prattle

I seldom write here about myself, well, when I say about myself, what I mean to say is, I seldom write here the stuff of a journal, well, why would I bother? This might be contrary to the motivations of many who do write, as I think it fair to say that journaling is the preferred form hereabouts, the preferred ‘prattle’ if you like. We’ve chronology on our side after all, and the obsession Blogger and Wordpress exercise with date-tagging which forms the back-bone of this post-mapping system, without which, I suppose, there would be no line upon which to peg out and air our dirty metaphorical laundry.

Personally, I would prefer a patchwork quilting approach to journaling, a kind of desultory scrap-booking by which snippets of this, that or the other are scattered in no particular order, broadcast randomly, certainly not a chronology (the rotary clothes airer comes to mind here - the laundry analogy) no merit in following this extract with that, no tension in a hanging narrative, no dénouement. Like the circularity of Steve Reich (I mention this only because a Steve Reich track has started playing on my ipod) whose compositions seem to grow not in narrative form, whose music moves away from the unpacking of plot, instead layering up an elaboration of sound, crafted, finely honed, exquisitely integrated ‘presences’ which keep returning back upon themselves, regenerating, rebuilding, over and over again, a marginally enhanced form of that which had been before; but I digress…

It’s not as if I have secrets to hide, or that I exercise caution dipping my toe into the inviting shallows for fear that the bleak and dark unfathomable depths beyond may throw up indescribable scenes of the unknowable, or that in declaring my thoughts and drives, in uncovering that which to date has remained unspoken, I fear that you will discover something in me, what is the word, something representing the essence of me. But perhaps I am missing the point, perhaps this essence, I can’t think of a better word, is what it’s all about? You see, I’m not sure whether this work, this stuff of journaling, is really me. Don’t get me wrong, I love the diary, I love stealing upon the abandoned book in an empty room, I love the tension evidenced quivering between the written words, of the author’s sanctuary of the privacy in pages; yet this excitement born in the very moment of each words formation, in the time it takes for the pen to scratch out the letter shapes and for the ink to dry (I enjoy this image, although it’s hardly relevant in the age of instant messaging) the author’s clandestine declarations longingly await discovery, ache for it, you might say. There always remains this tangible self-conscious dialectic: between the secret diary and the moment of its discovery, or when that moment might reveal itself, the one existing in deference to the other.

It is not dissimilar to the tensions resident in the endless prattling in posts such as this.

journal

I love the journal precisely because of its audacious claim to truth. Words emit truth like radioactivity the minute they take form, but unless the writing is purely cathartic (ie: it takes no published form, or the pages are burned when complete, or the post is deleted rather than published, or perhaps the draft is kept locked in a tin box, stuffed under the bed, hidden deep in the inaccessible depths, or set sail majestically amid the myriad stars of the firmament, where perhaps it remains true to its author… ) writing resonates to the style of its telling, emits the reader’s needs, and what is truth for me is that which I need at the moment I read. When I read your journal aloud, it tells a different story, it’s suddenly all about me.

I don’t know how to respond to the tremulous narrative of ‘truth’ because I don’t know you, I don’t know what part of yourself you think you’ve knitted into the text, I have to ‘make you up’ as I go along, I make a kind of identikit ‘you’ and this is the truth for me, this is how my reading becomes writing. I measure and sample the scenes in your text, taste the narrative for what it can offer me, what texture, what frisson, what jouissance, and it is for the love of this tension that I adore the journal (I said that before somewhere). Because of its precocious obsession with self, the ‘I’, the ‘me’, the ‘my’ (and therefore the truth) and because of this contradiction: it never really knows who it is, and partly, as Barthes has said, because the ego only discourses when it is grieved, the journal is a kind of masochist's journey.

Everything I write here is my journal, but I tend not to borrow the form: today I thought, today I hate, today I love, today I reflect, today I cry (well, actually I do, but it’s deeply stitched). I link to your journal because the writing I find there gives birth to all this, and that for me is what it’s about, that’s the truth for me.

slipstream

I’ve been reading. It’s a job, a project; NetNewsWire grooms for me, post after post, a reading list expanding without end, a list which splutters in fits and starts, mapping out a histogram of frequency, flooded with data, a mapping of observations which fall under disjointed tags. Is there an optimal number of blogs one should follow? Should one choose one or more based on the frequency of posting? Should one measure one’s consumption?

Sometimes I find myself unwittingly following certain posts, well, not the posts exactly, I find myself slipping into the glide path so to speak, into another’s slipstream, and this other is the poster of comments. Perhaps because I see his or her commentary consistently posted on a site that I follow, of a writer whose work intrigues me, I get sidetracked, I follow the commentary. Maybe I do not care much for the voice of this commentator, for his or her style, but because this body is a hypertext - levels of authoring beget authoring and voices mesh - I have to remind myself who it is that I’m reading, where I came from, the route I took, where I’ve got to, and whether it matters. My reading becomes hysterical; this reading revolves not in the kind of orbital circularity of the inertia of planets travelling at their own momentum, but more like a catherine wheel, spinning and spluttering fragments and sparks in unpredictable directions.

As these distractions occur, as the commentary swallows me up, I begin to imagine a nomadic kind of posting, a posting without site, without origin, which I admire; a reactive occupation, a parasitic commentary whose fuel is the writing that feeds it; a subversive, scatterbrained, machine-gun writing which originates nowhere, is untraceable, unidentifiable, seemingly without ego, asking for no response, seeking no acknowledgement, and which provides no track-back to home.

