I have written else where of the ‘time wars’ but in a slightly narrativized/genre induced setting. I don’t know whether a small town is a good place to oversee the resulting carnage or not. No doubt a good place if one wants some distance from the embodiment of it. But lets face it, a great many folks like to rub elbows with it (i.e., catastrophe, overload, a generally super-heated environment)–otherwise there would be no cities. Perhaps in cities one has to obtain and retain a higher capacity for confusion, opacity, and the unreadable, all things which cause small towns to break out in night sweats maybe….or even better, just ignore it since it sometimes is hard to recognize.
I began to think along these lines after finding some notes I had left on the back pages of a book on Hegel (of course!) for chapbook on unreadability:
There is no way to interrogate the unreadable even though it doesn’t present a slippery surface; rather its jagged irregularity acts a catch to be pulled along the path of history. notoriously the apotheosis of sense making, and sealed off, for perhaps another time existing in a mode of opaque simultaneity, neither inside nor outside but in a state of suspension, resisting all appreciations, all aspects of forgiving, forgetting, guilt. longing, nostalghias, being neither beginning nor end yet somehow alwasy there. It is everything we wish it to be and nothing at all that we expect, know, or like (or unlike). Unreadability shares with the disaster, the apocalpse, the catastrophe, the accidental slow grind of processes (once called gods) that we can only barely make out in the fall of dice, away from the hidden, and directly back into the hidden.