Report on sectioning / words, memories / the root of "thoughts" (LH)

‘Explore the gulf between the stupefying reality of things that happen, at the moment they happen, and, years later, the strange unreality in which the things that happened are enveloped.’ Annie Ernaux, A Girl’s Story, p. 143

‘I’ve got to tell you I often talk as if you were both me and you and a third person, another person too. I do this to subsume my desire to tell everything in confusion but as if it were public.’

Bernadette Mayer, 'The Desires of Mothers to Please Others' in Letters, p. 26

‘You sounded so vulnerable because you said things so transparently, like a letter to everyone.’

Ibid., p. 122

‘I can’t imagine when we get older, very much older I’d hope, and we will be writing to each other without knowing if the other will live long enough to receive the letter in the mail’

Ibid., p. 92

'The root of ‘thoughts’ (channelled through ‘thinking’) is emotional experience – thoughts that come as emotions (feeling states) which themselves contain knowledge about the world (and the suffering the world imposes)...'
Gail Lewis, ‘Whose Movement is it anyway?’ https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/whose-movement-is-it-anyway 

‘Think the biggest obstacle when we were trying everything we could to avoid them sectioning last year was the fact that language had completely broken down – seems they decide to section when they can't hold a back and forth with the person they're talking to, because there’s no way of knowing whether anything is being comprehended. Ofc this rationale of needing to evidence comprehension, insight, etc. as the (necessary legal/supposedly neutral) system for determining when to section is flawed and feels awful in the moment – especially because I felt we were able to communicate with each other throughout, whether verbally or through some other means. I just explain it here to make sense of how they reacted last time, and to see how else we could navigate if we ever needed to again.’
KB *

Everything was so opaque, one thing opening up only when you reach crisis point or beyond. The Listening Place offered when already suicidal, ceramics offered for free for rehabilitation for a set period of time, now I want to go back but I’d have to pay. No one knew when I’d be getting out of hospital, he just got a call one day to say she’ll be going home tomorrow probably. There was someone in my room, a Canadian with post-partum depression made me so angry, her questioning invasive, another woman always wearing dark glasses always on the phone, told me bisexuals always have mental health problems take Kate Middleton for example. And the Polish woman who I only saw at mealtimes and started sitting opposite, she’d stayed thin, knew that hospital makes you put on weight and took the soup where I took the meal with rice and peas, gave my gravity blanket away then missed it but wouldn’t take it back, had already proposed to the same girl, who I thought was maybe anorexic and who I told I could take with me to Venice. I wasn’t going to Venice. I had also been planning to fly to New York, got as far as emailing three people and making plans to stay but never making the booking, received a call from Texas I think it was and suddenly felt scared – who had my number there? Obi took photos of us the second time I proposed and we exchanged paper rings. I stayed high a long time, sedated all the while by diazepam, lithium, olanzapine. Now I think they put me on olanzapine because it doesn’t interact the way aripiprazole does with diazepam. Was it when the dose was wrong that I lay down on the floor and saw dancers with twirling skirts on the ceiling. Tried to cut my wrist with a plastic knife by drawing a cross through my circular tattoo. I had thought the pills they gave me at Homerton Hospital were suicide pills. Someone was going to commit suicide I was convinced. I was also convinced that the police were going to come to the door – I was scared at any sound of housemates coming or going, started sleeping downstairs on the living room floor on a pile of blankets, felt safer down there with fewer books with spines to make associations between. 

Words, memories, fantasies, fears, were vastly more readily available and ripe for recombination, patterning, attempted relation. I thought they’d be screening Lulu Sanchez’s Bathroom Sluts (1991) at the Castle Cinema. I thought there was someone tied to the roof of MayDay Rooms, and that there was a bomb plot.

