theasif.info
plot
page
(Lo-tech
Website, text based)
Date:
October, November, December 2008
www.theasif.info
·
Plot
·
Tenant: Rumpledsilkskin (avatar, thinly concealing
terrestrial)
·
Crops and Cultivation (constantly
changing content)
The
philosophy of virtuality: a virtual allotment for the cultivation of virtual
escape.
The
Website of the Philosopher Rumpledsilkskin.
Now and then truth (contingent truth): - no
allocation of infertile space happens except within the medium of the commodity
and all resistance to the commodity is contained within this medium.
Plan
of Crops and Cultivation:
Digging:
all theory and argument will be at least double dug, meaning there will be no
substitute for hard-graft, heart-stimulation, and sound-beds in an old English
style. Modus operandi will be spade striking the old rocks of logic,
objectivity and truth value and barrowing off-site, all post-modernist,
polystyrene packaging.
Weeding: meticulous hoeing, burrowing out, poisoning,
flame gunning of civilised cultivations in their theoretical forms -
dialectical and apocalyptic weeding!
Rank and gross, tap and fibrous rooted, weed-binding possessors of
nature, include: - Morality, Politics, Culture, Religion, Free- Market
Apologia, State, Law, Education, Family. (Marx identified these weeds but was
an inconsistent or lazy weeder.)
Fertilising: scattering images and fictions in the spirit
of virtuality, dressing virtual soil in readiness for main-crop seemings.
Planting:
intercropping, and regular planting throughout four seasons, free from global
warming but contributing to same.
Perennial
Harvesting:
Materialist Virtuality, As Ifness, Modernism (hybrid), Invisible Cells,
Optical Density, Simulacra, Subterraneans,
Indeterminism, Rational Schizophrenia, the Unnoticed. (Irregular allotment
visitors take home emptier baskets, but emptier baskets are easier to carry.
You pays no money and takes your choice.)
Composting:
“Art an Enemy of the People”, “Beyond Art”, “Invisible Cells”, “Mme Rousseau”, Historical Materialism, Fact/Value
distinction, Ideological and Commodity theories of Art. Sartre. Marx. Unamuno.
Richard Jefferies. Jean Seberg. Genet.
Patrick White. David Mercer. Viviane Forrester. Michael Heim. (A virtual
future’s past.)
Pest
Control:
Dialectical spraying: - determinism (evolutionary, neurophysiological,
philosophical, A.I. nonsense), non-dialectical conceptual analysis, sluggish Heideggerian and Post Modernist abstraction. Plus days of
reckoning, Rumpledsilkskin confronts his critics.
THIS
TIME ON THE VIRTUAL ALLOTMENT:- 2008 was to be the
year in which the Virtuality Project was to be completed. Progress towards
this, like last year, takes place off-line. This means its content will not
reappear on theasif.info before 2009 and maybe later. There are no instant
fixes here. Meanwhile theasif.info continues to resurrect Thérèse
Levasseur. Ironically, she is known in these web
pages as Madame Rousseau. It was hoped that her total resurrection but not her
ascension into heaven, would be completed at the Great Exhibition and fete of
the Rousseau For All commemoration in Geneva in 2012, rehearsals for
this resurrection taking place at New Venture in Brighton during July 2009 in
commemoration of Bastille Day. However, Geneva, true to its history,
conservatism and protection of the money system wants in Rousseau an anodyne,
intellectual hero, and is not keen to smell Thérèse’s
piss. She is scheduled to appear at the Great Exhibition but if she does no
doubt this will only be for the purpose of what will be held to be belated
canonisation. However, her ghost may still turn up in time to wreck the party
and cause havoc in Grand Rue. This Quarter’s content at Crops and Cultivation contains, as last quarter, the final
part of a devotional drama for Thérèse. What follows
immediately is a preamble, followed by an account, (taken from “The Arcady
Project”) of a virtual conversation in Paris between Thérèse,
Jean Seberg (the film star) and Julia Callan-Thompson (Jilly
O’Sullivan, in “Tainted Love” by Stewart Home). These skirmishes lead to a
battle for the ordinary against the forces of high seriousness, which is the
drama itself. The richness of the ordinary theasif.info celebrates. For now
theasif.info is quite happy with its ancient monuments, Lenin, Levasseur, Seberg.
They continue to stand undisturbed. 2009, to state the obvious, will be a
different year.
Madame Rousseau (preamble)
Took all your
children away from you at birth, five in all, none of whom you would ever see
again?
Cheated on you
with high-class sophisticates and colluded with them to laugh at your ignorance
and illiteracy?
Lived with you
for over thirty years but never acknowledged you in the eyes of the world as
any more than the servant?
Pretended to
marry you, palming you off with a mock ceremony?
???????
Would you have……
Walked out years
before?
