Debord’s scripts. In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consummur Igni: We Turn In The Night Consumed By Fire. I like these texts that are made after a life lived, that are retrospective, looking back, even as they know, with great serenity, that there is only looking back. The future has come; it is already here, and it is one without Debord:
Here was the abode of the ancient king of Wu. Grass now grows peacefully on its ruins. There, the vast palace of the Tsin, once so splendid and so dreaded. All this is gone forever – events, people, everything constantly slips away, like the ceaseless waves of the Yangtze that vanish into the sea.
And so he writes from the perspective of one at the end, or from after the end. Has he died? How else has he managed to write from a time in which he has disappeared and his memory been forgotten? How beautiful to write from that time! How beautiful to write when you’ve already vanished, a wave in the sea.
What is writing? The guardian of history…. What is man? A slave of death, a passing traveller, a guest on earth….
Beautiful, beautiful. But still, something hard, adamantine, in Debord remembers (and this is his own voice):
Considering the overpowering forces of habit and the law, which continually pressured us to disperse, none of us could be sure we would still be there at the end of the week. Yet everything we would ever love was there. Time burned more intensely than elsewhere, and would soon run out.
And I want to remember one last paragraph, the thought of which, remembered from my first reading of these scripts, but when was that?:
The sensation of the passing of time has always been vivid for me, and I have been attracted by it just as others are allured by dizzying heights or by water. In this sense I have loved my era, which has seen the end of all existing security and the dissolution of everything that was socially ordained. These are pleasures that the practice of the greatest art would not have given me.
Passing time: I imagine Debord writes after his death, surviving in some way, still alive, and knowing now only the purity of time’s passing. ‘… passing through all those years as if with a knife in my hand’ – but now, there is no knife. He writes; writing neglects itself in his writing. Lies down and looks upward, to say: it’s all done, finished; the page has already turned.
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