Kar Ma

Going for a drive in the Packard of Remembrance

Sep 11, 2024

A KARMIC MIASMA

As the Cannes Film Festival - and the Festival behind the Festival - continue, it becomes clear that there is a kind of collective karma at play. Some take to calling it the Kannes Kommukarma. The actions of each participant in the festival, for good or ill, are experienced by all the othes to some degree or other. No individual is an individual. All share in the collective fate of the festival.

A Karmic Miasma spreads out from the Croisette, misting all of us in the collective soup of good and bad actions, clouding our days and glowing through our nights as Spica the Night Mother1 looks down and laughs in indifference to the calculus of fates intertwined.

The President comes to visit and is widely fêted. Confetti and other fragments are thrown. Roses and the flowers of other gardens are strewn in the President’s path.

Many things are remembered. Some things that were thought forgotten are recalled and a punishment is determined.

The Packard of Remembrance, a luxury 1898 model that was used to carry the first sacrifices to their destinations, is ordered out of the garage. The driver is assembled and given his instructions.

The President is invited to go for a ride.

THE PACKARD OF REMEMBRANCE

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Time to go go go for a lovely ride 
in the Packard of Remembrance. Fine vehicle
built 1898 and driven right through history.

A clean and sunny day in your world and mine. 
Cream trim. Maroon finish. Dark luscious leather livery 
like slabs of cool chocolate mousse and silver spoons.

Here's the driver to take us, broad fellow.
He grips the steering masterfully at your command,
ivory carved from tusks of many virile pachyderms.

I'm main sequence star, you're the bumbling tsar.
Match made in The Irreal Haven of Hollywood Heaven
consummate on the litoral of the Riviera literal. 

Off we go.

Cruising through the meadows, the lowlands of recency 
where everything is smooth and unsettled to your eyes. 
Only I and the driver see the weeds that choke the green.

Your faltering mind and motor. Know this, Caesar:
there's a collective Car, a collective Ma. 
Mother karma leaks from you to me, and back again. 

In the rear-view mirror I catch a glimpse: 
see, Icarus falls into the Mediterranean.
Ignore him. Loser. We have other fish to fry. 

Drive on. 

See, I take an avocado, dark egg. My other hand a knife. 
Hold it up to the sunlight and admire its darkness
as we begin to climb the hillroads,

into the uplands of imperial history, 
jagged and broken, though swarded in lushness.
Yours is the broken land, yours the false greenery. 

Regard the black nubby egg of the avocado.
Touch its warty skin, feel its firmess give. 
Hold the knife, feel its sharpness. Give it back. 

See how I slice it lengthwise, thus.
Thus halved we see the green pale flesh 
and the smaller egg within. This is its truth. 

Think on:

The world your empire made is made of three:
forgetfulness, happenstance and rage.
Look outside the Packard, the greenery is gone. 

We cruise now through the snaggy badlands that you made,
sawtooth ravines choked with rotting corpses,
once brown, though bleached and blanched and greyish green.

Stop the car, driver. Here is the place, the beauregard,
the overlook, the mise-en-abime. The mirador
where vistas open expanse of panaromavision. 

Get out. 

Yes, of course I hold the knife against your ribs.
You expected maybe another outcome, oh pinche gringo?
Epic has turned noir before your cataract eyes, old sport.

Far out over the denticulate waste we gaze,
over the lowlands, the shining city now smoked with worms.
See sea where other reals float on like little boats. 

I lured you by auto de luxe to tell you just one thing:
your life is a fraud. Your empire a waste of nothing.
Vengeance of millions is vain but fated to occur in any case. 

Die now.

OPENING NIGHT DISTURBANCE

Cruel limos slide growling up the boulevard towards Le Palais des Beaux Arts, bearing starlets fleshy or delicate, and leading men straight-jawed, impeccable haircuts combed just so, to their date with deification.

Bystanders wave hesitant, confused to unrecognize the as-yet unpremiered nobodies, and wondering if all the demigods dress just so, in crisp black jackets with silk black papillons at their throats, their dyads clad in black taffeta hourglass gowns with matching elbowgloves, pearls dripping like spilled seed around their scooping lovely throats. This procession has the silky black glamour of a ritual sacrifice, or an orgy of abandon and release in the despair of a nevercoming dawn.

The shimmering they make in the memory of passersby is unstable as yet, a wobbly wake, their images still unscreened and unavailable for purchase and repurchase. The interviews in which they express their admiration for Truffaut, for Renoir, for Hitchcock and Fellini, for each other, and each obscurely for his or herself, are composed and printed, but as yet not piled to the side of the newskiosks on the Croisette.

The limos pull up to the curb and flunkeys pull open the door. The demigods and dyads in their finery step out, but something's gone awry. The flashbulbs are popping but the paparazzi are looking elsewhere. They are gazing at the pavement or staring at the near-full moon as it rises and waxes in the glimmer out to sea. Cameras are aiming willy-nilly, pell-mell and unfocused, on the nothing around the stars and not at the stars themselves.

A murmur goes around: when the moon reaches its highpoint above the shimmery Med, or at midnight, or at some time determined by obscure geometries of fate esoteric and unknown to the profane, The Worming will commence. It's enough to start a shuffle of unease, building slowly to a subdued and orderly panic.

ON SPICA

Spica - Virgo alpha, alpha virginis.
She is the egg-shaped dark companion. Spica is Nyx, our Night Mother:

”In the beginning were Chaos and Nyx and black Erebus and broad Tartarus, and no Earth, Air, or Sky.
And in the boundless bosom of Erebus did black-winged Nyx at the very start bring forth a wind egg, from which as the seasons revolved came forth Eros the seductive, like to swift whirlwinds, his back aglitter with wings of gold.”