in the deep autumn, still raining. a sick planet, a missing book

A book vanishes and it cannot be found, nobody has any idea where its disappeared to, a slim volume of elegant prose hidden somewhere in the stacks. One moment there, hours or days later when looked for again it has gone. They have this idea. that the mass-media, social media and mass-consumption are some sense an ideal. version that is necessary for their lives to be fulfilled. After an hour of looking through the shelves its become clear that the book is not where you thought it should be. It is scarcely imaginable that anyone can think like that. It is understandable how to live with, to share an environment, with them but to think they are necessary in these forms, not at all. They believe that the spectacle is a utopia (false, true of Castells etc) even as the ocean fills with plastic, becomes increasingly acidic, the sky fills with carbon and methane, local space with the chips of paint satellites and launches. What makes the specialist in waste despair ? Vast amounts of waste that cannot be cleared up because […] the costs are too great for the spectacle to bear if its to produce the glittering objects that constitute the ideal. The ideal pollutes their imaginaries as much as it does the air they breathe.

a lunch

The three of them sat at an adjacent table, Talking about the macro-political [… (The human being is a segmentary animal, segmentarity is inherent in all the strata composing us,constructing us, we ares segmented in a binary fashion, following the great dualist oppositions: social classes, in a circular fashion, in ever larger circles) …] of the pandemic. A woman and two men, they were talking about the conservative, labour and liberal versions of the pandemic, more segmented than even we could imagine. They never spoke of themselves as belonging, not even the affects of the collapsing economy on them and them. Listening to them you can hear how fascism is inseparable from the proliferation of molecular forces in interaction on this table, between them and the macro-politics of the pandemic, they skip from point to point, before even resonating with the developing national liberal state... at an adjacent table we listen

Hairdressing History -- Heissennbuttel

((Heissenbüttel’s sentence combinations consist of dream sequences, scraps of memory, poetological notes, customs of knowledge. From private matters: shorthand grammes from the most recent guests,mocking declensions. From colour collages and lustful sensations and so on They form a repertoire of of alienating elements, a pattern that is pervaded by themost important figure in this prose: the quotation )) Hairdressing History….

you were there when it got there so to speak you couldn’t help but be there and get there if you wanted to get anywhere at all and you had to get somewhere if you wanted to get through and those who got there then what else did they want but to get through you had to be careful in the situation you had got into nobody knew what else could happen

a track goes along the edge in a large arc and then jumps over the arched area into the woods the surface is white the track is white the white track bends along the edge the movement is hesitant and fleeting but the surface is cool white flags move along the edge in a large arc the movement comes from the surface the flags go into the woods the hesitant fleeting movement carries the flags into the woods

in and of itself it was all right that you were there in this situation in which you wanted nothing more than everyone else but of course you didn’t know whether everyone was reliable and whether you could stay there if you wanted to get through you were afraid of leaving getting through was not the same as getting through getting through stood next to getting through and finally against it

on the surface stands a flat curved line below darker gray broad and black strokes spots one suddenly moves against the line above lighter gray and almost white towards the periphery until the black spots expand wider and onto the line and over it they swallow up the still lighter periphery on which now the spots light up from above and long they have spoken to all kinds of people and everyone has always said the same thing what should you do if it goes on you have to see how you get through and rather betray if you know it will go on or not betray if you don’t know what should you do but join in because if you don’t join in you won’t get through you are betrayed and sold that can be the case everyone has said what should you do

black discs and blacker discs flat fields white in between everything as if moved away strange blotchy black discs that are sometimes moved very slowly to one side or the other suddenly and immediately gone again in between brighter an outline torn triangle in between gray shapeless fallen down unidentifiable some said you might be able to get through better

if you don’t go along but then you would have to become one of those who don’t go along how can you do that if getting through means going along you can’t betray that means you could but you only went along you would have had to go alone and leave alone but then you say no no that’s not possible and so you got through the direction goes vertically towards the infinite across the void away but before the infinite can be reached the direction is blocked by an upright wall

the direction is swallowed up by an upright wall that covers the infinite at irregular intervals it lights up in the wall above it is nothing at all the wall stands motionless or moves so slowly that you can’t tell the difference

there is nothing to be beaten to death for so you finally left when it became too risky to stay there you didn’t betray or get betrayed but you waited no one took offense there was no other way you listened to what you had to say you knew there was no other way you didn’t know what could happen you got out of the dust and that’s how you got by

the surface is now as bright as a mirror a flat spot above another flat spot two more spots moving back and forth as if half regretting half affirming behind them indistinctly obliquely converging in blind corners an interior of mirror and duff fleetingly moving past a shadow in the shadow two shadows leaning towards each other with squinting eyes light reflections trembling on light reflections

you got through like this and now you’re standing here and sometimes you think about the people you talked to back then and whose speech you listened to and you look in the mirror and see the other person at the other end of the mirror who also got through and here you are with cigarettes enough booze doesn’t get beer doesn’t matter Sundays out first car then TV you weren’t there because you wanted to you just wanted to get on you didn’t know what could happen and now you know what will happen you can only watch out if you can stay out of it there is no thing you have to be beaten to death for there was already an agreement back then

