while the other has a weaker personal attachment to the material and simply finds the late Bee Gees more danceable than alternatives -- and it's true, they're danceable! Both groups are still subverting the tyranny of today's big thing, but from different angles. Both are yearning for something that is noticeably absent in the present. This is one factor that explains why it is possible to feel nostalgia for cultural textures that had died out before one was born. Naturally, capital costs make some retro maneuvers more or less restricted to fairly elite groups, but even then simpler forms often spontaneously emerge in reaction: for example, the lindy hoppers are vintage totalitarians (wear grandma's gloves or spend $$$ buying someone else's, or else you can't dance with us), but you can still shag around elsewhere even if your outfit isn't certifiably in-period.
Imbedded interests often (and perhaps by definition, always) work to conserve their tastes into the now. Time is what opposes this agenda. There are human agents on both sides (but are there, as George Lucas cryptically puts it, "heroes?") and the alliances constantly shift. The struggle among histories, war of the trees.
5. I have realized I like golf shirts and summer cocktails and I like to fly through Idyllwild. And that all stories of the green days of kings and wolves and forests are folkloric constructs aimed at the instruction of children, including that long story that starts with Ur, goes through Greece and Rome, meanders through a long summer with lutes and then pauses here a few decades after Elvis. Nature, family, fine art. Kings from Hammurabi to Trump, all our gnostic fathers on vacation.
"A father had been watching day and night beside the sick-bed of his child. After the child died, he retired to rest in an adjoining room, but left the door ajar so that he could look from his room into the next, where the child's body lay surrounded by tall candles. An old man, who had been installed as a watcher, sat beside the body, murmuring prayers. After sleeping for a few hours the father dreamed that the child was standing by his bed, clasping his arm and crying reproachfully: "Father, don't you see that I am burning?" The father woke up and noticed a bright light coming from the adjoining room. Rushing in, he found that the old man had fallen asleep, and the sheets and one arm of the beloved body were burnt by a fallen candle." -- The Interpretation of Dreams
NEXT:
Stitch-Faced American Sweetheart!