walkingtalkingwriting

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 -