theasif.info
plot
page
(Lo-tech
Website, text based)
Date:
July, August, September 2008
www.theasif.info
full links listing (click Links)
· Plot
· Tenant: Rumpledsilkskin
(avatar,
thinly concealing terrestrial)
· Crops and
cultivation (constantly updated content)
The
philosophy of virtuality: a virtual allotment for the cultivation of virtual
escape.
The
Website of the Philosopher Rumpledsilkskin.
Now and then truth (contingent truth): - no
allocation of infertile space happens except within the medium of the commodity
and all resistance to the commodity is contained within this medium.
Plan of Crops and Cultivation:
Digging:
all theory and argument will be at least double dug, meaning there will be no
substitute for hard-graft, heart-stimulation, and sound-beds in an old English
style. Modus operandi will be spade striking the old rocks of logic,
objectivity and truth value and barrowing off-site, all post-modernist,
polystyrene packaging.
Weeding: meticulous hoeing, burrowing out, poisoning,
flame gunning of civilised cultivations in their theoretical forms -
dialectical and apocalyptic weeding!
Rank and gross, tap and fibrous rooted, weed-binding possessors of
nature, include: - Morality, Politics, Culture, Religion, Free- Market
Apologia, State, Law, Education, Family. (Marx identified these weeds but was
an inconsistent or lazy weeder.)
Fertilising: scattering images and fictions in the spirit
of virtuality, dressing virtual soil in readiness for main-crop seemings.
Planting:
intercropping, and regular planting throughout four seasons, free from global
warming but contributing to same.
Perennial
Harvesting:
Materialist Virtuality, As Ifness, Modernism (hybrid), Invisible Cells,
Optical Density, Simulacra, Subterraneans, Indeterminism, Rational
Schizophrenia, the Unnoticed. (Irregular allotment visitors take home emptier
baskets, but emptier baskets are easier to carry. You pays no money and takes
your choice.)
Composting:
“Art an Enemy of the People”, “Beyond Art”, “Invisible Cells”, “Mme Rousseau”, Historical Materialism, Fact/Value
distinction, Ideological and Commodity theories of Art. Sartre. Marx. Unamuno.
Richard Jefferies. Jean Seberg. Genet. Patrick White. David Mercer. Viviane
Forrester. Michael Heim. (A virtual future’s past.)
Pest
Control:
Dialectical spraying: - determinism (evolutionary, neurophysiological,
philosophical, A.I. nonsense), non-dialectical conceptual analysis, sluggish
Heideggerian and Post Modernist abstraction. Plus days of reckoning,
Rumpledsilkskin confronts his critics.
THIS
TIME ON THE VIRTUAL ALLOTMENT:- 2008 has to be the year in which the Virtuality
Project will be completed. Progress towards this will, like last year, take
place off-line. This means its content will not reappear on theasif.info before
2009. There are no instant fixes here. Meanwhile theasif.info continues to
resurrect Thérèse Levasseur. Ironically, she is known in these web pages as
Madame Rousseau. It is hoped that her total resurrection but not her ascension
into heaven, will be completed at the Great Exhibition of the Rousseau For
All commemoration in Geneva in 2012. Rehearsals for this resurrection are
to take place at New Venture in Brighton during July 2009 in commemoration of
Bastille Day. This Quarter’s content at Crops &
Cultivation contains, as last quarter, the final part of a devotional drama
for Thérèse. What follows immediately is a preamble, followed by an account,
(taken from “The Arcady Project”) of a virtual conversation in Paris between
Thérèse, Jean Seberg (the film star) and Julia Callan-Thompson (Jilly
O’Sullivan, in “Tainted Love” by Stewart Home). These skirmishes lead to a
battle for the ordinary against the forces of high seriousness, which is the
drama itself. The richness of the ordinary theasif.info celebrates. For now
theasif.info is quite happy with its ancient monuments, Lenin, Levasseur,
Seberg. They continue to stand undisturbed. 2009, to state the obvious, will be
a different year.
Madame Rousseau (preamble)
Took all your children
away from you at birth, five in all, none of whom you would ever see again?
Cheated on you with high-class
sophisticates and colluded with them to laugh at your ignorance and illiteracy?
Lived with you for over
thirty years but never acknowledged you in the eyes of the world as any more
than the servant?
Pretended to marry you,
palming you off with a mock ceremony?
???????
Would you have……
Walked out years before?
Set Fire to the bed?
Gone off with someone
else and got abused in exactly the same sort of way?
ANSWER:
There was no Madame
Rousseau in the life of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Suzanne Rousseau (née Bernard)
died following childbirth, the birth of Rousseau. Thérèse Levasseur, on the
other hand, lived with him as wife, though not wife, for nearly all her adult
life.
During his time (the
years of the French Enlightenment, directly preceding the French Revolution)
Rousseau had celebrity and infamy in equal measure. The ideas of liberty,
equality and democracy, which he developed in the modern form, are embedded
now, though garbled, in a global, popular consciousness. People will sacrifice
their lives for them. They make up an orthodoxy, which excludes alternatives.
Rousseau, though, was persecuted for his intellectual daring and ended his life
a paranoid fugitive, thinking all the world sought to murder him.
