ÎNDĂRĂT is an old word, now unused; an odd word, and marginal. It roughly translates as back, backwards – simultaneously referring to a spatial and temporal dimension. Paraphrasing Krasna: a vertigo of space intertwined with a vertigo of time.

ÎNDĂRĂT means going back, reversing, looking behind one’s back, (re)tracing one’s steps, figuring out a different path, and leaving behind altogether the promise of any future. Benjamin wrote of Angelus Novus’ haunting backwards gaze and its impossible longing to “awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed” (257). ÎNDĂRĂT is a cry. It is also a whimper by which the current is annulled. It is not a cry for renewal but for reversing directions. The Big Crunch. Returning as closely to t0 as you can. From tomb to womb and beyond. Simultaneously a dream and a nightmare. 

These impulses to go back aren’t gratuitous, nor are they foolish. They are not cancellations of the future, nor do they fetishise lost possibilities. It is hauntological at its core, to go back one must attempt to become a ghost. This is why the desire to reverse is scary, hard, detrimental, and unnerving. ÎNDĂRĂT fundamentally engages with the unnatural. Von Trier’s Jack is fascinated with photographic negatives because they reveal the dark nature of light itself. They reveal that the inverse of reality was always closer than expected – its lining. ÎNDĂRĂT goes against common sense. “I know, however, of a young chronophobiac”, writes Nabokov, “who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. […] what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated” (1). Backing up, you risk complete obliteration. But then again so does going forward. This mustn’t dissuade.  

This impulse to go back constantly creeps into the mind of a chronophobiac. It marks a great longing that has been repressed. “All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic”, writes Pynchon, “useful to you, gentlemen, but no longer so to us here” (195). ÎNDĂRĂT is also a tactic, but this time to do away with the illusion of control: “That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. […] Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable” (34). Pynchon’s novel deals with the earth-shattering effects of war and how the V2 rockets inverted the natural order of things: you would hear the explosion only after its effects had already taken place. Causality thus rendered useless. A remnant from a bygone era. It’s not only the story of a confrontation but one of confronting paradox itself. It just as well might have been the detritus from a future war, like in Nolan’s Tenet (2020). Reversal is a weapon.

When William Burroughs asked Patti Smith, in a hushed and almost paranoid tone, what they could do to short-circuit control, he was inviting her to go against the grain at every cost; to become an agent against Control. It was not the first time he had tried to recruit someone, nor the last. But, unbeknownst to them, Sidis’ “reverse universe” had already taken hold. Like Whiterose’s project, except with no off switch, no cheat code, no nothing. Inevitable like Lemuria’s slow drift through time, Ada and Van Veen’s Terra collective dream, or The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia’s hyperstitional Tlön. His postulate that there exist places where the second law of thermodynamics functions in reverse dumbfounded his contemporaries. Of course, he couldn’t substantiate his claims. This is why he referred to his theory as speculative in nature. But reversal in itself always implies a degree of virtuality. Although the past is familiar, this does not mean that it is always secure. Going back, one might be surprised to find that the causal glue which keeps it together dries up, cracks and breaks off into Mandela-effect-inducing chunks. The past turns out to be not fixed but mobile and fragile. We see this at play every time we try to recollect something. Each iteration modifies the original memory. The past’s malleability terrifies the chronophobiac. Sidis was not afraid of this. Nor was he afraid to ask: “If observed facts can be explained in one case as a conceptual illusion, why not in another case?” (137). One can imagine Dr Manhattan’s faint smile at such a claim. ‘How could Sidis, without witnessing the supposed tachyons’ faster-than-light backwards journeys through time, think of this in 1925?’ the good doctor might have asked himself. He, the complete all-American deanxietised man, a true achronophobiac, who found it increasingly harder to relate to humans, found a kindred spirit in Sidis. That is if it weren’t for the latter’s untimely demise in 1944, fifteen years before the intrinsic field experiment test. Time is of the essence.

But as it turns out, Sidis was not the first to think of such things. The Aymara appear to have always known this. Their language encodes a different conceptualisation of time. Their time is not abstract, something to look forward to, something that is literally in front of their eyes, but strangely enough wholly invisible to them. No. “The forward direction is the source of what’s known: what’s seen by the eyes, what’s happened in the past. Behind, where they can’t see, lies the future” (Miller 2006). The unknowable future is always behind them. To access it is akin to taking a step back. Backwards into the wild unknown, with only the forward-facing past to guide them and bring them comfort. 

With both eyes wide open, we attempt to go backwards. This is what is needed. This is what was always needed. All are mesmerised by Angelus Novus’ backwards gaze, but how many notice that its open mouth vaguely resembles a smile? It knows ÎNDĂRĂT is a one-way journey.

Requirements for said journey: a ghost’s outlook. And Krasna’s patience.

Cristian Drăgan
Editor