Time’s Carcass

No.185, aired September 12, 2012, a continuation of the meditation on spectacular time began in No.164, again with readings of Guy Debord’s Society Of The Spectacle (theses 132, 131, 147, 148, 149) and H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine on audiobook.

“Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most time’s carcass”

        - Karl Marx, from The Poverty of Philosophy, qtd. by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle, no.147.

"And suddenly there came into my head the memory of the meat I had seen in the Under-world. It seemed odd how it floated into my mind: not stirred up as it were by the current of my meditations, but coming in almost like a question from outside. I tried to recall the form of it. I had a vague sense of something familiar, but I could not tell what it was at the time."

        - H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

In this episode, Wells’ narrator has lost his machine, and must confront the underground-dwelling Morlocks, who are the heirs of our industrial base, who are masters of underground machines, and have stolen the time machine, which like the annals of history as described in Society Of The Spectacle, floats above the world of production and growth as an alien technology.

As mentioned below in this blog (March 28), the splitting of humanity in The Time Machine represents a split in Wells’ own consciousness, and more generally in the modern consciousness. The new question that presented itself on this confrontation of Wells and Debord is: why does Wells only describe the upperworld post-humans sympathetically, and in detail? Why are the subterranean people so repulsive? The most obvious answer is that Wells describes the descendents of the modern upper classes, the Eloi, sympathetically because that is the world he knows, and his fear of the underworlders, descendents of the proletariat, expresses the gentleman’s horror of the harsh world of industry, and his fear of worker uprisings. I know that Wells was a liberal, progressive thinker – but his imaginative writing may express social concerns that go beyond his conscious political views.

Another idea is that Wells’ two contrary human states in The Time Machine constitute a Blakean critique of the separation of innocense and experience, the inability to synthesize these states being a failure of the adult imagination.

 Serendipity note: I ended with Forbidden Dimensions's Invisible Dimension, an instrumental track that I sometimes talk over. The track begins with a quote from some movie that runs "to satisfy his vile gluttony with the bodies of the innocent" - I had never paid attention to that quote before, and the meat/carcass theme did not occur to me until after airing the episode when I was working on this blog and noticed the connection in the two texts. Further evidence of the power of the unconscious.

Part 1

1. Thousand Days Of Yesterdays (intro) / Frozen Over – Captain Beyond
2. Naval Aviation In Art? – Frank Zappa
3. Concerto For Trumpet & Orchestra, Op.43, I – Jacques Hetu
4. New Home – Bluebeard
5. The Great Grandfather – Bo Diddley
6. D-Walker – Secret Saucer
7. Freshwater – Bluebeard

Part 2

1. I Can’t Feel Nothin’ pt.2 – Captain Beyond
2. Concerto For Trumpet & Orchestra, Op.43, II – Jacques Hetu
3. The Clock Strikes Twelve – Bo Diddley
4. Concerto For Trumpet & Orchestra, Op.43, III – Jacques Hetu
5. I Can’t Feel Nothin’ pt.1 – Captain Beyond
6. Moaning Wolf – Burro
7. Invisible Dimension – Forbidden Dimension