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Friday, 31 March 2006
Distracted by a fridge.
Preparations roll as slowly as the day, drawling off my tongue, drop-by-drop, each word, each assonance deliberately stilted and reclusive. Imagining an audience, the introduction and reception - none of this works.
Instead, a return to the computer and opening the file named Draft. Set about a structuring, a return to form. Ideas have been plotted in days and weeks past, a rough narrative drawn, but the peculiarities and purposes of each chapter have yet to be determined. Each must serve a purpose and the first are often the most difficult. They are the stall-setters, the ones in which the primary concerns - themes as existential enquiries as Kundera says - are raised.
But then a knock at the door and the thing I stayed in for; new fridge. Fluorescent-jacketed men (in case I lose them in the house?) lug in bulky white weight and abandoned it in the centre of the lino in the cold kitchen. Barely need for refrigeration in this climate. And, of course, it is up to me to dispose of the old, to walk the dead appliance out through the back door and it the yard where it'll probably sit for the next couple of decades. Return to the kitchen, hot water and vinegar, set about the surfaces.
On coming back to the open document, Draft, I have lost it. The opening descriptive passage with its simplicity and statement has been going well but is now lost to the afternoon. It is gone three and there is nothing for me here. An encouraging start but no doubt one that I will renege on once I have reread and consequently rewritten.
Countdown begins, and the only nervousness comes from the curl of smoke at the end of my cigarette. I am hungry too, and so it is off to the kitchen to empty the fridge, to render it useless again, holding nothing and just eating up the electricity. The kitchen is the birthplace of economics.
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Thursday, 30 March 2006
Everyd---- page not found---ay.
Server irrationality; the fickle connectivity of my home computer. Any work, brought to bear upon my mental salience, shattered and lost within the anonymities and loose ends of Telewest's network. Where does the web go when it disappears?
Today spent traipsing, over the hill and past the Palestinian olive shops, stolen bike refitters, Chinese coca-cola imitating cash-and-carry to the community furniture outlet. Have been without a fridge for a month; my courgettes are furry.
Boldly strode around sub-zero living room, reciting. Poems have been divided and conquered. Two sets named and partitioned; Excursions and Everyday. Excursions are semblances of escape, momentary loss of climate and location. These will be read first. But of course, and it always happen like this, I will finish tomorrow's recital with the everyday.
The seat you sit in is as important as the concept and relations you posit. Context is all. The everyday is the modern existence, transcending socio-political inevitability/ambition - it is where we are at. And so it is fitting that I return to it, start from it, take from it. Tomorrow's poetry reading -however irrelevant, out-of-touch and isolated - will at least take solace from that.
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Wednesday, 29 March 2006
In defence of narrators.
Great plans of discourse, practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak deny benign knowledge. In the novel, absence is conspicuous; there is never mention of the conditions of possibility, of what allowed this state to come in to being, the enablement of narrative. Knowledge is formative and contains power. There are no dead facts.
This is why the narrator is more important than the critic.
Criticism undermines the universal, ridicules made on behalf of the all-encompassing, made on behalf of the authority, made on behalf of the canon. It denies the dead fact, brings flow to lakes, and movement to the seemingly inanimate. The prescription of stillness imposed by the work's claims to finality is both the censure and the closure of the text. It signals the end. In this way inference is the true means of interpretation, interpretation the reifying aspect.
This is why the narrator is more important than the critic.
And where to look? Miscegenation, crossover, dilution, fragmentation. These are the playgrounds of true discourse, not in terms of creation - nothing is more affected than the deliberately fractured, sourced, intertextual writing of an author - but in terms of deriving meaning.
The text is a single grammar, but a multiplicitous communication. Bridges of meaning span the utterance of a novel in several, simultaneous languages. And if it happens in the novel, why not culture? If the novel is read and distilled infinitely, why not culture and society of which all novels are fabricated? Hybridity is present within both text and the formations of people. The constant interplay between monology and freedom, control and play, what is said and what is meant, permeate even the most basic exchanges.
This is why the narrator is more important than the critic.