(Helmut Hesissenbuttel — machine translation 2024)

monday morning during the singularity

Monday, at the coop in the village, on lower road, at the bottom of the hill, in the valley. There is no river anymore it was rerouted many years ago.  The woman behind the desk, selling alcohol and other drugs accepted the the parcels of books for despatch. There are two young men moving goods onto the shelves for resale from the warehouse. A man in his fifties is putting out vegetables and fruit onto shelves by the door from the familiar metal cages on wheels..  A few customers are streaming into the shop, women and men with shopping baskets. Some are greeted by name by the older staff members. They say,"good morning more  to post?" Yes i say, that's right. I wonder standing in the queue waiting for them to accept the small parcel and give me the paper receipt how long it takes to be recognised and accepted as a regular customer. I am after all a pretty regular customer. They do no expect to engage in conversation, a question, a few acknowledgements, a feint smile  Even more established customers find that the process is no different. Indifference and alienation, does this place them inside the crisis of being consumers rather than being a person?  Time is not taken over the choices they make, the customer imagines as they look over the different consumptive objects and then assuming the woman behind the counter wants to speak "Thankyou".  Is this the commons or the thick layer of consumerism that has supplanted it? But before she say "Thankyou"  you hand her the shopping basket, ask for some additional things you could not find. She responds in a soft mid-scottish-atlantic drawl, a dreamy eroticism touches your unconscious - a poem of domestic life, words played with a abstract satisfaction, your exchange touched with too many images - some meat and pieces of pineapple, money is exchanged through the phone, the loyalty card is registered, points added,  are they happy to be paid?  all sides of the exchange are alienated. I am amused by the idea that my social status is on display with the goods I have bought, we consume, our ability to exist in this society is shown. Behind me in the queue a middle aged woman with her young son is discussing the things he needs, he is going away for a night or two. Unconsciously they demonstrate their wealth. They move over to the automated payment system and have a complex conversation about the workings of the system on the network. It beeps and pings. A deeply symbolic exchange is taking place here, from the objects being consumed, convivial? the silence of the machines, the familial structures, the last mean this evening before he goes away. Around them, behind them the young and the lonely feel ill at ease. A police is standing in the doorway looking both socially and economically inadequate    as it looks at me walking out the door onto the street....

post-industrial

Fred Hoyle put the question of our situation well in a number of places in his Science Fiction novels, understanding that their could be limets to growth, limits that is to how long industrial society, (which is to say our mode of production can sustain itself) Hoyle put it well a number of times: "... I keep wondering if the true earth really did fail. Was it one of the many planets that reverted to pitiless barbarism? Or was it one of the very few to succeed in breaking trough to a higher level? Did the message of the late Betthoven quartets win through at the last? I live in hope that this was so." (Hoyle's last sentences in Into Deepest Space (1974)).

As the probability of capitalism becoming even more of a barbarism than it is now remains very high as the system is dealing so poorly and barbarically with the problem(s) identified with the concept of the "limits to growth" ((the most obvious evidence for this is of course climate change)) suggests why people might think and fear that Hoyle's pitiless barbarism is probable, that the end result of techno-science (a death driven thing as we know) may be simply terrible... Hoyle as the quote says 'hopes'... Though the implication is that its a deterministic process...

Shinjiro Okamoto (1933-2020) "Silver Dragonfly: Map of Great Tokyo" [acrylic on canvas, 1983]

exteriors, Annie Ernaux... particularly nice

Babel, bauman and mauro....

