Spurious

Infinite Audit Culture

W. is overwhelmed by work, he says. Broken by it, by the prospect of it. Administration! I love it, of course. I'm at it all day in my office. How do I even begin?, W. wonders. How can I make a start when the task itself is so immense?

I must not be able to see the whole thing, W. says. The big picture is closed to me. Otherwise, how could I go on? How could I persist from dayto day?

W., by comparison, is a seer, he says. He's seen too much! He knows where it's heading! He's seen through the day to the night, and to the night of all nights.

He sees it in his mind's eye, W. says. I pause from my ceaseless administrative work, look up for a moment ... What am I thinking about? What thought's struck me? But he knows I'm only full of administrative anxieties, and my pause is only a slackening of the same relentless movement.

And what of him, when he looks up from his administrative labours? What does he see? Of what is he dreaming? Of a single thought from which something might begin, he says. Of a single thought that might justify his existence.

Non Serviam

The gods to whom we sacrifice are themselves sacrifice, tears wept to the point of dying.

Bataille's the only Western philosopher to really understand sacrifice, haven't I told W. that? His work a kind of touchstone to me.

Poetry is the only sacrifice whose fire we can maintain, renew: W. read that in my notebook. But what does the poet sacrifice? That of which the poet would speak, perhaps - the world, in its living immediacy. The real world is substituted by an ideal one; the world rises anew on the page.

But then poetry depends upon more than signification. Isn't it the weight of language - its rhythms, its sonorities - which are the poet's chance?

What does the poet sacrifice? A second answer: the dream that language would be merely the outward garment of thought. Poetry rebels against the instrumental notion of language, its enslavement to the order of signification. Non serviam: that's the poet's motto, Bataille said. 

Heidegger says somewhere when we walk through a forest we walk through the word forest. The Bataillean poet, as she walks, awakens a conflagration in the ideal trees. The forest is burning – not the real forest, with its shade and its clearings: it is the word forest that is on fire. But the fire spreads from the the page of the poem to every page in every book ...

The poem, then, is akin to a sacrificial fire. The heaviness of language is the poet's fuel. Bataille's poem is on fire. It is not the torch that would illumine the night, but the night itself that burns. And the poet? The salamander in the flames. The one who lives from her death, her continual dying. And in the place of the poet (occupying her place), the reader burns in turn.

What happens when I write about him?, W. says. What, when I fill the blog with my nonsense? Isn't it enough that I've ruined his real life? Why do I want to ruin his ideal one, too?

The gods to whom we sacrifice are themselves sacrifice, tears wept to the point of dying.

Bataille's the only Western philosopher to really understand sacrifice, haven't I told W. that? His work a kind of touchstone to me.

Poetry is the only sacrifice whose fire we can maintain, renew: W. read that in my notebook. But what does the poet sacrifice? That of which the poet would speak, perhaps - the world, in its living immediacy. The real world is substituted by an ideal one; the world rises anew on the page.

But then poetry depends upon more than signification. Isn't it the weight of language - its rhythms, its sonorities - which are the poet's chance?

What does the poet sacrifice? A second answer: the dream that language would be merely the outward garment of thought. Poetry rebels against the instrumental notion of language, its enslavement to the order of signification. Non serviam: that's the poet's motto, Bataille said. 

Heidegger says somewhere when we walk through a forest we walk through the word forest. The Bataillean poet, as she walks, awakens a conflagration in the ideal trees. The forest is burning – not the real forest, with its shade and its clearings: it is the word forest that is on fire. But the fire spreads from the the page of the poem to every page in every book ...

The poem, then, is akin to a sacrificial fire. The heaviness of language is the poet's fuel. Bataille's poem is on fire. It is not the torch that would illumine the night, but the night itself that burns. And the poet? The salamander in the flames. The one who lives from her death, her continual dying. And in the place of the poet (occupying her place), the reader burns in turn.

What happens when I write about him?, W. says. What, when I fill the blog with my nonsense? Isn't it enough that I've ruined his real life? Why do I want to ruin his ideal one, too?

Thinker-Friends

When did it begin, W.'s exalted view of friendship? When did he receive his great vision of comradeship? At his grandmother's caravan park, he says, as a child. He made friends there. - 'Working class friends, like you', he says. 'Except unlike you they had a sense of loyalty'. They wouldn't betray him!

That was the fundamental rule: there was no betrayal. If one fell, when chased by the police, they would stop and carry him. If one was accused, the others would take the blame, each of them, in his place. It was like Spartacus, W. says. The cadre was what was important. The team. And hasn't that been what's he's sought ever since?

