Subject: Edward Moore: The Greater Festival of Masks
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 1997 10:49:33 PDT


There is nothing more unspeakable, unnameable, than a _festival_. Or
perhaps THE festival, as it usually is. A true festival leaves behind
no trace, no possibility of remembrance, although there is the 
ever-present possibility that certain "lesser" festivals will leave
behind traces in the memory, traces that make the (re)-emergence of
the "true" festival a "greater" event than it has any right to be, 
"when the old and the new, the real and the imaginary, truth and 
deception, all join in the masquerade" (Thomas Ligotti, "The Greater
Festival of Masks," _The Nightmare Factory_ p. 159).

A festival is linked to the world of dreams, and carries on a 
"tradition" which we have come to know through our experience of 
dreams -- this experience is in turn linked to the eve of 
representative consciousness, when we knew of ourselves only as the
center, as opposed to the later development of the self into a
_possible_ center, "not a familiar face in this neighborhood ... to 
be seen only as a fuzzy anonymous glow mirrored in silvery windows"
(Ligotti, p. 160). The festival is a return to that point, that time,
that era when the self was always at the center of things, and not,
as now, in waking life, engaged in the act of constituting the
spectacle of life, of perpetually providing the senses with an object
(Derrida, _Writing and Difference_ p. 244). The festival places the 
self in the center, back in that situation of primality, that 
"glossopoetic" time, when the "delirium ... does not radiate out from
the center of things, but seeps inward from remote margins" (Ligotti,
p. 160). That is, the "delirium" seeps into the self, the inner realm
of the language of gnosis, the language that retains its power 
because it cannot be spoken, and therefore cannot be repeated. This
language of the inner self, this "gnostic" language, which is not the
language of "things," does not contain, or allow itself to be 
overtaken by, those "strange mass[es] of bulges and depressions"
(Ligotti, p. 161) that are the careless growths of phonetic language,
external language.

But the language of gnosis is still always in danger of falling apart
momentarily, of becoming useless, at the moment when it encounters
the trace, the memory of an external event, a hurdle which it has
passed over already -- when the gnostic language is forced to recall
its pure function, it shuts up. When a greater festival is
encountered during a crisis like this, a tremor occurs that exposes
the blank spaces behind the immediate display of power, that causes
the greater festival to regress into a spectacle; and, by going even
further, the tremor shakes loose the veil of symbols which make
possible the spectacle, and points up the designs as "so many 
pointless embellishments" (Ligotti, p. 160).

This uncovering of blank space, of pure possibility, is the origin of
the festival itself; it is a point in time when the self returns to
its place(ment) as _center_, when the interpretation that is
forthcoming because it is necessary encounters a greater language of
gnosis in the midst of the greater festival that seems, momentarily,
to have been abolished. The necessity of this moment "takes us back
to the borderline of the moment when the word has not yet been born,
when articulation is no longer a shout but not yet discourse, when
repetition is _almost_ possible ...." (Derrida, p. 240). "This is the
eve of the origin of languages," Derrida says, but I think he means
the eve of the origin of phonetic, speakable and repeatable, language;
for this "eve" comes after the first murmurs of the inner language
of gnosis ....



Edward Moore
monsieurtexteEM-AT-hotmail.com 

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