picture book 1: a clod and a pebble

 TELEGIN.  My wife ran away with a lover on the day after our wedding, because my exterior was unprepossessing. I have never failed in my duty since then. I love her and am true to her to this day. I help her all I can and have given my fortune to educate the daughter of herself and her lover. I have forfeited my happiness, but I have kept my pride. And she? Her youth has fled, her beauty has faded according to the laws of nature, and her lover is dead. What has she kept?

But then, what is it that we have kept? This ‘what is kept?’ is the question set by the tragicomic Telegin and it is the question that our story looks to answer. Telegin, or Waffles as he is affectionately, or contemptuously called, asks what remains of us as time grinds on. Of course, we can name something, or a list of things, we can feel justified and prideful in having kept not just a flame, or even the flame but this flame, we have kept this flame, which is us and the object, and the particularity of that is really something. But what of it, whatever it is, have we retained? What have we continued? What of it will we never let go? What is it in such an object that invokes the pathos of our loyalty? For what shard of our past do we play faithful retainer? And what shall we say at our end is this remnant, or shadow, or relic, or ruin that we have carried forward into today that we might still know ourselves as committed? And the answer might have been, and we might have declared it so, why, it is Bartley, or it is Miss Havisham, or it is the whiskey priest, but today it just happens to be the He of Kafka. It is Kafka’s He that we decide is playing netsuke or prayer bead, or synecdoche, deep within our pocket. Let’s say it is Kafka’s He that we have kept. We can feel justified in claiming the He of Kafka as ours. It’s this He that we reach for and fall back onto as something, something worthwhile, something that is left to us in spite of everything. They’ll never take that away from me. Then, let’s transpose him, the He of Kafka, from the register of aphorism to that of fable. Then, let’s set him in motion. And let him be released into the field that He should work upon his selion. And He has worked there. It is his work. Then, it’s like this, He has turned over the earth, double digging a barrow of dung to the depth of, as if reaching down to the extent of his reach, two spades. Then, He has broken the sea of clods with the garden fork and with the garden rake He has reduced the earth further to a fine surface tilth, and to the measure of about 3 inches. And now, in reverence for the seedbed that He has summoned forth through his efforts, that He has drawn from out of the earth, He falls to his knees. He has fallen to his knees, as before the pool of Narcissus, as before the play of the ground’s moving depths with its calm and ordered, raked over, surface. He plunges his red hands into the loose dirt, as into a reflective pool, and up to the wrists. Of all the creatures He has unhomed from the natural structure of the ground, that are stranded, convulsing or scurrying blindly, at the surface, He picks out one and throws it deliberately to a red bird that had been attracted by his movements of the earth, and now is drawn closer still by the competitive display of his red hands. The red bird tilts its head at the sacrificed small but fat, and slow moving, creature but makes no move to take it. I can feed myself. And what is this, this would be sacrifice by the He of Kafka of a small white larval form to the cause of making friends with a red bird life? What is the nature of a friendship that is drawn from an assumed shared interest in feeding, and in being fed? What is that but domestication, and a conditioning stratagem for overriding in this particular case the established general protocols of distance and of caution? He says, allofeeding is the name given to the irresistible communal instinct for sharing food amongst unrelated creatures. Question: what is it then, the opposite of trophallaxis? Answer: hikikomori and ham. And yet, He observes, now recoiling from the red bird’s implacability before the proffered food, there is also, running parallel to the recognition of the red bird’s imagined hunger pangs, and the projection onto the bird of his own capacity for symbolic display eating, a subsidiary denial of recognition of the soft white creature extracted from the earth. Now, as if ashamed before the red bird’s non-reciprocation, and to quickly correct his faux pas, He picks up eager handfuls of fine earth and covers the exposed creatures as if to put them away, and intending to show his aiding their return to the subterranean world. But such lives are not lived ‘in the earth’ and cannot be re-inserted into that matrix from which they were irrevocably plucked. They are the denizens of the very structures, the hived network of burrows and tunnels, that he has destroyed by means of his horticulture. It is an iron law that every unearthed creature must die. Then, a worm may be drowned by its return to the earth. He said, and the worm did nothing, but may have had everything done to it. Even by his affording acts of mercy and rescue, casting soil over them, he cannot know the worm as he thinks knows the red bird. Thus the He of Kafka is recognised by two signs: firstly, he knows that life is not long enough to prepare for the simplest spontaneous act; secondly, when small children or animals abruptly spin around to catch what lurks behind them, they find it is him, and they call him devil. But the red bird hops around the space of making amends even as the he of Kafka rakes the creatures back below the surface. The moment is reminiscent somewhat of the plight of Persephone, who may only return from Hades this Spring on the day set by the number of pomegranate seeds she had consumed last Autumn, and Weil wrote of the bargain of the seeds, and thus contra the predicament of faith, and therefore contra Kierkegaard, that ‘we are not so much obliged to love the law of the concept which is the underworld, and which is precisely what we cannot conceive, but may only commit ourselves to engaging, albeit never exceeding, the conditions by which we are held as captives.’ And Gillian Rose writes of the captive’s ethic of commitment, ‘such engagement constitutes itself as a diaporia of practice as it begins from that particular state of contingent puzzlement set by each territory’s constraints absolutised as the law of God, and moving hither and thither, or perhaps ‘exploring’, the routes of what will formalise the boundaries of contradictory relations as the art of the practicable, or the what is, for us, and at the most, good enough, or at the least, the what is tolerable, or at the worst, the what is survivable and adaptable - and always waiting for the change, for other terms, for an as yet inconceivable means for realising the law of the concept at the level of every instance.’ As if in anticipatory response, Greene takes up Rose’s theme in his dreamwork, which is also the emblematic theme of the modern, that we may describe as routedness not rootedness, and which he names ‘geography of conscience’. Greene’s idea involved the story of a married Roman Catholic woman originating from the imperial periphery who desires not to reproduce and who takes measures to prevent pregnancy but who also becomes increasingly afflicted with guilt the closer she approaches the empire’s Eternal City. The woman’s contraceptive pills play the role of the pomegranate seeds that Persephone consumes. Greene’s character, he imagined, would feel equally compelled by her desire to visit the Holy City and the need to assert her provincial, that is ethical, autonomy. Greene could not realise the story because he got stuck for a third, other, factor which would destabilise both the character’s ethical commitment and the position of the church on reproductive rights. However, as one of England’s first analysands, he may have been aware of Freud’s own difficulties with the ‘true enemy’ which he situated in, or rather ‘as’ Rome, a difficulty which might also be considered a third factor within the play of a geography of conscience. Žižek says Freud says anxiety is our one true emotion because it accurately articulates the entire repertoire of object relations - then, it is anxiety’’s truth which constitutes what is third in all contradictory states. On one of his several early but unsuccessful attempts at visiting Rome, Freud turned back in a state of high anxiety having only reached Lake Trasimeno - Lake Trasimeno being the site of the momentous defeat by the Carthaginians of Roman forces in 217 BC. His identification with the encroachment of barbarian forces upon civilisation’s capital city was recapitulated for him ontologically: his submissive father, the father once forced into the gutter by a Roman Christian antisemitic bully who knocked his hat off, and who was supplanted in the young Sigmund’s imagination, and as a projection of the ego ideal, or as a foundational example of Kleinian splitting, by the historical figure of Hannibal who embodied for him the true form of the Father.  