Maisi I met sat crouched in the smoking area – I took up vaping Dinner Lady hospital issue brown sticks because deep breaths help to calm you down. Also bought something kiwi flavoured when I was finally allowed out for an hour or so with company. I met with Maisi when we were both out of hospital, thought I might see Imogen too who constantly made Spotify playlists from all the songs that came to our minds and that we danced to. DJ Sally was the name we gave to one of the staff members who would put on a lot of Lauryn Hill. Carolina was a law student. She had long red hair, Italian, and would wear her hospital nightgown showing her butt out the back, and a pair of Doc Martens for marching through the dining area. She barely ate. She wrote notes on paper about people thinking they were God, and about other patients wanting to have sex with her.

Before my admission, before sectioning, I kept saying, ‘consensus reality?’ But things still got super confusing. And when I woke up I literally didn’t know if I was dead or alive, where I was. I’d been taken in the night to Mile End hospital, in a security van with a cage in front of me, two hench mean men had been standing ready at the door, as if I were a danger. Why had we had to wait in that tiny room until the small hours? It was literally starting to drive the other two mad, seem to remember knocks at the door and expecting friends, seem to remember distrusting the rainbow lanyards, seem to remember trying to open the office doors, and being given numbered options to choose from but them not making sense, or feeling them as an attempt being made to catch me out.

Music therapy. We each took turns and Susan was there, who would always carry a bible which I started reading too, interested in everything. She asked me how my brother was and I said he’s not my brother he’s my boyfriend. Anyway music therapy also involved coloured ribbons and taking turns, stepping into the centre of a circle, stepping back, being respectful, moving felt good. There were other people there for political reasons, one of whom got out quickly, I think she’d been at a protest. We did some drawings at the table together and she didn’t want hers so I asked if I could keep it. Britney was always in so much pain, always wearing hospital issue pyjamas, always asking for different meds than she was allowed, getting angry at mealtimes. I shrunk my jeans in the dryer but also put on weight enough that these largest trousers no longer fit. I’m starting to care less.

I forget the cockney with Irish heritage woman’s name, grey hair in a bowl cut, a brilliant dancer, so into her moves, getting angry in a flash and given meds to calm that down.* She was always talking about her family, seemed like some of them were to blame for her ending up there, and her grandson looked just like her, the same eyes. Another woman was homeless, and the most racist things would come out of her mouth. I got angry at her and her anger fired back, she started insulting me as well whereas Kulsuma taught me about Allah and about Kun Faya Kun, shared her blackseed oil which she said would be good for Britney’s forehead scar. I initially thought the men downstairs playing football were in some way spying on me. I’d make sounds from my window to them, so they’d know I was watching them too. I thought Glenn in the office was a cop, thin Tottenham Hotspur supporter who sometimes gave out meds although he wasn’t supposed to. I thought Richard was a cop too and called him Under Armour after his t-shirt. He would give me his Evening Standard crossword to finish in the morning, I was often the first one up always wanting breakfast but there was so little of that on offer, instant coffee and untoasted bread. I started asking for my room to be locked behind me, also moved rooms several times, three times at least. I started going to the corridor toilet facing forwards, and was grateful for the rooms I got with an ensuite shower and toilet too, had to take care not to flood them. I wasn’t allowed the eczema cream I had been prescribed by my doctor before – they doled out tiny paper pots of doublebase or similar instead. I showered often for something to do, maybe twice a day, remembered being at the Priory and not being allowed to shut my bedroom door, on a one-to-one they didn’t have the staff on Roman Ward for.

On waking up the first morning I tore up a newspaper and arranged it into an arrow trying to make a pathway out. And poured coffee into the bedroom sink which blocked it and then it looked like a face because the taps are two big circles above the gaping mouth of the basin. A nurse named Nicola was annoyed and got a plunger, took ages pumping up and down to little avail, loads of hair in the sink I think. I’d be annoyed too, they were all overworked I think. I spoke in French to the staff who could parce que ça fait ralentir mes pensées.

In an email I’m embarrassed about: ‘it must be International Surrealism season’.

Diffused and no arrest – update from Clapton Square.

I get tattoos (friendship, time and revolution; say no to fear; distrust feelings of transcendence), I like the pressurised burn, book acupuncture in the hope it’ll help me sleep.

