1. Why start here? Any beginning is a consideration of invulnerability.
2. There is something mulish about this dog.
3. Being terribly moved. Moving terribly.
4. Coated in oil. Digital fits.
5. Death involves processions of dying.
6. Dying inhabites every possible space of death.
7. Disaffected parts.
8. Everyone’s a groaner.
9. Territories claimed then usurped.
10. At the heart of the swerve.
11. Skidding takes place elsewhere.
12. “You write like you drive.”
13. Why was it difficult to answer the question about “writing with a forked tongue”?
14. I feel it’s preferable to be “unconnected” rather than “disconnected”.
15. Textual Healing.
16. Don’t confuse proximity with connection.
17. Linguistic buffeting.
18. Language Buffet.
* * * *
Affordance
A desire to find a piece of writing somehow; to find something
to work on. To allow it to become those moments just ahead of him, now
that the eyes had begun to feel pinched at the edges of the covering
lids, now that the darkness of the room had burnished itself back into
shapes, his pupils naively slackening. Sight beginning to foam. Not the
middle of the night – he doesn’t belong to tiredness just yet, in fact
he knows that he is trying to sleep at a moment not quite fit for it, as
if always lying in an alien position. He knows there is the little
notebook, so searches this out, slips off its elasticated band, hooked
over the opening side of the cover, flipping it over the edges of the
pages like the first steps of seduction. Old handwriting, a pencil that
seemed to have an imperfection in its diamond stylus. Dragging a stone
in the words. He begins to read, rewrite. These are the same thing
perhaps, held each side of the mirror.
On a slight downward incline, a couple are pulling the car up, small hiccups of the engine as it disengages. The handbrake jolts, becoming only a length of rope bridging the length of the vehicle – a sinew between both bumpers. Previous to this, in the hotel room, his stomach had developed an odd string strain across it, like a cord of incongruous muscle, the twine of glue across egg albumen. His belly space dissected by a hairline wrench, something like a absent hernia; nothing but a twinge, except that the indiscernible line of discomfort sought its way through the abdomen with a kind of load, a sense of implied volume and potential (plans for expansion). Twined; the curious encampment of near-pain; its accommodation.
This seems incongruous, unremembered; some kind of business-speak from the newspaper: “pre-preparation.” What is this clinamen…? Another section then:
He reared, powered by an emerging thought, but collapsed in the orbit of the same movement – a tumbler, without the anchor of gravity, or the spurs of its insistence.
Anything seems permissible in this distended area. He wanted to write something about the opening shot of a film he had seen a few days ago, but there seemed no opening in his life where he might even consider the task. It was not something that made itself available. Yet the darkness had begun to lighten in the room – the electric lamp, the small notebook. Stupidly, he noticed his room had half an arch in one corner, the curve of the alcove disappearing into the wall. The writing is going to come out wrong.
It was the opening sequence, after the opening credits had appeared, white texts on black screens – suddenly a shot of the sky. At first it seemed overly complicated, as if there were too much going on for this to be a sky not beset by disasters, not recording some kind of catastrophe in its airborne surfaces. A mixture of smokes, vapours, clouds running close to the ground (near to, like objects held close to the eye) and distant at the very edges of the atmosphere – different textures each, dream quilts, the dirt of rain making some drifts seem like the excuses of forest fires, the declarations of exhaust fumes. The camera fidgeted strangely, a movement that seemed inhuman – though still absolutely performed by a human. This is what he was thinking as the sky panned awkwardly. This is not a mechanism seeing this, this is the movement of a stiff neck – the jostling movements of the head, neck (the body trunk off below too) together with the eyes themselves, all stacked up in a tower of looking – vertically looking up into the sky, wavering and taking it in. The vapour trail line of the plane linking one cloudbank and another, gilded by sunlight – some shift of backdrop. But it wasn’t being caught by a camera, this is what he was convinced of when he was watching it – the camera had disappeared for him – it was a special case of looking, as if he recognised somehow the stacking of the body in the upward gaze, looking up toward the light, the sun, and the terrible confluence of clouds drifting into and over one another.
