Letter to Danny (WR)

Dear Danny

I’ve been reading James Baldwin’s Another Country: actually wanting, and the self-betrayals it’s subject to. Giovanni’s Room even more … You write, ‘I sometimes think that poetry might be a kind of training in how to want things without justification . . . I need to be able to want things that I am myself likely to think about or treat with scorn.’ Not the world as it’s supposed-to-be, which I come back to later in this letter.

That communism should be how we ordinarily are…. see Vallejo in 1930s: “In the socialist poet, the poem is not a spectacular trance, provoked deliberately and in the preconceived service of some political credo or propaganda, it’s a natural and simply human function of sensibility/the senses”.

I have been reading earlier work of mine through a friend’s commentary, and noticing that I had an attitude to language which I feel no longer holds. She writes of my attention to the non-symbolised which can enter poetry, which was my main concern when I proposed we read Zurita’s ‘Green Areas’ at the Mayday sessions. I noticed—with a bit of surprise—that some people were reading the cows and cowboys in a historical key (as represented objects) when for me they have a de-symbolising function. At the time, I thought, ok, it’s ordinary for people who mostly read novels to read poetry in that way. But now I have a different sense of what’s at stake. A book by Leslie Scalapino on the bookshelf above me just caught my eye: in an abandoned section of an essay on Sean I experimented with the possibility that there might be a surprising intersection between their poems, where this would show that Sean’s work had passed through a similar suspension of ordinarily symbolised space. The proposition seemed to work ok but in the end I got rid of those pages of the essay because what Sean does with the relation between language and space doesn’t need that detour to be understood. I would still stand by the assertion that Sean has traversed the terrain that “language” poets were concerned with, but he does it more like one of Blanqui’s meteors, impelled by the relation between space and political desolation, than like Scalapino, who hollows language out so that there might be actual occurrence of events, and whose work I still like a lot. There’s a force of desolation in her work too, taking desolation to instantiate in feeling the destitutions of, say, 2012-2019. All that is a way of getting to how ‘the non-symbolized’ doesn’t any more have the validity and force that it used to have for me. When Jacob writes that what Sean makes are symbols, or you that what he produces are definitions, that summarises how I’ve come to a different position.

I realise I have left that term, the non-symbolised, undefined. In some ways, it relates to what Alain Badiou, in his book The Century, calls the real. I was—for quite a few years—confident that what’s excluded by the ordinary usages of language could, through the work of poetry, enter it. My points of reference were Paul Celan, César Vallejo and Raúl Zurita, especially. I don’t have that confidence any more. I’m not sure I can say exactly what happened, but I want to try.

It’s above all—that change in my attitude to language—concerned with the way that—I was going to say the way that pure destruction has failed, something I try to write about in essays on Sean’s two final books. But that’s not it. To say destruction as such has failed is to put oneself on the side of history, i.e. to place oneself inside a particular type of knowing that depends on making history into something you can draw lessons from. Experience of Trotskyism in the 70s and my gradual exit from it comes in here. Now I read Sean writing ‘the Bonnot gang were right’ and I don’t think any more of failure of destruction.

My change of attitude has something to do with Sean’s sense that space has been closed down or, better, utterly solidified by something like metallic hydrogen. Every time I take the Overground (now the Windrush line) eastwards from Shadwell, I look out of the window at night when it passes through Heron Quays, the station that comes after Canary Wharf: what I see seems to be not so much a premonition as a confirmation that the spatial controls of Capital as currently constituted really have become the substance of space, i.e. there’s no outside.

You have written of ‘an incurable wound’ that has no outside, in the face of which the outside is a metaphor. That corresponds with what I want to say here, and it seems important to say that Sean, in his early book Poisons Their Antidotes had already been inside that particular way in which the destituted city has got into language. (Perhaps I should add that I mean language as expression rather than language as instrument, a distinction that Pasolini makes). It’s not psychogeography, as Sean himself said. The linguistic self can’t function simply as a sounding-board but only as a site of wounding. Is that accurate? Sean says in the Letters that we are ‘vivisected mice’.

Some of this thinking has been brought into focus by reading your Training Exercises. I remembered Tom Raworth’s line, ‘imperative is the index / of a knowing discourse.’ And I like the attitude of experiment in the first part, as you go with the 15 minute entry into the circle of destruction. I find myself seeking confirmation of present perception in past thought. You avoid that. You suggest that the questions I point to in the reply to your report as defining our situation, that they are already their answers. Incidentally I didn’t take that badly. I am very glad you included me in your book.

My confidence that, to say it in a kind of shorthand, the real can enter a poem: how to understand that historically and geopolitically? For a start where did that begin for me, what I first came across in Lacan’s SVII, called the real. The idea of the non-symbolized did take shape when reading Lacan, but it was already there in a dream I had quite a few years before, where I heard Vallejo saying ‘my poems are pre-ideological.’ The thought of the non-symbolised was already a move away from materialism, though not incompatible with volume 1 of Capital. But the feeling you describe, of being stymied before we start, goes further. The fifteen minutes of smashing an ATM, or of what Catherine Malabou calls ‘destructive plasticity’.

My instinct, i.e. the past, is to take the sense of present destitution back to political conditions, but hadn’t Sean already done that, in ‘Letter on the language’ and other poems/letters? I had not intended when I began this letter to refer so extensively to Sean, but it’s still necessary.

I’ve been strongly affected by a poem I’m translating, especially the part of it that goes like this:

I knew I had lost something

and that nothing was missing. In its moment, the idea that

nothing is ever lost or that what we think is lost

was never part of the world was an unhinging experience.

The world is always complete. But things get lost

This feels to me not like mourning as in Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholy’ essay, the movement from fantasy of loss to the real object lost, but more like a demand addressed to language that it not be bound to the world that’s supposed-to-be, that against which we measure things to have been lost, the moral and metaphysical haunting. The real = that in which ‘nothing is missing’.

Letter from the BART, 15-16 April 2024

I’m on the BART and I’m going to my second day at the office. All of the contradictions here are up to my wildest expectations! Yesterday, friends of friends block the port of Oakland; me, I go to the office. The BART is full of tech workers, badly dressed in yoga clothes, grey light fabrics, and there are fentanyl addicts who pass through. The fentanyl addicts move whereas the tech workers stay still. The tech workers are so badly dressed you think they almost might be poor, save for the tell-tale watch or Apple product. There are many people who are struggling to walk in this town, they walk twisted, physically ravaged, if not they are slowed down by bags, mountains of clothes. 

Oakland, where I’m staying, is a ghost town. There’s no one on the streets. The new builds are huge and all shops and stores are more or less shuttered. Many of the condominiums are inhabited by the tech workers who work remotely. They order in with Ubereats, they work out in the gyms nested in the condominiums, and they move around in vehicles plucked from internal garages. 

In the street, people some times hang out and “bip" cars (i.e. break their windows) in plain daylight, night time, whenever. When I arrived to see my dear friends who I have not seen since Covid it was about 2 p.m., and some people had just bipped a car. People complain that tech workers blame everything on the homeless in San Francisco, and according to them Oakland is really dangerous because it’s empty, because of tech. “I had a gun pulled on me last week”, “it’s actually dangerous”, “it’s full social decomposition”, “it’s really sad”, they say. I have trouble, as a visitor, visualising this but I let them walk me home at night. 