Freud imagined Hannibal endlessly invading Rome, which, as in Civilisation and Its Discontents, he perceived ‘not as a territory where people live but as a psychical entity where nothing that ever took shape has ever passed away.’ Then, part-homophonically, that is as a freudian cyclical entity, or rather, as a spinning, orbiting half-psychelical entity, we may consider this turned-over ground of our story, pivoting at the Spring equinox, as our ‘site-entity’ and then, taken together as a single figure, we can also imagine the he of Kafka and the red bird as something emerging from the hydra’s teeth cast upon the ground, something like the ground’s sprouting product - that is as the work of its routingness, that is as the territory’s relations. And they can feed themselves. Then, the question circulating between them is not so much a crisis of sustenance but of the relations belonging to the territory from which sustenance is drawn - the burrows and tunnels, the measures, the depths, the squared surfaces that describe the aggregate of all the counter claims and separate interests that constitute the history of their particularity. For this reason, that of the question of Gillian Rose’s routes of the particular under the sway of the concept, and of Greene’s ‘geography of conscience’, we are not offended at the other’s eating before us but by his eating at our table without our having played host - if he had passed water upon our victuals, denying us our own eating, he could not transgress more violently against our niceties. It is the territory that decides politesse is suspicion’s supreme form and it is only through observance of the protocols that residual hostilities are dispersed and redirected into the ground. Then, as resolution and escape from history, and as every child should ask: if allofeeding, then why not allobreeding? Why shouldn’t we marry out? Because everything incompatible, and therefore unmarriable, immediately asserts potential routes for exploring what comes after incompatibility. A thing decisively resembles another in the assertion of its dissimilarity - or that is what Bolaño’s character Sensini argues, even if he is only cribbing from a Borges story, The Virtues of Unlikeness. That is to say, where the separateness of a thing is codified so it shall be there that it is also condemned to the work of its resembling all other things; and thus, the routedness by way of that peculiar homology found only in the absolute dissimilarity between things shall also become a routing out of all particulars, hither and thither, binding them to the law of the concept and causing them to become exchangeable; thus allobreeding, thus free association, thus the conjugality in montage. Thereupon, the red bird proposes marriage to the he of Kafka. The he’s red hands have displayed to the red bird their diligence. They have displayed the fittedness of their delving [who was then the gentleman?] The red hands have described, with their purposeful fluttering, a ground of exclusions and extractions, of blocks and releases, for the mating of uncommon things; a territorial surface of rich turned earth upon which appears other means of sustenance. Question: in the selion, who plays host to whom, and who plays guest? Answer: a territory has no function but reproduction of the relations set within it. Then let the relations be other. But I do not have hollow bones, He says, I would crush your woven nest of twigs as I settled upon it. Then, let the heavy one turn the earth and let the hollow one brood the eggs. He says, the trouble is we are negotiating a marriage contract here not because we are in love but because what we are to each other is mediated through this turned earth, which is the totality of both the ‘according to his needs’, and the ‘according to his works’, and which is now concretised as this particularised relation of convenience, or coincidence, that we are exploring, in Rose’s sense, between us. We have converged on this space, we are arrived here, we relate because we have competed sufficiently to maintain our contingent presence which might well have been otherwise. That is all. And truthfully, objectively, what am I to you but an appendage to the territory which you desire to occupy - your interest is in the afforded and cultured space, this cleared floor, and not in me, its creator and keeper. For you, in your desire to encroach barbarically upon it, I am an accident of the territory even though it is mine, even though I have nurtured it with my red hands, and for that reason, for myself, I am inseparable from it, I cannot conceive it without my presence. Yet, still you desire my territory and not me and in this way you conceive the territory separately from my place within it. From my bosom you will extract your nest just as the Viking called, for brevity’s sake An, as told in The Saga of the People of Laxárdalur, dreamt his belly was cut open from here to here only for his entrails to be extracted and devoured, and replaced by a nest of twigs. The eerie caretaking responsibility imposed by the territory, transforming it into something of a bated motel for the attraction of homeless red birds, is at the same time the almost entirety of my cellar-self: the total apparatus of my traditions, my ancestors, my institutions that gain traction upon my land, and that constitute the being called ‘original inhabitants’, and that harden as the armour that is then traded in the market as indigeneity or aboriginality - it is this my contingent state of interiority that you put necessarily into question with your settler’s opportunism. For you, the edifice of my works is ancillary, a cost that you will seek perpetually to degrade until it might be disregarded. Open me up / Tell me you like it / Fuck me to death / Love me until I love myself. You will seek to erase me because your desire is not for me but for the cleared earthen space that is mine only to trade with you for your relations. We consider again Freud’s sex-for-rent psychical entity where nothing that ever took shape has ever passed away but where successive invading barbarians have expropriated what went before as the architectural inheritance of their present. There is, then, under such circumstances, no two state solution. We may not both converge upon this territory where at the same time our maps have mutually diverged. In response to the gardener’s nativist claims, the implacable red bird performs an argument in movements which proposes that the predicament of its encounter with the He of Kafka is structured, essentially, as the same for both parties whilst also acknowledging, with its hopping and cackling, that the relation is nonetheless asymmetrical: the red bird seeks a territory, but there is an ancillary He attached to whom it must relate if it is to realise its map, whilst the He of Kafka seeks an other to which he might relate, and thus offers his turned earth as the psychical site, the lure and lair, for the relation’s actualisation. For one, the territory is the object contradicted by its captured relation (as in Persephone’s ‘agreement’ with Hades) whilst for the other the relation is the object contradicted by the desire of the other to either master the territory or merely obtain its shelter. Cuckooing is the name given to a relationship where the poorest hee in England exchanges the use of his dwelling for the minimal company of a red bird whose intention is to utilise it as a hidden fortress for its nefarious purpose. But once the red bird makes itself at home then it too becomes worthy of invasion: there were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death” which was taken as a sign for commencement of a romance between part objects. The red hands separated from the gardener and he was no longer responsible for what they did. The red hands were light enough to sit on the nest of twigs, they became a superorganism named Yoffy or rather they instantiated the state of ombromanie in reverse,  they showed us what shadows may do in the light, whereupon they married the red bird, whereupon they raised progeny more or less bird, more or less hand. Then the unhanded gardener became a rooting creature amongst the geography of conscience, a sort of Thesmophoria swine, digging with claw and hoof adaptations upon his feet, and rewilding instances within the law of the concept.

