The following text is part one of the second chapter from Martin’s second book, titled »Vom Geist der Maschine. Eine Geschichte kultureller Umbrüche«, published in 1999.Martin BurckhardtIn the Labyrinth of the Signs IThe Gods are from the Field of the Real(Jacques Lacan)Dazzled by the BlindingWhat is it like to look into the sun? To feel small sparks burning into your eyes, expanding into rings, into a glaring brightness mixed with blackness, shimmering red, the feeling of growing tension. Tears gather under the retina, like a burn blister that will eventually burst under the mere pressure of a blink. And with the watery vitreous humor, my eyesight will also drain away. I imagine this loss: almost a relief, no more burning, just this liquid running down my cheek and leaving a taste in the corner of my mouth. But I can still see: pulsating, bullet-like flashing points. Are they specks of sunlight or already the first holes in my eye? It doesn’t matter, who knows? Basically, I'm no longer sure whether the radiation comes from outside or rather from the depths of my skull, a volcanic magma that wells up and, at the moment of discharge, causes my gaze to explode and fly off in all directions—as if, at the moment of dazzlement, I could see with a thousand eyes, like an insect. A piercingly bright pain, but this pain is accompanied by an equally clear thought, the amazement that here, where the light shines brightest, the path leads into the darkness of Myth.Black. Nothing else. A calm black that stretches into infinity. And yet, this blink of an Eye [Augenblick] isn't accompanied by total darkness. Maybe it's because of the little noises making it feel like this blackness keeps changing color. Incidentally, it isn’t entirely dark to me either, but as if a residual radiation emanates from things, an almost imperceptible inner light. It takes time to get used to it. No, that's wrong, because you don't need time anymore. With your eyesight, time also runs out into timelessness. Everything returns to itself, like a kind of rhythm, so that it doesn't matter which tense I choose: I was, I am, or I will be. At the beginning, one sentence kept incessantly wandering through my mind: Fame is the Sun of the Dead—now I know it refers to that moment when there can only be light and shadow. In fact, this last and ultimate flashing blink describes the point at which the objective becomes one with the apocalyptic. There is the Bomb's blinding flash, casting a final, merciless glance at the World and simultaneously burning the body that its radiation has reduced to nothing into the ground as a shadow. Nunc stans.No, here the shadows aren't burned in, much less anything else that can be grasped. As my eyes (or what remains of them) adjust to the diffuse residual light, I notice that a black sun is shining here too—or are there several? But perhaps the word ›Sun‹ is wrong, because these luminous bodies are more like Cyclops' eyes. Like spotlights, they roam through the darkness, creating multiple exposures, image overlays, and blurred streaks of movement.Perhaps it’s this very presence-of-mind gaze that leads us to the Myth’s essence: that the individual body becomes invisible as an individual, composed of those silhouettes that the Cyclops' headlights, as its »pursuers«, cast onto the walls. Perhaps the Myth can be thought of as a layer of film, as a never-ending gaze in which large, intergenerational periods of time are inscribed. It would be misleading for the Myth to be interpreted as a face, or even as an individual being. If a name appears, it stands as a choir leader who embodies a long genealogy, a face assembled from many faces like that of a wanted poster. As in the receptive surface of the film, it’s only what’s inscribed in the Myth that corresponds to the substrate's receptivity (the exposure time): la longue durée. Just as the first photographs took hours until reality had burned itself into the image, and how a pedestrian could walk through the scene without leaving the faintest trace of his presence, so too can Myth be understood as a surface that remains unconcerned with passers-by and ephemera, anecdotes and episodes. When, on the other hand, something becomes visible in the picture, IT is because it is a condensation and crystallization of time. This explains how the one-and-the-same figure can appear multiple times, in different roles and stages of life. Like a long-exposure photograph, the Myth absorbs time, juxtaposes the sequential, and thus equates the different levels of history. The images may be dark, blurred, and shaky, but what is conveyed is pure architecture. There’s nothing random or arbitrary about them; rather, everything shares the same torpidity and heaviness inherent in our buildings and institutions. As an edifice of thought [Bauwerk des Denkens], Myth has always been Mytho-Logos.It may seem as if the idea of a single Myth is erroneous, since so many myths ...
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