life in the west…(3) — see it as aberrant and broken, you see it as the normal course of events….
There are two Pauls, one european and one american, one died the other will. Let’s begin with the american one… We were sitting a bookshop cafe, holding a few hours over lunch to speak, to renew our acquaintance. We talked about everything, meetings, friends, politics, science. [He said for me, the things that interest are socialism, nationalism and integralism all of which allow for a collective subject and a morality that goes beyond utilitarianism.] We were always skirting around the edges of the discussion that was the ontological difference, the crisis of being that would always separate us, and yet not… He said I know — you and I disagree. I think anything can become political; you think everything already is. I see it as aberrant and broken, you see it as the normal course of events…. Dialectics, he said, it’s all dialectics and fuzzy logic to you. In that phrase “I see it as aberrant and broken, you see it as the normal course of events…. “ The ontological chasm is revealed. For he believes that it is possible to imagine a society that isn’t broken, whereas for me deep in the fuzzy sets I think rather that no matter what the society is like, being will always remain unbearable[…broken… ] In a sense the difference is delineated/exemplified by the fact that these two almost old men, one in his sixth decade, the other in his seventh decade became rather surprisingly friends. Shortly after we met, we immediately and continuously began to study everything, all the rather strange and fantastical details amongst which we found ourselves, a peculiar ontological gesture to understand why why why. From every knot in the wooden floor of the cafe, every blemish in the polished concrete floor, the hiss of the Essence of the espresso machine, to the rhizomic grass growing in the crevices of the walled courtyard to the rear of the cafe, the tree growing in the corner, to the last slither on the stairs, scuff marks, mud, the Saharan sand in the air and steadily coating the vehicles. This was all a neo(now almost)secret preparation for the continuation of the friendship. The bizarre decadence of the hospital club sipping vodka late at night over burgers. (Who could imagine me there?) The insanity of friendship. Beyond this the detailed examination of the others desired objects means little, the surprising curves and angles of the body, the folds and warm limits emerging from the laughter. It must be so unless the opposite is true and we’d rather be sitting drinking margaritas and whiskey sours than returning to rooms on opposing sides of the city and suburbs. When he arrived in the city he had put a small, crackling record player between the desk and the door, he turns the room into what passes for a home for a denizen of the liquid modern, A place he can curl up in his private space and breathe more easily; on evenings when he took men home, on evenings spent in front of the machine, (which changed into expensive digital equipment later) and in front of the machine with a growing circle of friends, whose conversation gave his depressed soul hope, sometimes when laughter filled the now bigger space he wondered what it was like to be a father. A grey parrot living in a large cage, did he ever let it out to fly around the room or local sky ? paul, paul, paul it cried. The parrot outlived him and remained long after he left.
And then the European one… The woman across the room whose elegance speaks of casual wealth, is standing by the bar talking to the owner — he looks like an interested man. A course or two of small dishes arrive as we watch them go outside to stand beneath the arbor and dream of smoking cigarettes together in the half-light, she laughs smoke and he smiles as if happy. We were amongst the last people to leave, we often were in those days. They were still together sitting on stools eating the additional food he’d ordered. It was raining outside. Everything begins with the anomaly of our latest meeting in Brussels.Soho, [ah Brussels] which leads to an investigation of practice and place, theory being possible across the divergence that had appeared, we ate bowls of pasta and light beer or wine. It was a fine spring day and we had come across a serious break in the network of our worlds, which happens even though it is becoming extraordinarily overcrowded with humans and their things (and what isn’t their things?). Although nobody ever actually says anything, we wonder if we are the only ones who have noticed, but wonder in our joint madness if we dare say anything of this. How did that multiplicity of lines become political ? (does he speak of this in france and belguim?) We look across the square between the greyness of the bark of the London Plane trees, with drinks in our hands. (PL is drinking grappa whilst I sip shots of vodka, we are old friends, originally meeting in small political groups, three or four decades ago. Both gradually coming to exist in the dialectic of fuzziness.) And yet we recognize that it is meaningless for no one ever goes in amongst the trees, it is a conspiracy that cannot be broken. There is no way out. Between us there is an insufficient breakage of place and practice. We agree to stop the writing project, the ontology is cancelled, closed, papers end up in drawers, electronic files and diagrams vanish, the project ends. We are still trying to speak though its increasingly difficult. People move in, establish themselves and remain in stasis, not only unable to leave the place but actively prevented from doing so whether it is the desire to appear in the limelight, the economy of enslavement or a gay parade which runs a thread of conspiracy through the streets, still there and concealed behind their self-importance like a broken desire. […] Occasionally as we walk through a square with a dozen multi-centenarian trees we notice something else, a sudden stillness of place, a recess where we notice that the trees are waiting for us to vanish. (The buildings crumble into ruins, the now empty courtyard transformed by the growth of trees…) We walk down a side street to another Portugese bar to have a few final drinks. Through the window of the bar I can see a block of luxury flats entered through a metal gateway set in a tall archway, which masks the perfect crime of their existence. All we need do is accept the invitation and we will live entirely on the surface and avoid the mystery of the break which would allow us to know what is happening. Either that or we will become part of the scenery, like the denizens of the luxury flats entering and leaving through the gates, we will become the story, perhaps even the final solution. And yet in the conspiracy of secrets that is us, we arrive back at the break which leads to an interrogation of place and practices.