There are night herons that sleep in the trees. The George Floyd rebellion was the last time the streets were full, it seems. Huge murals of black panthers, or the minor stars of Hyphy music, decorate the walls of empty lots, apparently commissioned by NGOs. Elaine Brown, the former leader of the Panthers, suspected of also being the person who paid that dealer to assassinate Huey Newton, is building public housing called The Panther Building with “evil big money”. People talk about that. There were no “sideshows” during my visit, but as a pure tourist, of course I yearn to see such a thing one day.

We went to a CVS pharmacy. It was devoid of stock. Apparently since George Floyd there is a common practice of organized looting. The only products that remained, of little value—make-up wipes for example—were behind a locked glass cabinet. The make-up aisles, everything else, was empty. They cannot be bothered to replace the stock. The empty store is guarded by a security guard. But there is nothing in the store. 

While there is no one in the streets of Oakland, in San Francisco, in the Civic Center, there are crowds—hundreds of people—it’s called the “Open Drug Trade”—who converge to buy drugs. I thought it was a soup kitchen but no. Private cops—employees? volunteers?—belonging to an NGO called “Urban Alchemy” are in the midst of evicting them, gently, with moralistic slogans out of a microphone, which no one is listening to. We can’t hear them anyway. They seem officious, wearing fluorescent gilets. A Christian feeling. 

Next to this, the Tenderloin has also been a centre of the opioids crisis, as well as dispossessed people more generally, since the 2008 mortgage crisis. Tents, people sleeping, people searching, a bit more community. It’s true that one “feels better here” since there are people, despite the public lamentations of tech workers that San Francisco is “dangerous”. Then, another ghost town a block away, the big malls which will soon close down forever since Tech prefers to order online. Macys, for example. I went to buy a lipstick. No shop assistant. Have you ever seen an empty department store? 

We went to the Archimedes Banya, the Russian Baths, Sunday, which was a funny mix of muscly naked Russian men, tech workers without any capacity for relaxing, solitary male geeks, people who seemed to be micro- or macro-dosing psychedelics, overly involved couples, people who talk too much at the sauna, and us (me and my dear friends). An “Aromatherapy Relaxation Session” was led by a woman sporting a microphone, motivating people in an enthusiastic tone to wind down, but with the tone similar to someone announcing the winners of a contest. It felt to me like a ride through a haunted house in a funfair. The Russian felt sauna hats, on the heads of so many overexcited people, looked ineffably hippy and hobbit-like. A sense of totally productive and efficient bathing. Bathing adapted to modern technology. Cashless: a wristband for purchases. Borscht, pierogi, sauna hat.

At the office, I had to give my biometrics to get my visitor pass. They took my photo and my finger prints. I have a card with just my first name and picture on, and to go to the office I pass my hand over a sensor. I don’t even touch it. There’s a green light that takes my prints, and then the word “valid”. It reminds me of the film Gattaca. It’s so smooth I don’t even notice it. I go into the office. From street to office it goes like this: security guard and a closed door, stressed-out desk staff who come out and ask to see my ID, a flurry of anxiety because no one has put in a ticket for my presence, finally a staff member on my team who comes down to get me, weird to see these people in the flesh who I have only peered at through google meets, photo and biometrics, then another door, then the gate. So, to boil it down, security guard, card, door, lobby, fountain, security guards, door and card, lobby, kitchen, coffee, gates like on a subway, finger prints, real office. 

The real office is four floors. I arrive at my desk and they take me to the IT desk. They give me whatever I want (“need”): mac products, mouse pad, new Bose headphones, anything I want. In the toilets there’s an abundance of things: toothbrushes made of recycled plastic in brown paper packets, eyedrops, stain remover. Everything so you could stay over. There are velvet couches everywhere, fig trees, basket chairs—Airbnb aesthetic. It is the CEO of the company who insisted on the décor, they tell me. There are rooms for videoconferencing, there are private booths for being alone, there are rooms decorated like someone’s living room. There is a library. Each new full-time worker must put in an order for their favourite book, although now it’s getting too full, they’ve abandoned this policy. I perceive a copy of Infinite Jest. This is what mainly sticks out to me. Every room is behind glass for full transparency. 

There are pastries and cakes that arrive at particular times and days of the week, there’s lunch, there’s a kitchen on each floor with drip coffee, pour over, espresso, decaf, tea, fruits, snacks, chocolate, cereal. A fridge full of kombucha, soda La Croix, half and half, Oatly, Coca Cola that’s constantly being refilled by a discreet, almost invisible, Latin worker. I’ve been here only two days but in that time I’ve developed needs I didn’t know I had—I like this guava rose Kombucha for a healthier gut. Don’t forget to recycle! Here’s another mac product! I love these dried pineapple slices! I think I will come have a red velvet cookie or some pastries from Tartine bakery (a bakery well known for firing its striking staff). 

Outside, here, like in LA, it’s poverty or otherwise great wealth. A low-key dinner for two costs 140$, a croissant and a café times two is 25$, but in this office, everything is free. Going outside I saw this Tesla truck; when you see one it’s truly bizarre, rather like a kind of insect, and it gives me the repulsed feeling of seeing a cockroach in my house. I walked to Mission street. I saw a church turned private school for CEOs of big tech called La Scuola. On the corner of this street, someone gave me a flyer inviting me to a demonstration against the company I’m working at as a contractor. This morning, my manager told me not to use this or that entrance, and to stay safe. In any case I walked to Mission street, which is another world altogether—people selling hoodies, strong smell of weed, tamales, bars. I went to Bolerian books where my friend is an archivist. I almost had a kind of panic attack, the contrast was so intense, and knowing that tech was infringing on this dusty world of struggle. And perhaps the prevalence of all this struggle and left-culture is also what made the bay so suitable for tech. There’s the whole history of the bay area in there, American labour history, gay magazines, smut. Everything is old and material. You can touch it. 

Today the same, except I was writing to you on the BART while going past the docks of Oakland, and the weather was good. Now I’m in Oakland. The special transport police earn between 1-200,000$ a year, advertise the posters on the wall. Apparently they are having trouble recruiting. My friends are struggling on adjunct professor salaries of about 60k, and the salary advertised for the cops matches that of an engineer. On the BART you can’t really tell who’s who but there are little signs: Airpods, Apple watch. Other signs: dirty hands, walking twisted, talking to people (at all). The BART functions exclusively on the sale of tickets ($5 upwards, depending on how far you go), so police arrest people for not paying. The fine is $300 but they tend to arrest people, and so on. 

I’m getting off now, at 16^th street, sending you what I wrote today and yesterday, please excuse this bad writing.

