I like the flashbulb metaphor a lot. (Move into the light, movement is the light?) This also reminds me of the wrinkle in time/tesseract conversation we had a while back, and of some E.P. Thompson bit that I can’t find and can’t fully remember. It was something about how we pick our predecessors, at least that’s what I took from it. We hang on to the Diggers etc because of an interest we have in the present, tied to a future we want and anger at both certain pasts inflicted on us or our predecessors and certain futures stolen from us/our predecessors. I remember seeing a sci-fi movie once about time travel, I think it was called My Science Project, where they talked about how generating light always involves generating heat too. As another mangled metaphor, maybe there’s some tie between the heat of our anger and the light of the flashbulb moment? Philosophy-wise all of this makes me think of Walter Benjamin’s short thing on the philosophy of history, the stuff on class hatred and on now-time, and about Alain Badiou, the stuff about fidelity to past events.
Ramble, ramble…

Anyways great post. Sorry I’ve been so out of touch for so long.

take care,
Nate