Back in Brighton

Dreaming

"I never dream, at least if I do I never remember them," its a statement I have made many times because it happens to be true. At least it was true because lately and worryingly I have been having these cinematic stories buzzing around. Last night, for example, I was playing Victor Jara in a biopic of his struggle. How odd is that? I mean the closest I have ever been to South America is a wee trip to Tijuana. And of course that theme also provoked crossover ideas (as dreams do) and this track (below) was the soundtrack of that dream, which is, indeed Tijuana, and why I hate to dream. I don't like the confusion, the clutter or the muddle because it invariable takes me to places I don't want to be. And that is why I was drinking 'early grey' tea at 5.30am this morning, thinking about poor Victor Jara and Tijuana and listening to this J.J. Cale song.

Icarus over Belgium # 1

Still hiding...

Belgium is a strange place to be, cycling and swimming and reading while the world spins and you feel so far away from everything. Its nice, its like a European outpost. I have felt this way before, in remote parts of Australia and the USA, litle pockets that serve as vacuums in a troubled world. But soon it will be back to work - after numerous emails on the 'problems' of the Bogeyman production and the need for 'new' proofs, it seems I have the right ones after all so it could all have been done and  dusted. Also Monsters is now scheduled for January 2012 publication which is good, because it means I will publish a book this year and one next which looks better on the CV, especially when I have a couple of plans for next year already. But I realise in typing that I am not really saying anything much except reciting a housekeeping list, thogh I guess that is just life sometimes. Nietzsche said, ''All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking...'' and I we could add swimming and cycling to that. But that could also be , ''All truly naff throughts are conceived this way too... hooots.'' I was sent a copy of Carl Sandberg's, 'Under a Harvest Moon' recently, susch a great poem and it reminded me of a great song - dunno how I never came across this vid before (maybe I did and forgot - because I do) but I love this:

Icarus hiding # 2

dialektic im stillstand

Thomas Hoepker took this picture (below) of young people sitting on the Brooklyn waterfront on 9/11/01, of which he says: "The picture, I felt, was ambiguous and confusing: Publishing it might distort the reality as we had felt it on that historic day. I had seen and read about the outpouring of compassion of New Yorkers toward the stricken families, the acts of heroism by firefighters, police, and anonymous helpers... [the] shot didn't "feel right" at this moment and I put it in the "B" box of rejected images... "

Young people on the Brooklyn waterfront on Sept. 11 

Now, distanced from the actual event, the picture seemed strange and surreal. It asked questions but provided no answers. How could disaster descend on such a beautiful day? How could this group of cool-looking young people sit there so relaxed and seemingly untouched by the mother of all catastrophes which unfolded in the background? Was this the callousness of a generation, which had seen too much CNN and too many horror movies? Or was it just the devious lie of a snapshot, which ignored the seconds before and after I had clicked the shutter? Maybe this group had just gone through agony and catharsis or a long-concerned discussion? Was everyone supposed to run around with a worried look on that day or the weeks after 9/11? How would I have looked on that day to a distanced observer? Probably like a coldhearted reporter, geared to shoot the pictures of his life. I just remember that I was in shock, confused, scared, disoriented, and emotional, but trying hard to stay focused on getting my snaps." And  I just think its astonishing and I am reminded of Brueghel's painting and Auden's poem Musee des Beaux Arts and the boy Icarus! 

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. 

‘Oh,’ dialektic im stillstand - dialectics at a standstill - that amazing Icarus boy ignored, the ordinary smashing up against the extraordinary, and everything shaking just a little bit. As Auden suggests in his poem, the juxtaposition between the ordinary events and extraordinary ones collide and are worth recording as an arrested moment of experience, of something new which will not stand still, for it will never be new again, but will always be starting over. And perhaps there is a paper waiting to be written on the Benjamin / Breughel / Auden / Hoepker connections - pondering... how can a poor man share such times and live...

 

Icarus hiding # 1

hiding...

A guitar is a great thing to hide behind in troubled times. With wars going on around the world, and riots and all kinds of bad things I can just sit and strum away in my kitchen. And I have a set a plan to finish all of the songs I started this year - which is about twelve, all in need of lyrics. Note to self, the hush that is silence opens the door to music. I am off to quiet Belgium this weekend and there I will sit with pad and pencil and scrawl spider-like notes over notes and strumming chords and bottle-neck slides, in secret, hiding behind one of my guitars or mandolins... maybe thinking about Maria Elena: 

 

Icarus flying

Ikarus 1993 by Simon Benetton
(at the Bonn Opera)

Sometimes I think I have been kidding myself, though mostly not. There is no art to this blogging, its just another whittling stick, a way of staving off the loneliness of living while interminable hours whizz by. I should do something more constructive. Like get on with recording my songs or writing more constructively. I guess it takes a short illness for the real to come crashing through your window. I have a theory about that. Fate waits until you are down then takes its chance and then all you can do is try to reconstruct it as a song, or a poem or a fragment of thought before it gets lost on the breeze. Wallace Stevens said, '...it is the serenade/ Of a man that plays a blue guitar.' I am writing a new song now, called Fate Waits... But for now, Icarus meets Darwin in songs that link:

Icarus flying home # 42

Remembering to forget to rememember...