The everyday, then, is the site of multiplicity and it is this that the novel, the newspaper and the weblog is able to draw its longevity and authority. All are interactions between words and various objects in the milieu of the day, all are temporary contacts with the essence of being. The diverse peculiarities of the everyday underline social exchange, literary communication and history. The variant and simultaneous meaning preclude any reduction to a single meaning.
This is why the narrator is more important than the critic.
But this does not affect writing, and should not affect writing. It is a theory, a metanarrative the same as the others. It is a grand story that denies grand stories. It is a theoretical organisation that denies other theoretical organisation. It is a concept, a clever argument that is the denial of itself and the negation of itself and so, it is nothing. Fluidity and multiple-meaning destroys nothing and advances nothing.
This is why the narrator is more important than the critic.
12:16 Posted in Literary | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Toll and demand.
Accusations of the toll are fading fast. An early morning cigarette in the sunshine and a saunter through the terraces provide a bleak, roomy beginning to the day's writing. The usual breakfast, a skimming of the day's news and opinion, revelling in the disintegration of yet another governments claims to imperviousness, another glorious sporting victory, another stanch fact of the world.
The toll cares, and it moves you. The build-up of all that had gone before. Drawn out to a wider plane, we look at our own influences and stocktake. These four walls and endless months of poetry - to what? To the now, the present exclamation, the rise to mediocrity? To disillusion, protestations of a fractured, diluted modernity? A claim to assailability; no-one can touch us because we cannot even reach ourselves.
I write with a voice as much as I speak with a tone. These mornings are mine again and the lists of articles, the bold sketches of assignments, the elusive plans of dissertation and novel, poetry collections and readings are a blueprint of sorts.
The window is open and despite the sunshine it is still cold. A warming-up is to be enacted, this medium and anonymous flow is the tragedy and necessity of the day's purpose; a chance to begin and forget, produce in order to forget, forget in order to begin. The toll disappears. The endless rains of yesterday evening have long evaporated from the pavements and the gutters have distantly spilled into the drains. The brickwork of the houses and the slate of the roofs are beginning to get hot under the spring sun and regeneration is no longer but a password.
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Sunday, 26 March 2006
The build-up.
Found whilst browsing in stubborn market, girlfriend off buying pockets of seeds and cereal: a book!
No time for reading, or writing. Just thought I'd let you know.
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Wednesday, 22 March 2006
Those four walls.
I titled for a reason. These Four Walls, a weblog long gone and abandoned, referred to an imagination, projections onto the smooth white walls of a suburban flat. I was in the throes of boredom, incarcerated by my own laziness; a laziness that was entirely my own, but bred from an inactivity borne from a lack of postgraduate opportunities. There is nothing for us here; we must split up and look for survivors.
Walls were back in focus today also, so close as to be immediately imperceptible, but gradually visible. Today's class was dull, rhythmic and closed. A book, Women of Sand and Myrrh by Hanan al-Shaykh, was as uninspiring as it was overrated. The blinds were drawn, the projector set, the notes shuffled and - click - boredom ensued.
The central theme of the book - the imaginations of the repressed woman - was hammered into the pages; it may as well have been in bold type. Endless repetitions of meaningless (and impotently, self-confoundingly censored) sexual encounters in an anonymous and conveniently vague Arab, desert state held nothing in my imagination. For the deeply stupid, the clumsy translation even spelt out the limited and well-trod preoccupations in the final, galling sentence. Must we have everything spelt out?
It seems we must. The lecture was stringent, unfaltering and seemingly oblivious to all derailing lines of enquiry from the students. The class is taught, but it is accepted that we as human adults have a right and prerogative to pursue arguments as and when the arguments arise.
What is an Arab? Is this a political term? A geographical one? How, when the book is set as an insight into the Arab world, can it maintain any relevance when the 'Arab' world it portrays is vague and decentred? Where is the cutting edge in a book detached from any real political or religious engagement? As politically important as the book may be in terms of allowing a voice to a repressed minority, when it is devoid of any real literary quality, there is very little hope of even answering this questions with any poise or skill. There must be more valid modes of enquiry. I have more pertinent arguments than those above, but when the writing is so interminably dull, I cannot myself to elucidate upon them.