Two Reports (RL)

Report 1 

Last night I read poems out loud for the first time in I think two years. The reading was at the Cité des Arts, an international art residency, in Montmartre, and it was so well organized, by J, a new friend. Each reader had 5 minutes each, and there were about 11 readers, plus one or two who spontaneously volunteered to read. There were only a couple of things that I didn’t like and that didn’t matter, I shall nonetheless try to articulate why. One was a series of short texts, each numbered pretentiously, that were painful to listen to because of the amount of leftist jargon, such as ‘collective life’, ‘solidarity’, neatly tied up with more clichés about love, in still neater rhyme; and the other, a poem, also of clichés, which was as if a rewrite of the concept of all Survivor- or I Will Survive-type songs, but without much distance. Both of these poems, sets of poems, had the quality of total earnestness, and set free something other than what their highly controlling authors seemed to have hoped for, whereas with other people's readings, I didn’t have the same impression. In short, the texts I didn’t like were sheerly embarrassing, because their authors’ let some kind of painful unconscious hang out, without knowing so, whereas, in other texts I heard, I either felt there was a self-conscious use of this, or a more sincere taking of risks. Otherwise, it was very mixed. The French poetry was characteristically prose-y and ironic, closer to stand up, because of the collective unease about taking on the role of poet. This, I have observed, often happens in general with artists who become poets. The international poetry included an angry rap about Schengen in French and Spanish, an amazing meditation on an unanswered letter from Brazil, a Korean poem about grandmothers and demonic spirits. There was a lot that was funny. The five minute space de-dramatised the fact of reading. There were candles instead of electric lights. There were crisps, cheese, pickles, tea, non alcoholic beer, carrot juice and also wine. As well as people's own works, someone recited from memory a poem by Mallarme that seemed so racist, no one knew if they should applaud, and someone else read erotic poems in Persian and had someone else read the translation. I read three poems.

 

We spoke to the artist who had read from the Persian poet’s book – we is three of us, all friends -- at the end of the reading when all the lights had come back on, and the intimate space had become again a common room. We asked her some questions and she began to describe her practice, by which she has a ‘partnership’ with ‘scientists’ who build ‘robots’. She builds sorts of sculpture organs, and has an exhibition soon. She is going to be making some organs with real blood. We asked what kind of blood and she said human blood, via donation, even though personally, she is phobic of blood herself. So she doesn’t know why she’s doing this. I said, well that’s why, you want to find out about your phobia. She then said, no but actually it’s because, I’ve had enough, the last few years, all we hear about is War War War, et j’en ai marre, et en fait, on a tous le meme sang, et en fait je vais prendre un gout de sang Iranienne, Palestinienne, Israelienne… (She wants to take a drop of blood from people of difference ‘races’, and put them all together in the same organ, to show that we all have the same blood).

 

This reminds me that a few days ago a friend described going to see a play in Paris put on by the company of some friends of his, and that he got in a disagreement with everyone there. The play is about Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, how the latter wasn’t the successor of the former, that the two species co-existed, and about the scientists in the 1990s who led this discovery. If you look on the website of the piece it says something like “DNA is an encyclopedia”. And, for the grand finale, where did these Neanderthals and Homo sapiens coexist? Indeed, in the land that is now Israel-Palestine. A well intended humanism, with biological and racialist underpinnings. My friend got in a fight with everyone about the subventions that will soon be cut, saying well maybe it’s not such a bad idea, look what state funding gets us to. And was met with, but outreach in the provinces! 

Report 2

I have 25 minutes to write this, before my biweekly 1-1 with one manager (online) and another weekly with my manager who is my ‘direct report’ (weekly), which are back to back. I wanted to go to the café at the end of the road and write this and somehow instead I ended up shopping for dinner. Not only shopping, but being fussy. Buying about one ingredient per shop. These 1-1s are inconvenient 15 minute slots that hang my week together. I spend most of my time trying to pretend I’m working, or trying to work. Last week I couldn’t work that much. I had to generate prompts which would prompt a set of instructions for a discussion, using my company’s own program. But as it turns out they hadn’t signed me up to an unlimited account, and I was stuck on the free one. I could only generate 10 at a time before getting locked out for several hours. I had a hundred to turn in. The gaps were at least 5 hours long. Kismet. I went out and had lunch. Tried to enjoy the ‘weather’. As of last week, according to a blurb screenshotted from Instagram that a friend sent me, this city had not had 3 consecutive days of sunshine since September, causing mass lack of vitamin D and sporadic depression. At the poetry reading I spoke about in my last report, a girl mocked the general climate with the phrase “I dream of a burnout”. A few weeks back, I kept getting locked out of my company laptop, so I had a few days where I just couldn’t work. In any case the weather was not nice, it was grey.

 

Anyway, I spent the rest of the day doing this impossible task of generating prompts. Then, that evening, rushing out of my 1-1, we had decided to go and see The Brutalist. Apparently the director says he spent 8 years writing it. It is a film that should have been written and made in a shorter time and it should also have be cut to a shorter running time. We are living in an epoch of cinema that has been allowed to take on epic proportions in length, without any demand on the content of the film being worthy of such a length. It is formless, its only quality being just that it is long. I blame Netflix, and the rise of the mini series, which means that films are now like a long episode (which, in the case of for example Dune, only guarantees a sequel). There is little at stake, but it is said over a long time. I have seen some truly awful long long films this and last year – Megalopolis, Nosferatu, and now The Brutalist, and they have this quality. 

 

With the Brutalist, the opening shot announces the carnage, the tenor, doing what the film will do all the way through. In a shot which tempts us to think – camera d’epaule, following Adrien Brody -- we think we are following him out of the camps. But no! A clever feint, it is the boat. Here is the statue of Liberty! Welcome to America. This is the strategy of the whole film, beginning to end. We think the film will talk about the experience of the camp survivor, but no – the familiar fetish of “silence”. Except that this silence is full of on the nose images, on the nose dialogue. 

 

As for the rest of the film, I found myself extremely anxious watching it. That is because, like with the tendency of our times, there is nothing there. It looks like its something but it isn’t. It sounds like language, but it’s not. There is an uncanniness we are living through. You watch it gaslighting yourself and unconsciously straining to find the thing, but there is nothing there. Perhaps the scenario was written by AI, or perhaps modern writing is now the same as LLMs. There is are disconcerting moments in which the dialogue sound is entirely isolated from any ambient noise. There is background music all the time. We are in a permanent and hellish elevator. Everything is smooth, shot like a drone. As for the dialogue -- why does it “feel AI”? Because everything, which could be suggested by the cunning combination of image, sound, motion, is explicated in speech. Everything is on the nose. There is no space in the film that isn’t being explained to us, whether in vulgarized pop-psychoanalysis (as the crippled Erzebet tells him I wanted you so badly, it made me sick), or the smorgasbord of maux, cynically put together as a tasting menu of all the possible things a modern viewer might find objectionable -- sodomy, rape, chemsex… The #metoo moment eyerollable. I found the niece’s articulation of her decision to make Aliyah much more of today’s discourse than what I imagine of New York in the 70s (I don’t know). And still, it all suddenly neatly leads to the architect’s enunciation of the words “they don’t want us here”, which I also questioned, thought was irresponsible and also anachronistic. In any case, the conclusion of the film – the beginning of postmodernism at the Venice Biennale -- is equally grave, it is indeed the wrong way around. In the end it is not the architect who makes his building despite the camp, but the camp that has dreamed the building. The building is a prison. I found this the most shocking, as if Nazis can be congratulated, in the end, for modern architecture, rather than what we know – that Nazis hate flat roofs, and it was the Bauhaus and ‘degenerate art’ that was so much of a threat to National Socialism that Bauhaus architects such as Gropius ended up in America. 

