Icarus skimming the surface # 1

Snowing again

I seem to have less and less to say these days, my inarticulacy is taking over my ability to communicate and talking is just a chore which I can barely manage. I wonder why that is? Tripping over the inarticulacy of my sense of self. I really don't know what it is. Antonin Artaud said,

When we speak the word 'life', it must

be understood we are not referring to life

as we know it from its surface of facts,

but to that fragile, fluctuating centre which

forms never reach.

Is that the problem? The 'fragile, fluctuating centre which / forms never reach...' where, as Yeats said, 'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold...' I don't know. All I know is that it snowed over the weekend and that is a 'surface of facts' because that snowy surface sprinkling masks so much more:

How am I supposed to feel,

how am I supposed to be,

how am I supposed to understand

the many things I cannot see...

Some music methinks, W.B. Yeats and Joni Mitchell in collaboration with choreographer Jean Grand-Maitre of the Alberta Ballet Company created this modern ballet that speaks volumes of Mitchell's life-long concerns about environmental neglect and warring mankind - culture or wot? Sorry its just a snatch but its better than nothing:

Icarus flying ~ 1

Not sad - I just look like this

Sometimes pictures just catch you the wrong way, this has me looking like a sad-eyed laddie of the lowlands, but I am not. Its just that as I get older my eyelids droop, which is a strange thing indeed. I have noticed it in my peers too. Maybe from now on we should not photograph faces but belly buttons - I mean, have you ever seen a sad belly button? Now if that seems a little irreverent well then so be it, for I have found even in my academic life that taking things too seriously can be detrimental to our well being. Encouraged by my editor, I made my Bogeyman and Monsters books speak in uncharacteristic tones about serious issues - and why not, who says writing has to be inaccessible and reminiscent of Dr Dryasdust. But I guess there is an older academic generation out there who demand it, until it becomes dull for dull's sake. Ho-hum, writing should be fun, even when saying serious things. Jonathan Wilson is a singer who reminds me a little of myself thirty-five years ago, indeed the first line of this song sounds just like I did once and I hear my own, younger voice throughout this song - how uncanny is that, Dr Freud? Its a 'gentle spirit' a ghost of my own past, haunting my new haircut (above - why do they cut hair so short - my barber isn't cutting hair any longer).

Icarus at home # 8

1992

In And our faces, my heart, brief as photos, John Berger writes: ‘That a poem may use the same words as a Company Report means no more than the fact that a lighthouse and a prison cell may be built with stones from the same quarry, joined with the same mortar’. By the same token this picture might be of me but not, it was built with stones from the same DNA but time has passed, adding lines and wrinkles and wisdom (oh yes). I can still do the pose but not the hair, I fear. But this links me back to Baudrillard on time and how it creates this twofold illusion of what is real. This picture is really me, as I feel, and even then I could have been thinking about now, just as I am thinking about then. I know where I was when this was taken, the south of France, Villefranche-sur-Mer to be precise and it was a time when you could ask, is the blue sea really blue without really caring for a reply because it just was and is and this was an act of free will, captured in a photograph which can never be anything but a snapshot of the temporal - this is a Villefrance-sur-Mer song, it has that feel to it, like a Woody Allen film: dance me to the end of love.

Icarus at home # 8



Watching the webcam



Living in a different time zone from my daughter and catching her on skype and via webcams as she plays tennis has a strange effect. In the past I have been writing with an Australian and that was strange, she would write in my night and I in hers, 10,000 miles apart. And sometimes we would cross simultaneously, with me at porridge for breakfast and her drinking champagne, or even the other way around. And then I wondered if its 'time' or whether its just writers. My good friend Neil and I worked on a project where he was writing a novel and he wrote at night and I read it during the morning. Maybe he's really an Australian - got any roo in yah, mate? But I only began musing on this because the Australasian/UK paper was about narrative crossing centuries, how an Icarus idea met what we now call 9/11 and how story narrative travels, which fascinates me. Baudrillard once wrote:

Time itself, lived time, no longer has taken place. The historical time of events, the psychological time of affects and passion, the subjective time of judgement and will, are all simultaneously called into question by virtual time, which is called, no doubt derisevely, 'real time'... Nothing and no one is absolutely present to itself, herself or himself (or, a fortiori, to others)... real time does not exist.

And you know, I am coming to know what he means by this and I might, if I can link in Benjamin to this - just as a musing on sequences of cause and effect and reflecting on narrative, like Phillip Gross, reflecting on some petroglyphs:

Five thousand years from now

    will we have left one sign

        as plain as brave as these...

Its a brave new world, this internet one, and I don't even know what half of these new tricks will do - the same clown:

Icarus Flying Over Oklahoma





Can it really be
Abbi on TV



Boomer Soomer

Yesterday the miracle of the internet dropped into my lap and gave me such a buzz. I was alerted to an internet link of a tennis tournament taking place in Oklahoma - and sure enough, there she was, my Abbi, who I hadn't seen for 2 weeks, taking part in her very first US Colleges Tennis Tournament - wow! It was really her, she won 6-3, 6-0 and 6-1, 6-1 in the singles and 8-2 and 8-1 in the doubles. Such a blast being able to see her, I was sooooo excited - and she played sooooo well - and i know this is a boring old post but I am recording it for posterity because one day she will read it and that will be so cool. But here is something also quite cool - I took this picture while I was over 4500 miles away. How cool is that eh? Baudrillard, boy, this is the 'fringes of the real'. And doncha just love this song, done this way? Yabba Do!

Neil Young,Dylan... My Back Pages by ivaxavi

Icarus in 2012 # 1

At home 2012

Saturdays are writing days and today I am writing a paper which might be called 'Wunderkammer, Wunderkinder - the Hidden Adult and/or the Hidden Child' then again I may not. But its a nervous day because Abbi plays her first tournament for her new team in Oklahoma, aligned to the fact that her new US phone doesn't seem to be texting to the UK. So writing the paper is all about diversion therapy too, although, of course it needs to be be written - ah the life of an active academic, why couldn't that have been the active life of a footballer, or a guitar player, or a sex expert, engaging might have been more fun than sitting typing - how life distracts us from our chosen path. And this is how I am dressed while doing so, heating off though its winter, lots of clothes on, including the grey woollen hoodie and scarf, body warm, head cold to keep it working. I was up in Scotland last week to see my parents but it was good to see A. and R & A too. Nostalgia is death is a phrase I have used before but there is also something wonderfully warm about it too - and I am with Kundera on the 'grammatical future of nostalgia' for surely its the projected thoughts of a daydreamer and I do like to daydream (mostly about being a football and guitar playing sexpert - that'll do nicely). But the musing, Blake, in a very nice little collection bought for me some time ago, wrote:

I have no name

I am but two days old. -

What shall I call thee?

I happy am

Joy is my name. -

Sweet joy befall thee!

and I guess that pretty well sums the nostalgic up for me, its the projected thoughts of happy times and those yet to come - sigh. Nostalgia is this song: