Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts

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.

sospirando

When somebody loves you
Its no good unless he loves you - all the way


I recently asked myself how I got here, how I came to start this blog (I can hardly bring myself to press the keys and form the word without cringing). It all unfolded one evening in front of a tv show about, well, bloggers, some two or three in particular—you’ll know the ones I mean—and there I was, surveying their sites, sampling with head cocked to one side, like a robin listening for worms... then, peck, peck, looking for clues. What were they writing and why had they written?

Happy to be near you,
When you need someone to cheer you, all the way


And I realised that whilst they were pretending to write a diary (the usual stuff packed and pricked with plots) something else was intervening, something that the lonely diarist, wracked with neurosis, scratching at the fibres of his page smudged both by ink and tears, only hints at. In theses texts the writers voice was not stitched behind the charming narrator; here the writers voice did not form the deftly woven tableaux through which the interplay of character and plot were teased and tricked. Here we were asked to be interested in… ah… the writer himself. And it was thus I realised—like a bird looking up, listening to what we do not hear, hearing what we do not understand—that stabled before me were some of the hungriest egos of our time, and this is why I was cringing… earlier on, remember?

Taller than the tallest tree is
That’s how its got to feel
Deeper than the deep blue see is
That’s how deep it goes - if its real


Funny… that night, I drifted off quickly from those first blogs… there were links of course, and comments and all the trappings, the stepping-stones if you will, that nimbly guided me from one site to another. I got a little splashed along the way of course, but I found myself, well, found some stuff that maneuvered my spirits, kind of fucked me over in a way… the way the curve of your lips could rewrite history.

I pretended I had found a community of people with blood and emotions, a society condemned to live by their confessions alone, a clan of neurotic individuals for whom the publishing of these coughings-up was a massage to their egos as the analyst massages the id.

When somebody needs you
Its no good unless he needs you - all the way
Through the good or lean years
And for all the in between years - come what may


I was astonished by the naked hunger demonstrated by these texts. So disenchanted was I by their rapacious and unquenchable thirst for glory that I ran for cover more quickly than I had arrived. Yet cowering—like mole, in his snowy tree-stump in the wild wood, longing for his dear friend ratty-—I heard a sigh, the sound that comes from a body expressing the emotion of absence. It was me… as if each of my breaths, being incomplete, sought to mingle with the other. I was, sadly, unglued, drying, yellowing, shrivelling. It had only been fifteen hours and seventeen days since I took my blog away, I’d been out all night and slept all day, since I took my blog away. And unlike the seventeen-year periodic cicada, it had taken me only seventeen days to dissolve into amorous absence.

Who knows where the road will lead us
Only a fool would say
But if you’ll let me love you
Its for sure I’m gonna love you - all the way, all the way


Bring your lips to mine, so that out of my mouth my soul may pass into yours.

getting there

Whilst once again wondering what to write, where to begin, how it will end, where occurs the middle by which I may commence—as it were—the tormented countdown to some kind of conclusion; in what direction I will launch my address, by which I suppose I mean, who will be listening—yes, yes, we have briefly squinted at these questions before, dwelt several times on their impact, in fact I have already perhaps tired you out with them—it occurs to me that writing is like travelling, a journey without end where plots pass like moving landscapes, slipping predictably from this comma, to this ellipsis…

Scenes zip by relentlessly like the back-end of towns: backyards littered with broken swings, bicycles tossed to the ground, thrashing threads of strung out washing and sheds surveyed from the window of a train. Against the rhythmic clatter of train wheels on tracks, travelling assumes a kind of suspended disbelief, neither arriving nor leaving, crying or laughing, whispering or screaming; vista, town, ocean and mountain pass like plots packed with characters waiting to be cast, unfolding like a thousand stories waiting to be told. I love this no-where-ness of transit.

This getting-there of travel is a kind of floatation—the suspension of arrival—and the pleasure is the pleasure of reading not terrorised by foreclosure. Getting-there is so pricked with excited restlessness, like the book one cannot bare to finish, like the narrative, so ensnaring that one has to look up, stop reading, in order to release the delicious pleasure contained within the words so sweetly stitched. So entangling can be its spell that one despairs of the release wrapped up in the last sentence, afraid of the abandonment and the loneliness after the last word is cast, no further page to turn, but the cover left to close.


