walkingtalkingwriting

   - 'What is there to keep us here?'   - 'The dialogue.'  

Threads and Traces (ak)

I think of networks of nerves and blood vessels, I think of love that touches and enables new organisation to take shape, I think of a sheep trapped in barbed wire; the paths that open out into the journey and those that apparently come to what we call a ‘dead’ end. A few weeks ago I could not help but notice the body of a black cat killed by the rushing of motorised traffic as I cycled out, vulnerable, myself, to the possibilities of the same fate. A mile or two of A road before I can dive off into the network of lanes that connect farms and hamlets, wriggling and clinging up hill and down dale; a maze to disorientate, to visit sleepy hollows, and present new and surprising vistas that I didn’t know existed. The black cat’s cadaver was in the middle of the carriageway, recognisably cat-like, but it wasn’t long before it was flattened, bones crushed, soft tissue squeezed out, perhaps nibbled by creatures that have a taste for that sort of carrion fast-food – crows and the like. Then a couple of weeks later it looked like a scrap of fur rug and by this time it had moved (been moved?) into the edge of the road, more or less right in my path and finally in the last week or two all that remains are three or four scuffs of black something-or-other across the white line; something that I no longer bother to avoid. A mere trace of something that had lived and breathed and been loved.

    Earlier this morning I read Paul Durcan’s The Road to Vétheuil 2009 (from Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have My Being)  and loved how it traces a path of love from walking ‘downhill to the village’ to the opening of the door and ‘we embraced and we burst out laughing.’ And the final six lines:

        ‘We stood face to face, talking nonsense,

        Not having seen one another for six months.

        Delighted to be doing that, and that only,

        And not being expected to do or say anything else

        But simply to be there and nowhere else

        Piping absolute, pure, spontaneous song.’

    Alain Badiou (In Praise of Love) writes (something else I read this morning): ‘ . . . between May ’68 and the Eighties . . . I developed the political conviction I have remained implacably loyal to and for which “communism” is one possible name. But I then equally structured my future life around processes of love that were by and large definitive. What came later, of the same order, was illuminated by that inspiration and its enduring nature . . . That was really the moment when, in between politics and love, my life found the musical chord that ensured its harmony.’

    The image of the project that we call life that is suggested by Badiou's words is that of a musical instrument (take your choice of instrument!). We are given the rough outline and we struggle daily and in our dreams at night to refine the trumpet or violin, to clarify what sort of instrument it is, learn to play it, engage with our resistances – when the teacher says sing, well, sing for God’s sake . . . but no, I can’t, I won’t, leave me alone, I’m in too much pain, I’m too distracted.

    And here is Tonto peering at the traces, the hoof print in the soft earth, the broken twig. He’ll know which we must go

 

Stranger and Stranger (mmj)

"Boredom is the dreambird that hatches the egg of experience" (W Benjamin, The Storyteller - Illuminations (New York 1968), P 91). There are exercises for keeping our eyes open, awake, and alert to what is emerging out from what was not there to begin with when we began looking; the Where's Wally illustrated books for example, which we used to pore over with our children before bedtime, looking for the bespectacled black-haired smooth-faced Wally in the huge crowds.

We explored the picture book landscapes in which all those people were moving, looking for the one, the case, the exception, the singular. Or the strange: such as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in literature, and in history. Cases of exception, or anomalies (NB see the review of Carlo Ginzburg, Threads and Traces: True, False, Fictive in the LRB 26 April 2012).

Cases of exception, or States of Emergency. On the one hand, there is the biopolitical discourse of Agamben et al, examining the history of "outlaw". On the other hand, there is the lawyer Utterton in Stevenson's evegreen novel attempting to describe Edward Hyde to himself after his first meeting, but being unable to find afequate words for the man, who is not so much misshapen as the personification of exception. "A man who is a disgrace" Utterston thinks to himself, or a perversion - as a legal man would describe "the perversion of the course of justice".

Perversions, cases of exception, including also those who are - or believe themselves to be - above the law or beyond it, whether politically, medically, economically, or socially; we will see how Rebekkah and her clan make out when they have their day in court... meanwhile Tony Blair smoothies his way through the Leveson Inquiry cross-examination, and we remember what a consumate performer he is and was.

Why does this all matter? It matters in the strange case of our moral imagination, here and now in the middle of the flag-waving crowds with all their current versions of scepticism - late philosophical relativism, negationism, barbarism - "What is Fiction? What is Non-Fiction?" versions. Because it matters to be able to detect the difference between fact and invention (including epistemiological questions and issues to do with methodology).

An intense "subjectivity" (in inverted commas as Joseph Roth put it in one of his 1920's letters to an aspiring feuilleton writer); personal experience as a cognitive instrument. Another way of putting it? Here's Willy:
"I was sitting in a lunchroom in new York having my doughnuts and coffee. I was thinking that one does feel a little boxed in New York, like living in a series of boxes. I looked out of the window and there was this great big Yale (mover's) truck. That's cut-up - a juxtaposition of what's happening and what you're thinking of. I make this practice when I walk down the street. I'll say, when I got to here I saw that sign; I was thinking this, and when I return to the house I'll type this up. Some of this material I use and some I don't. I literally have thousands of pages of notes here, raw, and I keep a diary as well. In a sense it is travelling in time.
Most people don't see what is going on around them.That's my principal message to writers: for God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what is going on around you."
William S Burroughs, The Art of Fiction, No 36 (Paris Review, 35, Autumn 1965).

Moral Imagination: Threads and Traces (Carlo Ginzburg), Lines (Tim Ingold), cut-up boredom in Uncle Wally or Cousin Willy's magic encyclopaedias, criss-crossings time and place (the great slabs of time under pressure), hatching the data sets, dialogues, a songthrush singing in the trees behind Camden Road in north London, handwritten pages of notes, personal journals, saved files, online articles, half-read books on the bedside table...

Where’s Wally? (ak)

Which one do you mean? There are so many, lined up against the pock-marked wall, their faces fatty and flabby and pox-marked, eyes screwed up against the suddenness of bright sunshine, a phenomenon that we had long since given up hoping for, believing that we had entered a state of permanent overlapping of autumn and winter; the seasonal clock winding on a few clacks of the worn out ratchet and then slipping back. Jerry and Dave guffawing as they must, as they have long been programmed to do; surely this can’t be real – a sort of intermission from the early days of television and at any moment Bill and Ben will chirrup their way on to the screen and all will be well. Nanny will arrive with a soft-boiled egg and nicely toasted soldiers, dripping with the best butter that unearned money can buy.

    Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Their trousers are round their ankles. What have they been up to? I do hope they haven’t been playing with that nasty, jumped-up Aussie . . . what was his name? Rupie . . . yes, I think that is what it was. An unpleasant ambitious sort of person, up to all sorts of no good tricks – very good at making unverifiable promises, actually very good at telling woppers. Question: how do you get the outcome you’ve promised your big friends whilst pretending to be impartial? Now, that is the skill of this game that we’ve blagged our way into – politics.

    Question: how do you get away with impoverishing much of the population whilst begging for their votes?

    Oh, yes, that’s where Rupie comes in.

    Is that what they call a virtuous circle. I mean we get richer.

    It was unfortunate for Dave that the wind that had filled the Australian’s sails for these last twenty or so years was flagging just as Dave got into power. It’s true he was still able to shift the blame from the bankers who had rather overstepped themselves – but we mustn’t get in the way of wealth creation for the few by regulating their behaviour or taxing their dubious casino transactions - on to the previous government.

    Question: can we shoot them now? No, sorry, but we have something called the rule of law and they do have access to the most expensive lawyers in the land. No wonder they are guffawing, it’s touch and go, but they believe they can still get away with it. Like their hero, the slippery Tony B, it’s all about timing the exit, having clawed your way up into the super rich category. Come on, even Ken Liversalts has become rich enough to pay those clever accountants to find those perfectly legal tax dodges.

    But let’s leave the last word to St Wally Benjamin:

    ‘In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful. Not only is any reference to a certain public or its representatives misleading, but even the concept of an ‘ideal’ receiver is detrimental in the theoretical consideration of art, since all it posits is the existence and nature of man as such. Art, in the same way, but in none of its works is it concerned with his response. No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.’

    (The opening paragraph of his essay, The Task of the Translator.)

    Actually I do believe that I could pick at random any paragraph from Walter Benjamin and it would be a gem.

    And I don’t think Benjamin was a salesman.

 

Funnier and Funnier (mmj)

Buffo Buffo - How else should politics be conducted these days except with loud guffaws? Or rather performed because what we are exploring here is the performative efforts required of governments. Are they doing any thinking? One rather feels not. And if not, how should we in turn be thinking and acting, and what happens when we begin to consider the possibility that our politicians have become superfluous?

Direct action along the lines of the Occupy Movement is one possibility: Activism (see Graeber's Direct Action: An Ethnography for more on this)... although who knows whether or not anarchist spontaneous self-organisation (protest + assemblies + encampments) produces any real thinking either.

Inaction is another familiar and widely used response: Fatalism... and the avoidance of anything that might interupt the cultivation of our inner sense of eternal peace, plus or minus (more likely) any real thinking.

Where is the moral imagination to be found these days?

On the one hand there is the current crisis (a source of concern or celebration depending on your point of view) that capitalist dynamics are really running down: both overcapacity in manufacturing worldwide and a disconnect between economic activity and productivity over the last forty years... and that the world economies are heading for a state of growthlessness, in which we will never be able to work off the DEBT. On the other hand there is simultaneously the other crisis as well (imbued with a terrible uncertainty as to its future outcome) that global warming is happening and we ought to do something about stopping the world getting HOTTER, but we can't because - Buffo, Buffo - it seems democracy is not fit for purpose.

Where is the moral imagination to be found these days?

I am held by a quotation of the 18th century political theorist Edmund Burke, which I read in the latest copy of the LRB (24 May P5) that society "is a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and who are to be born.":

- so that, while Uncle Wally's chessplaying Turkish puppets continue to stalk the land, a toast to Franz Josef by us all, and a salute to the Great Porte, is as an important performative effort today as it ever was.

Active boundaries and sulky flow (ak)

POZZO: His hat!

            [VLADIMIR seizes LUCKY’s hat. Silence of LUCKY. He falls. Silence. Panting of victors.]

