blackwater/whitenoise

“The question that you must ask yourself is why you do not dissolve. Why don’t you disintegrate? Why don’t you dissipate? What is holding together the mass of subatomic particles that constitutes your physical being? What is holding together the mass of illusions that constitutes your self?”
—Jesús Vaca, “Forget the Raza—It’s All About Class, Ese!”: Urban Phantoms and the Gentrifying Politics of Ethni-City Erasure


“ ‘We conjure ourselves and one another,” she says. “It is a form of magic.”

‘And if the spell is broken?’”
—René Ron Arriaga, The Hyperadventures of Princess Klown in Borderville



The television sets manufactured in maquiladoras along the border were subject to a massive recall due to the presence of toxic substances that would leak from the screens when the machines were plugged in and turned on. On the other side of the border, images were manufactured and prepared for mass distribution through a parallel network of transmission interwoven through and around the truck, train, barge, and aircraft routes that facilitated the transportation of machines and raw materials and sometimes people. Some networks were invisible; some people were invisible.



There were reports of mass suicides all around the prime real estate of the perimeter of the city’s center. There was a blanket of white noise to cover up any evidence. There were lots of places you could go to get a fix. By then, everyone was infected. This was a blindness to the intersections. This was a natural state of things. The walls reflected a lack of oxygen. The bodies piled up. It was a dead zone for hundreds of square miles. Everywhere you looked, the same message was transmitted. The homogeneity was masked by a façade of difference in choices of how to die.



Nothing moved. Nothing changed. The airborne leakage of toxic substances had resulted in a total lack of oxygen, as if a neutron bomb had been detonated during one of the many spectacular events on the edges of the city core, leaving the architecture of apartments, freeways, parking lots, and offices intact, and creating an unbroken surface that masked a growing mass grave and a crumbling infrastructure perpetually on the point of collapse.



At the time, paramilitary mercenaries were training on the outskirts of the urban centers, in the deserts, at the borders. They were preparing for domestic deployment. They were familiar and experienced with military operations, heavily armed, and accountable to no one. There were millions of images of murder, hatred, and disease, yet nobody could perceive the state of emergency. It was a spectacular failure of the imagination.



The first point of contact with the world was the skin. This is primarily where the leakage/infection took place. But even before the skin were the eyes. In time, certain individuals and organizations found that the manipulation and misidentification resulting from the dissemination of toxic substances through images transmitted via the visual field could neutralize individuals just as effectively as—and often more efficiently than—direct contact.



They were immobilized. They were paralyzed. Limited, repetitive, and highly regulated/surveilled motions helped to mask immobility. A set of several prefabricated floorplans helped to mask the reality of a cage. A hypermediated reality helped to mask the hyperreality of their nonreality.



The discussion centered myopically on race—no wait, class—no, sexuality—no ideology—no identity—no media—no architecture—no migration—no space—no time—no history—no death—no life—



The transmission of the ideology and knowledge of a particular set of cultural values through officially sanctioned channels resulted in a catastrophic collapse of will, spirit, emotional resolve, creativity, imagination, community, and humanity.



The moment of violence extended in all directions at once to infinity. It was neverending. It erased us all in an instant that passed so quickly that it was decades before we realized that we’d been long dead even before we were born.



Afterwards, we wandered, turned to ash. We collided and dissolved. On the walls of still standing structures, smeared, gray dust charted the cartography of loss, a record of the bodies that had given out the last of themselves in transmitting these messages as they crumbled inward and then to nothing at the point of contact with these surfaces.

CONCRETE IS NOT AS POROUS AS YOU THOUGHT

IN THE UNDERWORLD YOUR FEET LEAVE NO TRACKS

THERE IS NO NOTE OF HOPE FOR YOU HERE

YOU ARE THE WALKING DEAD




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Blackwater Report: Transcript Of A Report Broadcast Aug. 9 On KNBC TV

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006).

Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985).
---. Underworld (1997).

Le Temps du Loup (The Time of the Wolf), dir. Michael Haneke (2003).

Raúl Homero Villa, Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture (2000).