a letter from an uncle
by uzwi
On looking at it, I feel no frisson. No excitement. No real interest. It no longer works for me even as the illustration of an illusion or of a failure of interpretation. It may be of interest to a specialist in perception, but I receive it the way I would receive any other trailer for a movie or TV advert for a product.
When I say this, of course, it’s because I’m interested in how popular fantasy propels or catalyses our increasingly saturated intimacy with the absurd and illusory. While I have no difficulty reading out “floating bin” from the picture, and indeed have lost all surprise at the absurdity of images like this, it remains a picture and I have no interest whatsoever in the “possibility” of a floating bin. I thought perhaps I should make that clear, in case anyone mistook the content of the particular photograph for the subject matter here.
I’d also like to say that my father’s brother was called Don.
Don wrote to me once when I was quite young, a nice letter full of news. I looked at the signature and was filled with delight. I couldn’t quite understand why Dan Dare would write to me, or why my hero, a fictional space pilot, would send me news from a town just up the A5 in a tone of such familiarity. “Your Uncle Dan”! The facts percolated through to me across that morning at school, reluctantly you would say, but as if I’d known them all along. Until I could no longer avoid acknowledging them, it was the most exciting day of my life.
the m john harrison blog 
Interesting as a kind of experimental gauge of temperament – for a fraction of a second, my nervous system convulsed in ecstasy ‘a floating bin!’ The pedantic rationalist in me forced the sense of wonder into submission in the time it takes a synapse to fire. I could still see a ‘floating bin’, but the magic was gone – it was an amusement, a cheap novelty which for an fraction of a moment assumed the appearance of the miraculous. I maintain that the fragment of an illusion could possibly be the true universe, winking, the tidal wave of ‘reality’ only asserting itself by raw force. I surrender, because the idea of the miracle of a floating bin is to me sacred, and I cannot allow it to be cheapened by belief, faith, advertising, special effects, psychology, rationalism or fantasy. Scepticism is the paper thin eschutcheon of the romantic searcher, who hopes that all possibilities can exist
We like to think that our brain takes a picture of everything within our field of view and analyses what is there the same way that we might do with a photo on the table in front of us but is quite shocking just how much of what we ‘See’ is actually our brain just picking one detail and guessing what the rest must be based on past experience. Famous experiments include the video of a gorilla walking through the middle of a basketball game unnoticed and Edwin Lands demonstration that the brain can see a black & white photo in full colour if just one colour is provided because it cares more about the tonal differences and context than what the cones in your eyes are recording. It makes eye-witness accounts pretty useless really.
Hi sagittarius, good luck with that. If you see Dan Dare, give him my best.
Mike, you’re father was an engineer. Would you say your family was working-class or middle-class? Did your family value fact over fiction? The practical and ‘made’ and ‘real’ over the invented and fantastical? Was there much fiction in your childhood home? Was your first experience of fantasy in comics?
My partner’ doing an MA in education and, funnily enough, she was just talking to me about cultures (sometimes working-class) in which fact is valued over fiction. How education is biased towards the middle-class emphasis on fairy stories, fiction and fantasy. I may have misunderstood it, but it chimes with what you’re saying.
I’m interested in how your work differs from the concerns off Autofiction. I can see similarities between your work and Rachel Cusk, but her interest in the real comes from a more middle-class position. I feel that when you talk about the real it only makes sense when seen as the opposite of something. It’s generally defined as the opposite of something.
(Also, I’ve been thinking recently about how your use of climbing examined notions off masculinity. Climbing was the opposite of something. It partly represented the physical, the body, the real. The opposite of what? the head, the dream, words, images. It’s interesting to me that you never become macho, or celebrate masculinity in that D H Lawrence way. But you also don’t use it to criticise masculinity exactly.)
Hi dllo: As I get older I think constantly about these very issues & one day I’ll gather up all the fragments I’ve written about them & try to make them say something. But I don’t want my conclusions to be superficial or easy & autofiction will be dead by then, for sure: so I’m letting it all cook down for a while yet. If you organise by intuition, along a structure you aren’t going to make the reader entirely privy to, you have to be sure you’re coming from a very deep place. I feel as if I’m approaching that. This blog has really helped.
PS: my intro to the Gylphi “M John Harrison: Critical Essays” was a first attempt to engage with much of this stuff, but perhaps you’d already guessed that…
PS dllo: Thinking about it, I don’t see this stuff as a problem, except that it’s become something I want to “understand” by encouraging it to write itself down for me. I don’t see it as a matter of colliding class-identifiers per se, either: just the circumstances of my own life, from the detritus of which, like the caddis larva, I make a kind of wonky construction, the purpose of which I gave up trying to comprehend years ago.
I put “understanding” in quotes there because I’m not all that sure what I mean by it, except that I don’t mean conscious or rational understanding. The written piece *is* the understanding–it’s both the episteme & its product–even though I don’t necessarily understand it when I’ve finished. & even though the episteme may well change for (by becoming) the next piece.
In a story of hers, Maeve Brennan describes a long room belonging to a close friend as “like a telescope and at the same time it is like what you see through a telescope”. All writing should give that effect, it’s both the mechanism & the product of the mechanism. By which I don’t mean it’s looking at itself… Or even that the instrument you make is the answer to the question you asked…
dllo I think you made a great allusion to how conflicting personalities arise from what can appear to be a causal chain of events. I read an interesting bit on the abusive dynamic of epistemic inequality between silicon valley corps & customers, which essentially powers the commodification of potential desires (fantasy?) on aggregate and highly personalized scales. You could say there is a high availability of meaning to the data collectors. How do you write well without trying to sell someone something? Can you take that away even?