Reenactment and Renovation

Reenactment and Renovation

Chosen Pasts Are Stories of the Future

The other day I was thinking about the making of exact copies--from paintings to cover bands that sound exactly like the originals. As the decades go by you can even have second third-generation copies--replicas of replicas made without any knowledge of the history of the original. Sometimes the distant replicas have the same essences of the Original through coincidence, but usually, they gather lots of other histories through time.

The Ship of Theseus philosophy proposes that a copy of an object, even if an exact replica, cannot absolutely contain the original essences. In fact, new essences may be in direct conflict: In fact, new essences may be in direct conflict--such as money donated for the rebuilding of Notre Dame being tainted by unwitting nefarious implications.

Reenactments, especially of events in ancient history are "temporal replicas", but are different in the sense that replaying or performing them as new "arrangements". Since we don't have a modern score, the modern versions can never capture the essences of the music performed millennia ago. It is impossible to reenact that far in the past because there are so many incremental changes over centuries--each time getting better and better or worse and worse, with perhaps some periods losing all knowledge, then created anew from what was left in the residue. Music in ancient Greece was more for special occasions: Not many people had instruments unless they attempted to make them themselves. The layperson probably did not have the understanding of how to drill holes in a tubular piece of wood or ivory such that they would create some kind of scale that sounded musical. We attempt to fill in the gaps with more modern approximations with reenactments, but there is no way of knowing through abstract extrapolations. A friend made the comment that it sounded like Balkan music, and this is in fact true. How can we know how ancient peoples used rhythm, let alone assume it was in 5/8? Would it have been what we understand as "Balkan"--a modern construct based on political and ideological boundaries formed thousands of years into the future, and then make assumptions simply based on geographical proximity to Greece? It is probably true that styles of music emerge in regions--but why would the rhythms be non-4/4?

Remixing

The work of scribes was the primary vehicle for transformations over centuries in all the extant trades. For example, in the Middle Ages, the textile artisans had various recipes for dying cloth, but each iteration created a somewhat different recipe:

"[Manuals for dyers] are very difficult to analyze. One difficulty stems from the nature of texts copied by hand: although these collections are always copied from others, each one gives a new version of the text--scribes add to or abridge some formulas, modify others, change the name of the material, or give the same name to what are, in fact, different substances." (Blue: The History of a Color, p. 76)

Per Ship of Theseus, each variation has new intentions in it, whether we are aware of them or not.

Renovation

Cathedrals are architectural metaphors for forest canopies and are very often “site-specific” with timber derived from local woods. This metaphor also includes the changes a forest endures through time, including fires. So it’s not unusual in the long view of history. As long as it is mostly intact, there are sufficient resources to restore them. We see it as tragic, but in the lives of old churches through history, this might seem a common occurrence. They are closest to nature in a spiritual sense.

Resurrection

Perhaps churches have their own spiritual crises and are reservoirs for all the terrible things that are happening in the world, and eventually reach a resonant frequency and collapse or crumble.

"But for some people in France, Notre Dame has also served as a deep-seated symbol of resentment, a monument to a deeply flawed institution and an idealized Christian European France that arguably never existed in the first place. “The building was so overburdened with meaning that its burning feels like an act of liberation,” says Patricio del Real, an architecture historian at Harvard University. If nothing else, the cathedral has been viewed by some as a stodgy reminder of “the old city — the embodiment of the Paris of stone and faith — just as the Eiffel Tower exemplifies the Paris of modernity, joie de vivre and change,” Michael Kimmelmann wrote for the New York Times." https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/notre-dame-cathedral-paris-fire-whats-next-822743/

We have a tendency to dismiss the supernatural out-of-hand but may inform our collective psyche in subtle ways. Spiritual practices have become distorted at the collective level--from individual ego inflations to the collective ego run amok, with many explanations manifesting through esoteric philosophies and spiritual practices. They are similar to reenactments of history based on historical remixes of scribes over generations--many lost in fires, floods, or otherwise damaged and recreated from collective or consensus memories with no empirical or rational basis. In the 19th century, Russian Cosmists (and they still exist today in other forms, such as transhumanism) had Utopian ideals such as "The Common Task", arising from timeless immortality, where man finally conquers entropy, and nature will truly be our eternal friend, as opposed to nature's slave.

"In many passages throughout The Philosophy of the Common Task (Philosophy of Physical Resurrection), Fedorov calls nature "our temporary enemy but a permanent friend." By virtue of our reason, we are intended to regulate blind nature, a duty which, from Adam's time to now, through weakness, we have failed to exercise. As fallen humanity, we are now nature's slaves, and our common task is to become nature's masters, after which we shall have recreated paradise and nature will truly be our eternal friend. The secret to mastery of nature is to know and utilize rational counterforces of which we are now only dimly and passively aware." (The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers, p.78)

It is ironic that the Federal Security Service, formerly known as the KGB, is housed in a former Orthodox church, going back to the idea of re-use and recycling of objects and infusing them with new meaning--coming from different directions: All the money now being donated to renovate Notre Dame may poison its essences. The fire was an inflection point and could have simply been caused by a lightning strike but in this case an electrical spark. It must be common over thousands of years that churches are hit by lightning and are set ablaze, not to mention pure iconoclasm as is in the destruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 1931 under Stalin, then rebuilt in 2000. It is interestingly ironic that as of 2018, the foundation of the church is sinking. In another 1000 years, it may replace itself again. How is the Original defined in terms of original essences?


Cathedral of Christ the Saviour demolition (1931) from Aureus Axum on Vimeo.

The evergreen belief that the Ressurection is a tabula rasa--pure light when the history of that new life brings with it the freight of the past completely atoned for. Notre Dame's renovation is the beginning of the renovation of the future, perhaps not too far in the future. But what pasts will be chosen for that story of the future?