These discoveries are a becoming part of the physical world and perhaps as we walk uphill later passing through the fallen leaves and thistles, the sound of owls and foxes around us, we’ll become different. Whatever, we are unable to separate the two, even our friends find it difficult, even impossible to separate their images of the difference between the american Paul and I. For them dialectics and fuzzy logic are the same as aberration and broken, and we have no idea how to explain the difference as they continue to work so hard at destroying the planet. This is hidden from them in the bracelets and the clothes they wear, which are always fashionable and thus spectacular. We love their earrings, their muscles and pens hanging from the edges of their finary, their silk shirts iridescent in the… Becoming does not begin from an act as banal as removing one’s clothes, its a constant, an endless movement from detail to detail, from an Italian restaurant to a Spanish bar in Soho, from a transitional jacket to a warm leather coat, from the swish of a stocking to the warmth of a thigh, to the sound of a heavy page being turned, despite this the connection remains, connecting across the plane of being, constructing a networked world together for a few moments… (Tomorrow he will be flying to Australia via Tokyo or Hong Kong, to vanish into finitude. […] Did he speak of this to others before he died on the edges of the pacific? Did his mother and family fly in from the americas ?). In those full moments when the mind isn’t taken up by fear and worry, but instead just covered with pleasures, when only the drinks in the Spanish bar of interest, when only the challenge of the ontological differences is of interest, when there are no obligations but the semiotic exchanges between friends, then we will return to the unanswerable questions, there is a room behind you that is roped off, the lights dimmed. Later you arrive home, switch on the light and the question remains there waiting. She is a a a asleep upstairs.
[ I am reasonably certain I will never go to Lisbon, the only aspect of Portugal that will come into my life now are humans who have migrated here for economic reasons, which is the only reason anyone moves anywhere]
In Brussels with PL leaning against a richly lacquered bar in the empty University Club. All the students and lecturers absent, vanished during this long holiday weekend. The bartender is there so that someone is in front of you as you drink. Not a therapist, or someone who can be said to care even at an abstract level nor even as an idiot might appear to. They looks at us with smiling indifference, intercepting our gaze across the bar so that we cannot scan the bottles for something strange and interesting to drink. But whilst she or he pours wine and other drinks into our glasses, PL and I talk with her/him about things, the locality, what’s interesting and so on, for they speak perfect english, and we speak imperfect english. She/he has no name, no identity at all, when she says her name all we here is the ‘saaaaan’. Only the fact that she is other, that we cannot grasp what the difference is and neither can we understand what the idea of it should be, which means we cannot separate her from the role she is playing, and this enables us to live with who we are…. which is why, from something related to vanity, we spent an evening in the University Club drinking with bartender rather than the people who had been expecting us, at a meeting which was raided. When we were alone we reminisced about driving people across borders, deep into western europe when we were young. Writing almost meaningless notes into the small tablet, we allow ourselves to appear out of the emptiness of the bar — out of something, making nothing — like the bartender dreaming of becoming something else. In the early evening ending up in his house. The house is full of things. Heaped surfaces, busy walls, window sills with things balanced on them, a plant on his office window, overloaded bookshelves that are dust traps, in the secondary library plastic crates filled with books. Only these are inventoried. Most things are related to the work we have carried out over the decades, the four or five decades of our adult lives. There are books that I/he often pauses to reflect on as he exists in the various rooms of the house, these books link the very different activities of our lives. The piles of unread books, unlistened to music have grown in the pandemic. The lack of others in the house over the past three months has been the strangest thing of all, he says. Instead the communication technologies so beloved of the spectacle have turned into essential items of everyday life.
