the pure & the impure

Lots of responses like James Lasdun’s to Michael Finkel’s book on Christopher Knight, Stranger in the Woods.

The interesting thing about Finkel’s revision of Knight is not that it attempts to romanticise a thief but that it accidentally questions the idea of wilderness survival as an available form of self-authentication.

The space he went to ground in was already impure: full of weekend retreats and–presumably–used for outdoor recreation. Any attempt to “survive” authentically there was doomed by that. Its usage as a space was already domesticated, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to steal from holiday homes.

The same was true of Christopher McCandless and of John Krakeur’s book about him: the space in which McCandless tried to authenticate himself was not considered by local users of wilderness to be particularly wild. He wasn’t, as far as they were concerned, all that deep in. That was the tenor of the local reaction to the tragedy. With a little of the workaday understanding the local users had, their complaint went, he could easily have survived.

The problem with that position is that it describes the wilderness as already partly domesticated. The level of skill required might be specialised, but it is perfectly available. And the more people take up the skills, the more normalised the process of survival becomes. That begins an inevitable domestication of the space which will, eventually, lead to it becoming a leisure resource, an extension of the suburb.

So when you blame McCandless for being naive and failing to learn anything about the problems he would face in the “wild”; or when you blame Knight for living off the land the way a Yosemite bear or suburban racoon might (that is, as “the land” now presents itself), you are really, if unintentionally, mourning an already vanished concept of wildness. Penetration of that pure space as an equally pure self-authenticatory act has become a game. It can no longer be romanticised. It is no longer the scene of the rite of passage–or at least not that particular rite of passage. Our irritation at Knight for “cheating” is a tacit admission of that.

marooned this side of heartfelt

I’m old enough to remember things that happened around 1949, although they are mostly about the weather & building sites. I don’t seem to remember myself at that age, only the things I looked at. Puddles. Careful stacks of materials. Sacks of sand. I don’t have a narrative of those places or of myself in relation to them; I’m careful not to retrofit them with one. They weren’t in cities, or even, really, in towns. They weren’t bomb sites. I wasn’t drawn to them, I already lived there. They were brand new greenbelt housing estates in Staffordshire or Warwickshire, on the perimeters of which the builders were still at work. They weren’t sites of fantasy or escape. The objects in them were fascinating because they were the objects of those places. Or they were intrinsically interesting, on a day-to-day basis, because of some quality, such as being transparent. Or frozen. Or yellow. Or having moved since I last saw them.

what I’m after here

Something the reader can only navigate with a kind of emotional sonar. I mean, a space distancing enough to be reverberant, remote-feeling enough to be on the astral plane. (You have to imagine those last two words as intoned by Jonathan Richman in the eponymous song.) So the landscape of the book wants to be a big empty yet resonant emotional space in which the characters don’t even know they’ve lost their orientation. There’s some kind of alien invasion or hauntological action going on in there, but even that’s at one remove or maybe two. The space is loaded but as the reader you don’t know how to complete it. You don’t know what your side of the bargain is. It would be easier if you thought the characters knew the right kinds of things about themselves, but they so very clearly don’t. Meanwhile, the pings come back from emotional structures–Big Dumb Objects–so very far away you can’t tell them from lightweight passing concerns.

evening routines of the world’s most unproductive people

• Not collecting anything or putting it in order.
• Standing on the stairs thinking what to do next.
• Thinking what you would do if another set of conditions applied.
• Going dressed for Cannery Row.
• “When I feel I’ve had it up to here with the entire shitshow, I sit in a chair.”
• You don’t know what you know.
• Having the wrong set of emotions for what you dreamed.
• Not knowing how it happened.
• Remembering that, before you came here, people seemed to move about a bit more.

the new real bread

First the corporate bakers replace bread with a packaged, highly uniform item based on the cheapest ingredients and most cost-efficient production methods. By comparison, old fashioned bread is too slow, too difficult to make; it has a shorter shelf life and can be shown to appeal to fewer customers: they drop it from their repertoire, on the basis of the fall in demand they themselves have stimulated. As a result, perhaps a generation later, there begins to be seen a minor but discernible movement in the population itself towards “real” bread, generally defined as “wholemeal”; a bread which, though it is slower to make and harder to store, has all the qualities manufactured bread now lacks–taste, texture, substance & so on. The corporate bakers ignore this “new” bread until it begins to win publicity & shelf-space, at which point they claim that its entire raison d’etre is baseless: their product adheres fully to the regulations that define bread; it is just as good, just as wholesome, nutritious and fulfilling to eat; and anyway, people prefer its qualities of softness, reproducibility and long shelf-life. They commission advertising around these points. They commission nostalgia advertising. The wholemeal market, though still small, continues to grow. The corporate bakers commission cultural attack advertising, which shows ordinary, decent voters trying to make fish-finger-&-tomato-sauce sandwiches with “difficult” & foreign breads. But while these ads are comedy & rhetorical gold, and work well with the confirmation biases of eighty percent of the bread market, it’s now clear to corporate accountancy that there is in fact money to be made from the other twenty percent. Achieving by political lobby a change in the rules that define the notion of “wholemeal” which allows them to make a cheap, long-life, soft-feel imitation and still call it “real bread”, the corporates begin their move back into the slice of the market they voluntarily vacated a generation before, publicly condemning the “crushing consistency” of their own core product and tempting wholemeal experts away from their start-ups to design & package lines of the new real bread they will move through locally branded outlets set up on the sites of the old high street bakeries. Equilibrium returns. Everyone is safe.