When Thérèse first
appears in Rousseau’s life she is a shy, young, pretty girl working in the
laundry of a hotel in Paris. Her native town is Orléans, and, like the Maid of
Orléans, she is illiterate and ill educated but possesses considerable practical
intelligence. Gauche and with an open heart she gives herself, her whole being,
to Jean Jacques, who sweeps her off her feet with his mask of eloquence and
romanticism and the perversions which it conceals. By the end of Rousseau’s
life Thérèse has metamorphosed into a vengeful shrew, totally dominating and
subjugating him. At the end of her life, Rousseau dead, Thérèse gains a little
celebrity and recognition from Revolutionary France. As for posterity, she
exists as a footnote to intellectual history.
There is a putative text
by Flores Amelia, concubine to St Augustine, “The Codex Floriae”, whose post-modernist authorship/translation is
attributed by Phoenix House to Jostein Gaarder. This text sets out to reply to
St Augustine’s “Confessions”, challenging his philosophical justifications for
banishing Flores Amelia both from his bed and from the son they had produced.
Her sound argument centres on an integration of mind and body and the
physicality of existence in opposition to Augustine’s high-sounding, Platonic
virtualism.
In similar vein “Madame Rousseau” is a reply to Rousseau’s own “Confessions”. It is not illustrative history but stays close to
historical fact in order to express freely and with necessary exaggeration
Thérèse’s undoubted bitterness and need for revenge, as well as her sound, good
sense. The circumstances of Rousseau’s death were at the time far from clear
and “Madame
Rousseau” takes up a position on
this, which fits some of the facts. The drama pictures Thérèse leading a reluctant
Rousseau by the genitals towards the French Revolution and the collapse of an
effete, sophisticated society. A rebellion of servants. This is true to
Thérèse’s feelings about the high society courted by Rousseau. The society to
which he tells risqué stories about itself, like the disjunctive story of “The Social
Contract” concerning nob rule or
mob rule. Ultimately “Madame
Rousseau” asserts that footnotes
to “history” are more important than what they are footnotes to, and that
ordinary, unrecorded experience is the way of the world. Before you might go
there you might try to catch the cadence of Thérèse when her ghost accosted
Jean and Julia at the Place du Panthéon, August 1965.
The
Arcady Project ( Exposé. Excerpt)
Jean Seberg had been walking
Paris for most of the afternoon. After their brief lunch, consisting, on her
part, of a few leaves of lettuce, she had left Romain in the apartment on Rue
du Bac, so he might write. Paris was hot and empty. She had been all the way down the Boulevard Raspail, slowing as
she passed the Cimetière du Montparnasse. On the Boulevard Saint Michel she had
stopped at the window of a patisserie and gleamed at a millefeuille and then a
chocolate éclair but had moved on. At four o’clock she found herself at the
Place du Panthéon and decided to rest, setting herself beside the fountain.
There were water nymphs and a floating cupola to take in. Running through her
mind was a variant on a theme, a theme, which had helped establish her
celebrity.
“I don’t know if I’m fat
because I’m free, or free because I’m fat.” This disregard for the imperatives
of her career encouraged her to be the farm girl she was not. She would go
further in this scepticism. “So, if I had chosen a chocolate éclair am I
compelled to think that a chocolate éclair is better than a millefeuille?
Surely that is ridiculous. Even if I prefer chocolate éclairs it cannot follow
from my deciding to have the chocolate éclair that I think they are better than
millefeuilles. Sometimes I may have a millefeuille and other times an éclair. I
may choose the éclair because I know you prefer millefeuille and there is only
one of each. I may choose the éclair because if I am to have anything at all I
have to have one or the other. I am a farm girl, not a donkey.”
The night before in the
same city, Julie Thompson, as she was sometimes known, dined with Elizabeth
Buntt and her husband Alfred Duhrsson. All of them were interested in
philosophy and the conversation turned to the subject of universalisability and
whether it could be treated as a secure predicate, so conferring conceptual
coherence and rationality on the practice of morality. The subject stayed with
her as she set out for an afternoon of drifting. Staying with it was for
reasons of nostalgia. It took her back just a few years, to Geoff in his prime,
to UCL then, to the buzz of professional philosophy, to her pregnancy and to
feelings of optimism. But as she came down the steps at the front of the hotel
she was distracted, through association, by an incomplete remembering of a text
by Beckett. This interrupted her philosophical deliberations, although Beckett
encouraged a sceptical approach to the philosophising. Had she been able to
recite the specific passage in her head, she would have said to herself, “There were not many steps. I
had counted them a thousand times, both going up and coming down, but the
figure has gone from my mind. I have never known whether you should say one
with your foot on the sidewalk, two with the following foot on the first step,
and so on, or whether the sidewalk shouldn’t count. At the top of the steps I
fell foul of the same dilemma. In the other direction, I mean from top to
bottom, it was the same, the word is not too strong. I did not know where to
begin nor where to end, that’s the truth of the matter. I arrived therefore at
three totally different figures, without ever knowing which of them was right.
And when I say that the figure has gone from my mind, I mean that none of the
three figures is with me anymore, in my mind. It is true that if I were to
find, in my mind, where is certainly to be found, one of these figures, I would
find it and it alone, without being able to deduce it from the other two. And
even were I to recover two, I would not know the third. No, I would have to
find all three, in my mind, in order to know all three. Memories are killing.” As she was unable to recall this text in this
detail, she was able to resume quickly her own line of thought. And her walk
began.
“Had I left my hotel in
the Marais and headed for Notre Dame, armed with a map, there would be all
sorts of instrumental choices I would have to make, calculating the better
route to follow, my choices being made on the basis of which rue would best
serve my chosen end, arrival at Notre Dame. But just to go out, as I have, with
no real rhyme or reason, is the stuff of ordinary life. Honestly it’s how we
live in the domestic space, fully intentional, fully choosing, but not
stretched over a barrel of values. So I come out of my hotel. I turn right.
