JEFFREY BABCOCK

Fire up and hit it hard. Give it all you’ve got. Shake it loose, slap it around, pry it open if you must. Since the connection has been severed, there’s nothing left to lose. Two silhouettes cornered in a dead end alley, faced with a cabal of gleaming knives. It’s better to stop hoping for an escape, stop killing time, quit all the pussyfooting—bring it on!

Language shouldn’t slip out easily, leak all over the place like this, God made the Word that we should eat it like dirt… each and every word should be like gravel. Every syllable, a gash. That would put a bit of life in things again!

Instead, we have a thunderstorm of images and words, soundbites without context, an endless pit of downward swiping. The Internet has defeated us with its impression of endlessness. Even when you collapse with nausea, it seems to continue uninterrupted. In fact, it’s nothing but air. One vast burial ground…

Cinema is different —movies are parcelled in doses… You sink, you soak, usually for a couple hours, and it’s over. Then the time begins to metabolise it. Your own time: your walk back home, your conversation with a stranger, your bus ride, your morning after, your very own so-on, and on, and on.

In still moments—which are never still at all—I can sense another self. The glass is broken, words obliterated. There was a time when words crystallised into golden articulations. ‘Exactly’ one generation ago we were invited to language’s funeral in the disguise of a banquet. After that misstep, we found ourselves in a no man’s land, where language has been tortured by politics, exploited by the marketplace, and scrambled into nonsense by social media—words twisted into their opposite, leaving a bad taste in the mouth. The firmament has been dissolved, the moorings broken, and any magic has become fatal.

If words have been so muddied, is it possible to form clear thoughts internally anymore? At most you can produce a gurgle… or a tweet. When language becomes a commodity it is neutralised, and history extinguished. In this new Babel, only the ash of cynicism remains—words as mercenaries, undercover agents, traitors. We have reached the apex of aphasia.

Perhaps something can be cut here
once and for all.

Give me,
Give me the tongue.

In previous times troublemakers were accused of being thick-skinned. Today it’s the opposite—we are collectively skinless, born into social technology and hard-wired acquiescence. The gush has expired, the detour isn’t visible, the tangents intangible. The Soviet paradigm of micro = macro (in the smallest microscopic particle you find the cosmos) has vanished without a trace. There is no longer any dialectic, no contradiction possible.

Multitudes fingering their cozy devices, in the euphoric glow of a screen, with death grins on their faces. Nothing could be more hideous… the phosphorescent light in their eyes reflects oblivion. Take that gleeful smile, freeze-frame it, fossilise it… more grotesque than the forced grimace of Meinhof. Electronic nagging, electro pallor… phantom images for a phantom economy. Can the heart still sweat? 

The bourgeois state is the electronic screen. A dance of censorship. Every flashing image is a denial, a gag order.

We need more grain in the image, frenzy, static, dissonance, urgency.

The first impulse of cinema was a flickering—a dance between darkness and image, death and life, absence and substance… pulsating at 24 frames per second. The pitch black gaps in between—those subliminal negations—were just as important as the illuminated image. The pulse of reversal and opposition is what gave them their significance… what made them breathe. It is what unleashed the buried dreams, tapped them into a kind of destiny. Cinema was always unstable… always a twilight zone. Film nitrate no longer explodes as it once did, and cinema has become a hollow listless movement. A safe space without risk, sovereignty, exploration, foreignness. No more tightrope.

In the place of a primal volcanic force, we instead live detached, in dispersal. We can’t pull ourselves together. The fact is, death no longer exists—and that’s the problem. The striptease is over, it’s all become mechanical, and anything mechanical doesn’t exist. Let’s destroy everything that doesn’t exist…

Outside the window, the 1968 snow of oblivion falls, a blazing white night,
an otherworldly psychiatry.

Down the hall waits a tempest of connection… a desynchronised realm. An Ariel of spectral triggers. A guillotine releasing a deluge of mud, broken teeth, strands of hair, glistening chips of glass, unresolved memories, tossing and turning, blood, unwanted sperm, whispers, lost caresses, knucklebones. A primordial soup of broken silences, wet thighs, heretical ramblings, swarms of unknown insects… open wounds. The stranger seated beside you coughs up streams of black milk, severed eyelids, celestial foam, submerged laughter, transistors, indecipherable scribblings, clouds of billowing dust… knots of fingers, cold surges of adrenaline, snapped wings, random punches. Swirling on the surface are traces of rose petals mixed with dead-gray saliva, fingernails, unmarked graves, shredded photographs, twinkling moonlight, twigs, even faint chuckles and cries… all trashed in the flood, the genocide… a cathedral of light and dark, knowledge and mystery.  

Your red hair tumbles down, like the blood from an ox’s throat.
An onslaught… flickering like twilight, a constant stutter.
These days we hold our breath, armor our position,
Oblivious to the vast reservoir underneath.
We speak from the shallow graves…

She sits there in the corner
Naked as a rusty nail
Upon which I hang my desire.

Every puff of expression is a suffocation.
We shall only work with bone from now on.

Lashes to lashes, lust to lust
In the fear of our Lord, 2026

Underground cinemas
Amsterdam