The Role of the Prophet in the Cinematic Age

The prophet, by nature, stands outside.  But where does he stand in the cinematic age, when all the world’s a film and the prophet but another strutter stuttering his lines?

He once stood outside of society; he had nature to stand in.  Nature, hardly hospitable, but still a home to those who lived without extensions, offered pyretic inspiration to the vatic class.  But in this age of moving pictures, shadows collaboratively scripting, where even nature has become another movie, the prophet has nowhere to stand but within the script.

Never one to toe the party line or even to attend to parties, he tended to appeal to one of two trajectories:  law or perfection.  While both his appeals were impossible to fully follow, at least the gap between behavior and ideal in the former was measurable; but in the latter it was infinite ... and infinity, despite the modern mathematical set, is troublesome to measure.

Yet prophets still are born.  The human soul has not kept pace with its technological extensions and continues to blindly cast anachronisms into the urban ball.  Not just prophets, but an entire assortment of leftovers and hangovers from the age of nature and religion swirl democratically with the adaptable, awaiting death or genetic modification to make them palatable or sterile or both.

Prophets still are born and have no choice, as with the rest of us, but to be who they are.  Where do they stand?  What do they say?  Can and should they do anything to perpetuate their kind?

I have answered the first question:  they stand inside and must find the outside from within.  If the path to prophecy is less direct than it used to be, this simply reflects the growth of the mirror-lined labyrinth in which we all find ourselves; the path to all vocations is less direct; there is more life--and death--to negotiate to travel anywhere.  Time and space have not shrunk, as false prophets glibly claim in DOA bestsellers, but expanded; they both reach for infinity with their greedy hands and we, peculiar configurations of time and space, are compelled to follow.

I have inferred the answer to the second question.  They say what they have been given.  They search in the labyrinth for the prophetic script, find their lines, and read them.  Law or perfection, it doesn’t matter:  they both are now immeasurable.  Law has become a discipline of cinematography, as all disciplines have, without depth or limit, a surface of screens and regulations stretched across the feral earth; and perfection is the only thing outside the law.  Does this seem futile?  Does it seem vain?  Does it seem as if one speaks to noise-plugged ears and beam-scaled eyes?  Well, this is in the job description.

As to the third question, I am no prophet.  I peer into the eye of the past, but the future’s blind, its eyeballs gouged.  Can and should are modals and modals are politicians’ province.  I am no politician.  I simply say:  let soul and technology battle it out on eros’ primrose fields.  Can technology modify soul?  Can soul’s extensions modify their source?  This is the human experiment, and prophets are simply little litmus tests to tell which way the battle’s going.  In short, prophets can perpetuate their kind as long as soul retains sectors free from technology’s reach; once soul and technology are synonymous, however, perpetuation will not only not be achievable, it will not be attempted, for it will not be thought.

If I am no prophet or politician, what am I?  I am what so many are:  a journalist.  I simply describe what I have seen and see.  Prophets, though, are prophets, and are compelled to babble their outside from within until the outside is no more.  Their role is as it always has been:  impossible, necessary, repetitive, unheard.   Cinema itself, this flatland we have constructed for ourselves and moved within, modifies perhaps the challenges, but only at a technical level, not a spiritual one.  This would in fact modify the role for many others, but not for the prophet; for he, as we know, lives spiritually not technically, and technical vicissitudes, their domain and power, are outside his comprehension.

The cinema not only lives, but we live within it.  The prophet too cannot escape this newfound air, the ventilated air of the theater, but breathes it along with everyone else.  He peers not from darkness directly--this capacity is lost to the species--but through a front or backlit screen and says what he must say in such a manner.  Nevertheless, he will be ignored.

Those whose home is the theater, who find the within from within, are often called prophets, but they are not; they are managers and moneychangers and scribes of all assortments and, yes, even journalists; their words are gold, though even in this age as they must be--orbiting flecks of gold.  The prophet, though, bumbles forth, in certainty lost, and now, in the cinematic age, lost even to his lostness.