 

I cried when I got home, or had a panic attack, finding the conclusions or implications of the film so terrible and historically dire, and also in shock or cognitive dissonance after having spent the day generating AI scenarios, and then finding myself in one. I don’t want to contribute to this world, the destruction of something I love which is cinema, and I find it startling and horrific how bad and ugly the films of our moment are, how historically revisionist. 

'Report'

2001/2 – M


Full five fathoms deep was your heart
In the ruins of an ancient city
Fish were eating what used to be your art
Your good works, your sorrowful pity

Didn’t tell the cabin crew what I’d seen
Didn’t want them to worry
After all the sea was so serene
Why think about something so gory

It must have happened while you were asleep
It must have happened on several occasions
That you would reach for it and it wasn’t there
What do you do in these situations?

Full five fathoms was your heart
In the ruins of Lemuria
Starfish were sitting on what used to be your art
I was looking at their euphoria



I
store bricks
hard carry
hand shape
heavy velocity
still carry
my face
hard water
freezing
at street corner
world of pipes
and arrows
stick to water
hand to throat
freezing slowly
super gasp
lustrous water
slicing dryly
glowing slightly
of soft substances
sibilant
motion melt
from strength to strength
see a nexus of forces
when I look into a wall
splitting drily
like a subject
never got
your profound modality


2008 – M, from a notebook

‘No, no, I don’t hate you, I couldn’t ever hate you, I’m just trying to fill up the space where love should have been.

Goodbye, goodbye, I’m gone, you’re gone, goodbye, goodbye, it’s gone, it’s gone, we’ve killed it, with kindness and soap, we’ve killed it, it’ll trouble us no more, goodbye brave young man, goodbye valiant girl, out with you, door, electronic key, we are gone, the warmth dissipates fast, the stairs follow down, goodbye, we got there in the end’


Jan 2012, me, from an email to M

Light

thought that I could grow forever
lachrymose imperial dismay whomever
about me random but interesting
that sense is gone now, for months
I have skipped over language unhesitating
confident in my abilities releasing
development gain nostrils a spare
moment’s silence cyclically indicated.
In room 618 window fittings seen
a great work of art, hunt not to understand
what stops it:
After the crash even
The encaustic bridge loans dry up,
Your arm draped across the American Bar
becomes unaffordable; so I measure it
with a tongue that comes up shorted
daylight falling fifth to gentle love.
Or something different.


February 2012 – M, transcription from a notebook


I miss my baby i miss my baby i miss him so much i want to carry my connection to the ground with me, the plane’s conditions at all times must or could be present to me i at no time wish to default the experience of flight to a hypothesis i want the ground of the flight to be accessible to me at all times though it is grey and indistinct this ground is more felt than perceived

he is my life now not in it i have not made space for him i do not know where he is in distinction from all else he is just all the space/ he is what is the case i am in it with him he and i what is the case ‘this looks like becoming the new normal’ mediation/s at a standstill so so so sweet my baby so so so so so sweet everything has stopped around us in us though I feel the vibrations still the reports he and I are the stop we are here and we are in it








2012/13 – M, book dedications to me


On this temporal stopping point
    punctured with light and
        in your shape
            let me never
            let my eyes go from
            this never

             xx xx xx xx
                     M



For the year,
     for the hour
Held alongside
     Rushing forward
     into rarefaction
     and you with me
         for this increment,
             I hand over
             what is always
             your
                 I
                 (and her properties)
                           M


2016. Me – Al-Wawa fable, birthday card on M’s 40th birthday






2018 M – Brno, a writing exercise, a dialogue between ‘Earth’ and ‘World’, transcription from a notebook (2018)

"Valley

- fear of birds to be immersed in the world?
-
Earth to World:

I know you try to minimise the contingencies I introduce to you. But earth to world, earth to world come in, world, The duality between us is a hard epistemological fiction, a real abstraction. The earth -- me -- is that which disrupts your plans but really your strategizing unfolds from the tenuous principle that I exist, that you exist, that there is culture & nature, and that one impacts on the other & the impacts must be managed. You depart from me and you welcome me. But my bareness is your baseness, a projection of your fear and impatience. When you love me and praise me, it is a sentimental self-love, you bewail the hard necessity of your conquest. But neither of us exists. I beckon to you, I reproach you; but we respectively are artefacts of the domination you externalize on me as brute fact


2019 Me, Advice column, outro 


close your eyes,


imagine a carpark with no soun-
dsystem, embers falling. candle-
lit emblem of employee loyalty,
you who cry out with joy like u

are never to descend, in the toil-
ets at McDonalds an image wait
s for you forever it must necess-
arily be infinite, like a total pigs-

sty in woolwich that no sprinkle-
rs could ever alleviate o my god,
so many miles from free childca
re and training we all see the sig

ns yeah o we all see the sinks in
the distance, we can all feel it s-
welling, a little green in the fore
ground like a vast orange sea. O

open me please, the capitalists a
re all globalists the world is just
an alibi, the shelter hotline rings
forever pink forever sweet yeah,

Squat the grey fluourescent rain.
there are no rich people here. in
a carpark, with no soundsystem,
we all arrive together wet and b-

ruises all our bodies, fresh from,
pink nailbars our nails will neve
r. scratch this out. we arrive tog-
ether. all our ideas are perfect b-

roken fingers, we can only hold
these flares with them. These. a
flower grows over an ambulanc
e in the air. the black medulla o

f the red tulip. costas pour from
its escape hatches in little perfe-
ct shavings of coloured shadow,
dickhead adecco flowers suitab-

le for any occasion shatter its wi
ndows oh wow how spectacular
ice creeps across the lake, like a
bbc accent kids home charity do

gala we are never found dead, a
nd will never tell the council ho
w beautiful it is in the carpark a
t night we can all watch the am-

bulance sinking into the Oceans,
we can all split in two we can al
l come to life in the taxi to the h
ospital, with pink nailbars in the

distance. Do what u want to me,
All our images are perfect ideas.
just don’t engage with the cunts,
the more you engage with them,

the more they fuck you over. O,
tremendous stillness of what gr-
ows from our chest, a deckchair
has been placed here representi-

ng struggle, from the nailbars w
indswept and kept empty by the
nature of things we will emerge,
stronger than we were we will s

it in a plastic chair, yeah. and do
the crossword like lovers. we ha
ve hair on our lips; will never te-
ll the council how beautiful it is,

how exquisite. never scab never


27.10.2018, M, dream


- curse placed on magician who produced wind-up rabbits (lowest form of legerdemain) by aesthetically appalled witches (2, women, glam)

- magician also a woman (me-surrogate), youngish

- curse consisted of material slippages in laws of physics (floor becoming sand for instance)