Does it matter that I turn right? Do I think it the better way to go? Do I
think it better to have turned left or right rather than remain on the steps of
the hotel? No! It doesn’t matter to me. I have no idea which is the best way to
go. I have decided to go for a walk, which more or less entailed turning right
or left. There is no question of remaining at the hotel entrance. There is no
scale ranging from best to worst that I am on. Decisions have consequences. At
the same time I am not compelled to walk. The walk is voluntary. It is my own
choice. I do not seek refuge in bad faith. I am responsible for my walk. My
choices will have reasons and the reasons explain my choices but they do not
need to justify them or involve me legislating for others. Most of what I do is
volitional, intentional, chosen, explicable but done without thinking.”
By the time Julie had
worked this out she found herself outside the Panthéon. Feeling hot and her
flip-flops rubbing her little toes she made for the fountain to ease those toes
in the water.
In a blank moment Jean
Seberg, the pharmacist’s daughter and not a farm girl, raised her gaze to the
sun, which forced her to squint a little but she smiled welcoming, and, as if
an apparition, an old woman pottered into view. The old woman wore a bonnet, a
bodice jacket and a long skirt with a bit of a bustle, all looking like hand-
me -downs from another age. Despite the heat her hands were buried in a muff.
She approached. Jean expected her to be
on the cadge, but instead of demanding a few francs the old woman launched into
a declaration, surprisingly in English with staccato, terrier delivery, like
another Julie, Burchill!
“Jean Jacques Rousseau-
political philosopher, moralist, essayist, novelist, composer, naturalist, copyist,
secretary, servant, cashier, walker, idler, womanizer, masturbator, citizen of
Geneva, educationalist, absent father, exhibitionist, masochist, hermit,
peasant-lover, noble-ass-licker, reluctant revolutionary, romantic, drop-out,
victim of murder?”
She then proceeded to
squat herself between where Jean and Julie were sitting. Pulling up her skirt and lowering her
drawers she piddled into the waters of the fountain. Julie, with an amused
smile, quickly withdrew her feet. Julie didn’t know who to be intrigued with
most, the outlandish old woman or the other occupant of the fountain. “Really,
isn’t that Jean Seberg?” Also she felt a shade embarrassed. She had come to
Paris sporting le coup Seberg. Fortunately, Jean Seberg, if she was Jean
Seberg, had moved on to a formalized bouffant.
“That’s better!” The old
woman pulled up her drawers and rearranged her skirt making herself at home in
the space between Julie and Jean, trying to strike up conversation, but not
bothered if she was not interrupted.
“Free as pigeons now. Waddling down our
roads…Platriere…Grenelle…a jingle of pension in me purse, ta! Publisher Rey,
still a tingle of passion in me poke, a cockade in me ’at, crapping and pissing
where I likes. Do dicky birds pee? He would know something fucking useless like
that. Flutter off to Palais Royal for a little din dins, before taking my
perch, my honoured perch mind you, like a vulture, in our new place, Place de
la Revolution. A place for citizens, poissardes and the taking of nobs! They
don’t call it that now dearies. Now it’s Place de la Concorde! What’s think of
my English? I’ve picked it up quite well ghosting around this city for a couple
hundred years, from you tourists, dearies!” Jean was about to remonstrate she
was not a tourist but the old woman had moved on.
“He pissed like a leaking
tap, old cock, ’til I siphoned him…And the tall stories he would tell… me
bending and threading bougies. Zulietta in Venice was a trusty tale…’The
Origins of a Disequilibrium of Bilge Water’ he called it…that fucking harlot
made a spurting bean sprout of you…my once upon a time, for all my life.” She
turned to Jean. “We poissardes ponced about Versailles, Citizen of somewhere. I
was there for that. Broad daylight and she was still abed. You should have seen
the look on a rich face. Marie Antoinette, a slab of Viennese pastry, and fifty
Parisian strumpets rampaging the royal bedchamber…tugging on gowns and wigs,
braying all the names of the pigsty. She snorts out of bed like a fast fart, in
a shift and petticoat, and, for some notion of hers, with stockings in her
hand, and scampers off down the corridors of Versailles, poissardes, with fish
knives out, in pursuit. I couldn’t keep up, not enough puff, you understand,
being a pensioner.”
Julie’s
curiosity was aroused. “Hi! I’m Julie, now who are you?” Perhaps she would also
get Jean Seberg to say who she was.
“I’m Thérèse darlin’, I’m
Thérèse…Did I ever think he was a divine being? If so I was very young and
simple. He said I was the Maid d’Orleans, when we first met.”
Jean was not going to
introduce herself but this conversation was coming close to home, so she asked
the leading question. “Was that Otto?”
“No darlin’, not Otto,
Jean Jacques, the divine Jean Jacques. I don’t know if I was there at the birth
of Supreme Being, but, if he was divine, certainly I was there at the death of
God. That would be ‘deicide’? Or am I saying the opposite of what I mean again?
Not that anyone suspected unholy crime. And who done it? Surely not that young
girl he saw for the first time, here in Paris, waiting on tables at the Hotel
Saint Quentin? Flustered and blushin’, innocent of gentlemen’s ways she was. Up
to her fucking armpits in soapsuds. Gave nearly all my life to live with him…
And we did speak in the days that followed. And like Saint Joan I heard voices.
