I received a text message from the picture framing workshop where I’d taken something before the summer holidays - the paper boat that, for some reason, my son and I had had the most success with. It floated very well, never took on water, always returned to shore, and dried out perfectly after each voyage. It could even be flung through the air like a knife and would land (sea?) the right way up. Eventually we decided to place it on a windowsill as if it were an ornament, and after a while the paper started to become discoloured by the sun in certain places. I carefully unmade the boat and took it to be framed. The most discoloured section gave the unfolded boat an ersatz Rothko quality (please note: I have no real affinity for Abstract Impressionism - I’m the kind of artist who’s so coincé that I usually focus on things like dried up quinces), and it seemed like a good idea to preserve its current state of discolouration behind museum glass.
I’ve had great difficulty in thinking of a title for it now that it is, or at least resembles, an artwork. Confusingly, in the real world, a ship that is decommissioned may relinquish its name, which can then be passed on to another, new ship. But this boat never had a name. So perhaps, for the first time in my life, I can make a work entitled Untitled.
Just after finishing the last note the Instagram algorithm started repeatedly showing me a video that entwined, completed and collapsed the categories of video it had been showing me over the course of my weeks of stupidity. It’s a six-second clip which is both an ‘anti-fail’, an act of grace, and a piece of video art that would have fitted in perfectly with (and perhaps made obsolete) the male video art that was so prevalent when I was an art student (not just the work of artists with two first names like Stan Douglas and Douglas Gordon, but Steve McQueen too, along with many other lesser Western men solemnly performing simple actions into a MiniDV tape): Zinedine Zidane falling off a horse, but falling into a forward roll of the greatest delicacy before standing up in one fluid movement, grinning shyly.
Gordon and Phillip Parreno should have set up 17 synchronised cameras to record this instead of Zidane playing a football match, and Steve McQueen should have re-enacted the fall from multiple angles.
Now I’m editing a long text about embodied performative practices of care as a form of ephemeral worlding-with ritual. Imaginaries abound, although strangely this text does not use the word ‘imaginaries’. I feel pretty tired and delirious. I can only assume that entering so deeply into the world of terminology that happens to be current in the art world is an act of faith, almost a religious commitment or submission to certain ideas, and a trusting commitment to staking a place in that world. I may, of course, be overthinking this; or I may find it difficult because at some point I lost my own faith in words.
Some days with a vision of a new life and its horizons has occurred with the beginning of kindergarten for my son. Two days, to be precise, and then everyone except me has got sick. Insane late summer haze, warm weather that makes no equation with leisure. Chaotic fruit and vegetables growing, tomatoes that will not ripen, courgettes that are growing with distortions, redcurrants too deep in their bushes to be reached by children, and which have grown to the size of cherries. I can feel how tired I look. Someone told me that an Indian summer is called a British summer here. I’ve asked around and other people haven’t heard this idiom. I’m writing as I walk around with my son in his pram. Other people are walking with prams, also looking at their phones, perhaps writing their own iPhone notes. Some are still on their first note, others are probably a few notes in, and some may have gone further than me, maybe writing their fortieth or fiftieth iPhone note. My legs are trembling with tiredness, a terrible lassitude.
But later on I went for a bike ride and my legs were fine, they were even singing with speed. I used my oldest and most patched together bike and I was still fast. Weirdly, I’m in good form, and I must accept that much of the tiredness I feel is therefore mental rather than strictly physical.
This is the last one of these notes. Only a few days to go. To my great surprise, several publishers are now almost fighting one another to make a book out of them, despite the way the notes themselves show such defensive animosity to the very possibility of… only joking, everything is exactly as it was. The statistics available to me say that I have about thirty notional readers, not including you. I have first-hand knowledge that there are about five or six active readers, and perhaps five other more casual readers. About twenty of the thirty potential readers definitely glance at the notes, although this is part of a downward curve. The effect these notes have had on their readers is almost unviral, anti-viral; once vaccinated they have not infected others. As far as I can tell not one new reader has come through the recommendation of an existing reader.