I remembered a short story by Milan Kundera called, 'A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings' and how much it had inspired the novel, Skellig but also how it chimed with ideas on Icarus and angels and such winged creatures, which led me to the film Wings of Desire, as such thoughts tend to do - constantly making connections - but the Wings of Desire film took me to Paris, Texas and I reflected on that too while I was about it and all these started to take shape into a central theme on loneliness which is an interesting theme too. it is one I used to mull over and I hadn't quite seen Icarus in that light until now. I'm not sure how it can be explored - having just completed for publication the paper, Icarus and Intimacy for Axon Journal, with the 'webmeister'. But its an interesting thought which I record here, while and at the same time play the theme tune to Paris, Texas, which is Ry Cooder at his most sublime. 

Icarus flying home # 41

Pondering...

The proofs to my Bogeyman book have arrived - yikes! I say that because it is getting close to being real and it is getting closer to not being mine but everyone else's who chooses to read it. That is the scary bit, especially as I have been a tad hard on some in the kid lit 'tribe' - of which I am not really a member. If the tribe were Robin Hood and his merry men, I would be Will Scarlet, the wandering minstrel who drops in occasionally. Although if you saw me now you might think of me as Friar Tuck, being as I am a little wide around the girth - I am working on it honest but its taking some shifting. And to make matters worse, I picked all the plums on my plum tree and made way too much jam of industrial proportions. In fact I have run out of jars. What am I going to do with it all? I must have been mad. But back to the Bogeyman, it is a worry knowing that I have called the idea behind a major critic’s book called The Hidden Adult the biggest elephant in the room. But sometimes other things come good too. In the Monsters book I managed to steal an idea on wonderkammern and it works a treat as a metaphor, especially when I then turn it into wonderkinder but unfortunately, that too is preceded by the elephant in the room idea - so it’s now in both books. I hope he's not a big bloke, or has heavies waiting at the end of the phone. Worrying times, being a writer is a potentially hazardous job. Which is why I am sitting pondering - should I be concerned. A friend I edit a journal with said, 'you are making enemies of most of our editorial board.' But they were never my friends anyway - and besides, intellectual sparring is the food of knowledge. But I have worked out that Bogeyman and Monsters are my thirty-second and thirty-third books - double yikes, because it’s my own fault and I should know better by now. And that said I am now thinking about publishing an edited version of The Ghost of Joe Di Maggio on Kindle - thirty-four, show me the door, the world doesn't need any more! Bob Dylan once said that nostalgia is death - what does he know? Right now I have a heavy cold and there is no better way to feel sorry for yourself than a good wallow. Illness makes me miss my home country, which has an umbilical pull, so some time this summer I will go back to see my Ma 'n' Da and my mate Rocky. In the meantime, sit back and wallow in the sites (sic) and sounds:

Icarus asking why # 1

I am sitting watching the news watching thuggery! Kids ok, we can cope with that but more who should know better. Capitalism gone mad, its like the novel perfume where the shit is hitting the fan and everyone is grasping for a piece of it, a t-shirt here and a single trainer there, a tele here and a 'dummy' blackberry phone there, someone said on radio its Martin Luther King all over again - what a lot of rubbish that is. There is no socialist agenda here, it is capitalism gone sour, the wanna-haves need a bigger fix. This is my song for this evening, I am so sad because Foucault and Bourdeiu would be saying oh, merde... what is happening in the UK tonight and this week is just an extension of football hooliganism - arsehole boys out for a fight and a free Bench t-shirt (which are 50p t-shirts selling at £20 for no reason except profit riding on the back of cheap labour). Jeez, I am so fucking annoyed that we have to spend time trying to rationalise teenage boys with, what my Dan just called, an I.Q., of 4 or 5 and no interest in anything except themselves. There are reasons to exhibit this kind of hostility. Not having a flatscreen tele, or new trainers is not it... sigh, problem is,  in the UK we do birthday cards and Christmas and christenings and get Mum and Nana tattoos, all the cute stuff, but sometimes, under the surface, people just ain't no good - tonight I am a very unhappy socialist because while these kids don't know it yet, the Tories love this, hose them down, duff them up, lock them up shit (even though they and their polices are the root of it) - tonight I donated £100 to save the children in Africa as my own act of rebellion - sigh and fuck it - sigh again... wearing my hat indoors for 'singing the blues, with love...'