If there were a few more of us ..., W. says. A few more, living close to us, helping one another think. Helping us, even us. If I lived closer, W. says, instead of four hundred miles away, that would be something. We're islands, he says. We're stranded at the opposite ends of the country.

He dreams, like Phaedrus, of an army of thinker-friends. He dreams of a thought-army, a thought-swarm, who would storm the philosophical Houses of Parliament. He dreams of Tartars from the philosophical steppes, thought-barbarians, thought-outsiders. What distances would shine in their eyes!

A Scholar of the Coast

Stonehouse. It's a rough part of Plymouth, W. admits, but he's happy there. - 'You should always live among the poor', he says. We thread through the refugees who gather at the end of the road. They're always standing about outside, the refugees, the sun on their faces, W. says. He likes that. They're men of the street, as he is. But where are their womenfolk? Where do they live? It's a mystery to him, W. says.

We're heading to the sea. That's what Plymouth means to him, essentially, W. says, proximity to the sea. He has to see it!, W. says. He has to be near it! It's as essential as oxygen for him. He is a scholar of the coast, W. says, which means he's bound to end up living inland, far inland, when he loses his job. He's a scholar of fresh air, which means he'll end up somewhere underground and fetid, just like me, W. says.

On the road by the Hoe, the council have stuck little metal pillars into the road, with the names of famous residents written on them. What traces will we leave? What will be our immortality?

We pay to enter the lighthouse, and ascend its winding staircase. It was moved from the breakwater, the lighthouse, W. says when we reach the top. It's only ornamental now, with its red and white stripes. The real lighthouse is much further out to sea. We squint over the waves. The horizon is only ever three miles away, W. tells me. It's not as far as you think.  

W. takes me to his favourite cafe, to see if we can find the young Pole who used to serve us. He wants me to have a romantic interest, W. says. He wants to see me stutter and fumble. He wants to see me pucker my lips for a kiss. But she isn't there, and he has to listen to my caffeine theories instead, as he sips his cappuccino.

'You'll have to document all this', W. says as we walk through the shopping arcades. 'You need to document my Plymouth years'. W. takes me on a pointing tour of his favourite buildings.

I take photos of him pointing to particular architectural features he admires. He points to the brown facade of the new arts and community building. He points to the decrepit Palace Theatre. He tells me again how the old city was razed to the ground by the Luftwaffe, and how it was rebuilt in the 50s, according to the Abercrombie Plan.

I take a picture of him pointing directly up into the sky, from where the Luftwaffe came, and then, standing on a bench, pointing directly at the earth, where they deposited their bombs. I ask a passerby to take a photo of W. pointing at me, and of me pointing at him, and, finally, of W. and I pointing at one another.

The Temple of Scholarship

I take photos to document W.'s house. I photograph the wide entrance hall and the stairs to the next floor. I photograph the ground floor living room, with its internal shutters over the windows and its marble fireplace. I photograph the CDs lined up alphabetically on the shelf, and the pile of CDs without covers by the ghetto blaster.

I photograph full ashtrays and discarded Emmenthal packets. I photograph the great kitchen where sometimes we dance, sliding on our socks, and the tiny toilet on the ground floor, with pictures of W. and Sal's friends. I always ask why there isn't a picture of me there, but they never reply.

Upstairs, I document the great living room in a series of photos which, laid edge to edge, would give the whole panorama: the wide floorboards and the high old skirting board. The high windows, newly restored. The king sized fireplace ...

It's here we come to listen to Jandek, W. and I. It's here, late at night, that I make him listen in silence to Khartoum and Khartoum Variations. W. finds Jandek very disturbing, and needs me in the room to listen to it with him. Sal never stays for Jandek. - 'I hate fucking Jandek', she says. 'Don't play him while I'm in the house', she says.

I document the great bathroom, too - the greatest of bathrooms, we're all agreed. The lion-footed bath on a raised plinth. The generosity of the airing cupboard, with its many towels. The copies of Uncut by the toilet. The stained glass window.

It's indescribably horrifying to W., the thought of leaving his house. But he'll have to leave it, he's knows that. They'll sack him. They'll drive him out of his city.

Up another flight to the top floor, and the holy of holies: W.'s office. His bookshelves - not too many, since W. gives away most of his books ('I don't hoard them, like you', he says), but all the essentials. His Hebrew dictionary. His volumes of Cohen. His row of Rosenzweigs.