Set Fire to the
bed?
Gone off with
someone else and got abused in exactly the same sort of way?
ANSWER:
There was no
Madame Rousseau in the life of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Suzanne Rousseau (née
Bernard) died following childbirth, the birth of Rousseau. Thérèse
Levasseur, on the other hand, lived with him as wife,
though not wife, for nearly all her adult life.
During his time
(the years of the French Enlightenment, directly preceding the French
Revolution) Rousseau had celebrity and infamy in equal measure. The ideas of
liberty, equality and democracy, which he developed in the modern form, are
embedded now, though garbled, in a global, popular consciousness. People will
sacrifice their lives for them. They make up an orthodoxy, which excludes
alternatives. Rousseau, though, was persecuted for his intellectual daring and
ended his life a paranoid fugitive, thinking all the
world sought to murder him.
When Thérèse first appears in Rousseau’s life she is a shy, young,
pretty girl working in the laundry of a hotel in Paris. Her native town is Orléans, and, like the Maid of Orléans,
she is illiterate and ill educated but possesses considerable practical
intelligence. Gauche and with an open heart she gives herself, her whole being,
to Jean Jacques, who sweeps her off her feet with his mask of eloquence and
romanticism and the perversions which it conceals. By the end of Rousseau’s
life Thérèse has metamorphosed into a vengeful shrew,
totally dominating and subjugating him. At the end of her life, Rousseau dead, Thérèse gains a little celebrity and recognition from
Revolutionary France. As for posterity, she exists as a footnote to
intellectual history.
There is a
putative text by Flores Amelia, concubine to St Augustine, “The Codex Floriae”, whose post-modernist authorship/translation is
attributed by Phoenix House to Jostein Gaarder. This text sets out to reply to St Augustine’s “Confessions”, challenging his philosophical justifications for
banishing Flores Amelia both from his bed and from the son they had produced.
Her sound argument centres on an integration of mind and body and the
physicality of existence in opposition to Augustine’s high-sounding, Platonic virtualism.
In similar vein “Madame Rousseau” is a reply to Rousseau’s own “Confessions”. It is not illustrative history but stays close to
historical fact in order to express freely and with necessary exaggeration Thérèse’s undoubted bitterness and need for revenge, as
well as her sound, good sense. The circumstances of Rousseau’s death were at
the time far from clear and “Madame
Rousseau” takes up a
position on this, which fits some of the facts. The drama pictures Thérèse leading a reluctant Rousseau by the genitals
towards the French Revolution and the collapse of an effete, sophisticated
society. A rebellion of servants. This is true to Thérèse’s feelings about the high society courted by
Rousseau. The society to which he tells risqué stories about itself, like the
disjunctive story of “The Social
Contract” concerning nob rule or mob rule. Ultimately “Madame Rousseau” asserts that footnotes to “history” are more
important than what they are footnotes to, and that ordinary, unrecorded
experience is the way of the world. Before you might go there you might try to
catch the cadence of Thérèse when her ghost accosted
Jean and Julia at the Place du Panthéon, August 1965.
The
Arcady Project ( Exposé. Excerpt)
Jean Seberg had been walking Paris for most of the afternoon. After
their brief lunch, consisting, on her part, of a few leaves of lettuce, she had
left Romain in the apartment on Rue du Bac, so he might write. Paris was hot and empty. She had been all the way down the Boulevard Raspail, slowing as she passed the Cimetière
du Montparnasse. On the Boulevard Saint Michel she had stopped at the window of
a patisserie and gleamed at a millefeuille and then a
chocolate éclair but had moved on. At four o’clock she found herself at the
Place du Panthéon and decided to rest, setting
herself beside the fountain. There were water nymphs and a floating cupola to
take in. Running through her mind was a variant on a theme, a theme, which had
helped establish her celebrity.
“I don’t know if
I’m fat because I’m free, or free because I’m fat.”
This disregard for the imperatives of her career encouraged her to be the farm
girl she was not. She would go further in this scepticism. “So, if I had chosen
a chocolate éclair am I compelled to think that a chocolate éclair is better
than a millefeuille? Surely that is ridiculous. Even
if I prefer chocolate éclairs it cannot follow from my deciding to have the
chocolate éclair that I think they are better than millefeuilles.
Sometimes I may have a millefeuille and other times
an éclair. I may choose the éclair because I know you prefer millefeuille and there is only one of each. I may choose
the éclair because if I am to have anything at all I have to have one or the
other. I am a farm girl, not a donkey.”