ESTRAGON: Avenged!

            [VLADIMIR examines the hat, peers inside it.]

POZZO; Give me that!

[He snatches the hat from VLADIMIR, throws it on the ground, tramples on it.]

            There’s an end to his thinking!

VLADIMIR; But will he be able to walk?

POZZO; Walk or crawl! [He kicks LUCKY.] Up pig!

ESTRAGON; Perhaps he’s dead.

VLADIMIR; You’ll kill him.

POZZO; Up scum! [He jerks the rope.] Help me!

VALDIMIR; How?

POZZO; Raise him up!

 

    And so on. Brilliant Beckett! I can’t help thinking that St Samuel was keeping a close eye on the politicians of his day.

 

    LUCKY, in his current incarnation being Greece with the rope around its neck and Frau Merkel has been enlisted to play the role of POZZO. And our own Pinky Dave Cameron is shouting obscenities from the sidelines even as his erstwhile buddy LOL Rebekah is expressing her outrage that the CPS has had the temerity to actually charge her with an offence. It can’t get any better, I mean funnier. If this goes on the so-called comedians will be out of a job. Why do we need to pay for comedy when the politicians are doing such a good job of it. And the icing on the cake is that they are not intentionally funny. Of course , if they tried to be funny, they would fail utterly.

    This must be why autocrats are so hard on anybody who makes fun of them because they must know, deep down, that they really are buffoons. It’s only themselves that cannot see the garish clown make-up on their bloated faces.

 

‘On the following day I sat alone till tea time in the bar restaurant of the Crown Hotel. The rattle of crockery in the kitchen had long since subsided; in the grandfather clock, with its rising and setting sun and a moon that appears at night, the cogwheels gripped, the pendulum swung from side to side, and the big hand, bit by bit, in tiny jerks, went its round. For some time I had been feeling a sense of eternal peace when, leafing through the Independent on Sunday, I came across an article that was related to the Balkan pictures I had seen in the Reading Room the previous evening. The article, which was about the so-called cleansing operations carried out in Bosnia, by the Croats together with the Austrians and Germans, began by describing a photograph taken as a souvenir by men of the Croatian Ustasha, in which fellow militiamen in the best of spirits, some of them striking heroic poses, are sawing off the head of a Serb named Branco Jungic.’ (Page 96 W G Sebald, The Rings of Saturn).

 

Yes, sometimes the politicians get seriously out of hand. Though the perpetrators in the Independent’s text appear to be still caught up in the belief that they are part of some sort of theatrical comedy.

 

Maturing and Dementing (mmj)

The true King of Redonda (Xavier Marias), the illustrious lord of that small island rock near Monserrat, has written at length concerning the "dark back of time," including a book with that title. The phrase is taken, or at least adapted, from Shakespeare: "What seest thou else / In the dark backward and abyss of time?", The Tempest, act I, sc. ii, line 49. Redonda has no inhabitants currently so far as is known, but there are several rival living claimants to the throne, and many famous ennobled peers, among them the Lord of Vertigo (WG Sebald), Duchess of Morpho Eugenia ( AS Byatt), Duke of Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola), and so on.

Cicatrix* also claims the island throne. This is not the queen’s real name, but it might be something along those lines. She is a woman with long dark flowing hair and cold blue eyes. Chilling indeed. She is sexed, but only nearly so, being forever adolescent like Wednesday Addams –
Child of woe is wane and delicate...sensitive and on the quiet side, she loves the picnics and outings to the underground caverns...a solemn child, prim in dress and, on the whole, pretty lost...secretive and imaginitive, poetic, seems underprivileged and given to occasional tantrums...has six toes on one foot
- black and dark tones predominating and giving the impression that she is above the law.

A parallel example of dark backwardness in nature is indigo, also said to be the colour of the ‘Third Eye’. The lines of flow which produce the natural dye are famed for their difficulty, especially the tendency of the dye mixture to “sulk”. A sulk may last a great length of time and in some cases can become irreversible.

These are the difficulties of wayfaring across boundaries. Gilles Deleuze demands from us similar performative efforts for the purpose, contortions as some have argued, to make us think. Perplexion, and similar words which employ the root “-pli-“, such as perplicate, implicate and replicate, are not uncommon in his writing. The “-pli-“ root meaning is fold, a turned down corner, or, by extension, an angle across which criss-crossing lines of flow are simultaneously being both reflected and permeated.

It is leaky. Such, as Anne Carson reminds us in one of her essays in Decreation, is the nature of active boundaries.

* a scar forming over an old wound. In excess this can impede the functioning of a limb.

What, you’re not there yet!! (ak)

All this time as a maturing man . . . my goodness, when can we cut him down and serve him with a bowl of French fries and a glass of chilled champagne in that “night club” of his? Let’s get on with it. We need strength for the journey; we need sustaining for goodness sake even if we are heading for that crest of the wave when maturing slips over into dementing. Or perhaps it’s the same thing: maturing must mean getting old and smelly; dementing means that we are past caring – unaware – unconscious aging. The dictionary suggests that there is no verb to dement, therefore I should not use dementing, it gives the wrong idea, as though I am doing something to myself. But why not? To be is a verb and is not quite a doing word. So is maturing I do something with conscious intention. Not sure – yes and no. I suppose drinking alcohol would be an example of conscious dementing and going to chat to my analyst an example of conscious maturing.

    When did Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver come out? Oh yeah, 1976, I checked on Wikipedia. Anyway, the point is I watched it last night having rented the DVD. The fact is I wasn’t sure whether I had actually seen it or whether I only imagined I had seen it because it’s one of those movies that entered what Jung referred to as the collective unconscious (if there is such a thing?). After watching it I’m still not sure whether I saw it in 1976 or 77 but I'm inclined to the view that I didn't see it. Could be I didn’t, because I wasn’t getting to the movies very much as that point in my life. Checking the Scorsese filmography on Wikipedia I noticed Mean Streets which came out a couple of years before Taxi Driver. Perhaps that was the one I saw. So this might be about venturing into the territory, reminding me of Dartmoor once again, of my dementing. But for the moment let’s stay with the movie. Robert de Niro’s Travis is a fascinating creation of a character, coming into America post-Vietnam, an ex-marine, probably traumatised, cannot sleep, finds a job as a taxi driver and occupies a fine line between maturing and dementing. The question that is so gripping is, is he going to make it? Which mainly means, will he survive? But also demands some clarity as to notions of maturing/dementing. He seems to have little in the way of self protective mechanisms operating. Is that another consequence of the PTSD? To what degree does he represent a socially inadequate character irrespective of whatever happened to him in Vietnam. So, yes, the various Jimmy’s and their questioning of what it is to live and survive or not. Travis even has a go at falling in love which doesn’t get far when he takes his dream of woman to a pornographic movie because it is just another film and besides he doesn’t know anything about films. Later, her boss, a presidential hopeful, happens to get into his taxi and Travis makes out he really admires this politician, though he knows nothing about politics, which in turn invites the presidential hopeful to ask him about what he’d like to see happen. Given permission Travis spews out a stream of paranoid stuff about clearing out the filth of the city and then it’s not long before he’s buying guns.

    It’s a fine essay on maturing and dementing, the socially isolated and excluded, heading for an explosion of some sort.

    I better get along to my analyst.

 

Nurburgring : Writing Across Boundaries (mmj)

A cast iron handle to a trap door, then down some steep slippery steps. Are you counting? And then a passageway. At the end of which a glimmer of light. A group of men. Laughter. A nightclub, and a red light inside.

Then down some slippery steps. Are you counting? Have you reached thirty nine? And what makes you think that your story last week “must be a dream”?

And, another thing, don’t apologise (it is editorial policy here not to). Don’t apologise about “James”: James Hunt (sic: meaning ‘as it is’). World Racing Champion. 1976. Hot year. Driving for McClaren and smoking forty a day. On the edge of the racing line and going flat out on the Nurburgring circuit heading for that corner where your friend’s car is already on fire.

I am counting. Because at a precise moment, the story goes that it is at the number thirty nine or in the next few seconds, I am meant to do something. Maybe it is to change gear. Maybe it is to hit the brakes. Maybe it is to start running. Or to stop. At this split-second moment I can’t remember which. How much adrenalin is pumping? Or is it the fear? Fear driving the fear.

The next six seconds, thirty nine steps, or 127 Hours. I hadn’t thought about that film much until about a month ago (based on the true story of professional mountaineer Aron Ralston). I was looking for books to recommend for a ‘Navigating Serious Illness’ section of a health chapter I was writing for a book for maturing men, and came across The Power of Two: Surviving Serious Illness with an Attitude and an Advocate by Brian and Geri Monaghan (Workman Publishing, New York. 2009). Brian and Geri keeping going; he was seriously ill, she became his health advocate, and it was Brian who told me how much he had got from the film 127 Hours. Theirs is one of the best books of "experience and common sense" I know on the subject of serious illness.

The path of Conscious Ageing? An Elders Rite of Passage? Post-traumatic growth? “James”: this time another James. James Hawkins writes across the boundaries in his latest two posts in his Good Medicine blog about the “most intense, prolonged, potentially catastrophic experience of my life”, and about the “lessons, self-compassion and post-traumatic growth”.

About his 3 Hours: three hours down a snow shute above a cliff in the mountains of Skye. I dwell on every word and rejoice in his rescue! James says he writes, “both personally and as a therapist”, and, I would add, writing across the boundaries of humanity about:
…wayfaring / the primacy of movement / the nature and constitution of the ground / divergent perspectives of earth as ground of habitation and scientific object / the intercourse of earth and sky, wind and weather / the fluidity and friction of materials / the experience of light, sound and feeling / what it means to make things / drawing and writing/ storytelling (this list as it happens is borrowed from Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, by Tim Ingold (2012)).

I am not there yet, but I am still counting.

