LIGHTNING ON THE UPPER REACHES OF THE LETHE

‘Time is paradoxical; it folds or twists; it is as various as the dance of flames in a brazier—here interrupted,
there vertical, mobile, and unexpected.’
— Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres with Bruno Latour
Across many mythological traditions, the River Lethe is imagined as a river of oblivion, whose waters erase all memory. Even the word lethargy derives from the same root. Lethe can also be understood as the hidden current beneath linear time: a subterranean river into which all things dissolve back into indistinction, before they are permitted to return as singular beings. Lightning on the Upper Reaches of the Lethe seeks to seize those fleeting instants when the chaos of history is briefly illuminated—when seemingly unrelated things suddenly become connected, and obscure constellations of relation momentarily conduct once more. Cao Shu’s works trace a series of unsettling synchronisms across modern history: nineteenth-century colonial surveys attempting to prove that two differently named rivers shared a single origin; the ghostly overlap between the flash that erased bodies in Nagasaki and the photographic flash that fixes a subject upon film; science-fiction film narratives propelled by absent protagonists; and images from the visual cortex of deceased mice, drawn onward by invisible
memories.
These seemingly disparate episodes converge upon a single question: might there be such a thing as an irrational history of technology? Colonial triangulation, polygonal meshes in digital modelling, datasets for training artificial intelligence, and the meticulous archives of cortical activity all translate the heterogeneous sea of lived phenomena into a lucid, linear cognitive universe. Yet beneath this technological surface—so clear, so rectilinear—the meandering river of Lethe continually returns, folding fear and memory back into the landscape.
Mark Hansen has proposed the notion of a worldly sensibility, directing attention to the conditions under which experience takes shape before we can ever say I feel. Bodily processes, environmental forces, and technical operations unfold beneath the threshold of consciousness, feeding forward into perception and action, while consciousness itself arrives only afterwards. Cao Shu’s practice is remarkably attuned to these opaque moments of feed-forward—to the upstream of Lethe, where anima and animus have yet to be separated by conscious interpretation, and where the non-human mysticism of climate and geology remains at work.
In this sense, Lightning on the Upper Reaches is not merely a collection of stories woven from coincidence and omen. It proposes a more permeable mode of historical perception, one capable of gently unsettling the inear narrative of progress constructed through invention, institutions, and media. Each flash of lightning briefly illuminates the darkness before the world falls back into shadow. Yet the lightning returns, again and again, upstream of Lethe.