He became my voices. All the different people in Jean Jacques…my voices… until
for a long time I had no voice of me own. Oh! Jean Jacques. How I got to know
him. So high-sounding. I fell in love with high-sounding. But my ears deceived
me. He was the tenderest, most sensitive, most feeling soul ever born, or so he
kept saying. For all those years I was his servant, his nurse, his aunt. I was Pope
Joan, Lieutenant Criminel, not even his mistress, never his wife, not really.”
The old woman fell silent and seemed to go into herself. They all continued
sitting there, staring in front of themselves, the younger women just enjoying
the sun on their flesh.
Julie broke the silence.
“So this is Rousseau you are talking about, the great philosopher? You knew
him!”
The old woman ignored
this. “ For a long time after, I didn’t think I’d get worked up ever again. I
went sullen, numb, into myself. When I had my fifth, I didn’t make no trouble.
After that there were no more. He robbed me of the whole brood. Sucked all the
life out of me. Blew me up and down so many times until I was just a distorted
old bag. Bundled them up, bothered to put a monogram in for the first one, and
he carried them to the door of the Sisters of St Vincent de Paul. Five times he
must have knocked on that door. ‘Foundlings!’ I must have been deep asleep.
Have you any children dear?” She turned to Julie. “Yes, a boy.” “And what’s his
name?” “Llewelyn.” “And what about you dearie?” Jean told her she had a boy
too, by the name of Diego.
“That must be lovely for
you, and I expect you have men who are proud of you. Lovely for you. My bugger
was ashamed of me.” She fished in her muff and pulled out some scraps of paper.
“Do you know what this is? It’s a letter he wrote and I trudged up the valley
in Montmorency to deliver it for him. Can you believe? I’ll read some of it to
you. I can read. Listen. ‘
Beloved Sophie! You intoxicate my sight. When I’m near you I’m seized with
delightful shiverings. O contagious power of love.’ Well that was just Jean Jacques being a soft shit.
A woman in her birth fever goes over the top, and I’d come to think perhaps it
was right a philosopher should feel free and not have to bother with family,
after all he was providing some sort of living for us, but to write about me,
to her! ‘You ask
about Thérèse and our relationship.’ This I remember. I don’t need no reading. ‘From the first moment when I
saw her up to this day, I never felt the least spark of love for her. The
sensual needs, which I satisfy in her person, are only for me those of sexual
impulse, without in any way connected with the individual. As you may well
imagine we do not have sufficient ideas in common to make a great stock in
conversation. Our conversation is just gossip, scandal and feeble jokes, as
operatic as washerwomen. When living as a hermit one feels the advantage of
living with someone who knows how to think, as you do my angel Sophie.’ Well that was a soup I would have relieved myself
in. But I stayed the course. Women who stay the course eventually get the upper
hand. Don’t think he got off easily. I had much more than was fit. I had him
howling mad. I used to say to him ‘What
will you spit on for me? Spit on the King of France! Spit on the Arts, all that
painting and music and literature! Never did me no good. Spit on all I have had
to suffer living with a fartist!’ Not that it was living. ‘Spit on the Sciences
and Diderot’s encyclopaedia, for all I have had to suffer in the name of
progress! Spit on civilization! Spit on all the aristocrats who have ever
lived! Spit on all the swanky, furry muff you’ve ever fondled! And when you
cum, cum on all your tumblings, your operas, your music, your romances. When
you play court jester to the high and mighty you betray us. You betray the
unnoticed. From now on I want all this spit and cum in your writings, otherwise
I’ll brain you…with a chamber-pot!’ I made something of Jean Jacques. So he wrote that
Art was tossing for nobs, kings had no God-given rights, the rabble knew best
and even if they didn’t who cares, wealth was always theft somehow or other,
children should be brought up as peasants. I was not to be denied revolution
just because Jean Jacques would doff his Armenian turban to the perfumed
persecutors of the hoi polloi. I encouraged him to be the little piss-taker he
really was. I would say to him, ‘The
king and his cronies are all nobs and impostors and they’ve imposed for long
enough. We want everything to our level. How do you write that down in a book?’
Well they went and threw his
books at him! That’s what fancy knickers do when you’re really messing with
their privates.”
The old woman looked at
her audience of two, they seemed transfixed, a little agog. She continued,
reaching out to hold both Jean and Julie by the wrist, her muff in her lap. “So
I hit ‘im citizens. We was at Ermenonville thanks to Monsieur Giradin. Always
borrowing somewhere to live. Jean Jacques was sixty years old. He was bent over
and I was holding him, like I’m holding you now, and I brought it down on his
head. It seemed the only way. I must have done it. I’d thought about it so many
times, just that way. And the chamber pot was all broken over the floor, like mosaic,
and a pool of blood beside his bonks. ‘I arose and pierced the silence with me screams,’ that’s what they wrote. Feathers ruffled,
scratching at the floor like an enraged hen. Monsieur Giradin came, we had
locked the door, but he had a key… he found me covered with blood from my
husband’s wound. He was my husband, although he never married me, not properly…
the most famous man in Europe…to whom I’d given everything and in the end took
it all back. There was lot’s of rumours. Some said he committed suicide because
he found out about me and John, I won’t go into that. Some said it was at the
order of the king. His cracked head lay on the floor, on the stone tiles. I lay
down beside him and put me arms around him. I remember he was as cold as the
floor in next to no time. Then I cried for the love of women… for the little
nobody in Jean Jacques… for all my babbies whether they lived or not. But how
can a woman get sentimental in the head when it’s her lot to always have her
hands in goo and her ass on the nest. On the 4th July 1778 Rousseau
was buried, as befits an artist, on the Ile des Peupliers, a tiny island in the
lake of the Parc Ermenonville. On the 9th October 1794 his remains
were removed from Ile des Peupliers and taken in triumph, as befits a hero, to
the Panthéon over there. In 1814, with the return of the Bourbons his remains
were removed from the Panthéon and scattered, as befits the unnoticed. And me,
Thérèse Levasseur, always largely unnoticed, dropped off the world sometime, I
could never tell the time in my lifetime, and they said murmuring in my final
sleep, with some regret, for some reason or other… ‘Because Rousseau did a poor girl, who did not know how to
read or write, the honour of having her wash his linen and cook his soup and
share his bed… must this girl be turned into a heroine?’ The widow of Jean Jacques for all my after-life.