Whoops, what’s this? (ak)

I thought it was the lashing rain that woke me, but no, there is something digging into my back. Actually it’s not exactly a foxhole, at least not according to the image I have. Foxholes are either foxholes, which are really tunnels, or a depression in the earth/mud that infantry soldiers dig in a hurry for protection. This is always the problem with metaphors when you begin to examine them. What I have in mind are the various depressions around the Eastern White Barrow not far from the Avon Reservoir. The barrow itself is takes the shape of a nipple-shaped cairn constructed out of lumps of granite – quite a good landmark as long as the mist keeps away. I wonder if the depressions are the result of mining activity around that area. Miners following their threads of tin, leaving marks of their activity, the remains of blowing houses. It must have been a hard life; hard in a way that I probably can only fail to imagine. But I can borrow that mining as a metaphor for this writing process: digging, searching, seeking that trail of what is valuable, following threads that maybe lead nowhere, to nothing but exhaustion. I could, I suppose, trudge downhill through the tussocks and cross the Avon and climb the hill on that side to the pillow mounds, the remains of the rabbit warrens created a hundred and fifty years ago.

    But why bother, let’s get back to the story. The thing that is pressing so uncomfortably into my back is (of course) the circular cast-iron handle of a trap-door. There has to be a way out. Although one wonders why the LibDems don’t take the obvious path of walking away from the coalition that is destroying them. Perky Clegg was reported as being ‘sad’ about his fellow LibDem members who had lost out in Thursday’s local elections. Though it has to be said he is not looking quite so Perky these days; rather more pale, even ghostly. Pinky Vampire Cameron is meanwhile looking as well fed as ever. But I suppose this is Cleggy’s only possible holding of a position of power.

    We better get down these slippery slimy steps without further ado. Progress is slow, each step has to be felt for with nothing to hold on to except the uneven and slimy stone on the right. My left hand meanwhile touches nothing when I reach out in that direction . . . so better try not to think about what that implies.

    Why has Ken Livingstone started appearing with a dog; a cuddly Labrador? Does it make him appear more human? He might be very ready with anti-Semitic one-liners but he does like dogs – he can’t be all bad, especially when compared with the straw thatched dummy opposite.

    Perhaps we are getting somewhere the steps have finished and the passageway is more or less level and, am I imagining it or is there a glimmer of light ahead. Oh yes, here we are, I must have arrived, there’s a crowd milling around. There are bursts of laughter. Though now I notice that it’s an all male crowd. So what does that mean? A bit like school days. And like school days there is some pushing and shoving, as we try to work our way to the head of the queue. This must be a dream. Why didn’t I realise before? Because now we are outside, it’s still night though, the light is from a street lamp and we are in a street of rather shabby Victorian terraces. Perhaps this is a nightclub of some sort. And now I’m getting closer to the entrance I see the light inside is red! And some of the men look vaguely familiar as people often do it dreams.

“Hey, don’t I know you?’

Apparently not. Men looking furtive. Men reaching into their pockets and pulling out fistfuls of money, twenty pound notes by the look of it. ‘Look I’m sorry I don’t have any money with me – it’s a mistake, I shouldn’t be here – I just . . . ‘

‘Cheap I might be, but not that cheap.’ Smudged mascara, like bruised eyes, a spangly dress hanging on thin shoulders. There is, I notice, a developing arousal, an excitement; but as usual I’m out of step with what’s going on. Missed my chance, again.

Crazy dreams. Hey it’s getting light, maybe time to get up.

Oh and sorry to James Hunt for getting Jeremy mixed up with you last week.

 

Squeeze (in the Foxhole, Part 3) Up! (mmj)

It is crowded here, but there is always room for more. Our foxhole. Think of the Bakerloo Line during rush-hour transposed to the wilderness. I remember once driving south from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco several years ago. We had rented a car in Marakesh, a red fiat 127 as I recall which had brakes and an accelerator and a gear called third. After we had crossed the mountains and passed through Ouzerzat (sp?), we were out beyond the foothills of the anti-Atlas, and there was only the border town Zagora ahead of us and the empty sands of the Sahara were beginning to press in on all sides.

We stopped in a pull-in at the top of the last big hill, still maybe 10 km away from Zagora which was out of site in a low depression ahead. We got out of the red fiat 127, standing by the two car doors not so much to admire the view as to catch our breaths. The desert. Everywhere. Not a soul to be seen. No habitation in any direction. Only the road. Empty in all directions. And the wind.

We were there for only about five minutes, but in the time at least five men in ones and two's, and a large group of veiled and thickly dressed women had appeared out of the landscape as if by magic and joined us. Some asked if we were broken down. Others came to sell us something from their previously hidden positions in the ditch beside the roadside, maybe a wood or stone carving, some jewelry, or a pineapple. Others simply came to stare at us, or light fingers to explore what was available to take from off the back seat of the red fiat 127. One old woman took my arm, screwed up her face tilting her head sideways and began to moan. And the wind.

"The moment when a feeling enters the body is political. This touch is political." I had not read these words by Adrienne Rich's poem 'The Blue Ghazals' before a couple of weeks ago, although they were written many years ago. The feeling was charged, heated. It smelled of heat and dust. it was the smell of bodies close together. Old sweat. Resistance. Pilgrimage.

The red fiat 127 was becoming very overcrowded, our personal space was dissolving, and I could now see there were yet more small groups of people walking along the road towards us. A rusting bus with no glass in its passenger windows had also stopped in the pull-in, its diesel engine roaring and belching blue smoke from behind, and more people were spilling out from its door. A pick-up truck had now pulled up in front of our car and two thickly bearded young man had got out and were coming towards us. One held a shiny black tubular metal object in one hand, the other was carrying a thick rope.

Of course at that point we reverted to being tourists and got back into the red fiat 127. I started the engine, engaged in third gear and moved slowly forward on the slipping clutch. My window was open, and the old woman put her hand through to take my arm again, calling out and moaning with her face screwed up as before.

According to Tim Ingold in his book Being Alive (the link here is to one of his online essays which is included in the book) we should understand all life as "experimental" - P. 16... I have only just begun dipping in, and there is the excitement of opening to a wide open brand new territory... having to pull-in and stop from time to time to take it all in, as it were 'to catch our breaths'. He does not mean experiments undertaken by white coated people in laboratories. Not closed experiments, but open experiments, he is describing the relationship between mind (the thinking we do), tools (the things in our hands - both symbolically and in the physical world), and tasks (the criss-crossing paths we follow); the same as the old woman who was holding my arm on the steering wheel of the red fiat 127, the same as the two bearded young men stood in front of the car. As well as us in the red fiat 127, and the wind.

And the wind. "We say 'the wind blows', because the subject-verb structure of the English language makes it difficult to express otherwise. But in truth, we know the wind is its blowing. Similarly, the stream is the running water. And so, too I am what I am doing. I am not an agent but a hive of activity" (P 17 Tim Ingold, Being Alive).

A compost heap something like us all here wriggling together and squashing up in this foxhole, getting hotter.

Oh what endless fun (ak)

Sometimes, in conversations, in responding to what others are saying, we (I) say what we want to be, or that we believe should be, true rather than what is true. As usual watching our politicians is enormously instructive in this regard. It is not possible to say nothing because, well, they are supposed to be pretending to be in charge, to be responding positively to whatever crisis has arisen. But on the other hand they often have nothing intelligent to say, they are in fact overwhelmed, but obviously can’t admit it, so then they are dependent on slippery advisers to dream up some form of words that they hope will hide their nakedness. Time has become so condensed and is in such short supply that effectively there is no time. All those who cannot pretend to keep up fall by the wayside. In fact, it seems that we need new migrants coming in with each tide who are desperate enough to work flat out for any number of hours for a pittance before they are reduced, burnt out and the next wave are ready to take their places.

    At least they don’t lie about ‘trickle down’ these days. The gloves are off: this is how it is; you better get used to it. How long will it be before the financial elite and their propagandists persuade us that democracy is actually not working and it should be jettisoned in favour of . . . what? An unelected national unity government?

    Hello, this cosy little foxhole on Dartmoor is getting rather crowded – surely we can’t all fit in. Alright, alright, I’m moving up, don’t shout.

    Don’t get in a panic, our current form of democracy was always a bit of sham, a bit of a first attempt; after all those two arrogant posh boys – Giddy Osborne and Pinky Cameron – have been educated at the country’s finest establishments, so they must know what is best for us.

    You are right, of course, we are endlessly corruptible. Perhaps the only person existing on this planet who isn’t must be Aung San Suu Kyi. The rest of us are constantly caught with our trousers down in the midst of overwhelming confusions of desire. I want to fit in but I don’t agree with you. I wish I could be you but I can’t, I’m not; there are these different thoughts in my mind but on the other hand it’s a bit too scary to be separate for more than a few moments so I’ll shut up and agree with you even if I don’t agree with you. It’s simpler this way and maybe I’ll get something out of it. You know what I mean!

    I mean, could you, you know, make it worth my while.

    Anyway, what do I know?

    Did you see that grinning buffoon James Hunt after he was outed by all those emails? And the only way he managed to stutter though his statement in the Commons was to have Cameron’s finger thrust up his fundament. Or two fingers, perhaps. Come along, Jimmy, let’s see if we can talk our way out of this one. At least there was a submissive special adviser ready to fall on his sword to protect the boss who knew nothing about what was going on.

    Oh, what endless fun. A sudden possible insight: has something been done to our politicians, some surgical procedure performed in an exclusive private hospital to change politicians into stand-up comedians. And are the real politicians those who have admitted to being stand-up comedians? Or am I simply a slow learner and politicians have always been stand-up comedians?

    I think you should institute an immediate investigation.

    And I suppose by this time you have already ordered that book, but please don’t talk about being alive to Giddy and Pinky. Nobody has told them. Yet. They will have such a shock.

 

Hookerd (mmj)

Thank you for the warning not to stop and look up when that delicious voice calls down to me to come up for a good time, but I fear your warning comes too late. Resistance ("Lead us not into temptation but deliver is from evil") is joined at the neck and crop with desire and excitement, and curiosity as well as doubt and confusion over what is going on and what is possible, whether I should be stopping to look up or head down keep marching on. Am I supposed to resist, or is resistance resisting? Yes, as you can see, I am already - and have been for some considerable length of time, if not all my adult life - lost, impossibly well and truly lost.

We are, as I recall, in the process currently of making a list, and slowly ticking off the locations where resistance arises; curling up in a foxhole on a rain swept Dartmoor for one, or advancing into "the strange world of life beyond 60" for another. But even in those two locations, my perception of resistance is clouded. Even as I sink down in that foxhole, or count off the grey hairs on my ageing head, I seem to be reworking the story. So I may think of these locations as resistance but to others, to those who stumble accross me in these locations, I am more than an event. We are all implicated.

