Asteroidea

Like the Asteroidea that circle in the sea,
So the heavenly wanderers that our bourn oversee,
So are the beasts and birds, and so are we.
The starts that glide their course by night
Make fated paths within our sight,
So do the asteroids on deep
Plot careful courses while we sleep,
Turn on turn, insensibly,
Like the turning of the wheel,
That great wheel of the galaxy
That by each movement, will reveal
The spiral and the five-armed star
Marking out a destiny;
Whether in depths of sky or sea,
Or bound by land like mortals are,
Whether peace or frightful war,
Whether death or ecstasy.
That man, four-limbed, one-headed, is
Like the bright comet of the astral fish,
Shown by five points of errant fire;
And tugged by currents and lazy drifts,
Knows not the end of any wish,
Nor yet the author of desire.

Metropolis 7

Now if only could see the script for this Movie. The dialogue is incredible, completely authentic, for the director (or so he claims) has the power of the Cosmic Recorder of all speech and thought. His claim seems genuine. The actor is given his lines to remember on a daily basis, at least that's the theory.
But this is no clear-cut memorable movie talk, carefully revised and faux-authentic, this is real speech, based on an original improvisatory and never-to-be-repeated performance. The actors have to get used to acting real talk as if they were lines from a movie, real speech with all its umms and ahs interruptions trailings-off and vagaries.
"What was I gonna say? Can you oh never mind..."
"Huh?... Whut?"
"Nuthin'".
I watched and listened once to a group of five kids speaking. If this scene had been represented in a film they would all have more or less taken turns to speak, and delivered their lines more or less clearly, all to the coherence of the plot. In fact, in real life, all of the kids spoke at exactly the same time, continually interrupting one another, all the time competing to chime in the loudest or wittiest, spilling out half-lines and half-words and sounds that were not words and never meant to be words, but merely sounds of assent or doubt, amusement or derision- All of it banal, meaningless, blabbing out stock phrases from TV, incomprehensible private jokes and words. Now it certainly would take an especially skilled kind of actor to recreate this (extremely common) kind of speech, which is really completely fluid, flexible, and insubstantial.

He lent us his spectacles and we looked at Europe

 He lent us his spectacles and we looked at Europe, and we were saddened and shocked and 

                         angered all at once. But some small, hard part of us, some interior iron, was glad. And 

                         eventually we were able to persuade our heart, to wake it to the gladness of the great work

                         to come, the great uncompleted work, the fostering and waking and tending of the seeds of the 

                         previous great works, the great works of Athens, the great works of Florence, the great works

                         of Paris.  And we were able to perceive in that flourishing and in that work of destruction

                         after all a wild joy, and a stern one, a double-helix twined upon itself, composed of contradictory

                         impulses, spinning like a top, full of dynamism and orgasmic potential. 

His gaze is the gaze of the bourgeois divested of illusion. Thus it is both noble and frightening, like the gaze of a fallen Zeus, divested of his splendour and somehow cynical. It is the gaze of Moses who has after all seen that there is nothing upon the mountain-top, and that the stones he holds in his hand are mere dross matter, come to tell us all, that he is after all still a prophet, and that there is after all still a Promised Land. 

We have given authoritarianism a chance, a million chances. We have tried the pyramid power structure, for thousands of years. It's given us pyramids of skulls, rivers of blood, obscenities of piled-up cash, rubble of broken lives. It's time for God's sake to dismantle it, somehow, by all means and any, to dismantle it, even if we have to become angels, even if it's impossible, even if it's the last thing we do. 

It's time to laugh at it and mock it, to fight it tooth and nail, to take up arms against it, to banish it, to undermine it, to fanatically attack its weakest points. It is ridiculous, therefore laugh. The more it demands to be taken seriously, laugh at it the more. The more it surrounds itself with mysticism and shadow, shine a bright light on it the more. To its pomposity and seriousness and ritual, laugh like you would at a clown, for it is clownish. Exalt small brave acts of disobedience and cynicism, exalt small honesties, exalt what is heartfelt, exalt what is whole-hearted. 

It is the Zigurrat of Ur, the pyramid of phraoah, the ridiculous and ungainly, the skyscrapers of Manhattan, the monuments of Moloch, the tombs of the City of London, the military barracks, the sacred leader principle, the holy pyramid, the priest in his inner sanctum, the lofty priest caste, the banker caste, the proud stockbroker caste in his inner sanctum office, the celebrity-god, emblem and unwitting symbol of the hierarchy, symbolic sacrifice-victim of the priesthood. It is the missile, the phallus, the indestructible granite tomb, the needle of Cleopatra, the prick of profit, the cold hardness of cash, the glorious bank vault.  

