The Resonance of Unseen Things

tags: Moloch

Notes

a sense that life in America is shaped by some ineffable, enormous power, a power that can be seen only in the patterns of its effects.

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People telling these uncanny stories can only wonder about what really happened; but they just know something is wrong

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a sense that the true driving force of economic and political life in this country, and in the world, was not to be found in the surface ups and downs that might be declared on the news

NOTER_PAGE: (15 . 0.48913805185704273)

the people I write about here cultivate apophenia, not as an “error,” but instead as a way to begin seeing those things that have become invisible

NOTER_PAGE: (16 . 0.1807988787666433)

forceful insistence of freedom as a master metatrope of American national identity

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a sense of distance from the powers that be

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The UFO becomes a sign expressing that simultaneous sense of contingency and design, an inkling of some complete “grammar” of meaningfulness

NOTER_PAGE: (36 . 0.2431674842326559)

Metaphorically, one could think of narrative resonance as an intertextual half-rhyme

NOTER_PAGE: (36 . 0.3419761737911703)

There was an immediate assumption in the group that our private numbers, added together, would get us closer to the larger pattern

NOTER_PAGE: (40 . 0.23615977575332864)

Maybe the wounds you suffer are caused by paradigmatic forces and powers beyond what you can see.

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there is a hunch that maybe it’s not all your own fault

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a kind of set-apart memory, outside of normal time

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as with any trauma anywhere, the feeling of dis- sociation still arises from the conlict between “They’re doing things to me” and “There’s nothing I can do about it.”

NOTER_PAGE: (49 . 0.6524176594253679)

subtle ordinary traumas whose pervasive violations and sense of disempowerment sometimes start to seem like the air you breathe

NOTER_PAGE: (49 . 0.8367203924316748)

the vague unspoken shame of striving for cultural authority without born-to-privilege ease

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portrayed as both passé and futuristic-fascist

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These stories don’t explain anything. They find cracks in the order of things

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the American master narrative of containment and as- similation is itself an iteration of the captivity narrative genre

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When the captor is the savage, the trauma of coninement is drama- tized in the captive’s experience. The captivity is a clearly marked or- deal, with discrete points that mark its narrative beginning and end. 2 But when the captor is the state itself, then its acts of containment are told through images of paternal or civic benevolence: health, sanitation, progress, enlightenment

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At the dense point where the various stories overlap you can see a real that is more complete, more true to phenomenological experience, when it is piled up in a heap of other stories than when it sits on its own

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For whatever their inscrutable alien ends may be, they need the fallible human body, much as any blindingly com- plex corporate system of information and power still needs, and takes what it needs, from labor.

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Saddam Hussein has unruly hair and a beard. The doctor has a smooth, hairless head, smooth gloves, and a barely discernable face whose only distinguishable feature seems to be eyeglasses. In fact, this military doctor looks a lot like one of Travis Walton’s aliens: bald, with any nails or knuckles invisible in surgically gloved ingers. He has amplified eyes, and a smooth garment without seams. He is examining the unwilling captive.

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she wants the reporter to know that one of her Pilgrim ancestors was captured by Indians

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Rowlandson struggles with sinful despair. In Kelly’s nineteenth- century narrative, it’s no longer her soul, but her sanity, which is in peril.

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There is a feeling that something ineffable has been taken away. A few people say they feel they’ve got Indian blood

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Now, because of modernity and its violent thefts, those old, otherworldly secrets are mostly lost

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“plane spotters,” guys who move out here to climb the small hills and wait, patiently and quietly with binoculars, the way men elsewhere might wait with a fishing pole, to catch a glimpse of power.

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You see the carcass but never the killing; for it is secret, yet it leaves its remainders right in your face, right up next to the road where you’ll ind evidence, the trace of its presence. This makes sense; this is what power feels like

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But this power is unnatural. It grossly disrupts the order of things.

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If I would quit my job, they would take care of me and my family, for life. I told em: When I drop dead feed my family.

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“You only see a shadow. That’s the only way you know it’s there, by the shadow on the ground.”

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they were bored young fellows and felt like using their lashing lights, just felt like having an encounter. These guards embod- ied the huge, secret power; they could choose to remain invisible, or to force encounters whenever they arbitrarily wished

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tangible, unspoken satisfaction

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details of a political struggle are expressed in a narratively compressed shorthand as you align yourself with the West and the rural, with decades of sage- brush rebellions against federal control of land and urban ideas of what nature ought to be

NOTER_PAGE: (115 . 0.5697266993693062)

felt sense of an amorphous alien power, grabbing things up, stealing your pride away, and thinking they know the rules of nature

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How could people have such similar memories if something was not really happening, these researchers asked?