The remains of doormats retain an imprint of all the traffic of the world, and
with the unnoticed everything is noticed.”
The Burchill voice fell
silent and it seemed the torrent had passed. Jean reflected on the state she
had been in, making Moment
to Moment, the film she had just
finished, when, living the character of Kay Stanton, she had
wrestled emotionally with Kay’s shooting the Navy ensign with whom she had been
briefly unfaithful. Julie, on the other hand, was left thinking about Llewelyn.
She was glad she, even there, had his baby photo with her.
Jean stood up and made to
go, but turning sensed she was leaving a couple of strays, a couple of lost
souls.
“Hey! Thérèse and Julie, why not come back to my
place for tea. It’s only a few stops on the Metro. Come on!”
“Oh thank you dear that
would be very nice for sure.”
“Ok, yes, thanks!”
They all moved off
towards Boulevard Saint Germain, but they had not gone far when Jean and Julie
realized the old woman had disappeared, dematerialised.
“ She was a ghost, wasn’t
she?” Jean said.
They both laughed.
Julie plucked up courage
to ask the question that had been bothering her. “ You are Jean Seberg, aren’t
you?”
Jean replied, “I like
your hairstyle” and gave Julie the smile.
Also, on
this page, the plot (home) page, one of the adventures of V.I.U remains, his
adventure in reminiscence, “Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov’s Anatomy of Melancholia”.
(See below.)
A scan on essays from theasif.info
erupted in Issue 28 of Mute,
under the title “Art is Like Cancer”. A full-length version of this text is
available online at Metamute.
Very well rotted compost for these essays is now
available in Portuguese bags from the Brazilian publisher Conrad. The bags are labelled Arte
Inimiga Do Povo, and are presented as a virtual defacement of the
Guggenheim in New York.
MUCK YOU
MAY HAVE MISSED:- Fiction, “Terminations
1” (from “Suspect Device” edited by Stewart Home). Fiction,
“Enduring
Freedom” (loosely based on the
adventures of Blair, Bush, Bad Laden and the rest of us). Fiction,“Adventures
in Cyberspace” (a conversation about mind
with Iris Murdoch on Grassington Moor). Essay, “Virtual Reality, Virtuality and Reality”. Essay, “How Art The People’s Enemy Became The
People’s Friend” parts 1 and 2. Essay,
“Objections
and Replies parts 1 and 2. Essay,
The
Arcady Project, Part 1 the Exposé and Part 2 the Convolutes. Fiction, “Playa
Melanoma and Santa Maria de las Neus. Essay, Determinism:
the preamble. These essays and fictions
form part of INVESTIGATIONS
OF VIRTUALITY, REALITY AND
UNDERCLASS (a collection of essays,
fictions and analogues). They
may reappear in these virtual spaces.
WHERE FLOWERS GROW:- Invisible Cells, a parallel
allotment where an attempt is being made to grow the same philosophical
argument as here, only there as a work of fiction. Check it out. All of part 1
is now there. Follow the links at the end of each section*. INVISIBLE CELLS is
an assault on the dominance of Marduk over the chaos of Tiamat, where ancient
and modern ruins span the history of the Euphrates. Part 2, concerning the
farcical and blasphemous antics of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s descendants in C21st
Euro-Zone were planted on site late 2004, but did not grow well. The plan is to
re-sow these flowers in better soil! For the time being they continue to
wither, but some of them excite the busy, undiscerning bees at Google.
*Alternatively, to scan the content of INVISIBLE
CELLS follow these links:-
FAITH,
WAR,
PRESSUREGROUPS,
HOWTOGETTHERE,
FAMILY,
WOMENSHEALTH,
XBOX.
VLADIMIR ILICH ULYANOV’S ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLIA.
Ragged, drunken buffoons have that within which
passes show. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov sometimes longed to have a second chance at
Materialism and Empiriocriticism.
It may be wondered how his Bic scrawl on the back
of the shit-house door (narrated in V.I.U Terrorised by the Free Society)
could be so accurate in its reference. An excellent, classical education
forming a precision of memory and thinking, and still miraculously intact
despite the nightly intake, would be one explanation, but more importantly the
PFI (the mark of a better building) Jubilee Library in Brighton, newly standing
for the achievements of today, a R&D resource, was what explained the
trick.
Materialism and Empiriocriticism had
been the consequence of a hurried but sober sojourn at desk L13 (unlucky Lenin?