The suspended fictional world cruises us, then seduces us so completely, in so brutal yet enchanting a manner, that to finish is like arriving, like tumbling—at our destination—from it’s beguiling net, only to dream of travelling-on once more, wistfully into the night, the patina of the city’s dancing lamp-light calling us to suspend once again, and float away to that other place, away to Never-Never land, to The Wild Wood, to the Emerald City, without the muting, dulling anticipation, without the arrest that foreclosure affords.

Mummy, are we there yet?
Mummy, can you tell me a story?
Mummy, can you read it again?
Mummy, I don’t want it to finish.

And as the various combinations of words and characters in our favourite plots never fails to give pleasure so long as they endure, so their repeated telling only reassures and cocoons us, casts its inspiriting world of images, and like our journey, it’s all about the getting there not the arriving. It’s about the writer’s ego-centric pleasure in the bric-a-brac of telling. We don’t mind how often the tale is told, just keep on telling it.

And like the authors of our favourite blogs, perhaps it is not the what they’re telling us that we listen to, but how they get there, the chosen mechanism of their transport, the grain of their voice.

We love getting there; it’s just that we don’t know where we’re going yet.

when

And so once again dear reader I turn from something to almost nothing as I consider this, my address to you, and in doing so realise that in addition to not knowing the 'what' and the 'why' of writing, the thing that now plays heavily upon my thoughts is its 'when'. I don't know 'when' to write. I don't know when you are ready, you don't say, because of course you don't ask me to write. It is my choice to decide upon the right time, the time that you are ready to read. I don't want to display an over zealous adolescence, an ever ready urge to provide a relentless prattling discourse upon nothing-in-particular, pumping out the words with scant disregard to their piquancy, to the 'spice' of their meaning, the delicacy of their impact upon you, casual reader. But, like others I imagine, I want to seem spontaneous; I wish to avoid the laboured delivery of one merely performing a scheduled function, obliging his diary with pedestrian punctuality.

I know a little of these fecundities, as I am myself a reader and I glean a certain pleasure from observing the anticipated and rhythmic 'clocking' of my newsreader, the invigorating bubbling-up to the surface of fresh feeds, like oxygen, as they are polled and logged. I measure my reading list and hence my favorite writers by this reassuring pulse of publication. The palpitations of the site which suddenly, after slumbering silence, throws up six new feeds, clocking up unread entries arrhythmically, engenders a kind of neurosis of reading - what is the author trying to say in this hiccupping publication, what literary suspension needs to be applied to his or her bumpy off-piste course? I look at the list of my favourite sites and take delight in the ping-ponging of names from unreliable to beautiful from cheerful to scandal from pandemian to humdrum from six words to ... as feeds flicker and flash, fizz and futz, one here, one there, like the half-broken neons flickering above the neo-decrepit streets of 2019 Los Angeles in Bladerunner. And in observing this flickering, this rhythmical blossoming, I recognise the flicker of meaning contained in these texts. That not only do my favourite writers deliver their messages, craft from language - credibly, politely, poetically, drearily, intolerably, uncertainly - like potters at the wheel forming an elegant vase from a soggy spinning mass of clay, not only do they 'handle' language, but their writing oscillates and trembles with a meaning not conjured up by the author at the writing stage, but which is bound up in the frequency it's publication.

As I gloss over this text or that, I consider the story told by this 'when' of writing. Is the writer deploying a kind of suave authorial nonchalance by measuring and staggering the release of his babblings, and does this apply a certain sexy sheen to their reading, like the final addition of butter to a sauce? Or, does the author not care-a-less about such scheduling, throwing out his texts at random, unhindered by punctiliousness, like burps and farts released at will. And like the unhindered expulsion of these burps and farts, what are we to learn of his avoidance of good manners? Like an automatic golf trainer, firing balls at a predetermined interval, does measured publication remove the flamboyance to be found in unpredictability, remove the skill exercised in reading? Is the newsreader then no different to the lover - always listening for the phone (he has not called because he is stuck on the tube, his battery is low), always alert for the postman's footsteps (he has not replied perhaps because he did not receive my letter), like the lover who checks his mobile because he did not hear an alert (perhaps it is MY battery that's flat, perhaps I did not here the tone because I was in the loo, perhaps I inadvertently set it to silent, perhaps he did not receive my text - perhaps I should resend, perhaps I missed his call because I was talking with another). Like the writer of an earlier post who does not know his reader, this lover does not know his loved, guesses at his movements, tries to trace upon his eyelids the shadows of his dreams, tries to outwit his next and every move, anticipating and seeking out every sign of that love. And like our lover, the writer seeks the same response. Like our lover - ever questioning, ever demanding, too often building the verbal discourse of his plight, trying to earn sympathies, and in doing so, alienating himself from the loved object - so the writer, begs the sympathies of his reader.

