Relocating the Argument

It is no good where we are.  Not at all.   The argument needs relocating.  Just a few blades of grass survive, if that.  Sticking out of the cracks between the broken paving. 

Cake not Water

In The Passages of Joy the poet Thom Gunn writes about self-expression in a paradoxical way; in what amounts to a rare moment of self-revelation, he writes against it, seeing it as a form of disease.  The class he is taking have been writing poems about their lives. These concern such fraught subjects as Mum’s suicide, the Dad being a notable alcoholic, filial troubles, an endless catalogue of disasters, black moods, depressions and whatnot.  Their main life experiences stem from such stuff seemingly.  Afterwards left to his own devices he finds himself compelled to visit an art museum (I am vague on details); and realises that he is searching for something, something specific, the counterbalance - a madonna and child in a medieval painting.  Formalised, stylised, blank of expression.  Impersonal.  Impersonal.  That is the key.   It is like a drink of water after too much cake.  A draught of something normal, real after self-indulgence. (Much of my own writing falls into that category: cake not water.)

Representation

… Suppose a phone text face image. Perhaps the recipient sees the texter.  But, categorically, seeing what?  A stand-in for the face; or is it the face?  To what extent is the face represented – and to what extent is it the face – ?  Is there anything to argue what we must say - ? The temptation to assert the obvious must be resisted; as though some sort of fact were added by: “But I don’t actually mistake it for my friend!”   As though that clarified the subject under discussion.   It is a confusion to think that there can be such a clarification – when this isn’t being thought anyway.  (“I didn’t think it, actually, to be my friend’s face!”) Here I want to say: But it is it – categorically! For even if the word red “doesn’t actually seem red”, still I can find myself saying in some instance that an apple is red. It is not that the word “red” stands for red, but in the act of saying it, yet it is red in so far as that is its meaning.  The mask is the thing itself.

A mask, Wuthering Heights

A mask is like a still from a film, like a frame from a comic strip.  A moment.  A guessable quantity, implied, transparent.  As with the masks of tragedy and comedy.  An umbrella just as the sun is breaking out - suppose that a mask.  Wuthering Heights‘ story seems to come from nothing real. And it seems too commonplace, also, but this insipidity of manner ends in the strangeness of a vanishing … To read the novel is to find oneself unexpectedly haunted by a power that defeats logic. 

A Childhood Idyll

Novels are house bound phenomena. They express a species of exile where our lives are either in the process of becoming, or have wholly become, urbanised; a kind of mourning. A grief, like one of those elongated faces you see on painted African masks; for a loss that cannot be rectified: whatever the ostensible subject matter the racial memory that is its spring is the vanished pastoral.  The ancient, ancestral powerhouse is our homelessness.

In the idiom of self-reflection

The critique of the idea of politics amounts to a critique of the idea that politics is self-reflection by other means.  To look out at the world is to see only oneself reflected in it.  To be interested in the world is to be interested only in what there is in it that will serve one’s interests.  In these terms we live in a culture of self-deception in the supposition that things are ever otherwise.  If things are ever otherwise those exceptions remain invisible, selfishly; for self-interest cannot account for them.   So is one homeless.