The night before
in the same city, Julie Thompson, as she was sometimes known, dined with
Elizabeth Buntt and her husband Alfred Duhrsson. All of them were interested in philosophy and the
conversation turned to the subject of universalisability
and whether it could be treated as a secure predicate, so conferring conceptual
coherence and rationality on the practice of morality. The subject stayed with
her as she set out for an afternoon of drifting. Staying with it was for
reasons of nostalgia. It took her back just a few years, to Geoff in his prime,
to UCL then, to the buzz of professional philosophy, to her pregnancy and to
feelings of optimism. But as she came down the steps at the front of the hotel
she was distracted, through association, by an incomplete remembering of a text
by Beckett. This interrupted her philosophical deliberations, although Beckett
encouraged a sceptical approach to the philosophising. Had she been able to
recite the specific passage in her head, she would have said to herself, “There were not many steps. I had
counted them a thousand times, both going up and coming down, but the figure
has gone from my mind. I have never known whether you should say one with your
foot on the sidewalk, two with the following foot on the first step, and so on,
or whether the sidewalk shouldn’t count. At the top of the steps I fell foul of
the same dilemma. In the other direction, I mean from top to bottom, it was the
same, the word is not too strong. I did not know where
to begin nor where to end, that’s the truth of the
matter. I arrived therefore at three totally different figures, without ever
knowing which of them was right. And when I say that the figure has gone from
my mind, I mean that none of the three figures is with me anymore, in my mind.
It is true that if I were to find, in my mind, where is certainly to be found,
one of these figures, I would find it and it alone, without being able to
deduce it from the other two. And even were I to recover two, I would not know
the third. No, I would have to find all three, in my mind, in order to know all
three. Memories are killing.” As she was unable to recall this text in this detail, she was able to
resume quickly her own line of thought. And her walk began.
“Had I left my
hotel in the Marais and headed for Notre Dame, armed with a map, there would be
all sorts of instrumental choices I would have to make, calculating the better
route to follow, my choices being made on the basis of which rue would best
serve my chosen end, arrival at Notre Dame. But just to go out, as I have, with
no real rhyme or reason, is the stuff of ordinary life. Honestly it’s how we
live in the domestic space, fully intentional, fully
choosing, but not stretched over a barrel of values. So I come out of my hotel.
I turn right. Does it matter that I turn right? Do I think it the better way to
go? Do I think it better to have turned left or right rather than remain on the
steps of the hotel? No! It doesn’t matter to me. I have no idea which is the
best way to go. I have decided to go for a walk, which more or less entailed
turning right or left. There is no question of remaining at the hotel entrance.
There is no scale ranging from best to worst that I am on. Decisions have
consequences. At the same time I am not compelled to walk. The walk is
voluntary. It is my own choice. I do not seek refuge in bad faith. I am
responsible for my walk. My choices will have reasons and the reasons explain
my choices but they do not need to justify them or involve me legislating for
others. Most of what I do is volitional, intentional, chosen, explicable but
done without thinking.”
By the time Julie
had worked this out she found herself outside the Panthéon.
Feeling hot and her flip-flops rubbing her little toes she made for the
fountain to ease those toes in the water.
In a blank moment
Jean Seberg, the pharmacist’s daughter and not a farm
girl, raised her gaze to the sun, which forced her to squint a little but she
smiled welcoming, and, as if an apparition, an old woman pottered into view.
The old woman wore a bonnet, a bodice jacket and a
long skirt with a bit of a bustle, all looking like hand- me -downs from
another age. Despite the heat her hands were buried in a muff. She
approached. Jean expected her to be on
the cadge, but instead of demanding a few francs the old woman launched into a
declaration, surprisingly in English with staccato, terrier delivery, like
another Julie, Burchill!
“Jean
Jacques Rousseau- political philosopher, moralist, essayist, novelist,
composer, naturalist, copyist, secretary, servant, cashier, walker, idler,
womanizer, masturbator, citizen of Geneva, educationalist, absent father,
exhibitionist, masochist, hermit, peasant-lover, noble-ass-licker, reluctant
revolutionary, romantic, drop-out, victim of murder?”
She then
proceeded to squat herself between where Jean and Julie were sitting. Pulling up her skirt and lowering her drawers
she piddled into the waters of the fountain. Julie, with an amused smile,
quickly withdrew her feet. Julie didn’t know who to be intrigued with most, the
outlandish old woman or the other occupant of the fountain. “Really, isn’t that
Jean Seberg?” Also she felt a shade embarrassed. She
had come to Paris sporting le coup Seberg.
Fortunately, Jean Seberg, if she was Jean Seberg, had moved on to a formalized bouffant.
“That’s better!”
The old woman pulled up her drawers and rearranged her skirt making herself at
home in the space between Julie and Jean, trying to strike up conversation, but
not bothered if she was not interrupted.