When I go to the studio I make tiny and probably inscrutable gestures, small drawings and arcane studies of small objects, as usual. I post pictures of some of these on Instagram, mostly to see which (if any) capture the imagination of my many dedicated followers, and so might represent an avenue by which my aesthetic instincts converge with a mass audience. Every now and again one such pictures gets as many as 15, or even 20 ‘likes’. But each time this surfeit of admiration occurs it makes me feel no different to the usual 5-10 likes I receive. I start thinking about what art is, and if it is a feasible enterprise, and begin feeling insane. I ask the AI interface to produce ‘an amateur oil painting of Duchamp’s Fountain’. The results are grotesque.
The inexplicable insignia in the middle is beautiful though.
Today my son and I went to the studio together. He quickly showed me that it wasn’t difficult to draw the acorn his younger brother had found for me.
A caveat to everything I’ve been writing about in these iPhone notes, especially the ones which complain (either implicitly or explicitly) is that it’s actually my wife who’s been doing all the hard work. I even claim, sometimes, that I’m working hard too, but I don’t think I believe it myself, not really. I merely help, to a greater or lesser degree, and do so depending on my fluctuating mental states, moods, and degrees of selfishness and self-absorption; she is the one who is indispensable for our sons, and the one it would be devastating for them to lose. But at my very best I can be like a butler described as ‘irreplaceable’ in a British novel or costume drama, however much that irreplaceability is offset by the reality that nobody actually needs domestic staff and that all works of British fiction are forms of dealing with the traumas of class. The childish freedoms that I strive to obtain for myself (cycling, time to make little drawings, playing video games with and like an eight year-old, etc) are costly for her in terms of time, energy and childcare burden. I haven’t lived up to the relative gender equality that Sweden at least aspires to achieve. I’d like to say I’ve done my best, but personal crises, weaknesses, desires and immaturities mean that I haven’t. If she ever reads this, then sorry. Or you can tell her I’m sorry perhaps.
My son is sleeping in the pram. I’m sitting on a bench near our apartment, drinking a Coke Zero. At this point I drink at least one caffeinated sugar-free drink every day to supplement the coffee I drink during the morning (I drink as much coffee as my stomach can take, but this doesn’t give me the amount of caffeine I will eventually need). If I stop at a petrol station shop during a bike ride to refill my water bottle I also drink a caffeinated drink with sugar, always in one or two gulps. I wonder what would happen if I was to forego caffeine for a day, a week, a month or a year? For me, doing that would probably be like taking Ayahuasca or mescaline. Perhaps that can be my next project: in a few days I’ll stop writing, after a year and a half of iPhone notes, and instead I could spend a year and half not drinking caffeine. It’s intensely humid, but the day hasn’t got warm yet so the air is static with a kind of fine mist. The sky is totally white. My eyes are screwed up against the light and I can feel the resulting profundity of my frown; my forehead creased into deep wrinkles. My older son is back at school after his days of illness. My younger son will return to kindergarten tomorrow, and I will see my therapist for the first time in nine months; all kinds of interregnums (interregna?) will come to an end, the republic will be dissolved and the monarchy of my foolish self will be restored. I’ll go to the studio and begin a monumental proofreading task which I’m very late with because everyone was sick. I never got sick, at least not officially, but it may be that my body knew it wasn’t possible for me to be sick at the same time as everyone else. When I get to the studio tomorrow I won’t want to proofread, I will want to continue erasing pencil lines I made years ago, look at old art magazines, start new drawings and shut off my conscious mind. When my son and I were at the studio together I showed him the paintbrush we found buried in the playground gravel of his old, abandoned kindergarten. He again asserted that he recognised the brush, and had probably used it in the past. He very quickly made a painting of ‘himself, when he was at the kindergarten’.