So we have our growing list of locations, (Yes, yes, be patient! I'll get back to that delicious voice in a moment... my feet are already on the creaking stairs leading up) but having a list is not the same as having a map perception of landscape. The list tells us the destinations, but it does not describe the intimacy of the route.

We have our growing list, and one of the locations is her (or should it be Her?) wherever she is to be found. Herumhuren! I am on the first floor landing now and wondering which door I should approach. I shouldn't, but I must.

In recent conversation with a male friend, who is an artist. "Now I am in my sixties, it is finally a relief that I have less sex drive. I get so much more work done," he said. At the time, to get out of disagreeing I sort of mumbled back without real words in a herumhuren (half-cough) kind of way, but my mind was far away elsewhere enfolding the film Walkabout (1971) which I had seen for the first time the night before on tv. If you don't know it, it is a film set in the Australian outback about being lost, and a boy and a girl meeting. I missed it when it came out in 1971. Just as well too - "While the boy goes hunting, she swims naked in a deep pool" - it would have thrown me into a complete crazed frenzy if I had seen it back then.

Reworking resistance in the wilderness in my sixties: what was possible in 1971 (How did Nicolas Roeg the director get away with it - "While the boy goes hunting, she swims naked in a deep pool" - and Jenny Agutter being hardly sixteen?) is not possible now. Less sex drive, but no less desire, and capacity for doubt and confusion. Resistance... meaning I shouldn't, but I must.

Of course, I agree there is commodification everywhere, and even the outback and wilderness has its share these days. But still whenever I hear that delicious voice I can't resist. Today it was the Amazon hooks which were in me, a crafty email offering me the chance to 'Look Inside' a delicious sounding new book by Tim Ingold Being Alive. Resistance. One click and I am by her side.

Fighting for Intentions in Berlin (ak)

Or at least spying out the cracks that allow some sort of resistance. What is the nature of our intentions? Resistance? Yes, that must be high up on the list, but what form might this resistance take?

    Shivering on Dartmoor? Yes, tick that one.

    Advancing, not terribly bravely, into the strange world of life beyond 60? Yes, tick that one.

    What about that hooker, that our old friend booksmith talks about? Does he have s someone in mind? Is Michelle available? Is she cheap? The first and last prostitute I knowingly had anything to do with was one who shouted down to me from her first floor window in Berwick Street. It must have been 1970 or 71 because that was when I was working in Soho. There is no memory of how I responded. And for that matter, I can’t remember what her precise words were. ‘Do you want to come up?’ she might have said. And I might have responded, ‘no thank you, darling.’ Though it was probably without the darling. These days I seem to have started using ‘darling’ or ‘my dear’ to almost anyone I might have met once or twice. Perhaps all vaguely intimate contact is something to be treasured.

    Though working in Soho for what was probably a few months or at most a year must have meant that I encountered (in passing) any number of what have become better known as sex workers. What was my work? Just in case you were wondering. Overseas Telegrams. How quaint! The  technology of teleprinters and sticking strips of paper with their stream of words down on what I assume was an A5 sheet of paper has been completely superseded except for the nostalgia of wedding telegrams.

    Resistance must primarily have as its target the huge industrial force of commodification with its accompanying reduction of human value. I guess what it mostly amounts to is a tiny (but maybe not irrelevant) action of human solidarity. Like walking. Which is where this all started – something very simple: walking. Doing it and naming it. And even in the face of the divine comedy, talking and writing: endeavouring to nail the fragile sheet of paper, with the ink running, obscuring, losing the possibility of anybody actually reading it, in the howling wind and lashing rain of the night. ‘For f---ks sake, everything is fine; keep shopping’ is what they said when I protested.

    Can we put our little shoulders to the wheel of Debord’s détournement. Turning it round. But it’s hard not to feel trapped by the appearance of Beckett’s angel- tramps seemingly stuck in some sort of purgatory, sensing the ticking of the clock, the winding down of one’s life force, and standing back in amazement as the younger generations come forward to take their places in the world, full of creative pizzazz.

    It feels like a narrow passage that I have to force our way through . . . sounds rather like another session of rebirthing doesn’t it. Oh dear, do I have the energy?

    Yes, come on, get on with it. OK OK. What sort of soap opera is this? Is there anybody there?

 

Berlin, City Centre (mmj)

Last time we were here talking about 10 days ago you reminded us not to forget about walking, and to look at our feet from time to time to check that we were still on the move. Or I could just walk away, you said. Or I could just walk away. It was shortly before the Easter break, a break as a result of which I appear to have forgotten what it was I was thinking about before. I guess I have moved on. I guess I have.

This forgetting, it is the nature of this flitting about the world, the wildness of thought, or the wilderness as we refer to it in the language of this particular sort of thinking we call walkingtalkingwriting. A wilderness, whether we mean a boggy patch of Dartmoor, or the break between sleeping and waking, or somewhere similar. It happens that way.

It is any location where I am aware of having forgotten how it was that I got to be there, between doubt and certainty beyond that death which awaits (Not “beyond that death awaits me” as I wrote in my last error-strewn piece, written at the beginning of that crisis of biblical proportions, the Easter break that included the circuits of my desktop PC going ‘POP!’ on Palm Sunday, my electronic notebooks spilling all over the editorial floor, and my running around in such a flat panic attempting to restore them that I tore a muscle quite badly in my right calf on Easter Day, ‘POP! POP!’, in the hopping-mad limitations-of-age-forgetting rush).

A location like the Easter break, in which that awareness arises which prompts a resistance, the same intention that demands we stop long enough to meet the deadline of this serial-feuilleton writing. Resistance. The demand of that awareness arising – a search for coherence? A thought experiment? The process of discernment? – in the midst of a crisis, a tear, a meaning gap marked by at least apprehension, if not (more likely) outright fear and terror.

Or a location like the first time in Berlin, City Centre. Resistance. It was several years ago now, and – November 2008, Alexanderplatz – it is a location to which I periodically return, indeed am almost required to, as it were, by force. Resistance. As in this beginning:

c l i p p i n g s
09 April 2010

When I opened the window
Fishes swam into the room.
Herrings…

…

…

I don’t think I can stay here.

(from ‘Where I Live’ by Gunter Eich, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n06/gunter-eich/five-poems)

Memory like glass architecture has surfaces that are part reflective and part permeable, and so it was as I recalled my early morning waking in the new city, new because I had never visited it before, and first looked out of the hotel window…

This beginning which I wrote: it is a story, here of unknown length and kind, whether something which might be called a novel or a piece of (so-called) non-fiction, which is both subjective and universal. For instance, the ‘glass architecture’ appears to be based on a twentieth century methodology defined by (among others):

Robert Walser. Berlin Stories (NYRB tr. 2012)

Alfred Döblin. Berlin Alexanderplatz (Continuum tr. 2004)

Joseph Roth. What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-33 (Granta Books tr. 2005)

Anselm Kieffer. Berlin Tempelhof Airport (Canvases exhibited at White Cube
Gallery, London 2011)

The resistance of the location of Berlin, City Centre; I have told it before and will no doubt tell it again, next time perhaps (‘triangulated’ c20,000 words) in pamphlet form.

There we were, walking . . . (ak)

Of course you should have been tipped out of your hammock, dreaming in that brief but welcome sunshine of early spring. Tipped out to suffer minor abrasions and some bruising; although we can never be quite sure to what degree you will wake up. What sort of waking up could we hope for? Even at your great age! The apprentices had gone wild, running amok. In the past it would have been safe to assume their gender/sexual identity – young men longing for a sight of a young woman – but let’s not make any assumptions in that direction. Let us simply assume the rising sap of spring, the spring in the step of those young apprentices, let loose; what were the authorities thinking of, taking their eye off them, indulging in lazy lunches with bottles of strong red wine that appeared as if my magic amidst the mounds of succulent dishes on the increasingly stained white table cloth. A slurring of words, coarser humour, raucous laughter leading to amorous fondlings or simply sleep.

    There we were, walking with little thought of direction or destination and there’s a point when the legs are tired after many miles, perhaps the feet are sore, and hunger begins to gnaw at the belly. My thoughts are worn thin and few coins sit in my pocket. Is that the junction of paths where I espy a tantalising beauty? Perhaps there will be no going back. Already the myriad paths behind me are shifting, bending their way to a new tune, new possibilities, forcing a future that I didn’t know I wanted. A glimpse of beauty has me by the nose. Sweetness beckons me into the dance to the tune of the dazzling, rippling of the stream.

    But my steps are clumsy and unwelcome as I lurch across the green sward. I would grab but she’s gone on the lightest, fleetest of feet. My tiredness forgotten as I give chase – there is no chance that she’ll get away, evade the passions that suddenly command me; leave me no choice.

    I must enter the trap or die in the effort. The waters that close over my head are sweet and welcome.

    Or I could just walk away. Sorry, darling, I’ve got an urgent appointment. And I will jump into my BMW something-or-other and roar away, tyres squealing, back wheels drifting out in the loose gravel.

Or I could just walk away. After all, it’s where we started: walking. This fact of walking I was reminded of by the piece, in last Saturday’s (31.03.12) Guardian Review, by Will Self. He’s become a spokesman for walking, even quoting Rebecca Solnit who we discovered and valued several years ago. Of course, we were also reminded of our shared history of walking by the film Patience (after Sebald) which we both mentioned on this scroll recently. How far does the average European (let alone North American) walk these days? I mean in the course of their day-to-day life. We’ve been busy creating lives that exclude the possibility. Will Self mentions that a hundred years ago 90% of Londoners walked their journeys if they were less than six miles. It’s a great loss.

 

Blame and Responsibility (Part 3): Being Green-Minded

A boggy patch of Dartmoor? It certainly feels damp and wet under me, and Schubert's music from the wind-up radio has not stopped playing about my ears, and green-minded, but the temperature and humidity appears to have risen considerably since last we met and spoke here a week ago. We seem to have progressed to another location.Where? Well, it could be below (or is it above?) the Tropic of Capricorn, since - My. My... - you have been busy during the intervening period! While I have been lounging and loafing in my hammock listening to the endless Schubertiade on BBC Radio 3 over the last week and merely considering the possibilities of threesomes and triangulations, you seem to have got right 'stuck in' taking hold of Smith and Dumezil in both eroticised hands ahead of me.

