The Journal of Manny Face, Installment 5
As seen at Tango Camp in Crimea during the May holidays, 2013
There are moments in Time when Time is suspended. We die and at the appointed time are resurrected. Being unconscious, we haven’t felt the millions and billions of years that have passed, and the time between our death and our return from death might as well be the blink of an eye. One moment, we leave. The very next moment, we are risen again. And yet, millions and billions of years have passed, thousands and millions of generations have lived on Earth and passed their flesh and bone back into it. In this sense, the later time that I die from those who have preceded me, and the later time that those who proceed after me go is not even relative – but irrelevant. It’s all the same. No one waits, because no one knows they are waiting. You leave consciousness, and you return to consciousness, and there is no experience of the in-between. We are absolutely powerless. We can do little more than take a step here or there, this way or that, but in the picture, which is infinitely bigger than us, and far, far beyond our ken, the best we can do is yearn to go back where we came from.
And so, what does it matter, what I’ve said, or thought, or done? We will never know – but maybe it matters. Perhaps how we get to where we started is affected by our doing.
It is only when we are risen that we begin to rejoice or suffer. If there are ghosts flying around, it is because for them, all this has already ended. Time for them and Time for us are different Times. As perhaps my Time here is different from yours.
Have I fallen behind writing for The Checkout? No one moves – either for or against. Am I in another dimension, experiencing time at a different rate from others, both inside this website, from where I look out, and out there, where you’re looking back in at me, like in Delany?
Why aren’t more anti-post pieces going up on this website? Or does it just seem that way – to me? The same thing with the Commix section – merely floating there with those killer-clown images rolling past in repetition, through a ghost web link, like poison clouds across the edge of a dead city after an unnamed disaster; atrophied Commix, vestigial, shriveled, impotent, prolific no more. Is this the last hurrah? Is the website shutting down? Is it doomed? Am I the only one left?
Manny Face doesn’t give a shit. Know what I mean?
So I continue with my fucking questions, because I feel like it, in freedom, because no one ever gives you anything this good; know what I mean? They don’t want you going there; they try to bring you down to their level, block your way.
That’s why this was a blind screaming charge into the bottomless abyss of self-abnegation born of the anguish of vision, to stake this little plot of writing turf as my own. Who’s going to take that from me? Death? Not when I’m dancing. I’ve already been annihilated. I’ve done it to myself. There’s not much more anyone else can do to me – not even Mr. D – know what I mean?
You, go ahead and try – what can you do? You can only read. And what are you reading? Who are you reading? It isn’t me. It’s not who I started out as. Every time I come back, there’s someone else here, on this side of the website, writing this, writing as you read, and if you didn’t read, it wouldn’t be here – like this world, this universe – if we weren’t here to contemplate it and wonder, then what’s the sense? When I get here, myself, slightly before you do, it’s already written, and signed – Manny Face.
And in a sense, you’re no longer reading me, because by now, I’ve changed, and if you come back, I’ll have changed again. You’re reading a someone else who wrote this then, and you’re reading a someone else, who has written this, now, and an altogether someone else, who had written this at some time, but is no longer here.
And so I ask:
Why is a simple documentary, about old men who have been dancing tango their entire lives, better than a regular made-up film?
The film is “Milongueros,” a 2010 production directed by Andrea Zambelli and Andrea Zanoli.
Manny Face caught this one in a little no-place town of Nikolayevka in western Crimea, at tango camp, holding hands with a hot Muscovite chick, shown in an old musty Soviet screening and theater room inside an entertainment center that had a good, large wooden dance floor, which is why it was chosen for the camp location.
But to learn the answer to that last question, about the film, that is, you’re gonna havta go to Installment 5½ of my journal.
Know what I mean?
Manny Face, May 28, 2013