So those four walls were redundant. Nothing today, of course, reached the culmination of my morning epiphany, nothing reached the heights of that tiny, dusty room. It was brought to life in a dream and will be realised all too soon on paper. There is far to go, but the four walls of that room hold more potential than I've felt in a long time. The fecundity of networks was encouraged by fitful sleep, dots were joined in a beautiful, sprawling map of stars and lines, all claimed and postured within my tired evening's rest.
23:10 Posted in Literary | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
The diary of a novel.
Ha ha, so this is what it is all for! This solemn gradient, this imperceptible, irreparable haul up a slope unknown, it is for this!
Weeks, if not months, of leaden, impenetrable weight within the confines of my head. It was as though clouds, great swathes of storm, had gathered around my temples and anchored themselves. It is not a suffering, but a dampening and a smothering - breathing, let alone talking, is rendered impossible in its immediacy.
But last night, restless and freezing, the revolutions began and the climate of unease, frustration and impotence began to clear. I dreamt, solidly and irrationally, all night, never managing to quite slip beneath the lines of consciousness into a truly restorative, blind sleep. It remained light throughout the duration of the night and dawn.
Upon being woken by the alarm clock at quarter-to-eight, there was nothing but confusion exhibited upon my face, and in my thoughts. A series of untied strings, frayed ends slowly unravelling, removing the strength of form, reducing everything to individual threads.
My girlfriend left for work, she abandoned a docile, muddled man and left him to sleep - a practice well-worn and practised, for sure. Her levels of exasperation at this particular time bear no comparison to the vigour of her disillusionment brought into play by my erratic and entirely singular modes of behaviour in weeks past. March had been dark and difficult.
A second sleep ensued, warmed by the radiator, which had spluttered into action, the cold pipes creaking with pockets of air and gurgling fluid. The curtains had moved into the night and triangular slips of daylight began to fall into the room. It is perceptibly brighter at an earlier hour these mornings, and waking is so much more pleasant for it.
And so I slept a healthy, bold sleep for at least another two hours. And in that time, in the time it took to fall and rise, all the confusions and disparate elements of not just the previous nights attempts at rest, but also all the confusions and elements of the previous months, came to fruition, came to bear relevance and message. First, an untangling occurred and secondly, a bringing-together, a delicate weaving.
For months I have thought of theory and discourse, movements in intellectual climates, academia bowing to political pressures, the processes of learning, the frustrations of learning, generations of substandard education, the effect of a city, post-industrial reclamation, the power of immigration, the story of the émigré, the role of community, the establishment of concepts in relation to social space, notions of the underground, freemasons, the history of the novel, the calculations of institution, the vagueness of relationships, the hidden sexualities within communication, and - inevitably - the validity of the written form.
All came together, all were brought forward in the dream. And when I woke, I had only a single concept in my head - not even a concept, to be truthful, but a place, a location. But this place, high at the top of a doglegged flight of dusty stairs with windows overlooking two sides of the street, was at the centre of everything. Or, rather, is at the centre of everything. It is the arena and playground in which the concepts enumerated above can duel and joust. The characters are in the room, three of them, and their pursuit is set. The discovery is also balanced and ready, as is the relationship, the counterpoint.
Of course, the room ties in my theoretical with my fiction - how could it not in the contemporary age? - and, of course, there are books and echoes of books because, unavoidably, last night the novel came into being, the lines of research and enquiry were set and five people, previously unthought, began to breathe.
It is untitled, impure and undistilled - but it lives.
13:27 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Tuesday, 21 March 2006
Hours spended.
Great dirty slabs of ice lie upon the cars, a mockery of the slowly warming night previous. There is a genuine suspicion that our climate is irreparably fucked. This appears to be not just a simple observation of a slight change in temperatures or periods of prolonged rain or sun, but a genuine, clear indication that something is very wrong. Things never used to happen like this, not even ten years ago. The weather never used to behave like this, not even my childhood.