A Schubertiade, it is wise to make these observations this at the outset, is an evening occasion when musical pieces are played together in an informal way to be shared among friends - or "male companions", as you prefer to call the relationship, perhaps in a (none of that kind of sodomy thing) pre-cautionary thrust against Sappho rearing her shaggy head? But I think you are too late here, and will find the meaneads are already among us, and probably Achilles too in his young cross-dressing phase, and as well as Sappho, there is Gaspara Stampa and Mary W among a host of others.

A Schubertiade is also a kind of journey along side-roads and tracks. For instance, one of the musicians playing has been the pianist Paul Lewis, who, as the BBC Radio 3 announcer explained, had interupted his two year concert-hall worldwide odyssey playing the Schubert sonatas on Monday evening a week back to return to his home city Liverpool - for the recital he played 16 German dances, and then the two A minor sonatas D784 and D845 (a risky combo it was suggested), but... you will have missed it now -f you have missed it - as it will now gone past the 'Listen Again' option deadline.

What kind of journey? It is a series of unsettling journeys along roads where the destination is known, but where there is no prospect of resolution or attainment. However, fortunately in the company of Schubert's music there is always the quality of kindness, the journeys always being ones that "take you to the top of the mountain, but then brings you back down again". The destination, in case you need it spelling out, is of course the grave, where he gently asks, "Since that is where we will all end up, why not have a look now?"

Like in the Schone Mullerin I am feeling green-minded. "in Grunen... wieder Grunen... immer Grunen", it started off well enough in threesome-ness. I headed off into the wilderness and it was/I was green everywhere and there by the babbling brook there she stood, and I lost my heart to her... But then you came in and spoiled everything, you; the hunter, the man who wears green, is green, and goes by so many names, St George, El Khidr and others. So I am green-minded too, eroticised, and also politicised - one is reminded that in Schubert's days to be an artist or poet who goes wandering freely and beyond the jealous eyes and ears of the 'listening stations' of the secret agents (who are everywhere within the city) is to be political - and beyond that death awaits me.

Does she even notice that I’m making love to her? (ak)

Have we arrived? Are we here? The place we are meant to be? In the place to which some god or fate intended us to reach? An intention that was in place from the very dawn of eternity, not that eternity can have a dawn, or a sunset come to that. A sort of enlightenment without the fireworks? Surely fireworks were on the menu! A patch of boggy Dartmoor, a gentle rain, a mist, Schubert on the little wind-up radio and we have to squat because it is too wet to sit down. In the midst of a would-be heated male companionship but so exhausted that our chilly fingers can no longer grasp the weapons that now lie unused glistening in the tussocks. Clever weapons that I should have been trained in many decades ago when my mind was still supple enough, in the sunshine, not down here in the labyrinthine depths full of strange snortings, a dark world in which it’s certainly better not to trust any living thing. Or dead thing. Or even things that claim to be alive but actually exist in some dimension unknown to our current state of knowledge.

 

    Priest-king or war-lord? Excuse me, I just need to go to the lavatory. That’s better, now what was that you were saying? The thing with foreign names is that they are so mysteriously attractive. Take Smith as a for instance, take it in your left hand and then in your right take Dumézil. Chalk and cheese, I think you’ll agree. But we do have to move on, we can’t squat around here all day. Pinky Dave Cameron, of course, is a fully paid up lizard dressed up as a castrated war-lord. The fact of it is, is that somebody or other got the bags mixed up, the contents spilt all over the Piazza del Popolo during a benefit concert for that poor beggar Berlusconi. We did our best to pick up the pieces, but many were stolen or were washed into the sewers. And we’ve never been able to properly sort out the ones we were able to collect. There’s no time. I know it sounds like an excuse but . . . please be reasonable. Time is money. And you know how while I’m dreaming of what to have for supper some other guys are busy hoarding all the available cash. I must add that it is also in part a question of categories. It seems to me to be a good thing that we can begin to see the complexity of it all but it does make simple decision making almost impossible unless we shut our eyes and stab wildly with a pin. Can we really call that decision making?

 

    I’m not convinced that she realises I’m making love to her. Not like the old days when the heat was undeniable. Jenny Diski, who I believe to be a woman, (LRB 22 March 2012) quotes Roger Ebert: ‘One of the reasons that America inspires so many road movies that we have so many roads. One of the reasons we have so many buddy movies is that Hollywood doesn’t understand female characters (there are so many hookers in the movies because, as characters, they share the convenience of their real-life counterparts: they’re easy to find and easy to get rid of).’

 

    Of course we like to pretend that we have roads here in jolly old England but essentially we only have rather damp patches of Dartmoor on which to squat and shout at each other, occasionally managing to strike a blow that’s got enough umph behind it to cause a darkening of the flesh. Where are you Michelle? And is this Michelle playing the part of a hooker? In this Movie?

 

Blame and Responsibilty (Part 2): Schubertiade (mmj)

An 'Evening Entertainment': last week we went to the Picture House together to watch the documentary film called Patience about WG Sebald and based on his The Rings of Saturn , about walking in Suffolk; yes, full of charm and wonder. And it is true that we were a threesome at the film, which is an uneven number for socialising (one thinks of chaperones and such arrangements, not that courting is our bag these days).

It was ‘On a Journey’; I get my copy of Rings of Saturn from off the book shelf and see that it was first published in England 1998, having been translated from the German original published in 1995. The black and white filming mimicked the photographs which are such an integral part of his Technik (in German where it means both the technique itself and the more mysterious knack of knowing how to do it), the impression of smoke and a shaky hand held camera, and a touch of magic.

 However, one wonders if poor dead Max would not have groaned to see the trickery of an image of his face being superimposed on the still photograph of some smoke rising from a roadside firework, which a researcher, ‘devotee’ or ‘fan’ had let off at the cross-roads where he had met his death in 2001. Max was a stickler about his disgust for stylistic “adornment” of any kind, whether photographic magical tricks, or the uncritical critical adulation of the Anglophone (English and American) Sebald Industry. Where for instance, I asked myself, were the Germans?

Ah yes, but perhaps you noticed the music during the film? It was Schubert, one of the tunes from the Wintereise , as I think it trying to remember now. It was possibly the last in that song series, Die Liederman (the hurdy-gurdy man) - Und er last es gehen / Alles, wie es will, / Dreht, und seine Leier / Steht ihm nimmer still – but without the words in the film version, the music was, as it were, unsupported.

And ‘In a Train’; I cannot recall whether in The Rings of Saturn he (the narrator) travelled by train. It is likely. In his Selected Poems (1964-2001), Across the Land and the Water, many of the poems describe journeys made , some explicitly some probably, in trains. Begin with the very first poem in the collection:

How hard it is
to understand the landscape
as you pass in a train
from here to there
and mutely it
watches you vanish.

Max wrote that one as early as 1964, indicating he knew his direction of travel if not the final destination even then as a young man, which was about the time he arrived to live in Manchester. The short two-stressed lines (in German) are typical of a great many of his poems: the clickety-clack rhythm of the carriage wheels on the rails (before the high-speed rail versions replaced them), and again reminiscent of Schubert and his frequent use of two repeating notes.

And his ‘Darker Tones’: “melancholy but without any hint of pathos”, as Alfred Brendal described it on BBC Radio 3 last night. It is Radio 3’s 8-day, all day Schubertiade, and it is in full flow now – The Schubert Industry - don’t miss it! The two repeating notes and darker tones, whatever was the cause (the effects of the Treponema Pallidum and mercury poisoning some say): for two alternating and repeating notes I particularly recommend you try listening to his Andante D929, but Patience - it is 9 mins and 36 secs long.

And do you not think Schubert would also have liked trains, if he had lived long enough to know what they were, and would  have written songs about train travel? Who knows, probably two-stressed rhythmic train songs to add to the near 700 other songs he wrote in his actual life, and perhaps based on poems by Johann Mayrhofer (Freund und Text dichter: 46 Schubert songs and 2 operas are based on his poems) before the writer committed suicide by jumping from the window of his office in Vienna in 1836 in his 49^th year.

Max, and Johann Mayrhofer and Franz Schubert on trains, having had some choice in the matter - unlike trains of no return: Kadish Ofra Hazi, Kadish.

Was the word the beginning? (ak)

Lacan linked the "father" with the symbolic, with language. Here, the "father" might not be the father but some (any) mediating agent that is able to change the energetic lock of mother and child, enabling the further development of the symbolic function. So we can see the necessity of triangulation to shift the focus, to open up, and provide impetus to new themes and projects. Not that mother/child quite describes us, we are more like a pair of orphans long lost waifs in the wilderness. Lost in the wilderness requires us to find three landmarks – a triangulation to ascertain our position so that we might discover the onward stream.

    Keeping to the idea of three, having named Lacan as one of the three, two more events during the course of Wednesday of this week might serve to fill in the remaining two spaces. The second space could be filled by meeting a new pal during the courtse of cycling out through the maze of lanes outside of town. I was the guide, he the stranger. But he occupied a particular position as a researcher in robotics at a nearby university; an American: factors which offered another view, a perspective. Then later the  same day three of us met up to go to the movies. The film on this occasion was Patience (after Sebald), directed by Grant Gee with Sebald the absent hero and a cast of countless literary critics and others to guide us into new insights into the work of Sebald: in particular his book, The Rings of Saturn. It was beautiful slow moving meditation on that work which itself was a slow moving walk in which he followed chance encounters and psychoanalytic style free associations to build up chains of meaning to pursue his themes of European history and loss. Walking through East Anglia the associations erupted or percolated and created a moving if not terrifying opening to the glories and violence of patriarchy.

    And robotics, where does that come from? What are we, the patriarchy, trying to do, where are we going? But always bearing in mind the fact that we have probably never known where we are going. But nonetheless, we continue to set off hopefully and chock-full of delusions.

    We focus down until we can see a direction which interests us and then we can chase down the quarry, ignoring other siren calls.

    Lacan and Sebald, in their different ways, might challenge us to see bigger, different pictures, give us a foothold upon which we can begin to climb out of the deep betrayals of the patriarchy, the deep trenches of tradition and rules whilst goaded by the sharp sticks of editors, willing participants in the search for new songs.