It is, and is like, a children’s painting, completely distinct from what he produces when he looks at something real then draws or paints it. I, on the other hand, find it impossible to draw or paint something I’m not looking at, ‘from my imagination’. Perhaps I can make a large scale painting replicating his painting of himself, using the same brush. I had meant to use the brush to make a portrait of him, but better that I reproduce his self-portrait of himself in the past. We also made a simultaneous attempt to depict what he described as something I would find it difficult to draw (he was right): a plum stone. On our way to and from school we pass a beautiful Victoria plum tree in a grassy area between two houses. We didn’t really know if to access the tree would be trespassing, but a genial older man who lives in one of the houses was there picking plums and said that we were welcome to join him. He greatly amused my younger son by showing him how to shake the tree with the right amount of vigour to make only the ripe plums fall onto the soft grass below. Workers are digging near to the tree, replacing all the water pipes leading to the neighbourhood’s houses, and the man explained that soon they will have to destroy the tree so as to dig beneath it. He begged them to wait until the end of the plum harvest, which they have agreed to. For us this tree is a novelty, we hadn’t spotted it before this summer, but for him two decades of plums will soon come to an end.
I’ve been reading interviews with the author Olga Ravn about her book to do with childbirth and motherhood, which has just been published in English. On the one hand it belongs to the category of literature that I have sometimes pathetically mocked or satirised in these iPhone notes; highly literary European acts of transcending everyday life from the position of an author alert to the human and institutional scenery they find themselves in. It should be clear by now that I do this because it’s precisely the field of literature that I’d be in myself if my writing was good enough, or was of interest to the publishers and editors who oversee it. At just the moment I’m stopping writing it’s nice, a relief, that Ravn’s book both trumps and makes obsolete these iPhones notes: it too describes the first months of having a baby in Stockholm, the difficulties faced in doing so, the emotional cleave of being an artistic person compromised by being a parent, the peculiarities of encountering Swedish people and their institutions as a privileged foreigner, and the possibility of recovering parts of oneself through the act of writing (she even did so in the form of iPhone notes, initially, and was inspired by Lessing’s The Golden Notebook just like me). However, she does so from the essential and central position of not only being a mother (and so having the totalising and traumatic physicality of motherhood from which to write) but also as a writer, a real writer, someone who already is a writer. Unbeknownst to me, while she was writing what would become a book that allowed her to eventually regain and enrich her life and the creation of a new life, not to mention raise important issues on a societal level in Denmark, Sweden and further afield, I was doing something similar - but what I was doing has remained in the margins of not only my life but the lives of those around me. Much as the video of Zinedine Zidane falling off a horse has apparently allowed me stop watching silly videos, perhaps Ravn’s book will allow me to stop writing or even thinking about myself in terms of writing. Also, I can now drop my ridiculous self inflicted isolation from literature and start reading again, maybe beginning with her book.
My son is still sleeping in the pram. The sky is still completely white. If it wasn’t for a very slight breeze trembling the leaves of a willow tree just in front of me I’d happily believe that time had stopped. My son is now smiling in his sleep, perhaps thinking about cars. I’m extremely hungry, and the Coke Zero is wearing off. The weather forecast says there will be two more warm days, then a transitional day of rain, and then the beginning of autumn temperatures. I would like to do one more bike ride in warm weather. I would like to make one more exhibition. I would like to publish one book. I would like to make a perfectly executed chocolate cake. I would like our band to release the one album we recorded. I would like to spend one day without a desperate anxiety about the timetable and my responsibilities. I would like to sit down on the sofa for an indefinite period of time. I would like my work to become indistinct from my job. I would like to see a friend. I would like to play one more cricket match. I would like to have time to spend with my parents. I would like my sons to feel they had spent time with me. I would like to be able to sustain domestic cleanliness and tidiness.
Just like beginnings, I’m very bad at writing endings. I leave things unfinished, even when they stop.
The four-digit door codes of almost all the buildings in Stockholm tend to be a year from the very heart of Social Democracy’s hegemony, 1950-1965 approximately.
My younger son found and gave me a strange object a few days ago, a heavy and scratched little piece of metal. I think it’s metal, it’s hard to tell. The haptic identity of the object, as communicated to me, is a magical hybrid of lead, chalk, iron, sand and tin. I don’t understand it. If I hold it between finger and thumb my sweat leaves traces on it. It is both smooth and rough. Perhaps it’s an object that has escaped from the picture-making of artificial intelligence. I heard on a podcast that John Cale’s album Artificial Intelligence got it’s title not from one of the album’s songs nor even from Cale himself, but that it was an offhand suggestion made by David Cronenberg at a dinner party. Or was it Paul Schrader?
