learned to drive on a black 1952 version of this

A quick stab

at the problem of description again. 
As usual my reading is in and endless, less than cosmic rebound between too many, I suppose, different kinds of text - a sub acute form of the aporetics of retirement - so called - if only, like inspector Maigret, I had some fishing rods - though I do have a couple of good, farmers' markets to hand, but that is not the issue. Somewhere between Barbara Pym, a study of Averroes, the ever present Tractatus as well as Wittgenstein's letters to Sraffa and a good new dose of Pepe Carvalho, the idea of describing them as an ensemble and that of raking them for structural homologies in the manner of the early Eco require different modes of attention from close to very close to rather distracted reading, one that leads, perhaps, to a poetics of retirement, otherwise known as not being responsible to an institution, nor even to the hors texte, but only to the texts as such and the fragile pretention to their 'inter-ness'.

The issues flit around with an almost desolate lack of urgency even though being urgent has never been my strong point, even in the 1970s when we really thought that capitalism would collapse and agitated to that end. So little urgency that, if I turn first to Pym as a support for my reflection, the rounds of thought of one of her shabbily elegant or elegantly shabby spinsters, living in a nearly specified part of London or an unnamed village or an almost Oxford

(BTW, see youtube, Specters of Communism, performance series two, Haus der Kunst, Adrian Rifkin, for a recent exercise in this mode

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EMAl77sy44 )

anyway, be that as it may I wrote a little piece for the Solitary Pleasures show at the Freud Museum, London, which is in the book, but here is a free copy. There is no reason for you to pay for one as somehow, in these rigorous days, copyright assignment was overlooked:

Two’s Company, One’s a Crowd

I was wandering, lonely enough, in search of a quotation of which I could hardly trace the source, in notes, in files, no trace, I thought it was to hand, so first thing last, of course, I found it on the internet: it was, as it happened, something I had written, I myself, or rather used, alone, once before, at this computer. Above it were two incipits which, now, I want to use again, because they do put me in mind of this essay, as well as setting up what I had already, once, written. Here they are. I am dropping the authors as these are just isolated, lonely memories of me, that came to me via the internet.

Who am I? I had asked. / Who am I? I replied. / Repetition is, in its difference, accomplishment.

And

There is no speech without response, even if it meets only silence, provided there is someone to hear it.

When I watch jack-off videos on gay sites on the internet, and, indeed, I often do, they offer something of the comfort of the thoroughly indeterminate, the indeterminacy of the enunciation, or the signifier as such, a crowd of lovely daffodils, the rippling field of near identical singularities, near identical in this way or that, an identity itself indeterminable other than the endless shadings of small and greater differences. The truth of the matter is that I find them, on the whole, quite tedious and sometimes unwatchable. On anything longer that 14 seconds, I tend to skip a bit, to jump and see what happens at the end. On the truly long ones, sometimes as much as a quarter of an hour, those of the expert edgers who know how to delay the moment, and, even then, when it comes, to prolong it, I might become so riven in my attention, that the minutes pass quicker than mere seconds.

Not unlike a standard TV thriller, the end is always and already known, and suspense lies not in the narrative itself, but rather in its details, the outcome of the very next ‘frame’ or edit; with the author, the quality of the scenario, so as to speak. What can he wring out of himself, and what will it signify to me, for me, whether it is much or little, protracted or instantaneous, shot into the air, across a coffee table, staining a settee, against a mirror or even, oh dread, onto the camera lens itself? For me, that is, in my singularity, the absolute particularity in the probable crowd of other viewers; crowds, readers, viewers, daffodils, clouds, cumshots; can I hold on to that, you see, it’s just to do with that, that holding on perhaps is, as such, solitary, though whether in its success or relinquishment, I might find it hard to say.

At the same time, it is not unlike the self-conversational landscape of one of those highly educated women of Barbara Pym’s novels who, more or less alone in their middle age, turn their thoughts around such issues as these: will the new curate enjoy boiled chicken? What can it mean to and for her if the archdeacon tells her that one of her circle has knitted him socks a little ‘short in the feet…’? what precisely, at each moment of its possible recurrence, is the nature of the ‘need’ for a cup of tea? The instances multiply to become the body of one novel, or a dozen novels, of a whole oeuvre. Reading these novels on the Overground I feel no readier to concede my laughter to a neighbour than I do to show them a video, even a few seconds of some gasping and immense sublimity. That is to say the episteme of what we might call a collectivity of monads, or of a certain loneliness in the frame of a repetitive sociability already and, perhaps, always analogically links the most improbable comparatives.

In any event I had thought to valorise these lost and lonely hours like this. I was to make an art video installation of some kind. I had noticed, quite early on in my years of viewing, that the point where these videos take off is, queerly enough, at their very end: the moment when the actions of the hand, the squelching and so forth are sublimated in a groan, a series of grunts when another singularity emerges, the grain of a body that is in the throat. It was enough that I was, am here to hear it. So the project was and remains this: that I would, and perhaps will, take the best downloads from my collection and swiftly edit them so that however long or short, and on the simplest of algorithms, they would play over and over until, finally, before the loops begin again, they all groan together. These videos should play with the image too dark to see and the sound turned up to the point of absolute displeasure. Hard to measure, but at least my two old incipits would be once again fulfilled in solitude’s own, final, crowded shot.

Mother/Oven, use of the one by the other

A friend who grew up in Puglia said to me, just the other day, when we were discussing the merits of eating various Mediterranean foods at room temperature that

'for my mother the oven was just another cupboard'

for those of us with severe refrigeration neurosis this is quite a scary idea, everything from botulism to whatever flares up, although my mother and her mother who came to live in England both used a heavy stone table as if it were a fridge and I survived

Anyway to conjure the fear I made four images in imitation of my favourite food painter, Sanchez Cotan, but composed with modern ingredients. see below:

The Horror

Honour the Nakba

15 May 2018

I can think of no more to say to day than this.