    And another thought: I guess there were always two necessary wings of the Church. One formal, dressed up in glorious robes, rituals and tradition; the other, the mystics striding off into the wilderness to do what mystics must do and bring back the bacon of inner glory and news of the Other. God or viper.

Blame and Responsibility (mmj)

The suggestion of a theme has wafted along this corridor of scribblers, a mal-odour for sure, and we can't be sure if it is emanating from the Editor-in-Chief's office or from some 'crack' to be found elsewhere more interstitial and provisional. "She" doesn't have her offices on our floor anyway, plus nobody has seen her down at our lowly level for many years. Heavenly epiphanies are in short supply these days, but looking on the bright side this means we are equally spared most demonic visitations too, from the likes of Mr Magoo from Newswarp [or his goggled eyed offspring].

"Blame and Responsibility: how may we proceed in a post-Catholic era?" Our pythian viperette suggests as she respires the sulphurous fumes rising from out of the 'crack' between her legs.  There is a theme to chew on, and I am bidding for a triangulated methodology since traditional ways of proceeding are clearly out in this so-called post-Catholic age. Triangulated, like a stool - to sit on? You call them "dangerous structures when applied to us": presumably because triangulations are intrinsically unstable, restless and always on the move, slide-rules slipping sideways, and prone to warfare with two's ganging up against one's, and frequent buddings like children "popping out from God knows where".

OK, but one can start with the basics. Triangulated means three sides, and for the purposes of this design methodology I would suggest that the sides are equal, meaning it is an isoceles triangle. But although they are equal, the three sides are not the same. I'll say that again. Although they are equal, the three sides are not the same. Each side is completely different being made from different stuff. One side is rational and analytic, which is good enough for precision except we might waste a lot of time debating what 'precision' precisely means, and precisely what 'stuff' is and so on. One side is raw energy and power, which is great for farting and 'bottom sniffing' and those kinds of things, except fights are always breaking out about the Constituted Authority and who is in charge. The last side is the stuff of dreams, and the many voices in our ('dialogic') ears, and it is sometimes good for therapy too, but there is no end to the proliferation, like "all these children appearing, popping out from God knows where".

Three equal but different sides: well, that is the ontology done (in case you were wondering). Now lets deal with the epistemiology, and I am glad to say this is also simple. All three sides work the same way, all being relatively permeable and relatively reflective. So a lot of mirroring goes, seeing things from one side in the other and so on, and put together that is what makes the whole thing work: with enough precision, enough energy, and enough dialogue.

Let's get on, I am getting bored! It all boils down to the 'subjective' anyway ('subjective' in inverted commas - like Joseph Roth said in his letter to his Feuilleton Editor and friend Benno).

Blame and Responsibility. Yesterday I went to the 'Picasso and Modern British Art' exhibition at Tate Britain, and there was a black and white half-size copy of 'Guernica' as you would expect. So it was clear that Franco was getting the blame in 1937. But then there was also the photograph of Picasso in a suit and tie in 1948 at an 'Intellectuals for Peace' conference in 1948 looking decidely uncomforable, as if he hadn't wiped his bottom that morning, and then I was less sure who was to blame and who was taking responsibility.

However, there were also some powerful drawings by Picasso of the Crucifixion which followed his 1930's visit to the Grünewald Isenheim Altarpiece, and these reminded me of WG Sebald's As the Snow on the Alps in After Nature (2002), exploring the same master:

"Always the same
gentleness, the same burden of grief,
the same irregularity of the eyes, veiled
and sliding sideways down into loneliness."

There are eight long verse sections in 'Max's' writing on Grünewald, and Pablo's series of designs (Minotaure, No 1 1933 - Tate Library and Archive 203220) based on the Grünewald Crucifixion are similar extensive explorations into a blame and responsibility which appears to be being withheld. See for yourself -

There I wasn't . . . (ak)

There I wasn’t strolling along this delightful grassy track when an unwarranted viper spoke to me though perhaps the speaking part was merely my imagination. Over there, I can hear a laughing faun hidden behind that rock. And I can just make out a shrieking satyr wild dancing amidst the trees. Meanwhile there is this coil of serpent sunning herself but alerted by my thundering patriarchal footfalls. There was no claim to possess a licence, no enquiry as to the possible remuneration attaching to the position of editor-in-chief. Why on earth did I get off the train?

    Am I not supposed to know where I am going? Aunty Maggie bashed me around the head until I understood that business plans were all the rage. And if I was so pathetic that I had no idea where I was bound (hand and foot) then at least I should have the decency to pretend that I did. Rather like writing this piece – where on earth do I want it to go? Solipsistic hallucinations allowing!

    Triangulations, we must remember are dangerous structures when applied to us. All well and good when referring to lengths of wood or metal; Hey, that’s really strong. But mummy what is he doing here? Aren’t I good enough for you? Surely we don’t need anybody else? And don’t go away when I’m talking, or at least having a go at thinking, I like you to be around while I think. And then all these children start appearing, popping out from God knows where. Was it something that I did? I was absent, asleep somewhere on a grassy track, minding my own business, dreaming of being deeply implicated in some sort of pleasurable activity, the nature of which is very unclear to me. A sort of mist came down . . . you know, like the transfiguration – what is it that is hidden in that cloud?

    And then I wake up to discover an unlicensed editor in the nest.

    Welcome you little snake in the grass, it seems rather exciting to imagine you paying occasional visits. I better get the vacuum cleaner out, have a shower and comb my hair.

 

A Nice Triangular Arrangement (mmj)

For obvious and promiscuous reasons the genealogy and origins of King Ubu is uncertain, but it is known (you told me so yourself as I recall) that one of the other names he answers to is Ubi, which the Latinists among us will tell us means ‘everywhere’. In Greek everywhere translates as Pan of course, as in panorama and panopticon, and we should be open to the possibility of a divine or at least semi-divine (ie promiscuous) status in the unruly ruler between whose feet we have been scurrying about like children in our writing here these last couple of weeks, especially a ruler who has such a preference for revealing himself in wild places and wilderness. That Ubu is the Lord of Misrule is also clearly an unwarranted slur upon him, a nasty piece of negative briefing put out no doubt by Tory Central Office at the beck of Pinky C (pink-faced; as could be from too much hand motion), and disseminated by the Sun Newspaper under a ‘Ubu The Flasher’ headline.

 “How are we doing here? Are we on track?” These are the disarming questions which you asked during our meeting yesterday. I have it verbatim because, as you will remember, I was scrawling across the pages in my black notebook as you spoke. “It is like getting on the train and not knowing the destination,” you continued. “If we were going to Istanbul, we could say that Belgrade is closer than London…”.

 Yes, it is hard to give accurate answers as to our position when there is just the two of us and we happen to be inhabiting everywhere. Panorama and panopticon are the privileges we enjoy, but by Sisyphus they come with a heavy price. And the joke is truly on us! Having yoked ourselves together to the engine of this serial-feuilleton weekly-deadline writing there is truly no getting off. It is what is called a twin handcar on the railways, or a Kalamazoo out west, or Laufmaschine in the east ...
A life sentence of hard work, toil and sweat! If only we knew were going to Istanbul again and could depend on history and the reliable timetabling, powerful imperial engines, and kindly presence of His Highness of the Dual Monarchy. No wonder I have been making such regular toasts to the memory of Franz Josef!

 ‘Subjective’ is what we are, and hence the impossibility of knowing our position. Simply moving under our own steam and looking over each other’s shoulders as we go along we describe the receding (or are they approaching?) views as best we can. ‘Subjective’, and in inverted commas, as Joseph Roth had it –
“I should like to write a wholly ‘subjective’ book, in other words something completely objective.”(Letter – Hotel Beauvau, Marseille, 30 August 1925 - to Benno Reifenberg, feuilleton editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung. Roth was referring to his “White Cities” collection, which were eventually published posthumously).

And serves us right! For having once set off like this for Istanbul there is no getting off. In another black notebook I come across the following quotation I wrote down from somebody who set off for a long walk in 2004, “…Pain resumes… Think of Theta’s answer to why monks go wandering: ‘In order to fail’.” Still the privileges of this inter-continental panorama and panopticon are not insignificant. What views – and authentic subjects like Disgust and so on – What endless vista; there is no shortage of material to write about! Wipe the sweat from your eyes!

What we do need now at this point is an editor like Benno to make a nice triangular arrangement with us, and who can answer your questions, tell us how we are doing and where we are at from time to time… I am on the look-out. Here is Joseph Roth again telling a junior writer how it works:

‘By now you will have spoken with Reifenberg, and you will know my views on editing.  But just in case, let me say again: it goes against the grain of journalism to forbid an editor to make cuts.  Since I fought for this principle the whole time I was in Frankfurt, I can't very well turn around and say you shouldn't be cut. (It wouldn't do much for you either.) Not only is it right to cut and to make changes, I see it almost as an imperative.  Of the 40-odd pieces I've written, maybe ten appeared “unshorn”.  You are no soloist, you're a choir member.  You toe the line.  In questions of detail, you can argue the toss if you like.  But in principle you are duty bound to submit.  Perhaps, with your jealous love of every single line you write, you will become a brilliant poet, but you'll never make a half decent journalist.  The subject of your article is sacred to you.  Your article is a means to an end.  Your subject and you, the writer, are more important than your article.  As much more as you are more than the air you breathe out.  As far as your latest piece is concerned, it wasn't any good. Kracauer cut it. He was right to.  It was loose, inorganic, the description of a path, but not the path itself.  You have good ideas, good images, good turns of phrase.  But they don't grow together.  Your pieces are chain links without any coherence.  Read French feuilletons, read Heine's prose.  Learn about natural transitions. Your spade was the best piece of yours I've read.  In poems, atmosphere and rhythm fuse loose things together.  In so-called prose, the context must make the atmosphere.’

(Letter – Kaiserhof, Essen, 11 February 1926 – to Bernard von Brentano)

Above quotes are from Joseph Roth, A Life in Letters, tr and ed Michael Hoffmann, Granta 2012.

Distant Eastern Skies (ak)

Entre nous, you know how it is, spread-eagled as you are, by the gently lapping waves of the Arabian Sea, while Scheherazade is busy with her elegant pruning shears, somewhere out of sight beneath your heaving belly, severing what you intriguingly call your wifi connection. You are stuffed, as they say. But you don’t tell us with what. Where are the details of this gargantuan feast that you so greedily lunched upon with your bourgeois entrepreneurial mates, stuck in the environs of an anonymous oriental entrepôt.