- another witch (male) takes pity & tells her a botanical form-of-words antidote (or maybe just some magic word)

- related to watching It Follows via attempt to normalize suddenly haywire day-to-day life (neutralize threat)


Jan 2019, M – journal, immediately following 1st diagnosis, transcription from notebook


So now it's this. After all these years of being what I thought was lucky, of getting away with something, w/ my life. How silly it is to say that sickness is the body’s way of asserting itself when you’d just as soon overlook it, I’m sure ‘the body’ has no interest in being damaged or attacked, any more than ‘you’ do, as if a separate thing. Obviously there is old age and decrepitude, an unfolding process with much contingency to it, but I thought that would be the extent of it, at least for now, and judging by what I see around me or what I know to expect, I was right. What is happening to me now is objectively unusual and couldn’t have been included in any overview except a gratuitously darkened one, and again, nothing in my previous life would have led me to have that one rather than the one I did have, if there was an outlook at all as such. I guess most of all I’m surprised [...] I don’t need mortality to give my life meaning. although I do worry that reincarnation is true and this will never end [...] I feel like there’s absolutely no space in my life for this experience, though I don’t really want to think of it in those terms, as an ‘experience’. It is a horrible unlucky event, a crippling piece of bad luck. Why should some crazy cells propel me to reevaluate everything? What kind of abject superstition is that? Maybe I should read Illness as Metaphor. It’s all just so offensive. This tradition of the sick animal as the contemplative animal, well, it’s disgusting, it appals the Nietzschean in me. Part of me feels like even writing these thoughts down is pandering to that impulse or logic.

What I wish for is that rather than us deteriorating through sickness and old age, at a certain point in our lives we would just change into something else, another form. Slowly changes would take place in our bodies and we would become rocks, other animals, plants. It is humiliating to be confined to one type of body, one species.

So do you know how you will survive, is this something you can plan for? I know I do not want to sleep in my illness. I do not want to ‘live’ with it. I do not want to talk to other people who are ill, i.e., in a centre or support group. I will take the time off work but I will use it to do things I want to do, not things dictated by my illness, except the bare minimum obligations of treatment. I am not going to be plaintive or wistful. I am not going to be sad or sorry, or a survivor. It has no claim on me. Just fucking cells.'


Dec 2020, me, book dedication, in the front pages of Fernanda Melchor book


Halve Life

& every morning I get up and inject the state into my arm
and listen to the children singing in the nursery

the world is only ten years old
when the youth centres re-open the emptiness inside them

falls in the sea
at a hundred miles an hour we are its ceiling

& we have everything to live
for a hundred wild tubes from the mouth the ears and the anus

as the brains walk through the hearts
snow theme parks burn to the ground at a hundred miles’ distance

& I love that we share a window,
& every morning I get up their voices sound a little bit deeper


2020-23, M book dedications to me


2020:

Together,
        we will create
        an instrument
        that will carry
        us through the
        cut we make
        in space.

        To next year’s gamboling. I
        love you so much.

        M


2022:

To you,
        A hopefully
        luckier
        Fitzcarraldo selection

        With love foreign
        to fathoming,

        M

Dec 2023:

No you’re not sick and tired!

            With all the love I have &
                all the love I can
                find in my deficient
                    body, to you my
                        always

                        M.


June 2024

Grey walls and glass floors
collapsing dogmas

some dead leaves scattered
adhesion of unrelated elements
inconclusive investigation

in the unbroken shell
Its wet surface

lying on their separate beds

God’s light
outside of historical time
where for once we completely forgot ourselves
Of desperate encouragement,
wide expanses of water, moving, or still, or both or either at once
in a city whose centre is its circumference
like something taking place in Malevich’s head
tried to laugh.
A waiting room full of melted plastic chairs
basic epistemological failures
the oddest part of town

from here on tends to remember and think in lumps
field of ashes
shapes like fingers or open mouths
The mirrors are somewhere in New York
Pine trees in street lamps

Now and then children lie down in the snow to freeze to death
Seaside. Stupidity. Graffitied carriages.
Layers of a castrated God
A gloved hand
Countermanouevres
As a form of associative thinking
Uprooted trees, still growing
Furious burning, at room temperature
On a map of those grey circles

As a hole in the sun
The points in my body
Or anything. Snowdrops, molasses.

that are not there
inversion of that logic

that I dedicate my life to the maximum presence of yours in this world


transformation

My love
my mouth
spray
spit tray
Sauerstoff
syllable
splits
sirens
equal
sauerstoff
spray syllable
spray
splitter and sequel
in the lit
siren
split of you
slit and lit
up like
left
upper scree
and why
scree of
you
spray
spray
my mouth’s
myth of
you
each split
into
split of
you
split and split
of you
splitter
and spray
spray
seashore
and
spray,
spray
and white
glitter
and
day


something rosehued, is scattered around
on the cold, unexpectedly cold floor
at specific times,
something green
I miss you. I’m too tired to write poems.
I’m too tired to have
a clever idea.
As intimate as sex before sex
itself becomes a tired rehearsal
of merely conventional meanings,
when it is still an image of space.
‘It’s OK, I’m on the pill.’
I look out at the sky, I guess.
it’s the largest possible space there is
less expensive than hotels
or waking in a room I
don’t recognise
which are other ways of approaching this.
The sea is too steep now.
The stars cannot reach it. A rented
room at the top of it waits,
waiting, dreams of your arrival


(One more attempt at a book dedication)

When I see you as you are
the words race into me
for the first time this
is my mind and boredom
and hurt are nothing
everyone is alive
since you are
the words in my mind
the names of my friends
who are dead
and who you are
and what I am and
everything else.

When I see you as you are
there is a light in me
the sun has fun
making shadows
and the plants like to grow
it’s like I’d never written
a single word about you
everything is magnificent
desert tundra ocean
terrain steppe
cityscape suburb
landfill & littoral

When I see you as you are
nothing can hurt us
and nothing is despised
time runs in any direction
the words race into me
for the first time this
is my mind and boredom
and hurt are nothing
everything is alive
when I see you as you are
and when I see you as you are
everything is
good enough, even
me, even this


***

What was it like, Marina, what was it like, now that you can speak in that tense,
That each of us has a home in the other

