square white world

As a woman in Saudi Arabia, I am restricted in some ways as a woman. - writes Niesha Salman Abdulaziz to me.

Assalamalekum

In the face of the current Covid-19 pandemic, the wider performance sector has effectively been rendered inoperable. The current convergence of complex issues in the sector and beyond, triggered by the pandemic as well as the Black Lives Matter movement, in conjunction with the environmental crisis, calls for a radical undoing and reorganising of the political, the social, the cultural and the existential.

— from here

the control of science and the coercion of politics.

— from here

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/20/joe-biden-action-bernie-sanders

…

shortly before Christmas I came across something called neodecadence, featuring people like Justin Isis, based in Nihon, and Chomu Press, and K.J. Bishop’s The Etched City, Bantam Books, 2004, which reviewers were happy to call neo-decadent. Here are some excerpts:

Art is the conscious making of numinous phenomena. Many objects are just objects–inert, merely utilitarian. Many events are inconsequential, too banal to add anything to our experience of life. This is unfortunate, as one cannot grow except by having one’s spirit greatly stirred by spiritless things. Much of our very life is dead. For primitive man, this was not so. He made his own possessions, and shaped and decorated them with the aim of making them not merely useful, but powerful. He tried to infuse his weapons with the nature of the tiger, his cooking pots with the life of growing things; and he succeeded. Appearance, materiality, history, context, rarity–perhaps rarity most of all–combine to create, magically, the quality of soul. But we modern demiurges are prolific copyists; we give few things souls of their own. Locomotives, with their close resemblance to beasts, may be the great exception; but in nearly all else with which today’s poor humans are filling the world, I see a quelling of the numinous, an ashening of the fire of life. We are making an inert world; we are building a cemetery. And on the tombs, to remind us of life, we lay wreaths of poetry and bouquets of painting. … No longer integral, the numinous has become optional, a luxury–…

— op. cit., 297.

We go no further than this. Yonder abide the dead in their domain. And when the living sun burns out and the living moon falls dark and all things that have life have come and gone, that world shall be the only world, and so it will be forever. All of time is but a shell floating alone on a still ocean; and the shell holds the universe; and the shell has a day of birth and a day of death, when it will sink into the ocean, and all it held will be lost, save for what is remembered in the memories of the dead.

— ibid., 352.

Absence is more truthful than presence, if truth is that which endures and never changes its nature.

— ibid., 344.

In the nomad’s land, which was a land of lines, many lines, with space as such being incidental filler, a negative concept, Raule occasionally wondered whether she had escaped from a doomed world–escaped from nowhere to somewhere. An equal number of times, she wondered whether she was part of something left by a world that had birthed itself into a new, more gracious state–a state beyond apprehension by that which remained, dry, linear as bone, as the veins in a dead leaf.

— ibid., 377.

life during lockdown:

The Assembly adopted draft resolution I, “Combating glorification of Nazism, neo‑Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance”, by a recorded vote of 130 in favour to 2 against (Ukraine, United States), with 51 abstentions. – from here

note abstention of both Australia and New Zealand.

US maintains it is a freedom of speech issue.

note also that this is not fake but mirage news.

…

s: who knows what the new year will bring…

c: it will just make us more nuggetty.

…

…

A controlled population is a living population

what is the role of COVID-19? to discredit democracy

what is the role of Trump? to discredit democracy

…

Lohraw: In the future there will be infamy every 15 minutes.

via Ttekceb: And once this first ordeal is surmounted, the next will come along, like buses…

…

to be meaningless is easy as long as you keep your meaning secret

Talking with an old friend I realised:

