Barrett Watten 

f r o m   N O T Z E I T

( A F T E R   H A N N A H   H Ö C H )*

X

The landscape remains identical; the equinoctial sun rises above recent rain; houses stand in their distanced proximity; voices may be heard.

What is there for us to expect? We can only amplify the formal logic of the question, which we must use to justify our existence.

The open question is the form of sociality in our Great Isolation, where each must find their place in a series and no end has been disclosed.

The open form of the question accesses only bare remains of material evidence and distant reports of mayhem in public buildings.

I am a window on a crowded room, a distant observation point on a small screen, a recording device that cannot be confirmed by others.

The only mitigation between “out there” and “in here” is doubt about social hierarchies and the boundaries of the property system.

Fear brought an object into the room, covered with minuscule particles of glitter; your task is to remove them by whatever means necessary.

An empty halo shelters the object in place, while the day dawns in neutral overtones as it did the day before, and any succeeding day.

Fear created an empty object that cannot be removed or gotten rid of; it is colorless, odorless, tasteless and reflects no light to the observer.

One imagines violent and prolonged kissing with others as compensation for the sustained separation from them one has endured.

X I

Civilization has gone beyond discontent to paralysis; we are reduced to being global spectators of a drama of manipulated outcomes.

Trauma is the law, foundation of the social order, the only legitimate vocation, a preexisting condition that opens the pathway to disease.

Episode five is a bloody mess, a parody of Viennese Actionism in ritual spasms of bloodletting to access a pre-Christian past beyond guilt.

There must be a secondary affect that provides the truth we seek, while the lack of explanation can only be recovered in its traumatic origins.

In Iceland the light is blue reflecting off cold steel in an abandoned warehouse where the victim, the perpetrator, and an agent will meet.

Narrative becomes a crevasse in which the body of a teenage boy who wandered away from an orphanage will be found years later.

What motivates a sequence of events is not disclosed but a gunshot rings out at the end of the episode and we refuse to watch further.

Sudden discontinuities are tipping points, abrupt moments of change occurring in a nonlinear fashion when the global system crosses a line.

Such tipping points, occurring throughout history, may be pushed by biophysical feedback mechanisms into virtual “tipping cascades.”

This writing is vertiginous unfolding of manipulated outcomes, each crossing a line to cancel any causal connection between them.

This nature is a manifold of nonlinear outcomes, each the expression of an underlying principle that is discontinuous with the next.

X I I

I who am here at this date and time, inhabiting this place with another, hereby submit my data to be counted in the general record if not will.

This is an account of personal identity in which I am not continuous with myself; I am a series of discontinuities by which I know that I am.

Symptoms may include headache, fever, chills, sore throat, dry cough, reddening eyes, loss of sense of taste and smell, tiredness, body aches.

Symptoms may progress from one state to the next or not; they may include some symptoms and not others; there may be no symptoms.

We need to come to a better understanding of what this story is about; I am sick of the usual run of disinformation and the paranoia of denial.

There are multiple frames of interpretation, each historically distinct from each other, but organized around a central, uninterpretable core.

There is objective danger, Gefahr, dangéité, fraught with danger, Gefährdung, a danger-situation, an endangering of the subject, he said.

What is a danger? It will be granted that fear, of its nature, is adequate to, corresponds to, entsprechend, the object from which danger stems.

One day, he rides out onto a plain and, at sundown, as the sun has always already set, he spies a belfry in the distance, but close enough.

He sees flickering through a tiny window, high in the turret—which he knows no one can reach—a mysterious, inexplicable flame, signaling fear.

A guarantee from harm surrounds you, and a voice is all you hear; you feel various sensations in your body, but are far removed from them.

Let me translate: you have nothing to fear, there is nothing to be afraid of, there is nothing there, anything that is not there cannot harm you.

X I I I

“Most of my life has been lived in hell—a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration, when a poem such as this or that might appear.

“Life's processes are very simple. One or two moves are made and that is the end. The rest is repetition, a playing out of foregone conclusions.”

In the emergency rooms there is another kind of hell being lived without recourse to any closure, a holding pattern of bare existence.

In one world the law is everywhere present, in another everywhere withheld. The two worlds split into justice for some and none for others.

The country has adopted an array of wartime measures never employed before in history—confining 230 million of its people to their homes.

How many thousands of deaths, or millions of infections, would be prevented with a response that was more coherent, urgent, and rational.

An American woman bought a tin of sardines; the grocer made her open the can because you cannot hoard tinned food if it is opened first.

The Germans just announced that if Warsaw does not surrender within twelve hours, the army will use all military means to subdue it.

Unreason begins with the particular, ends on an epic scale that elides our comprehension; we can only perceive its traces in what does not add up.

The Germans assert it is the Poles in Warsaw who are violating international law by making their civilians help defend the capital.

It is a shell game of conclusions, where cause disappears from shell to shell. We only know the bare outline of what made such things occur.

Reporter signs off: “But, as I say, I just can't follow the things that are happening in this war. Off to the front tomorrow, if I can find one.”

They will order their provisions and they will be placed outside, ready at the curb to be picked up—this will reduce their contact with others.