I remember us walking home from that party, up lansdowne drive hand in hand, with you in the long pink scarf and the brechtian leather jacket, and walking in London Fields the next day and seeing the line between your brows, the crease that 12.5 years later I would touch with my hands as I lay with your dead body, alone together in that room as we were for just a minute, before I kissed you on your cold and open lips for the very last time, my love, my only love, my only true love, lover of Shirley Collins and paradox and everything changeable and everything small. I remember seeing the line between your brows then and wondering if this would be possible between us, between the person I was, this child, and you my beautiful one with all of your different faces. I remember how serious you were then, how frightened of seeming stupid or trivial around me, how once you caught yourself humming in the hallway or singing to yourself in your weak but tuneful voice, and stopped, and said something about how stupid you sounded. A note of the self-accusation that later I would find in your journals. The seriousness as a kind of self-discipline, to be an intellectual, to be a radical, to be something other than a child, or a brilliant american girl full of ambitions and unformed ideas. I don't remember whether I said anything but I remember how much I liked you singing. This capacity of idealisation in you. You never ever threatened to leave me. You never wanted that. You always wanted me to nurture and protect you. Later you would do that more and more. You in your leather jacket and your long pink scarf that later would disappear. With the crease between your brows that doesn't show up in pictures of you unless they're taken close up; and there are so few of those. It is the memory of being with you that day, of looking at your face in the clear 1 January light, of wondering and hoping and feeling so full of possibility and anxiety, that after all of this time we were finally here, and that the boundary had been crossed, and we had to discover now what existed. Because the crease represented the distance between us that so fascinated me, because you already represented a world, years of thought, publications, lines of development, your home full of records and clutter and posters for your events 8 years before (20 now) where already you could speak with the style that defined you, when I was still almost a child. I can feel the weight of you, your sudden physical presence as a being I could touch and who wanted me to touch them, to touch you, and also the lightness of our finally bring together, light and grass and morning and walking together nowhere in particular. And when you cycled down the canal with that strange backpack you had then you looked like a beautiful dinosaur. And your hair was slightly wispy. And sometimes when I saw your face you seemed like simply the most beautiful person in the world and sometimes I could see the mousiness that occasionally you saw in yourself, and that was so beautiful to me too, that there were two of you. I don't remember any of the things we spoke about that day. I only remember how I felt when I looked at you, how I felt the miraculousness of your presence that I had yearned for and told myself was impossible for so long; like when months before I had seen your amazing bright eyes at the squat cinema, really seen them for the first time, and felt how exquisite you were and how far away from me. Pink scarf, leather jacket, fracture boot, light, grass.

you and I are the stop we are here and we are in it

*

sometimes

the rose in the spheare, second ring
the cancer disappears. simple wish.
armoured lorries on otherwise deserted lanes
spheare after spheare
detrimental space at a distance from the outskirts.
we go there to do sordid things,
like love one another.
we all do things for money
I touch you on your hand
the cancer disappears,
simple wish. the rose in the spheare, second rim.
that you bring
snow from the will itself,
that’s why the white bus comes for us.
what we need kisses us:
take care, thousands of hinterlands,
fucked up ass system, fucked up ass sunrise,
simple wish. the rose in the spheare, second ring


6 June - notes from a phone app

I didn't describe it well to him. The feeling of being with someone as if being with a whole world. When the person you are with represents something more than themselves. Not just in the sense of a particular social 'scene', or 'who (or what) you know', but who you are, which in her case was defined through a movement of relation. She represented something more than a person, an ordinary person like me, or you, because to be with her was to be in a relation with that to which she herself related, because the capacity of relation was so strong and so intense and so creative in her, and 'What is the ability of the assemblage [but] to open onto a whole field of unlimited immanence that blurs all the segmentary offices and doesn't take place as a punctual ending but is already at work in each limit and at every moment?'

The strength of the capacity to relate defines the power of attraction of the person who becomes the things that they know and love and promises to the person who loves them in turn all of those things in response. The mysteriousness of this. The enigmatical quality of the person who contains inside of themselves a whole shifting landscape of relations to their objects, and who so is always more than themselves: a puzzle. When I look at the pictures of Marina from the first years we were together I see me. I see myself in her; and even when I am also there in the frame, standing right next to her, I am not there. I am her. It's this dizzying sensation of evaporation, of being dazzled and attracted and evaporated at the same time. You are me. It doesn't go the other way round. My life was you. You were my life. I see my life in you, in the world of relations that you and no one else I have ever been able to imagine myself being with opened up for me, by letting me be with you. You are me. And mystery pulses in that experience because I know that the relations that she contained and promised to me could only be held together through her, that I could only experience them through her. Without her they slip through my fingers like flashing silver fish into an ocean that I cannot bear to look at and all that I am left with is the image of her as the person who I first loved who amazed me and who amazed me because right from the beginning she always meant something more than herself, through being herself, in a way that, however harsh it sounds, many of the people she meant (our 'communities') never could. Which is why what I am talking about is neither about the discrepancy of experience between two people at different stages of their lives, nor about the promise of entry into a scene or a social environment to which a particular individual holds the key. It is much more about the awful radiance of the person whose own capacity of relation is what defines them, a singularity of feeling and intelligence that most people simply don't possess; and as much as that might sound uncomradely, or judgmental, or dismissive, the whole web and intertexture of my feelings screams at me that it is true.

Because the concept refers to a feeling, but there is no feeling. Or it has so many layers. The object is a field, an ingathering. The tenderness I felt before her death and the desire I felt when we were together and the yearning I feel for the person who she was before I met her. So the word is made to signify a whole lifetime of changing experiences; which accounts for the painful sense that no one else could elicit from me anything approaching the same total state. The social world of the present acquires its tissue-like thinness and artificiality, the sense of a game that is being played, not very convincingly, by the mannequins of some Kleistian theatre. Or something of the aircushioned air hockey table: the actors as pucks on a cushion of air, sliding across the emptiness on which they rely; where with you it is possible to identify roots, the movements of depth and of deepness.

*

Marina why have you produced so many riddles? I feel so powerless around you, around the idea of you. Every image open unto every other. The whole trembles and quakes, trembles and quakes. Am I you? Is this the answer to all this? I feel that if I could die then everything would be simpler. I wouldn't have to follow the clues anymore. The clues lead to no discovery except the circle of clues itself widening, the amount of space I have to move in singes me and the limits sting. Round and round and round. "False theorems and grand mistakes". Because it is as if you were building a system the whole time out of the whole medium of your life and all its relations and I cannot find my place here, the walls are made out of glass but they exclude space. As it happens I was twenty years old then, already an adult. "The entropy may make itself felt by small dysfunctionalities accumulating over the course of the exhibition". Or eighteen. You were the more powerful and the more perfect one and no one sees it, at least not as I do, and I am too weak to tell anyone. Wonderstruck, and why should it wait, the tremor in an artificial voice. No doors. Infinite regress. Grey walls. As if it collapses into five sections. Because my work is still important, the political aspect of my work. But Marina why can't I be continuous like you, you're making me feel like I did when I was a child again, when I was always good and there was always one person who was better; but now that one person is you, and I cannot even feel your loss more powerfully or evocatively than you felt the absence of a no one, a nothing, a ghost, years before I met you. All of this so grossly artificial. I've lost the plot, the thread, the string, it's slipping through my hands, the fish has taken the bait, it's gone, it’s gone, no need to keep going now, it's gone, good bye, as you will one day say, seventeen years ago, goodbye.

Is this a competition between us? At last? After all these years? As I chase you around the last widening curve to find that it never resolves into a straight, that I orbit you in the hanging glorious affinity of these quotations, preoccupations, hang ups, weightless and turning and absurd. That I cannot even feel as much pain as you. How inordinate. And you are dead and there is no third. Or there is but there may as well not be.