… certainly, not on the money as was G7 for Marx) in the Reading Room of the
British Museum. Then, political expediency took precedence over careful
research. Now, Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov had a ghostly eternity to fill. Although
it was not for this reason that he sought redemption: his resurrection was
wholly material, rank rather than eerie, quantum mechanics rather than the
doctrine of the Trinity. Given he had so much time he was glad that, as the
Secretary of State had said, CABE’s buildings (the advanced buildings of now)
were “designed to be used by people”! In fact it was while lingering
over the politically correct warmth of the Jubilee Library, and feeling
materially so much happier than when a struggling terrorist in the British
Museum, that he had clicked on Tessa Jowell’s speech, which announced that the
Jubilee was the winner of the 2005 Prime Minister’s Better Building Award, no
less! And looking this up in a free country was even more comforting! Had he
tried the same when he was in Beijing, which still is another story, sometime
to be told, he may well have been arrested and charged with something
fantastical like being a member of the Falung Gong Cult, or worse still a
supporter of the Mills/McCartney clan and its calumny against public health
measures requiring the killing of dogs in Guangzhou. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov had
nothing against the killing of dogs even if it was to promote the Initial
Socialist Market: “vagrant persons before vagrant dogs” was one of his mottos.
So comfortable did he feel in Blair’s better building that he even allowed
himself some venting of spleen as he luxuriated nonchalantly over some of New
Labour’s speak. “In Victorian times, you could see that age’s ambition, it’s
vaulting achievements and its emphasis on improving society etched clearly in
the blue prints of their public buildings. Their vision and commitment to
quality means we are still using – and admiring – many of their town halls,
schools and railway stations.” “FUCKING, PETIT-BOURGEOIS TORY. GO ON SHE
LIVES IN A VICTORIAN TERRACE AND’S BOXING HER PROPERTY VALUE WITH MINISTERIAL
HEDGE. AND WHAT’S THIS FUCKING CONTRADICTION..” “ post-war Britain… The
emphasis was placed too much on functionality over form… poor architectural
design: it forgets that buildings are designed to be used by people.” “AND
LOOK AT THIS! THEY MUST HAVE RAKED UP OLD BETJEMAN TO GET THAT EUPHEMISM
‘FRIENDLY FIRE’.” “when John Betjeman wrote those immortal lines beckoning
friendly bombs to ‘fall on Slough, because its not for humans now’, he struck a
chord with many of us.” “I BET HE DID! AND HOW’S THIS FOR WRITING OFF THE
ONLY RADICAL LABOUR GOVERNMENT…” “post-war Britain was in such a rush to
rebuild that in some ways, it cut corners… ugly council estates…sprang up all
over the place”. “AND WHAT DID VICTORIANA DO WITH CORNERS? GOT THEM
PLASTERED LIKE A DRUNKEN TART. COUNCIL HOUSES WERE NOT HALF-CUT, THEY CALLED A
CORNER A CORNER, BARE AND UNADORNED FOR UNAFFECTED COMMONERS, SALT OF THE
EARTH, NOT A TASTELESS MIDDLE CLASS!”
For Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov it was not the vulgarity
of Materialism and Empiriocriticism he minded. Instead it was the
one-dimensional nature of its vulgarity. There had been insufficient time to
balance feeling and logic. Now he was transfixed by what caught his attention,
whereas his attitude had been singularly instrumental. In the Jubilee the
objects of his research would hold him captive all day, just as cheap booze
captured his nights. Many books he returned to over and over again attempting
to memorize content that he could carry with him into an incoherent dark.
Service’s book on Lenin was one of the books he
tried to monopolize. Between pages 116 and 117 he would locate the photo of
Nadezhda Krupskaya and stare at it for hours on end. Secretly he could have
removed her from the book but he was not possessive about her beauty because
her beauty was truly social. Eventually he would break his concentration and
move on with irritation to Service’s haute-bourgeois distaste for Nadezhda
Krupskaya. Sexually, Service obviously preferred the promiscuous, redhead,
horse-rider and pianist, Inessa Armand to Nadezhda Krupskaya with her
single-minded, unremitting zeal for the revolution. But that was no reason to
invent an affair between Lenin and Armand on the basis of some pluralist
probability. Certainly to Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov’s way of thinking such a
sexual preference was no excuse for failing to write anything adequate about
the pure beauty of Lenin’s wife. And Service no doubt had even baser bourgeois
motives for proceeding in the opposite direction, describing Nadezhda Krupskaya
as ponderous, ailing and dowdy, and as having a swollen neck, bulging eyes and
looking like a herring. “IMPOTENT, BOURGEOIS HACKS DESTROY SIMPLE BEAUTY OF THE
UNAFFECTED AND THE UNADORNED. THEY NEED PAINTINGS TO JERK OFF”. Nadezhda
Krupskaya’s photo was the blindingly beautiful refutation of Service’s
duplicitous perception. The 1895 photo showed her with her hair strained back,
wearing a high-necked, sombre dress, and no trace of Tsarinist stucco
disguising her face. This was the face of a person of high-seriousness, of few
leisure pursuits, her life dedicated from the age of eighteen to Marxism and
the revolution, a person of great patience, as befits the true revolutionary,
her life lived at one with ordinary, labouring people. Her unremitting gaze
staring back at him filled Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov with an overwhelming sense of
a fugitive passion regained. Nadezhda Krupskaya was revolutionary now and one
hundred years ago. Any feminism, which did not claim her, was pathologically bourgeois.