I’ll try to draw the object it but I should probably have it cast by a master sculptor and replicated in a variety of materials to see if one makes sense, or I should have a radically oversized replica carved in stone or wood. Or exhibit every such permutation of the work in the huge sculpture hall of a public museum somewhere in provincial Spain, compelling viewers to walk a great distance between what would look from a distance like standing stones (I Really Should be Holding You, Holding You, Loving You, Loving You, 2026). The accompanying booklet would feature a short story by one of those Latin American authors noted for their extravagant fabulations which allude to political and existential atrocities.
It was possible to remove most of the pencil lines from my depiction of the plum stone; just a few remain remain sealed beneath watercolour.
The light in the studio is weird, gloomy, but I never, ever think to switch the lights on. My son’s depiction of the stone, on the other hand, must remain as it is - there is no chance of removing the lines. He had used very dark 6B pencil then taken a highly aggressive approach to colour (non-watercolour pencil treated as if it were soluble, rubbed at by a finger wet with saliva).
It’s a strange sheet of paper with these two things together, strange in every respect.
Perhaps too strange to present to the man who lives by the soon to be destroyed plum tree as a gift, a consolation for the tree’s absence?
I’m so tired I’ve no idea what I’m doing, no idea what I’m writing. This might as well be a dream. This won’t end well. For weeks now, ever since the few days we spent at home before going on one holiday too many while utterly exhausted, my heart has not been in the process of writing these iPhone notes. I haven’t been thinking, looking, noticing or feeling enough to have the necessary mental surplus to write. And why should I? It’s ridiculous to imagine that I could keep writing indefinitely. Even so, it’s much easier to write than it is to write about something. You shouldn’t have read this! You should have waited and read Olga Ravn’s book instead.
It really is getting harder to write now, I’ve stopped. These iPhone notes have finished. I’ve reverted to my original state. The flat is a mess. I have hundreds more corrections to check. I got a paper cut last night then immediately ate some salt and vinegar crisps, rubbing salt and vinegar into the wound, a sort of weirdly English form of self-harm. I keep going back deeper and deeper into old half-finished watercolours, not just erasing the pencil lines but continuing painting as if nothing had happened. In another ten or twenty years I will have filled in all the blank paper.
Nike, the goddess of victory itself. Just do it. At some point a few weeks ago, right before the end of the summer holidays (the return to work, the pleasure of making images and marks, terminal mental exhaustion and being forced to start going to bed earlier) I wondered if I’d find it difficult to stop writing these iPhone notes. I wondered if I’d be bereft without them, or without having the space to write more. I didn’t expect to forget about them before they’d finished. Maybe this is what it’s like to be person in the world, someone who doesn’t write iPhone notes all the time. In a few days, next week, I won’t be writing this and I won’t have any editing jobs. Autumn has begun. What have I learned? Nothing at all; I can’t even remember what I’ve written. I’ve gone as far as I can without going anywhere. I’ve forgotten why I do anything, which makes life slightly bemusing: what are all these papers next to me on the desk, and why have I kept them? Why do I have so many books if I don’t read them, and so many records if I don’t listen to them? Why did I spend so long trying to be someone? Why did I invest so much time in Super Mario Galaxy only to abandon it just before the end? Why have I archived so many scraps of paper, some of which aren’t even marked? Why did I spend so many years in art schools learning then teaching nothing except the vaguely defensive notion that one’s reasons for making something are self-defined anyway? For now, at least, I’ve lost it, I don’t know what ‘it’ is, and I’m not sure when I will come back, or when my own thoughts will feel urgent to me.
5/09/2005
Why is it that I am, or become, the person that people tell me I am. One time, five years ago, I was on the first day of the foundation course and went out with two other boys to find some junk to make a sculpture. Somewhere along the line I have overrated ‘reality’, or the quality of reality. I shall walk around a bit more.