Sometimes you cannot go any further

Fields of dandelions, puddles metres wide

Helicopter contains hell and cops, he said. There’s little you can do about an aural hallucination that hovers up above. But make it land.

There was never enough distance

between times of day and days 

and weeks and weeks 

and months and months and years

My hands looked red before me

Impossibility choked because what was there to do now

How to know which parts of lives can go unlived 

and which 

will draw a knot 

around the neck

‘Don’t break down, break out’ was the title of a symposium to which we contributed a video performance that made most of the collective unhappy, or is that too strong, dissatisfied

How many breakdowns will it take to make the message 

Clear as water, clear as soup

Is this denial and if not why the tears

ripping words on which the image was based

Music downstairs why can’t I listen to music anymore

Can I imagine a self outside of this?

Do you have an idea of why it happened? she asked

Spat at in the face, newly fascinating wrist, outdoor sex

Unadorned I said, like a diary — the book that brought the topic up again 

was also written, said a friend, like a case

*I’ve since remembered her name was Jack.

Report on Meeting at the Cock Tavern, 17th April 2023

Readings: * 'Is the uprising in Iran a feminist revolution?' * Photographs by Chris Killip * 'Green Areas' (extract from Raul Zurita's Purgatorio)

We met at the Cock Tavern and waited for the upstairs room to become available as some ASLEF union members were using it. There was confusion about some of our group sitting talking in a separate part of the pub from everyone else. Once together, things started with a recap of the last meeting, followed by a proposal that we read Raúl Zurita’s ‘Green Areas’ From Purgatory (translated by William Rowe) out loud. There was almost enough poem for each person present to read one page, going round in a circle.

About the poem: 

How to find a sense of space that’s not permeated by the Pinochet dictatorship and everything that we know about it, everything Chileans have felt about it?

As a position of the I (?)

There’s some way in which the possession of space, including the possession of language by that regime can start to be felt as uncanny.

Q: Is he a Chilean poet? Kept thinking of Argentina all the time. The gauchos as national symbol while there’s a violent process of enclosure

Difficult to orient oneself in this. Geometry, the measuring out of lands by state forces, but what is it that interests Zurita? Perhaps something stranger?

Yes, something stranger. It’s difficult to speak about this part of the book (Purgatory).

Q: About the black and white of Chris Killip’s photos, and the b/w of the cows in Zurita’s excerpt. What does the b/w of the images do to our reading of the poetry? From the prefatory note to the Killip book being handed around: about a system regarding lives of those depicted in the photos… the book is a ‘fiction about metaphor’.

What’s happening to the cows’ patches? It’s impressed on their skin, their hides. Something about figure merging into background – an inescapable background. There’s a troubling of the idea of standpoint. Figure and ground relation is not to do with complicity, more to do with geometry and abstraction (?)

You get a sense of an aerial view, but there isn’t a place that’s above with a non-Euclidean geometry. It felt like a map.

On the page with the Greek for logos: thinking about what you do when your society is ruled by fascists. A set of three options presented at an event with Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis – generation politicised by the Vietnam War. Some people went above, others below, others sideways. Above = joined the state; below = went underground; sideways = went to Africa and formed an alternative project. The cows also have three directions they can go in.

Committee of Actions of Art did some very dangerous things – went out at midnight and crossed out signs on surface of roads, confusing traffic: marks against the system of efficiency.

In Ireland they would rotate the signs during guerrilla warfare.

Creating jolts. The colonisation of public space is not a requirement. The poem moves like a mathematical proposal. The translator’s note says the poem is trying to represent the real of space. In the enormity of that, some piece of what it would mean to imagine that is offered… we’re not inside a Wordsworthian landscape where the subject would spill out.

That move between the abstracted geometry of the map and the real movement of the cows… relationship to sovereignty and territory. Author looking at the piebald pattern and seeing it as a map. Is who owns what land as arbitrary as the patterning on a cow? Clearly not…

Colours. Blue auras. Ruled green areas. Ruled as in with lines through, and governed. 

