always behind

So Stockhausen came from Sirius, and why the hell not?, and Cage made 4′33 of silence and pointed out that around huge swathes of the whole world, silence is traffic. The sound of traffic, he said, is always different whereas the sound of Mozart or Beethoven is always the same. The point is, a friend said late last night, it is all in their imaginations and the truth is they don’t actually know what they’re talking about. This, in reference to those other friends who say they’re being spied on and the place is a police state. Attempts to somehow harness an incredibly dense experience with acute language resulted in disaster a little later on. A press of the button and the mail had gone. To the wrong person. Worse, to an in-law; the in-law who was the subject of the mail. Can I blame my morning but oh so belated discoveries? The liberation felt encountering Stockhausen and Cage at youtube? Can I blame Ill Seen Ill Said? Or that woman in the pool? Or the imaginery author who wrote the book reviewed by MJH holed up in an ambient hotel? Perhaps it’s all the bullshit being said about the bankers and their bonuses, the deceit about the borrowing. Language used only to cover up, never to release. The insistence on an outdated etiquette I’ve never understood anyway. Is this a kind of aspergers? Isn’t it that all the aspergers carriers, the schizos and psychos are all we have left as some kind of moral guide? I’d like this to have been written in a more classical way, probably a more male way, so I’d be taken more seriously, be allowed a little more status. But it just comes out. Bloggers’ Tourettes. When my book is finished, I’m going to take a male name.

jusqu’au bout

On Sunday, we were here. Two Sundays before, we were here. And two Sundays before that, we had been here. In between those Sundays, we went here too. I said dumb things like, I wish I was an artist and Perhaps I should have been an artist. I said I feel more at home here than anywhere else and I wish I could live in an art gallery. I think I could put up with the people I don’t know wandering past my bathroom as I showered, gazing into my kitchen as I boiled coffee or took the washing out of the machine. It would be closed before bedtime anyway, so we could still go to sleep alone, quietly, surrounded by vast red paintings and towers of loo-roll spine and sponges painted black. Waking up and drinking tea in bed gazing at An ornamental hermit would definitely assist.

Samuel Beckett took his writing right up to the edge, abstracted the subject as far as he could go, yet his really raw material is his least known, and least liked. His fiction, his novels: they were works of true art, creative in the most complete way possible. Are there writers out there, today, pushing the line as far as he did? Or further? Are there some factual and fiction writers who are going as far as they can, to hell with what the publishers want? Or are they all only poets? Published writing seems to follow such a very limited form and structure. Only poetry breaks boundaries. Novels and biographies, essays and short stories… they all tend to follow a very solid path to a lesser or greater degree. Why isn’t there a greater divergence away from the mainstream, when it comes to the written word? Why don’t writers play play play a bit more, take their writing over the edge a bit more, push their way with words as far as it will go? Where are the writers who are taking risks with their work? Who are taking risks as big as the painters are? Are there any at all? Or have they all died?