see you next week

Under the title Grumpiness Is the Fifth Truth Condition, Infinite Thought has this–

Heine recalling his meeting with Hegel in Berlin. Heine, expressing his appreciation of the night-sky, was met with this response from Hegel:

‘The stars, harrumph, the stars are only a gleaming leprosy on the sky.’ – quoted in Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, p. 119.

Always the life & soul of the party.

I’m off now. If you want a quarrel with me over anything it’ll have to be next Tuesday. By then, hopefully, I’ll either have drowned in rain or be so stuffed with endorphins I won’t care what I say. Or both.

tomorrow’s post today

A draft of tomorrow’s post escaped into the wild when I pressed the wrong button, & was frozen in the headlamps of the careering world wide web, how embarrassing. So it might as well be tomorrow’s post today–

See, this is part of what I meant here, & what I meant about bad pub landscapes here: for god’s sake, let us be amateurs. Let us point & press & get accidental effects or just fuck up & sort of enjoy the result: because we are not “photographers”, all we are is people who got a camera. All we are is human beings trying to save a bit of our lives from time. What is the point of encouraging promateurism, except to open up paid masterclassing opportunities for professionals ? I’m already obsessive & knowing about my trade (though, god knows, I try not to be): so why the fuck would I want to waste even more nervous energy being obsessive & knowing about someone else’s ? The problem with experts is they just can’t stop broadcasting their knowledge. They know too much & they’re desperate to pass it on. Part of that is less down to enthusiasm than it seems. It is a darker desperation, an anxiety to make sure that all wisdom is received wisdom, to make sure that no one ever makes “the common error”, or “reinvents the wheel”. It reflects a deep fear of peer contempt: to make a mistake, to fail to receive the wisdom, to act as if you don’t know the score, is to feel a rush of shame so hot it might become psychically unmanageable.

Z Krishna reminded me the other day of Suzuki’s brilliant, “in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few”. “Education” of the sort recommended here makes absolutely certain that everyone–even someone who isn’t actually doing the discipline–knows how few possibilities there are. Even inside a profession, knowing too much means everyone in chains, from the producer to the consumer. Grooming of young writers by a cadre of publishing professionals & promateurs (the latter basically parroting wisdom received from the former) is one reason why contemporary fiction has so little actual imaginative content.

fantasyland

Three green woodpeckers feeding on the ground by the woodland near the station. On a wet morning or at twilight this is a ghostly enough place as it is. For a moment one of the little paths of opportunity that crisscross the common will seem to lengthen out in front of you into deep heath & distances not at all possible. This morning the woodpeckers were at the gate of one of these distances, part of a frame which implied I could now run forever into a “landscape” which would both recede infinitely & offer me infinite accommodation. Which would be in essence penetrable yet unchanged by penetration. In the endless scratchy observations which went together to make up Climbers, The Course of the Heart & Signs of Life, I often noted this: in the bad art of 1980s seaside cafes or pubs in deep Lancashire, Victorian & sub-Victorian twilights recess endlessly plane by feathery plane wrenched by failed technique into something more. As if failed technique could demonstrate some proposition otherwise undemonstrable. Now I destroy this perspective as I did then, by moving smartly on into it, & I wonder: why a group of three ? Is one of them a fledgling ?

Also I think: I’m hungry again. I haven’t been so hungry all the time since I was last young.

Off camping again tomorrow. The Peak District. It’s due to rain, but it would rain in the Peak District even if it wasn’t, if you see what I mean. I’m going to climb, & who knows maybe write that down. I’ve noticed that I get bad feedback from climbers if I actually try to describe my experience of climbing; but I’m ok with them if I just use the cliches. So what I mean is, I’m going to try & tick a few low grade trad solos, guys. Does that allow you to dismiss my efforts–simultaneously pensionable & puerile–with a smile instead of the usual frown ?

