Oi

Argh.

Life takes its route, through sexual desire, into the tunnel of early middle age, where you worry about a combination of your body and your performance: in point of actual fact, you are neither a pornstar with a ten inch cock of almost infinite variety and adaptability, nor a non-wannabe train-spotter with a semi-hibernating cock of uncertain provenance and even less certain occupation (to the extent that even a putative mother in law might worry about the general occupation of your membrum virilis). In short - you are just a guy, just a guy.

You are the service module of any Apollo mission: you do what you can but you are never going to be the star.

Trees are cut down, hurricanes never come again and the modern world fades into oblivion; you and your friends vaguely recall a female prime minister and lots of strikes; you don't in fact recall a time when accepting a job was not your decision but the union in charge's call. You don't recall there being no point in holding savings of any kind. You remember the smiles but you didn't see the cynicism in them. You don't recall the violence of the picket lines that you did see on TV, even though you were a kid. You remember the sparkly, glittery music and television, the over-emphasised desire to escape at every single point. You really do not remember the concrete blocks from motorway bridges; the spittle; the dodgy deals; the illegality that seemed normal because there was no law that could contain this new age with its conflict between the two sides of the same belief: Self.

What is self?


the....

going to school, in the cold and the fog and the mist, just like going anywhere anywhen on this island.

Shiver: down the path to the bogs, the dirty concrete, the other person there - he was the boy who you never understood. There he was, trousers round his ankles; even then, at the age of seven, you knew that was not how males went for a piss. Went for a piss/ a slash/ a jimmy riddle/ a wee/ to see a man about a dog/ to strain the greens.

Went for a Martin. A Martin Amis.

Fuck me I think I have missed a trick in the last four years. Blogging has truly passed me by. What do you write? how do you write it? Who do you write it for?

Do you need pictures?

Do you need porn?

More Diaries

Having just finished the second volume of Bernard Donoughue's No10 memoirs (but not being bothered to read volume 1), I thought I would stick with the theme of diaries for the moment, so I'm now reading The Duff Cooper Diaries.

What has struck me in the first hundred pages or so, apart from the extraordinary indulgence of his lifestyle, his casual evenings out with the PM, and his sudden encounter with war in 1918, has been his attitude to love.

The object of his affections is usually Lady Diana Manners (whom he marries in 1919), but he describes his love for her in rollercoaster terms: it appears and disappears day by day and sits sometimes comfortably alongside his love for other women he variously kisses, looks at, or as in the case of an unnamed woman in France, follows out of a restaurant and into her bed. His love does not seem like an animating force, but like a scratch that is more or less irritating.

I often wonder how diarists can separate themselves from their emotions long enough to commit something readable to paper. Does it mean there is a kind of distance between an experience and its impact? How can you write something down while its consequences are still rattling through your veins? Do such people in fact not really experience things at all but merely observe them?

I ask because I've often tried to write diaries of my own. They always stop at precisely the point something ghastly happens, like a work crisis or a love crisis. I cannot record these things, because I can never find the words for them. The feelings always re-emerge, or are too vivid anyway, and anything I put seems trite or simply inadequate. That, or it just seems wrong to be writing things that are really happening and are really awful. The only way I could see to do it would be if I - as a self, as a feeling being - was not affected by the things that happened to me, so that I could sit there as the same, possessed person I had been before, and write it as though it were a story.

Even that is difficult, because I know I am lying, in the sense that I'm not writing a story, but babbling a set of unpleasantnesses or a jagged series of events. This is why for years I've only written poetry, so that I can write in shades of opacity that suit my need to close the actual experience down, and leave myself with only a reflected emotion, which I can write in analogue or metaphor.

Real experience, for me, needs to be left alone to settle or to wreak the havoc it wants to wreak. It is too important to be narrowed and scribed, and the emotion too raw to write, even privately.

Maybe years later. Or sublimated into an imagery that can actually be used; but then you never quite get to the centre of the issue.