*

Regrets. Marina I regret not being you. I regret not having learned about 'postconceptual art', for finding the art that preoccupied you too inexpressive. I regret not having watched Tarkovsky's Solaris with you, or Born in Flames. I regret not having read Difference and Repetition. I was so closed, a closed book, a tight-ass, a tight little logical contraption, a system of inductions and hearth-like, compensatory passions. I regret not understanding your anger.

*

It feels like a whole history has been destroyed, strung together on the fine, winding thread of you. All the elements float apart and re-assume their original equidistance on a flat plane. Entropy. You were their solvent. Maybe this is what to be alive is, to be the living solvent for things? You were such an incredible solvent. I move around in the world you made and feel enchanted, slanted and enchanted, transplanted into this world of labour struggle and feedback and invisible orbs. I keep thinking of Kerstin's 'Marina's Cues' and translating it into Marina's clues, sticky little clues, sticky signs, references, enigmas. A reference to Robert Smithson in a private journal from 2007, enigmatic breadcrumb trail to a paper on entropy and critique given at a cultural venue in Graz in late 2022, your head on Zoom and our undecorated London bedroom wall behind you. A t-shirt in a picture of you from ‘97 that you still wore to bed with me more than twenty-five years later, that I have now. My desperate failing attempt to remember the song you had told me was your favourite three months ago and then the list of 'The most romantic songs' from New Years 2000 scribbled at the bottom of a page of notes about your determination to be loved this year and there it is, 13 by Big Star, stupendous teenage music of yearning and lambent encroaching abandonment. The person as a system of references on a plane of intensity, a landscape through which others can move, their eyes hurting. Marina where are you in here? Everything around me is you, is something that existed for me only through the medium of you, but you are not and your way of relating these things to each other is unrepeatable, unreplaceable, an enigma, a puzzle, a box of playful silly tricks, rickety puns and inside it something that could be just a costume (stolen pink lamé underwear with a big black heart) or the whole reason for living. And the world of your objects is being exposed to an irresistible entropic process, breakdown, dedifferentiation, I need your desire to move through them, across them, to animate them again, as Zoe said so truthfully about you, to join them again through the superlative medium of your being alive and knowing them and loving them and introducing them into your beautiful puzzling sentences, puzzles and jigsaws and Vision Masters and etch a sketches and toys everywhere, you my best friend, you beautiful child whose mother worked in a toy shop, you riddle. I need you. I need you to organise the world for me, Marina, I need you. Marina my heart is hurting. Stop setting me riddles. Stop. The clues of things, the way they suggest your way of being with them, your puzzling sentences, your puzzles and tricks, your love of conjuring and magic, Ladies and Gentlemen, meinen Damen und Herren, 'Tonight we have the unbelievable pleasure of presenting the magician Irina!' 2006. Irina, Marina, magician, trickster, rhymester, clown. Your cues and clues. Your tender understated enigmas. That you were a kind of animist. That you made things come alive. That we are surrounded by living death except that somebody does this and then they are gone and no one can find the key and so the box just sits there and all of life is inside of it. You beautiful confused american immigrant Jewish girl with all of your prodigious reading and your love of puns, whose mother worked in a toy shop. You Marxist intellectual who drew Teddy bears all the way through your notebooks all the way through to March 2024 when you were 47 years old and the left hand side of the two page spread is filled with notes on the totality and a month later you were dead and I was holding your head in my hands and touching your hair for the last time and the universe had respectfully ceased to exist. Actually I think this is what to be alive is, to have this power, the power to organise a world through the simple fact of being in it, by being you, by relating to objects with enough snickering tender invention that they peel away from the sheet of endless dead reality to which they adhere and for the first time a reality with three dimensions comes into view, a reality organised through the medium of your love for it, a little totality, a little toybox totality in which at last everything deserves to exist and does, but the logic of this world is only the puzzling person who made it, and the elements are all clues to a way of being that we lack the power to emulate. And then they are gone: Flashing fish slipping through my hands into an ocean I can't bear to look at. Glare. Glare. Bright impossible retina tearing glare. That the objects on their own are so flat and so lonely; that they point beyond themselves to something that no longer exists, a chasm, deep gouged out empty apophatic sandstone quarry question mark turning into drill bit. Drill. Drill and glare. The glare of the crystal prism. Bereft question mark drill of 2007 and astonishing crystal drill of 2020, one of the most beautiful sentences you ever wrote, the closest thing to a solution. In the whole million word canvas. Your cues and your clues, breadcrumb trails in the void that Elisabeth Nicula despises in the paper that Matthew found and that you loved so much. Just as he found Ishmael Reed's Dualism. 'If it's over let me know, if it's over I can go / I won't make you, ooh ooh ooh'. A pure, moving material of expression. With a big black heart on oversized pink lamé underwear thieved from an upscale lingerie outlet near Russell Square: another toy store, but only if you're stealing from it. Which is another riddle. 'Won't you tell me what you're thinking of'.

'I am outside of
History. I wish
I had some peanuts. It
Looks hungry there in
Its cage'

I love her and miss her. Sometimes I can say these words to myself and they are like a wooden frame. Everything else is inside of them but for a moment the outer structure is enough and my eyes can rest on it. I love you and miss you.

I love you and I miss you.

Knotting and unknotting, binding and unbinding, tangling and untangling (LH)

Below: Untitled, 2000, 2 poems by Jorge Eduardo Eielson, trans. LH from the Spanish on the back of two postcards left on chairs at the Peruvian Embassy, London, 24–25 July 2024.

Will Rowe spoke of knotting (in the form of quipu in Eielson’s work and in Indigenous cultures more broadly (see Cecilia Vicuña’s work for ex.), as well as an alphabet of sorts constituted of knots – nudos) and how knots may be undone but it takes a long time to undo them (think of undoing tangled/knotted necklace chains, separating them out…).

Do knots need to be undone? / Should they be? When? By who? (Codification, symbolism, secrecy, private and public language, Latin American mestizaje… Eielson was involved in the production of a new kind of mestizaje from Lima, from the coast, and then from a place of exile – Eielson made work in Europe with materials exported by friends from Peru, including black sand applied to the surface of paintings.)

Eielson’s series of nudos constituted a kind of alphabet; a new language. How to understand his practice as an artist in relation to his practice as a poet?

—

Learning how to tie knots in the navy in the film Cerrar los ojos by Víctor Erice (2023) – film director protagonist showing photos to the disappeared friend he learned to tie knots with and the latter’s lack of recognition / denial / forgetting in response… ‘La idea de cambiar la identidad y de rehacer la vida en otro sitio’ (The idea of changing one’s identity and of remaking one’s life in another place).

1
EVERY MACHINE IS USELESS

It’s no use multiplying
The gaze or delaying
The speed of pain
For millions of years
No accelerant star has existed
Not its splendour nor the tortoise who desires
The falcon’s speed
Slowness, too
Is a celestial machine
That moves between us
And nothing beats
The speed
Of love

2
IMMEDIATELY AFTER HAVING READ

These words
Close doors and windows
Don’t peep too much
Don’t make the trembling one jump
Yellow butterfly
Resting on a chair
Pulls the chain
And lets life go
As if nothing would have happened
She responds to the phone so quickly
Speaks of things stupid and wise
Hangs up yet again
But now considering
That the whole wide world is just
This mysterious yellow butterfly
Resting on a chair

—

https://lemelle.substack.com/p/taylor-le-melle-in-conversation-with?utm_source=podcast-email&publication_id=847199 

Notes from Taylor Le Melle in conversation with Derica Shields

Is it about the book, specifically?