It transumted, and became a friendly face, a falsely smiling face, and expressed itself with borrowed Venusian luxury, and false frontages of glossy pastel colours and perfect teeth. It transmuted, and clothed itself with mixtures of subcultures and glamour. It transmuted again, and became a jester with a mask of rebellion. It traded in these images as in all else, it traded in souls, it traded in hopes, its wares were like so many glittering and deceiving jewels in an endless fair, a fair that never let you sleep or left you in peace, a fair that was insistent and multifarious, and that colonised all your space, and lied to you, and maniuplated you in a sweet voice, and endlessly transmuted like a demon-nymph that could not be held. 

"I will this" it said "and I will traffic in everything, and all things shall be laid out upon my stall, and I will be the merchant-god, and turn all men to the shades of Mercury, with deceit, with conjuring, and with commerce. I will be the mask of mammon, the false face of the zigurrat-pyramid, the mountain of skulls. Behind me will be open sores and wounds, ugly corruption, sickening violence, which I will surreptiously traffic in as spectacle. Behind me the vacuous tomb-memorials, the marble pillars, the sparse bank vaults. Behind me every desire and impulse cheapened and parasited, every ugliness made concrete and sprawling and vast. I am advertisement, I am a perpetually grinning mask". 

The Phantom of No Sleep

What is this bare horror that comes around like clockwork, and yet unexpectedly? Unexpectedly because I did not prepare, somehow I thought this time would be an exception, and I didn't foresee it. And yet it came, the bare horror. It came at night, as it usually comes, at retiring-time. That is when the monster makes itself known, when it's time to sleep. This horror, this monster, is felt and experienced as a void, a frightening space, a lack. This absence is almost felt like a presence, something which has intruded into the room, but also, somehow, something which has always been present, and was merely covered, as with a flimsy bit of cloth, which time itself naturally dislodged in the course of day-to-day events, revealing it suddenly and starkly.

It is cyclical. This horror, this monster, this ghost, this phantom, is frightening and yet not ugly, not ghastly, not exactly ugly. She isn't an ungainly black dog. She's a sweet void, a smiling ghost, a mocking phantom, a terrible demon. She comes unbidden at night and enwraps me in arms which are no arms, and kisses me with horrible air kisses, that miss their target. She is the woman that does not come, whose presence is felt as an absence. And the tiniest bit of anguish I can wrench from within allows nothing to show on the surface.  

How does she affect me, the woman that is not there, who doesn't visit? Simply, I find myself unable to sleep. The night bothers me, the night itself, not the darkness, but something about the night irritates me like an itch, its void, its silence. Perhaps its emptiness. 

What do I need then? And what will stop this influence from flowing in, from ebbing in like a murky tide? I need incident perhaps, to be kept busy. Glad voices and cheerful faces around me. And sincere faces, soulful faces, voices capable of feeling and expression and truth. All that can put the phantasm to flight, she becomes jealous, restive, and finally she dwindles to nothing. It is the emptiness that makes her strong, and the silence that embodies her. That emboldens her to give me that embrace which is no embrace. 

I go to bed. I turn on my pillow. My pillow suddenly seems hideous and unbecoming. I know quite clearly that I shall not sleep, I have known it for hours. But whether it is a decision that proceeds from me, or some response to external stimuli, or some physiological consequence of having ingested something or other, I do not know. Perhaps it is worry, worry over work left undone. But I thought I had reached an age when I had conquered that, and I think I have, largely. I am not prone to stress, and it is not stress that keeps me awake. It is the persistent and worrying feeling that I haven't lived. It is the subjective feeling that haunts me, that something has been left undone, and with that feeling comes doubt, plaguing doubt, and on its wings, multiple and multiplying thoughts. And she is there, the phantom of No Sleep, she is there again as usual. 

She never leaves me alone for long. I thought I was rid of her, having suffered from her presence in the summer, and struggled through many nights of suffering and wakefulness. But we're a month into autumn now and she has come again, inevitably, though I didn't foresee it somehow. Somehow I never do. For a few nights, she is there, sitting on the bed, standing in the corner, silent witness to my tumultuous thoughts. What is she? She is a lack felt as an object, she is an absence felt as a presence. She is the space where the phenomena ought to be, the banal phenomena that makes life liveable. How I loathe my own susceptibility to such weakness, to so many clichés, how disgusted I am by the banality of my dreams. Can it be that I, I, who have conquered life, who has figured it out, who was so independent and so haughty, and with every good reason, can it be that I have fallen into the contemptible weakness of solitude, an affliction I cannot afford to suffer from?

