Read Online The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Nicholas Rombes
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shiny with old scars. His black hair is patchy.”
Suddenly Laing stops talking and tenses, as if he’s heard something. His hand edges slightly closer to the cone. Then, for the very first time, he looks me directly in the eyes. The late Wisconsin sun has cast everything in blood orange. “Were you followed here?” he asks, and I nearly laugh out loud. Followed , as if he has me confused with one of the movie characters he’s been telling me about. I begin to say, “I don’t think. . .” but he interrupts me with, “I’m not so interested in what you think.” Then something else happens: a look of pity comes acrossLaing’s face, pity for me, and I wish I had never seen that look, I can tell you, not that I attribute to Laing or to his knowing look the losses that I’ve suffered since that time. I’m not that superstitious. Those aren’t the sort of demons I believe in. Then his face relaxes, almost in regret, and he continues.
“ It wasn’t always like what? the off-camera voice asks Ephraim again.
“ This , he says, fumbling to light yet another cigarette, nodding to something out there , as if the forest itself were an entity. He’s at a weather-worn picnic table. His shirt is Nirvana-era denim, as if grunge had slipped back in time and caught him up for the three-minute-and-thirty-four-second duration of this tape.
“The old professor, dead now to the world. The very world that he had brought into being. A man of theory , began the letter announcing his dismissal from the university, must be at all times vigilant lest his ideas yield actions hostile to theory itself .
“He’s not particularly eloquent, Ephraim isn’t. It’s only after the fourth or fifth viewing that you realize where the hidden action is. In between the trees. Ephraim’s words are just cover. The sort of bitter, dustbin-of-history philosophizing you’d expect from a man who had predicted punk was the harbinger of a truly revolutionary accelerationist movement, only to see it swallowed like everything else into the networked, invisible machinery of our age.”
Laing stops for a moment, as if he’s heard something. For some reason when I think about it now it seems like he was wearing the scarf again. But he wasn’t. After a few seconds he goes on.
“I watched the tape in Marlene’s basement apartment, with its warped, damp walls, around the time that the Walt Disney film The Black Hole was released on VHS (it had to have been 1980), a movie so overpowered by Maximilian Schell (‘you were monitored ever since our sensors first detected you,’ he intones to Anthony Perkins as if reciting for the first and last time inhuman history a long lost line from Shakespeare) that the black hole swirling continuously in the spaceship’s monitors becomes an afterthought. The tape was labelled, in black ink, AXXON N . It was my last year in southern Ohio, and Marlene (who also went by Arlene) was a teaching assistant for a professor there in ‘art theory’ (no one knew what that meant) whom I had audited a class with a few years earlier, which was how I met Marlene, who had piercings in her left eyebrow before this became common, and who gave off a sort of Patty Hearst vibe, someone who potentially could be vulnerable and very dangerous at the same time. The next year I would be gone, blasted into the heart of Pennsylvania at a college much larger and indifferent and even crueler than where I was at the time of Black Hole .
“ Wasn’t always like what? the off-camera voice asks again, at which point Ephraim twists out his cigarette on the patchy and slanted picnic table and proceeds to remove from his denim shirt pocket a sheaf of folded yellow papers—obviously his well-worn and now irrelevant research notes—and begins to read. But the wind has picked up and in a gust they fly out of his hands, screen left. He moves faster than you’d expect, leaving the frame, presumably, to chase down the pages. The camera doesn’t
Suddenly Laing stops talking and tenses, as if he’s heard something. His hand edges slightly closer to the cone. Then, for the very first time, he looks me directly in the eyes. The late Wisconsin sun has cast everything in blood orange. “Were you followed here?” he asks, and I nearly laugh out loud. Followed , as if he has me confused with one of the movie characters he’s been telling me about. I begin to say, “I don’t think. . .” but he interrupts me with, “I’m not so interested in what you think.” Then something else happens: a look of pity comes acrossLaing’s face, pity for me, and I wish I had never seen that look, I can tell you, not that I attribute to Laing or to his knowing look the losses that I’ve suffered since that time. I’m not that superstitious. Those aren’t the sort of demons I believe in. Then his face relaxes, almost in regret, and he continues.
“ It wasn’t always like what? the off-camera voice asks Ephraim again.
“ This , he says, fumbling to light yet another cigarette, nodding to something out there , as if the forest itself were an entity. He’s at a weather-worn picnic table. His shirt is Nirvana-era denim, as if grunge had slipped back in time and caught him up for the three-minute-and-thirty-four-second duration of this tape.
“The old professor, dead now to the world. The very world that he had brought into being. A man of theory , began the letter announcing his dismissal from the university, must be at all times vigilant lest his ideas yield actions hostile to theory itself .
“He’s not particularly eloquent, Ephraim isn’t. It’s only after the fourth or fifth viewing that you realize where the hidden action is. In between the trees. Ephraim’s words are just cover. The sort of bitter, dustbin-of-history philosophizing you’d expect from a man who had predicted punk was the harbinger of a truly revolutionary accelerationist movement, only to see it swallowed like everything else into the networked, invisible machinery of our age.”
Laing stops for a moment, as if he’s heard something. For some reason when I think about it now it seems like he was wearing the scarf again. But he wasn’t. After a few seconds he goes on.
“I watched the tape in Marlene’s basement apartment, with its warped, damp walls, around the time that the Walt Disney film The Black Hole was released on VHS (it had to have been 1980), a movie so overpowered by Maximilian Schell (‘you were monitored ever since our sensors first detected you,’ he intones to Anthony Perkins as if reciting for the first and last time inhuman history a long lost line from Shakespeare) that the black hole swirling continuously in the spaceship’s monitors becomes an afterthought. The tape was labelled, in black ink, AXXON N . It was my last year in southern Ohio, and Marlene (who also went by Arlene) was a teaching assistant for a professor there in ‘art theory’ (no one knew what that meant) whom I had audited a class with a few years earlier, which was how I met Marlene, who had piercings in her left eyebrow before this became common, and who gave off a sort of Patty Hearst vibe, someone who potentially could be vulnerable and very dangerous at the same time. The next year I would be gone, blasted into the heart of Pennsylvania at a college much larger and indifferent and even crueler than where I was at the time of Black Hole .
“ Wasn’t always like what? the off-camera voice asks again, at which point Ephraim twists out his cigarette on the patchy and slanted picnic table and proceeds to remove from his denim shirt pocket a sheaf of folded yellow papers—obviously his well-worn and now irrelevant research notes—and begins to read. But the wind has picked up and in a gust they fly out of his hands, screen left. He moves faster than you’d expect, leaving the frame, presumably, to chase down the pages. The camera doesn’t
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