Auras make you think of standing against the sky and having light surrounding.

Blue comes in right before the epilogue – seems important. Hesitant to say it doesn’t read as defeat – the poem has done what it has to do and then we wake up in Santiago (?) Not sure it’s about making things concrete but about holding onto a glimmer of another space.

In Zurita’s long poem INRI he’s singing about people thrown out of helicopters… it can sound very Christian but the book is always refusing that. Refusal of the framework of salvation, whether that be Christian or a concrete proposal.

Sense of unbounded space. Infinity is a mathematical concept aligned with the divine. Things fall into lines and grids and auras. Non-redemptive.

Cows are the instrument of the frontier.

Highest concentration of capital apart from banks was in cows in the nineteenth century.

Cows produce the landscape. Europeans brought cows into the landscape as a symbol of accumulation.

Conflict with landlords was through the murdering of cows. Cycle of impoverishment. The mad cowboys have done the ruling. People have been thrown off the land to make room for pasture.

Patagonia had the highest rate of extinction of Indigenous people.

It’s still going on: the Mapuche are still fighting.

How do you form a politics out of land that has been emptied?

Terra nullius: signs of Indigenous inhabitation were invisibilised. Ernesto Laclau invented one of the most comforting forms of Marxism. He said the beginning of poetics is the making of space.

Films by Patricio Guzmán include a trio, one with an interview with Zurita and an Indigenous person’s speech intercut. The second of the trio is the best, Nostalgia for the Light.

But isn’t this a redemptive movie? When there’s nothing redemptive in Zurita.

An Indigenous person says there’s no word for police – we don’t need that. The same goes for God.

The poem opens with negatives.

The difference between Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry is the difference between a map and the globe.

Thinking of people being disappeared.

What happens when the bodies you are after come to encompass the whole space?

There are symbols but Zurita refuses ideas of metaphorical mapping.

How does this relate to the text on Iran? There’s not an explicit connection.

Text in Killip book by John Berger. Killip doesn’t take the position of witness, neither does the Zurita poem.

But why doesn’t the Zurita come from an experience of witnessing? Seems like it comes from a restriction in being able to speak freely, and being very much inside the experience, embedded.

Agreed, but there’s no signalling ‘I was there’.

Sense of time in Killip’s work  is not making a cut in the way that is familiar from writing about photography. It’s not like a still from a movie. Hard to designate the moment the photos were taken – the year.

Stephen Watts talked in the first meeting about how long Killip took to get people to trust him to take their photo.

In the Iran text, whatever charge the images have is spontaneous. Mimetic desiring.

There’s a list of ingredients about what makes an effective image: a woman with her head uncovered, maybe a fist in the air, a bin or a car… Killip is interested in text on walls.

Killip’s images do not become a pornography of suffering as so many photos of working class life do. There’s a defiance.

Worried about the exhibition of Killip’s images in our current institutions – they are vulnerable to authentocrat centrists.

They’d need not only a good exhibition text but also a site that isn’t frequented by people who would fetishise these images.

Looks at these images and worries Jess Phillips MP would like them.

Aesthetic reaction of the enemy. What does the hypothetical Jess Phillips’ reaction do to the image?

With the passage of time comes the trap of nostalgia.

Viewing different images of women in Iran, people were uncertain how to engage with them. There was trepidation about the different interpretation or usage they could be lent to. The most important thing in the text is the potential of revolutionary desire.

Finds Chris Killip photos difficult. B/w emphasises the cold. Are the people in them happy or unhappy?

In Iran, the iconic photo made you want to be one of those figures. Once you were on the street you started to lose your fear. People in crowds do courageous things that normally they wouldn’t do. She writes of what the still image can do as opposed to the moving image.

The way that uprisings are imaged.

The gestures of refusal are so simple – unveiling. This is why they’re powerful. Contrasts with images of women in YPJ. The writing is so seductive – it makes you believe in the power of the image.

