The Noun and the Verb

The moment when the piano’s string strikes, the dum hits correctly, the string is bowed perfectly, a vibrating motion becomes, for an instant atemporal. The black mark on sheet music is reached, a moment not oriented in sequence, with the vibrations fading behind as background constructions of each little stab onto the linear paper. Further behind the vibration which produced the note, the player is acting in an entire complexity of actions, coordination of countless minute movements synchronized together to that final instant of production, where the manipulation of the instruments strikes along the note blotted onto paper.

The symphony of causes and effects, influences and coincidences, adds up together and produces the “event” in its photographic form. The image emerges from this chaos of flows confluencing on the single point, that of the image. When analyzing from behind, it’s always impossible to reverse engineer any single cause of it, as has been noted by any consultant tasked with duplicating given results. Like the note emerges from vibration, the “event” emerges as the photograph does, a single capturing to create a noun out of a chaos of verbs.

The same occurs in the various theories of history reliant upon great singularities to drive time forwards. Out from the chaotic confluence of circumstances and happenings, the historians finds his fetishes amidst the piled up chaos. Hitler, Napoleon, Khan, Alexander, all appear lined up like marble busts, complete with their own little shrine he can worship at. The historian reads history backwards in this way. The fetish, whether it be a person, an event, a movement, etc, is read first and from there, data is unfolded around it. The historian sets to work uncovering history by writing all detail into the narrative of his fetish, thus begetting the biography, the narrative, the endless historiographical debates on how to perform this fetish-worship correctly. In doing so, there is a buried insight. These figures, these texts, emerge from their historical time in the same way as the photograph and back plunges the photographs, as the historian reinterprets into his own context. The mechanics of this movement can be seen in slow motion in every library, a perusal of the right sort of stacks showing a tidal-geologic shift, risings and fallings out of and back into the watery chaos.

This resinking, where the noun descends back into verbic chaos, is something rarely understood. Rumblings in certain circles tell of how spending can predate and inspire wealth, attracting it upon the person. In these cases, the person has made themselves into something, an image of a rich person, and then that descends again. Back flowing, they flow, seen by cosmic currents in a new way, thus prompting the attraction of flows of material wealth onto their person.