“Free as pigeons now. Waddling down our
roads…Platriere…Grenelle…a
jingle of pension in me purse, ta! Publisher Rey,
still a tingle of passion in me poke, a cockade in me ’at, crapping and pissing
where I likes. Do dicky birds pee? He would know
something fucking useless like that. Flutter off to Palais
Royal for a little din dins, before taking my perch, my honoured perch mind
you, like a vulture, in our new place, Place de la Revolution. A place for
citizens, poissardes and the taking of nobs! They don’t call it that now dearies. Now it’s Place de la Concorde! What’s think of my English? I’ve picked it up quite well ghosting
around this city for a couple hundred years, from you tourists, dearies!” Jean was about to remonstrate she was not a
tourist but the old woman had moved on.
“He pissed like a
leaking tap, old cock, ’til I siphoned him…And the tall stories he would tell…
me bending and threading bougies. Zulietta
in Venice was a trusty tale…’The Origins of a Disequilibrium of Bilge Water’ he
called it…that fucking harlot made a spurting bean sprout of you…my once upon a
time, for all my life.” She turned to Jean. “We poissardes
ponced about Versailles, Citizen of somewhere. I was
there for that. Broad daylight and she was still abed. You should have seen the
look on a rich face. Marie Antoinette, a slab of Viennese pastry, and fifty
Parisian strumpets rampaging the royal bedchamber…tugging
on gowns and wigs, braying all the names of the pigsty. She snorts out of bed
like a fast fart, in a shift and petticoat, and, for some notion of hers, with
stockings in her hand, and scampers off down the corridors of Versailles, poissardes, with fish knives out, in pursuit. I couldn’t
keep up, not enough puff, you understand, being a pensioner.”
Julie’s curiosity was aroused. “Hi! I’m Julie, now who are you?” Perhaps
she would also get Jean Seberg to say who she was.
“I’m Thérèse darlin’, I’m Thérèse…Did I ever think he was a divine being? If so I was
very young and simple. He said I was the Maid d’Orleans,
when we first met.”
Jean was not going
to introduce herself but this conversation was coming close to home, so she
asked the leading question. “Was that Otto?”
“No darlin’, not Otto, Jean Jacques, the divine Jean Jacques. I
don’t know if I was there at the birth of Supreme Being, but, if he was divine,
certainly I was there at the death of God. That would be ‘deicide’? Or am I
saying the opposite of what I mean again? Not that anyone suspected unholy
crime. And who done it? Surely not that young girl he
saw for the first time, here in Paris, waiting on tables at the Hotel Saint
Quentin? Flustered and blushin’, innocent of
gentlemen’s ways she was. Up to her fucking armpits in
soapsuds. Gave nearly all my life to live with him… And we did speak in
the days that followed. And like Saint Joan I heard voices. He became my
voices. All the different people in Jean Jacques…my voices… until for a long
time I had no voice of me own. Oh! Jean Jacques. How I got to know him. So high-sounding. I fell in love with high-sounding. But my
ears deceived me. He was the tenderest, most
sensitive, most feeling soul ever born, or so he kept saying. For all those
years I was his servant, his nurse, his aunt. I was Pope Joan, Lieutenant Criminel, not even his mistress, never his wife, not
really.” The old woman fell silent and seemed to go into herself. They all
continued sitting there, staring in front of themselves, the younger women just
enjoying the sun on their flesh.
Julie broke the
silence. “So this is Rousseau you are talking about, the great philosopher? You
knew him!”
The old woman
ignored this. “ For a long time after, I didn’t think
I’d get worked up ever again. I went sullen, numb, into myself. When I had my
fifth, I didn’t make no trouble. After that there were
no more. He robbed me of the whole brood. Sucked all the life
out of me. Blew me up and down so many times until I
was just a distorted old bag. Bundled them up, bothered to put a
monogram in for the first one, and he carried them to the door of the Sisters
of St Vincent de Paul. Five times he must have knocked on that door. ‘Foundlings!’ I must have been deep asleep. Have you any
children dear?” She turned to Julie. “Yes, a boy.” “And what’s his name?” “Llewelyn.” “And
what about you dearie?” Jean told her she had
a boy too, by the name of Diego.
“That must be
lovely for you, and I expect you have men who are proud of you. Lovely for you. My bugger was ashamed of me.” She fished in
her muff and pulled out some scraps of paper. “Do you know what this is? It’s a
letter he wrote and I trudged up the valley in Montmorency
to deliver it for him. Can you believe? I’ll read some of it to you. I can
read. Listen. ‘
Beloved
Sophie! You intoxicate my sight. When I’m near you I’m seized with delightful shiverings. O contagious power of love.’ Well that was just Jean Jacques being a soft shit.