500th post

Across both blogs, is over at the other place. Something to do with polynomials, I think. I'd be surprised, if, over these 500 posts, more than a handful are worth anything. I've become seriously, perhaps irrevocably, disillusioned with the blogosphere and its relentless shrieking and abuse. I've come to agree, though for entirely different reasons, and from an opposite perspective, with those who argued that there was too much bullying in cyberspace. This doesn't mean i am going to stop blogging: far from it. I get more out of typing than before, especially with regard to the maths (it is really helping my revision and if it helps anyone else, all the better). Most of my posts have been snippets, shouty and largely irrelevant. I don't think that really matters to be honest; but if you're looking for really quality posts from this blog, you do have to look quite hard actually. It seems a shame to admit it of one's own creative effort, and i never did set out to compete with DK or Dizzy or Timmy, but you do sometimes think, a la Kevin Pietersen, "what's the point if you're not going to be the best you can be?" (paraphrase) There has never been more blather in the world as there is now, opinions and arguments wherever you look. Opinions are good, very good. But after two years of trawling through the comments boxes of blogs both British and international you do begin to wonder how many hours of your life you will never get back reading people calling each other cunts*. Unlike some I actually like reading about blogging itself because I think it needs a dose of self-reflection; I'd like to see more good writing about blogging and where it could go from here.

* yes, yes, this is the Dalek accusing the Cyberman of not having enough respect for other species...

Sexcrime

You'd think I could get some, somewhere, wouldn't you?


Or, at the very worst, goodsex?


But instead every day I wearily pull on my Anti-Sex League sash and put up posters about Artsem.

Oh how those marches satisfy me, and the long lectures on "Ingsoc in Relation to Chess".

For The Love of Big Brother

I worship power: oh yes I do, I love powerful beings, in their strength and their decision-making genius, and their rights, oh when I see them exercising their rights it makes me quiver; how they turn and move and destroy. Destruction is the greatest act of power, after the ability to make another suffer. To make another suffer must be as great a display of power as any, but to destroy one - fabulous. Unmake me, unwind me, untie me, let my threads fly into the corners and leave me to settle into the floors. Spill my mind from end to end of the world. Anything can create; very few have the ability to destroy. It takes a certain kind of tidy mind.

Oh the love of power is the end-point of a type of narcissism, the obliteration of self and the dedication to a thing you can absorb yourself in, regardless of who you are (indeed the idea is to subsume one into the other so that it becomes virtually invisible).

Without power there'd be no light; no hospitals, no schools. Someone needs power: power needs someone.

Not me. I just receive it and I look on in awe.

I Don't Want To Stay Here On My Own

It might be nice sometimes, but other times it is dark, cold and there is noone to love; it bleeds concern and sucks adoration through a straw. This time is an illusion which entices you into living; at other times you know, for certain, that life means nothing but a progress towards soil, even a race. You know that your greatest end is as part of a beautiful tree, even though you know that this is environmentally unfriendly. But if you let yourself stay, and rot, you will be such a tiny part of so many lovely plants: your brain might even be part of the trunk of a giant oak, surveying the degredation year by year. How magnificent - for one's body and self to become part of a more permanent England than even New Labour had in mind when they set about fucking it up as the home of racists and fuckwits, the worst of all places - where they came from.

I like the idea that I'll become a leaf and that I'll blow underneath a car, the car of a twat teenager spouting all the fuckwittery of his own day, as I always wished I could do of mine but never believed any of it. How we claim the satisfaction of desire as the end of ethics, how we sweep, always sweep, we love to sweep.

What an awful instrument, the brush. It simply hides, in the soft summer breezes, in the winter we hide from, in the end of days. When we end, when the clouds rise up on all sides from the tumult on the horizon, and the heat, and the oak leaves dissipate into nowhere, then we will love winter and all its hatreds, until we feel it stronger than before, and darker, darker.

Our best and brightest are the most determined that we hide in the blazes of desire and strength. That we destroy what we think is weak. It has to go.

Fever breathe your love on me.

I am happy to be a tenth rate mind, at least I think there might have been something to live for apart from strength and sexuality. I can accept being an idiot if it means thinking there might have at one time been more to life than I can see now.

Tenth rate music and tenth rate alcohol will do for my inspirations. And this is why I carry on. For the best is the most brutal and I really, really do not want to know.

The Movement of History

I make no excuses for projecting my own thoughts onto the world in this post. I have little else to go on, for am I no real historian nor thinker.

We live in a constantly changing world, or so we are told, and it becomes part of our day to day survival to cope with that change: we need to change our ways of living, speaking and thinking to ensure we are not separated from the community, although the community itself is increasingly vague to us. We know some people, sure, but few of us could honestly say we share the views and assumptions of the people in either our real, physical locality or our internet habitat: however much we leave approving comments on blogs we like there will always be the divergence of views caused by thought, independence and history.

For such a changing world the movement of time seems to be remarkably solid. I mean that very quickly the past, or other ways of living, begin to seem unlikely, even impossible; from tiny things like the changing coin to the vast sand-shifting of ethics. Our experience, though varied, seems to be immersed. It did not take long of governance by New Labour for a Tory government to seem almost unthinkable, and for the long years of Tory dominance of politics to seem less than a memory. In many places, with silent pits, the memories would be strong: I mean culturally, even philosophically: in the years 1999-2004 (roughly) I think, the assumptions, arguments, practicalities of Conservative government were so alien to the commentariat and swathes of the public (including, to be fair, myself) as to be meaningless, irrelevant, unexisting.

I don't know if this is making sense but the point I am making is that I think the changing world, in certain ways, makes us unable to remember. It keeps us mired in the present, and thinking of the future (at the moment), with particular regard to global warming, in a kind of fearful fascination. I would have thought we would remember more sharply things being different because it wasn't that long ago: but this is partly what is driving us to worship youth: it is not just beauty, or sexuality, or ability, but the fact that it is, at any given moment, youth which is best attuned to the state of the world at that point, best able to cope, completely unconcerned by trying to adapt. Youth fits, it works. The rest of us find it harder because we are (to greater or lesser degrees) different from the world we live in.

So the study of modern history assumes a keener aspect, and becomes more popular because it is history, it is the story of real or nearly real people in a world we can see has changed. Other types of history (say, medieval) are about other worlds, and so don't interest us so much. Modern history is about our world. The nazification of the school history syllabus and of the bookshelves is a testament to the fact that we are still trying to understand our cultural origins in that time. We see our society as evolving from that, rather than before - take the notion and enacting of human rights, though it may have its origins in the Enlightenment or French Revolution, the key document of our time is the UN Declaration of Human Rights. I think there is also a powerful part of our culture that still cannot understand how it all happened and why it all happened.

I've written on this idea before of course - that the twentieth century is not quite over, and that, possibly, we are suffering some kind of extended anxiety problems caused by 45 years of living under 4 minutes' notice of destruction (ok it was a bit longer than that until the early sixties). But that isn't entirely what i mean here. I mean a culture (though it is so mixed now as to make even the singular noun questionable) which has come into existence only five minutes ago, furnished with a history that it does not remember, but it does remember being at one point in time and at that nexus emerging into something resembling life. From there it has turned, shifted, slid, slanted and cracked so that we just do not, really, remember what it was like.

I don't mind if you think this is a lot of contradictory, muddled cobblers. It is a kind of live-thinking exercise, no pre thought has gone into this post at all except a vague sense that i'd like to put finger to keyboard. If you like it, great. If you don't, also great.

On Pseudonymity

Forgive me if I derive this post entirely from one by CBI on the subject of identity. He outs himself, with, in his view, good reason. I will not presume to comment on his decision.

I am not outing myself: firstly I do not accept any ethical principle that says you must identify yourself to have a view - very few societies have ever accepted this and we seem to find enough value from Anglo Saxon poetry without whinging about the identities of its writers. Either the writing has interest, or it doesn't. It smacks of a different, controlling impulse to demand that people give you personal information before you consent to read their writings. Of course, it is your right to demand that, just as it the writer's right to refuse. Even in the semi-anarchy of the blogosphere, we still hold to market values. Yay.

