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190 Crucifictions The World Jones Made, which was written at the same time as the novella version of Vulcan’s Hammer, continues to contemplate the unattended aberration that is technophobicity, which arises when the group-psychologization of gadget love or life as preparedness is dismissed or reinterpreted in favor of rationalization, the word Ernest Jones made. At least in the European crisis center of the 1930s, Marxists, for instance, tended to deny the irrational force that is with mass psychology, while the fascists hitched their head start to it. The masses want to express themselves and for no good reason. Developmentally as well as historically, adolescence marks the commencement of this metabolization of the jolts and bolts of our technologization. If we hold onto Benjamin’s calculus, that the Menge or group is the legible hub or simulacrum of the masses, we can recognize teen in-group psychology along these lines as the control release outlet of mass psychology. This is where Benjamin situated his either/aura as the test Christianity, too, would have to pass into the secular order raised to the power of cinema. But by his own standards (the Origin book), Benjamin’s media-therapeutic readings would have to be judged, at least with regard to the influence of mass psychology, another rationalization. Ever since Christianity set aside one Good Friday as demonstration that God can die, it has been the religion scheduled for erasure, replacement , but also for returns. No resurrection without the tomb. But that also means Christianity is the religion of the empty tomb, which, having made it, must repeatedly lie in it. No return without the death of Christianity. In The World Jones Made Floyd Jones, next year’s world leader, originally put out the shingle of his time sense at a circus for radiation freaks. Crucifictions 191 When we encounter him he specializes as fortune-teller in “the future of mankind;” he doesn’t do “personal futures.” When his own turn of—turn with—events is only one year away, Jones starts seeing the big events to come—back. Like Faust, he takes a turn in the small world first, until the turn places him at the controls of the big world. His “gift” is that he can see one year ahead at any time (all the time). Like Faust his life is doubled, but always in the span of one year. His present tense lies doubly in the past while he is alive in the absent tense to the future. It is always the recent past that returns, only the near future that gets projected or foretold. Jones thus must struggle both to remember and to remember to forget: “For a moment he tried to remember what came immediately ahead. . . . It was so long ago; one whole year had passed and details had blurred. . . . The old mechanical actions . . . stale events, dry and dusty, sagging under the smothering blanket of dull age. And meanwhile, the living wave flashed on. He was a man with his eyes in the present and his body in the past. Even now. . . his senses were glued tight on another scene, a world that still danced with vitality, a world that hadn’t become stale. Much had happened in the next year” (47). If Faustian striving were a wish, this would be the wish fulfillment that doubles as punitive curse. “To me,” Jones said hoarsely, “this is the past. Right now, with you three, here in this building, this is a year ago. It’s not so much like I can see the future; it’s more that I’ve got one foot stuck in the past. I can’t shake it loose. I’m retarded; I’m reliving one year of my life forever.” He shuddered. “Over and over again. Everything I do, everything I say, hear, experience, I have to grind over twice. He raised his voice, sharp and anguished, without hope. “I’m living the same life two times!” (39) Only the foreseen year to come is in real time, though it doesn’t happen until it starts to repeat itself in double time. The actual year is just the shell or incubator for the prematurely born and borne year to come. Thus the original title: “Womb for Another.” Jones cannot intervene in the future or past, but must endure it in its unchanging aspect: “That was what he hated; that was the loathsome thing. The molasses of time: it couldn’t be...

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