{ Monthly Archives }
March 2011
a festive mash-up, featuring William Gaddis IN HIS INIMITABLE PREPOSTEROUS STYLE, a book I doubt I’ll be reading much more of, Nick Land “making it with death,” like, inverted, whom I will, despite myself, be reading more of, to find out where it all tends, and snaps of a night with Douglas Wright’s Rapt, someone ought to say, Douglas, Douglas, your dance is genius, sometimes your theatre is… well… naff – make more work! Then we won’t get either this sense of artistic constipation, or, which is worse, this sense of artistic relief
Birds ran on the empty lawns of the parsonage pecking at fallen irregular shapes of unripe crab apples. Swallows cut silent erratic courses above the carriage barn.
– William Gaddis, The Recognitions, (first publd. 1955) Atlantic Books, London, 2003, p. 48
consciousness, it seemed, was a succession of separate particles, being carried along on the surface of the deep and steady unconscious flow of life, of time itself, and its fainting, the particles of consciousness simply stopped, and the rest flowed on, until they were restored: but this was the stoppage, the entire disappearance of that deeper flow which left the particles of consciousness suspended, piling up, ready at any instant to shatter with nothing to support them. Still, at such times everything was in order, of shape and colour to mass and distance, of minutes accomplishing hours by accumulation just as the clock itself stayed on the table where it was if only because it had been accumulating there for so long: that was the reassurance of weight.
– Ibid., p. 51
in the name of free will, by which she meant conscious desire
– Op. Cit., p. 78
ART OF THE PROFILE
a sort of graphic index to the intricate labyrinth of her mind arrayed to impress the most casual guest, a system of immediate introduction
– Op. Cit., p. 83
– Is it all right to kiss a nun?
– What do you mean, for Christ’s sake?
– Sure it’s all right, as long as you don’t get into the habit.
– Op. Cit. p. 103
people … the instant you look at them they begin to talk automatically, they take it for granted you understand them, that you recognise them, that they have something to say to you, and you have to wait, you have to pretend to listen, pretend you don’t know what’s coming next while they go right on talking with no idea what they’re talking about, they don’t even know but they go right on, trying to explain who they are because they take it for granted you want to know, not that they have the damnedest idea as far as that goes, they just want to know what kind of receptacle you’ll be for their confidences.
– Op. Cit., p. 107
FLAMENCO MUSIC
– What does it mean? she asked quietly, her eyes still turned from him.
– Life without a friend, death without a witness.
– I don’t like it, she said quietly
– Op. Cit. p. 112
– it’s the sense of privacy that most popular expressions of suffering don’t have, don’t dare have, that’s what makes it arrogant. That’s what sentimentalising invades and corrupts, that’s what we’ve lost everywhere, especially here where they make every possible assault on your feelings and privacy. These things have their own patterns, suffering and violence, and that’s … the sense of violence within its own pattern, the pattern that belongs to violence like the bullfight, that’s why the bullfight is art, because it respects its own pattern…
…
how fragile situations are. But not tenuous. Delicate, but not flimsy, not indulgent. Delicate, that’s why they keep breaking, they must break and you must get the pieces together and show it before it breaks again, or put them aside for a moment when something else breaks and turn to that, and all this keeps going on.
…
Listen, there are so many delicate fixtures, moving toward you, you’ll see. Like a man going into a dark room … a sudden bang! something breaks. Then you have to stop and put the pieces together again. But you never can put them back together quite the same way. You stop when you can and expose things and leave them within reach, and others come on by themselves, and they break, and even then you may put the pieces aside just out of reach until you can bring them back and show them, put together slightly different, maybe a little more enduring, until you’ve broken it and picked up the pieces enough times, and you have the whole thing in all its dimensions. … sometimes the accumulation is too much to bear.
– Op. Cit., pp. 112-114
It is a naked city. Faith is not pampered, nor hope encouraged; there is no place to lay one’s exhaustion: but instead pinnacles skewer it undisguised against vacancy.
– Op. Cit., p. 114
the ones who receive extreme unction with salted peanuts on their breath.
– Op. Cit., p. 114
outsourcing la città
– photo by Gillian Needham
What is the war about?
It is about the cost of food and petrol, of basic alimentation and transport. It is about not being able to pay bills, rent, mortgage, housing costs, the costs of habitation, shelter. It is about not being able to afford to pay for education, whether for children or oneself. It is about not being able to afford to support those who depend on us, aging parents, sick relations, friends in need. It is about having no money. It is also about high prices, about taxes set punitively high. And it is about the contrast visible everywhere around between people with enough to pay high prices, usually the people who impose high prices, and the people with less, less to the degree that they are victims.
A line has been crossed: the spectacle of wealth is no longer sufficient reason to keep our seats. We are at war with those on the stage, on the other side of the line, across the carefully regulated, policed and legislated for wealth divide. A line has been crossed in so far as we have been betrayed: we no longer believe in enjoying ourselves to death; we are no longer complacent about watching since we have discovered we can no longer attain to the sort of lives or gain access to the sort of world we see represented before us, everywhere around. Life in the real world has become too expensive. The line is real cost, actual price.
The war is about a threshold we have not crossed but been forced over and now life is insupportable; it is beyond our means. We wage war neither on the images of lives we cannot possess, nor with needs fed on these illusions, but on the injustice concentrating wealth in fewer and fewer hands. The compensation for this decrease is found in the multiplication of images of excess, to excess. Here also a threshold: forced to consume advertising, we declare ourselves at war with the authority who gives us to be force-fed, the power that regulates for, not against, the advertiser.
Here again a divide: between greed and fear. We overcome our fear of information, of the fetishes advertising holds up to mesmerise us; we overthrow this combination of the greedy using fear, this combine. We don’t assert a right to what we need, we take it. The war is about the overthrow of every government that allows injustice to be perpetuated as good business.
With entry to deregulated markets (that is markets in whose favour states regulate), with access to docile populations strangled, sociopathic corporations turn to autism, the affliction symptomatic of their affect on individuals in victim societies.
The power of the state lies both in an advertising jingle, a matter of representation, and the permission it gives for us to be made victims, a matter of authority. The war is about rejecting the illusion and claiming the right of authority. It is about representing our wishes to the greedy. It is for an open and egalitarian society.
It is happening everywhere because conditions are similar everywhere, even where histories differ. It is happening in the Middle East. It is happening in Europe and in England. Why isn’t it happening yet in the US?
The war is about rejecting both economics and politics as reasons for victimisation. It is about claiming adequate representation in the overthrow of authority.