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she was the one to deine her own experience

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By scientistic, I mean mimetic of scientific discourse, or in the “style of” science

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What is left is a longing for a more “real” place, a more “natural” home, and an earth that was once uncolonized

NOTER_PAGE: (139 . 0.3229461756373938)

It’s all overmechanized, this too-technical society where the least little thing you want to do is beyond your control

NOTER_PAGE: (140 . 0.18201133144475923)

This place was a deep well of too much rootedness, but a rootedness he was no longer part of. It was the opposite of the clear empty dry new possibility of the West

NOTER_PAGE: (146 . 0.46728307254623047)

In fact, her narrative is not organized causally. It is organized mimetically, a plot of contagious magic

NOTER_PAGE: (154 . 0.1372688477951636)

When it works, the agreement to move without anxiety inside a licensed realm seems natural for those whose imagined community includes the “we” of the representative-based state. Yet for those who don’t feel part of the franchise, this ordinary zone of sanctioned freedom feels strange

NOTER_PAGE: (160 . 0.7944523470839261)

The biblical mark of the beast was recast in the ordinary procedures of state bureaucracy

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displacing the awesome power of God with the power of computers [interesting collision of words with Hillel Wayne]

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This was not a discussion about the invisible corporate collection of online consumer information that would emerge a few years later, or the government surveillance of cell phones. But years before this public discourse, people just knew

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Notes

a sense that life in America is shaped by some ineffable, enormous power, a power that can be seen only in the patterns of its effects.

People telling these uncanny stories can only wonder about what really happened; but they just know something is wrong

a sense that the true driving force of economic and political life in this country, and in the world, was not to be found in the surface ups and downs that might be declared on the news

the people I write about here cultivate apophenia, not as an “error,” but instead as a way to begin seeing those things that have become invisible

forceful insistence of freedom as a master metatrope of American national identity

arranged their political, social, and emotional affinities not around ideas of a “left” or a “right” political wing but always around ideas of invisible centers of power

a sense of distance from the powers that be

The UFO becomes a sign expressing that simultaneous sense of contingency and design, an inkling of some complete “grammar” of meaningfulness

Metaphorically, one could think of narrative resonance as an intertextual half-rhyme

There was an immediate assumption in the group that our private numbers, added together, would get us closer to the larger pattern

Maybe the wounds you suffer are caused by paradigmatic forces and powers beyond what you can see.

there is a hunch that maybe it’s not all your own fault

a kind of set-apart memory, outside of normal time

as with any trauma anywhere, the feeling of dis- sociation still arises from the conlict between “They’re doing things to me” and “There’s nothing I can do about it.”

subtle ordinary traumas whose pervasive violations and sense of disempowerment sometimes start to seem like the air you breathe

the vague unspoken shame of striving for cultural authority without born-to-privilege ease

portrayed as both passé and futuristic-fascist

These stories don’t explain anything. They find cracks in the order of things

the American master narrative of containment and as- similation is itself an iteration of the captivity narrative genre

At the dense point where the various stories overlap you can see a real that is more complete, more true to phenomenological experience, when it is piled up in a heap of other stories than when it sits on its own

For whatever their inscrutable alien ends may be, they need the fallible human body, much as any blindingly com- plex corporate system of information and power still needs, and takes what it needs, from labor.

she wants the reporter to know that one of her Pilgrim ancestors was captured by Indians

Rowlandson struggles with sinful despair. In Kelly’s nineteenth- century narrative, it’s no longer her soul, but her sanity, which is in peril.

There is a feeling that something ineffable has been taken away. A few people say they feel they’ve got Indian blood

Now, because of modernity and its violent thefts, those old, otherworldly secrets are mostly lost

“plane spotters,” guys who move out here to climb the small hills and wait, patiently and quietly with binoculars, the way men elsewhere might wait with a fishing pole, to catch a glimpse of power.

You see the carcass but never the killing; for it is secret, yet it leaves its remainders right in your face, right up next to the road where you’ll ind evidence, the trace of its presence. This makes sense; this is what power feels like

But this power is unnatural. It grossly disrupts the order of things.

If I would quit my job, they would take care of me and my family, for life. I told em: When I drop dead feed my family.

“You only see a shadow. That’s the only way you know it’s there, by the shadow on the ground.”

they were bored young fellows and felt like using their lashing lights, just felt like having an encounter. These guards embod- ied the huge, secret power; they could choose to remain invisible, or to force encounters whenever they arbitrarily wished

tangible, unspoken satisfaction

details of a political struggle are expressed in a narratively compressed shorthand as you align yourself with the West and the rural, with decades of sage- brush rebellions against federal control of land and urban ideas of what nature ought to be

felt sense of an amorphous alien power, grabbing things up, stealing your pride away, and thinking they know the rules of nature

How could people have such similar memories if something was not really happening, these researchers asked?

she was the one to deine her own experience

By scientistic, I mean mimetic of scientific discourse, or in the “style of” science

What is left is a longing for a more “real” place, a more “natural” home, and an earth that was once uncolonized

It’s all overmechanized, this too-technical society where the least little thing you want to do is beyond your control

This place was a deep well of too much rootedness, but a rootedness he was no longer part of. It was the opposite of the clear empty dry new possibility of the West

In fact, her narrative is not organized causally. It is organized mimetically, a plot of contagious magic

When it works, the agreement to move without anxiety inside a licensed realm seems natural for those whose imagined community includes the “we” of the representative-based state. Yet for those who don’t feel part of the franchise, this ordinary zone of sanctioned freedom feels strange

The biblical mark of the beast was recast in the ordinary procedures of state bureaucracy

displacing the awesome power of God with the power of computers [interesting collision of words with Hillel Wayne]

This was not a discussion about the invisible corporate collection of online consumer information that would emerge a few years later, or the government surveillance of cell phones. But years before this public discourse, people just knew