Icarus flying home # 40

One of the things I remember about learning to play guitar and harmonica was hearing this great song and then thinking, 'well I could do that...' so I did. I played the guitar and the harmonica in a harness while my buddy JD sang, we were 14 and the bees-bloody-knees. How life has changed from way back then in 1968 - goodness is it so long ago? And we graduated from this to Let's Work Together and ain't nothin' changed there. I have just read (in The Lost Books of the Odyssey) that Alcinous said:

Among the Phaeanicians it is believed that each man lives out his life as a character in a story told by someone else... The one thing all Phaeanicians agree is that not enough is known to infer even a single teller's name

Well all I can say I have a bloody good storyteller in charge of mine (oops - thus far, touch wood, kiss a lucky rabbit's foot, don't walk under a ladder..). And Odysseus replied:

Wise king of the happiest country I have seen, is it not better to live your well-favoured life never knowing the teller's name?'

I am not going to go further than this today - because I am curious but mulling the ideas both have put. And I love the technique of this book, which is not dissimilar to Calvino's Invisible Cities - thus far. I like it very much but I feel you can't just devoir it on the beach. I'm on the road again, reading and writing and back on track - yay!

Icarus flying home # 39

In the beginning

Starting a new writing project after two books and one article (co-written with the webmeister) isn't something that comes easily. I have lots to write and say and think about and want to write and hope to write and should write and could write but its a case of getting the head to tell the fingers to do its bidding. But thus far the head isn't behaving itself. I have my iTunes on shuffle at the moment because I can't settle on what I want to listen to, so I am getting a bit of a mixed bag - my writing is like that too. I feel like a Red Admiral, hopping around the garden but not lingering on any particular flower. If the page was a lover I would be Don Juan's reckless brother. Be that as it may, I can be a word-slut for the time being, can I not? There is nothing in the writer's toolbox that says you will write this and only this, or that and only that, rather it says, go on, dip your hand in the lucky bag, you might just find a sherbet lemon to suck on - ooh, do I remember them. I am thinking about tigers at the moment. For a paper I will be giving in Australia and I have two tiger stories to play around with. The first is:

A woman is walking along the road and she sees a man planting pebbles. How odd, she thought. 'Tell me,' she said to the man, 'why are you planting those pebbles?'

'To keep the tigers away,' he replied.

'But there are no tigers around here,' she said.

'Then it works,' said he.

The second:

A man goes into a bar and says, 'There's a tiger outside.'

'No there isn't,' replied the barman.

Just then a woman rushes in and says, 'There's a tiger outside.'

'Huh,' said the barman, 'you two are just trying it on.'

Just then the bar door opens again and a child says, 'Hey mister, is that your tiger out there?'

I have just spent the year wrestling with critcs who are all buddies in the bar, all in the same tribe, all quoting each other when talking about the tiger without questioning the logic of the first story or the veracity of the second and I found myself saying, 'well I just don't believe that.' Someone said my books will upset some in the 'tribe' but since none of them were my pals anyway - yah-boo-sucks is all I can say to that. The mathematician, G.H. Hardy once reported,

I can remember Bertrand Russell telling me of a horrible dream. He was in the top floor of the University Library, about A.D. 2100. A library assistant was going round the shelves carrying an enormous bucket, taking down books, glancing at them, restoring them to the shelves or dumping them into the bucket. At last he came to three large volumes which Russell could recognize as the last surviving copy of Principia Mathematica [written by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, 1910]. He [the library assistant] took down one of the volumes, turned over a few pages, seemed puzzled for a moment by the curious symbolism, closed the volume, balanced it in his hand and hesitated....

This says a lot about the ‘how’ of choices, the randomness without really addressing the ‘why’; the randomness is intriguing; what to include and leave out; what to keep and what to ditch, do we keep what we understand and discard what we don't, or do we keep re-reading the book to learn what we don't already know? It is all about furthering knowledge with a view to being able to choose from a position of knowing. Do I care if critics in the tribe don't like my book? Not a jot! But do I care if they ignore the books - well of course I do. Otherwise its like writing this blog that no one reads, and only another form of talking to myself. Hey And, fancy a glass of wine? Don't mind if I do! I am leaving the tribe I was never in anyway, setting the tigers free: