What The Matter Is

Procrastinating on Moday, looking out of the window:

This is one solution to a problem I can’t quite nail down. I’ve been imagining a lot of these solutions, and I’m hoping that if I collect up enough of them, I might get a better idea of what the actual problem might be.

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I propose we each carry a purse containing threads with small clips fastened at each end. One end of each thread would be attached to the inside of the purse, and the other would be clipped in passing to objects and people we expect might be relevant later on. Over time we would each amass tens of thousands of these clipped threads, both issuing from our purses and clipped to our person and personal effects by others.

Provided the threads are sufficiently long and robust and numerous, instead of speaking we could physically tug at the things we wish to denote and finally abandon language once and for all.

Admittedly communication would proceed painstakingly. There would be no grammar of course, and I should add that I disprefer the development of any standardized ‘tug order’ because it smacks of iconicity from which it’s only a short step to fully blown representational grammar and the end of all our extralinguistic efforts. Not least because of this constraint, it would take almost insurmountable imaginative leaps to express causal and temporal forms and abstract ideas and using only personally clipped concrete nouns. Moreover, interpersonal communication would depend on each interlocutor having happened to clip a thread to the very same instance of an object in such a way that a tug by one might be felt by the other. Such tugs would continually risk intercepting the threads of unrelated interlocutors any distance away as they pick through the thick webs of thread that would gradually engulf areas of the world populated by people and things within reach of thread. Because of the need to wade through networks of threads without snapping or dislodging any of them, it would be difficult to move even short distances at any speed, though even these slow movements would suffice to keep the web in continual movement.

Nevertheless I would think these obvious communicative drawbacks are far offset by the clear gain to be made by finally outmanoeuvring the grip of language upon on our order of reality.

NOTES: Any purse or bag will do provided it can be securely fastened to the body and carried about at all times. Clips like these are available inexpensively and in bulk, and their swivelling hooks facilitate movement in any direction from the clipped object. Dental floss is ideal for both its strength and its convenient dispenser, though nylon threads like these are longer and less costly.

In September I’m joining a group of artists and writers for a residency at The Pigeon Wing in London. The residency sets out “to consider what it means to ‘write live'” in the space.

Thinking about “writing live” has brought to mind a project I’d been thinking about early last year:

“We are planning to make a theme tune for ourselves. We are going to write a song and video aspects of our daily lives and edit them together into something snappy and indicative, then we will play it on a screen each morning as we wake up (it could work as an alarm clock) and last thing at night.

The beginning and end theme tunes will need to be subtly different, for instance the beginning tune will need to conclude with a fading chord so that it leads encouragingly into the opening scene. Since each opening scene will be generally similar – turning off the alarm clock, getting out of bed etc – those first moments might in time be assumed by the closing chord of the theme tune and fade into repetition, so our actions in real life gradually become part of the videotaped theme tune. Once that happens, perhaps eating breakfast will be sucked in to the theme tune too, and so on and so on. We wonder how far outwards it will stretch, and likewise for bedtime before the end theme tune begins.”

We haven’t got round to trying this out yet, but I’d like to attempt a variation of the idea at the Pigeon Wing. I’ll spend the first week grabbing video of whatever we each get up to in the space, and editing it into a video as described above. When it’s complete, I’ll ask all the resident artists and writers, including myself, to watch this video at the beginning and end of every working day.

Repeatedly setting each day’s work into the structure of an episode productively conflicts with the prospect of “writing live”.

At the moment I’m thinking about writing as a strict opposition to liveness (Peter Schwenger’s essay “Words and the Murder of the Thing”) and the theme tune might imply a “writing” of our residency that denies the liveness of anything we might do.

I imagine an uncomfortable ambiguity over the authorship of each day – is there a hidden director somewhere? Are we playing parts? Is everything we’re doing and writing planned in advance and rehearsed by our actors before we get here? (Who the hell are our actors?!)

Would this change if the video were a collaborative work? How would it change if the footage were taken surveillance-style and without anybody knowing, rather than with full consent and knowledge, and perhaps even posed?

Lots more to think about.

http://www.thepigeonwing.co.uk/

Imagine the trompe l’oeil covering the front door of Number 298 Park Road, North London. Typical of its genre, the painting exploits existing panelling on the door to lend shadow and weight to the form it depicts. The correlation of forms between the door and the painting is so exact that the painter succeeds with a single pot of gloss paint and a broad brush in creating the effect that the red door is white in colour. A neighbour likes the colour and paints his front door white, and the two look identical.

The other evening I watched a poet read from a book he’d written. The poem described a series of long walks around London and for poetic effect made connections between moments that had passed on these walks. There was poetry in the language and words got stuck to themselves and stopped.

On the train on the way home I looked out of the window at barbed wire and the late sunshine on a roof. It made me imagine a sentence about barbed wire and the late sunshine on a roof, and I regretted doubling the view onto itself. I wished the poet could have transmitted the walks without the poem, or the poem without the poetry or better still, had not transmitted the walks at all, not even to himself. I’d like him to have just walked, and even that by accident.

Likewise, to my right there is a pot of thyme. I have just tugged from the soil a dry strand of this thyme, and it came out cleanly and I put it down on the piece of paper by the window. It is very thin indeed. Its leaves are detailed to the hilt. It occupies space so close to me that its outline responds as I move.

I’d thought about taking a photograph or painting it or filming it, but it’s best as it is, just looked at. And yet here I am writing, and the writing is using up some of the thyme. I’m hoping the writing will redeem itself despite what it’s done to the thyme, most of which (I think, if my description’s been sufficiently brief) is still left on the paper. I hope it might redeem itself by doing something other than description. Things describe themselves best on their own. Language has other work to do.