Article is written as a love letter. If you think of the structure of lovers, think of a ‘tryst’ with images.

What is it I want when I look so enthusiastically at images of cop cars getting blown up, etc?

Is porn always bad? It tells you about your curiosity and what you want. 

Finding something cool is an entrypoint for young people (example of a student bringing Chris Killip photos into class).

Things will never be the same again in Iran.

It’s a personal piece of writing, not tied to a programme or struggle as usually conceived. Something deeper about desire and mimesis. Had previously been drawn to texts about strategy and the Iran text came as a shock to the system.

In Iran, it’s an uprising against the state and against a particular form of gendered oppression.

So much discourse around photography is a warning against photography.

People at demonstrations. Author wants to celebrate the capacity of things to be photographed.

Strong sense of historical moment which has little to do with identification. Vivid sense of history that is not predictable. Talking about something that happens once in a generation. Not about a Leninist sense of image and slogan that are going to need to be tactical. This grasp of history does not seem available to us here.

It is a revolution because I experienced it as a revolution. It’s about making an argument by convincing the reader.

The revolution can be seen in the daily evolution of images, producing branching points for further images. It’s quite non-linear.

Thinking about up/down/sideways, it gets into blurring distinctions, says this is how the images were working.

Skipping and short circuits: when your body does something as soon as you’ve thought of it.

Zurita’s main unit of composition is the duration of a proposition, or the time of a proposition. This time becomes unfixed. When we read aloud, everyone gave a different amount of time to the gaps that were the same width on the page.

Something still to think about re. Repression. In Zurita movement away, in Iran text movement against… a general categorising thought. Our politics is bound up with things we can or can’t say.

Stances of knowingness.

Resisting the explanatory voice. 

Craft, technique and work involved in taking people with you if you don’t have, or don’t want to use, the explanatory voice.

Thinks of (?’s) writing on what you don’t know but what the body does somehow know.

Is this kind of struggle (as in Iran) only available in certain moments? The emergence of an image that is something to be faithful to. What we have is preparation, thinking.

If you’re in a practice against the mainstream discourse you may not be very convincing.

The state is in charge of education but there are many types of education. The state has an enormous amount of pedagogical power.

Through the education system, everyone has a sense of their place in society but the image as written of in the Iran text disrupts that. Missing words: empowerment, confidence.

Momentum had been building: Iran text mentions other, previous years.

End of meeting: debate about whether to read T. J. Clark, ‘For a Left with No Future’. Alternative proposal to read Gail Lewis, ‘Whose movement is it anyway?’

Turning Point UK counter-protests / Honor Oak Park / Defacement (RK)

Scratching things on surfaces is very important for me, or slapping stickers on top of things. Recently around Honor Oak Park there have been protests and counter-protests by Turning Point UK around some drag story readings in the grand tradition of pantos, and transphobic stickers cropping up on some lampposts and then replaced the next week. At the second demo around 2 weeks or so back, or 3, or 4, I can't tell time anymore, it really seemed to me when you counted the fascists and the cops there were more of them than us, but chants about "more of us than you" continued on our side, maybe even both sides, both sides claiming they were attacking fascists, both sides claiming they were protecting something. Some funny things happen when you're facing a group like that. I was there with someone who made some well-intentioned observations which fed into our own stereotypes, like: "look at those fascists, all white older men." Then young men turn up. "Look at them, they look like gamers, neckbeards." Then young women turn up and more attractive-looking men. "They're overwhelmingly white." Then more of them show up, many many more not-"white." It felt absurd, reality was being so didactic, like any fucking lesson-plan or training session, rubbing our face in something we should already know. There was something about facing them which brought out, and momentarily in me too, some kind of stupid need to describe them, but of course they changed with every description, because the only thing that distinguished them from us was definitely not appearance or even composition but happenstance and the resulting directions and dependencies in which they love and hate, e.g. for them to "love" children was to express violent hate to anything even vaguely queer-adjacent, even some wigs and make-up. If P then Q. That and no doubt some funding from some millionaires.

It's obvious, but it can be worth stating the obvious, or writing it out, for myself at least.

[…] I am feeling a kind of dizzying vertigo about the past and future, as if everything in my being is telling me that I am well past the mid-point of a journey. I call my parents most weeks, and memories of childhood keep coming back to me as well as premonitions and desires for the future, like a growing desire to have a kid. I often don't feel like I'm here or anywhere at all, like I don't even exist, like I have disappeared or gone out of view. […] Right now I feel like a palimpsest, like an accretion of alternating transphobic and anti-transphobic stickers, and those stickers are building up a charge like any battery we learnt about in school, and those stickers have grown to absurd thickness all over the lamppost, and though I'm not sure I know which way is up, I know what I love and who and its dependencies and I know that everything else will shift and get painted over and defaced again and again.

some kind of reading diary (16 April 2023)

One can arrive in this part of the city either by air, the terracing offering a series of landing strips; by car, at ground level; or lastly by underground train — according to the distances to be covered. Crossed in all directions by freeways, the ground level is devoid of buildings, with the exception of various pylons which support the construction, and a round building of six storeys, which supports the overhanging terrace. These supports, around which one has foreseen areas for the parking of the means of transport, contain the lifts which go up to the upper levels of the city or to the basement floors

An inner horizon, extending vertically as it was, in the self-dark, an external one of great breadth, in the world-light; and the regions behind both horizons are filled with the same utopia, are consequently identical in the Ultimum 

In satellite estates, villages, small towns and inner-cities, the most common response is one of empathy, and recognition that other segments of the population are struggling to keep themselves and their loved ones alive. Day in day out all I really see is them endlessly grinding to collectively survive, and I wonder if there's any way that capital "a" activists and capital "o" organisers can ever work in genuine solidarity with them, or whether it will always be a relationship of contempt, pity and extraction 

We watched this from our hiding places, wordlessly we were there like in a bad dream of a bad book. We hasn't been given any sense of subtlety, we were rough-hewn in terms of intelligence. We understood little and our fear didn't diminish. On the contrary it never seemed to cease to grow, and it spread within us nauseatingly, scraping and mistreating our secret ducts and oneiric glands 

She knew that one had to survive many desolations and injuries — one would be both bloodied and bowed; but one had to keep writing anyway — through it, despite it, because of it, around it, in it, under it goddam

Human actions and appetites can be considered just as if it were a question of lines, surfaces and bodies

... and new neighborhoods of such a city could be constructed increasingly toward the west, while to the same extent the east would be abandoned to the overgrowth of topical vegetation, thereby creating, on its own, zones of gradual transition between the modern city and wild nature. This city pursued by the forest would offer unsurpassable zones of drift that would take shape behind it; it would also be a marriage with nature more audacious than anything attempted by our modern architects 

"We forget that no bird sings when it is hungry or cold, not the nightingale, nor the swallow, nor the hoopoe, though they do say these birds sing when in pain"

... for although it is true that "these times are certainly not the heroic age", still the ethical task of encouraging others to want to live is entrusted to the intellect and the imagination, to philosophy and poetry. But who can show that this illusion is less real than reality? Ultimately, we humans will discover ourselves to be quite another thing from what we have been, or what we have imagined ourselves to be

and to have missed as we have missed is no small thing. In islands cleansed by fast and straight winds, and in the unsurpassable zones that take shape behind them; between four seas, and on either side of the same space of gradual transition. To have moved between the words of our language like guerrillas in some strange undeclared war, and across ice, and across snow, and across the elevated Fronts of an occurring world, in hope and doubt. With desires to die that seem out of control. And sometimes serenely, while at other times chaos is obligated to devour us. (This is how we have missed one another.)  

"A march, rhythmic and full of an infectious and ideologically irreproachable euphoria" 

(en route from D. Hunter, Plato, Antoine Volodine, Andrea Dworkin, the Situationists, Giacomo Leopardi, Ernst Bloch, Alejandra Pizarnik, and SB [as always])