work pieces series by simon taylor
{ Monthly Archives }
this epigraph,
How many names have I etched in memory
like “dog” or “elephant” or “cow”
So long ago now, I recognize them only from afar,
even the zebra–and what was it all for?
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Was hab ich mir für Namen eingeprägt und Hund und Kuh und Elefant nun schon so lang und ganz von weit erkannt, und dann das Zebra, ach, wozu?
the Right Honourable Chris Hipkins vs Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition of New Zealand (wiki) Christopher Luxon played on the television last night, the first of the leaders’ debates for this year’s election, 14 October 2023.
Jack Tame conducted what was risibly called (at the link above) analysis after the debate. Jack greeted Jessica with the embarrassing stupidity that, neither Chris nor Christopher, as they were interchangeably referred to throughout her moderation, but she had been the ‘winner.’ The analysis that followed featured an unbroken string of sports metaphors and was equally embarrassing for all involved, whoever they were.
…but who were Chris and Christopher? (one seemed always to be bigger in the shot, as if he had been eating) … the question was not really gratified with an answer. The sole gratification to come from the debate was its signalling of the end of adversarial politics in New Zealand. The contestants felt no need to distinguish themselves. And didn’t, either personally or professionally, either with their political or personal acuity, and neither were the policies of the parties they represent distinguished nor was any effort felt needed to do so.
Chris L, the Meataxe of the title, best described the differences in the party-line each was there to push (or pull) as their having the same aims but getting there different ways. He said this several times. It was odd. And, when it came to cogovernance, sort of like the guards and kapo getting together in front of the ovens … and exactly like that when it came to climate change.
… but then there they all are, including the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, Act and TOP and NZ Fi(r)st, the Meataxe and the Mouse’s parties, warming their hands …
No. They’re not warming their hands. They’re melting their crayons. It’s a colouring in competition. It’s all the colours of the rainbow. It’s paint by numbers but all the numbers are called Chris and…
It’s the political future of New Zealand Aotearoa and were it in the slightest involving it would be a nightmare or a gameshow if you felt the contestants were in the least engaged… but they are not. They are absent. They are Chris.
… and I had thought of illustrating this post with with a song from Aldous Harding’s Warm Chris album… or this,
… but it’s too familiar and filled … with actual meanings … or this, its meanings are more of the moment,
Donald Antrim’s My Eliot, the author’s first novel in more than 20 years, in which our protagonist “Donald Antrim” sits down to read his late father’s treatise on T.S. Eliot, determined to come to terms, at last, with the ghost of his old man … book rights sold to Random House
— from here
Her father is the former Newsweek correspondent Curtis (Bill) Pepper, and her mother is the controversial sculptor (and social steamroller) Beverly Pepper. “Jorie is an amalgam of the two,” one New York editor told me.
— that’s poet Jorie Graham, from here
Mother Teresa once rang the doorbell looking for her husband Bill.
— that’s the doorbell of Beverly Pepper, Jorie Graham’s mum, from here
When she was a little girl in Brooklyn, so did the Dodgers.
— from the same Beverly Pepper piece, here
Cole married his American wife, Elizabeth Lewis, in December 1989.
— that’s Lloyd Cole, from here
In 1987, Tim and his wife Sarah played along with lurid tabloid reports that they were incestuous siblings.
— that’s Tim Smith of the Cardiacs, here
American poetry is full of ‘Oh, poor me.’ Jorie doesn’t do that. I think she’s carved out such a powerful œuvre that it’s unignorable.
— that’s Jorie Graham again, from here
‘Your normal reading habits, which have to do with the follow-through of plot, aren’t going to work here. So let’s let go and see what else we can read with.’ says Jorie Graham, followed by
Can We Decipher a Whale’s First Sounds?
— from here
Cole stays in the creep — that space of unresolved circumstances and emotions that has room for great discomfort and some hope, some beauty.
— that’s Lloyd Cole again, again from here and it finds it’s way into this list by way of the creep
Or is it simply the onslaught of another dangerous mood?
— from here
A screenshot of her comment rippled through social media and many fans, especially those in her sizable LGBTQ fanbase, were met with bewilderment, anger, and disappointment.
— although they weren’t met by her bewilderment, anger and disappointment, that’s Róisín Murphy, from here
on which subject, the bewilderment, anger and disappointment of fans, I’ve almost had it with Claire Dederer’s book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, had it after statements like this,
Hemmingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon: “Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death.” (Makes wanking gesture with hand.)
had it not because of its disrespect for Hemmingway but Dederer’s disrespect for herself.
~’~.~’~.~’~.~!~.~’~.~’~.~’~.~’~.~’~
A.L. Kennedy’s book On Bullfighting starts with the writer about to jump. Then from a neighbouring building she hears some crap song and decides that that cheesy mor tune can’t be the soundtrack for her going out. The telephone rings. It’s her publisher offering her an assignment to write on bullfighting. She goes, with Federico García Lorca as her guide.
