Pattern, Form, Monsters

Houndstooth.

The pattern becomes.

The pattern doesn't just become more visible, or clear, or comprehensible. The pattern doesn't simply appear. It is appearing. It keeps appearing. It keeps moving, coordinating, re-ordering, reforming. Form is reformation, reforming.

The moving picture.

The form and contour is not just the outline, but all the lines of demarcation that cross and divide the body. This is the grid of the body, the marks, scars, signs. And the city is marked by all these bodies and their lines. The city is constantly composed of this dis/organization, this upheaval, its lines made up of all the lines of its constituent bodies, re-forming and re-ordering like cells making the subset and sections, always a factor of displacement, each and all negotiating across the lines of other, alien, refugee. To articulate this form is to begin to reveal the monster, or banish it, to analyze and distinguish between the imaginary or fabulous and the real, to familiarize, domesticate, perhaps even tame. But the monster is thereby not without beauty, whether fabulous or real.

-- Monster

Most monsters are such with symmetry, the disarray of the parts seeming to have been arranged in orderly fashion.

-- Georges-Louris Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Supplement to Natural History

Unless Rousset considers every line, every spatial form (but every form is spatial) beautiful a priori, unless he deems, as did a certain medieval theology (Considérans in particular), that form is transcendentally beautiful, since it is and makes things be, and that Being is Beautiful; these were truths for this theology to the extent that monsters themselves, as it was said, were beautiful, in that they exist through line or form, which bear witness to the order of the created universe and reflect divine light. Formosus means beautiful.

-- Jacques Derrida, "Force and Signification," in Writing and Difference (trans. Alan Bass)

The pattern floats.
The pattern does not see itself.
This is the agency of its perception.
(Tiles on the floor, a kind of hyperconsciousness and mesmerization at once, floating of concentration, in between state, neither unified nor fragmented, neither immersed nor entirely separate. From an airplane at night the plane of city lights looks like it has no ground, suspended in the air or space. The zone. "Belonging" as this distance from which [what? - "it"] measures [or is measured] this sensation, the removal. The passive reception of the world. To be - longing.)
Immersion as a subjective sense presupposes distinction.

-- "The Subjunctive," Monster

Once upon a time there was a young man whose first love was monster movies. He would go straight for the TV guide in the Sunday paper, then rush through the pages to find the listings, first for the special Sunday matinee "Mystery Theater," then for the Friday night and Saturday night late shows. When the time came, he would claim his favorite perch in an armchair, lying sideways with his legs over one stuffed arm. The rest of the week was anticipation for the haunting hours of Friday and Saturday, and the cycle to start over on Sunday. Monster traits, nocturnal habits, the window to other worlds beaming its blue light into the darkness - he was one of those movie scientists caught in the glow like a tractor beam, his glare fixed on that aperture to his bunker. The ever more plastic form presented by creatures, aliens, robots (mostly rubber suits), play and swap of scale, pretending as such grand business, manipulation was already on the outskirts of imagination, as much fun as sublimation of fear.

-- "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Superman," Monster

The upholstery of that favorite chair had a houndstooth pattern.

Do you see the hound's tooth in the pattern? Or do you see ninja gears? Or do you see space invaders?

Below is a survey of the monster movie, by some higher points of its history. The table is sortable, with year the *default order. The ranking is mine, considering these relatively as monster movies.

© 2024 Greg Macon.
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