Text Collages Desertes, 1ere Tabeau: Du Sable Lyrics

Motion now, up through history. Bodies crashing into each other like gigantic starships over barren planets, bodies wallowing in multitudes in red watery mud, bodies influence bodies, flow into bodies, bodies rearranged. Time. Godess Adastra craves. Ancient celtic tribes roaming the isles. Women impaled, b______ cut off and placed over mouths. The event, the sociality, the violence. Agon first as harnessed war, feudal settlements. Informs us Aristofanes of slaves however "tie him to a ladder, suspend or whip him, pile rocks upon him, put vinegar in his nose". Status of course will fail him, nothing has he but his pain to offer. Rome of course not satisfied, not ever. Consider Suetonius' note of Caesar Domitian, at once the psychotic rage of his family, extravagance of cruelty in times of decadence introducing into law the practice of "inserting fire into their private parts". But violence ran strong in judicial tradition, the call for vengeance at heart. Drawing from methods of capital punishment for interrogation and always confession. Lignum: two pieces of wood to separate joints. Ungulae: hooks that lacerate flesh. Hot metal. Flogging. And mala mansio: the close constriction of powerless body. Europe undergoing transformation. Great imperial power in the south culture of wine once, and verse, and now of violence in law. It reaches down, you see, it connects and displays. Once there was the oath-takers reconsiling crime, restoring balance to communal affairs. But that was for a different age. He sees it now, social integration, differentiation, building of a new society. 1100s Bologna recovers it integral to a new body of reason, a logic at the foundation of the human condition. Ordeal by fire or water, flood of the Old Testament, God intervening to protect the innocent. Inquisition is the name of the dawning age. Civil law preceding, ecclesiastical soon returning to the fore. Blood caked and coagulated in chunks and lumps under the instruments. He picks one up, holds it in the palm of his hand. It quivers like jello, apparently not quite stale as yet. Now, the Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada was a passionate man. Himself a grandson of a converso, his quest to purge Spain for the sangre limpia was likewise an internal struggle. Within him there was a longing for purity so strong he could resolve it only by focusing the whole of existence in one sensation of pain. Time and again he would experience the melting of the self, its borders erased, in his many encounters with evil. Aiming straight for the blinding light of Christ he would reconsile antagonists, overcome the dualism of Self and Other in the single shared experience of pain, inflicted and received. The violence, the emotionality, the absolution. The wheel: streched across it bones would shatter successively. The strappado, corda or cola: known as "queen of torments", ropes tied behind back and hauled into air, sometimes also with weights. The leg-brace or leg-screw: metal plates around the calves - slowly screwed together til bones are shattered. Eros-Thanatos. There exists no death outside of life, individual death distinguishing merely individuality in the undifferentiated process of life. The l___ for death in life however strong, for death replenishes and recreates life. Torture moves between - it wills life and seeks to preserve it because it is its accomplice. In the wake appears love for love cannot exist if not mated with a history of extreme pain and humiliation common to all and beyond what is bearable. A man chained to the ground, naked, a rat in a pot fastened to his b___ocks, a piece of white-hot iron inserted through a hole in the pot, the rat fighting with teeth and claws to escape the only way possible. Pain and torture feeding on the will to life, the strength of life. 1600s effectivity increased, thumbscrew. Torture is being worked into the legal machine, precise, restricted, dispassionate, not so of course in practice. Shifts now occurring. Shift in technology of power. Shift in legal rhetoric away from confession. Shift in social logic into a field of abstract symbol. Violence moves away from bureaucracies. And there it ends; in the machine, the rational killing, the death without emotion, without passion, the mere effective obliteration of life, the guillotine, the chair, the bullet, the Bomb, Auschwitz, the modern neurotic dream.