Life or something like it
1. I detest posing for photographs because I do not like to live a moment of my life as if in death.
2. The best cinema can awake, out of its death, life in the living.
3. That is, the world can seem laid fresh, instant, and novel, like an early evening’s descendent snow, but entire.
4. Interactions, the train ride home, paving stones, aware of everything like the whole world suddenly mapped onto a complaining nerve.
5. That won’t stop complaining.
6. And is brilliant.
7. An empty home is the analogue of a photograph.
8. The book on the table open at the page, the weathered lobster creel lending the kitchen authenticity, a hazard of lego pieces strewn across a brother’s floor.
9. All the elements of emptiness pull, in silent waiting for their referents (the reader, the judge, the builder), attempting to turn the lack inside out. Into ‘presence’.
10. Or the knowledge that referents do exist lends the emptiness no genius of its own, nothing but simple contingency.
11. Simple contingency.
12. The continuum isn’t real-fake but real-simple.
13. Rather, the continuum doesn’t need to be real-fake but can be real-simple.
14. The switch from real into simple is the same made from hypothesis into assumption.
15. Where questions firm up and slink away to become given answers.
16. Given answers and comfort.
17. The best cinema resets the simple, the quotidian, the permanent.
18. And all is real again.
19. All.
20. Or most.
21. I am an idealist.
22. And I do work very hard.
23. And I do take this all too seriously.
24. Because I care.
25. Woah. I said ‘less serious’, didn’t I?
26. And ‘less intense’.
27. Meep.
28. Has IP stopped sleeping with Bataille? If not then where are the soiled sheets, the half-remembered movements of the time instinct clashed with thought, the lines in the creases of his sentences, the anger, the damage, all the reckless nonsense of thinking, of thought? Has IP stopped sleeping with Bataille? No.
29. When I said I had an errant nerve after seeing some cinema. I wasn’t kidding.
30. Something stills the blood so the tick of raw animus (“the rage inside a dying head”) disappears for a second.
31. Once informed inner monologue with all its tics of prejudice and aesthetic, its leanings and overbearing doubts, its ‘seen’ and ‘had’, ‘been’ and ‘went’ - all of it, it all becomes outer dialogue where everything is negotiable and negotiating.
32. Re-defining.
33. The tenses here are important.
34. I hope I’m making sense.
35. I’m trying to make sense.
36. Orwell tells a singular anecdote of his time sniping during the Spanish Civil War: an enemy races along the length of a wall, clear in his sights and at the fatal moment George is unable to shoot him, his trousers hung loose ‘round his ankles.
37. Orwell was no idiot and even less a naif.
38. The mechanics of this moment, then, owe little to some notion of perceived humanity (an excess of eye white, (paradoxically) privacy as centripetal force, those shuffling feet) isolated in the weakness of the straggling soldier.
39. This is no simple angle of incidence analogy.
40. What is it then? Mercy? A glimpsed singularity? Gestalt?
41. I never liked Orwell either.
42. So many names, dropped.
43. “An empty home is the analogue of a photograph,” vs “in Photography I can never deny the thing has been there... the name of Photography’s noeme will therefore be: “That-has-been,” or again: the Intractable.”
44. An empty home without a “That-has-been” (i.e. a forever empty home, never a dwelling) is a house.
45. Do you believe in what Burnside calls “the beauty of things submerged”? And, therefore, the ‘loss’ in things newly found?
46. I really should stop reading. And writing.
47. Look at all these twatty aphorisms.
48. Consider apologies rendered.
49. These aren’t ‘truths’ or statements or assertions but (just) ‘brain-quakes’ or slips of the tongue or things that managed to escape when I was thinking out loud.
50. Just so you know.
51. Don’t take me seriously.
52. You’ll be in the majority.
53. With me.
54. Now let’s get more intense.
55. Woooooh!
56. Reading Barthes & Barthelme, it is now apparent to me what Paul Morley was buying when he mortgage his soul.
57. What a mortgage!
58. What sentences!
59. Woooooh!
