A man planting trees during the singularity — morning. Part one of a serial…

1.

Before elsewhere: [((. He was talking about photographs, photographs which documented and created the fascination that the instant holds — click and the photograph of a face is captured. If it was me, perhaps it would be his face, she thought or of the child on the bench seat behind them, or of my face. Most likely though one of the Russian constructivist portraits he likes so much — or perhaps, we should say, he was talking about his dreams of taking such a photograph. Why did he like photographs ? “Since we came here you have become fixated on representations…” She said to him as they drove past Sheffield. “I know, I don’t know which one of us became so fixated on the eternity of the instant. I blame it on the universe..” Sometimes in strawberry world. You can tell we are on holiday because of the existential crises, in our normal life we simply could not afford them at that time… It’s evident that the basic constitution of the individual consciousness, even at its most innermost levels, derives from content belonging to the collective consciousness… sign and meaning… what we shared before, but afterwards did not. This is a story of her and me… an introduction to before the singularity… I (who and what I?) this became the question after I was injured. An old question became a new question. Where before I was a split subject afterwards to say I is to say we. Who is the subject of this utterance, alien, an alien to to to the subject of the statement, the person I was before became this body and with more obviously split subjects. Parts of my body now an unfamiliar intruder, titanium and plastic, the auto-immune system saving the body, the intrusion, the shifter becoming me. Before I thought indifferently, indifferent because of love and liking, knowing that she was a slightly psychopathic construct, afterwards I understood more clearly that it was because to live we (she and I) had to become non-human…) (In the cafe though — who knew what the man walking through the cafe door wanted? What did the waitress want? Always the thought that… ) Am I the intruder in this head of mine or the split subject that almost died? This person who is alive because she could not imagine living without me? Though neither of us feels like we are intruders, why don’t we feel like that? So I am sitting here on my/our own, without any of the several others, those closest to me who believed that prolonging my life (making me a non-human) was worth the effort. Perhaps i should say inhuman, but I have always liked the way a friend says she is non-human, so in solidarity with her it seems better. Before we came here I thought we were human. It’s hard to imagine the complexity of this strange group… And I write this for the others who were in the house during the singularity. The science of singularities was as underdeveloped as the science of literature.

2.

Drinking tea before going to the supermarket

I was sitting in a tea room facing towards the door, (a habit I developed in Tokyo all those years ago.) thinking about (who and what I am?). but mostly about plants and writing (continue) sometimes fiction but also the endless documents that I write for work. It’s not that these subjects are necessarily connected. And its not that I was thinking of writing a piece of fiction about trees, or a report on the planting of the trees in the new northern safe house but well, it was also something else entirely, enjoying drinking strange Chinese tea in a northern town Sitting sitting sitting… When I began to think about writing this, documenting the “creation of the woods project” as the finance director insisted on calling it, a project which began last year and which had many problems before I could even imagine writing about it, and for that matter the seemingly endless budget meetings and the decisions about what should have been a simple structure, that finance told me about. But then as I type those texts, — well plants got in the way of it. If you were to ask me, as I sit here sipping tea, how they got in the way, i don’t think its relevant anymore; the trees, bushes, machines, people are arriving… the first steps in creating a new woods, new hedgerows, a new garden has already begun. Eventually the woods will spread up the valley behind the house and beyond. Perhaps i should explain how the house and land became hers… anyway I am drinking tea, writing this and remembering the pause before entering the supermarket to buy food whilst my partner is at the safe house with our non-human children. And I’m thinking of what is necessary for for for me to write about her and them. I am aware of how this feels like an unintentional metafiction, with me hiding behind her, always behind her and think should I give her a name, but perhaps I am standing beside her, not as fictional as her actual name or as a single capital or lower case letter version of her name N, S or P, and have her appear as a fictional character after writing this. Not so much placing her into your consciousness as reminding you that she is already in my collective consciousness. I suppose a fictional name might always be better than her actual name. Though as I think about this these words written out on paper and then later typed differently here — she would say << its too abstract, the sentences make no sense, they are too metaphysical, too allegorical. No more metaphors. Your representation is unsatisfactory.>> <<You are the prototypical split subject, a conscious being and a multiplicity of others.>> I might say. <<The part of which your writing, (she might respond,) is only a small part of us and the unmentioned parts are much bigger, we are living in a geopolitical space that you hardly try to describe at all.>> But really I am writing about these parts that are really us, avoiding describing our external worlds, not telling them about our origins in cheese world, I am not surprised thinking of what she would say on that afternoon on the day before easter, an early spring afternoon. A hill wind blowing into the tea room from the veranda through the open glass doors… I could hear her seriousness as she said to me, listen to me, hear what we have to say. But as I might say to her, as I’m leaving the tea room for the supermarket, we are living in a geopolitical space, all of us, are you sure you know what we are doing here? In the supermarket, shopping, filling the trolley with food for the people already here and those arriving later, i hear the strains of ‘life during wartime’ which provokes a memory of the novel. (Is it available here?I I wonder if the feelings of pleasure I am experiencing will end as the music ends or will it be later when I am loading the car. Does it have anything to do with some of the things that have happened to me? the books that have made a lasting impression on me? The supermarket cashier is a young woman, a student working the easter holidays, perhaps, she is laughing and talking with the people working the adjacent tills, i am too busy packing the calico bags to pay attention to their conversations Should i care about their relaxed lives, a casual moment, traces of an existential crisis ? […] I shouldn’t be thinking this as I drive back to the safe house, but i’m distracted, perhaps I should have asked her to come with me,. but the work needed attention from one us… I wondered who was looking after the children and cats as the trees and other bushes were delivered today. […]

Sipping tea in the spring after I was injured, I’d spent time in the hospital recuperating from the wounds, before we had returned home. By the time we were back at the home still getting used to the ontological and epistemological disaster that we are. it had been years and we had surrendered to the inevitable and agreed that we were both original and stopped thinking about the issue. Some people have existential crises over things like this, but she, who, has a clearer understanding about these things than I do says that she wouldn’t have let me live with her if I was likely to go into crisis over something like this, which effectively means… (better not to think of that). After a while I went (to go) back to work, before being in this great house in the north, which she stole.