And I turn upon myself, as upon a stranger, and see this contemptible weakness declare itself insistently. Just like a common mortal, I am afflicted after all, with petty, mean wants, that I can't quite forgive myself for entertaining, as though I had found myself to be infested with lice, or nits in the hair, after all susceptible to the common ailments of the common herd, and what's more, I was so prideful and stuffed-up and conceited that I haven't taken the time to build up a resistance to these common ailments, which some superstition tells me could have been accomplished by a letting go of ego and a common humility, but instead, I immured myself behind walls, walls of selfishness, and deceived myself into thinking I was free and independent. What a thought: I shut myself off behind walls, mocking the crowd, and afterwards suffered for it when the crowds finally departed, leaving in their wake a vast silence. 

This silence! What is in it? 

Metropolis 6

Of course the logistics of such a project are absolutely mind-boggling, and perhaps the Movie will never be one-tenth of the way completed. The Director, in his pitch to the studios, failed to account for the problem that the Movie is in effect Neverending and infinitely extendable in any random direction. The studio bosses refused to countenance the lunacy of the idea, a movie version of all human life, especially since the project seemed to cancel out the idea of finished product. The Movie's central idea was that it was a thing to be *made*, accomplished, enacted, and not necessarily a thing to be watched.
So this is what constitutes our wish-city, our Metropolis. But it is only one incarnation. The movie intruding, and becoming sharp and anxious. No doubt the movie will require numberless departments and subdivisions, to handle the re-enactments of certain periods of history. The director was at the moment madly keen on the re-enactment of the late 20th century. Here he was, sweating and cursing, always in a rush to finish the scene, morbidly anxious to get it exactly right, now and again leaping up and glowing with such transcendent, cherubic joy that the actors could not help bit pause and watch, moved and still, thinking the whole enterprise suddenly worthwhile. They admired the director, who formerly had been a lowly director of skateboarding videos. Lacking backing from the studios, he had decided to fund the immense project himself. This to some seemed like a heroic decision. Others asserted that the director was absolutely far-gone in derangement.

Metropolis 5

For this is the most ambitious film project ever contemplated: Nothing less than The Neverending Movie. The Movie starts at the very inception of mankind, indeed at the very first word uttered. From then on it attempts to show every event, large and small, that ever happened in the history of the world. We want not just the affairs of princes, kings, and heads of state, but the middling forgettable conversations and non-sequiturs, quips and meaningless puns from long-forgotten years of dull centuries.
The film is to be triumphant and arrogant in its tediousness, a remake of the Life of Man, all-reconstructed, in blazing technicolour. What Christ said upon the cross, the oaths of Caesar, pillaging Vandals and Vikings not faceless but as clear as soap opera characters, Joan of Arc, Luther nailing his theses to the church-door, Columbus embarked upon the shore. Lincoln and Kennedy assassinated, man on moon, screaming births and long drawn-out deaths.
Imagine a secret recorder of all action and all speech and thought worldwide. Imagine it recording humanity for an eternity. Imagine then the movie reconstruction!
Endless and endlessly involved, with billions of characters, subdivided into numberless screens, each life startlingly played out, authentically set-dressed and scripted, but with an extra Hollywood gloss.
It is instructive to watch actors who are reading not scripted lines but real dialogue... Look at a made-for-TV biopic or true crime story. The actors are always more glamorous and sharply-defined than real people. They always bring immediacy, largeness, precision. All the qualities lacking from real life, with its downbeat vagueness and lack of certainty.

Metropolis 4 (The Director)

Now the director reveals himself. He looms suddenly from a sidestreet, producer, director, conductor of a mad symphony. Conductor of cacophonies! He's a fat grizelled American, and you know how Americans like to yell. This kid has taken upon himself a most ambitious plan, for what he has touted to the studio as The Neverending Movie.
He has long brown tresses, skateshoes, shorts, a Slayer T-shirt, sunglasses tinged with red. His forte hitherto has been shooting skate videos for Thrasher. He'd been hoping to branch out into extreme sports. He wouldn't look out of place in the mosh pit, plunging feebly, rolls of fat shaking, dropping curses.
Maybe he's running out of time or over-budget, it seems that way. He's continually stressed and excitable, yelling at everyone in sight, in fury and love,- "No no you're not doin it fuckin right, we gotta get this straight goddammit!"- His passion, his temper, his sweats and flip-outs, always seem to threaten to culminate in an inferno, a spontaneous combustion burning out from the inside. He sweats himself inside out in an orgy of violent creation.
And you can bet he believes in this movie like it was a sacred mission handed to him by God, with such religious fervour that he may at its completion drop dead from sheer exhaustion, from universes of expended energy.