The Details

People don’t believe what is in front of their noses - they don’t see the human condition in itself - because of an habituation to the idea that it isn’t unreasonable.  The evidence is overwhelming that something is wrong with the human condition (”Something here is absolutely wrong” - Iggy Pop) but our own circumstances conspire to make us ignore that.  We get comfortable.  Life swings along.  But what is really happening?  This question gets reduced to a question such as: Is NN (a politician) really doing the right thing in x case?  Is that tax claim fair?  Is my security system sufficient to deter thieves? Busyness and detail supplant reality.

Exercise (2)

the wave rows ashore

and rows out again

a wash of bubbles before

a trail of them in train

The Generation of Time

Our means to unmasking infinity is to generate property. 

The image is at once resonant and inert.

The presuppostion I am making is this …

We don’t ‘fit’ into the world.  We have no given space in it as a species.  This could be expressed by saying that there is no ecological niche for human beings.  We are not like other primates, or like birds, or whales, or mayflies or anything else that exists in the natural wilderness.  In this being so we have to invent ourselves out of the clay, so to speak.  So that in these terms human life can be argued to be a deficiency of awareness.  (What I am doing is relocating the argument.)

 …   The image I have is of reality, that it is as with one of those taxis where a woman’s skirt-clad legs extend beneath the window of the cab, inside the cabbie sitting oblivious.

Proper Trains

autumn, summer then spring

borrowed spaces 

places,

estates,

property

as in proper,

Gubbins Lane, Havering

What image is evoked by the description “a tall galoot”? Someone so described, is being described vaguely; what are they like, what is ‘galootish’ about them?  It is the same when something or other is talked about as a lot of “folderol”.  “Where did you park the car?”  “Over next to the gubbins folderol.”  What’s so funny about that?  The same too applies to the idea of a something or other.

Track 2

Summer then winter

autumn then spring

the train

the track

the back the outward the in

Exercise (1)

the cards are pushed over, the wave

moves back and forth on the tide

a black and green laddered cave

bubbling over the slide

and seethe of pebbles

whadyamacallit dammit

Uncertainty pulls the rug that like a spooked horse we run before. 

Compare Salter’s prose with Ford’s.  Linear certainty gives way to a discursive ‘yabber’ with words like woogle or folderol or the whadyamacallit dammit replacing exact sense.

 And yet whadayamacallit dammit can be exact too.

The certainty of the camera

Prose within prose.  Prose that has no origin, and no history, remote but potent like a cloud, that the world it renders doesn’t exist but in anycase never could. 

Flow My Tears the Policeman Said is like this. 

Like an abstract of an abstract.  

 He is watching television: 

camera cocksure dib my horn dib my card go in see up close the cross-grained texture of an eye lost in two far the air - fine hairs of the reticule cross point where to a look across the office black dot fields a line duck duck duck translated means: glancing at the Radio Times he looked across the office a sandwich in his hand, adjusted a tray of paperclips, straightened the post it note, facing away from the window.

Parasites

The parasite is the hammer and anvil of evolution, or that is my understanding of things.  We have been able to evolve through our adaptation to them.  The stomach digests food by its use of parasitic bacteria - by being home to parasites. 

Is a virus a kind of parasite?  Anyway, what interests me in this instance is the mind parasite.  If there is such a thing and if there is how we would go about finding out.  Of course, the suggestion may seem absurd, in so far as the mind is an imaginary animal - so to speak.  What am I talking about?  An imaginary parasite for an imaginary animal?  

However how else to explain the extremes of human vanity if we are not … polluted? - these extremes that infest every dimension of life, so that like phantom dirt, like imaginary mud no washing can cleanse one?   I think of the sound of laughter; uninflected by any idea of social status, where no aspiration, complex, hang up, or fear - or anything else - lurks, as opposed to say the ‘human’ aliens in They Live!,  whose ruse is revealed by dark glasses.  They don’t laugh at our jokes!