Adrian Ghenie, Pie Fight Study (2013).
But outside, Revelation 22:15 “are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.” So since there is nothing to say about the truth the discussion has to be about evil in the poet. What is the truth outside the Walls is the very darkness of Puritan thought at bay, the American Renaissance.
We add a wrinkole to Amer Renn the puritan never saw, an age free of shadow, scrutiny or self examination. Now when the waSwahili stay indoors at noon and we mutter at the superstition, it is from their failure to see the shadow and hence the loss of themselves, because the shadow is their proof of being. (see Edgar Poleme, Swahili Language Handbook). The loss of shadow may seem at first a proof of immortality, but it is a mortality super induced by the cultural function and loss of self interrogation of the digital, especially a loss of the shadow of the past the most important shadow. It is a reversal of order among all the reversals and denial of boundaries that mark the split at the center of human existence. No longer considered conflict or crisis difference is resolved or feared.
The puritans were all shadow of sin and unbelief in their Errand into the Wilderness (Perry Miller) so full of self examination they could not credit their successors to properly carry the torch. The opposition of generations was the opposite of the binary double that drives out the shadow cast by the bad in favor of preserving the intrinsic ongoing corruption of the whole system." (Masha Tupitsyn, "Return to Shadow," in Adrian Ghenie, The Holigans. Pace, 2021). The good of the puritan is measured in the remains of institutions founded and cities designed in struggle with that shadow. The consumer amnesia of the past and the divided self has no sense of sin, for it is illness parading as ideological health. The Puritans and all predecessors feared the shadow, replaced now with a boundary-less algorithm of this branded self which is personality as an algorithm with no historical, familial shadow. Instead of thinking there is something to lose, some lack, the shadow is at noon. I'm OK! We can't see it, the shadow, equivalent of the soul. The very peresonable Mcconeagle thought it was the body. Other goofs call it the dweller on the threshold. All this is well proved by the compromise of art which once vetted the spiritual and by the civilization that interrogated new ways to confront the self. In the reversal of orders the digital self of the double took over. It came to be called the spiritual machine (Kurzweil, et al.) Authority for the elders was revoked. All precedence was by friends, faux friends who joined in the algos. It was Otaku. The digital double was an addiction, like Runescape. Creativity was replaced with imitation. They flocked to take and confirm the Turing test. Are you a machine. PRETEND THE MACHINE'S HUMANto cover up the fissures of the divided self. The machine could actually think it had no flaws, since it had no shadow, and did not know it was also addicted to porn and fifteen drugs. The "predatory fundamentalism of the algorithm" (Tupitsyn, 28) blurred all affect of the good and bad with every pair, rational/irrational, artist/neurotic, past/future all for self promotion. Existence was a pitch, a stage to get hits. All these copies of the self we take as revenge of the Japanese for Hiroshima, the Little Boy death of childhood and age, to be replaced with toy boys and girls in the velocity of its digital commerce. Little boy "artists today do not seem to be at odds with anything," says Tupitsyn. The only title a father or grandfather will get for these formless beings is Dude! But the father, the elder's most importance is protect the child and family, face the shadow, confront it.