All kinds of dramas were taking place then, some harrowing moments, a lot of walking around Paris, a double bill of Ozu films, eating pastries, and the diary flits between England, France and Sweden. Then there’s no diary entry for almost a month until I write about having lost the habit of writing. I move to the giant man’s flat and start reading Ratner’s Star by Don DeLillo. The convenience shop over the road sells (for some reason) individual cigarettes and I sometimes buy one then smoke it at my bedroom window, looking over at the shop where the cigarette had come from. I go on another trip to England and forget to even bring my diary. I apply for some masters degree courses. One of my writer friends comes around to play on the GameCube (I wonder if he remembers that, if it features in his diary), then we have lunch together. Beautiful autumn light in Paris. I shot a super8 film of some sticks on the ground.
15/11/2005 (1.30 AM)
It’s a little like we’ve breathed in; now we’re waiting to breath out. But we’re doing so much in between these breaths that maybe we’ll never breath out. The habits and routines of when I didn’t work: diary writing, drawing, reading, all gone! I don’t feel bad, or unhappy, but serious things have happened and have changed.
Some of the diary entries read like they’re by a 15 year old (melodrama) and some like they’re by an 8 year old (describing a nice stone, unlocking a secret level in the Tony Hawk’s game). This makes sense because I was the sum total of these personae, a remarkably self-absorbed 23 year old. Yet it’s amazing to me how little I’ve developed or achieved in the intervening time. I’m sitting at the desk, everyone else is asleep. I should go to bed too but I’ll keep reading. I wrote a lot about having no sense of time, no comprehension of its passing, “losing my feeling for distinct periods of time and their characteristic, distinguishing moods”. I note (incorrectly, as it happens) that maybe I’m growing up. I realise that I should go to bed because I have a cooking shift the next morning, so just like now I set an alarm for 6.30. A few weeks later I write about a dream in which a girl I used to be in love with and a work colleague from the restaurant both wanted to kiss me while one of my earliest childhood friends (the one with whom I played Myst when were 10 or 11 years old) was there “as a kind of monk/saint, strolling down the Rue des Martyrs.” I listen to Felt, and borrow a Michel Polnareff CD from the library, but don’t yet realise the connection between the two. I also listen to the Hard Rain live album by Bob Dylan. I finish reading Ratner’s Star and start drawing pyramids because I realise that to do so simply means drawing two triangles; I even congratulate myself on finding a new shape to draw.
7/01/2006
I went for a run in the woods just over the hill from here, I tired myself out, slipped in the mud, noticed my breathing.
This must mean the woods near the Fort de Romainville, a weird and desolate zone accessed through huge areas of social housing named after communist heroes. I go to the library at the Centre Pompidou a lot, and write about what the people on the desks near mine are reading. I saw a girl I knew I recognised but couldn’t remember from where; she was reading photocopies of a book written in Hebrew. An older man was writing something by hand about Joseph Beuys. A few months earlier I’d stolen a tiny bit of felt from the walls of the Joseph Beuys room downstairs in the museum. I’ve still got it somewhere, in an old tobacco tin. In 2005 lots of people were earnestly writing things by hand rather than in iPhone notes. The diary entries become more and more sporadic and less concerned with day to day life, my songwriting friend and I write and record masses of songs, taking breaks to play table tennis, I leave France and return to England, start studying again, stop writing, and then a long series of blank pages begin. The end of the diary, and two very turbulent years. I still have some of the pencils I used on the first page. We still haven’t done anything with some of the songs we wrote on the final pages. I still have some of the same clothes I was wearing then, and some of the same friends. Some of the key figures in the diary have disappeared from my life completely. My fingers still remember how to play the Tony Hawk’s games, but I’ve lost the ability to link the moves together into combos.
I’m still at the desk, but it’s daytime. I’ll hide the diary away for another 17 years. I’ve just spent several hours fulfilling, badly, the one remaining ambition these iPhone notes revealed to me: to translate ‘Holidays’ by Michel Polnareff into English.
‘Am Em
Les vacances, oh les vacances,
Am C
an aeroplane falling from the sky,
Dm Am
and beneath its winged shadow,
Dm G
a town below,
Em
the ground so low,
Am
Les vacances…
Les vacances, oh les vacances,
the churches and the housing estates,
what of the god who loves them,
from a heavenly abode?
the ground so low,
les vacances…
Les vacances, oh les vacances,
the aeroplane’s shadow falls across the sea,
the sea is like a preface,
before the sand,
the sea is low, and,
les vacances…
Les vacances, oh les vacances,
so much sky and so many clouds,
you’re still too young to know it,
that life is slow,
and that death is low,
les vacances…
Les vacances, oh les vacances,
It’s the aeroplane that lives in the sky,
but don’t forget, my beauty,
that aeroplanes crash you know,
and the ground is low
les vacances…’
It isn’t as good as the lyrics of a song by Felt, but could almost, maybe, just about, be a Go-Kart Mozart b-side. In the diary I often wondered about being useless, a failure, someone who’ll never achieve anything or never make anything of themselves. I wondered if I’d manage to become an artist (again). I even describe trying to write something: a text about the idea of ‘fragmentation’, heavily influenced by what was probably a misreading of the term ‘archipelago’ in Deleuze. I can’t find the text I was writing now (if I could I’d quote it to embarrass myself further), but I know it would seem both immature and oddly similar to what I’m writing now. If only I could tell my younger self that, firstly, there would one day be telephones on which one could write long introspective text documents, and that secondly he would not only write a series of such documents but that they would culminate in a flawed but earnest translation of ‘Holidays’ by Michel Polnareff that would be read by up to thirty people. He would be amazed at the incredible journey his life had taken.
In the alternate universe where all this is real, I’d celebrate the publication of the book of these notes by giving an ambitious, vulgar and cabaret-like performance during which I’d first perform ‘La ville des gaufres’ ‘as’ Jacques Brel, and then ‘Les vacances’ ‘as’ Michel Polnareff. I’d do so in full costume and using props, with horrible wigs, a cigarette for Brel and huge sunglasses for Polnareff. In both cases I’d micic their voices to the best of my ability, falling badly short and failing to enunciate as quickly as Brel or sing as high as Polnareff.
If my sons read this in the future they’ll find that one brief period of their childhoods is intensely recorded, and many details that they would ordinarily forget will be preserved. But they’ll probably wish that it was less about me.
In the final part of Deleuze’s Abécédaire even he can’t really think of what to say. He laughs when Claire Parnet suggests that Z could stand for the great philosophers, Zarathustra, Leibniz, Spinoza, Nietzsche, ‘Bergzon’ (he actually chuckles at her pronouncing the non-existent-but-to-the-French Z in Bergson’s name. Meanwhile, I discover American Zs that should be British Ss in documents I’ve read, edited and proofread a hundred times, and I’m struck by the spectre of S/Z that hangs over me without my mentioning it), and “évidemment Deleuze”. He suggests that Z could stand for the zig-zagging of the fly, the shape of the nose, some kind of elemental movement, the creation of the world, he mentions he’s reading a book about the Big Bang, which he pronounces ‘Big Bong’, grinning to himself and speaking as vaguely as someone who is completely stoned. It would be funny to get stoned with Deleuze. The reel finishes, the film blurs and cuts, and returns to Deleuze rubbing his head and looking into the distance, still trying to think of something to say. Then he remembers the zigzag, and talks about singularities and relationships. How to put singularities into relationships? Does the shape of the letter Z represent a relationship between (three) singularities? In some scientific book, he can’t remember which, he recalls reading about the ‘sombre précurseur’, the thing that makes relationships out of disparate potentials, between which something happens. A lightning bolt, for example, which is shaped like a zigzag. Everything always begins with a ‘dark precursor’, which no-one sees, and then there is light. Just like philosophy. And Zen, for good measure. The Zen master striking his student suddenly with a stick. He really laughs when Parnet asks him if he’s happy to have a Z in his name. He gets up, seemingly removes his cardigan, thanks her, and the film finishes. Deleuze, circa 1988, looks quite a bit like my therapist. One of my writer friends writes to me sending a screenshot with some of the most frequently asked questions about Deleuze on Google, and at the top of the list is ‘why didn’t Deleuze cut his fingernails?’.
He also sends an article on LinkedIn where someone discusses their conviction that Deleuze suffered from peripheral neuropathy and used long fingernails to keep his extremities distant from the world of objects. Somewhat against my better judgement, and at great length (especially for the non-reader I’ve become), I manage to find the instance I must have encountered in 2005 of the word ‘archipelago’ in Deleuze - it’s in the essay on Herman Melville. I’d forgotten a lot, forgotten the casual brilliance of Deleuze’s essays on literature, and forgotten that the essay on Melville isn’t only about language and Bartleby’s declaration of renouncement. Towards the end Deleuze starts to think about Melville’s work forming a kind of portfolio of ‘declarations of independence’, and the relationship of his writings to the American ‘pragmatism’ that is the non-identical twin of the Bolshevism of the Soviet Union to come. He writes (and forgive me for translating out of my depth) that “[i]t’s above all the affirmation of a world in progress, an archipelago [a world archipelagated; if I was writing an essay for the New Left Review I'd try to coin the term 'archipelagated community' in the hope of being called into Perry Anderson’s office for a chat]. Not just a puzzle, the pieces of which can reconstitute a whole, but more like a wall built of loose stones [what in Britain we’d call a dry stone wall], uncemented together, where each element speaks for itself but also in terms of others: floating isolates [I’m both mangling the grammar and insisting on ‘isolate’ as a noun here, for my own purposes] and floating relations, islands and between-islands, unfixed points and sinuous lines, for Truth always has ‘jagged edges’. Not a skull but a cordon [he probably means ‘line’ or ‘rope’, but why not invoke the grotesque circumscription of the cordon sanitaire or the police cordon and simply render cordon as ‘cordon’) of vertebra, spinal marrow [getting more grotesque, but good to avoid repetition and English wants ‘spinal cord’ here, ‘spinal marrow’ is more Outlandish, and best to cut down {on} the strings and ropes], not a uniform covering but the jacket of the harlequin, white on white even, an infinite patchwork…”
Everything that is grotesque in Deleuze is, as usual, beautiful like life under the microscope in Glissant, and I’m reminded of the part in Nathalie Stephens’ (miraculously good) translation of Poetic Intention where the idea of the ‘epic’ begins to burst its banks and overflow, where “the exceeded poem is no longer a patient and sufficient catharsis. Beyond the poem lurks a complete expression. It forges itself everywhere: it is difficult for each to catch its echo off guard, also to weave a part of the network, in its very language.”
A few key texts, a few memories of my past selves. I would never have guessed, not in 2005 or now, that Deleuze’s analysis of Melville would converge in some way with CLR James’s. For James, Melville is a figure who (like James himself, it must be said) has internalised the totality of English literature and secreted it out in refined form (rather than regurgitated it without the aid of organs), but also a kind of test case or canary in the mine of modernity. His Melville shows us, earlier than anyone else, that the “whole point is the intimate, the close, the logical relation of the madness, to what the whole world has hitherto accepted as sane, reasonable…”, that Melville wrote anticipating the symptoms of mid-twentieth century modernity, the insane ways in which societies ‘recover’ from ruination, nationalism and totalitarianism and especially the ways these excessions of politics are underpinned by machine-like logic and what he terms ‘planning’. ‘Planning’ is something societies do; it is logical, sensible, completely understandable, but also totally insane. James’s book came about in a strange but fitting context, which he only fully reveals in an autobiographical final chapter. While travelling around America in the 1950s, sometimes lecturing on Melville, he is arrested and imprisoned for a while as an enemy alien on Ellis Island. Despite a serious illness and very bad treatment he nonetheless decides to write his book on Melville to pass the time, and takes some apparent delight in the irony that his imprisonment places him alongside the kind of individuals that Melville would assemble; it makes him part of a crew of “sailors, ‘isolatoes’, renegades and castaways”. Alienated from their various homelands and now held as aliens to America, however, James’s strange new fellows are not precursors (dark or otherwise) to modernity but its knowing rejects. “This is my final impression”, he writes: “The meanest mariners, renegades and castaways of Melville’s day were objectively a new world. But they knew nothing. These know everything. The symbolic mariners and renegades of Melville’s book were isolatoes, federated by one keel, but only because they had been assembled by penetrating genius. These were federated to nothing. But they were looking for federation.” As usual, the ‘presiding genius’ at work in James is the recognition of not only what has happened and what is happening, but what is most febrile and most subject to extreme contingency (not the French Revolution per se but the country that would become Haiti within the French Revolution, for example, etc etc).
For James, Melville is a fascinating early patient, a patient zero, but I almost worry that for Deleuze he was a circus freak for all the same reasons, that Deleuze reads Melville like the way we/‘we’ terrify ourselves by reading about illnesses online and making self-diagnoses (‘Essays Critical and Hypochondriac: Deleuze’s Language as Symptomatic Imaginary’, forthcoming article in The Journal of Para-Psychiatric Aesthetics, 2027). James’s Janus-faced image of societies ‘planning’ themselves, whether through capitalism or communism, forces the reader to ask themselves how we can live in a planned world that manifestly isn’t going to plan, and in the face of all of our own failed plans. My own thoughts, small as they are, start to spill over and escalate. I should have thought twice before reading.
Back at the library-waiting area at my therapist’s office, very little has changed. There is a new Magritte book on a side table. Actually, maybe everything has changed. There are two armchairs which I could swear used to be green, but which are now blue. And one ceiling lamp is missing. Another seems to have a completely different lampshade. A whole section of books seems to be missing from one bookshelf as well, certain books about child psychology I think, but the key works, the ones I open up to glance at again and again, are still there. The journals on the lower part of that bookcase are the same.
I got here early because I thought I was going to be late, so cycled extremely fast, squeezing through the humid air and pondering the selection rationale for the England cricket team rather than thinking about what I would say when I sat down for the last time and began talking. A few days ago I had the sense that there was a list of important topics to do with my deepest feelings and anxieties, a list revealed to me by the writing of these iPhone notes and all that is unsaid in them. But if the England team really are to emphasise bravery and enterprise at the cost of any kind of conservative calculation of safety, and are to play a series of highly pressurised matches on Indian pitches, then is a (probable) reliance on part-time and/or speculative second spin bowler a good idea? What if something happens to Adil Rashid? And what does it mean, in a wider metaphorical or spiritual sense, to leave out Harry Brook? There are theories posited online that his non-selection is a kind of meta-parable about the problems faced by talented members of Gen-Z who cannot find work due simply to the pre-existence of those older than them; there are already people ‘in post’ and so Western civilisation must carefully oversee its own obsolescence - I pause for a moment to find my way around a word I cannot spell well enough even for the automatic spell-checker.
I left another round of proofreading to make the journey here. I’m at page 11 of 108 and the temptation to draw, research, write about and contemplate almost anything else (a splintered ice lolly stick, a little shard of slate, some incredible sycamore seeds, an old article with a monochrome illustration of one of Roy Liechtenstein’s exquisite ‘landscapes’) was overwhelming. My mind is all over the place. As usual I locked my bike up a short distance from the front door (door code: 1957), so as to have a couple of minutes’ walk to collect, catalogue then forget about my thoughts. As usual, this was enough time for me to briefly forget why I was even there, crossing a churchyard, overhearing people’s conversations, looking at magpies, listening to the shouts of teenagers outside a school, crossing roads and stepping onto and off pavements I now know as well as the pavements of places I’ve lived.
I actually feel quite elated to be stopping writing these iPhone notes, to have stopped writing them. Now I’ll never have to think about them again, or think about anything ever again. It feels like I’m about to go swimming.
I felt immeasurably strange retracing those steps into my therapist’s office, seeing his library-waiting room again and its familiar volumes of Freud and Klein, opening the Collected Writings for a moment to glance at the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’ essay, waiting for the minutes and seconds to tick down before his door would open. Finally, at exactly 11 o’clock, I heard his slow footsteps behind the door, the gentle shuffle of his feet over the carpet, and the door slowly opened exactly as it had always done, for me and for others, for decades. He stepped out into the waiting room and greeted me in his usual friendly manner, as if no time had passed, but there was something slightly different, some minor addition to or alteration of his manner. I knew in that moment that this would not simply be a resumption. I gathered my things, stood up, and followed him into the room.
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