I regularly detect the hysterical ego when I read, the anxiety expressed in the ‘do I post often enough/when is the right time to post/what does my frequency of posting say/not say, about me, when does it exceed me?’, the blogging with obligation dialectic. The comment-only piggy-back posting I admire offers the neat solution; it is a kind of reading without writing, a hijacking of sites, a tainting, an invasion, an infection, a stalking, but neurotically, this is an endosymbiotic activity which provides validation whilst at the same time requires the life of the p(h)ost in order to survive. Like the festive mistletoe, once considered a pest that killed and devalued its habitat, but now thought to have a pervasive influence over its community, I find the commentary often precedes and exceeds its subject.

In the brave new world in which we switch off the comments, we find a kind of writing without reading and without the reading there’s no one to look after the writing.

oliver

At the heart of these stories, these fables, these tales strung from unearthly worlds, call them what you will, lie creatures strange, worlds stranger still, in which terrible witches cast their evil spells, where toys come alive, where the mouse-organ plays its endless roll, where a mechanical chicken rattles in space and in the depths of the shimmering green soup wells, the soup dragon gurgles; where Pippin, the earth-born son of the fairy king, lives with the Pogle’s, and the railway engine of the Merioneth and Llantisilly Rail Traction Company Limited sings in the local choir. Such peculiar and odd characters from my childhood brought back to focus today by the death of Oliver Postgate who invented them and with his gentle master's pen scribed, then narrated each and every glorious one, and who will never be forgotten. R.I.P.

pogles

The Pogles, now where shall we find the Pogles? Yes, there is the notice board, can you read it? Of course you can: “Pogle’s Wood”, the wood where The Pogles live. Now then, let us go into the wood and let us see if we can find a hedgehog. You know why we have to find a hedgehog don’t you? Because the hedgehog goes to wake The Pogles in the morning.

bagpuss

Once upon a time, not so long ago, there lived a little girl and her name was Emily, and she had a shop, there it is. It was rather an unusual shop, because it didn’t sell anything. You see, everything in that shop window was a thing that somebody had once lost, and Emily had found and brought home to Bagpuss, the most important, the most beautiful, the most magical, saggy old cloth cat in the whole wide word.

clangers

Stranger stars by far than ours ever shone in our night sky, and planets too. This calm serene orb, sailing majestically among the myriad stars of the firmament - perhaps this star too is home for somebody. Can we imagine the sort of people that might live on a star like this? Let us go very close, let us look and listen very carefully, then perhaps we shall see…. and hear…

ivor

Not very long ago in the top left-hand corner of Wales there was railway. It wasn’t a very long railway, or a very important railway, but it was called The Merioneth and Llantisilly Rail Traction Company Limited, and it was all there was. And in a shed, in a siding at the end of the railway, lives the Locomotive of the Merioneth and Llantisilly Rail Traction Company Limited, which was a long name for a little engine so his friends just called him Ivor..."

noggin

In the lands of the North, where the Black Rocks stand guard against the cold sea, in the dark night that is very long, the men of the Northlands sit by their great log fires and they tell a tale. They tell how a prince built a long ship and sailed in it beyond the black ice at the edge of the world, to bring home his bride from the land of the midnight sun.

adele

Listening to Adele today, I detect three elements of singing: here is the melody: pretty, recognisable, anthemic, melancholic, the transport for the song; and here then are the words, the narrative, the story told, the because, the why, the I, the you; but listening, there is a third element nesting: a texture, a lubrication, a grain.

This grain is the substance that fills the gaps between words, between notes, between meanings. Like the droning bagpipes of earlier, there is a legato, a slurring of words, a substance, a glue beneath the fine surface of language, which provides it’s ‘other’ meaning. Is it the words which bring us back to these songs (I’ve made up my mind, don’t need to think it over, if I’m wrong, I am right); will we weep & morn, sing & swoon, vicariously ‘live’ out her story; is it the precociousness of melody, a preoccupation with the accepted rules of singing, the perfection of diction and breath, that draws us in, or is it, like the trembling prose of the book we cannot put down, yet dare not pick up because we rue the stories foreclosure, is it here that we hear something outside of language, is it here that we find the erotics of performance?

It has nothing to do with the representation of feelings or expression, but is the crest of a rolling wave of voluptuousness, where the melody really works at the language, not at what it says; a kind of ‘body’ of sound, we hear the tongue, the teeth, the glottis, the mucous membranes, the nose, the heart, the blood, the meat, the grit of singing; as the face of Garbo once plunged cinema audiences into deepest ecstasy, there is an ‘essence’ in the singing voice which is not communicated in the articulation of its songs.

It is this grain in Adele’s voice that reminds me of why I read my favourite texts, rejoice over passages in a newly found book, remember, re-read or recite aloud lines from poems and songs, and why I play loudly again and again the same tunes, twirling insanely about my flat because, although the words and the music repeat unchanged, my reading is forever reinvigorated, for at each new listening I rewrite the song, I hear it for the first time, I sing out the lyrics without knowing what they are, I drown in that wave of voluptuousness, because I don’t know what it is that I want to hear, I don’t know what it is that I want to read, I don’t know what it is that I want to write.

chant

Today at Green Park station a stocky-legged kilted enthusiast is playing the bagpipes. He wrestles with the plump tartan bladder as if fighting with a demon from whose lungs he wrings a filthy banshee wail. What musicality could be extracted from this straining attempt was immeasurable as the player’s fingers fumbled. But as the tuneless dirge continued, I thought I heard another tangled sound escaping from the bag, another voice. In ostentatious disregard of the attempt that fingers made to weld a melody, narrate the song, chant, I heard the pipe's legato drone. It occurred to me that however earnestly our musician played his pipe, however tightly he rang his tune, there was always this, the droning voice resisting all intention, and it reminded me of the uncontrollable flight taken by our text as it leaves the author on route to the reader, unmappable, irresponsible, free, and in this respect it thrilled me!