Off Modern regulars and good friends COCADISCO have a really special party coming up this week at our own Corsica Studios. Its on Friday the 24th and Vitalic, Mark Moore, The Horrors and Louis Enchante are all dj’ing, its bound to be special and we’ll definitely be down there having a great time. To warm you up for this, Rodaidh of Cocadisco has done a little mix for you to listen to and download.

[CLICK TO LISTEN TO MIX + VIEW WHOLE POST]

In preparation for the launch of our second zine this summer, a literary treat courtesy of young writer Kendall Atcliffe.

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Soft light’s a bitch, because I know it means I’m waking up at Maria’s place again. You know what it’s like, when you wake up but don’t open your eyes, and realise you aren’t in Kansas anymore? (In this metaphor, Kansas is your own bed)

You’re trapped there, vision suspended in swirling colours and blackness, floating in your little world of sheets and pillows, certain there’s a world beyond your eyelids and totally unaware of what it is. That’s the great thing about waking up and not knowing where you are or who she is. You have those few seconds – I’ve stretched them out to almost a minute before – where it’s all potentiality. I try not to imagine where I am as being too awesome, because it’s only something truly special (studio apartment with Monet prints on the wall and flatpanel B&O A/V equipment, hotel room with huge bay window view of skyscrapers, empty white minimalist show-flat with more than one girl) every once in a while. If I imagined it was a place like that, and it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be able to shake the sense of failure for the next week.

My name’s Irwin, by the way, pleased to meet you.

But you have to open your eyes before the memory rush, when it all comes flooding back, and various cringe-moments or dancefloor mistakes start to ruin your buzz. When you’re in the middle of a moment like that, you have to force it to an end, or else it’ll fizzle out. Better a bang than a whimper. (As the actress said to the bishop)

Eyelids are only so good at shutting out light, though, which is why I always know when I wake up in a soft, white-golden glow, that the moment’s been denied. I can’t stop my skin from checking the texture of the sheets, my nose from detecting the blend of her perfume, her floor cleaner and just… her, and my tongue from tasting the hangover-mouth that comes from drinking enough alcohol for she and I to have conversed at all. My senses won’t wait. They’ve got a casefile a foot wide proving the girl in this bed next to me is Maria before I’ve opened my eyes.

Son of a bitch.

I’m a leaver, if that’s a word; leaving is what I do. I left my hometown, I left my one true love, I left Titanic halfway through; I left my ambition behind when I embarked on this stupid mission to get rich. I left one girl to her own devices as she got down to her underwear because I realised she looked like Liam Neeson (an extremely pretty Liam Neeson, but Liam Neeson nonetheless). I used to leave my lessons during high school to go to my locker and drink a swig of rum. I left a detailed deconstruction of my friend Steve’s personality written on a toilet wall at my old job. I left a note saying “I quits” on the front door of my last houseshare (I denoting Irwin, I does speak English as a first language). I left before the main course of a date once because Abbi texted me saying the girl didn’t wax. I’m left wing. I’ve left more jackets in more club cloakrooms than I can count. I leave things. I depart. Je departs, or whatever the French would be. But no matter how many times I leave Maria’s damn bed, I always stupid fucking damn shitting balls end up there again.

C’est la vie.

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UPON EASTER ISLAND

I.
Memory refers to; a personal ability to store memory on the one hand; and the actual memories; but then there is also the technological definition of memory in which pure information is stored digitally inside a computer for retrieval.

II.
George Santayana has said two interesting things about memory; that memory is an internal rumour; and that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

III.
Let us consider Easter Island then, specifically as a symbolic representative of Atlantis to the modern world, in this role it is something integral to the collective unconscious make-up of humanity. It is modern, in the grander scheme of human history; the first settlement of the island only dates to 300 AD, at the earliest. Which places the island inside a very different timeline to that inhabited by the rest of the world. It exists outside of all the traditional Judao-Christianic-Sino historical narratives that we normally consider when tracking the large scale developments of human history, Easter Island subsists in its own unique teleological progression, that of the mini-history.

For a people so historically insignifigant they created a system of beliefs that centred on the worship of a series of non-existent ancestors and the Ariki kings, whom they built the famous ‘Easter Island Heads’ in tribute too. In praise of their birdman god they harvested all the forests on the island, history has a way of throwing a curve ball at people, and as they set about destroying their delicate ecosystem they were attacked by raids of Portuguese slave traders. Twelve islanders managed to escape from captivity and upon brought smallpox back with them upon their return. The smallpox began to kill off a large numbers of Easter Island’s inhabitants; this rapid population decrease and the deforestation ruined the island’s eco-system and drove their race to the very brink of extinction. Amongst all this, they started to wage genocidal clan wars between the survivors for the remaining land. Almost all of those who hadn’t died because of the famine that followed the destruction of their eco-system had now been killed in sweeping merciless acts of tribal warfare.

In the space of 1500 years (the great disasters that befell Easter Island happened in the 1800s) they had created their own history that encapsulated the macrohistorical timeline of the rest of the world; war, disaster, famine, disease, extinction, stupidity, religion.