A woman in her birth fever goes over the top, and I’d come to think perhaps it
was right a philosopher should feel free and not have to bother with family,
after all he was providing some sort of living for us, but to write about me,
to her! ‘You ask
about Thérèse and our relationship.’ This I remember. I don’t need no
reading. ‘From the
first moment when I saw her up to this day, I never felt the least spark of
love for her. The sensual needs, which I satisfy in her person, are only for me
those of sexual impulse, without in any way connected with the individual. As
you may well imagine we do not have sufficient ideas in common to make a great
stock in conversation. Our conversation is just gossip, scandal and feeble jokes,
as operatic as washerwomen. When living as a hermit one feels the advantage of
living with someone who knows how to think, as you do my angel Sophie.’ Well that was a soup I would have relieved myself
in. But I stayed the course. Women who stay the course eventually get the upper
hand. Don’t think he got off easily. I had much more than was fit. I had him
howling mad. I used to say to him ‘What
will you spit on for me? Spit on the King of France! Spit on the Arts, all that
painting and music and literature! Never did me no
good. Spit on all I have had to suffer living with a fartist!’
Not that it was living. ‘Spit on the Sciences and Diderot’s encyclopaedia, for
all I have had to suffer in the name of progress! Spit on civilization! Spit on
all the aristocrats who have ever lived! Spit on all the
swanky, furry muff you’ve ever fondled! And when you cum, cum
on all your tumblings, your operas, your music, your
romances. When you play court jester to the high and mighty you betray
us. You betray the unnoticed. From now on I want all this spit and cum in your
writings, otherwise I’ll brain you…with a chamber-pot!’ I made something of Jean Jacques. So he wrote that
Art was tossing for nobs, kings had no God-given
rights, the rabble knew best and even if they didn’t who cares, wealth was
always theft somehow or other, children should be brought up as peasants. I was
not to be denied revolution just because Jean Jacques would doff his Armenian
turban to the perfumed persecutors of the hoi polloi. I encouraged him to be
the little piss-taker he really was. I would say to him, ‘The king and his cronies are all nobs and impostors and they’ve imposed for long enough. We
want everything to our level. How do you write that down in a book?’ Well they went and threw his books at him! That’s
what fancy knickers do when you’re really messing with their privates.”
The old woman
looked at her audience of two, they seemed transfixed,
a little agog. She continued, reaching out to hold both Jean and Julie by the
wrist, her muff in her lap. “So I hit ‘im citizens.
We was at Ermenonville
thanks to Monsieur Giradin. Always
borrowing somewhere to live. Jean Jacques was sixty years old. He was
bent over and I was holding him, like I’m holding you now, and I brought it
down on his head. It seemed the only way. I must have done it. I’d thought
about it so many times, just that way. And the chamber pot was all broken over
the floor, like mosaic, and a pool of blood beside his bonks. ‘I arose and pierced the silence
with me screams,’ that’s
what they wrote. Feathers ruffled, scratching at the floor like an enraged hen.
Monsieur Giradin came, we had locked the door, but he
had a key… he found me covered with blood from my husband’s wound. He was my
husband, although he never married me, not properly… the most famous man in
Europe…to whom I’d given everything and in the end took it all back. There was
lot’s of rumours. Some said he committed suicide because he found out about me
and John, I won’t go into that. Some said it was at the order of the king. His
cracked head lay on the floor, on the stone tiles. I lay
down beside him and put me arms around him. I remember he was as cold as the
floor in next to no time. Then I cried for the love of women… for the little
nobody in Jean Jacques… for all my babbies whether
they lived or not. But how can a woman get sentimental in the head when it’s
her lot to always have her hands in goo and her ass on the nest. On the 4th
July 1778 Rousseau was buried, as befits an artist, on the Ile des Peupliers, a tiny island in the lake of the Parc Ermenonville. On the 9th
October 1794 his remains were removed from Ile des Peupliers
and taken in triumph, as befits a hero, to the Panthéon
over there. In 1814, with the return of the Bourbons his remains were removed
from the Panthéon and scattered, as befits the
unnoticed. And me, Thérèse Levasseur,
always largely unnoticed, dropped off the world sometime, I could never tell
the time in my lifetime, and they said murmuring in my final sleep, with some
regret, for some reason or other… ‘Because
Rousseau did a poor girl, who did not know how to read or write, the honour of
having her wash his linen and cook his soup and share his bed… must this girl
be turned into a heroine?’ The widow of Jean Jacques for all my after-life. The remains
of doormats retain an imprint of all the traffic of the world, and with the
unnoticed everything is noticed.”
The Burchill voice fell silent and it seemed the torrent had
passed. Jean reflected on the state she had been in, making Moment to Moment, the film she had just finished, when, living the character of Kay Stanton, she had wrestled emotionally
with Kay’s shooting the Navy ensign with whom she had been briefly unfaithful.
Julie, on the other hand, was left thinking about Llewelyn.
She was glad she, even there, had his baby photo with her.
Jean stood up and
made to go, but turning sensed she was leaving a couple of strays, a couple of
lost souls.
