walkingtalkingwriting

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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?

 

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.

 

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?

 

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.