The Parody of Reversal

This is an age that doesn’t need a double since any individual is already two people by a simple act of inadvertence.  The peppery surface of an electronic screen.  Its sim doesn’t have to be real, it has only to be a world.  Obviously, we are talking about a cultural creation – reality.  Like the concept ‘normal’ reality’s concept doesn’t have a designated truly actual place … only an ‘approximation’.  A place that divides in two.  The more interesting simulations of ‘what is the original object’ – ? are those that somehow occupy a space of their own: don’t look real.  Just as a sand castle doesn’t resemble anything much but vague sand, with the interesting textures, as with rain’s patina, acheived within that … the thing itself standing as the sim’s inverse, or as turned inside out sim-wise like sand seen underneath (in reverse shadow) or as with the underneath top of a wave say or the lining of a coat which parodies the coat’s outside …  turning the lining into its mirror so there is another actual coat inside out: so what difference is there between the lining and the coat’s ‘real skin’ if that surface itself is the lining – in fact just like the icing that covers the cake with a pure and snow white white, eaten first?  Because once the food is eaten it becomes the skin.  The icing of that becomes the icing of me.  The movement of ice in all the jostling forms, the gut, the blood, the blook, all the animals of the slow organs in slow thought, squamous, a-squawk, the blue feathers of the starling, that are a-flutter inside me …

Ants Again

If prose is a line of ants then I can only write one ant at a time; moreover, they aren’t all following the same script.

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!”

Writing on

Most of my writing is form of place-holding.  A kind of ’something ought to go here’ gesture, so that I can remember – if vaguely – that I need to keep thinking about this.  You try out different things, often half-heartedly.  They are all place-holders, some better than others; some just bad, stupid; some near the mark but apparently far off.  A mere change of word, a reversal of punctuation, adding ‘-ing’ to ’hello’ or ‘a puts’ finds the path home, life is shaken into it the way a bird might have a dust bath.  Or I think of it as like a tailor cutting a suit sometimes.  You start with a bit of cloth (most of the cloths in my case are rags, cast-offs, bargains from a jumble sale, stuff discovered down at the Red Cross), you toss your cloth on your ironing board, iron it a bit, trim it up, hold it to the light to look at it squint-eyed, reverse it, invert it, think the better of it and toss it in a bin to be looked at later.  In the shadows.

… Later, you start to think on it seriously, you had forgotten it, this thing, so vaguely peculiar, you have thought of a new idea, if it is to be made into any sort of object then the time is now.  Perhaps a section of jacket, a collar.  A gusset.   This square of cambric might make a useful back pocket.  But it all takes effort, a deal of measuring and sewing and unpicking.  Buttons are the worst.  In the meantime, I need offer no apologies for the loose threads, the absence of a lining, the uncut seams, the generally uncouth appearance.  The scarecrow fluff.  It will be very smart in the end.  I hope.