“Hey! Thérèse and Julie,
why not come back to my place for tea. It’s only a few stops on the Metro. Come
on!”
“Oh thank you
dear that would be very nice for sure.”
“Ok, yes,
thanks!”
They all moved
off towards Boulevard Saint Germain, but they had not
gone far when Jean and Julie realized the old woman had disappeared,
dematerialised.
“ She was a ghost, wasn’t she?” Jean said.
They both
laughed.
Julie plucked up
courage to ask the question that had been bothering her. “
You are Jean Seberg, aren’t you?”
Jean replied, “I
like your hairstyle” and gave Julie the smile.
Also,
on this page, the plot (home) page, one of the adventures of V.I.U remains, his adventure in reminiscence, “Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov’s Anatomy of
Melancholia”. (See below.)
A scan on essays from theasif.info erupted
in Issue 28 of Mute, under
the title “Art is Like Cancer”. A full-length version of this text is available
online at Metamute.
Very well rotted compost for these essays is now
available in Portuguese bags from the Brazilian publisher Conrad. The bags are labelled Arte
Inimiga Do Povo, and
are presented as a virtual defacement of the Guggenheim in New York.
MUCK
YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:-
Fiction, “Terminations 1” (from “Suspect
Device” edited by Stewart
Home). Fiction, “Enduring
Freedom” (loosely based on
the adventures of Blair, Bush, Bad Laden and the rest of us). Fiction,“Adventures in Cyberspace” (a conversation about mind with Iris Murdoch on Grassington Moor). Essay, “Virtual Reality, Virtuality and Reality”. Essay, “How Art The People’s Enemy Became The People’s Friend”
parts 1 and 2. Essay, “Objections
and Replies parts 1 and 2. Essay, The Arcady Project, Part 1 the Exposé
and Part 2 the Convolutes. Fiction, “Playa
Melanoma and Santa Maria de las Neus. Essay, Determinism:
the preamble. These essays and
fictions form part of INVESTIGATIONS
OF VIRTUALITY,
REALITY AND UNDERCLASS (a
collection of essays, fictions and analogues). They may reappear in these virtual spaces.
WHERE FLOWERS GROW:-
Invisible Cells, a parallel
allotment where an attempt is being made to grow the same philosophical
argument as here, only there as a work of fiction. Check it out. All of part 1
is now there. Follow the links at the end of each section*. INVISIBLE CELLS is
an assault on the dominance of Marduk over the chaos
of Tiamat, where ancient and modern ruins span the
history of the Euphrates. Part 2, concerning the farcical and blasphemous
antics of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s descendants in C21st Euro-Zone were planted
on site late 2004, but did not grow well. The plan is to re-sow these flowers
in better soil! For the time being they continue to wither, but some of them
excite the busy, undiscerning bees at Google.
*Alternatively, to scan the content of
INVISIBLE CELLS follow these links:-
FAITH, WAR, PRESSUREGROUPS, HOWTOGETTHERE, FAMILY, WOMENSHEALTH, XBOX.
VLADIMIR ILICH
ULYANOV’S ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLIA.
Ragged, drunken buffoons have that within
which passes show. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov
sometimes longed to have a second chance at Materialism and Empiriocriticism.
It may be wondered how his Bic scrawl on the back of the shit-house door (narrated in V.I.U
Terrorised by the Free Society) could be so accurate in its reference. An
excellent, classical education forming a precision of memory and thinking, and
still miraculously intact despite the nightly intake, would be one explanation,
but more importantly the PFI (the mark of a better building) Jubilee Library in
Brighton, newly standing for the achievements of today, a R&D resource, was
what explained the trick.
Materialism and Empiriocriticism
had been the consequence of a hurried but
sober sojourn at desk L13 (unlucky Lenin? … certainly,
not on the money as was G7 for Marx) in the Reading Room of the British Museum.