Her support for Lenin was unflinching. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov had somehow
sensed her sitting alone, for a whole day, beside his coffin when it lay in
state. If she had her way and ordinariness had prevailed, there would have been
no mausoleum, no material embalming, no undisclosed resurrection and hurried
production of a waxwork replica, and so no endless life of vagrancy. Instead,
as she said, “what they should have done was bury him with his comrades so
that they could lie beneath the Red Wall together”. And in character with
everything about her, her own grave, resting place was beneath that Red Kremlin
Wall.
How could he be worthy of this devotion? There was
a poem he had uncovered in the Jubilee, which seemed, in part, to express how
he wished to reciprocate. It spoke of passion, which was the essence of the
revolution, though, something missing from his books. The poem by Carol Ann
Duffy, of whom he knew nothing, having been attracted to her collection by the
red of its cover, was Elegy. It needed rewriting to fit, but he did not
really try that, apart from a word here and there. Instead he saturated certain
lines with his tears. No one had the temerity to admit to noticing or to
remonstrate with him. “Who’ll know then, when they walk by the WALL/where
your bones will be brittle things/…-that love, which wanders history,/ singled
you out in your time?/ Love loved you best; lit you/ with a flame, like
talent, under your skin;…Who’ll guess …that were I DEAD, I would lie on the
STONES/ above your bones till I mirrored your pose, your infinite grace?”
And the revolutionary love he revisited was love of the revolution, not
personal, bourgeois muck, which heaped itself over fugitive alternatives.
And where else did his slow research take him as he
sheltered in the Jubilee from far blown Siberian winds? One book was called Culture
& Value to which they had put the name of Wittgenstein, not that
Wittgenstein would have thanked them for it. There was much in it, which
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov read and re-read. For instance, there was:
“There is no religious denomination in which so
much sin has been committed through the misuse of metaphorical expressions as
in mathematics.”
“Each sentence that I write is trying to say the
whole thing, that is, the same thing over and over again and it is as though
they were views of one object seen from different angles.”
“If you do not want certain people to get into a
room, put a lock on it for which they do not have the key.”
“As we may say that such and such an animal has
escaped extinction only because it has the possibility of concealing itself.”
“It is hard to say anything, that is as good as
saying nothing.”
“Philosophers are often like little children who
first scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and now ask the
grown-up ‘what’s that?’- It happened like this: the grown-up had often drawn
something for the child and said: ‘this a man’, ‘this is a house’ etc. And now
the child makes some marks too and asks: ‘and what’s this then?’ ”
“In philosophy the winner of the race is the one
who can run most slowly. Or: the one who gets to the winning post last.”
“How small a thought it takes to fill a whole
life.”
“Nothing is more important though than the
construction of fictional concepts, which will teach us at last to understand
our own.”
“Always come down from the barren heights of
cleverness into the green valleys of folly.”
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov thought that if ever there
would be a new book it would have to be constructed out of materials like these.
Another book with aggregate, picked over like a vagrant hunting for insulation,
was Girlfriend in a Coma by a Douglas Coupland, the slacker-scribe. If
Wittgenstein pointed up basic, ordinary blocks and slabs of intelligence in
order to deflect the eye from the illusions of mercurial and neon brilliance,
Coupland’s people pointed to the pollution of light and its lighting of
ordinary space.
“ ‘And now there’s only the system. All other
options have evaporated. For most people it’s the system or what … death.
There’s nothing. There’s no way out.’ ”
“ ‘Did we all go into a Coma in 1979… work,
work, work, get, get, get…?’ ”
“ ’Didn’t you feel as if all of the symbols and
ideas fed to you since birth had become worn out like old shoes? Didn’t you
ache for change but you didn’t know how to do it, would you have had the guts
to go forth?’
‘Yeah. Sure. But didn’t everybody?’
‘No. Not always. This feeling is specific to the
times we live in.’ “
“ ‘Every day for the rest of your lives, all of
your living moments are to be spent making others aware of this need – the need
to probe and drill and examine and locate the words that take us beyond
ourselves.
Grind
questions onto the glass on photocopiers. Scrape challenges onto old auto parts
and throw them off bridges so that future people digging in the mud will
question the world too… Make bar codes point out fables, not prices. You can’t
ever throw away a piece of litter unless it has a question stamped on it – a
demand for people to reach a finer
place.’ “
“ ‘Ask whatever challenges dead and thoughtless
beliefs. Ask: when did we become human beings and stop being whatever it was we
were before this?’ “
“ ‘I know you have the necessary skills –
explosives, medicine, engineering, media knowledge and the ability to
camouflage yourselves… if you’re not plotting every moment, boiling the carcass
of the old order – then you’re wasting your day.’ “
“ ‘Think about all those crazy people you can
see on the streets. Maybe they aren’t crazy at all. Maybe they’ve seen what
we’ve seen – maybe those people are us.’ “
“ ‘We’ll be adults who smash the tired,
exhausted system. We’ll crawl and dig our way into a radical new world.’ “
Not only did Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov find in the
Jubilee books traces of ordinary intelligence moving in a polluted space, but
he also found examples of it remonstrating against transcendental deceptions;
those deceptions designed to induce feelings of inferiority, and induce
scepticism about the ordinary being the measure of objective reality:
deceptions terrified to allow objectivity at all, less everyone might see how
IT was and is. Sadegh Hedayet was a book writer to whom in this respect
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov turned.