It was all the american Pauls fault […] In the evening we sit in one of the booths its the cocktail hour and is one of the quiet times in the bar. Yet as we sit in the alcove beneath the hanging tapestry, at one of the movable tables designed to let the more common overweight drinkers to slide out of the alcove — or even to enable tapas or drinks to be passed around and shared, we realize suddenly that their are others are close by on adjacent tables, couples who find themselves suddenly embedded in our life stories, as we are in theirs, all part of the same chaotic uncertain universe, as are all our singular destinies. Whilst the young couple to the right are at the beginning of things, a certain carefulness in the way they speak… [-Jasa, han var det. Men i somras holl forbibindelsen pa att ga isar. — Ja. Falk fick veta att Hedlund brukade besome Ulla och da blev han tw …. Men det ordnade sig sa smaningnom. — Vad anser a a. Nn. ni om er vaninnas forsvinnande ? — Jag kan inte forklara t.qwnnqnwwjj. new yyy The — Hedlund kanner ni ju W. A. W. W. ….- Har ni nagr fotograpier av Yytt Lundgren och Hedlund ?] In the Hospital club we talk of the work that is to be done. Let us draw up a list, an inventory of exceptional places that will not reveal their qualities so much as interrogate them, forcing them to speak. We hope that as words slowly emerge the places lives will be recognized and acknowledged, the end of networks being drawn out by our post geo-philosophical moment, no longer binary connections between geo-local nodes on the network but instead entanglement. As we walk down the narrow street that parallels the main road we find our ideal refuge, where we can stop panicking like a lost city dweller with a broken semiosis system and relax. Then we set off again, sitting like a nomad sipping coffee with slices of sausage keeping our eyes open as we look for details, it is only as we sit that we realize that we are getting somewhere, eventually standing and walking, our footsteps echoing on the pavementssss… A last coffee and we part, he heading off to a hotel and a flight, W in a cab towards Tottenham and I walking to the north wondering at how difficult it was to speak, one foot going in front of the other. I couldn’t get drunk that night I often wondered why. I drink a margarita whilst he drinks a whiskey sour, an espresso perhaps. He explains that “I’m going to Moscow for a conference on digital governance in September, flying in from a stopover in Singapore.” A strange goodbye. Did anything explain why he became increasingly right wing over the last few years of his life ? It was never clear why things being aberrant and broken caused that rightward shift. We couldn’t go to the funeral, the funeral rites passed us by as most do. The London memorial service was avoided, music, drinks and memories best avoided. It would have been as Michaux described it like being a body stretched out on “a sea of clouds”. The cacophony of noises that were our shared space rumble on, buses changing gear, diesel engines (courtesy of Max) revving up, horns shrieking, police and ambulance sirens, planes growling, the overpowering sound of church bells ringing… the furnace heating up. All that is left is the dust of memories. Where did the ashes go? What happened to the cat ?
He reached the point on the hill where he can turn right or continue up the gentle slope, he takes the longer route towards home. He continues and takes out ‘The Hegel Variations’ from his jacket pocket which he had been reading in the cafe, and starts to read a few pages as his feet touch the road, listening to bird song between words. The occasional crunch of loose gravel that spills out of the driveways […] walking along the pavement on the lane he passes the Nigerian Woman who is walking two Dachhunds, “nice weather no coats on the dogs again”, he says interrupting the sentences on language. (He will see her again as he turns right into the house). He walks on musing about how the understanding of a Left and Right Hegel proposed here is philosophically applicable to most decent philosophers. The first of the gardeners looks at him as he passes. He reties his left lace on the bench. More gardeners, the machines they use grumble in the sunshine. One gardener is blowing beech leaves and mast husks out of the garden onto the road. A Red Kite circles over the Close, looking for food, perhaps, he cannot tell. A section of pavement is being re-tarmacked in front of number 8. He walks around the close anti-clockwise circumnavigating the woods, reading again, thinking of Darwin and Hegel… The european Paul is sitting in the garden, his left foot encased in a dark blue plastic cast. Tea? he asks in a long convoluted sentence. Sipping tea and eating fruit cake they/we talk of crises. The ontological difference is small — for us its “Dialectics, it’s all dialectics and fuzzy logic. In that phrase “We see it as aberrant and broken and also we see it as the normal course of events…” Their histories are close… differences can sometimes be circumvented / all narrative is annihilated. Living in a pandemic makes him feel nostalgic for these moments.”
[In memory of PS who died in January 2020]