…

a tissue for my eyes please

[Of course, to say to be meaningless is easy as long as you keep your meaning secret is completely disingenuous. Being meaningless is easy so long as secretly you believe that you are meaningful. Being meaningless is easy so long as secretly I believe that I am not. To believe you are meaningless is difficult. … We used to do this thing in Minus Theatre where all meaning is moved up onto the surface. The more meaningful the better. The more intensity of meaning the better. And the more depth of meaning the better. The idea is not for meaning to be lost, to lose or shed meaning from that which previously had meaning and was meaningful. The idea was not to pull meaning up by the roots, to root it out from wherever it sprang. The idea was, the idea is, that once put on the surface meaning can change. To keep it secret (hidden in the deep) or to keep it secretly (because of its depth) keeps meaning the same. So it can’t change. What is meaningful remains rooted in the soil where it grows. But it only seems to grow. What in fact is happening is that meaning has stuck. It remains rooted to the spot. It has only one fixed meaning, when this in fact is only a part of its meaning. A gesture of suicide, what does it mean? Does it mean the desire to rejoin the soil–of meaninglessness? Or is it threatening death to what is too full of meaning, has too much meaning? Suicide seems to be both the absolute statement of personal meaning at the same time as it is the absolute statement of personal meaninglessness. In Minus we would make the gesture and steal it for other purposes. A man tearing out his own hair would be getting his hair done. A woman shooting herself would have suicide as part of its meaning, it would be, in other words, acting. … Acting seems to be both the absolute statement of personal meaninglessness at the same time as it is the absolute statement of personal meaning. It is where the personal changes meaning. Online personal expression fixes meaning. No statement can be made that does not stick to the one who makes it. The selfie mask sticks to the face (…the face to the mask / the root to the plant…). It is not acting but a gesture that by being made is meaningful. And it is not theatre. Or rather it is the worst kind of theatre, the theatre of feelings that are no less meaningful for being manufactured, a factory for the sentimental, a productionline for kitsch, for a politicised engagement with the personal and for a personalised performance of the political. It means taking a stand. Against this: Minus Theatre. What if your meaningful statement was more mobile and less absolute? Your political standpoint–what if it allowed of other meanings? Your personal viewpoint–it is not enough to let there be other and opposite viewpoints from which it either differs or to which it is opposed: what if your personal viewpoint meant different things at different times and places and even the opposite then and there of what it means here and now? Meaning needs to be decomposed just enough for it to become mobile–neither full of meaning nor wholly without meaning. Communication, sympathy, empathy–these are not enough: for each statement, each gesture, each action and each suicide that it is meaningless participates in its meaning. We might say that its deconstruction is present in it, an ongoing part of it, allowing it to travel not only back and forth but in all directions, towards all sorts of unintended meanings and lacks of meaning. Aporetic and ephectic, Beckett writes.]

he knew this air,

          knew this monumental procession of cloud

 rain hangs in the air

           without pressure or promise
 
 
 but I don’t know how he knew the rain

           or this ragged coastline

 in a way that was his alone,

           or knew the tangle of lives
 
 
 on most mornings for a dozen years

           I saw him sit on the barstool

 at Brazil and Rex would say, the wit

           and wisdom of David Peterson:
 
 
 Never eat anything bigger than your head

           and Never put anything  

 smaller than your

           elbow in your ear
 
 
 while Dave read the paper, measured the bites

           of his breakfast,

 drank his coffee, and he and Rex

           grumped about the world and state of business
 
 
 Dave turning his face sideways to comment,

           bringing his voice up to air

 from a certain depth, a depth of certainty.

           The absence of him is hard and present.
 
 
 After Brazil, for a baker’s dozen years

           he was my most regular coffee client,

 I measured my consistency by his. Always

           knowing I could rely on him
 
 
 to let me know if the quality of service suffered

           from changes in circumstance—tangle.

 The lives he kept me updated with. The years passed.

           He never asked to be celebrated,
 
 
 Never asked for the praise he was due

           as solo dad to his two children

 for the way they prospered—he told me

           how they were doing, how they did.

 Had my admiration always, and I imagine
 
 
           many were and are impressed because

 he was an impressive man, whose

           good works were never good works and

 he kept out of the light they reflected
 
 
           on him. He never commanded the respect

 shown him. A look was enough, as
  
          others are better placed to say, in his profession

 also outside of the light
 
 
           his fingers moving over the controls in the

 little light on the desk, wearing black,

           tweaking the sound to the precise spec

 of the gear so it got the praise not him.
 
 
           He would not ask to be celebrated like this

 but I ask myself what it is to do right

           by him and this writing is my work, Dave.

 The rain that was pendant
 
 
           fell for a while and has passed, clouds have

 dispersed. I have asked about the air:

           what does it mean to have breathed a while

 in it and then not to be?
 
 
           not to be present in it and sharing in it, the

 tangle of lives—Never leave a lead

           tangled. A cable has a memory of being twisted

 it needs time in the heat of the sun to lose
 
 
           for it to be coiled. It means a

 certain amount of work needs to be done,

           then a little sleep,

 before it is, for it to be, perfect. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 — for David Peterson (d. 30 December 2020)
 
 
 [Simon Taylor,
 2 January 2021]