Then, political expediency took precedence over careful research. Now, Vladimir
Ilich Ulyanov had a ghostly
eternity to fill. Although it was not for this reason that he
sought redemption: his resurrection was wholly material, rank rather than eerie,
quantum mechanics rather than the doctrine of the Trinity. Given he had
so much time he was glad that, as the Secretary of State had said, CABE’s
buildings (the advanced buildings of now) were “designed to be used by
people”! In fact it was while lingering over the politically correct warmth
of the Jubilee Library, and feeling materially so much happier than when a
struggling terrorist in the British Museum, that he had clicked on Tessa Jowell’s speech, which announced that the Jubilee was the
winner of the 2005 Prime Minister’s Better Building Award, no less! And looking
this up in a free country was even more comforting! Had he tried the same when
he was in Beijing, which still is another story, sometime to be told, he may
well have been arrested and charged with something fantastical like being a
member of the Falung Gong Cult, or worse still a
supporter of the Mills/McCartney clan and its calumny against public health
measures requiring the killing of dogs in Guangzhou. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov had nothing against
the killing of dogs even if it was to promote the Initial Socialist Market:
“vagrant persons before vagrant dogs” was one of his mottos. So comfortable did
he feel in Blair’s better building that he even allowed himself some venting of
spleen as he luxuriated nonchalantly over some of New Labour’s speak. “In
Victorian times, you could see that age’s ambition, it’s vaulting achievements
and its emphasis on improving society etched clearly in the blue prints of
their public buildings. Their vision and commitment to quality means we are
still using – and admiring – many of their town halls, schools and railway
stations.” “FUCKING, PETIT-BOURGEOIS TORY. GO ON
SHE LIVES IN A VICTORIAN TERRACE AND’S BOXING HER PROPERTY VALUE WITH
MINISTERIAL HEDGE. AND WHAT’S THIS FUCKING CONTRADICTION..”
“ post-war Britain… The emphasis was placed
too much on functionality over form… poor architectural design: it forgets that
buildings are designed to be used by people.” “AND LOOK AT THIS! THEY MUST
HAVE RAKED UP OLD BETJEMAN TO GET THAT EUPHEMISM ‘FRIENDLY FIRE’.” “when John Betjeman wrote those immortal lines beckoning
friendly bombs to ‘fall on Slough, because its not for humans now’, he struck a
chord with many of us.” “I BET HE DID! AND HOW’S THIS FOR WRITING OFF THE
ONLY RADICAL LABOUR GOVERNMENT…” “post-war Britain
was in such a rush to rebuild that in some ways, it cut corners… ugly council
estates…sprang up all over the place”. “AND WHAT DID VICTORIANA DO WITH
CORNERS? GOT THEM PLASTERED LIKE A DRUNKEN TART. COUNCIL
HOUSES WERE NOT HALF-CUT, THEY CALLED A CORNER A
CORNER, BARE AND UNADORNED FOR UNAFFECTED COMMONERS, SALT OF THE EARTH, NOT A
TASTELESS MIDDLE CLASS!”
For Vladimir Ilich
Ulyanov it was not the vulgarity of Materialism
and Empiriocriticism he minded. Instead it was
the one-dimensional nature of its vulgarity. There had been insufficient time
to balance feeling and logic. Now he was transfixed by what caught his
attention, whereas his attitude had been singularly instrumental. In the
Jubilee the objects of his research would hold him captive all day, just as
cheap booze captured his nights. Many books he returned to over and over again
attempting to memorize content that he could carry with him into an incoherent
dark.
Service’s book on Lenin was one of the
books he tried to monopolize. Between pages 116 and 117 he would locate the
photo of Nadezhda Krupskaya and stare at it for hours
on end. Secretly he could have removed her from the book but he was not
possessive about her beauty because her beauty was truly social. Eventually he
would break his concentration and move on with irritation to Service’s
haute-bourgeois distaste for Nadezhda Krupskaya.
Sexually, Service obviously preferred the promiscuous, redhead, horse-rider and
pianist, Inessa Armand to Nadezhda
Krupskaya with her single-minded, unremitting zeal for the revolution. But that
was no reason to invent an affair between Lenin and Armand on the basis of some
pluralist probability. Certainly to Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov’s way of thinking such a sexual preference was no
excuse for failing to write anything adequate about the pure beauty of Lenin’s
wife. And Service no doubt had even baser bourgeois motives for proceeding in
the opposite direction, describing Nadezhda Krupskaya
as ponderous, ailing and dowdy, and as having a swollen neck, bulging eyes and
looking like a herring. “IMPOTENT, BOURGEOIS HACKS DESTROY SIMPLE BEAUTY OF THE
UNAFFECTED AND THE UNADORNED. THEY NEED PAINTINGS TO JERK OFF”. Nadezhda Krupskaya’s photo was the blindingly beautiful
refutation of Service’s duplicitous perception. The 1895 photo showed her with
her hair strained back, wearing a high-necked, sombre dress, and no trace of Tsarinist stucco disguising her face. This was the face of
a person of high-seriousness, of few leisure pursuits, her life dedicated from
the age of eighteen to Marxism and the revolution, a person of great patience,
as befits the true revolutionary, her life lived at one with ordinary,
labouring people. Her unremitting gaze staring back at him filled Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov with an
overwhelming sense of a fugitive passion regained. Nadezhda
Krupskaya was revolutionary now and one hundred years ago. Any feminism, which
did not claim her, was pathologically bourgeois. Her support for Lenin was
unflinching. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov
had somehow sensed her sitting alone, for a whole day, beside his coffin when
it lay in state. If she had her way and ordinariness had prevailed, there would
have been no mausoleum, no material embalming, no undisclosed resurrection and
hurried production of a waxwork replica, and so no endless life of vagrancy.