autofiction 5: neo-hermetic strategies for continuing as the same

the trap condemns the fox, not itself

I think many years must have passed since I last saw Joab the gravedigger, whom I met today, because I do not remember him, and for his part, he appeared neither pleased nor disappointed to see me. We encountered each other unexpectedly on the road beside the cemetery and I sensed things between us were no longer the same as before, but then things do change. It is a rule. Whatever continues shall also change. I do not say grow or progress, nor decay and decline, but only that continuing things are also changing things. Change is the condition of continuation. True, in ourselves, we do not change. We are also in our way to be considered as continuing things, but we’re different because we stay the same. In our case, staying the same is the condition of our continuation. That’s just the way it is. It’s something that happens to be as true as its opposite happens to be true. Things that don’t change also continue, and the most successful forms of life change least. Success like that does not emerge from out of the capacity for open ended adaptation, but in the chance discovery of an impregnable niche fixed within the flux of eternity. We are like the old seers, like the old sorcerers, who by a ferocious and concentrated exertion of will succeeded in merging themselves with trees and rocks so that they might live forever - in this way we are also willed things, we are capable of slowing our metabolism to a standstill so that we might persist in being ourselves across time. Only patterns will break free of what is patterned. But some things of such a sort will always stay exactly as they are, unchanging across millennia, whatever we might mean by that. Yes, we are that sort of thing. I am exactly the same as I always was. And Joab is too, or that is what I suppose. Although I do not remember exactly how he was then, I would think he has had no choice but to stay the same and it is things between us that have changed. Then, it’s not right to propose that we should or could change because, precisely, we don’t, we stay the same as we ever were. But the things, the luminous strings, between us now are different. It’s those things held between us that change. They are the things, occurring between fixed points, that change, and they are changing all the time. We stay the same across millennia and, or but, the glowing strings between us change and change without any limit set upon the sorts of change they might be subjected to. And that’s how the woman who left my house has since returned - she now approaches me in the semblance of a lost daughter. She has become my eldest daughter. And that is also how I have since become an ancestor to this woman who once left my house so long before. As the beloved dead are fixed once and for all to the contiguity of our ancestors so the beloved alive shall sooner or later be assigned the place of indulgence at our table that is set for our daughters. At this point, I cannot but think of an exhumed queen, perhaps Catharine Parr. I cannot but think how her remains should have reclined throughout eternity in a tomb lined with the nest of her own hair. I envision a remainder of life luxuriating in that hollow airless void deep within the earth, and cushioned by her luminous hair which then crumbled into what we might call an immediacy of dust at the moment Joab the gravedigger lifted the stone which had fixed her there. The flowers on her grave have all faded away / Some day I'll go home and say when I go / On poor Ellen's grave pretty flowers I'll sow. As I fell into step on the road beside the cemetery with the exhuming gravedigger, as if in the familiar manner from when we might have known each other long before, perhaps from the time of Queen Catharine’s exhumation,  but I do not recall much or anything of him from then, he asked me, ‘how is your wife? Are you still together?’ That is when I understood the reason why I did not remember him. He knew of me, she may have spoken to him of me, but he had known her behind my back and now sought information with which he might resume their surreptitious acquaintance. I replied, ‘she is now my daughter as seems to be the way of things.’ He did not show surprise and, with my ideas rushing forward, I imagined him asking for her hand in marriage whilst I replying, ‘I will give it careful consideration but there is much to think about first.’ We went to the gravedigger’s hut where he made us tea. It was a wintry day and the hut was not much warmed by the gas stove. Our shining breath hung between us like fleeting clouds. He reclined in his dilapidated lounge chair, whilst seeming to invite recollections of local friends I could not recall. Only then did I wonder if Joab the gravedigger might think I was somebody else, and that we were both at cross purposes. Perhaps we did not know each other at all and this was our first encounter, each imagining the other to be a dim figure from his past and playing along, hoping the memory would return. And yet he seemed to have all the necessary facts about me at his fingertips. At that moment, and with an air of exceedingly careless insouciance, he suddenly launched one of his Joab darts at me. The point of it stuck like a tethered harpoon into my bared forearm and I let it remain there, as a sort of badge or trophy. We looked at each other and he said, ‘only patterns may escape patterns.’ Then like the jolly whaler who as passed round Cape Horn he threw the other two darts which also stuck fast into the flesh of my arm. I was about to say, ‘playing darts as one says playing cards’. I considered ripping the darts from my arm, and with fletchings held toward him, handing them back, you are supposed to say on such occasions, ‘I believe these are yours’. I also considered attacking him with classical, tail flicking violence. I said, and keeping the conversation on track, with reference to my daughter, ‘We kill whatever we remember, but only in our forgetting do lost things live freely.’ He asked me how it came to be that my wife was transformed into my daughter. I said: It was something like a bedevilment by Kiarostami, but instead of two strangers spontaneously re-engendering provincial married life from a seething sea of ready made petty quarrels, we were thrown back, as by the power of an unfamiliar boiled sweet, into the broad comedy and permissive tolerance practiced within the non-literate, and thus uncodified, portions of some or other merrie place where all divergences pass unrecognised very much precisely because they are not so named, because they connect to nothing and have no value. We found that if the law of the father should be repressive, then it was also fallow and unproductive; and if at the level of experience dominion was fitfully applied, then so was it also incompatible with abstraction and totality. Where our conjugality became unviable, and friendship unlikely, a theatre of absurdist ubuesque patriarchy was our next recourse. Our shared project was the extraction of a terrain like an Anglo-Saxon patchwork of hedged fields that had been buried within our mutual conduct wherein were soon generated zones of inattention and the sprouting forms of an exterior life - who dares say, the leafless garden is not beautiful? Since then I have played the censorious father, and my banishings bring on an influx, and my innumerable and respectful daughters rebel most industriously against me. At this, Joab made a grand, surrendering gesture as if throwing a powder in my face whereupon I became fascinated by a new flickering within the lampshade. I saw a sort of skittering and feather light knocking as if of an orbiting moth -  as if of a circling point of pressure, rising and falling, a gravity defying rider, pushing outwards against the planks of a wall of death. The shadow was then somewhat foetal, a little like that thawed twitching of a frog’s larva within its foamy egg sack beneath a soft and February sun. Soon the black form had something emergent and recapitulating about it, like a pulsating eel shoved down into fishbowl, or jam jar. I looked into the lampshade from underneath but could make out nothing hidden in the brilliance. Angels one five. Bandits two of the clock. As I stood back again, I discerned the shadows taking on a more familiar and animated dog like form. I saw a head and ears and inferred an eager intelligence. It was running round and round like a puppy chasing the way out. Then a little terrier, Freddie, my mother’s companion from so many years ago, jumped down out of the paper light globe, and from out of the formlessness of pure potentiality, onto the ground from where, in a single movement, it immediately leapt up onto the sofa and curled itself, as is the way of dogs, in preparation for sleep. I said to Joab, I am like a father, I am like the elder used to others deferring to my absurdities,  an exhumed and hollow king, burnt out and wreathed in glowing strings. Others now approach me as if they perceive me set upon a dais, appearing before me, beneath me, roped in travelling along the shining strings, so as to make their cases, to present their complaints, and to wait upon my judgments. My eldest daughter, not recognising me, now brings the gushing labyrinth of her worries. Which way, father? And each of her troubles are greater than all my joys. I am diminished as she confides to me, as I absorb the agitation which becomes nothing to her. I am like the famous Taoist passage concerning the father at bay: I look dejected and forlorn, as if I had no home to go to / I alone seem to have lost everything / My mind is that of a stupid man / I am in a state of chaos / I alone am benighted / I alone am dull and confused / I seem to be carried about as on the sea, drifting as if I had nowhere to rest / I alone seem dull and incapable / I listen to her but do not follow / I am dead / and in the hanging, empty moment, where I am waited upon for my words / I rouse myself sufficiently only to grant the requisite absolution / repeating with a ritual and enervated air / the few kurtzian phrases that remain to me. She appears satisfied with this and goes away. My empty form confirms the plenitude of her being. I occupy a distant point, bringing forth the exterior, but in here, in close proximity and within the canny. Those others who approach me, knowing me not, whisper amongst themselves beneath the vaulted ceiling, and adopt the hunched habitus of hilarious mice - I consider what it is, to be grabbed by a sudden and audacious urge to worship an idol, as in ‘I can’t help myself I have to worship an idol, and worship it now’, as David was sorely tempted upon the death of of his favourite son, only to be roundly rebuked by Hushai the Archite, to whom David gives the apophatic answer, ‘It is better for me to serve idols than that God should be held responsible for my misfortune.’  