exit from historical dust

I never knew about C. Nadia Seremetakis' work. It would have been wise for me to read her as I was composing the work that became my "time genre" material. I'm kind of a dumbass sometimes. But my shame and general lacking-ness don't really get in the way of pleasure. 

I learned of Seremetakis through Kim-Ahn Schrieber's Fantasy, which is endlessly instructive and delightful. I'm very, very slowly looking at her chapters, drips of heavy liquid before sleeping, in The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. A bunch of explosive things are happening as I read each night, but just a few notables here, for now:

Seremetakis argues for attention to an ephemeral and sensory archive that is a source of layered information and "an instrument for mobilizing the perceptual penetration" of history. 

She cites Max Ernst as someone who did work into the utopian possibilities of junk/junky ephemeral archives (!!!???), and that idea caused me to think of those Loplop images (I think I so stupidly gave that book away after studying it in grad school!):

And then I thought about Dorothea Tanning's hotel room bodies:

And how della watson showed me those images, via a print copy of Grand Street. How little comes in the mail, anymore! And strangely the dish soap we currently have in our kitchen smells like something in della watson's apartment on Wayne Ave., circa 2003. These ephemeral sensory experiences haunt me. Honestly. I have no other word for them. I even woke up one morning in the midst of a terrible wonderful dream of owning a box of textures I'd known as a child.

Loulou got stomach flu and now all of the holiday seems like that slowed-down bad time.

"Against the flow of the present, there is stillness in the material culture of historicity; those things, spaces, gestures, and tales that signify the perceptual capacity for elemental historical creation. Stillness is the moment when the buried, the discarded, and the forgotten escape to the social surface of awareness like life-supporting oxygen. It is the moment of exit from historical dust."

"Modernity portrays and constructs itself as a self originating continuum selectively appropriating the past and creating inattention, in order to mandate the present and the future through the idea of progress."

From a book I read last month, Tomoe Hill's Songs for Olympia: "It becomes the most obtuse of choices, to step out of modernity even to the smallest degree."

I don't know yet what to do with this information.

Or even what the gathering of information is truly for.