walkingtalkingwriting

What was it I came here to do? (ak)

Let's check this out. Let's check the arithmetic of memory. I was getting older but there was still (I estimated) plenty of time left, barring accidents and those well known Acts of God or plain and simple murder, come to that. The brief time of innocence between forgetting about nuclear weapons and the advent of global warming had just given us the window of opportunity to launch an attack on the unsuspecting world; heads in the clouds, feet barely touching the the wild flowers in the meadows.

    Fast forward to some time that might or might not be the present, limping along in a desultory fashion; a result of varieties of conflict and trauma, cynical but still raising the standard of hope. Crawling out of bed, aware that we are not going to do anything very much about anything until it becomes a major catastrophe, such as the iconic asteroid that threatens to bring life on Earth to an abrupt end. Come on, get real – it would not be politically expedient. Instead we have been given a gift: Buffoon Boris. We will elect him to oversee our final apotheosis. The process might well be dialectical: Buffoon Boris's apotheosis but BUT our nemesis. Even if we didn't vote for the Billy Bunter raiding the tuck shop lookalike. Was our collective act one of hubris? Of course I'm getting mixed up in my tenses; suggesting an act in the past when some might feel it belongs in the future. But the confusion of tenses is appropriate because the damage has already been done. It happened when I was asleep.

    Dreaming, in fact, of something very different; the sweep of brushstroke that has picked up the energy of the centre, pulling it towards the periphery but then surprisingly executing the most exquisite curve and leading us back to the centre. Or at least that is apparently what is happening. Is that Greedy Guts hanging helplessly from the centre?

    The question remains: how do we find our way our of the Hayek maze of wondrous hallucinations? Can we sidestep the dazed bankers, the shell shocked monkeys from News Corp facing criminal charges?

    Or another question: how to support and help democracy to evolve? Rather than, in our sense of powerlessness we opt out of democratic struggle even at the basic level of voting. Was it somebody writing in the Daily Telegraph who accused Danny Boyle of sneaking a Marxist analysis into the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics?

    We all have to fight our way into the future. Even if the advantages and disadvantages handed out are so weighted in certain socially conditioned ways. But at the same time we have to work out what happened yesterday in the face of rampant amnesia and varieties of dementia. We, obviously cannot see the myths that currently construct our thinking, not until they are broken and burning on the bonfire of the yesterday's vanities.

    Missy Sniper is a version of the Republican/Tea Party/NRA fantasy: it can all be sorted out at the end of a gun. Just make sure YOU are the one with the finger on the trigger. Don't let those other buggers get their fingers in on the act. WE CAN BE TRUSTED (oh yeah!) THEY CAN'T. Let's hear it for Pussy Riot. Dancing in the cathedral and offering a prayer for the demise of Vlad Putin. Well why not? What's the problem?

Questions? (ak)

On board the Dreamboat there were puzzles to be examined. Such as, who is Massimo?  Such as, why would anybody think that I might be his friend? And if I was what would it mean? And more importantly, would it be dangerous?

    Not that my potential interrogator hung around long enough for me to reply.

    Out beyond the harbour walls the Dreamboat encountered a lazy swell; the combination of that gentle lurching and the ever-present smell of fish stirred my intestines into high alert, a state of readiness to evacuate should conditions deteriorate.

    More questions flooded my mind, perhaps in an effort to distract attention away from the volatility of current peristaltic activity. Questions such as:

    Did Tony Blair wet himself when shown the instruments of torture? Or, even, did any of those convictions he was so proud to display, his façade of self-belief, wobble?

    Such as:

    What am I supposed to remember?

    Such as:

    Did the image of the assassin as woman turn you on?

    Such as:

    What sort of shoes was she wearing?

    Such as:

    What would it be like living in a de-growth economy?

    Such as:

    Was the captain of the Dreamboat called Pring? And was he indeed a poet?

    Such as:

    What are the rules of this vessel?

