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

 

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.

 

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.

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.

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.