    The little englanders are getting ready to fight, proudly washing and polishing their 1956 grey jet bombers, though like much else the years have had a seriously emasculating effect on them – both the little englanders and the bombers – though, they (the little englanders) are more interested in battling with their fellow citizens. Their short-sighted eyes can only peer into the next street which they can see is full of strangers. Although under the misty nostalgia for the iron lady when 900 dead was a small price to pay for holding on to some dots in the South Atlantic they are turning to Rupie Murdoch to await further instructions.

    Entre nous, we know what we like.

    Is Pinky Cameron allowed to talk to his old friend Rupie and if so what do they talk about. It must be in the manner of secret negotiations – that mutual back scratching, in the belief that nothing is remembered for long. They seem to believe that we will have little recall of the NHS in a short while. And will Blair hand over his responsibilities as god-father (in the mafia sense?) to one of Rupie’s grandchildren to Pinky? These questions must be just the stuff for endless rumination of UBU’s offspring whilst lying on the pebbles of Brighton beach. Is your Ubi the great-grand-son of Ubu or is the connection more distant. A mere wish of distant intimate coupling under eastern skies – somewhere near Lowestoft, I suppose.

    And whilst I think about it, please grab me a transcript, or better a You Tube video of the Pinky/Rupie chat next time you’re in Downing Street.

    And another thing . . .  I went to see A Dangerous Method, the movie by David Cronenberg with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton setting up a nice triangular arrangement between Freud, Jung and Sabina Spielrein. Everybody apart from Spielrein speaking in impeccable English, whilst she adopted a Russian (I assume) accent, resulting in a rather odd feeling that Zurich and Vienna had been transported to some English home counties setting only with the addition of Keira Knightley adopting the Russian accent together with the bodily contortions of a famous hysteric patient. After all, I suppose, the British are far too full of phlegm to stand for any of that hysterical nonsense – surely the hysterics are all foreigners. Mind you Jung, played by Michael Fassbender, had a good try at spanking and indeed beating his patient. And Freud played by Viggo Mortensen endeavouring to maintain (and failing) his authority. For me it was a rather disappointing experience, especially as I’ve been reading the rather more serious Darian Leader’s What is Madness? And consequently was rather looking forward to more psychoanalytic stuff. Mind you, the settings were rather lovely and wasn’t Jung lucky to have such a wealthy wife who tolerated his affairs and bought him a rather swish yacht.

 

A Taxonomy for Entrepreneurs (mmj)

While Ubi was sleeping off his huge lunch on Monday on the beach in front of the Arabian Ocean, his smooth round belly rising and falling and the regular breath issuing from his open mouth with loud snores, Scheherezade crept in to the plus petit chambre behind the throne and cut the wifi connection here. Appararently her 1003^rd Tale was not to her liking and she has grown peevish in her maturer years.

So you might like to consider a taxonomy of entrepreneurship during the interlude. Because of course not all entrepreneurs are the same; Pinky Cameron is one of a very particular kind, and we might like to know the sort he is the better to distinguish him from some of the others.

"Bourgeoisie was the old way of describing the genus", Scherezade says as she emerges from the little room, hitches ‘her’ trousers up and adjusts ‘her’ flies. Those more familiar with Est-Politik-Sprech might still prefer that word to entrepreneur
anyway. Slavov Zizek does in his last essay in the LRB (26 Jan 2012). The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie was its title, and the discussion was on the hegemonies
of power that arise through the “privatisation of the general intellect”; not
just the power exercised by professional classes (ie which continues to provide
their ample ‘fat cat’ opportunities to charge for everything on the basis of
scarcity), but also the power exercised through the world of ideas, including through
our computers and the worlds they inhabit. In other words, including THROUGH
HERE!

Slavov was writing in the context of the emergence of a possible new class which inhabits and works in what could be called the “Life in Common”. It is the way of being networked according to Slavov (referring to the philosophers’ Hardt and Negri latest book Multitudes) which has arisen, this new domain of shared knowledge
and new forms of communication and co-operation. Like Ubi himself the domain is
called everywhere, but it should be distinguished from the global, which of course is entirely owned by the ‘fat cats’ these days. The Commons are open and inclusive, and composed of innumerable internal differences (so they are not like ‘the masses’ and so on). The Commons are also socially diverse (‘biopolitical’ is the posh word; meaning it is not just about economics, it is about everything - everything in life that is).

Ubi gives a sudden snort, and begins waving and grappling with his arms, muttering wildly and blowing kisses. He appears to have encountered a Devi Goddess in his dreams.

Here I am sunning myself for two weeks on the coast of the Arabian Sea with my old Russian friends. What we have in common is our sharing the dreamy delights of vacation time Asclepian style, but we have our other differences. For instance, I tried a novel conversation gambit on one of the Russian men this morning after
breakfast. Being more or less of the intellectual bourgeois type myself, I
shall call him Alexei, and myself Maxim to disguise our real identities.

Hello, says Maxim. Hello, replies Alexei. We are beginning in workable English as you can already tell, and Alexei continues with his familiar and very detailed explanation of his work as a genius of nuclear reprocessing material which of course Maxim has
heard from him several times before over the last few days.

When were you born Alexei, 1948, Maxim suddenly interjects.

I was born in 1951, Alexei replies after a pause. Maxim writes down the two dates on a blank piece of paper. Da, he says pointing at one of them, and then, Da, again pointing at the other and drawing a line between the two.

What is your first recollection of England? Maxim begins again smiling at Alexei. There is an even longer pause.

My first recollection of Russia was in 1956, Maxim continues still smiling. We lived near an aerodrome in the east midlands and one day on a walk with my father he pointed at the large grey jet aeroplanes lined up in a row on the tarmac on the other side of the barbed wire perimeter fence.

"Do you know what they are?”, my father asked me.

“No” I replied.

“They are bombers and they fly to Russia”.

What is your first recollection of England, Maxim asks again, but Alexei appears to have suddenly lost his command of English.

In the taxonomy of entrepreneurs, the Russians clearly belong to a different brand than I do, a brand where silence is also a valuable commodity. Call me Intellectual Bourgeoisie, but call them Survivor Bourgeoisie. They are of the Uncle Scrooge McDuck’s type, The Tougher Than The Toughies and I admire them! Comrades!

And superpink Pinky Cameron? What brand of bourgeoisie is he? He is of a very different breed than the Russian entrepreneurs. You see his kind out and about in cities and the countryside, usually dressed in tweed jackets and corduroy trousers. They are called the Antiquated Bourgeoisie. In literature they are the ones who always write for full effect (you know the novelists I am referring to and there is no need for me to name names!). In politics it is the same, only it is full effect speaking instead of writing. And they are addicted to the idea of leaving monuments after them, which they usually achieve in doing… as any kind of atrocious legacy will do.

In general they are also unaware that the imperium of Ukania ended fifty years ago (probably about the time of Maxim’s first recollection of Russia on the walk with his father). And so on...

...Ubi has awoken and in order to properly disillusion him says he wishes to conjure Cameron into his presence for an audience as soon as possible.

Say the magic words after me:

“Franz Josef”.

Ubu watches as Pinky gets ever pinker (ak)

Ubu, the king of misrule is squeaking once more in his unusually high-pitched voice with the result that nobody pays him any attention. But he is there, perched on his rather rackety stool, clad in glorious robes of mistake, reminding us that the best sort of majestic ruler is the one that we can safely ignore but nonetheless remains at his post, or her post I think should be added to the possibilities of anti-rule. Our king of ridicule sits, putting on a glower of smouldering condescension, picking his nose and squirming in a way that is quite frankly disgusting.

    He would like to take himself seriously but is congenitally unable to do any such thing as he views life as a huge comedy, probably of infinitely complex errors. Bloated as he is he would still like to emulate Pinky Cameron nobly astride a retired police horse. Ubu envies what he sees as Cameron’s power. He thinks that when Cameron speaks people listen and listening to Cameron is bad for everybody’s health so that, in turn, would be good for his royal self. Has there ever been such an inept bunch of wannabees pretending to be a government. There is only one line that they can manage to sing: hand it over to my friends in the private sector [and increase the range of extravagant poverties available to all who were not born with the gold spoon shoved with haste and vigour into their drooling gobs].

    Of course we should all be entrepreneurs and don’t get me wrong I would be if I could be: if only I could arouse some elements of interest in it but my mind swerves away on to something more interesting which could be almost anything at all. The thing is my mind has been corrupted by my early years of post-war social democracy and the fact is I have, one way or another, managed to survive these years of free market madness – an ideology, a potent virus, that has taken deep root in the bones of the movers and shakers in an orgy of me-too hysteria.

    Ubu is banging on his tambourine, endeavouring to stretch his atrophied arm up towards the misty heavens and giving it little shakes and despite his pathetic efforts he has managed to capture our attention.

    ‘What is it, your majesty?’

    ‘Listen to me,’ he squeaks.

    ‘We are listening, sire.’

    ‘It is time for war, where is my army.’

    ‘We privatised them, sire. They are currently protecting the banks from angry mobs.’

    He is up and off his stool and screaming in purple-faced rage. My God, he’s angry. Watch our or he’ll catch you with that mace that he insists on carrying.

    Just keep our of his way, it doesn’t usually last too long.

    Ah yes, here comes the collapse:

    ‘Oh I think it must be time for my medicine.’

    ‘Indeed it is, indeed it is. Which bit of your majestic self shall I stick it in?’

 

Ubi, Ubi, Ubi (mmj)

Having abandoned writing a history of ourselves because for quite some time now one can’t rely on anything I say, or anything you say either for that matter, we have been given permission to travel everywhere. That is the message today from Ubu Roi. What I say is always simply another event. What you say is just another historical observation, but together in the form of the serial feulleton we seem to have chanced upon a method to allow us to seek for work without troubling too much about having a status, fixed situation or known position. Seeking a publisher, we are at the gateway of the world, the threshold of all people...

