{"id":277,"date":"2015-09-26T15:39:41","date_gmt":"2015-09-26T15:39:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/?p=277"},"modified":"2015-09-27T08:44:48","modified_gmt":"2015-09-27T08:44:48","slug":"the-gulls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/?p=277","title":{"rendered":"The Gulls"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the most superb fictions of our last several decades has been that of the VUE \u2013 the \u201cviolent unknown event\u201d \u2013 that swept the world and left many thousands both maimed and enhanced, speaking hitherto unknown languages, inhabiting hitherto unseen genders, suffering from strange new illnesses. The individuals who agreed to be featured in Peter Greenaway\u2019s The Falls <\/i>(1980) <\/i>variously confess, after the VUE swept over them, to an obsessive desire to attempt unaided flight; to a discovered vocation for singing; to now sharing certain physical and behavioral features with certain species of birds, either to their betterment or crippling detriment. The title of Greenaway\u2019s film refers to the first five letters in the last names of a narrow selection of those affected by the VUE and registered in the files of the committee dedicated to investigating the violent unknown event, known as the VUE Commission or Directory Commission. Other relevant institutions and entities in the film include BFI (Bird Facilities Investments), WSPB (the World Society for the Preservation of Birds, with their magazine The Rooster<\/i>), and FOX (or the Society for Ornithological Extermination.)<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, many of the personages involved subscribe to the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds \u2013 which is to say that birds consciously and malevolently precipitated the VUE and all its effects.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

The Falls<\/i> has been called a \u201csequel\u201d to Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s The Birds<\/i>\u00a0\u2013 and in fact the film itself refers to the VUE as a possible \u201choax\u201d by Hitchcock himself, who was hoping to \u201cgive credence\u201d to the otherwise unsatisfactory ending of his film. This perhaps refers to the closing scenes in which the vivacious and mischievous Tippi Hedren, attacked in a dark upstairs room by a shrieking mob of birds, emerges not only gravely injured but nearly catatonic, metamorphosed into a different creature entirely \u2013 oddly and perhaps coincidentally recalling the effects of states of metempsychosis too long sustained by too-intrepid members of the Order of the Third Bird.<\/p>\n

The Hitchcock film was of course based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier, of the same title. By far the most menacing creatures in that story are the gulls, wheeling in ever-widening circles over unsuspecting farmsteads, riding the swells in massive numbers, like a carpet of white foam, waiting for the signal to attack.<\/p>\n

The appearance in The Falls<\/i> not only of references to the Order of the Third Bird but of actual members of the Order is a matter of record. The individual appearing as \u201cSashio Fallaspy\u201d in the film, whose real name was Sashio Hattori, was a member of a vol\u00e9e of the Order in Swansea, Wales from 1974. Moreover, in the film\u2019s fictional biography she suffers after the VUE from a condition called \u201capr\u00e8s-radiance.\u201d This is an allusion, inserted by Ms. Hattori herself, to the phase known as Radiance in the so-called Protocol of the Representative as practiced by the Order.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

The story of \u201cCoppice Fallbatteo,\u201d in addition, is a caricature of an associate of the Order (the distinguished Concetto Passerini) with whom the creators of The Falls<\/i> were somewhat acquainted. Fallbatteo, in the film, is an art historian \u201ctrying to make a novel cultural theory out of the VUE,\u201d embarking upon a \u201cdutiful exploration of the significance of birds in European painting.\u201d His great obsession is Piero della Francesca\u2019s painting known as the Brera Madonna<\/i>, and the meaning of the egg that hangs so mysteriously from the scallop-shell-shaped apse.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

Finally, the Greenaway film\u2019s most explicit reference to the Order amounts to a gesture of distancing. Those afflicted by the VUE, it is said, are able to \u201cterminate their relationship with birds\u201d if they manage to be buried in a certain field dominated by a bird-scarer. The saffron color of the bird-scarer in question \u2013 recalling the saffron worn by practitioners in the Order \u2013 is somewhat heavy-handed, and makes its point sufficiently.<\/p>\n

However the true purpose of the present communiqu\u00e9 is to request that more research be conducted on a troubling event from the Order\u2019s relatively recent past. It appears that not long after the release of the film \u2013 hugely popular among associates of the Order at that time, for reasons apparently unrelated to the Order\u2019s central purpose and calling \u2013 a group led, as is so rarely the case, by the Secretary Locotenant of the Order, M. Gylhmat, attempted to conduct a standard Action upon the film, or rather upon a certain segment of it. This action took place on September 11, 1982, and the segment concerned was that devoted to the obviously fictional Stachia Fallari and her relationship with the half-brothers Pulat and Ipson Fallari whose name she came to share.\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

Stachia\u2019s artwork is featured in the segment, including a sequence in which the camera zooms in closer and closer to a pen-and-ink drawing, appearing to reveal finer and finer networks of hatch lines and bird-scratches, as if in deeper strata of inter-imbricated truth and lie. At the time, a number of Protocols for \u201cbirding\u201d films \u2013\u00a0as the birdish colloquialism would have it \u2013\u00a0were in frequent use, especially in the UK. But this was a highly risky and experimental Action \u2013\u00a0which explains the (intended perhaps as stabilizing, perhaps further perturbative) presence of the Secretary Locotenant. All participants were aware that the heightened risk of fully attending upon the film was due to the multiple and highly compressed involutions of self-referential fabrication\u00a0implied by this rendezvous between the Order and the Directory Commission.<\/p>\n

What remains to us of the event is only that none of the Birds who participated in this Action emerged quite the same; and all without exception changed their names afterward to reflect their changed lives. Moreover, while their new names varied widely, all had originally had last or first names that began with the letters G-U-L-L or could be transliterated that way. The only participant who did not change his\/her name was the Secretary Locotenant. However, it seems that M. Gylhmat was the most deeply affected. Gylhmat was not spared, for example, the quadruple partition of the sexes characteristic of the VUE-afflicted in Greenaway\u2019s fictional film \u2013 and has been, from the moment the Action ended, a middle-aged female man fluent in the VUE language Betelgeuse.<\/p>\n

We encourage anyone in our community possessing documentation related to this event which has not yet been fully explored in its implications for the Order (aside from the Secretary, whose reticence is both unassailable and understandable) to kindly come forward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the most superb fictions of our last several decades has been that of the VUE \u2013 the \u201cviolent unknown event\u201d \u2013 that swept the world and left many thousands both maimed and enhanced, speaking hitherto unknown languages, inhabiting hitherto unseen genders, suffering from strange new illnesses. The individuals who agreed to be featured […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=277"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":284,"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions\/284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}