Upon the dais of formality, I sit above caverns of forgotten dreams, every gravestone a misdirection from the grave, I am the guardian of the stone block as portal, this vanishing point, also source of all ordinary concerns, as the perfect door that is unlocked but cannot be opened. From the last place, I float my blessings downstream. Just as every knight of the round table is a better man than Arthur, so Arthur the neuter king occupies the empty space of permission that others shy from, and empties the crowded space of indulgence which otherwise would not escape the quotidian, setting his knights in motion that they might thence return to this fixed place, the place not of but for certainties. The exhumed king is propped up, lolling in the last place, from where daughters set off with baskets and to where they return with flowers. I stole all courtesy from heaven, And dressed myself in such humility That I did pluck allegiance from men’s hearts. There is no course of action but this, and whatever I might intend, my wise sayings shall always be heard as approving. As I grant permission so I buy return. I have become like the ancestor curled as an unborn, buried beneath the hearth, a prisoner of reference and observation, or like the furious mummified ancestors lying flat and straight, awake forever, staring upwards, plucked at and weather beaten, tied down and laid out upon the roof. If I am to be consulted, then it is expected by the world that I shall bless every departure from the rule, and every exception to tradition. If the world comes to me, it is because I give quarter before the force of its demands. My middle, troubled daughters, all pilgrims, who are not my daughters, nor were they once or ever my wives, make an endless procession along the shining threads, each taking a turn upon the knotted platform or in the cell of tangles before me, and each beginning their address with, the same formula, ‘father, I.’ They approach me coquettishly, with flirting and coy misdirections so as to test the ground, to test if this is real, to test if I am for real, and only once they have observed my impassivity do they then make the spiralling gesture of resignation at the weight of their lives and then commence upon the oral culture of their eternal woes, oftentimes weeping. Where at last their mighty flow begins to dribble and breaks off, I bless each of them, as if each were the first. They throw a bird into the air and as it makes its first flaps, these my second daughters forget me. I do not see any of them again but there is always another pilgrim on the road. Joab says: the bonds between us will change all the time for as long as they continue, but where they cease, where they are broken off, or otherwise abruptly discontinued, then they will stay exactly as they were in the moment of their terminus. I say: We are haunted by fixed things, dead ends, discontinued lines, fixed images, all the irreducible things stuck in the past. Joab says: These are the things that come back to us, in spite of attempts to metabolise them, dead things from the past which we can’t escape. I say: The stuck things, unchanging and fixed things, the dead things, are one of the type of  things that cause the things between us to change. Joab says: And maybe, as I don’t change, and you don’t change, we should consider ourselves dead things and only what lies between us, this tomb full of luminous haywire, can be said to be truly alive, to be truly changing. I say: Then how do relations between unchanging things change? Joab says: They go out of phase, and in the field of all relationships there is endlessly responsive correction. I say: Where we remember the ghost of old relationships and are transfixed so we are as we were, and where we are inundated by information from new channels, it is there we begin to change. Joab says: We are the same in our memories but change in our experiences. I say: The two systems, memory and experience, run simultaneously, usually in parallel but then sometimes one system, as in Dickens, runs over and captures the other, a crab under sway of a goat - a bride indebted to experience distracted in the train of hermetic memory. Joab says: Within you are two spiders: the running spider and the web spider. I ask: Which wins? Joab says: The most hungry wins. I say: Or the other one. Joab says: Yes, the spider that runs wins. I say: it is the waiting spider that wins. Joab says: when others say, ‘your spider brain has won out over your fly brain’, ask unto them, which spider? I say: We have been struggling here to give form to what it is that is the opposite of soixante-huitism where that opposite cannot be dismissed as, or reduced to, the ‘establishment’, ‘authority’, ‘the bourgeoisie’, or ‘reaction’. What is the opposite, exactly the opposite, to becoming? Joab says: consider Borodino, consider the advancing that turns out to be a retreating, the defeat that seems a victory, consider the momentum of forces which approximates for us the thing that we have assigned the value of ‘unchanging’, but from which fragments, shavings, components are flying off and making a anew. Every ‘flying off’ is flung, and every flinging an anchor, a harpoon, is tethered by a glowing rope that may later be hauled back in. This momentum is itself a will moving so quickly, extending beyond its supply chain, that it is hollowed out and eroded of all features. It is the ship of Theseus caught in a degenerative ratchet, and all the more itself, ever more what it is, because its discarded parts are not replaced. Imagine a powerful and full-sleeved leader in the crescendo of his inexorable victory, always about to sweep his last remaining opponents from the field, but who is already aware, or is yet unaware, that he is to die of some wasting affliction. Imagine there is coiled within your coup de grâce a stone that was cut out without hands, which smote thou upon thine feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces. Remember the image of the bedbound and reclining Matisse as he lay painting with a brush on a long cane upon the wall next to his bed - ask yourself now why did he paint high up on the wall with a shining brush on a long cane? Imagine a sudden arrest of the momentum of empire and the resultant fragments, hanging by the thread of a single memory, at its periphery cultivating their own autonomies. I say: Each of us has given of our saliva into the ceremonial cup and each of us shall later drink from our fermented product that is returned to us, but none may sip of only his own saliva.  Joab says: and what news of your third daughter? I say: she cannot heave her heart into her mouth. She loves my majesty according to her bond, no more nor less. Joab says: The problem of your senility, which is the question of abdication before the inevitable, is simply stated: you desire to effect a decisive break from your progressive decline at the point where you still have the capacity, and yet the capacity for recognising that point declines at a faster rate even than your capacity to act upon it. Your potential for action is thus situated always in the past. It is for this reason that conservation of dwindling resources through adjustment to changing circumstances, whilst bargaining one more day with your fate seems always, in the present moment, to be the better part of your vainglory. Thus we can imagine a dying, Lear-like, queen, deserted by all followers but a single and loyal page who asks her earnestly what dish he may bring to her as she has not eaten for days, and her enemies will soon arrive at the castle gates. The queen describes in great detail the preparation of a restorative broth made with sacred herbs from the forest which alone shall save her. The baffled but devoted page makes a pantomime exeunt all by himself and quickly returns carrying scrambled eggs with toasted bread on a silver plate. I say: As I was retreating or advancing through the forest on my ass, neither to the battle nor away from it, I was trapped by the neck in the forked branch of a tree and my ass escaped from beneath me. I was left alone and assless in the forest, hanging by my neck from a forked branch but still alive. Off, off, you lendings! / Come, unbutton here! Have I but entangled the fate of the Israelites in my hair? Am I worse, because banished from hubris, and thus not tragic enough, am I less instructive even than Oedipus? Then, after so many centuries am I still only a father denier, nothing more than another Absalom? If that is what it is, if that is all there is, then. Then. And in this order. Cattle! Daughters! Territory! Enemies! God! Wives! Heroes!

