Those of you in London, who get radio reception for it, can listen to me doing some live stuff utilising several of my DIY instruments and being interviewed on Carole Finer's rather excellent Sound Out show on Resonancefm this coming Tuesday (10 December, 15:00- 15:45). Otherwise, you can hear it live online here, wherever you are. All the shows are archived here for listening to at leisure. I'm pretty excited about it.
All going well, listeners will also be treated to a small preview of my new album, "...The Hour of Our Apparition is Forever Fixed (and we are returned always the same)..." which will be available on Bandcamp in due course. The title is from Auguste Blanqui's work Eternity By The Stars (available here), written when the revolutionary was imprisoned on a rock off the Brittany coast whilst the Paris Commune rose and was brutally suppressed. It is a strange work, that takes the logic of mechanistic 19th Century science to a disturbing conclusion: that in an infinite space ruled by physical laws consistent in all places, operating on a finite number of elements, repetition is inevitable.
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| Fortress Taureau, where Blanqui, incarcerated, wrote Eternity By The Stars |
[...]in order to fill its expanse, nature must repeat to infinity each of its original combinations or types. So each heavenly body, whatever it might be, exists in infinite number in time and space, not only in one of its aspects but as it is at each second of its existence, from birth to death. … The earth is one of these heavenly bodies. Every human being is thus eternal at every second of his or her existence. What I write at this moment in a cell of the Fort du Taureau I have written and shall write throughout all eternity – at a table, with a pen, clothed as I am now, in circumstances like these. And thus it is for everyone. … The number of our doubles is infinite in time and space. One cannot in good conscience demand anything more. These doubles exist in flesh and bone – indeed, in trousers and jacket, in crinoline and chignon. They are by no means phantoms; they are the present eternalized. Here, nonetheless, lies a great drawback: there is no progress. … What we call “progress” is confined to each particular world, and vanishes with it. Always and everywhere in the terrestrial arena, the same drama, the same setting, on the same narrow stage – a noisy humanity infatuated with its own grandeur, believing itself to be the universe and living in its prison as though in some immense realm, only to founder at an early date along with its globe, which has borne with deepest disdain the burden of human arrogance. The same monotony, the same immobility, on other heavenly bodies. The universe repeats itself endlessly and paws the ground in place. In infinity, eternity performs – imperturbably – the same routines.
This text had an enormous impact on Walter Benjamin; particularly in the enormous, fragmentary, Arcades Project and also in his last writing - Theses on the Philosophy of History.
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