… and I am back on the shores of the Arabian Sea for two weeks in southern India, staying at a kind of Asclepion hotel where the gaps between dreams and waking have
become even more porous than usual. Sinbad is here fishing offshore in his dugout canoes and telling stories to himself all through the night, and so quite probably is Sherehezade tapping at her tablet on the beach before winging her piece back to Benno (the feuilleton editor) for publication. The 1002^nd Arabian Night and so on, in and out of history and backing on to the ocean, there is music everywhere, floating through the coconut groves which fringe the sea from black speakers te size of double-beds.

Yes, our narod - our people - is recomposed, including the Russians who are also back here. There the same ones who I wrote about last year who glow with an intense and restless kind of roaming energy and swim far out to sea five times a day. We are all about the same age, but there are of course many more of them than us, and back home the men work in the nuclear energy industry, running their own businesses with similar robust vigour and will power, and so making themselves reasonable profits (they are as it were well to do borgeoise intellectuals but not the super-rich) sufficient to travel so that we can meet here to the tip of southern India, and break the ice of the Volga in winter to go for a regular dip. So far as I am able to understand them because neither of us speak each other‘s tongue. However, we are all inhabiting a kind of “novelletish world” as Roth wrote in his feuilleton to the F.Z (published 26^th August 1925), and we have no trouble filling the gaps between the words with our imagination.

East and West, Roth continues in the same piece, “From wealth to poverty is but a step. The homeless sleep on the palace steps”. We have got on to politics in our conversation, and I ask one of the Russian men for his opinions. It appears he longs for the return of Tzar Nicholas. At any rate he cannot stand Putin and the rest of the toting laptop parvenus with their Social Democrat pretensions, and fat wives with heelless sandles which they buy from the most expensive shops in Italy. It was the same with Rot Roth, the “revolutionary” as he was called, who writes a letter to Benno (the feuilleton editor) in which he tells him how much he cried when Franz Josef died. Like Andrzej Stasiuk too, who I quoted at some length a week or two back, toasting the birthday of the old emperor in East Hungary.

The ends of epochs but without any feelings of nostalgia, and this longing for caesars from another time. We should note that - Plato was of the same viewpoint. Or the longing in our case for an editor like Benno, who will rule us with a firm but kindly hand (“on the one hand feullieton editor, on the other well-disposed human being” as Roth put it in his letter of 30^th August 1925).

Do we not share this longing for caesars, editors who will publish us, making deadlines, and demand clarity, and give us back morality? Yes! – Truth in half a page.

That was Roth's definition of the feuilleton by the way. I will leave it to you to check if this Benno is the same one who fulfils the editor role for the hero of Bolano’s 2666. Quite probably.

UBU awaits (ak)

If you like, the staircase is always a series of mythological Gnostic steps, and, if you are lucky, a troubadouring Bob Dylan will be waiting for you in the minstrels’ gallery, to sing you through five hundred verses of Desolation Row, though whether or not you find the minstrels’ gallery is another question. Something to do with fate or history or alternatively, to be more personal, who were your people? Did your people clear the thorn entangled path so that you might steal a march on the opposition and your own inveterate laziness. Without further ado I think I should mention that Ubu awaits you in the throne room. And it’s not for me say whether the throne room is up the stairs or down in the extensive cellars. Though one might hazard a guess that as the cellars are where the wine is (was) kept – that might be the place to begin your search.

    Ubu is much bigger than he used to be: a gargantuan waistline, little short legs, a face apoplectically red and purple and his arms waving in rage. It will soon be apparent that all you have to do is follow the noise; a thin weaselling sort of noise, plus explosions of hoarse, enraged grief. Madame Ubu has long since abandoned him and taken most of the staff with her, leaving him only a couple of weasels to hose him down once or twice a day.

    An audience with le Roi is a pressing necessity; better not delay it too long before you set off for the cellars. Ignore, for now, those inviting stairs and don’t forget to drink a couple of bottles on your through the early stages of the labyrinth. Don’t worry I know you are no Theseus – no gorgonzola awaits you. Only the demented Ubi. By the way, he likes to be called Ubi. Ubu is more formal, so I would advise you to stick to Ubi. And do bow low as you enter the throne room. It will be dark, so you might not spot him right away but he will spot you. In fact he will have sniffed your approach two days ago. He is ready. His little red eyes almost bursting with excited anticipation. And do take along your collected works of Walter Benjamin. I can assure you that Uncle Wally is one of his favourite authors. He is very fond of quoting huge chunks to any who come within spitting difference. And that’s something else of course – better to keep beyond spitting difference if you know what’s good for you. And do try to resist his siren calls to divest yourself of your protective clothing.

    Once you find your way out of there (hopefully not needing too much in the way of medical intervention) you will be more than (psychologically, speaking) ready to mount the famous staircase. And hopefully with the physical prowess to lift one foot up on to the next tread.

    To really and truly find out where it leads.

 

In short, Work Finds Itself a Voice (mmj)

Readings out of Walter Benjamin’s Selected Writings, this time it was Volume 2, part 2, 1931-1934, but the selecting and making of quotations appeared wrong to me. A feeling of transgression, I wanted to quote it all, as if the only honest response I could think of as the reader was to transcribe the whole volume from start to end, or beginning from wherever I had begun dipping into, and then over and over again. This honest response, my honesty or the lack of it today, being the question of morality; of the ethical position of writer and reader.

In short, (how) work finds itself a voice. The phrase is found in a piece in Vol 2, Part 2, called Diary from August 7, 1931, to the Day of My Death. Unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime, “This diary does not promise to become very long,” Benjamin begins and it is true that it is brief, amounting to only about two thousand words in all. But the phrase about work and the brevity of his pieces seems to offer a kind of salvation.

Or put another way, which Benjamin did using a similar phrase within a later, and this time even shorter, piece called The Newspaper, this time published in Der öffentliche Dienst (Zurich), March 1934, and totalling less then five hundred words. “For since writing gains in breadth what it loses in depth, the conventional distinction between author and public that the press has maintained (although it is tending to loosen it through routine) is disappearing in a socially desirable way. The reader is at all times ready to become a writer – that is, a describer or even a prescriber. As an expert – not perhaps in a discipline but in a post that he holds – he gains access to authorship. Work itself has its turn to speak.”

As it happened, being both in and out of work last weekend, I was staying in a large house along the southwest coast of Wales. Located perhaps not so far from where WG Sebald had described the lonely childhood of his middle-european hero in his last novel Austerlitz, the house had been extensively rebuilt in the nineteenth century around a cavernous hall and great wooden staircase, so that on first entering by the front door the wide stairway in the centre of the hall immediately presented itself, leading upwards to a half landing and then dividing against the distant seeming wall to both left and right, a far wall upon which an enormous oil painting happened to hang like a cinema screen covering the whole surface and capturing a moment from antiquity, it was in fact the entry of Alexander into Athens upon a chariot with a near naked Diogenes shown lying outside his barrel in the foreground, and the divided stairs then turned again rising without visible means of support in parallel flights back on themselves towards what is hidden to the onlooker apart from their wooden embossed and geometrically patterned undersides, rising to an obscured landing, and the hall itself was also very dark adding to the sense of foreboding, the only natural light penetrating from above the staircase and giving the impression that further flights of stairs might continue to rise higher and higher towards the sky, but all was hidden from view.

Where is this staircase leading to? I asked myself more than once during the weekend, having found myself in a state of being equally in and out of place. Because the staircase was clearly not going nowhere, for instance, I could grasp the notion that the staircase was located in a house which was a home, and I could rely on there being bedrooms on the first and perhaps higher floors. But although I could also fix upon a date for its construction in the 1870’s, the question remained, neither wholly in or out of mind, since the purpose of the staircase seemed to transcend domesticity, and my thinking split like the divided staircase itself towards nightmare possibilities of a fantastic architecture, and other imaginative purposes which also impressed themselves on me in cinematic fashion like the story from antiquity being shown in the great picture on the far wall, but again whether my attention was meant more for Alexander or Diogenes I was unable to tell, and split in many other ways to do with its seeming continental minded design and past, and so on without end.

But whether in or out of history, I seemed entirely unable to post the staircase along the river of time. “Run-of-the-mill history answers more questions than a wise man will”, Benjamin writes elsewhere in the diary entry for August 7^th (1931), and then continues. “My attempt to explain a theory of history in which the concept of development is entirely supplanted by the concept of origins.  Understood in this way, history cannot be sought in the riverbed of a process of development.  Instead, as I have remarked elsewhere, the image of a riverbed is replaced by that of a whirlpool.  In such a whirlpool earlier and later events - the prehistory and post history of the event, or, better, of a status, swirled around it. The actual objects of such a view of history are not specific events but specific unchanging statuses of the conceptual or sensual kind - for example, the Russian agrarian system, the city of Barcelona, population shifts in the Mark of Brandenburg, barrel vaulting, and so on.” Or the status (state, condition or situation) of this staircase I thought as I paused in my reading. “ If this approach is determined by its firm rejection of the possibility of an evolutionary or universalist dimension in history, it is determined internally by a productive polarity.  The twin poles of such a view of the historical and political – or, to point up the distinction even more sharply, the historical and the event. These two factors occupy two completely different planes. We can never say, for example, that we experience history; nor can we maintain that a historical account brings the events so close to us that it has the same impact as a historical event (such an account would be worthless), or that we have experienced events that are destined to become history (since such a view is journalistic).”

The image of a whirlpool, or a turning staircase at whose bottom we have arrived (in media res inadvertently revisiting) upon entering the darkly lit hall, and ascend to the first landing mid-floor, where it divides in two along the productive polarity of parallel flights, because - Yes! - the world is otherwise bewildering.

 

Have I slept? I am just falling asleep.
(- Karl Kraus, Words in Verse IV)

Strangers in the night (ak)

How strange it is to inadvertently revisit themes, ideas, realities that I had lost touch with. They had been important, had grabbed my attention but then been left behind in the ever shifting movement, the seeking after toeholds on the cliff, the imperative struggle to combine what is interesting with making money, supporting the family; enjoying life, surviving and moving up*.

It’s like finding buried treasure.

 

*Until it all crashed about my ears.

 

Agora / Tree of Life (mmj)

The thread is so fine... (Paul Klee, Tree of Life, 1918)

It develops its being in roundness

Slowly giving itself

The form that eliminates

The hazard of wind.

 (Theodore Rilke)

Piet Mondrian,

Trees and Abstract Geometries