STILL FIRES

“No straight thing has ever been made out of the crooked timber of humanity.” – Kant.

“Surely we did not need this (to see an inscrutable sky so clearly) to consider God a base invention, a vile insinuation, an impolite proposition, an attempt-alas, successful-at overwhelming human consciences: those who persuade us otherwise are traitors or impostors.

Elsewhere, nature longs for skies busy with other things, carting clouds, for example. Here, the skies are clearly busy with suffocating nature. Here, it is clear that nature is suffocating. It remains cloistered beneath an inscrutable sky, tries pathetically to live. Urns, statues become its interpreters, its supplicants. But there is no answer: it's splendid.” – Francis Ponge, ‘La Rage de L’Expression’, Paris Review.

Ponge's is to attempt to scoop the particular from its nest as the abstract abstraction: to realise the ultimate evolution of the poet: render the Thing unto itself. Ponge's is a peculiar talent in his ability to deadbolt his words to the thing he’s describing: the words become the invisible-thin ‘filter’ through which we absorb the subject: attached like a dot-to-dot map, taking on the textures, feelings, smells, flavours, colours, everything of the things he writes about so that by the end Francis has written a still fire into life.

To wipe away the scrim of reality-as-thought (thought-as-substrate) to be able to knuckle into emotive shape the real underneath is Francis’ special talent. And we’re left with the beautiful thoughts and emotions evoked by heroic molluscs clinging to their stone-shelf, like Ponge’s words to their creators.

"Dear Lorca, I would like to make poems out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon that the reader could cut and squeeze-a real lemon like a newspaper in a collage is a real newspaper. I would like the moon in my poems to be a real moon, one which could suddenly be covered with a cloud that has nothing to do with the poem, a moon utterly independent of images." - Jack Spicer, After Lorca

THE SILENT FOOTAGE

"Just as any truly accurate representation of a particular geography can only exist on a scale of 1:1 (imagine the vast, rustling map of Burgundy, say, settling over it like a freshly-starched sheet!) so it is with all our abandoned histories, those ignoble lines of succession that end in neither triumph nor disaster, but merely plunge on into deeper and deeper obscurity; only in the infinite ghost-libraries of the imagination - their only possible analogue - can their ends be pursued, the dull and terrible facts finally authenticated." - Francois Aussemain, Pensees

Addenda - re: Tara Jane O'Neill:

"[W]e should bear in mind that the opposite of existence is not nonexistence, but insistence: that which does not exist, continues to insist, striving towards existence." - Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!

TLON, UQBAR, ORBIS TERTIUS

Remember what I said about Interpol?

“[A] very daring hypothesis. This happy conjecture affirmed that there is only one subject, that this indivisible subject is every being in the universe and that these beings are the organs and masks of divinity. X is Y and is Z. Schopenhaur… formulates a very similar doctrine in the first volume of Parerga und Paralipomena.” – Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, Labyrinths.

[There is also an extremely cryptic message embedded in that post which, if you bring a poet to the table, you should be able to decipher. But this isn't a game: so ignore it. It's just ego. Suffice to say, if I didn't say this I could be sued. But I was making a point, Don.]

A NAUGHTY BIT OF CRAP

“We’re all dilletantes now.” – Tom Ewing, ‘Download This’.

"She's like [xXx] but without all the bad qualities." - Indie fan, about dilletante xXx.

I think what I like about garage is its refusal to let me not be a dilettante. I’ve been extremely wary to the point of inaction about even starting listening to garage because there is so much of it and I don’t have any idea of where to enter and I’d have no chance of catching up, keeping up. Then I realised that this was me approaching it from a rock mindset (I hesitate to use the word “rockist” because I see it increasingly used and I’m not exactly sure what it means; some form of conservatism, completism, and centralism, I think) which means that I approached it wanting my appreciation of and collection of to be complete, my appreciation of and collection of to have a center to revolve around (a canon?) and a comprehensiveness that I don’t associate with garage 'thinking'.

I suppose such a shift in mindsets was occasioned by the emergence of dance (note: a genre of dance is Album Dance) but that has completely passed me by as of yet. Coming from indie leanings one of the main values it covets is integrity: integrity of soul / spirit / attitude, integrity of your worldview and integrity of your collection (to mean purity and comprehensivity). So what’s so enthralling about garage is that it forces me to be a dilettante: it is built into the very music. The way it is distributed, the white-label culture, its London-centricity, the keeping up with ‘the pirates’, everything, means that ‘integrity’ collapses as a tenable value. And it’s exciting.

(Side note: you might ask why hasn’t pop-centrism forced such a shift to dilettantism. Well in a way it has in that it’s meant I have dabbled a lot more but there is no necessity [physical or otherwise] built in.)

A PAIN IN THE HEAD

I never told you about the time I was in Tara Jane O’Neill’s kitchen:

“It’s not the doubt that lets you know you’re alive. It’s the constant and perpetual affirmation and re-affirmation or disavowal and re-disavowalling of such doubt that lets you know that. Your eyes, ears, mouth, nose, senses, fourth fifth sixth or seventh are all in thrall to doubt but not for doubt’s sake but for the ridding of the doubt that they crave. You live in a systematic opening and closing, re-opening and re-closing of doubt.

This all happens on an infinitesimal scale, everyday as you walk into the strip mall or wash your hair or tickle an infant you’re doubting and swallowing that doubt millisecond after millisecond. Say we draw it out into a larger scale or we magnify the smaller captions, you see that in the space where doubt reigns there’s no self-concept, you can’t sit comfortable with anything that you tell yourself or that the world tells you [a tinkle in her eye as she thinks about South Africa’s Truth & Reconciliation committee and their, admittedly multifarious, reasons for offering amnesty not punishment] – it’s only when that gap is closed can you sit 'comfortable'. Erase, re-wind, replay. Cup of tea or a Pain Killer?”