The World Turned Upside Down...

Sometimes it's possible to actually reach and feel an edge of your being alive. It happens that you come to a point in which you recognise that there is nothing more beyond. This occurs in sensation, in emotion, in physicality (possibly?). It's a joy, a delerium, a courage. The way out is found in the passions of the possible in the everyday, in what is, of course, the impossible, the endpoint, an end of the world. Even if the starting point is personal or private, the end point is essentially public. This must be an Exodus discovered and enjoyed here at 'Happy Hour in Homelesshome'.
When we reach our 'out there', it's so definitively finite. It is not knowledge, but knowing. A simplicity of knowing. There is nothing else. I have discovered two endpoints in my life. The first can be found via old photographs although a photo has no part in the end point. It's mere circuitry. Taking the scenic route. Because...

Recently 'Happy Hour at Homelesshome' has included the photography of Edward Weston. Chosen almost at random but never quite left to the orders of chance, two photos from a similar period in his life bleed joy from my heart. A landscape, a desert scene, quite like a hundred other Weston photos, appears as a mass confusion of sky, blurs, dunes, air, vacancy, foriegn, nowhere. This still life comes with the territory. Both the territory of photography that presents to us as a shock the totality of what is there and and the territory of American photography as it was being emboldened by that school of photographers at that time. The other photo is a image of Charis Wilson laying in the desert sand. Barely a human body in this setting but so much a body residing here, but seemingly without any possible future movement. Incorporated in the landscape, the sand made flesh. For me, in these two amazing photos, the body and the landscape are the same. There is nothing else in the world after the realisation that these two images fuse as everything and nothing. This is a pure end...'For me photographs of landscapes must be habitable, not visitable' - Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (1980)
But it is not my endpoint.

My realised end point is my hand comfortable on my lover's body. On the stomach, grasping in stillness a shoulder, resting abstractly on the calf. In the artificial light of a bedside lamp or in a 4am darkness during a temporary moment of waking. Here I have found something that I experience as final. In my spontaneity or in a moment of careful placement, like a re-creation, there is still no way further ahead. It can be like there is nothing else. Time has stood still in intimacy and eroticism without rule.

(My other discovered endpoint is to be found merely in listening to John Coltrane Live in Seattle. This is something I do from time to time, although for three months last year, I listened to this recording every single night as I slowly fell to sleep. It was probably in this manic period that it dawned on me what I was hearing. Here was an end point in music. The whole record is awesome but in a certain moment, the honking and scraping breaks into a kind of howling that I can't work out if it comes from a saxophone or from Coltrane just reaching a limit and forcing out a gutteral groaning. There cannot possibly be anything else left to hear beyond this point. It's unimportant anyway, it sounds likes nothing else I have heard so far and until something comes along to conquer this recording, this jazz sounds like Exodus).


Myself Live In Life...
When I say that a photo has no part in my end point, I tremble that the look of my hand on my lover's body, as this sight was the key to finding this end, is like the creation of a photograph and its built-in battle over representation and authenticity. Am I framing, composing, looking, gazing? Bah! It's 'Happy Hour!' Here is a photo taking in such a moment. I don't care, for nothing this sensational (in the realm of senses) (time sense?) can me dissolved by (my) ancient worries. 'Politics forecloses desire, save to achieve it in the form of neurosis' writes Roland Barthes in his fantastic essay on Fourier. My political headspace versus the combination of the seen and the unseen. Vague sensualities of the feel of communion... an integration of human and landscape in my shared bed. An alchemy towards communism that shreds the Colonised thoughts in my head.

The tension in our flesh, fingers on thigh, in warming, in intent, can also create the urge to make time real again, to walk away from our endpoint and to head into the hills of the erotic not-in-the-everyday. But a peak, in rhythmic sex, (in free jazz?) may be a counter to our relaxtion, our homecoming, our root. I don't know. Maybe this beauty I found in Charis Wilson merging with sand, of my merging body with the one I love, is merely libido. Or an affirmation of my 'mania', in the sense of how the great nutcase Utopianist Charles Fourier uses 'mania', as in communal perversity, or adventurous carnivalesque games of fetishism. This my be the case albeit happily a large 'mania' or happily something I need not keep secret. Who's libido is not tied into a desire for a type of community fetishism routed in the sensuous well-being of the everyday? Happily I see that my end point does not contain the possibility for sex but is sex itself in all it's possibility. My hand on my lover is a kind of endgame/exit from a game-life that moves endlessly around the same senseless board. Or an exit from the game of the (furtive) attractiveness of the naked body, the tease game, the voyeur game, the desire game (as unhappy 'mania'), or how really dull in the world of warm senses or fucking, the game of monopoly really is. These remote control romanticisms are the current view out from our Cannibal Colony. A desert landscape devoid of the body/sand. Merely a postcard.