IV.
Easter Island is a memory bank, a totemic summarisation of grand histories of many different cultures in one tiny place, adrift in the world’s biggest ocean. The Rapa Nui people who inhabit it are only part-human; or more correctly they are genetically homo-sapiens but are defined by their lack of human contact and historical socialisation in the creation of their society. Yet still they are engaged in the acts that classify human endeavour and civilisation, in them we can actively see the creation of the human artifices that we use to define ourselves as being more than animals. We see the creation of religion, (nature triumphs over man), we see the destruction of ecological systems that humans rely on to survive (man triumphs over nature), we see ware (man triumphs over man).

The birdman god whom they worshipped is symbolic of the freedom they are geographically and historically excluded from; set apart as they are on their tiny, remote island from a human history that doesn’t exist for them. Their invented ancestors, the Ariki, are the creation of a history that doesn’t exist. Their mini-history shares many parallel motifs with our macro-history, the creation of the human from the homo-sapien in the worship of god and in violence. Here we see humanity engaged in the actual creation of a history and the invention of a collective unconscious memory in order to give a meaning to the id that allows them to be human.

Easter Island is a modern Atlantis, geographically and historically. The larger activities of humanity happen there at a sped up historical rate, the passage from the creation of gods that give meaning to life, through to destruction and almost extinction, happen entirely within the larger narrative of modern western human history. What haunts modern man about Easter Island is what is left behind, a series of sculptures in praise of forgotten gods, they are incomprehensible, artistic religious iconographic artefacts. They come to symbolise a memory of humanity, they make us ask ourselves what we will leave behind and thus what will be found of us.

V.

He invented a face for himself. Behind it, he lived, died, and was resurrected many times. (‘The Other’, Octavio Paz)

The rise of the modern age, which we can claim to have truly started in 1781 with the American Revolution and then also in Europe with the French Revolution of 1789, represents the abandonment of the belief in the power of theological models and its subsequent usurpation by the supremacy of the ideological. Up until the French Revolution religious belief had defined human history; as the modern era progressed, through industrialisation, capitalisation and then into the twentieth century, theological belief dwindled and stagnated, becoming a cultural petit four with little philosophical power over the populous in general. Theology and ideology are the two primary ways of measuring the progression of man through time. Theology provides a constant cultural id to the pre-modern existence; it gave man the existential solace of a belief in something beyond the sufferings he experienced in his everyday life. As the living conditions in the modern western world got better there was less need for the kind of grand schemata that was offered by religion. Thus, to fill the void left by faith, ideologies begin to take root; they place man as being fully in control of the creation of his own existential definition by actively demanding of man to make the utopian visions of theology into an earthly reality; this is the new historical progression of the modern era. In the modern era time is measured by the progress of man’s achievements, the goal of progress becomes progression itself, it is no longer defined by a development to a promised land that exists only beyond the corporeal.

This modern progression provides a framework for the revolution as the method of achieving it. The revolution is the implement of modernity. When the sans-culottes started demanding bread and prosperity (utopia) they set in motion the French Revolution. Then when the sans-culottes start demanding Terror and Vengeance (dystopia) we see the actuality of the French Revolution, the very first act of modernity was to turn the dreams of utopia into a reality of dystopia.

In the novels of Lewis Carroll we have a movement into a world in which the normal laws regarding probability and logic are suspended in order to illustrate the illogical and absurd nature of the real world that Alice leaves behind. On her adventures through the Looking Glass and also in Wonderland, Alice meets certain characters that pose ontological questions to themselves and her, but because in these magical realms there is no normal logic there can be no logical answers to those questions. The novels are both theological and ideological; Alice must struggle through the existence she is forced to endure in order to reach the promised land of normal life – this is both an affirmation and inversion of modernity. Alice only has Alice; she must struggle to make things better, to return to the real world of Alice; but this real world exists outside of the existence she is stuck in inside the books; it is thus also a theological fable about god and heaven and the tribulations of man. Wonderland and the world through the Looking Glass are both modern and pre-modern, this paradox creates their absurdity; we can transpose our reading of Alice In Wonderland and Alice Through The Looking Glass onto the current situation in Iran in that is also paradoxically modern and pre-modern.

So then, Iran, in 1979, almost 300 years since the first tremors of modernity began to be felt there occurred an Alice-like inversion of its founding principles; in the Islamic Revolution of Ayatollah Khomeni we are witness to an alternate pathway of modernity, whereby the assumption that modernity is about a replacement of theology with ideology is confused; the Islamic Revolution and the system put in place as a result of it is a Religious ideology, fundamentalism more or less. Revolution, the implement of modernity, has here been historically appropriated for the purposes of theology, the leftovers of the pre-modern, there is an anomaly in the chronological superstructures of the development of the Western world whereby a ghost from its past comes back to haunt it, it shows it its own distorted reflection.

The current situation in Iran opens up a vast field of land upon which to form historical and philosophical assumptions about the state of modernity, especially in relation to the intersections between the theological and ideological ideas of progress. Revolution is naturally cyclical, it is in the name, and one cycle of revolution brought a theological system of governance into creation just as another can replace it. Revolution and the modern age cannot be permanent, in order for there to be progress there must be another revolution, an act of creation that unites man with god, a return to the origin in order to move forwards. This is how Modernity operates, it built in its own demise as a necessary by-product of its being able to exist.