The Dream of Night: a third ancient obsession of human consciousness (birthplace of the marauder, the highwayman, and the vigilante). Myths of the shadow and of the pitch-black; myths of nothingness and darkening
Category Archive: Thought-Images
The following are entries that showcase the global scope and experimental methods of the 5th (Dis)Appearance Lab. We welcome submissions through our Contact page.
A display of ‘technical wizardry’. Magic, they say. The eyes blink when tired. The lungs inflate and deflate in synchronicity. A theatrical procession that appears only where geographical spaces meet with ancient myth.
Spiritual practices modify the boundary of inner and outer: alter flows of consumption, centers of perception, limits of self-care, vectors of accumulation, receptors of bliss.
The square — home to the uprising at its dawn — here serves as a radical quarantine, fabricated by the shepherd-turned-hunter to smother a political sickness…It is an ancient medicinal ritual, this bloodletting.
People, goods, forces seep in and out of the city, along lines both visible and invisible. Cities as continually bordering phenomena. Horizontal roots, flowing fibers, extend as a capillary consequence. Orifices emerge only to melt into bright lava.
Is there a typology of the sacred that generates itself through the forces of torrent and outpouring (that which spills infinitely, bleeds everywhere), and then another that manifests only through processes of containment and drought (that which wastes nothing, overflows nowhere)?
And yet, far from all vertical meditations, we find ourselves confronted with a horizontal universe of black nets strung together as suspension bridges (there can be only unstable travelers/passengers here).
There can be only one, in the end. The rest, like the cobra used in ritual suicide by ancient Egyptian pharaohs, become nothing more than a serpentine sacrifice. The tangled martyrs of the frenzy.
The engravings are done by scratching the rock, then applying color in order to make silhouettes of moving images, flashing riders on animals we call camels, or dromedaries.
Beneath the lake, we slowly realize a psychic register stranger even than that of “the cellar.”