Bedfellows

 Posted by at 12:26 pm  OVER and BEYOND  Comments Off
Jul 282009
 

Sexuality and vitality: to be alive, to be quick is to be sexual; to be tuned, in tune, in time, to neither be ahead nor behind, rather in the right place. The analogy here is the orchestra – keeping time in the eternity of the music. All my cells scraping away on their violins, singing, humming, gurgling.

At a certain point sexual loving becomes exclusive; the eye contact, the excitement, the longing, the touching – retiring to privacy – to enable a certain dirtiness, fecundity, wildness. An edgy sort of place where uncertainty can reign, potential unleashed, anxiety assuaged . . . and, I want to suggest, morality can be discerned, even established. Right in the core of dirtiness there is the centre of morality. They belong together providing we let them belong together.

A Guide of Sorts

 Posted by at 12:02 pm  OVER and BEYOND  Comments Off
Jul 242009
 

What did reading Dostoevsky – late teens/early twenties – do to me? Do to my mind? He tunnelled into and through it, opening up new passages, vast chambers, narrow twisting, water-filled ways, turned darkness ever darker, exposing hidden machinery of perversity and complexity, opaqueness and mystery. Did he, I ask myself forty years or so on, set me off on my life's path? Not exactly a slap on the back and a 'good luck'. More like I blinked in bewildered astonishment, stumbled and took a step.

Was it an illusion, my discernment of that path? No, I don't think it was entirely but perhaps the question can be refined as to what sort of path I imagined it to be. Though whether we ever see our path ahead with any sort of reality is doubtful. I can see a faint but definite glow of glory in my image of the path. Is that glow the glow of anticipation, of hope – what I saw back then – or is it the superimposition of the lived experience of the path? Yes to both of those. The excitement of new life. The actual glory of sexual love, the glory of lighting upon new thoughts. 
Was I lucky? Yes.
Was there pain, suffering, difficulty? Yes.
Did I doubt? Yes.
And I continue.
Am I grateful? Yes.

O Yeah You Look Very Funny!

 Posted by at 12:28 pm  OUT in the WILDERNESS  Comments Off
Jul 232009
 

We are opaque to ourselves, a mystery. So we imitate others and make up stories in which we have a leading part, copying phrases we hear, using words that attract us: ohhh that sounds good. This keeps our spirits up when the nights are dark. Otherwise we might slip down, get dragged down by 'lost' souls. Don Quixote went off with Sancho Panza following his phantom, chivalrous, holy heroes, Arthur and Amadis. Sancho and everybody else thought he was mad but loved him anyway.

We imitate in admiration, following the faint trail made by those who go before us. A dead end is when we find ourselves in a situation in which we cannot admire others around and above (in a hierarchical sense) us. Then we are thrown back on our own opacity, tilting at windmills, waiting to hear the words that sing to us. 
Let me get on with the work; the work of words. Listening to others, finding arrangements of words that have the power to make sense, to give form and to lead me a step or two forward.
Where are you? 
I'm here! 
I can't see you . . . oh yes I can now. Can you see me? 
O yeah you look very funny.

The Next Task

 Posted by at 1:07 pm  Atelier  Comments Off
Jul 152009
 

The job is to merely to build a bridge. I can see two platforms (how long before other platforms emerge from the mist?); the first being psychoanalytic thought; the second
Catholicism/Christianity. Slavoj Zizek seems to have done it though it’s hard
for me to judge how good a bridge it is. 

Here's a start on the list: I need a better feel for Lacanian
thought, to read more Zizek and others; to battle with the material; plenty of that sort of grappling with the stuff (you know how it is, when
the mind twists and turns and tries to run but to no avail and then the poor old brain starts to melt), and, of course, attempts to write it out as well as thinking and talking whenever possible. 

You see, it didn't take long: a further platform occurs to me: my subjectivity.