The Sub-Editor - Pause

PAUSE

So, she's back: our omniscient narrator.

I don't know who she thinks she is, this self-appointed interventionist. But I recognise her.

The last time I saw her she was sitting on a wall, a dry-stone wall in Yorkshire. She had insisted I come for a walk. A stomp and talk, she called it.  Stretch the legs. Blow away the cobwebs. She was full of the latest book she'd just read: Wanderlust. As with all her enthusiasms, she had now turned her attention fully, comprehensively, to walking - as a consequence of her reading - with renewed and exasperating vigour. (Although, to be fair, it wasn't only a fair-weather occupation of hers, this walking, this stomping, the stretching of the legs. She had always walked when she was pre-occupied. When asked, as a child, what she'd like to become she answered with naive sincerity 'a bag-lady'.)

It was a glorious day, the season shifting into autumn: crisp and fresh. She began by telling me how she loved the touch of the breeze on her forearms and face - 'like a gentle embrace', she said.  But, then she began talking of scopic regimes, launched into the fact that photographs aren't ever what they seem. A photograph is one-dimensional and static.  To live is to be fully sensate, fully embodied.  She turned her face to me and said, 'I'm scared that for me, all that's too late'.

I stopped in my tracks, not knowing what I'd heard, except that it was bad. And she turned and looked at me, and laughed.

We ate our sandwiches in the shelter of a wall. A dry-stone wall in Yorkshire. And when we had finished she hoisted herself up and sat on it, letting the breeze caress her face and blow away the cobwebs, as she drank from the water bottle.

As children we used to play this game. We called it the pause game. These were the rules: you had to describe the scenario in which you'd like to die.

In retrospect, I suppose it was a morbid game for children to play.

As she sat on the wall she said, 'let's play the pause game'.  I shook my head as I lit a cigarette, and refused to look her in the eye.

'Come on,' she said, slightly goading. 'Give me that, at least.'

But, I said nothing.

The day didn't end there, but I have no memory of what followed. We would've continued to walk, to stomp and talk. We would have reached town and continued, passed the Co-op and the Inn on the Bridge, on to the station. We would have laughed as we waited for the train, and kissed before I embarked. But I cannot picture any of that.

So, my sweet sister, let's play the pause game now.

I would stop it all there, with you, fully embodied and fully sensate.  Provocative, over-dramatic and irritating, as usual.  Pre-occupied and scared and, as usual, pretending not to care.

Really, I would stop it all there.

Semiotics Of Photography: K

K is for Klein (Yves Klein's Leap into the Void, 1960)

A leap into the void.

A year later - the year before he died - Klein masterminded another brilliant stunt: Blue Monochrome (1961).

According to the MoMA website (http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=80103) 'Klein likened monochrome painting to an 'open window to freedom'. He worked with a chemist to develop his own particular brand of blue. Made from pure color pigment and a binding medium, it is called International Klein Blue. Klein adopted this hue as a means of evoking the immateriality and boundlessness of his own particular utopian vision of the world.'

Blue: the hue of freedom and immateriality. Rebecca Solnit is Klein's true successor with her beautiful philosophical memoir A Field Guide To Getting Lost (2005).

From her chapter, 'The Blue of Distance':

'For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of emotion, the color of solitude and desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. The color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.' (pp29-30)

The Waiting Pool

'I kept coming back to this route for respite from my work and for my work too, because thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-orientated culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.'
(R. Solnit, 2002, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, London: Verso, 5)

If walking is the closest one comes to doing nothing, then swimming is the physical equivalent of waiting. Dive in, hold your breath as you move silently across the bottom of the pool and, when the waiting time is over, remember to re-surface.

The Point of 0.6 (2)

The Cow Is Over The Moon

'Hey diddle diddle,' she murmured to herself as she savoured her humus and harissa pitta, sitting at her desk in front of her computer. 

Well, so far so good. The horse still wasn't running and the barking was all but done.  Just some samples to moderate and some late submissions; the latter could wait, after all they were ... late. They'd be later still by the time she got round to looking at them. 

Her first 0.6 payslip had momentarily fazed her; but she was used to frugality and that was the answer. She would spend all her free time outside; pecuniary matters mattered little in the countryside.

'The cat and the fiddle,' she sang out loud.

'I've heard of that place,' he said.

'What place?' she enquired. She'd forgotten he was there.  On reflection she decided he looked decidedly tired. 'You should get out more,' she suggested.  'Nothing like a good walk to ensure you feel relaxed and rested.'

'The Cat and the Fiddle,' he repeated.  'It's a pub. People walk from there.'

'Walk where?'

'That I don't know.  It's miles from anywhere. You like to walk. You should try it.  Though I've never seen the point.  Especially the circular walk. I really don't buy it.'

'Well, inadvertently (of that, of course, I'm convinced) you've just hit the nail on the head. Today's society is all about consuming, about purchasing, about buying. The great thing about walking is that it actually costs nothing. Better still, I see it as a form of subversion. The primary drive behind late-capitalist culture is productivity. The great thing about walking is that you expend lots of energy and produce nothing of measurable value at all. Except, of course, muscular power and increased lung capacity. Something some of us could benefit from, non?'

'Why are you looking at me like that?' he asked accusingly.

'Moi?' she responded, hopefully, amusingly.

'Has it ever occurred to you that you're a cow?'

'Funny you should say that. Ha. The next line of my ditty is perfectly bovary, pertinently bovine: 'the cow jumps over the moon'.  But I, too, prefer Bob Dylan's line. To the point as ever, some may even say blunt: 'you're a cow'. (Ballad of a Thin Man, in case you were trying to locate the lyric.)'

'And your point is?' he responded, pointedly. 'Are you saying I'm fat?'

'Au contraire . . .'

'Speak English, you bitch.'

'You are so prescient in your anticipation of the next stanza of my rhyme: 'The little dog laughed to see such fun.'

'Great. And the relevance of the dish and the spoon? Got you there, I'll bet, even if you are over the moon.'

'Well, no actually. I have found the most adorable dish, and I believe he's found his spoon.'