With the rise in satellite technology, the predictability and accuracy of weather reporting also rose. The feelings of safety provided by new systems of guesswork appear to have obscured the fact that something is wrong; just because you can guess at something around the corner, doesn't mean it should be around the corner.
But all this talk of water-tables and late daffodil blooms is getting me down. I have lost interest in the paper, lost faith in undisclosed loans, lost faith the teaching of creationism, lost faith in probation crises and executions, trials and denials. I am trying to find ways to spend my hours.
I place import upon the here and now. Received kindly raise of my ego yesterday, firstly through the kind words of friends, distant kind words, and secondly through an academic appraisal. The marks held, the waters subsided and the lines left were of sufficient height. Despite my reticence, my stifled anger and my abstinence (all of which have been documented incriminatingly and foolishly right here) I managed to keep my head above water. Despite all the tides, the two full-time jobs, the two part-time jobs and despite preoccupations of spirit and creativity, I blushed and bluffed my way through.
Which leads me to the here and now, and to what must be done. An inquest, as I have said, will be held into my whereabouts, my total disappearance, but when they find out where I have been, or rather what I have been doing then the clamour and fervour will die down. As I always threaten, criticise not the method until the product has been dismissed.
My hours must now be spent feverishly (to keep out the cold) tearing my way through books, absorbing concept after concept, story over story. Even then it will not all be told. Even then there will be blind alleys and dark pockets into which meaning will escape. I will root it out, flush it from its occluded hideaway with dogs. My hours will be spent burrowing.
Reconciliations are afoot. The bringing together of theory and text, grounding myself in more direct connection with the narratives and forms that I approach. I must make myself relevant to the work, not the other way round. But I am nothing if not a learner, I exist not if I do not learn. So, the next few weeks are to act as a mirror, a direct replication of the movement inwards experienced recently. It will appear, if pictured, as an inky butterfly. This is an immediate future, a way to spend hours, a way to forget the immediate past.
The future is not a cold, dead place. It is just cold.
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Monday, 20 March 2006
The origin of the boredom.
Monday launches me into memories, into memories and away from the malaise that has been smothering me all week. Once again, I am ill. The sickly man, propped at his keyboard, squinting at the pinpricks of light that filter through the blanket, the blanket that has been hoist up over the window frame to keep eyes out and heat in.
The month of silence abates and I find myself in full, frustrated flow. These are the feelings common to me and my friends - they know these hours. Cursed negativity, blunt intellectual ignorance, a self-inflicted apathy that is obstruction as much as inspiration, that obstructs as much inspires.
The reasons line up. I can rationalise it all. One is able to draw a narrative, like a thread, from anything. The reason for my dull behaviour, my irrational complex? History, argument, ambition, failure, boredom, geography, even the weather.
But some excuses ring truer than others, true through a sense of story not actuality. They simply make better listening, they are like the interpretation of a dream first thing from waking.
I have been busy, mentally and physically. My work required a shift in focus; it required an element of a façade, the acceptable face. I held promises in my every word as I set out to work each morning, and I could not release a single one of those promises till I returned home, cold and tired. I received praise for my work, was held up as an example, publicly thanked and rewarded, but that ensured the face had to stay up longer and firmer. Now, upon finishing work, there is nothing to show the face to.
And upon returning home, cold and tired, and huddling around the electric stove heating chopped vegetables and rice I cannot remember my origins. I have forgotten the point at which this all started, of how this person - myself - came into being. I have reached a moment in time upon which my ends are splayed out like broken chair-legs, separate and quite functionless, the original purpose of the thing - the reason for its being - long lost and abandoned.
I am left now to reconstruct, to make up for the month of silence, those weeks of absence in which I abandoned my writing, my friends, and my work. I disappeared and they all lost me; I too lost them.
