blah-feme

all about... him

He sits quietly, smiling, listening. How old he has become. He is small, frail, white-haired and quiet. I remember him as large, loud, with an infectious laugh that I could hear from my bedroom (all the way upstairs) as he and mum watched TV into the night. Now he is so quiet, so careful, so fragile. As I watch him sitting there, he catches my eye and roles his eyes. I smile back the smile of  shared knowledge. That complicity, that sharing of what we both know, that history of errors is powerful, but also as quiet, frail and brittle as he is. I have never really spoken much with him,  never really sat down and talked about anything other than polite nothings, harmless humorous quips or dead inanities about work . Perhaps it is because he is a man, or perhaps it is because he is that kind of man. Whatever the reason, we have never really shared much other than that long and delicate history that runs through all families.

When I was a child he always seemed so me to be so extraordinarily easy. Where mum was tense, edgy, cross and sparky, he was laid back, warm, friendly. That warmth is still here as I watch him, sipping at his wine, looking at my mother and my sister, listening intently to heir inane ramblings.

He notices me watching him again and grins, slightly flush.

After the meal, all the guests gone, he chunters, showing mild but loving irritation at my mother's fussing in the kitchen. I try to wash up, but am banished to the lounge. 'You've done enough' he says, placing a gentle hand on my shoulder. He was never the most tactile of men, but these moments were always common: punctuations by touch, meant to mark out the moment of their being spoken as if to ask gently and carefully, 'Can you listen now?'.

After all the fussing in the kitchen and question after question about where I keep this, that or the other bowl, cup or pan, we settle down in the lounge. He takes up his book and continues to read and mother tuts. He looks at me and smiles, roles his eyes, and puts down his book. He knows...

delicate synchronicity

On the way home, I am cycling across a bridge over a small river near the People's Theatre. It is one of those chilly late spring evenings, clear, crisp and still. Someone is burning garden wood and the smoke drifts slowly across the bridge. Beautiful, beautiful. I am listening to my ipod as I cycle slowly across the bridge. I am listening to Swedish keyfiddle music - Daniel Petersen's arrangement of a Brudmarch. The melody begins unaccompanied for several stanzas and then the nyckelharpa starts, like a veil of rustles that slowly falls, encroaching quietly on the voice. The music hovers, swoons and drifts like smoke on a breeze. It all fits, all of it: there is no more delicate, more vulnerable moment than this brief glimpse of fragile synchronicity.

conjuring ... someone

The 'someone' of this title is suggestive in the context of my recent posts. Certainly the thoughts and feelings articulated there form a  framewok for some of what follows, but the question, it seems to me, is one which haunts us all: what does it mean to speak of someone in their absence, to write of them, to seek to make reference to them? It is no mere citationality, no 'simple' intertextuality.

To conjure someone up is to refuse citation's limpid omnidirectionality, to refute the mobility of the intertext; to conjure here would be to make flesh of the word, to transmute that brutal fixity of media that has dogged late Western modernity in a return to a kind of fitful tracing, a melancholy dance of meanings, traces, marks, humours. What are the traces and humours that we seek to intensify, to underline, mark out when we, to put it rather blandly, 'miss' someone? Voice certainly, but also the tiny metonyms of the blessed habitus in absentia: a smell, a fabric, a scarf, a handbag. The colour of the hair, a simple gesture, a posture – they can all take on an extraordinary intensity and stand in for the whole, or for other missing pieces of the habitus. These details, poised precariously, then, between metonym and synechdoche, are the stuff of melancholy recollection.

This is in some sense about a melancholy materialism, the yearning for the matter that has dissipated, but which holds impressive and palpable sway over the symbolic universie it has abandoned. In a certain sense, it becomes more vivid for a while, operates wih more efficiency precisiely for for being absent. To conjure in this sense, so antithetical to citation, so at odds with that comfortable textuality of citation, is to bypass the logic of symbolisation altogether. It is as if one were able to suspend the symbolic universe, crack it open with a supreme effort of will and MAKE IT SO, make it that you never left, never died, never abandoned.

This melancholy materialism is thus also constituted around a strangely comforting atavism, a deliberate weakening of the the division that seems to separate  presence and absence, perhaps our primary means of ordering our world and also the primary means by which symbolisation is put to work.

It is the angry and whistful anguish at that order's brutal division of absence and presence that drives the grief one feels at loss and which makes conjuring so important. To remember in this way, in this melancholy materialism of absence, is, in a very important and palpable sense, to experience the truth of leftism: it is born of a mourning, of sadness and melancholy, of wanting things to be as they were or as they might be.

This melancholy is the curse of the left but it is what feeds it, powers it, gives it life.