The iconic opening scene of “Blindspot”

In ads and trailers, prior to the series debut, NBC heavily marketed the opening scene, in which “Jane Doe” appears naked out of a carry-bag  in the middle of Times Square;  and wisely so.  For it contains a veritable mythologem.

In literature, the best-known birth-from-a-handbag is that of the titular character of Wilde’s “The Importance of Being E(a)rnest”;  he was discovered therein, at a railway station, provenience unknown.

The next-most-famous Railway Station birth, is that of Paddington Bear.

For “Paddington Station”, the American update is “Times Square”.  (Note, by the way, the universal appropriateness of that name.)

Now, if Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank had put their heads together, they would doubtless have deemed this motif  a wish-fulfillment reworking  of the Birth Trauma.  The Newcomer appears suddenly in a bruising world of blooming-buzzing confusion (as each we must);  but as compensation, this rude Awakening is Immaculate, ex nihilo, with none of the dreadful ickiness of having been whelped by one’s parents, Mom and Dad, via some penis-and-vagina action too terrible to contemplate.

It is a satisfying fantasy;  thus Minerva, born from the brow of Zeus.

~

But now there is a twist;  and it deepens things.  Born from a bag, as though from empty space, she nonetheless comes “with baggage”, in the form of intricate enigmatic tattoos.  Like "Memento"s Leonard, alone in his hotel room, having his (latest) very-first moment of conscious self-awareness. Born with a mission.

He awakens each day  to a world new-made; he spots the writing  with the same surprise  that Crusoe spotted footprints in the sand.  He cannot really recognize it as his own: even those he wrote himself, he stippled into the skin – it won’t resemble his normal cursive – and others he left to the tattoo-artist.   The writing must therefore confront him like that at Belshazzar’s feast.  It is otherwordly.  He is wreathed in cryptic admonitions, some penned in a Gothic script like that of Scripture.  He might almost be forgiven for fancying himself a prophet.  And yet – for here the story is bleakly modern.  He pays no mind to the source of these writings, just takes them for granted.  He simply takes the next step forward, in his appointed task.  That Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin  has no resonance, divine or diabolocal.
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/01/moreismenitto.html

Born with a mission.

The show so far is stupid;  but I am probably going to watch another episode, simply from the power of this underlying motif -- this motivating motif.   For it applies very broadly:  These amnesiacs, with their strange “Thou must” inscribed scrolls, are like each one of us, adrift in the randomness of this sublunary life, yet with a sense, that somehow, all of it somehow means something.

Weiteres zum Thema:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/09/blindspot-and-memento.html

Tabula rasa

Another day, another atrocity.  This time it’s Hatra’s turn.

The actualités on Médi1 this morning  said (referring to the destruction of antiquities in Iraq and Syria -- on the model of those earlier actions in Azawad and Afghanistan) that Da`esh was “en train de faire table rase du passé” -- to obliterate the past.

The phrase is striking, for it appears  quite unapologetically  in the anthem l’Intérnationale:

Du passé, faisons table rase;

foule esclave -- debout, debout !

Time was, that was intended to be the international anthem of the entire world (or what was left of it).

The French revolution as well  meant to scr-r-rape French discourse clean of some of its origins, going so far as to rename the names of the the days of the week, and of the months, with decimal (Primidi, Duodi) or descriptive equivalents (Frimaire, Nivôse) -- not to suppress the pagan reminiscences of the original names (for the Révolution was down on Christianity as well), but for a clean slate (with a decimal predilection). (Today, for example, is Decadi, 20 Pluviôse, l’an CCXXIII.  Many happy returns of the day.)

For the sans-culottes as for the Bolsheviks, the slogan might have been, not “nothing new under the sun”, but “nothing old under the sun”.   ISIL is not like that.  They are, indeed, laudatores temporis acti :  they wish only to destroy the non-Islamic past.

Question pour vous:
From the "society of the spectacle" aspect:
Who is the intended audience of these depredations?
Is it potential recruits, thinking, "He-ey, that's kewl !!"
Or is it us -- the West, whom they wish to drag into (to quote that same anthem) "la lutte finale" ???