My friends and I however, we know these hours. These ropes and pulleys and winches belong to a generation trying to haul themselves from the brink of boredom. Overqualified and without a use, we roam about in educated packs looking for work in cafes and behind bars. We have all scrubbed toilets and written lists to pay the rent, we all buy the paper as a single unit every Thursday and scour the pages for jobs. Every Thursday the same thing happens and we place the folded newspaper in the bin, quietly and angrily, having read nothing but the centre pages full of classifieds, and having found nothing but miles of newsprint and unsuitable positions.
Obstruction and inspiration arrive to us in the same breath long before we give up though. We are constantly straining against ourselves, looking for things promised, having followed the prescribed journeys. The anti-climax felt this week; the downer experienced after all those weeks gone and missed, is nothing new. Macro to micro, we are living under scrutiny and nowhere do the eyes fall heavier than on our own failings.
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Saturday, 18 March 2006
Day - A lecture theatre.
Enough of the suspense, you will be told.
Nothing happened.
Why is it that when I sit down to write, racked with cognition and lines of pure thought, nothing is produced? The stimulus to write - a quiet moment at the centre of the day, the poesis of inspiring music, the drawing together of ideas, the love of a sentence - is given, is taken as such but he result in not forthcoming. I know what should happen, the fruition that should occur, but time and time again I am left with blankness, a pre-erasure, impotence.
Over the last two weeks, I have been away, learning. The balance of syntax and the loading of verbs has been my life's work (or rather the life-away-from-work's work) for two years. For two years I have stunned myself and maddened others in pursuit of form, the autonomy of creation, a disposition and a displacement. I have written and spelt and punctuated, all as the seasons have been changing over the single city of my dwelling.
And the city played its part, allowing me to talk bridges both pre and post industrial, of curved Georgian facades and cobbled lanes, of the valleys and swells of trees, of Victorian drinking holes and cavernous music clubs. It aided and abetted, it facilitated.
Picture the weather, as I did in my descriptions, take it as context and romance. Hold the great yawning northern sky for what it was - an exposure, a threat, a living blanket of colour. Think of the sheeting, iced rain and bold autumnal sunshine, the brisk summers and torpid, long winters. Nowhere builds snowdrifts like the fields out of the city's limits, nowhere soaks the skin more than the eternally damp central streets in spring, the drains full to burst, excess water ebbing in waves away from the lowest point and up, onto the pavements.
So this was the establishment, the statement of intent I often talk of to great length and with little effect. No-one listens, not any more. Their reception of my ambitions are predictable and sparse. They know what they like. They know who I am. They are used to stifling yawns, nodding heads, they are used to answering answers with another question. They are used to watching my silence, my struggle, my trudge away into the dimness.
But as I sat there, a week ago today, I made a resolve. I received a construct of reason, all sketched out in biro upon the middle pages of my black notebook. I claim no credit of creation - these were not my expressions, nor my actions but they came to me and I held them. That much I will take credit for.
I was sitting in the back rows of a lecture theatre, a new wood-panelled, fully sound-equipped auditorium. The projector threw flickering images onto the large white rectangle behind the speakers head, the head itself remaining the focal point, moreover the speaker's mouth could not be ignored.
What assurance passed those lips! What confidence spilled out past the teeth and over the tongue, drawled in an unavoidable, unfamiliar accent but no weight was taken from the words by the intonations. What depths the words felt for! And it wasn't even so much the words, but the way they were said, and what they said. This was the draw, this was the steady irresistible pull that changed things forever.
This was the point at which I breathed, consciously and slowly, no longer a reflex but a reaction, and stopped writing. I sat back, slid my hips forward in the seat and hunched my shoulders, supporting my body weight with my elbows and forearms. Irreproachably attentive, I couldn't stop listening and although a fervour was at work behind my eyes, on the surface I was calm and even.
A dual process was being enacted, a release and a build-up; an accumulation of content and a letting go of old work; a simultaneous movement away and towards. All of these things happened, and none of things happened. A decision was made and not made, a path was recognised and forgotten, a epiphany was given and received.
Of course, none of this matters now, at this juncture, at this parallel of time and purpose. All that matters is my inability to write, all that matters is the amnesia that approaches as I move closer to the paper. But sitiing in that lecture theatre, restful and intense, a fire was set underneath me, a course in lyric that will prepare me for ever.