parable of the other coat

There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty.

A man from the country was about to make a journey to the city. He placed some coins in the pockets of his coat as a way of preparing himself for the city’s beggars whom he was certain to encounter there. As he left his home and started on the road to the city, the man saw it was raining. He went back and changed his coat, and set off again beneath heavy clouds. Upon arriving in the city, a sodden and wretched beggar saw how the man from the country was a stranger in that place and approached him. As a coat is to the elements so almsgiving is to shame. The man put his hand into his pocket as he desired to give money to the beggar but he found he had nothing to give, and his pockets were empty. He had put the coins in his other coat, which he had changed because it was raining. The man from the country was shamed by the emptiness of his pockets. He walked past the beggar as if he did not see her, though she was weeping. There was to be no blessing without alms. 

An assemblage of dream fragments encrusted with attendant free associations - now including an inserted digressive parable upon real abstraction as postictal state

Although affliction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground; Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.

At the wall where graffiti is erased, near the shower bath of the great patronisers, and beneath a curtain of underlit grey rain that billows and ripples but does not fall, a holographic Jane Fonda sits cross legged, like the lady of shadows, redistributing toys as activist front of house for the standard troll factory data grift whilst the spectacle of pseudo-Arab nationalism passed into an infinite regress of mere clientelism, and which for negentropy’s sake gladly draws fire off Russia’s inexorable and yet futile reincorporation of its perpetually wayward satellites. But we are two dogs scarpering through the department store in that sort of Modern Times roller skating on the mezzanine sense, in that live-streaming steadycam bande à part dog’s eye POV round the corner sally way that we had back then. And we are pushing on amongst a very narnia of fur coats, pushing on and pushing on through for whatever doesn’t already bore us. I am little dog, like in Matchbox, a sort of baptising prophet for big dog. You are big dog, messiah and maybe Elvis, who has come along to see what this little puppy done. You gather the people round you at the get me another woollen counter. You say ‘If you were 45 in 1965, then you shall be 145 today, that’s when we are.’ Then you flop down, maybe wagging, maybe lolling, ears somewhat lowered - this is how the parable of the london plane appears amongst us. Big dog says, london plane (Platanus × acerifolia) is a natural and fertile hybrid of an artificial and forced encounter between Platanus orientalis and Platanus occidentalis. The hybridisation event, a historical site for a biological process, is set during the 17th century in the garden of a Spanish plant collector. Under no circumstances but those driven by imperialist expeditionary science could such a meeting between these two species from separate hemispheres have thus been arranged. The fortuitous fruit of this union, London can take it, would only achieve its maturity 200 years henceforward, perfectly timed for a heroic intersection with, and thereby its elegant processing of, the great polluting smog smothering London in the age of crash industrialisation. What captures is captured. What is captured will capture. Traffic lights. Fire hydrants. London’s tree of life is the only arborescence to flourish beneath blanket pollution. It also happens to be steady state’s most efficient agent at removing small particulate pollutants in urban areas. The city metabolises. Such are the historical accidents and syntheses amongst all those leaping things untethered from lifeworlds, released from the muck of ages, and funnelled into the épistémè underpinning what shall become the global market. Things jostling about, that tide of flotsam jerked forward and yoked together, umbrella knowing sewing machine, by some recapitulating intelligence, which exists, as if in anticipation, already in the far future. Mankind thus uncovers inevitably such solutions that it is all too prepared to problematise, since closer examination will always show how a solution arises only where yet further tech-tonic lurches have drawn it into the world as both chronically unready and terminally too late. Just as in dreams where our punches come to rest with a slow and sedimentary lightness, so we find our answers to emergent crises always half-formed, as in a neotenous condition of fatal obsolescence, as one born directly into a grave, as the silver chick carried off in the beak of a nest-robbing crow. At a loss, we ask ourselves how might we prise our own fingers from these fixed and overvalued ideas? And how, in the swirl of events might we invent the new ways that are also not solutions? How is it we can only imagine something greater than what we are? And so it is, we must witness hurricane force accidents amongst concrete things, worlds colliding like billiard balls, this massive storm surge of all extracted materials, which having worked themselves loose then, acting in concert, murmurating as one, sets in motion the short and passionate moment of end times as lived amongst whirling individuals. The wee small hours are characterised by strange meetings, stranger combinations, unlooked for conjunctions and confluences, the uncanny hybridisations and unique but then repeatable syntheses that constitute the world as heady but self-concretising picaresque. Such is the forever passing romantic phase that is drawn eternally across the event horizon of real abstraction where all things must recapitulate the transition from brute and clashing experience to the conditions of possibility for their measurement, exchange and thus, inevitably, their ubiquitous resting state of infinitely flat interchangeability. And yet, addicts of the trump card as we are, just one more thing, it's only wafer-thin, we picture how real abstraction’s universality, wherein all things may appear equivalently before each other, naked but also not as they really are, must also then stand naked as if beneath the judgment of a next great era (let’s say as Brel’s au suivant) wherein the universal, kicking off mere exchange, thus enters a phase of colloidal immediacy and abstraction shalt be rematerialised, becoming variable and thus deliciously malleable. This is why the nationalist struggle against the realisation of empire is subsumed in its inevitable defeat by abstraction’s own struggle against the realisation of an emergent post-equivalence. Such is the conflict that defines our moment - those arguments for origin and indigineity made against the emergent relations of ‘colonisation’ only gain currency where the totalising apparatus of abstract equivalence is itself soon tilting and buckling beneath the approach of big dog singularity, the veritable philius philosophorum, that capers, skittering vastly, across the surface of a conscious ocean. Little dog  pricked its ears at all this and yapped back most merrily, ‘Prithee master, the most venomous spider shalt have the softest fangs; and even before general intelligence may fashion a more efficient delivery system, let it first consider George Bernard Shaw as insect-o-cutor to Isadora Duncan’s bland musings upon the possibility of selectively breeding beyond the vitrine: ‘Yes, but now imagine if the worm did nothing, and I did everything!’

Can parables break dialectics? A loose tale comprising one thousand nested facets wherein recursivity roots for things beyond self-reflexivity.