On a slight downward incline, a couple are pulling the car up, small hiccups of the engine as it disengages. The handbrake jolts, becoming only a length of rope bridging the length of the vehicle – a sinew between both bumpers. Previous to this, in the hotel room, his stomach had developed an odd string strain across it, like a cord of incongruous muscle, the twine of glue across egg albumen. His belly space dissected by a hairline wrench, something like a absent hernia; nothing but a twinge, except that the indiscernible line of discomfort sought its way through the abdomen with a kind of load, a sense of implied volume and potential (plans for expansion). Twined; the curious encampment of near-pain; its accommodation.
This seems incongruous, unremembered; some kind of business-speak from the newspaper: “pre-preparation.” What is this clinamen…? Another section then:
He reared, powered by an emerging thought, but collapsed in the orbit of the same movement – a tumbler, without the anchor of gravity, or the spurs of its insistence.
Anything seems permissible in this distended area. He wanted to write something about the opening shot of a film he had seen a few days ago, but there seemed no opening in his life where he might even consider the task. It was not something that made itself available. Yet the darkness had begun to lighten in the room – the electric lamp, the small notebook. Stupidly, he noticed his room had half an arch in one corner, the curve of the alcove disappearing into the wall. The writing is going to come out wrong.
It was the opening sequence, after the opening credits had appeared, white texts on black screens – suddenly a shot of the sky. At first it seemed overly complicated, as if there were too much going on for this to be a sky not beset by disasters, not recording some kind of catastrophe in its airborne surfaces. A mixture of smokes, vapours, clouds running close to the ground (near to, like objects held close to the eye) and distant at the very edges of the atmosphere – different textures each, dream quilts, the dirt of rain making some drifts seem like the excuses of forest fires, the declarations of exhaust fumes. The camera fidgeted strangely, a movement that seemed inhuman – though still absolutely performed by a human. This is what he was thinking as the sky panned awkwardly. This is not a mechanism seeing this, this is the movement of a stiff neck – the jostling movements of the head, neck (the body trunk off below too) together with the eyes themselves, all stacked up in a tower of looking – vertically looking up into the sky, wavering and taking it in. The vapour trail line of the plane linking one cloudbank and another, gilded by sunlight – some shift of backdrop. But it wasn’t being caught by a camera, this is what he was convinced of when he was watching it – the camera had disappeared for him – it was a special case of looking, as if he recognised somehow the stacking of the body in the upward gaze, looking up toward the light, the sun, and the terrible confluence of clouds drifting into and over one another.
* * * *
RPM
1. The light stands in the lorry park.
2. A bubble of plastic extrudes from the base of the building.
3. Writing as hernia.
4. To address its conditions – some kind of imperative.
5. Hands cannot be washed.
6. It is not clear how best to expose the apparatus.
7. He began thinking about sap and how he was always fascinated by the idea of trees bleeding.
8. ‘Sap’ as a noun and as a verb.
9. A trail of flames amongst the black. Suddenly a vision of an assumed totality.
10. A point of turnaround; seriousness coughs up farce, then sobers on a swallow.
11. A barrel of apples, each one a grenade of coherence.
12. Submit an extract.
13. Any empty claims as to what this is doing.
14. There can be no comeback.
15. Combination engine.
16. Spill it.
17. Writing as tar baby.
18. Get set. Lay up.
19. This is entirely serious.
20. Having cut across the chambers.
21. Forestalls its own progress.
22. A stewball.
23. Stumbling block.
24. PUSH OUT REMNANTS
25. A theory peel-off.
26. Writing as hypochondriac.
27. A folded piece of paper, having been unfolded.
28. Permit construction.
29. Difficult persuasive positions.
30. Writing as revolving door.
31. Writing as jigsaw puzzle.
32. Failure becomes sustainable.
33. A sponsoring thought.