actually I’m just completely fucked off & tired of it

This sums something up for me. I like Gormley’s work & I like people, but One And Other doesn’t seem to be either, just the usual insane undignified late Capitalist babel. Big Brother on a stilt. Why are “the people” always advertising something ? Are they aspiring to the condition of being a brand ? Is it a kind of exhibiting of stigmata ? & why, in the UK, are charity & exhibitionism so rigidly linked, or, rather, why is the former always pulled like an Ikea blind across the latter ? Is it a clinical condition ? Why am I increasingly reminded of the stunt culture, breathless social inanity & marathon dance contests of the 1920s & 30s ? Why do I have such a sense of foreboding about that ? Why is everyone in the UK trying to earn a living as a personal fitness advisor ? Will anyone just go & stand on the plinth for their hour & not do anything at all ? These are not, as far as I can see this morning, rhetorical questions.

barnes common

Some humidity leached out the air in the night. Barnes is cool again, under the willows by Beverley Brook & in the little narrow tracks between bramble & waist-high nettles. Then as you emerge from there you feel the London summer thicken on your skin. The heath light could pass itself off as early morning, but you’re soon looking forward to the next shade. Right shoe a little loose. Today for some reason you don’t care. Feeling that bit of heat in your heel is just another way of being in your body. Scuttle across Mill Hill Road in front of the commuter traffic & you’re in the woods.

Reading: Western Grit, Chris Craggs & Alan James. Reviewing: The Sheiling, short stories by David Constantine. Looking forward to: a few days–& a few more easy trad solos–in the Peak District from Thursday. Also looking forward to: reading Brian Evenson’s collection, Fugue State. (Interview with him at Bookslut.)

Oh, & there’s this. I don’t know what to make of it, but it reminded me I was hungry. (via Indigenous Firepower).

miller originals

Among the goodies at his bazaar of the bizarre, Ian Miller now has for sale some original pages from The Luck in the Head.

more on the Theory Cadre

B writes, of my recent post the Theory Cadre in Snowdonia, “Mike, although a picture is mentioned, there’s no picture here.”

Yes, B, there is a picture. But the Theory Cadre, unwilling to give away anything of itself even in such a deliberately revelatory document, has encoded it as text. Another way to look at this is that while the image exists, but is not present, “AE Fenell” does not, & yet is.

Another correspondent asks the more difficult question, “Mr Harrison, is there a Theory Cadre at all ?”

Evidence suggests that any answer to such a question must be arrived at obliquely. Perhaps the shortest answer would be to say that while there may be a Theory Cadre, there is certainly an AE Fennel.

In 1979 someone calling herself “Alicia Feignall” addressed the guests at the Ambiente Hotel from this location in the old kitchen garden.

my 3-d constitutional

A hot sunny afternoon. Polished trade routes at the very bottom end of the grades, perfect for absolute beginners & old men who have made it back to being beginners again. If you squeeze through that flake crack up on the right, you come out in a dry vegetated corner of reality a million miles from your life. No one wants it. An insect trundles through a soft dusty ray of light. Why are you here ? Why be anywhere else ? Children’s voices filter down from an instructional group on the upper tier. They’re abbing! In helmets! (They’re really quite excited by that.)

If I had grandchildren the right age I’d bring them here on a day like this, to show them what it was all about: a walk in the air in the sunshine. The thing is just to be there, I’d explain. Whatever else happens, whatever else you do with it, that should be your base level: you never need do any more. I expect they’d laugh but I don’t think I’d care.

picture copyright C Phillips 2009

the Theory Cadre in Snowdonia

In its earliest years, Michael Jackson & Mickey Rourke committed the Ambiente Hotel’s shadowy but powerful Theory Cadre to a regime of Crowleyism, mechanical engineering & systemic self-doubt. This docufictional image restages a crucial moment from the 1948 May Day Phenomenology Camp: an anonymous member of what was then little more than a clique retreats down the Watkins Path from “a sudden organic lurching movement half-glimpsed along the lowering ridgeline”. “Several hanging cubical structures,” AE Fenell was later to recall, “were observed briefly during a lightning storm around the isloated peak of Yr Aran.” On the same day some younger members of the Camp, tragically decoding Rourke’s shopping list as an instruction, became disoriented & committed political suicide by simultaneously immersing one another in one of the deeper pools of the Afon Cwm Llan. [Photograph & text courtesy Alice E Fennel, both from her forthcoming monograph "Actioning the Optimal: The Theory Cadre in Wales".]

“your Mari foaled of the starry skies”

I’m going to Wales now.

Back next Tuesday.