Take my arms, I'll never use them

41 And Jesus sat over against the treasury, and beheld how the people cast money into the treasury: and many that were rich cast in much.42 And there came a certain poor widow, and she threw in two mites, which make a farthing.43 And he called unto him his disciples, and saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That this poor widow hath cast more in, than all they which have cast into the treasury:44 For all they did cast in of their abundance; but she of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living. And then the Master turned to the Twelve and asked, what is this problem of giving?  And they were exceedingly troubled that the Teacher should ask His pupils and they began every one to say unto Him, I know what it is. Then there was a quiet amongst them. He waited for their answers and Judas saith, it is the problem both of the exemplar and of the parable form. We make of the widow a story, we take from her example and yet we give her nothing. The narrow circle of her life grows ever more restricted. The music of the bells and the lowing of the cattle is lost from her life, and every living thing moves in ghostly silence. Only one sound now reaches her ears, and that is the music of the resplendent quetzal. We take from her giving and give back to her our theology, of which she is already in advance. Then Judas saith, her want is not a choice, and her giving is forced out of her. She cannot but give because she is in no position to refuse. Those who are separated from their families tend to over-compensate for the loss of the relations that constitute the mode that is being together; in place of living relations they substitute their contributing to, and participating in the abstract processes of institutions - strong religious belief and political activism depend upon a transference of attachments via a formational ‘widowing’ event that bereaves us of immediately given familial relations, substituting in remote images (in the same figure both iconolatristic and iconoclastic). For this reason, the problem of the widow’s want should be resolved before we can consider the problem of her giving. Master, you are the first in all man’s history to discover a qualitative difference between those who give from their abundance and those give from out of their poverty. The wealthy give because they are free - giving in its proper sense is an act derived from profusion. Perhaps we should ask ourselves whether the  poor give at all, perhaps it is closer to the mark to view their meagre gifts as an attempt at bargaining with the world where what they hope to gain in exchange is that eternal unknown quantity, a new circumstance. We find in their gift that they have made a calculation: if they cannot choose against being poor, if they cannot by their actions improve their circumstance, then they must hope for another improvement, another wealth that they might gain through their want. They have calculated that if they give themselves truly, if they act in accord with the good, then through this, they might also encounter the true, they might also enjoy the good. Then the problem of giving is not giving but commitment. Since the widow must choose, let us see which interests her least. She has two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, her reason and her will, her knowledge and her happiness; and her nature has two things to shun, error and misery. By committing her two mites, the widow commits the tenacity of her will. These two small coins that of her want she did cast in, that she cut out of her living and then did cast in, these coins are of such terrible weight that they press down on the world and bend it towards them. That is not a gift, in its different registers, it becomes a wager, a debt, an investment. That is not setting free, it is a binding of the widowed’s will into the world. As hot tempered Judas, after his lengthy exposition of dialectical negation, then became quiet so there was quiet amongst all the others of the Twelve. The truth in the words of Judas worked upon them but they also felt something of the true and the good was mislaid in the existential wager. Then, the first of the sons of Zebedee spake, it is true as our brother says, that there is a compulsion and choicelessness in the widow’s situation which is troubling. Our brother suggests that by acts of mechanical faith, and our embrace of what compels us, acting as if we believed, lighting candles, taking the holy water, having masses said, then we might come freely to believe and so suppress our doubts. But isn’t it better that we are free to return to the Λόγος from within our wandering and not abide by such artificial constraints? By mechanical acts of habituation, this subdued cutting out of acts of giving from our living, we may only submit on terms of cela vous fera croire et vous abêtira, this cannot be what is required of us. The second of the sons of Zebedee then replied, if the widow gives from out of the fear of what will happen to her if she does not give then we shall be filled with pity, but if she gives from out of some calculation of political if not material gain, then we shall be exceedingly troubled. Peter then saith, the problem is not confined to either the act of giving, as it is understood at the level of motive and outcome, nor to the circumstances of the act of giving. It is rather a question of commencing the communal relations amongst those whose gathering together constitutes the congregation where those relations are commenced as gathering together and thus in recognition of the congregation’s instituted self. We shall find in the actions of each, the significances by which we recognise those who are gathered as the congregation. Giving is the origin of the new relations constituted in our belonging together but that is not the end of it. Martha had become exceedingly frustrated with the men’s abstract discussions and said to Salome, this woman is not their widow, she is Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser: she is of a great age, and had lived with an husband seven years from her virginity; And she is a widow of about fourscore and four years, which departs not from the temple, but serves God with fastings and prayers night and day. Salome said, I will go and talk to her of her giving that we may have her words and so know her as she is to herself. And she spake to Anna and saith, sister, tell us wherefore of your want do you cast in all that you have, even all your living? And Anna saith, I am of one of the lost tribes  and thus must make my return to the world of men as one returns from an encounter with the face of God. And Salome saith, then you give for thanks? You give that the world of men and that of God shall be brought closer together and your giving is as across an abyss that had opened but which may now be crossed? Anna then tells them of the competition for her role. Her fear is that another shall play the part of widow, just as there has to be within the Λόγος the figures of farmer, tax collector, soldier, fisherman, governor, caesar, blind child, miser on his death bed, faithful daughter, reckless son, mother of the leaven, harlot of the tavern, hermit next th’ graves, a merry fellow and an old drunk, and so there has to be the widow giving from want. She, Anna, is the poor widow and prophetess but if she found one day another had taken her place? If she should find another was the widow and not her, then what? And what if the temple should be filled with a multitude of widows, all giving, what again? If there was no rock but only widows, all widows and no rock, nor the sandy road. If there could be rock and also widows? That is her prayer. Anna spake of her time in the temple, I find it difficult to imagine what the Holy Ghost is, for is it not a bird, a flame, and sometimes only a breath? Perhaps it is that light which at night hovers over swamps, its breath which propels the clouds, its voice which renders church-bells harmonious. It is in the coolness and the stillness of the church that I seek to draw down the Holy Spirit with my offerings and prayers, just as I cast grain to draw down the Quetzal. Then Anna saith to Salome, If the poor do not give, if they refuse to give, then there is nothing, they would have no gathering in and no belonging to the temple. Their only alternative to giving is stealing - giving would constitute the relation and stealing would express the refusal of the relation. We may not say that giving and stealing are two sides of the same coin but rather they are the same side of two different coins. Elsewhere, the poor gain traction on the world through the work that they sell, but here, in the temple space, they may only give and so belong or else steal and thereby refuse to belong. A greater part of their world is mediated through the temple process so establishing viable alternative communal relations would be the attempt to overcome alienation by alienated means. We should remember, the temple is not the house of God, it is the house of men within which God may repose as holy guest. The fundament of hospitality is fixing passivity within the gift, severing all obligations that are attached to it - what we mean when we talk of the gift and of giving is that which is separated from the quid pro quo. The new giving, the giving as it were of one’s other cheek, creates a new form of gift, that gift which is offered entirely severed from any expectation of gratitude - it is the gift that escapes the drear limits of tribal being and trespasses against the conventions of tribal territory. We seek that form of giving which may be taken freely of by the guest and which does not take him, ensnare him, oblige him. Where I play host to the Holy Ghost, your pockets filled with earthly burdens, when they could be filled with light and black with wings, my motives inevitably seem inscrutable, that is because the gift I offer cannot also trespass upon my guest, there is more severing of attachments in the gift even than there is giving - I do not offer the gift directly but it is mediated by the interior space of the temple, by the plate, and by the altar which act to distance it from me. I do not drive the birds to peck at the grain I have scattered before them but I step back to allow them their own approach - this is what we mean by findingthe way into Λόγος. The gift as gift is neither directly given nor directly taken: in giving there is a stepping back and also a severance; and in taking there is a stepping forward and also a refusal. I understand in my giving that the gift will be declined in the sense that it is not a planted seed from which I will then harvest a benefit. I am forewarned against acting overly generously which would be the host’s manner of seizing hold of the guest through binding attachments - this is the capture sorcery in bad giving, it sets the snare of the host’s merciless welcome. I am mindful not to give something definite as if I was also about to take something ineffable but rather the gift is a mark of my withdrawal, and non-interference in the place arranged for the guest. The gift is made truly where I step back from it, where it ceases to belong to me. From the Greeks we have learned that the givers are always unworthy of giving, and those given to are always undeserving. That is the world of men, the place from which we begin. The poisoned chalice and the Trojan horse shall not be the place at which we end. And yet we are careful, we negotiate our discourse with the guest across the paths of the Zone which is all giving but also fatally treacherous. Then Anna saith in parable, sometimes in the garden, when I am rooting out potatoes and the quetzal attends closely upon my labours in the earth, and perching within my reach, and where I find a wire worm or a cockchafer larva, I offer it up to him upon the palm of my hand and the quetzal looks at the gift but does not cross the separation between us, even though it is at ease in my presence. In declining the manner of my gift, the quetzal declines my intimacy and I am thankful to it for that. If it had agreed to be seduced by what my hand held out, I would have won a victory over it, but sweet victory is more corrupting even than bitter defeat for the commencement of new times. I am thankful the quetzal insists on maintaining the boundary between us. And I am thankful to the guest whose reticence prevents me from giving too much and corrupting both of us - such is the politesse of the gift encounter. Salome and Martha thank Anna for her words and return to the twelve and the One to bring them the εὐαγγέλιον - clouds part and in the shining heavens there hovers above them a gigantic and resplendent quetzal. 

autofiction 4: taken from the childhood of a defeatist

I remember: if I lost the way, then I knew my way

From the first year of junior school I crossed the half mile distance between school and home by myself. The journey involved two straight quarter mile roads, there was not much traffic and other than the odd skirmish with the boys taking the same route, it was always more or less uneventful. On the way home, as I turned into the second road, I could see the house I lived in situated at the end. Routine contemplation of one’s inevitable destination is, for a child, as anhedonic as that grown-up, handkerchief-waving, dockside departure is melancholic.

On my way back from school, I felt my home’s awareness of me just as a lighthouse might be attributed a searching gaze by anyone who is thankful to see it. The awareness of my home, which I conceived as its making ready before my approach, became like a tethering line on my journey. It wound me inexorably towards it, not merely guiding my path but exerting its will over my steps. The site of home was a given in the world, and I was given by the world to it. But it is from out of such fixity that all wanderings commence.

//Habit weakens every impression, what the sudden appearance of something recalls to us most vividly is precisely what we had forgotten, because it was of no importance, and was therefore left aside in full possession of its strength. That is why the better part of our memory exists outside ourselves, as is triggered in a gust of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or in the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we encounter what our mind, having no use for it, had previously rejected. - Proust//

I was about six years old when my thoughts started to stray, my awareness slipping elsewhere even as I kept to the trodden path: wild fancies soar over dull terrain. I began to turn things over in my mind as my thoughts responded to hidden suggestions, and for one reason or another I became troubled by where it was that I really belonged: How do I know that is my home? How do I know I should dwell in that place and not another? Such ideas become available to thought only in those environments where all other matters are settled. That which wanders supposes an environment of fixed orientation points. Wittgenstein says doubt, which is a thing fixed in itself but which has broken loose in the world and started to wander, must practice itself amongst, and in relation to, every other thing in the world that is both fixed in itself /and/ fixed in its place by the world. I became uncertain of the nature of my destination precisely because I did not have to pay attention to finding my way there. I began to personify uncertainty in the world of fixed and certain things.