This is the room where I sleep when I stay. W. folds out the sofabed and dresses it. He draws the curtains and makes it look homely. He has to fumigate the room after I live, he says. It has to be re-consecrated, his temple of scholarship. How does he do that? He opens a volume of Cohen, W. says, and says my name backwards three times.

Then, finally, W. and Sal's room, calm, generous and large windowed. This is where he recovers from his days of scholarship, W. says. It's where he wakes up, before dawn, ready for his studies.

'Compare this house to your flat', W. says. 'What does it make your feel?' I'm a failure, W. says, but then so's he. These are his last days in his house, he knows it. His last days ... he feels it in the air, as animals sense a storm. It's building up out there, W. says, it's massing, like the stormclouds over Plymouth Sound.

They'll turn him from his house, and from the temple of his scholarship. He'll have to wander the streets like a rat. - 'They'll turn us all out', W. says, 'even you'. I'll have to stagger out from my pit. They'll prise me out like a grub, W. says. They'll put out my eyes with sticks, just as they'll deafen him with sticks.   

Buried Alive

Sal is always moved by my response to dinner. A cooked meal! I'm always amazed. A whole chicken, steaming on the table! I become quite delirious. I can barely contain my excitement. It's as if I'd never eaten before. She can only imagine what kind of life I lead.

She refuses to visit my flat, of course. It's too squalid. And there's rubble in the shower. How do I wash? Do I wash? And there's no food, of course. Nothing. I can't have food in my house, I've told them, because I eat it all. I binge. I stuff myself. I make myself ill almost immediately. So there's no food.

Then, too, I've no fridge, and nowhere to store food. There's no electricity in the kitchen, and besides, it's dismantled, ready for another round of damp-proofing. The walls are so wet! it's like touching the skin of a frog. It's clammy.

Sal can imagine a terrible plague spreading from the flat. A new kind of illness, which travels by damp spores. And the flat's so dark! It's like being buried underground, staying at the flat, she says. It's like being buried alive. And you haven't told her about the rats yet, W. says.

... Bresson thought of 'performance' as something the entire film was doing, not just the 'actors' in it. The actor is one instrument, along with framing, lighting, editing, and sound, and it is usually these elements that displace the most dramatic 'actorly' scenes. In place of facial expressions of tension and rage, for example, we see falling objects, toppling tables, a skimmer clattering across the floor, impeccably shot and cut, and piercing the sonic compusre of the moment. We 'hear' and 'see' the emotion reverberating through space, often without the agent that sparked it.

One remembers a Bresson film not for a performance but for the accumulated effect of the world created. This is beyond a theory of acting.

The word scene, tied to the narrative film tradition since Griffith, the one Bresson labels 'cinema', is a component of dramatic structure of the rising and falling action type. Scenes crystallise tensions in the story, bring emotions to the surface, and move toward a climax. They excel in expressive and expository dialogue and the clashing of conflicting wills. Acting is the primary vehicle of scenes ...

... whereas a scene has a certain settling-in quality in which actors move about and speak freely as if the camera did not exist and the word cut were not an imminent threat, a sequence in almost any Bresson film after 1950 minimises or dispenses with acting and expansive dialogue, neutralises features essential to the dramatic thrust of a scene, and shifts the burden of carrying tensions, conflicts, and emotions to the cinematographic register: to framing, editing, and, even more tellingly, to off screen space and sound.

... The less a film is broken down into scenes, the more momentum it is capable of building and the more inexorable seems its trajectory.

from Tony Pipolo's Robert Bresson: A Passion For Film

Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.

Geoff Dyer, advice on how to write.

Bubbles of Blood

'Have we been good?, W. asks me. 'Have we led good lives?' Ah, but it's too late now. We've been struck, left for dead. Struck, knocked over, and our assailant zoomed away. We wander in the wake, dazed, white-faced. What happened? Who did this to us? But we have no idea. We're out of ideas, and dying of internal injuries, our insides pooling with blood ...

Our last words: is it time for them? Last words, but it's only bubbles of blood that speak; only blood tricking from the corners of our mouths.

The Reality of My Situation

Where death is, you are not, says Epicetus. Where I am, I should not be, that's the truth of it, W. says. Do I understand, really understand, the reality of my situation?, W. says. Of course not; it would be quite impossible. I'm not really aware of myself, says W., which is my saving grace. Because if I was ...

It's enough that W. knows. It's enough that he's aware of the reality of my situation. He tells other people about it, but they scarcely believe him. They have to blot it out. Screen memories replace real ones. When he tells them about me, about the reality of my situation, they recall only owls with spread wings swooping through the night.