Let's begin with the whys (and what it means to be a rolling stone)...
What Does it mean to be a rolling stone?
The reasons, although I have reserved to myself names and griefs, have already been said. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that, with assiduity, the triggers are only masks of an underlying desire, the glittering scenery of a script that is sometimes sad and gloomy. The matter in question is that what catalyses, is not what makes you move, that is, the favoring of the conditions to undertake or, even, accelerate any process, not always give grounds completely for the motivations. For this, I suppose, this new entry is justified.
Sisyphus, since the Dark Ages, was considered by all and sundry in the Aegean World, as the most cunning, wise and vivacious of men. A hellenized Solomon, if you will.It is not surprising, therefore, that it has been linked, from certain traditions, as an ancestor of the notorious Odysseus, man of twists and turns; even to consider the possibility that he could have been his father, conceiving with Anticlea the future king of Ithaca, before she was formally established with Laertes. Although the celestial and immortal power ran through his blood, and from both sides of his ancestry, mythology has been emphatic in recognizing that his actions, those of Sisyphus, tended always to transgress the absolute limits of life within society. Nothing unusual among the most famous members of the Greek pantheon, of course. But in this case it was not a guy walking on tiptoes in the tiny line that separates good from evil, but one who was joyfully dispensed between lies, excess, greed and murder.
Because of this, as we know, he was condemned by Zeus, who had also been the victim of his defamations (ὕβρις), to suffer imprisonment and ignominy, confined in the Tartarus . Thanatos, servant of the supreme ruler of Olympus, grabbed the shackles and tried to tighten them up violently to the extremities of our hero. But King Sisyphus, being as clever as it gets, requested a last wish. He wanted to see a demonstration of how the chains worked, and right when Thanatos was doing so, Sisyphus trapped him with them. Given this, a wave of wellbeing expanded on Earth, closing in to the human race, the condition of immortality. Ares, victim of an Oedipus complex before Oedipus (and of Freud, of course), which would make him fight his father for the rest of eternity, decided to stand this time on the side of Zeus, not because he cared about his honor or his purposes, but because he hated life without the despair of war, blood, and human loss. Hence, he freed Thanatos and send him to the underworld, carrying the unfortunate Sisyphus, to the custody of Hades. Before his last descent, he told his wife not to offer libations or ritual sacrifices on his behalf, which, in the end, would be the appropriate subterfuge to convince Persephone, Hades abducted wife, to let him return to the surface, and, thus, subject his inconsiderate spouse to the most edifying of punishments.
In this way, Sisyphus came back to his homeland, Ephyra (Corinth), with the taken resolution of never returning to the Hades. The immeasurable weight of the hierarchy between the Hellenic divinities would coerce the miserable Sisyphus, after a few years, to go back —subjugated by the power of Hermes— to the depths of the underworld, but this time to comply with the sentence that would make him famous. Our hero would vigorously push a boulder towards the top of a steep slope, only to watch impotently that, when he almost achieved his goal, the huge (and enchanted) stone would roll downhill where it would wait, again, for his exhausted arms to repeat, for eons, the unattainable task.
There will be another time to extend myself on some of the hundreds of interpretations that have been made regarding the significance of this character. However, I doubt that there is any that can dare to deny that in Sisyphus, right at the heart of the anguish that covers its myth, there is movement. His condemnation, therefore, involves an internal dynamic so rapid, that it would seem —by means of a cover-up— to seek something beyond the absurdity that made eternally impossible to achieve its objective. His "punishment" lies in the impotence of being only potency instead of actuality, per omnia saecula saeculorum.
Although one can reason to excess about why the story of Sisyphus is more pertinent and relevant than ever in these hyperconnected and vertiginous times, what interests me is to emphasize, that, in its myth, we always appreciate an incessant activity. And this similar trait, the heraclitean fire, would be perceived the same way, in the texts post on this page about cinema, the plastic and performative arts, literature, politics, culture, showbiz, fashion, music and the history of thought. To some of these topics we will dedicate many words in the next entries, to others, probably none, more for incompetence and the most petty ignorance, than for lack of will.
To conclude, I must shed one more clue, which has been raised, without myself realizing anything, as a delayed obligation I should be almost ashamed of. At the end of the 19th century, Léon Bouly invented and patented a novel artifact that was capable not only of filming but projecting what was filmed. He called it Cinématographe, and accompanied it, on the official patent, with his name. He said that the main innovation of his device was that it could write in movement. The movement, with Bouly, finally received an opportunity to tell its memoirs to us, who will serve as public and witness. Three years later, in 1895, as happened in similar situations to Lippershery, Beeckman, Meucci, Tesla, Göbel, and many others; the Lumière brothers bought the patent, because of the economic problems of Bouly, assuring with this investment (although it must be recognized that Auguste and Louis had an enormous merit in the technical development of the device) their place among the immortals of contemporaneity.
The term Cinématographe, then, as it was conceived by its original inventor, came from two Greek words. Cinéma, from the ancient Greek κῑνημᾰ, kīnēma, that is to say, movement, and the suffix -graphe, from the Greek γράφω, gráphō, which refers to the act of writing, drawing, sketching, proposing and cutting (possibilities that also do not escape my pretensions with this Webpage). This being the case, we have:
κῑ́νημᾰ Σῑ́σῠφος = kī́nēma Sī́suphos = KINEMA SISYPHUS, this is, the movement of Sisyphus.
It’s been my intention, paying tribute to both the circular character of his conviction and the cruel instrument that he was forced using to fulfill it (and to not fulfill, at the same time), which has led me to reverse the order of the nominal factors that baptize the project. Please note then, the preponderance of those arrows that strive to become ideograms.
Notes:
The painting at the beggining is an oil on canvas from 1548-49, entitled Sisyphus, by the venetian master Vecellio di Gregorio, Titian (Tiziano Vecellio); which is currently on display at the Museo del Prado. I would like to thank the museum for authorizing this use of image.
“Well, I wish I was a catfish,
Swimmin in a oh, deep, blue sea
I would have all you good lookin women,
Fishin, fishin after me
Sure 'nough, a-after me
Sure 'nough, a-after me
Oh 'nough, oh 'nough, sure 'nough”.This is the first verse of Rollin 'Stone, a song released in 1950 by Muddy Waters, and which is said to have had a significant influence on the resolution of a young londoner surnamed Jones, who in 1962, would baptize his band after it, in plural form of course —as the decade required. The rolling stone gathers no moss, says the old adage. Maybe Dylan thought differently about it, and we are, therefore, facing a discussion that deserves to be addressed in the near future. The important thing is that, possibly, this footnote responds better to what was raised as the subject of the entry; and since it’s impossible to deny that every title always encloses a promise, I prefer to comply poorly in the last minute, to not complying at all.
The name phuskine.com, as you could have assumed, has been a mere trivial occurrence that deficiently synthesizes a larger locution. I will not start to justify, metaphysically or esoterically, that, being the middle syllables of the two words that make up its name, these were arranged and articulated as the legitimization of the organizing element of any circular or spherical quality, namely, the center, equidistant inner point to the whole circumference. In itself, there would have been four letters excluded at the beginning, and two at the end. Albeit this does not completely tear apart the proportionality...
In a nutshell, heed what was said at the beginning of this note. Phuskine.com, the name of the page, was born by the need for a web domain that would not disappoint on a first date, although I would not be surprised if it does on the second.