Leyland Kirby remarked that his project “The Caretaker” was inspired by the final scene in The Shining, where the camera zooms into the wall of the entrance to the Gold Room ballroom, to show Jack Torrence’s face among the revelers of a black and white photograph of a party in 1921. Two strands are drawn together here. The Caretaker’s albums were crowned with Everywhere at the End of Time, a lengthy album chronicling the six phases of neurological degeneration taking place during Alzheimer’s disease. The album begins with “a beautiful daydream”, wistful, nostalgic remixes of the source material that gradually loses its coherence as the disease progresses. Order degenerates, ideas loop, thoughts become stuck in strange places, the ability to form a coherent train of narrative thought is lost. In the second half fo the album, this reaches the “post-awareness” point where this process crosses a threshold into losing a grip on the structures which make up coherent consciousness. The ego is broken down as more and more foundational facts of the self and the experience of the world fall to pieces, the identity, the external self slipping away, before one’s location in the world, the ability to form the experience of reality into coherence. The music becomes jumbled until it reaches an almost psychedelic point of recombination where fragments cross and loop over each other in disorganized, where the “grey fog” of hallucination and pains mix with the last embers of the old self and the new experiences of the self unable to comprehend reality, all these confused pieces overlapping and distorting each other to form a confusing tangle of hallucinatory noise. This picks up and up, losing coherence until, like a container containing a gas expanding until it bursts open, the particles and pieces lose proximity and fall away even from this process. The final part is emptiness. The mind is no more, the physical brain flaccid and literally drained of over half its mass, a drooling waking-coma that gradually leads to a silent terminus - “death” would be too human a word for it.
In The Shining, memories have teeth. The violence of history is shown in Jack Torrence’s timelessness, always being the caretaker, recreating the crimes of the previous caretaker, Charles Grady, repeating the older structures of racism and patriarchal family at the advice of the spectral ballroom-institution of the hotel. A corpse of a woman rises from her waterlogged grave and seduces Jack into the corporeal embrace of the past, choking the son capable of “Shining” - Dick’s word for telepathic connections with ghosts. Ghosts in all these cases return, bloody and horrific, the torrent of age-old blood in the hallway, the burial ground upon which the hotel is built, the sex scandal in the room. Wendy’s horror at the end of the film caught by the spectres of history in incoherent terror, unable to cohere them into legible messages as her more gifted son is, is the opposite reaction to Jack’s, as he is swept up to the point of being regarded as an employee of memories, at the end, burned into their recollection with the final shot zooming into the photographs.
Jack dies like the last images of an Alzheimer’s brain, injured, lost, bleeding and limping, through a world of fog, hazy electronic lights, and cold. Cold that increases and slows, stiffens, snow whipping to bury and wash away - “the grey mists form and fade away” and the last shot is of Jack’s person entombed in frost of the labyrinth. The protagonists escaped, pushing forwards in time while memory itself now fully possessed into Jack decayed and fell to pieces over time.
Such is the case for history and memory. Time encodes into the future in language. After writing and speech, humans were able to not only record but repeat and recombine abstractly the things of the world into a form that would continue on past their natural lifespan. All things then take on a form of suspended animation floating spectrally above the world - a ghost, in the most proper understanding of that phenomena. The past is the future of another time that now hangs, a foggy ectoplasm of things - things that barb, things like those of New Londo Ruins where the corpses of the flooded populace return with bladed arms and magic screeches to kill the player in a blackness without bonfires. Memory recombines into hallucinations by the process of its own fragility. It cannot decay cleanly, rather it falls apart into rumor and idea and fantasy, these fragments reproducing as they take on new lives of their own, a jumble becoming a cancerous new organism unrecognizable as anything familiar.
For those suffering underneath, memory entraps. Memory takes hold of one, until like Jack, they become a hollow vessel for ghosts. Until like Wendy and Danny, one is left to flee in terror into a black night of unknowing. Jack, now caught up decays with information and falls victim to the crumbling dementia of the labyrinth, while the snowcat’s dim headlights pierce an unknowing future, their terror and screams left behind to produce yet more ghosts.
And yet what other way could there be to live? The linguistic mind is a machine for memories, and thus a machine forever entrapped to dementia and hallucination. Entropy gnaws, delusion creeps through every crack, the human animal nothing more than a victim of ghosts, a rambler in a garden of roses tangled and bloodied by a shibari complex of thorns.
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