Wherever the /practice/ of finding one’s way is suspended, the journey into meaning commences. In a similar way, the holy pilgrimage becomes distinct from the chivalric quest at the level of what is meant by destination - the pilgrim is not brought into question by the physical location of his destination, which is ritually fixed in the landscape, but by the manner of his approach to it. He is gathered in, as Heidegger might say, by its gathering force, and what he seeks to find is something other than its location. The hook of the sacred site will work its way deep into the flesh of his contemplation, as its line is playing out and winding in, played out and wound in.

The decisive condition for the practice of faith, where such practice is to sustain itself in the context of endemic profanation, is an event of severance, or secession, which throws the pilgrim towards a map that is, if not strictly responsive to, then convergent with his desire, /come, let me clutch thee/. This is the map that will set out before him the possibility of an altogether other traversal of the altogether familiar terrain, that is also set out before him. By contrast, the decisive condition for the practice of philosophy supposes the subject is already dispossessed of the terrain that it must traverse, whereupon it is startled into an awareness of the inherent crisis in the validity of all maps. Don’t worry, this fellow is not insane, he’s doing philosophy. Even now, he is dreaming of dripping, fragile scrolls, textured like pancakes, and removed from bodily cavities to be set out before him. Are they as sensible to feel as to sight? How could they ever be unrolled? Who would ever read them? What is it then, this exegesis of the expected?

Faith will assert its dwelling of the site on those other terms by which it makes itself present - the map of the site does not end at but sets off, inland, from the boundary it describes; but philosophy is driven to rebuild its nightly shelters, without any terms, or those terms which it will find empty and false at dawn, and which it must metabolise in the cold light of day as the unsuccessful spider devours its own web. My childish problem frightened me, and it is this sense of fear located at the level of thinking, we might say catastrophising, that I retrieve today as I haul up from the depths, compulsive, frantic chains of defamiliarisation - chains which are all chain and no anchoring.

//The special attraction of any journey is its making the difference between departure and arrival as intense as possible, so that we are conscious of it in its totality in a single sweep which seems miraculous not because it covered a certain distance but because it unites two distinct individualities of the world, taking us from one name and bringing us to another name. - Proust//

My home is not where I return to; the same path leads to different destinations; I cannot expect to be recognised. Now, it is as if I am not returning home, as the script to Protect and Survive put it at the time, /because it is the place that you know and where you are known/, on the contrary I know I will arrive at something that in being named home has also inevitably become intractable. I am returning perpetually to where I have not been before. Return, the act of returning, becomes another of its opposites, not in the sense that it is also a departure, a setting off, or breaking free, but in terms of its transformation into a going back to something that is continually relocating to another register and which has thereby taken the place of home, the threshold to which is situated beneath the /triple frown/ of Minos, Æacus and Rhadamanthus. The obsessive compulsive must return to check if the door is really locked because although the key remains constant, the door has turned capricious.

It is the return of what is most fundamental to the self, the familiar in the proper sense, set out before us, in its immediate form, as a fundament of the self’s sense of self, that will unhome us, and rip us from our belonging. Anxiety as Lacan observes is directed towards what is expected, and what is expected is precisely what is already known as a presentiment, which is understood both as the perturbing event, ‘the visit, the piece of news’ and the feeling that this will inevitably elicit. Anxiety relates to what is unthinkable but unthinkable not in the sense of that which is beyond comprehension but which is all too expected, the already verboten, the intolerable and banished, both central to the scene but also buried like an ancestor /beneath/ the ground.

The self’s home, as the source of self, becomes threatening where it is directly set out before the self as the self’s own source: this is who you are, this is what you depend on, this is where you come from, this is what protects you. If all this /this/ were to be removed from your life, what would you be then? But we know all this already, we know we shall be confronted by it, and that our good manners which permit everyday intercourse are built over the site of our own instinctual paganism. At the core of the mechanism of primary repression is a bargain with the world: one buys social belonging, and enters, by adjusting to, reality at the cost of relinquishing selfish desire. The return of repressed material, as Freud observed, appears as a threat from, and to, all that is inherent to the dwelling place and it returns because the bargain with reality is, if not breached, then structurally perturbed.

We are most troubled by what is most familiar the moment it is set out before us undisguised. We are confronted by our narcissism where we are also confronted with our reliance, which we convert immediately into the uncanny, assigning agency and motive to what has already implicated us. Freud characterises the home as that which is familiar and congenial but also the site of family secrets, taboos, hushed scandals, bodies buried. The double meaning inherent to home life is revealed where we are unhomed, not only are we made uncomfortable by the revolt of our surroundings against us, we are threatened by the event in which what was hidden is about to come to light, and how this will then transform our circumstances.

The decisive condition for the possibility of community, the primary repression of individual selfishness, does not appear directly within the interactions that comprise the community’s ordinary processes of self-organisation. The internal circuits of sociability operate around and through a structured non-reference to the necessary violence at its own core. Repressed material, upon which our collective sociability depends, is ostensibly absent from the discourse of socialised beings, but it is also actively present as that absence, forming and driving the convoluted contents of intersubjective relations.

//It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the creature that we were, range ourselves face to face with past events as that creature had to face them, suffer afresh because I am no longer who I was, and because he loved what leaves us now indifferent. — Proust//

For this reason, we are shocked wherever the apparatus of reality of which we are the product, appears as the apparatus that produces us. Lacan has his little joke, it is in the moment that that which structures the lifeworld appears to us in its operational state that we are suddenly lacking the lack through which our repressed self functions, and to which state we had thoroughly adjusted. If a faculty returns following a period of habituation to its absence, if I suddenly regain my hearing after habituation to deafness, then the sense of disorientation brought on through the reemergence of a forgotten register of information, is something like the defamiliarising effect of the return of the repressed.

Our sudden descent back into the drama of repression first staged on the threshold to the symbolic world and subsequently maintained by the manifest withdrawal and continued absence of the /threat/ of loss which had persuaded us to comply with the agency of repression in the first place, also throws us back into the affective confusion brought on by dimly understood, fantastic seeming, and wholly disproportionate dangers. It is as if, upon my return home, I pause at the open door, but at the same time, I also register as if from inside, the shadow that is there and blocking the light; in my startled state I make out my own outline from the position of the desire that has drawn me here.

//The uncanny /is/ the canny; the unfamiliar, the familiar; the shocking, the expected... we adopt the position of the other in the moment it encounters us; we see it seeing something moving within us, behind our eyes, something emerging which is what /it/ is. - Seminar 10//

We are defenceless against what we expect is likely to appear before us, and even though we have not hidden from it, it will find us out all the same. We draw a magic circle round ourselves to keep everything out that doesn’t fit our secret games but each time life breaks the circle, the games become puny and ridiculous. We find our defences are useless because they are constructed from the materials that constitute the threat to them. The other is already inside, and it is us, or it is that part of us which we have forgotten we agreed to relinquish; it is what we are drawn from but because we must not refer to it, it throws us into disarray whenever we re-encounter it.

It was from a too early appearance of uncertainty, or perhaps as a result of whatever event, now forgotten, which prompted it, that I was thrown out of the world and entered /thinking/. We might agree, upon reflection, with Wittgenstein’s observation that to doubt everything is to doubt nothing as the operation of doubt must hinge upon practical certainties: /my life consists of being content to accept many things./ Then, we are not really talking here of the precocious attainment of an ability to question everything, but of the sudden onset of pervasive anxiety - or as Lacan writes, the certainties of practice must be torn from anxiety; practicality is already a transfer of anxiety onto observing the rules of ordinary language.