Another quotation lies ahead...
The above-described end points play out against the uselessness of order against chaos, chaos against order. They prick political systems to slot ourselves into. They deny the rational relationship of couples that eats itself as a thing.
The instability of the feeling that there is nothing beyond the endpoint or that Exodus is close, can maybe be seen in this realisation:
'The Director General himself, with all the power conferred on him by financial and adminstrative directives, could not control all the 'incomings and outgoings'. Thousands of comets, scattered by stars, burned and frittered away as they were flung into the earth's atmosphere, and not one of them found their way into the archives. Nor were they entered into the register for incoming mail. As for pain, that was only in the hearts domain...
Anis gave himself over to the view of the trees that bordered the road. They had been planted with extraordinary regularity. If they moved out of this fixed order, the known world would come tumbling down'.
Naguib Mahfouz 'Adrift On The Nile', 1966

Once Upon A Time In The Universe...
But alongside this, as lover and me at 3am, I'm aware of this isolating moment as a refuge from the pains outside. But an end point (such as mine) affects more than the lovers for a love affair is like a revolution. Love is (like) solidarity. Love feeds the courage needed to change. This isolating moment is paradoxically expansive and all encompassing. It seeks outer movement rather than inner movement. It seeks to out the secret history of revolutionary love for it is aware that the flipside to love is pain but love and pain make relationships as love and rage make revolution.

'Happy Hour At Homelesshome' is now ended. Coming soon: Life in Cannibal Colony...

Simplicity and Silence...Welcome to Happy Hour at Homelesshome...

'Is simplicity simple or Dada?
I consider myself rather likeable'
Tristan Tzara, How I Became Charming Likeable and Delightful (1922)

'Dada is applicable to eveything, and yet it is nothing, it is the point where yes and no meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophers, but quite simply on streets corners like dogs and grasshoppers'.
Tristan Tzara (1917)

'We want to give back to humanity the ability to understand that a unique fraternity comes into existence at the intense moment when beauty and life itself, brought into a high tension on a wire, ascends towards a flash-point; the blue tremor linked to the ground by out magnetised gaze which covers the peak with snow. The miracle!'
Tristan Tzara, Note on Art (1917)

Note:The above picture features an unopened can labelled 'EMERGENCY DRINKING WATER'. I found it on The Thames foreshore a few years ago.

I crave simplicity in life, away from all the machines and complications in this colony of humans. The fact of existence seems simple in itself to me. Difficultly simple though - sheer love and pain, as they face each other off. The above quoted writing seems to resonate with me, each snippet another battering on the Exodus door. Either in mine or your simplicity or in the understanding that choice, yes/no is not a real choice. Power/Opposition? All the greys between Black and White, like a London autumn sky as seen from my tower. We (or maybe it's just I) like to walk away from things. To not face them head on but no simply walk away. To walk around. To walk behind.

The intense moment where beauty meets life is neither yes or no but all and nothing. It is Exodus. It is Miracle.
This is my introduction to Happy Hour at Homelesshome. Next up, my hand, your photo, our end points.

Dada-Falluhja, Dada-Walworth
This, that, the irresistable...
London - city of confidence/s,
Fox in the grass,
The world turned upside down.
The Ruinist, Blue notebook (November 2005)


'She keeps me a few minutes more to tell me what it is about me that touches her - it is in the way I think, speak, in my whole manner, apprarently: and this is one of the compliments which has most moved me in my whole life, my simplicity'.
Andre Breton, in 'Nadja'(1928)

Interlude and Discovery...

'It is a journey to the end of the world. It is seven years since I last saw Robinson...I had heard from him from time to time during my travels but now he has written that he urgently wishes to see me, that he is on the verge of a breakthrough in his investigations and that I should come as soon as possible before it is too late.

...He isn't poor because he lacks money but because everything he wants is unobtainable...Robinson lives in Vauxhall, an area famous for its association with Sherlock Holmes...Apart from his academic work, Robinson rarely leaves his flat except to go to the supermarket...
Across the road from Robinson's flat a Driving School has opened...When we got home I stared out the window.'

Narration from London, a film by Patrick Keiller (1992)

There above lies the first line of the film 'London', and its last line and what a journey it is in between. Its restless protagonist Robinson is a classic 'autodidact' (like myself) a man who intends to solve 'the problem of London'. 'London' is loaded with beautiful and sublime random snippets of inner-city London that underscores a true narrative mania worthy of any pyschogeographer King. Each viewing reveals more and more of what we already know and live but also more and more of how finally wrong the film is in argument.

My first viewing was by accident in Vauxhall in 1996. After the discovery that Robinson lived in the area, it seemed right to set set out on the quest to find his house, to know! At the melancholy end of the movie, a view out of his window is shown, a view across to the new Portuguese-owned driving school. In my mind, although not so familiar with Vauxhall at that time, I knew exactly where it was. I cycled to this point on South Lambeth Rd but it was in fact not there. My second viewing of the film was probably in 2001. Finding Robinson didn't seem so urgent for me in that time. My third viewing of 'London', also in Vauxhall, was in October 2005. Once again, I had a sense that the driving school was somewhere nearby and should be found, located. This time I went to the Library to check out old Telephone and Post Office directories. I knew that a Londis supermarket was next door to the school in the 1992 shot but on arrival at the library, the name of the store went out of my mind. I also knew that a butchers was the other side. Anyway, eventually, after many false starts, the real address was there on the page. It was listed as 119 South Lambeth Rd, Vauxhall SW11. I assembed my papers and cycled to where this would be. Marvellously, mysteriously, it was in the exact same spot that I had first thought it to be and visited in 1996. The circular window on the front door on the right of the driving school was the only still existing remnant of truth from the mental still I had taken in mind from the movie. Londis was now Universal Food and Wine, the Drivemasters School of Motoring was now Golden Dragon Chinese Takeaway and the butchers was now Madeira, a Portuguese delicatessen. Opposite was the council block, Bishops House, home of Robinson. Now you know. I feel that these detective works are important in an age such as ours. Thank you.

 

2013 Now Chicken Valley