Forget family, or ethnic and religious groupings: corporations have supplanted all these as the primary structure of the modern tribe.
For anthropologists, even the exotic’s not exotic, let alone the everyday.
If people were to tell other people everything about themselves, we’d live in a dull world.
We require experience to stay ahead, if only by a nose, of our consciousness of experience—if for no other reason than that the latter needs to make sense of the former, to (as Peyman would say) narrate it both to others and ourselves, and, for this purpose, has to be fed with a constant, unsorted supply of fresh sensations and events.
The first move of any strategy of cultural production, he’d say, must be to liberate things – objects, situations, systems – into uselessness.
If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.
“The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.”
What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?
You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.
To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.
Lovers' reading of each other's bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeat itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against moments, recovering time?
“The book I'm looking for,' says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, 'is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world.”
Walkers navigate by sound. Drifting towards the Thames with no purpose beyond getting away from the construction dust and promotional screech to the east, I found myself eavesdropping on the climactic moan of the Overground. If the traffic ditch of Kingsland Road played like a gurgle of peristaltic juices recovering from a monster kebab, the Overground was a 14-hour sigh of mounting, but never-quite-satisfied sexual bliss. The heartbeat of the new London might be revealed, I felt, by tracking the acoustic footprints of the railway for a single day: Haggerston to Wapping, Clapham Junction, Imperial Wharf, Willesden Junction, Hampstead Heath and home again. The 33 stations of this perverse pilgrimage, stitched together in ways that had never been possible before, had their own microclimate. The arches beneath the elevated tracks, oil pits dealing in MOT certificates, mysterious lock-ups and rehearsal spaces for bands without names, were being rapidly upgraded to fish farms offering meditational aids to keep money-market buccaneers on an even keel, Japanese restaurants and artisan bakeries operated by downsizing hedge-fund managers. The word “artisan” signalled the change in demographic. A humble medieval craftsperson is upgraded to a purveyor of ethical coffee in a space that tries to look like a newly excavated ruin.
The intriguing aspect of London Overground, beyond parasitical clusters of new-build flats with their bicycle-rack balconies, beyond early-morning gyms and proliferating coffee outlets, was the fact that the system worked. Trains arrived every few minutes, carriages were nicely appointed in colours reminiscent of Penguin books in their pomp. Freshly carved neural pathways made it possible to ride from Dalston to Denmark Hill; to visit Goldsmiths college by way of New Cross Gate; to see where William Blake was married or where Freud died. Any commute, for the honeymoon period before the line caught on, was a rare London pleasure.
A walk around this accidental remapping of London in a single day; that’s what it had to be. If it could be managed. And if Andrew Kötting, the filmmaker and performer, could be persuaded to join me. As foil, informant, partner in absurdity. The journey would be potentially endless, linking prisons, football stadiums, waste-disposal plants, cemeteries and reservoirs of memory. Andrew’s anecdotes of Deptford would sustain us until we arrived at Angela Carter’s Clapham and the location for JG Ballard’s Millennium People in Chelsea Harbour. We must plod on, day into night, waiting to see if a shapely story would emerge
The best thing about search is you always find what you want. The worst thing about search is you never find what you do not want.
As for yours truly, I’ve been sitting with my laptop atop a pillow on my lap to keep those wireless hotspot waveparticles from reaching my genitals and frying my sperm, searching up—with my employer’s technology—myself, and Rach.
My necessities were books. I read a book at school, another to and from school, yet another at the beach, which was the closest escape from my father’s dying. Though when I walked alone it was far. Though I wasn’t allowed to walk alone when younger—so young that my concern wasn’t the danger to myself but to the books I’d bring, because they weren’t mine, they were everyone’s, entrusted to me in return for exemplary behavior, and if I lost even a single book, or let even its corner get nicked by a jitney, the city would come, the city itself, and lock me up in that grim brick jail that, in every feature, resembled the library.
No one around me was doing anything, even making conversation. They were all just perfectly inert, laid out prone or supine as if submitting to autopsy or dissection. Only the dead or the lowest of species can bask, I’m convinced.
Everything has a beginning, or needs one, and if the beginning’s identifiable but not dramatic enough, it needs to be deidentified—located elsewhere.
What’s privacy to the employee is security to the boss.
A people’s legitimacy is derived from its artifacts. Even a relationship isn’t a relationship unless it’s left behind its trash.