The idea of not legally being able to engage with a book – there are banned books

—

From $$ ABOMUNUS CRAXIOMS $$ by Bob Kaufman:

[...]

People who read are not happy.

People who do not read are not happy.

People are not very happy.

These days people get sicker quicker.

[...]

See Danny Hayward, in particular p. 29 of Training Exercises on doing and looking and reading. Also on politics as something we do and on poetry as a way to transform the self and also as a means of survival… on the ‘we’ as being worth defending. On the square within the circle. On the forest and the nymphs and what they represent / who they could be.

—

Taylor Le Melle:

‘The mobilisation… of forms, that spring up in order to support a goal’

‘The motivation behind developing the technology of film and photography had colonial stakes’

‘The people who are writing the novels at the time of the ship’s expansion… had a number of other people working on their behalf’

Someone facilitates the need to not have to labour

Derica Shields:

Lord Byron and Shelley were on vacay together… this form is coming out of a specific relationship to leisure and free time, certain ideas about the monster and the other… a sentimental education

Taylor:

‘That’s why I’m saying violent assimilation’

‘Liberatory politics centred around reading every word ever printed’

^ that ideology

‘What are you supposed to do?’

Curiosity and playing around

Opacity and specificity

‘This is not instruction’

‘Decisive or unrelenting about doing it this way’

‘A nothing to lose thing’

[Show a clip, c.42:27]

Discussion of intimacy by Hortense Spillers

‘If intimacy is not reliable…’

‘Sentimentality and feelings of love can be shown to be unstable [...] across the social order’

LISTEN

‘A cultural history of touch…’

‘Bodiedness associated with juridical… due process’

‘Flesh describes… a more or less expendable figure’

‘The alien does not have access… to ward[ing] off another’s touch’

Loss of freedom – ‘bodies lose their integrity and may be invaded by coercive power’

Immediacy in relationship to the slave, robs the touch of its… becomes the power to wound and violate

See Audre Lorde on the erotic

Man who focused on the visual world, the ‘eye’ man was positioned at the top

The skin man, was positioned at the bottom

‘Touch… has nothing to do with the erotic… or does it?’ – Spillers realises this is a question

—

What does self-defence look like/what forms can it take when we are seeing stickers left by fascists in the streets concealing Stanley knife blades? Other than removing them safely, what shall we do? How will we organise?

—  

Ways of distinguishing human life from bare or animal life…

[Clip ends c.49:56]

1:00:52

Say whatever your categorization is means that you are, means that you are, whatever your categorization or your situation is means that you got to live on 300 calories a day or you have like a chronic kind of like lack of access to vitamin C or like, so, you know, these are like real things that these policies create,

right? Like we have, and this is happening right now. It's not just, you know, right? Right. So it's like, and then whoever survives that does not escape the reproductive labour of reproducing the world, right? Creates more flesh and tells that flesh it's very important to read books. You know what I'm saying?

1:08:40
that's what massage therapy is it's like making a relationship for like four hours a day with four different people it's like okay this is the relationship we're gonna have for this hour this 90 minutes um And figuring that out together, right? Like it's never going to be the same every time.

TRUST
And loss of trust, politically, and erotically/libidinally, in others, in oneself…



2 screengrabs from Hal Hartley’s film Trust (1990) posted 2015 ^
Domestic space in Hal Hartley’s films

Knotting and unknotting (in Eielson’s work)

Binding and unbinding (Derica and Taylor)

Threads of thought in Marina’s talk with Andreas Petrossiants (‘tangling and untangling’): https://www.e-flux.com/podcasts/407867/marina-vishmidt-speculation-as-a-mode-of-production 

Contemporary capital and contemporary art… parallelism… the image of work.
Speculative negation…

‘Art is [...] an emancipatory activity… that can be commodified’

Open and closed forms of speculation: speculative fiction may be proximate to utopian approach
Speculative gambling, casino understanding of the nature of capitalism today (creates more of itself… a present of returns predicated on enclosing the future)
Open speculation (of art) is imbricated in… closed speculation

‘Situated movements in time and space’
Conventional understanding of autonomy is a kind of scripted non-performance

Mix of methodologies also reflects the process of putting it together over a long period of time


Robert Morris, Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, 1961

Trying to practise a negative dialectical, homemade approach that practises its politics in the field of theory… traces mediations between

13:00
‘Tangling and untangling’

14:30 – the turn to conceptualism and performance

—

The turn of visual artists to poetry and vice-versa / the combination of these practices, often with music (see e.g. Egg Meat quoting Bob Kaufman at SET Peckham last week).

→

7 August
(After reading more Training Exercises)

Binding and unbinding in Will Rowe’s response to Danny’s report ‘On Denial’:
https://communityofgoods.blogspot.com/2023/05/letter-to-danny-14523-wr.html

Freud’s notion of ‘binding’ came into the conversation at the recent Mayday Rooms meeting. Freud’s use of the term, where binding works in terms of ‘an energy which flows along chains of ideas and implies associative “links”’, suggests a possible cross-over between inner life and the political outside. When you write ‘there is no outside to an injury’ are you posing this as an outside where resolution might have been possible? I want to say that a wound with no outside is the pair of a situation with no solution—a situation where words are stuck in chains of association that perpetuate an impasse. Not that individual wound and social wound are homologous, but that they exist in a certain relation to each other. What kind of relation? The insistent trauma-talk of narcissistic selves falsifies the relation. Once you accept that life is suffering, you can accept the challenge of living. That’s Jordan Peterson speaking, and inside his voice the long history of voices that have said that suffering is an entirely internal matter, a belief highly acceptable to capitalism. Individual wound and social wound are not homologous but what they have in common is isolation.

Rimbaud’s poem ‘The Drunken Boat’ sums up a basic element of Leftist tradition: to break all moorings, the call to rebellion as radical subjective unbinding, the legacy of the Paris Commune gathered into that call, that cell of meaning. That Rimbaud got labelled a poète maudit was a manoeuvre of bourgeois literature, we know that. The boat lands in Africa and finds itself facing white men with firearms: subjective emancipation includes colonial violence. That’s the corrective to individualism. But the binding, undone, without new binding consisting of a changed social order—does it go where we need to go? Does it merely end up bending to a new master?

—-
I feel less worried about Stanley Knife blades hidden under stickers this morning — we can safely remove them and put them to other uses or dispose of them. I’m keeping an eye on the news and figuring out what self-defence and community defence can be, along with many others… The EDL have announced a ‘protest’ outside the Old Fire Station in Stoke Newington this evening. What do they think they’re going to find there? A closed office in proximity to Stoke Newington police station.


Louise Bourgeois, Cumul I, 1969