The archives always lie, language detests things. The limits of language are precisely that nothing archaic remains in it. "The authentic archives sleep in the earth and not in libraries"(serres) Being devoted to what has been said has reached its limits... the limits cannot be transcended. Every use of the transcendental are lies that condition everything, writing and saying, surely, avoid the necessary acts of living within the limits which nobody understood before, until we got close to nature which is hard and finite... most of human thought is magical thinking. “

soon…

games as ideology...

all games are ideological apparatus, though there is  a history assemblage of player+game+rules ... consider the invention of chess:  Nearly four hundred years after Confucius, the king of Kiang-Nan sent the general Han-Sing  into Shen-Si. After a successful campaign the army was  in its winter quarters, where they became impatient and wanted to be sent home. Han-Sing needed a way of calming them down and entertaining them before the campaign restarted the following year. Han-Sing was a genuis  as well as a  soldier and he invented the game of chess, which  would amuse them in times of leisure and being a tactical and strategic game would excite their military souls.  The strategy worked and in their daily contests and competitions forgot their wishes to go home, (souce Chinese Annals) And from this moment all future military, strategic and tactical  games have the same purpose(s). Games introduce order and strategy into play, play demands order absolute and extreme. The extended logic of this goes on to speak of  order, the symbolism,  industrialism and the inflexibility of the rules of the game. Bearing this in mind we can go much further with individual pieces directly reflecting the era.

...just got a hold of the only English translation I could find of Heissenbuttel's texts - poetry. Wish to someday find an English translation of his d'Alembert book you have.

If i ever finish the translation of the text i will let you know. I have a first draft but it requires a great deal of work and rework.

That, however, things of such general importance as, for example, the protests of the Berlin students or the war in Vietnam or the conflict between blacks and whites in the U.S., which they had talked about; or things like the war between Israel and the Arabs or the passing of the emergency laws by the German government, which they had not talked about, were merely topics of conversation. An occasion to talk about it. That these things actually did not affect those who were talking about them, or at least not at the moment, worse than regular politicians. That those who took part in the conversation nevertheless had other worries. The dentist or the liver problem, for example, the promotion to a higher pay grade or the next vacation destination, the children’s school report or the concealment of a sex jump or the next tax return, and so on. Were there people involved? Was the talking point they seized more than a talking point for, say, government officials, military commanders, party chairmen, police commanders, bank presidents, broadcasting executives, Axel Springer, administrators of industries, overseers of corporations? If the topic of conversation was only a topic of conversation for them, those for whom it was not only a topic of conversation were only those who were victims of what was talked about in the topic of conversation. Perhaps, however, no one is safe from becoming such a victim, and only therefore the talk, full of secret fear, in which everyone is only trying to keep himself safe. (1970, Heissenbuttel, Projektnr1)

nice

dreams

in her dreams she was still a little girl. She was sitting on the  beach, white sands on the shore  of the the south china sea. He, (what was he doing in her childhood dreams?) was lying on his back with his head on her legs, and was looking out to sea. They were talking about their pasts and their futures. I dream in english these days, she said. They were exchanging memories of their pasts. They are laughing over the strange way they had met. The laughter that came from the two of them was like the laughter that erupts from birds. Then he sat up looking down at her now adult breasts. “The day is pretty real, we should go and seize the logic of the day!”  The young girl who around 10 or 12 was looking at them, a short sword in its scabbard in her left hand. It's going to be alright in the end she told herself. And the three of them were walking off towards the village, she had a teeshirt on with a portrait of Popov on her chest, laughing and taallkking, an oedipal moment heading out to sea on a stolen yacht… "I'm sorry we can't take you home with us..." He was saying to her  young self....

things...

nearly, things;  these discrete  yet important words  which can  without trying immediately sumerize everything and anything. The dollop of steamed milk added to an espresso transforms it into a macchiato. Giving it the finishing touch, staining the espresso in he morning or evening coffee, a thing made into an even more perfect thing. Much like a perfectly cooked prawn, from grey too deep red. A slight crunch and then  almost gone, we have reached the point where our smiles have transformed our damaged selves, the moment when we have understood nearly everything;  it's thursday afternoon in winter soon it will be dark,  it is a near thing that we exist. somethings don’t...

the wasp in the vodka glass

It is not moving. Using the pointed end of my pen I extract the wasp from the burgundy colored drink and put it on top of my hobonichio techno diary. I assume it is dead. The colored liquid is absorbed into the page. After a few seconds, half a sentence said to my partner, a longer response, the insect begins to move. A minute or two later the short lived wasp vanishes from sight, flying up into the air. It did not seem to be drunk from the vodka. A lovely wasp that has, like its species earned our respect. Whilst in my sense of time our encounter lasted an hour, for it our encounter lasted for eighty hours (according to its sense of time). If it has children they will live longer than me. Wasps have existed for 200 to 100 million years and as a species this amounts to eternal life...