DEEPSTREAM JOURNAL

rejected and unfinished precursory notes, made

  • 10/05/2013, 13:18:21
  • 10/05/2013, 13:39:55
  • 16/09/2013 18:00:08
  • 15/09/2013, 01:46:22

follow so what may come may come:

cyclops


1
An airport lounge.
You see an unattended bag.
A woman is watching.



                              We alert the authorities.







They arrive swiftly and without fuss they remove the woman.

 








2

Open on an island –

                                               surrounded on all sides by a curtain.


It is small enough to walk around easily.
The curtain makes a similar sound to the sea –

                                                but much more



quietly .















3
Caution

or you will slip on dialogue.


















































4
I was standing at the bar. Frank said, Drink?

Sometimes it is dangerous to believe in the glass you are holding, 
the ice in the glass, the clinking of the chains binding you 
to the bar.
Frank said, He even looked me in the eye when he said it – there 
are three men coming. One of them will have a handkerchief tied 
over his mouth. One of them will be taller than the others. But it 
is the other, the short one, dressed head to foot in black, his 
face invisible inside his hood, his silence and the blackness in 
which he comes impenetrable – it is he who will know you.
I had a question but before it left my lips I felt a draught at my 
back and a shiver ran down my spine.

I have left my home and everything I felt comfortable with to join 
you. You see me dressed this way but tomorrow I could very well be 
wearing a suit and tie. I could be waiting in a queue at the

................................................................
I suppose it is about time I used this blog – with some small 
misgiving about even this being a concession – for keeping some 
kind of a record. Like the Leonard Cohen song goes. As it says, a 
condition of keeping a record can be that there's nothing worth 
keeping a record of: a life in a desert; a life on an island. What 
is the difference?
Recently I wrote an abstract for a formal paper to be presented at 
a local conference. The theme of the conference, therefore the 
given, was the Pacific's connectivity by sea, its fluidity of 
connection, a fluidity of connection among islands. I proposed 
something critical. I proposed to write about the provenance of a 
thinking that foregrounds fluid connectivity before one, one 
perhaps more classical, that seeks to ground and situate, to place 
– one that is displaced by the gerund 'placing'. Placing refers to 
a process by which place becomes. This place. That place. And is 
so designated. Placing leads to naming but recalls to it the 
process of arrival. Landing.
The project was, needless to say, misunderstood and the abstract 
more or less rejected. More or less because once I was made aware 
of the misunderstanding I could not proceed. It amounted to a 
different point of departure in order to get to the idea of 
fluidity, foregrounding connectivity, than I had in mind. It 
placed this idea on the ground of a privileged knowledge – that 
is, on the ground of the knowledge of the sea as it is understood 
by the natives of the Pacific as delivering us in our encounters 
to landings which are hardly fluid but never definitive and always 
potentially multiple: places which do not place and do not belong 
to a logic of placing. A sort of cartographic opportunism.
Fine. But not what I was thinking about doing. And... in actual 
fact, if I had addressed it on its own terms, this native 
understanding of how to island-hop, it would hardly have been, 
formally, academically, any more acceptable. But I don't care.
I have a lifetime's experience of acting against my own best 
interests.

................................................................