Secondly, as might be guessed, I am a raving idiot and I don't especially want everyone in my life to know this. I am happy with some people knowing it (two, to be precise) but everyone else can fuck right off, as a narcissist I want a public space to go on and on about all sorts of crap without anyone saying "ew, I don't think much of your blog..." well tough - fuck off. You're not even going to find out so you can piss right off.

Also, of course, I can swear. I love swearing. It gives me such a sense of futile transgression and belated but wholly stereotypical rebellion.

As a teacher I also have this lovely space where I am not expected to be a socialist. This is a relief beyond belief. I can say "Mrs Thatcher was great" and I don't need to say "THAtcher", spitting the entire contents of my saliva gland onto the grateful listener (it is interesting how people love to see you flobbing the great woman's name). I don't need to make excuses for Jim Callaghan, or go on and on about how wonderful the UK was in 1945, 1950, 1966, etc and how 1979 was in fact the peak of a settled, equal society.

These things are nigh on compulsory in education. It is a myth that private school teachers are less lefty. They just think state schools are for all the other fuckers, not them. I have had some truly bizarre, recursive arguments with colleagues in a private school who would tell me private education was wrong but could not, for the life of them, see what was wrong with their working in the system.

Some of them even lived in private roads. But they thought making any decisions on your children's education was evil.

Anyway. I stay pseudonymous for the final, and most important reason: I like it, it gives me pleasure.

So there.

Where Does The End Of Me Become The Start Of You?

Somewhere at the end of my sentence, is the answer. Then, you take what I've said and you mulch it through your prejudices, be they right or left, then you add your assumptions of what I am and you conclude the brief encounter with an idea of what you think I have said, and worse, what you think I think. All of this is rather nastily mashed in social mores and the end result is that you almost certainly think that I'm a cunt. I don't mind that, per se, it is probably true, I just "feel" that it's a touch unfair. And some people's feelings count for a good deal more than many others, so depending on your ethnic or sexual characteristics, this could well be enough to earn me a "cunt" certificate from the government itself. For example, if you scream and shout and say "cunt" but you happen to be a leftist, then you're not so bad, you were just provoked; if I do it, then I am full of rage and anger and I need therapy or a prison sentence, or worse. Or I'm defending my privileges, despite owning nothing at all, or whatever, but by looking at the colour of my skin you nonetheless know what I've been through or not, so you are qualified to comment by the presence of the Guardian under your flabby arm. And if I complain then I am yet another privileged white fucker against equality, or whatever justification for discrimination you've come up with this week after too long spent in the saloon bar of one of London's rather more fashionable establishments. And the comment threads at Harry's Place will go on and on about how easy I've had it and how I've never sat on an Equality Committee in my life, and how, after all, "cunt" is fair enough comment on me.

Where you begin is where my voice ends, and where I begin is where I turn what you say into whatever I want it to be: where I see memories of myself when you speak, and where I think of what you've made me think of myself when you've spoken of your life, even though it's taken me months to make you open up such that I now know something, a very small something, of the real you, and I've immediately reinterpreted it in the light of my bizarre assumptions about life and ethics.


Where you begin is where I've thought for a long time my words end, in gentle and soft landings somewhere in your outer consciousness; that's where I think I end but whether you see me there or not, is, frankly, up to you - and I guess that the answer is that I am a shell on the seashore, glinting in the occasional sunlight, but for the most part occluded by polluted waters or industrial skies.

And it all comes back to the end of the sentence: the suggestion of irony, the lifting lilt, the downbeat self-mockery, the absence of an actual full stop. I suggest by my insecurity that you might like to know more about me, and that I would like to know more about you: but you have other things to do, and your phone is ringing in your pocket, and the tea will be getting cold in an hour or so, so I am faded to black, which is where I should be.

The end of the sentence is no more interesting than the beginning, or the endless dullness of the middle with all its subordinate clauses and hesitations. The end of the sentence goes nowhere and says nothing.