LOCKDOWNTIME #17
"what is visible is but a fragment of the whole, there being many other latent realities" - paul klee
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today began pretty directionless and listless until i went for a walk, sat on a bench near blackheath common, and did my daily reading of todayâs main rec, virginia woolfâs the waves.
whatâs remarkable about the waves is how nakedly functional it is. stripped of âcharactersâ and a âplotâ in the conventional senses, it throws out from the very first page any notion of the book having an interiority or âmeaningâ that the reader gradually uncovers. no, much like the book-machine that deleuze & guattari evoke in the introduction of a thousand plateaus, the waves âexists only through the outside and on the outsideâ (p.4) â it is a book that seems to only exist at its very edges, at the very moments we read it and are affected by it. it refuses to stay still, constantly bleeding off the raw materiality of the paper itâs printed on into our everyday lives.
this may sound like puffed-up verbose nonsense, but it really is proved by the actual experience of reading the waves, which is remarkably meditative, centering, and contemplative. it takes me a long time to read bits of the bookâ the lyrically rich monologues of the 6 characters which make up the book are constantly meandering and wandering off course, and i often find myself losing concentration half-way through a sentence, thinking about something evoked by it, or looking outside at the trees, listening to the sounds around me. but far from a fault of the waves, this is precisely its function, its value, its moment of success. the waves is constantly setting into motion all these little flights that escape it, constantly propelling us into the Outside, constantly renewing us and recomposing us through a collision and combination with new exterior elements.
this is why, despite the bookâs difficulty, i look forward to reading the waves every day in lockdown. it completely turned by day around today, which began with me twitching between various different fragments of cyberspace flung at me by social media, getting increasingly frustrated and bored with every passing second, paralysed by the digital twitch. but after reading the waves, i felt centred, and was thinking more creatively and in-depth about some ideas/projects. (who needs therapy???)
to bourgeois âcommon senseâ, the waves would appear as a classic example of a flagrant, excessive and useless aestheticism, a self-entitled bit of âart for artâs sakeâ. but this couldnât be further from the truth: instead, the waves is one of the most coldly mechanical and functional works of literature i have ever read, immediately practical and useful. you really should read it.
other bits and bobs:
i fell down quite a strange rabbit hole earlier when i discovered bafflingly complex mazes of greg bright via âroland barfsâ on twitter. iâd massively like to get a hand on one of those maze books now (which are apparently out of print), full of strange, psychedelic mazes like the one above. bright apparently had some minor fame with these mazes back in the day, having an exhibition at the ICA called âThe Maze Kingâ (lol), and then completely went off the map at the end of the 70s. love shit like that. anyhoo, check out the twitter thread above for more.
i have been obsessively listening to this disco gem by arethra franklin, âget it rightâ, shared by âlittgensteinâ on twitter. (gotta love all these weird internet aliases, i need to get one of my own soon. âplaytimeâ just doesnât cut it, it was always a placeholder name.) anyway, this track is just a smooth groovy diamond, check it out, have a dance. i did my workout to it yesterday, what a rush!
cool article on The Fall on the quietus website. much like the waves, the fall are a band that increase their returns the more you listen to them. thereâs the sense of a whole grotesque subterranean world that expresses itself when you listen to the fall⌠itâs highly evocative music, not transient or throwaway in the slightest.
next installment thursday morning, 8am. stay safe!
jake x