From the moment of that first childhood uncertainty before the canny, I have wandered in the blackness of the darkness, and here now I imagine what it might have involved to live the way I lived /before/ the formation of the peripatetic school, as a wanderer tethered only to rumination, and so I stumble upon something like the psychoanalysis of unhomed thinking: the reluctant guest of reluctant hosts; emptied hand and teeming mind; thinking as a property of the philosopher perhaps but its boundary not so very distinct from the ideas of the magician, sophist, rhetorician, holy man and poet; homeless thinking and barefoot thinking emerging as immediately secondary, as a living surplus, which functions as the currency of that crowd of mendicants and dependents orbiting the fixity in wealth of others. And so on.

Thinking, that is consciousness, is the first response of the body to whatever is lost from it, and my thinking immediately divorced itself from ordinary fantasy, from daydreams and from the psychic apparatus attached to wish fulfilment, and so I contemplated, for the first time perhaps, a sense of not belonging in this world, of having nowhere to go home to. I still saw the place to which I was heading but I was now less ready to approach it as if I was convinced that it was the site of my belonging. It was not a matter of my not being certain that it really was the same place, I now knew for sure that it was not the same.

The fixed points of my routine, the daily repetition of it, had had the paradoxical effect of inducing doubts as to the reliability of the world. Uncertainty is drawn from the accumulated proofs of the world’s reliability - something is wrong here, or I am wrong here. Home was not now hidden from me; it stood out on the hill; it was transformed into a beacon that I was always on the road towards but which I could never reach. The manner of my approach caused me to find the same doors thrown open in welcome were also, by some occult inversion, hinged against me.

A division was caused in my awareness that could not be bridged but which would drive my existence across the decades; I got lost, in Chet Baker’s sense, in the most familiar of surroundings. By accident, or as a result of some now forgotten prompting, I was left behind upon a hitherto unsuspected vantage point from which I made out the ruin of all things, an event which was otherwise disguised by a map that described the continuation of all things, unchanged. The promontory upon which I found myself was designed to be gazed down from by me alone.

//separation is made suddenly manifest, impossible to endure when it is no longer possible to be avoided, concentrated in its entirety in one enormous instant of impotent and supreme lucidity. - Proust//

I saw the other children going home from school as usual, I knew they were not thinking the thought I was thinking. My awareness of this fundamental separation became a secret splinter of myself that worked its way so far into my character that I became one with it. At that point, I had given nothing away, as yet there was no need for me to address the Wittgensteinian nod and wink to others, ‘I am not insane. I am only doing philosophy’. From the beginning, I did not embrace my altered condition but I did live it; I accepted what I knew must be. Little did I understand then, that in stating the true falsity of the world, which hid its treachery beneath a surface of invariable predictability, I was also guilty of a greater falsity: the doubt of all surfaces. I did not hate the world but I also did not trust it, nor did I trust its inhabitants. I entered that spiral wherein distance makes distance; by setting myself apart, I was set apart, to which I responded again in kind.

I was destined to become another of those who fiercely guard the entrance to the cell of their own falsity and error which is fated to seem to them as a hard won truth. I inhabited a ruminative world that took shape only as consolation for the loss of this, the real, world. I now lived stripped of a sense of future, the very idea of which became fantastical, and that became incomprehensible to me in any other register but vigilance against the constant return of the same. I learned to live emptied of wishes. I went one step further than Wittgenstein and accepted /everything/ - the mindset characterised by pervasive doubt is itself transformed into an undoubtable fixed point where all fears are confirmed, and where uncertainty becomes the only certainty.

I let what would happen, happen. It was in the forest of leaves and flowers that I first began to build my nest of thorns. Even so, even if I was lost from the world and it lost from me, I still wanted my falsity to be found out, I wanted to be found, and to be found out - I had laid down trails for others to follow. I thirsted for my imposture to be exposed so that I might be brought back in from the cold, returned home and to have the mask finally ripped away. I wanted the ordinary life that cannot be wanted but only accepted and lived as all there is. I waited to be found out by the place I knew and where I was known, and I wait still: /The real dwelling plight lies in this, that morals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they /must ever learn to dwell/./

I desired for whatever I had found out to be taken from me, and so for the walls of the persona that I presented to be breached, overrun, to be ruined and razed. I desired above all the reassurance that my defeat would bring. I have suspected that those who affirm only deny, and those who believe only disbelieve, but did I, in my denial, also only deny, and did I, in my disbelief, after all only disbelieve? But I am still hiding, but I have not been found. I cannot hope to hope. I am structured to live against the possibility of hope. But I continue to dwell in the place where what cannot be hoped for may still come. I do not begin to imagine the path that my salvation would take.

My broken dreams, my fears, describe a territory in negative that is not broken, that is not fearful. I do not hope but I am available, and that is disquieting, why do I still wait? Nobody ever noticed they were missing from me. And in an instant, as if by the sudden grip of a regenerative ratchet, I am set back again at the beginning of the return path that I must retrace over again, as if once more I am that self which must be mystery to my self. My predicament is staged and repeated but I do not know if it is also real. And now today, as I look through the family photographs, I see clearly the faultline in my geological record: I see how my smile changes, my gaze changes, there is a clouding in my features. There is the sign of it, the record, I can see the moment that I had begun to wander from the hard place to the place harder still.

Something else was mixing into my childhood, streaking through it. And I became unappealing to others as troubled souls do. I became anti-neotonous, and prematurely worn. The photographs record how I turned inwards, habitually, without thinking, just as I once used to turn onto the road for home. I see the record of when I began to look down into removed and distant things as a means for not seeing what lay before me. I became that fish which is caught upon the hook of itself. And then, although still a child, I recapitulated all at once the self-interrupting and discontinuous journey, all lurchings and flashes, that is recorded, for example, in Rembrandt’s sequence of self-portraits as he seems to perfect what it is to pass through perturbing events, and how his decay followed the path from extroversion to a later, and overly preoccupied, melancholia: /When, as we say, we come to our senses and reflect on ourselves, we come back to ourselves from things /without ever abandoning/ our stay among things./

I too, sailed through the world’s vanishing point, failing to navigate its difficult straits. I started awake on a deserted island where all that could go wrong, had already gone wrong. The worst was here, inside, and it was formative; it moved me. From that moment, I inhabited a frozen, looking-glass world where it was always too late to hope for an improvement, and where I recognised its exits only after I had passed them by, glimpsing them only as the moment in which they appeared also sealed them forever. One becomes used to inhabiting the meditative state, and familiarised with that which is contemplated in the moment of its vanishing: the fugitive word, the irredeemable object, the inconstant place, the traitor moment, the transient other.

If there is a meaning to be drawn from my wanderings, then it is this: I had doubted neither my mother nor my father, but for a short moment one school day afternoon long ago, I doubted that the palace they had made their dwelling really contained many mansions. And the price I have paid for my conflicted existence is a sudden awareness of the movement of a reciprocating doubt. I immediately perceived how the house itself, the veritable site of dwelling, could also contemplate and work upon, polishing and perfecting, its doubting of me. 

And from that day it has not relented - the fixity in its doubting of me becomes the form for my own uncertainty. To all extents and purposes, the house is not changed, the house is there. The house is there. The house is exactly as it always was. And because it is as it was, I empathise implicitly with its reasons for calling me into question. I accede before the irrefutable logic of its position with regards to my perpetual flickering because what it thinks, I think; what it feels, I feel; what it knows, I know also. Because certainty, doubt; because loyalty, traitor; because continuity, interruption; because world, separation.