 

Does it always have to be so difficult? (ak)

I zipped up, waited a few seconds, grabbed at some oxygen, sighed and shrugged, then turned to face my interrogator. Expecting something altogether more solid, more muscular I was surprised to see a girl, well, a young woman, who could have been no more than seventeen, overwhelmed inside an oversized uniform, dark, black or possible navy, her waif like face locked in uncertainty was a striking contradiction to the questioning, challenging voice I had been subdued by.

    Are you, by any chance, looking for the Kazoo Dreamboat, her voice had mysteriously become dream like, soft.

    Perhaps she had a colleague with her, somewhere in the shadows, a senior colleague who was supervising her on her first day in the job.

    Kazoo Dreamboat? I wondered about the strange name but decided to press on with my mission to reach the conference on the ninth floor.

    I’m trying to reach the ninth floor.

    A sheaf of papers had appeared in her left hand. She carefully examined them.

    Apparently you must go down to the fish wharf, three floors down.

    Erm, I rather was hoping to . . . I need to  . . . erm pee. I never did like the word pee, so prissy, so pathetic, but my vocal apparatus had got strangled in the effort to say piss.

    Sorry, was all she said and waited for me to leave.

 

I drew myself up to my full height (ak)

As a committee member I had been invited to a specially conformed conference to discuss matters of the utmost international importance. Held as it was within the solid imperial splendour of Victorian limestone, the entrances watched over by uniformed staff, ex-military, ex-police or even ex-G4S, my expectations rose to dizzying heights as to not only the outcome of the conference but my own status which I had always thought to be of a rather doubtful nature, skirting as it did both  the gutter and the lower ranks of the aristocracy. Now this, I thought optimistically, now this is where I belong, and squared my shoulders as the commissionaire held out his hand so that he might examine any documentation I might have. My first attempt was a failure because he merely shook his head and moved as though he intended to send me marching back out the door that I had so recently entered through. From my voluminous pockets I was able to produce some other papers. I could see he was sorry that he didn’t have any latex gloves to handle such a doubtful offering but he was willing to take a chance and drew them towards his highly trained nostrils. After many dramatic contortions involving all his extensive facial musculature he cleared his throat. I had assumed he would then return my papers but his hands were now empty and he withdrew into an official indifference as to my existence and if I did indeed exist what actions I might take.

    There was no reception desk and no receptionist but fortunately I had been informed my text message that the conference would be held on the ninth floor so I cast about for the lifts. As you well know the public transport systems in that distant city do not include much in the way conveniences so it was imperative that I discover the whereabouts of the gentleman’s conveniences fairly hastily. But I now seemed to be alone so seeing some stairs descending off in the shadows to my left I decided on that course of action. Two flights down I had the notion that a Virgil was needed to guide my steps. Did I have to go down in order to eventually end up on the ninth floor? Had I once again made the wrong decision? But, no, there is a door, heavy dark wood, perhaps mahogany, and though there was no sign on the door my spirits were lifted at the prospect of relief of urinary pressure. And what a delight it was to see a long row of gleaming urinals arrayed along the length of one wall, with gleaming copper pipework and glass splash guards to protect my admittedly unpolished shoes. Unzipping, as one must, in such circumstances, I was surprised by a low cough behind me. And then a woman’s voice:

 

    ‘Are you Pring, the poet?’ Almost a purr, even a hint of growl.

 

    ‘N-n-no,’ I stammered.

 

    ‘Are you Peliot the poet?’

 

    ‘No,’ no longer a stammer, but in fact a hint of anger that I was being delayed in self-producing the wished for relief.

 

    ‘Are you a poet at all?’

 

    ‘No, no, no I’m not a poet but I have to get to the ninth floor.’

 

    That might just have been the wrong thing to say.

 

                    (To be continued)

 

What about remaking, rethinking, revisioning? (ak)

Christopher Turner (LRB 5 July 2012) in his review of the Barbican exhibition: Bauhaus: Art as Life, quotes Gropius’s manifesto that called for a unity between art and craft, a unity that would ‘rise one day towards heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystalline symbol of a new faith’ and to facilitate ‘a community that wanted to create a new man in a new environment.’