Instead, as she said, “what they should have done was bury him with his
comrades so that they could lie beneath the Red Wall together”. And in
character with everything about her, her own grave, resting place was beneath
that Red Kremlin Wall.
How could he be worthy of this devotion?
There was a poem he had uncovered in the Jubilee, which seemed, in part, to
express how he wished to reciprocate. It spoke of passion, which was the
essence of the revolution, though, something missing from his books. The poem
by Carol Ann Duffy, of whom he knew nothing, having been attracted to her
collection by the red of its cover, was Elegy. It needed rewriting to
fit, but he did not really try that, apart from a word here and there. Instead
he saturated certain lines with his tears. No one had the temerity to admit to
noticing or to remonstrate with him. “Who’ll know then, when they walk by
the WALL/where your bones will be brittle things/…-that love, which wanders
history,/ singled you out in your time?/ Love
loved you best; lit you/ with a flame, like talent, under your skin;…Who’ll
guess …that were I DEAD, I would lie on the STONES/ above your bones till I mirrored
your pose, your infinite grace?” And the revolutionary love he revisited
was love of the revolution, not personal, bourgeois muck, which heaped itself
over fugitive alternatives.
And where else did his slow research take
him as he sheltered in the Jubilee from far blown Siberian winds? One book was
called Culture & Value to which they had put the name of
Wittgenstein, not that Wittgenstein would have thanked them for it. There was
much in it, which Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov
read and re-read. For instance, there was:
“There is no religious denomination in
which so much sin has been committed through the misuse of metaphorical
expressions as in mathematics.”
“Each sentence that I write is trying to
say the whole thing, that is, the same thing over and over again and it is as
though they were views of one object seen from different angles.”
“If you do not want certain people to
get into a room, put a lock on it for which they do not have the key.”
“As we may say that such and such an
animal has escaped extinction only because it has the possibility of concealing
itself.”
“It is hard to say anything,
that is as good as saying nothing.”
“Philosophers are often like little
children who first scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and now
ask the grown-up ‘what’s that?’- It happened like this: the grown-up had often
drawn something for the child and said: ‘this a man’,
‘this is a house’ etc. And now the child makes some marks too and asks: ‘and
what’s this then?’ ”
“In philosophy the winner of the race is
the one who can run most slowly. Or: the one who gets to the winning post last.”
“How small a
thought it takes to fill a whole life.”
“Nothing is more important though than
the construction of fictional concepts, which will teach us at last to
understand our own.”
“Always come down from the barren
heights of cleverness into the green valleys of folly.”
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov thought that if ever there would be a new book it
would have to be constructed out of materials like these. Another book with
aggregate, picked over like a vagrant hunting for insulation, was Girlfriend
in a Coma by a Douglas Coupland,
the slacker-scribe. If Wittgenstein pointed up basic, ordinary blocks and slabs
of intelligence in order to deflect the eye from the illusions of mercurial and
neon brilliance, Coupland’s people pointed to the
pollution of light and its lighting of ordinary space.
“ ‘And
now there’s only the system. All other options have evaporated. For most people
it’s the system or what … death. There’s nothing. There’s no way out.’ ”
“ ‘Did
we all go into a Coma in 1979… work, work, work, get, get, get…?’ ”
“ ’Didn’t you feel as if all of the
symbols and ideas fed to you since birth had become worn out like old shoes?
Didn’t you ache for change but you didn’t know how to do it, would you have had
the guts to go forth?’
‘Yeah.
Sure. But didn’t everybody?’
‘No. Not always. This feeling is specific
to the times we live in.’ “
“ ‘Every day for the rest of your lives,
all of your living moments are to be spent making others aware of this need –
the need to probe and drill and examine and locate the words that take us
beyond ourselves.
Grind
questions onto the glass on photocopiers. Scrape challenges onto old auto parts
and throw them off bridges so that future people digging in the mud will
question the world too… Make bar codes point out fables, not prices. You can’t
ever throw away a piece of litter unless it has a question stamped on it – a
demand for people to reach a finer
place.’
“
“ ‘Ask
whatever challenges dead and thoughtless beliefs. Ask: when did we become human
beings and stop being whatever it was we were before this?’ “
“ ‘I know you have the necessary skills
– explosives, medicine, engineering, media knowledge and the ability to
camouflage yourselves… if you’re not plotting every moment, boiling the carcass
of the old order – then you’re wasting your day.’ “
“ ‘Think
about all those crazy people you can see on the streets. Maybe they aren’t
crazy at all. Maybe they’ve seen what we’ve seen – maybe those people are us.’ “
“ ‘We’ll be adults who smash the tired, exhausted system. We’ll crawl and dig our way in