“I found it pleasanter to talk to a friend or
acquaintance than to God, the high and mighty One. God was too important a
personage for me.”
“… It did not matter
to me whether God really existed or whether He was nothing but a
personification of the mighty ones of this world, invented for the greater
glory of spiritual values and the easier spoilation of the lower orders, the
pattern of earthly things being transferred to the sky.”
“As my eyes
closed a dim, indistinct world began to take shape around me. It was a world of
which I was the sole creator and which was in perfect harmony with my vision of
reality. At all events it was far more real and natural to me than my waking
world and presented no obstacle, no barrier, to my ideas. In it time and place
lost their validity. My repressed lusts, my secret needs, which had begotten
this dream, gave rise to shapes and happenings which were beyond belief but
which seemed natural to me. For a few moments after waking up I had no sense of
time or place and doubted whether I really existed. It would seem that I myself
created all my dreams and had long known the correct interpretations of them.”
“I felt that this world had not
been made for me but for a tribe of brazen, money-grubbing, blustering louts,
sellers of conscience, hungry of eye and heart – for people, in fact, who had
been created in its own likeness and who fawned and grovelled before the mighty
of earth and heaven, as the hungry dog outside the butcher’s shop wagged his
tail in the hope of receiving a fragment of offal.”
The Jubilee could not be
faulted as a winter-resting place, and although vagrant hibernation could be
persecuted, an erudite answer or two sufficed to pacify those few zealous
officials who sought to preserve the purity of commercial life. In fact for
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov his only complaint against the Jubilee was its
egalitarian repression of culture and its capitulation to non-élitist
commercialism, but he regretted this tendency in himself, recognizing its
bourgeois origins. The trouble was he could not find much in the way of
high-seriousness, and so not much that N.K. would have approved of him spending
his time with. Don Delillo’s Underworld, though another novel, sometimes addressed the
ordinary in ways that Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov found correct for his emotive
foundations. Sometimes he wondered if he was not hankering for a materialist
arcade, something that he would not have to bring to an objective proof. There
was one particularly frozen day when he spent all day on one sentence from
Delillo, that was until he found two others that matched.
“The shock, the power of an
ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a
dust-free room.”
“Sex is what you can get. For
some people, most people, it’s the most important thing they can get without
being rich or smart or stealing. This is what life can give you that’s equal to
others or better, even, that you don’t have to go to college six years to get.
And it’s not religion and it’s not science but you can explore it and learn
things about yourself.”
As springtime beckoned
but was slow to reveal itself Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov found a book of some
seriousness to arrest his escape from the Jubilee. Escape he sought because
although his hibernation had gathered basic building materials for new work, he
could no longer write: for too long now his mind had run without the restraint
of a defragmentation programme, so that whatever coherence he could muster was
confined to bursts of graffiti. The book that detained him was The Economic Horror by Viviane Forrester. He would spend a few more
days contemplating the books parity with the other contents of his mind, before
setting out to find the sun and curse the seagulls.
“At a time when the shortage of
jobs is proving to be a constant factor, ineradicable and ever increasing, one
can hardly decide whether it is more ludicrous or sinister to compel everyone
of the millions of the unemployed to engage in ‘an active and incessant search’
for work that does not exist and to do so every working day of every week,
every month and every year.”
“Aren’t such repeated refusals
and chains of rejections just a set staged to persuade the job-seekers of their
nothingness?”
“It is no trifling matter,
either, for the holders of economic power, i.e. true power, to have subdued the
trouble-makers who only yesterday were protesting, demonstrating, demanding and
fighting. How sweet to see them beg for what they used to vilify and now regard
as a Holy Grail! Nor is it a trifling matter for the economically powerful to
have certain other people at their mercy: those who do have jobs and salaries
and will baulk at nothing for fear of losing such rare, valuable and fragile
privileges and being obliged to join the porous ranks of the destitute.”
“They all seem to share the same
logic, taking it for granted that the present state of things is the natural
condition, the exact point where history has been waiting for us.”
“No support is left for those who
have nothing but loss. The only discourse heard is the deafening one of the
other side.”
“When life is calling out to
them, when nothing has even been hinted to them about the richness that their
one luxury might hold for them: their so-called ‘free time’.”
“And who would support them? What
group? What texts, what ideas would?”
“Engaging in thought demands some
practice such as forgetting its reputation for being austere, arduous,
unpleasant, inert, élitist, paralyzing and endlessly boring.”
“There is no more subversive
activity than thinking… Thinking is political… The mere fact of thinking is
political.”
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov
was still able to do that. He might not be able to write a book anymore but he
was a thinking thing and in so far as he was, just as was everyone, he could
not be accounted for. He thought therefore he was political. We all are. He
then broke down into a bout of incontrollable crying, sobbing aloud for all to
hear. Security asked him what was the matter. He told them he was crying for
Krupskaya. Eventually and sympathetically they escorted him from the building,
asking him at parting if he would like them to call the police. He trudged off
across Jubilee Square knowing he would not be welcome in any of the restaurants
that flanked the space, nor would he be offered residence in the new,
overlooking apartments, but, his equanimity quickly repaired, he began a
reflection on what the word ‘jubilee’ added to the concept of ‘better public
building’.
Go to Rumpledsilkskin
for philosophy, a kind of life, and Crops and
Cultivation for changing content.
Links: and see links above.
Virtuality
(the philosophy of) (where
invisible cells are just visible)
www.theasif.info
© 2008 theasif.info