Nothing happened.
Enough of the suspense, you will be told.
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Friday, 17 March 2006
Happens/ed.
As if all that happens now – the happenings of this writing - are a result of what has gone before.
These posts, the posts of this week, are epilogues to the greater effort, token movements towards the projects lined up ahead. But they are also severe indicators as to what happened before, the reasons why things are as they are, the reasons as to why this blog was abandoned for almost a month.
As if today is built upon and indebted to those things that took place in the early weeks of March.
I am urged to talk about it and to reveal myself. They wish to hold an inquest, my friends and confidants, they wish to bring my actions to argument and explanation. This they demand.
As if words, all these words, are echoes of a hundred yesterdays.
A narrative seems to be required; a structured path from then to now. They understand the precis, they observe the conclusion, but the logics of what happened are lost. Causality is held in the highest regard and an inquest must be held. Let us play at court and executioner, they suggest, perhaps it will be easier for you.
As if words, all these words, are traces of a single event that will occur.
Over time all things will be revealed. For the moment, one might as well guess at what happened, one might as well draw diagrams or hypothesise or make estimates through calculation as to the truth of the matter. The turning point of the piece remains hidden, and only through confession might it escape.
As if now, was then.18:43 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Racing
The pleasant morning drift of new music, locally produced and bought, the commodity torn from its centre by the very fact of knowing, the very argument of personal-terms, first names and live experience.
Less harsh the weather today, less knowing and provocative too. Still, the radiator turned all the way to boiling and three pairs of socks just to stay alive – these four walls are still without heat or reason. I cannot locate the thermostat nor the immersion.
Falling into great swathes of text, bulks of printed letter as I try to make up for lost ground, try to reclaim territory that was never mine. The books pile up dangerously on the chest of drawers, twenty-nine in all, most unread.
Extracts are taken though, measurements of intent, a vial of ambition siphoned through annotated introduction and skimmed chapter. The wad of notes grows steadily thicker, the blue inks seeping through into each other, transmediating the transparency of cheap, newsagent’s paper, the type seemingly patterning like the underscore of veins contained in the back of ones hand.
Thought about cleaning the windows, thought again. Twenty percent extra light can be achieved through this method, removing the need for lightbulbs during the day, for squinting eyes, for arguments about electricity meters. A sustained argument, the day, that’s all it is. A chance for conflict and to say you were right, I am right, a chance to boast and become indignant at your fallen enemies, to become fat on the pettyness of things.
So to the spines and covers and innards of theoretical manuals, to the discourses on postcolonialism, Orientalism, culture and imperialism. To try and adapt a medium of thought to this century’s, this decade’s, velocity and purpose. Things are moving, but so are our words, quickly, past our eyes and over our tongues. Two weeks of arts projects still hold fresh in my mind, still remembering the tingle of inferiority coupled with ambition, dismayed as my work is as irrelevant as the hour in which it was born, but encouraged by the fact that this society has documentors, has inscriptions etched upon it by artists, musicians and writers that are a deciphering part of the solution, not simply an encoded part of the problem.
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Wednesday, 15 March 2006
Marching
Raising one’s game for a time predicted. We try not to talk of each other’s pasts for you know I will go on, and on, until nightfall. Self-obsessed, a fulcrum of inwardness, a constant unwavering digression towards the centre. I will take any excuse to talk about myself; every conversation is a mountain range already flagged.
I do not wish to talk of what has past nor of where I have been, of the things that were enforced by absence from writing and friendship. They will no doubt fall out of the sky upon an evening when we are not looking, an evening that we do not own.
Things happened, that suffices.
I have reasons and arguments if pushed, coarse documentation and the scars to prove it.
We were movements and then standing, we moved and were still. We are a steadily clearing, brightening firmament trapped within dusk – the simultaneous movement towards both light and dark like the dramatic fall of temperature just before sunrise.
This weather is too long. I write nonsense, before anything. There will be more.
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