Cash on the barrelhead

An impractical ’something’: it haunts the human imagination like wildfire: it is certainly impractical; nothing value-based works very well; and everything, all, is like nothing.

A Mirror

A man, looking in the mirror, sees his face changing; the result: he doesn’t know who he is, who is the stranger with thick black hair when the day before his hair was ginger; he had a moustache; a scar on his right cheek.  Now that he looks at himself those things have disappeared; looking back at him, the lined, yellowed ancient: unchanged: no he remembers: it is the same face that he saw, the eyes unbroken grey blue.

Janus-faced I know from which direction the enemy will come.

The pinpoint attention that concentratedly wanders; that wonders by wandering … signs itself off with a flourish.

In the tank

This issue: the act of “Looking at an object in a tank full of black ink”: I have no idea what the object is.  Of what to measure it against.   Even if it is there at all.  The only thing I see is the reflection present in the black wafer of glass – the icy node of my looking face.  There it is, me, my face.  So, this thing, is that the object in the tank in its essence?  Only me. 

New Clothes

Everything changes - .  Looks the same.  Old things come back and I don’t know my own ignorance – at all.  And keep tripping over it.  The grass wires at each step snag my toes – a water of string – the proposition of knowing one’s ignorance is past grasping.  Suppose a glass tank filled with water in which the unknown objects of life show up; consider: they are being presented by an invisible hand.  This is the stuff that any object is in – and if it is just water it is in – then I can see this object; it is visible to me even if I don’t know what it is, even if its name or what it is for, is blank.  But change the media, for it is not the same for an object in a tank filled with ink; for in this case all I can see is the ink.  I have no idea what I am looking at – nothing translates.  Call it a stone or a candle; it is all one.  So that in such a case the circumstance by which a thing is known – an ignorance – excludes the rational mind as a matter of category; and so if that condition of ignorance operates as an invitation to act, it remains that the rational mind isn’t there.  Similarly, whether I stay the same or change in shape, in age, in demeanour, in each case the difference isn’t obvious to me.  Perhaps I have changed?  Perhaps my shape has changed?  My face?  I feel like one of those bowling pins: solid but easily knocked over.  Solid, white and made of an expensive material: an ignorant pin.  If you had asked me my shape ten years ago, it would have been slice-of-cake.  The thin end at the top.  Something has changed.  But I detect nothing actual.  It all looks the same – me; the world.  When I look in the mirror I tell myself (and I truly mean it too) I have always thus seemed.  Not changed.  There it is, it is the same face.  Me.  In the world.  But still old things – .

“Angry – happy – I am what I am.”  “Sad, cheerful - it’s me!”

Postmodern Light Switches

A postmodern light switch, typically a ‘rocker’ switch, is a light switch that doesn’t have a specific click for off and on; instead the switch position is unreadable or ambiguous.  Even the act of looking at the switch yields no information.  On or off? – woopsy woops.  Suppose in the dark I want to turn the light on.  I press it but nothing happens.  Mm, maybe it’s broken?  I press it using the other half but still nothing.  Perhaps there is a two second delay; but in my impatience I have already opposite pressed again and now remain doubly uncertain – the situation continues and so perhaps it is broken?  Perhaps I didn’t wait long enough?  But which way didn’t I wait long enough, was it the first time when I pressed it up; or was it in fact the second, the time when I pressed it down without waiting sufficiently for the system to connect with itself?  After about five attempts at this, finally the light is on – on but I remain uncertain as to which action effected this result.  Muttering frustratedly to myself I wander off into the room and leave it all be.  Clearly, what we have is a light switch for which the function of turning the light off and on is too simple.  All that is clear is that things are not obvious; there is no old-world bi-polar light and dark diffusion; where on is on. 

Swimmers

A city: driving at its centre, which was not a centre at all but an intersection through green lights, it occured to me that cars originate from worlds that are clearly imaginary and so form a planet that fails to be fully real, however familiar the objects from which it stems seem, because, well, imaginary is what imaginary wants.  It was as if all this was happening in a closed-but-open space, breathable but also somewhere one could drown like in a swimming pool; or in some sort of friction free computer game 3D landscape.  Imagine this, the swimming pool – it is one of the old fashioned, sixties sort, it has windows cut into its sides to create a below water-level show.  Bastard did you see that didn’t signal.  Looking through the glass shield headless bodies suspended impossibly, bobble, feet kicking in movement; and then after a long slow bounce up then down a complete swimmer, then another: she dived in or jumped so that exploding down, and holding her nose, a line of bubbles behind follows past – gets wavering cannonballs of empty air wobbling on, in silence’s warm vacuum.  Like a street light caught in the glass of a car’s back slope, the yellowish slop of the lamp a lozenge, a vitrescent blob sliding into an oblivion the lights stop and start and the numberless cars zip through blank of anything, the swimmers never fully emerging; for they are never truly present; or if present but then only for a moment.