Two short fragments from Adam Phillips writing in The Observer about the room in which he writes:
"The room is chaotic-ish most of the time because tidiness is beyond me here; it seems that I don't really like to know where things are, I just want them to come to hand when I need them. When books are taken off the shelves they are not often taken back, so I tend to use those I can see at any given moment for whatever it is I am writing."
"I can only really write in this room, which I regret. I have always wanted to be able to write wherever I was. In any room."
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Vlatka wrote me about a strand of philosophy described as 'speculative realism'. Reading about one of its adherents belief "that God does not exist but may exist in the future."
Meanwhile in rehearsals with Forced Enertainment there's a long discussion about what yesterday we were calling 'the linguistic texture of truth-telling' - its use in performance and its limits as a strategy. Also - in the same room but in another discussion - the observation that being able to define the exact nature, depth and other dimensions of the hole you are in does not necessarily mean that you are closer to getting out of it.
His whole personality seemed unsteady, bound in perpetual flux. His face unstable, over-animated; eyebrows, eyes, lips etc in almost constant exaggerated motion as though his tired and too fleshy features were channeling the preliminary sketches for some outlandish cartoon character. His voice too wavered all over the place, like someone trying out a series of options they might later use in a prank phone call.
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Meanwhile, not connected to the above, an engaged and positive blog response to the pieces by Vlatka and I in Art Sheffield 08 - Insults & Praises and Threats & Promises - from Sophie Risner here.
Spent time in New York working on writing a monologue/text called Sight Is The Sense That A Dying Person Tends To Lose First, for Jim Fletcher, an extraordinary perfomer people might well know from his work with Richard Maxwell’s New York City Players (he was in House, and in The End of Reality amongst other pieces and is currently in their brilliant Ode to the Man Who Kneels). The monologue will be shown as work-in-progress in Vienna this April. The text free-associates from topic to topic to create a flowing and failing iteration/explanation of the world, the things, forces, experiences, and people in it - what they are and how they work. I already included some working notes/a fragment from the text here, a while ago. Here's another short passage:
A cage is a container for animals. A mirror is a defective window. A hall of mirrors is a room full of bad mirrors. Shift workers are people who work when other people are sleeping. The night shift is hard on your sleep patterns and on your relationships. Tired people get depressed. Stressed people say unexpected things. Rage is another word for anger. There is only one correct answer to a mathematical question. There is only one way out of a maze. A blood transfusion is way of moving blood from one body into another using pipes and a small pump. Clouds change shape in ways that are impossible to predict. Hate is hard to explain. Rats move in groups. Knives are things made of metal. Metal comes from out of the ground. Heavy Metal music has a strong beat and a lot of guitar. You cannot stop people from dancing if they want to dance. You cannot stop progress. An umbrella is no protection against a swarm of bees. Happy people are more productive than sad people. Change is not always a good thing. A cardiac arrest is nothing to do with the police.
The full (but not yet entirely completed) text is running something like six thousand words. Discussing the whole project with Graham Parker (my friend, the artist, not the punk-era rocker) he flagged the Doris Lessing text below - which I really liked - as a cousin or relation to it. Something related to Perec's exhaustiveness too. Going to see if I can find my copy of the Lessing book, I know there's one somehwere here...
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I used at night to sit up in bed and play what I called 'the game.' First I created the room I sat in, object by object, 'naming' everything, bed, chair, curtains, till it was whole in my mind, then move out of the room, creating the house, then out of the house, slowly creating the street, then rise into the air, looking down on London, at the enormous sprawling wastes of London, but holding at the same time the room and the house and the street in my mind, and then England, the shape of England in Britain, then the little group of islands lying against the continent, then slowly, slowly, I would create the world, continent by continent, ocean by ocean (but the point of 'the game' was to create this vastness while holding the bedroom, the house, the street in their littleness in my mind at the same time), until the point was reached where I moved out into space, and watched the world, a sunlit ball in the sky, turning and rolling beneath me. Then, having reached that point, with the stars around me, and the little earth turning underneath me, I'd try to imagine at the same time, a drop of water, swarming with life, or a grean leaf. Sometimes I could reach what I wanted, a simultaneous knowledge of vastness and of smallness. Or I would concentrate on a single creature, a small coloured fish in a pool, or a single flower, or a moth, and try to create, to 'name' the being of the flower, the moth, the fish, slowly creating around it the forest, or the sea-pool, or the space of blowing night air that tilted my wings. And then, out, suddenly, from the smallness into space.
Thursday night wrote my last story for Barbara Campbell's amazing 1001 Nights Cast project. My text - from the prompt 'sowing apathy' - was number 998, in good company with texts 997 (Tony White), 996 (Deborah Levy) and 995 (M. John Harrison) who all pulled out the stops to write great pieces.
Here's the first paragraphs of mine, the rest is here. A great speedy pleasure to write.
To a lot of people it felt like the end. Some said months or weeks,
some even said it was only a matter of days. The big clock is ticking.
That is what an asshole yelled out the window of a speeding vehicle
that sprayed dirty water from a puddle all over her dress, its stupid
Versace sirens scratching the air. The big clock is still ticking. Yeah
yeah yeah.
To her it felt different though. More like a beginning in fact than an end.
At some point once its done I hope I'll write some kind of looking-back on the project (at least on my own experience and participation in it) but I think that will wait a while. For now follow the tags below if you want to find other stuff I wrote here about 1001 already. I'm looking forward to the next three nights as Barbara closes the piece down after almost three years continuos work. I wish I could be there in Sydney for the closing event/symposia this weekend at which Barbara is joined by Helen Grace (Hong Kong), Marian Pastor Roces (Manila), Matias Viegener (LA), Frazer Ward (Northampton, USA) and Tony White (London) to discuss the project. Free. The big final - night 1001's webcast will be 6.45pm (Sydney time), Monday March 17th, with a live studio audience at Performance Space at Carriageworks.
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