first draft excerpt completed Thursday March 29th, 2024 at roughly 3:00 am
Preface Note: I've been experimenting with a late-era typewriter that I received from a friend of mine a few weeks ago. Writing on one of these machines has always been a dream of mine, but I couldn't initially think of what purpose it might serve given its impracticality. There's a certain amount of tension in typing with something so much less forgiving in its editing. I tend to spend a lot of time deliberating on a single sentence, and I'm constantly rearranging the structures of paragraphs. The pace at which I write slows down dramatically when I use a typewriter; I have to commit to a thought with a sharper awareness of what I'm going to say a few lines further down or within the next few paragraphs.
Of course, much of this is due to the free-form nature of my writing habits. I'm sure many people who used typewriters never dealt with this issue because they did a significant amount of outlining before their fingers ever touched a key. I enjoy writing as things pop into my head and more-or-less just formalize my abstractions.
All that being said, the following is a copied transcript of what I wrote using the machine. This significant restructuring of my writing style was very stimulating in its difficulty, but I'll admit that this combination of committing to paper with my loose sensibilities means that this isn't my strongest work. I ask that you give me a little bit more grace in reading this material, especially in the areas where I fail to elaborate properly. I did my best to make necessary adjustments with spelling and grammar, but otherwise, this is an exact copy of my original transcript. I wrote this in one sitting very late at night with a bit of a headache, satiated only by the excitement of the machine to finish it then and there.
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september 11 2022
scenes from a wedding
"There's a certain enchantment cast upon the landscape of an endless green pasture resting beneath the unobstructed firmament that has penetrated the dreams of my generation. I speak on behalf of those my age, but I suspect that this vision of a place has existed in many iterations of imagination across time. The Idyllic as a genre of art is one such reference-- paintings of picturesque landscapes set in an idealized memory of country life, where man and nature coexist in a covenant of peace and mutual stewardship. It is in a sense a vision of heaven or "hiraeth" if you desire to refrain from the religious. Either way, there is a yearning in the heart as it is called home though the mind may be unable to recall its origin. In my generation, it is more concretely recognized as the Nostalgic even if the imagery remains spiritual.
“Bliss” or “Bucolic Green Hills” by Charles O’Rear
"Bliss", as it is titled, is a photograph of a rolling green hill along Highway 12 in Sonoma, California taken by Charles O'Rear. What was initially uploaded as a stock image was acquired by Microsoft and used as the default wallpaper for Windows XP as well as its marketing campaign. O'Rear's photograph would ingrain itself in the zeitgeist of the Internet age and in the minds of those whose earliest memories were shaped by the dawn of the home computer. The reality of this hill has been lost to those of us who gazed at it only in a state of transition between applications or upon moments of decision: its open expanse calling us to explore the unfathomed vastness of the web. It was also a threshold, a point that was crossed upon entering and exiting. We clicked "Log Off" and watched as the icons on our desktop vanished one by one until all that was left was the pasture. And when we booted up our towers, there it was, greeting us with a splendor of musical fanfare. In some regard, it is the most universal liminal space, a point of transition shared by millions.
Windows XP is no longer the primary point of entry to the Internet. And so it becomes a digital relic, and "Bliss" is its nostalgic face. There brews in that photo a collection of feelings almost too immeasurable to articulate: the Idyllic landscape that calls to home and heaven; the emptiness of its field that mirrors the low-poly edges of unexplored virtual worlds-- the inherent contradiction between the World Wide Web's interconnectivity and loneliness; the repetition of its face so that it is no longer a field, but an unreality, a simulacra of a field; the hauntology of the space, its liminality. It's no surprise then that its likeness is now in much Internet art I see today-- in Liminal Spaces, Vaporwave, and now Dreamcore, which seeks to merge all of these ideas in a Surrealist digital dream. The green pasture and the blue sky have been a point of location in my own dreams. Unlike the Idyllic though, the call to heaven is at its vaguest. Many artists may still portray this place with the aesthetics of the angelic, but there is only a faint longing and a sad resignation of its absence. Reflected in the art that appropriates "Bliss" is a cultural loss of faith, but also a preservation of its memory especially as it relates to our own childhood, and a deep-rooted desire for its fulfillment. The religious undertones can never be truly lost though.
Examples of Dreamcore Genre by theresalwayssomeonewatching and etern4lxm1sery
In the Orthodox tradition, heaven is often likened to a wedding, referring specifically to the Wedding at Cana and more broadly to the practices of the time in which the host invited guests with the gift of wedding garments to share properly in the union of love. It's fitting then that I find on this green hill the remnants of a wedding party-- rows of white chairs frozen in time. I enjoy the ambiguity of their placement, not just in the oddity of their appearance, but in their origin: whether they are waiting for a future event or if they are the remains of something long finished. Either way, they are Liminal in its purest form: a state of in-between-ism. Admittedly, I take a chair from the group and place it alone for a shot. I can't help but progress the narrative of this dream: that perhaps at some point there was only one chair left or that it was the first arriving. There is a lonely patience in its singleness, a quiet devotion to waiting in hopes of a sign."
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