    Where do any of us stand in relation to this linchpin of an ambition? What sort of work or practice would it take to bring enough light into our beings to make us ‘better’ people? Do we even believe that it is possible? And what is the evidence for change in us?

    Visiting an old friend recently, it seemed to me that he was much the same as he was when I met him more than forty years ago. There was the same strong ethical thread informing his behaviour as well as being an opportunistic chancer who was able to charm his way across social, professional and bureaucratic boundaries. And when I, in turn, reflected on any possible changes in me that I could detect, I see the same short sighted, shy individual with a poor instinctive sense of reality, who has to rely on books to aid him in building some useable concepts of reality. Sort of.

    Because there is a strand of doubt which hardly believes that locked into our subjective/objective tensions we have never and will never finally describe reality. And this idea or belief is central to this blog and then, of course, there is a but, quite a big but:

    But we can be tantalised, seduced, persuaded, entertained, enraged and engaged as we pursue these strange and surprising, not to say outrageous, gods of language. 

 

Vagabond Literature? (ak)

If, as you quote, ‘You must absolutely be disloyal to be a good writer’ (Somerset Vaughan? You mean Maugham?) then it rather suggests that to be a writer you must turn yourself out of hearth and home and live as a vagabond – using internet cafés to post the latest chapter of your magnum opus or your latest avant-garde incoherence and curling up each night in a cardboard box (should you be so lucky) free at last. And the smell?

 

    We are misled by books and presumably even more by kindles because the stink of the author has been wished away, reduced to leather, ink, paper, plastics, electronics. Writers must have their distinctive smells; a life at the desk or in the gutter – depending on your authenticity as a writer. What would have hit your nostril as you burst in on James Joyce en famille? And even more disturbing/terrifying what would have assailed your nostrils if you had happened to bump into Walter Benjamin in those moments before he committed suicide in the Pyrénées on the French/Spanish border. The mind reels. It’s as though smells have the ability to cut through the sanctity of our illusions, our best wishes. No wonder priests incense the altars, even the congregation, everybody within reach. And I always thought (though without putting it into words till this moment) that Somerset Maugham was entirely fishy, quite literally that of the rotting ocean, the whiff of some archetypal fishwife gutting fish (and you if you’re not quick on your feet) in one second flat – a grim smile on her face.

 

    Recently, in Florence, I heard Michael Ondhaatje and Kieran Desai discussing something the organisers of the conference called vagabond literature. It was the case that the need to translate slowed the proceedings but after some interesting accounts of their ‘roots’ in India and Sri Lanka, their migration first to the UK and then on to North America where they simply morphed into successful novelists. As they went on they had less and less interesting things to say. Ondaatje in particular looking bored and Desai beautifully decorative and trying hard. And the image of a couple of spoilt rich kids began to dominate my reactions to them. Obviously I should have got up close and had a good sniff to find out what they were made of. If in fact they could still be identified as human. Instead I wrestled with possible questions to ask them but then it was all over and we drifted out from the palazzo into the warm evening to wander and chat. But not about smells.

 

    What is the stench of over-privilege? Is it dry or wet or simply out of this world? Something from the far distant reaches of the universe? Occupying the eternal? Do gods smell?

 

    Life smells.

 

    You neglected to demand the answer to a question but I shan’t let you off so easily. Where are you digging? Do you have characters/plots in mind for the grave, sorry I mean novel?

 

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.

 

Funnier and Funnier (mmj)

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

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

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

Where is the moral imagination to be found these days?

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

Where is the moral imagination to be found these days?

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

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

Active boundaries and sulky flow (ak)

POZZO: His hat!

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

ESTRAGON: Avenged!

            [VLADIMIR examines the hat, peers inside it.]

POZZO; Give me that!

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

            There’s an end to his thinking!

VLADIMIR; But will he be able to walk?

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

ESTRAGON; Perhaps he’s dead.

VLADIMIR; You’ll kill him.

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

VALDIMIR; How?

POZZO; Raise him up!

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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