Thursday, October 15, 2009

I labled both these images "hallelujah" though only one has the word in it and the other is one of the working on the rail road images


I was contemplating how certain books are labled "bible" such as "repairman's bible" (repair man's bible - what a strange sentence), "hiker's bible" and "bible scholar's bible" - how the suffix partical "bible" is used as a modifier to indicate that a volume is a handbook. But the Bible is hardly a handbook. All my life I've had old codgers and, now, sick patients tell me, pointing to the dusty tome on the TV - "all life's answers are in there." As if that ended the matter, resolved all debates, answered any questions at all. I've found that reading it "actually reading it" tends to engender questions and in some areas mystification.
But a repairman's bible, if it were to model the actual bible, the biblical bible, should begain with a mythic saga of origins, contain a quasi-historical etiological tale of how the device to be repaired came to be, that the device has in fact been 'exiled' (scrapped, broken), and that finally, the device cannot be repaired by the person reading the repairman's bible after all. The one person who did know how to fix the device, a dishwasher perhaps, lived long ago, died and wonderfully rose again (only to be called away to another part of the galaxy). The device can now only be repaired in the next life. Meanwhile, you are free to consider the device as OK - an imputed OK; it is 'virtually' OK. As far as the manufacturer is concerned, the device is OK - even though it does not work. Finallly the repairman's bible would end with a violent tale of the end, where the manufacturer clears creation of all defective merchandise - wherein people whose dishwasher had broken, and who had resorted to doing dishes by hand while considering that the manufacturer claimed that their product was OK, and being promised a working dishwasher 'in the next life', discover, on the manufacturer's return in the apocolyptic scenario, that they can now eat with their hands. The dishwasher now no longer will matter, in the future, when dishes and glasses have been done away with. Hallelujah.

1 comment:

nostromo said...

materiality of the signifier
said Davis
When I noted that rain delays occur, but the rain continues to fall with the same speed.