[Updates & Afterthoughts]

Arno Widmann verweist im Zusammenhang mit der Zerstörung von Kulturgütern durch den Islamischen Staat auf den Umstand, "dass es nichts Neues gibt ohne die Zerstörung des Alten". "Kulturen begegnen sich. Mal feiern sie Hochzeit, mal beklauen sie, mal massakrieren sie einander. Die Kulturen gehen auseinander hervor in Zerstörung und Krieg. Wir feiern in zwei Jahren 500 Jahre Reformation. Was damals alles in Kirchen und Klöstern zerstört wurde von Menschen, die wenige Jahre vorher noch vor diesen Bildern und Statuen gelegen und sie um Hilfe in ihrer Not gebeten hatten, davon haben wir kaum noch eine Vorstellung. Aber diese Verwüstungen haben mitgeholfen bei der Entstehung der westlichen Kultur. Diese Barbarei, diese Vandalismen sind Teil unserer Geschichte. Wir sollten uns von unserem berechtigten Entsetzen an den Verwüstungen der Terrorgruppe 'Islamischer Staat' nicht dumm machen lassen dafür, wie Geschichte passiert. Sie muss so nicht passieren und jeder Versuch, sie daran zu hindern so zu passieren, ist jeder Mühe wert, aber wir wissen doch auch, dass es nichts Neues gibt ohne die Zerstörung des Alten."

(Berliner Zeitung vom 10.03.2015)

 

M(or)e(is)men(it)to

[a follow-up to this and this ]

            Come spring, you carefully fold your winter sweater, and set it on its proper shelf in the linen closet.

            The wheel of seasons turns, the cold winds blow; you unlatch the cupboard door … and find the garment in its place.  All is well.

            Suppose now rather, that at the first blast of winter, the sweater were to appear before you in midair.  Convenient to be sure; but disconcerting.

            Yet such is memory.  We do not choose where to store what we remember, nor can we fold these items to size.  Our experience vanishes backwards down a deep well, much of it never to reappear, some of it to pop back, bidden or unbidden, partially preserved or distorted or we know not what.  Our own experiences have become estranged from us, fallen into a vat of alchemy, from which they emerge (it may be) changed, we know not how or whether, for we have nothing against which to compare them – these insolent ‘memories’, these soi-disant relations to our own vital past, spewn forth from out the cauldron of the unconscious, like some unknown Australian self-proclaimed cousin showing up on our doorstep, bearing a letter of reference and a leer…

            How much   how far much   better  that, which our Memento hero hews to: It Is Written, on Mine Own Flesh.  He chooses which limb to scribe it on, what the wording, which the facts.   – Too, our standard memory is a cloaca, stuffed with every stray sensation, useless wadding stifling the essential.  Yet Leonard sets down only what will fit on his skin: Yea yea, nay nay; the rest -- away with it.

מנא ,מנא, תקל, ופרסין

            Such is the sanguine and level-headed view.  But now consider.  He awakens each day  to a world new-made; he spots the writing  with the same surprise  that Crusoe spotted footprints in the sand.  He cannot really recognize it as his own: even those he wrote himself, he stippled into the skin – it won’t resemble his normal cursive – and others he left to the tattoo-artist.   The writing must therefore confront him like that at Belshazzar’s feast.  It is otherwordly.  He is wreathed in cryptic admonitions, some penned in a Gothic script like that of Scripture.  He might almost be forgiven for fancying himself a prophet.  And yet – for here the story is bleakly modern.  He pays no mind to the source of these writings, just takes them for granted.  He simply takes the next step forward, in his appointed task.  That Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin  has no resonance, divine or diabolocal.

            The image of a man whose living skin is parchment, is striking in itself, apart from whatever story might be attached.  It is not a widespread motif.  One finds it in  Bradbury’s story “The Illustrated Man”, whose title character sports moving tattoos, each with a tale to tell.  These depictions are multifarious, and look outward, concerning the onlookers more than the bearer.  The situation in “Memento” is the opposite, the exact inversion: all the inscriptions prowl around the same central obsession; they are addressed to the bearer in the imperative; they hold nothing for anyone else.  Even for the bearer they are enigmatic, as he strains to find the goal at which they point.  In this respect the situation recalls that of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”, where the skin of the tormented man is slowly inscribed with the secret of his own guilt.  The parallel is exact if, in fact, Leonard is his wife’s murderer.