johnny

A johnny reveals vulnerability.

It leaves the spinal chord exposed, and allows for the rest of the body to be accessed easily.

It is simple.
It is deceptively light, whimsical.
It lies about the chronology of a trauma.

A johnny makes one a poet, passionate about death and war and all of the ideals that make rotting away a fiction. A johnny asks for the arrival of a floating woman, in the hospital halls, a Presbyterian possibly, with her ancient harp, to play a song, in gratitude, as a volunteer, to the gaping hole the johnny so unabashedly ifantilizes.

The johnny reduces limitations.

It expands the world in the eyes of the recently injured, while at the same time reducing their world, and its uncertainty, to the tying of a knot, behind the neck, intersecting the point at which the spinal chord meets the cerebellum.

The johnny blindly humiliates. It is at once carnivalesque and ignominious.

The old mole mocks the eagle and defecating your pants is no longer a peril. At once a gown and a cape, the johnny is pantless.

It makes the immoral organic.

A state of ghost like grace, where the involuntary expulsion of material, lack of cognizance, severing of a limb, all disappear into the serial world of hospital patients lining up for the same finality, the same burning, the same buzzards eating us whole that Geechie Wiley spoke of in her Last Kind Word Blues.

The johnny is cotton.
It is an open field for the patient.
It is patience on an assembly line.

i-phone

The i-phone blurs boundaries.

It consolidates the flow of information between different dominions of commerce, exchange, and identity; it capitalizes upon convergence. It is eternal recurrence, mise-en-abyme-en-multitude, an endless assemblage of unconscious reflections turning upon themselves.

It turns Zeus’s sky to blood and Zeno’s river to brass.

A picture of the world, upon a picture of the world learning of its own conditions, upon a picture of the world devising its own outcome.

Repetition unto death.

Again-and-again.

It is the second apparatus (following the camera in its relation to light) responsible for totalizing the organization of the first regime of madness: an unending system of signs perpetuated by their inherent interconnectedness. It denies the teleology of a prime-mover, and co-opts the responsibility for universal motion based on a stratagem of machinic desires that surpass design.

The fall of the Holy Roman Empire was the result of idolatry, of the inversion of the dualism between subjectivity and images, so that man, following a historically grandiose and romantic preoccupation with representation, himself became a function of the images he produced.

Images began to haunt their audience.

Specters against spectators.

The autonomization of symbolic power to the point of destruction.

The images themselves, as Vilem Flusser notes, were also destroyed. Man tore “the elements of the image from the surface and arranged them into lines,” into texts, reconstituting the moving forward of history as linear, as a chronology of thought inching fearfully away from the idols of a ruinous past.

Writing, however, continued calling out to the sky.

The sun speaking to the sun.

Occulted by the deliberate and literal systematization of the event, the epitaphs of images once eclipsed have returned again to organize themselves in an apparatus that localizes a transcendent efficacy; a dispositif that compartmentalizes our relationship to an eternal empire.