How often is too much, what is not enough, and when will we learn?
And in anticipation, how soon is now?

jouissance

And so once again I turn my attention from almost anything to almost nothing and start to write, but write what? It occurs to me that there is a stock of themes here from which I may draw my scripts trajectory, templates if you will, with plots and characters waiting to be directed and named. Here is the mother of all templates of course, the journal. If this is blogging then ostensibly it’s in the fashion of a journal, but with what protagonists and plots will I spin my script, provide my hook? What images, gestures or encounters plucked from the bottomless pit of daily life can I assume robust enough for you, docile reader, to resonate with, be ravished by, dip into, share? But of course you don't know me, perhaps I have provided no clues. Were we old friends perhaps you would be hugging your ribs anticipating a script of almost intolerable comedy, asking yourself on this as on other similar occasions, how you will cope with the gut-wrenching pain of uncontrollable laughter in the face of such comic torment. You might say to yourself, oh, that one, he is as funny as ever, he makes me roar. But you don’t. You know nothing of me, to be reduced to tears by my tragic prattlings, saying to yourself, oh that one, he's so reflective, he always trawls my secret depths with his knowing, searching prose. Oh, that is so him, he's so wan. Alas, these longed for warm recognitions, anticipations, or responses, do not form the texture of my unfettered mutterings.

The very fact of my writing, of my searching out and locating this space for text, for wringing out my jitterings before you, rustles-up an anxiety in me of a prolific response: who does he think he is, writing these things here, in this space? This place of all places which we baptized with our words, this place where we were just getting comfortable when he trolled along, poking his words around in our eeks, our familiar things twinkling reassuringly in the half-light. Really! Putting his words here, words which trip us up, distract us, as we tread our path through the deep dark wood. His words cause us to veer from the path. What does he want to tell us and more to the point, why does he want to tell us? Why has he waited this long and why has he chosen this as the time for his irritating outburst?

And of course, it seems, after all my blatherings, my lexical coughings and farts, it seems that I am capable of telling you nothing. I seem to spin a fabric, a whispery web of something-but-nothing, barely knitted together. But nothing holds still for long enough. Everything seems to slide. Slippage seems to be my thing then, glissage, as the French would say.

Perhaps it turns out that I haven’t actually got anything to say at all. I don’t have a story to tell you. No, there is no catalogue of links waiting to be posted echoing my hobbies, no mappings, no postings, no photo-sets story-boarding my weekend reveries. Here you will not find me unfolding lewd sketches of tender moonlit entanglements under the disused signal boxes of London's over-ground railways stations. You will not find my drawn-out tales of dining experiences with friends and colleagues cataloging the significant restaurant openings of 2007. You will not find mindless aphorisms or pendulous dragging narratives detailing the inconsequential meandering thoughts that plague us all when sleazing in the dark zone. And you will certainly not find the churlish comic-tragic posturing doused with rhyming couplets and folksy popular songs so overused by the amateur auteur.

And so you don't know me at all. And why would you want to bother?

And so once again I turn my attention from almost anything to almost nothing and I start to write. Write for who? It occurs to me that there is a stock of basic readers here for whom I may draw my scripts trajectory, blank canvases if you will, waiting to be directed and named. Thus in order to connect, in order to unfurl this text (we've already observed it forming a trajectory in an earlier passage) I must address it, and I address it to you. Taking refuge in the reassuring knowledge that we must have met, I write this to you, I write this for you, for in order to write, I must have already invented you. Your charms and foibles, your fay approach to reading, glossing the text, grasping a phrase here, a word there, looking up, your head cocked to one side, staring out to space. I do not expect that your reading should be devotional; it is this cut-up reading that excites me. Ah yes, you are looking down again, you are reading on some more, good. Sliding, slipping, skidding through the words, lovely!

What can it matter how much you take in, what you sieve out, what remains? For without you, I am nothing.
Thank God I found you.
I think I love you.