La casada infiel Y que yo me la llevé al río creyendo que era mozuela, pero tenía marido. Fue la noche de Santiago y casi por compromiso. Se apagaron los faroles y se encendieron los grillos. En las últimas esquinas toqué sus pechos dormidos, y se me abrieron de pronto como ramos de jacintos. El almidón de su enagua me sonaba en el oído, como una pieza de seda rasgada por diez cuchillos. Sin luz de plata en sus copas los árboles han crecido, y un horizonte de perros ladra muy lejos del río. Pasadas las zarzamoras, los juncos y los espinos, bajo su mata de pelo hice un hoyo sobre el limo. Yo me quité la corbata. Ella se quitó el vestido. Yo el cinturón con revólver. Ella sus cuatro corpiños. Ni nardos ni caracolas tienen el cutis tan fino, ni los cristales con luna relumbran con ese brillo. Sus muslos se me escapaban como peces sorprendidos, la mitad llenos de lumbre, la mitad llenos de frío. Aquella noche corrí el mejor de los caminos, montado en potra de nácar sin bridas y sin estribos. No quiero decir, por hombre, las cosas que ella me dijo. La luz del entendimiento me hace ser muy comedido. Sucia de besos y arena yo me la llevé del río. Con el aire se batían las espadas de los lirios. Me porté como quien soy. Como un gitano legítimo. Le regalé un costurero grande de raso pajizo, y no quise enamorarme porque teniendo marido me dijo que era mozuela cuando la llevaba al río.
THE FAITHLESS WIFE by Leonard Cohen after the poem by Lorca The Night of Santiago And I was passing through So I took her to the river As any man would do She said she was a virgin That wasn’t what I’d heard But I’m not the Inquisition I took her at her word And yes she lied about it all Her children and her husband You were meant to judge the world Forgive me but I wasn’t The lights went out behind us The fireflies undressed The broken sidewalk ended I touched her sleeping breasts They opened to me urgently Like lilies from the dead Behind a fine embroidery Her nipples rose like bread Her petticoat was starched and loud And crushed between our legs It thundered like a living cloud Beset by razor blades No silver light to plate their leaves The trees grew wild and high A file of dogs patrolled the beach To keep the night alive We passed the thorns and berry bush The reeds and prickly pear I made a hollow in the earth To nest her dampened hair Then I took off my necktie And she took off her dress My belt and pistol set aside We tore away the rest Her skin was oil and ointments And brighter than a shell Your gold and glass appointments Will never shine so well Her thighs they slipped away from me Like schools of startled fish Though I’ve forgotten half my life I still remember this That night I ran the best of roads Upon a mighty charger But very soon I’m overthrown And she’s become the rider Now as a man I won’t repeat The things she said aloud Except for this my lips are sealed Forever and for now And soon there’s sand in every kiss And soon the dawn is ready And soon the night surrenders To a daffodil machete I gave her something pretty And I waited ’til she laughed I wasn’t born a gypsy To make a woman sad I didn’t fall in love. Of course It’s never up to you But she was walking back and forth And I was passing through When I took her to the river In her virginal apparel When I took her to the river On the Night of Santiago And yes she lied about her life Her children and her husband You were born to get it right Forgive me but I wasn’t The Night of Santiago And I was passing through And I took her to the river As any man would do
Charles Tonderai Mudede (his name provides the link) uses Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759 to back up the idea it’s not the past that haunts the present but the present haunting the past. The ghosts are from now and matters of sympathetic identification with the figures of the past, the dead who generally have been done wrong. Smith argues we naturally side with those being beaten down and if they are killed it’s our natural empathy animating us to seek vengeance on their behalf.
Mudede calls this pushing of the social feeling potentially to beyond the death of those in whom we invest it a surplus, a surplus of human sociality. We don’t for the practical purpose of social participation need to identify ourselves with dead people but we do for the same reasons we identify ourselves with living people. Both are in a sense gratuitous. Although it might be said to be a matter of social utility in order pursue our own advantage, for example in producing ourselves as social subjects and in having social identities at all, that we have social feelings for the living if they are the same feelings we extend to the dead, if there is no difference and no distinction made, which practically there isn’t, is there a difference? Practically there is not because the cultural expectation we will side with the victims of historical wrongdoing is as strong as that at work in the social expectation we will show empathy towards those around us who are living.
To recognise as such crimes against humanity of which the victims are dead is as powerful an impetus to, and not just a matter of, correct thinking as the recognition of crimes on those who are alive. In fact in this case the values are inverted.
While the crimes of the present may be questioned those of the past rarely are. Our empathy with the dead of genocide matters more in the present than our identification with victims of the genocides that are ongoing and belong to the present. More surplus human sociality accrues to those who make the right identification, so that, culturally achieved, it goes to their advance in society. In other words, it has current utility and is to their advantage in a more than cultural sense.
Bringing in Adam Smith indicates that the advantage is economic and belongs to political economy. And I agree with Mudede. The ‘ghost’ as a figure of capital needs the emergence of hyper-culturality from ultra-sociality. Despite ants being ultra-social, having not developed symbolic exchange to the same level of ghost capital, they are not hyper-cultural. “There are no ghost ants.” (footnote 15)
The implications to be derived from ghost capital as the figure or value attached to surplus human sociality go in two directions, to the dead foundation and to the haunting of the living. Mark Fisher is famed for the sort of haunting I think being implied here. By the dead foundation I mean that calculation of a sign now marked as a cross or given arbitrary symbolic designation said to start time, said to be the point from which the time, lived and living time, starts. This is the time of inner duration. (see on computus here)
