Читать книгу Temporariness - John Kinsella - Страница 16

5.50pm Soon the Halloween invasiveness begins. I dread it—no peace at all. This annual ritual of confrontation with the horrors, demons and impositions of history. History should never be ‘sent back’ but confronted and conversed with to make a better future, but I find Halloween a grotesque re-envisioning of famine, colonisation and loss of control over one’s own destiny. I understand why it is, and appreciate its cyclical respatialising and attempt to ‘manage’ the horror, the heritage of loss and brutality, but its very desperation creates a contradicting consumerism I find disturbing. In a famine place there has to be a constant negotiation with a possibility that can never again become an actuality, but the commercial and sometimes prurient underpinnings seem to undo the confrontational and regenerative nature of the occasion. An activism is possible at the time of year when the ‘veil’ between the world of the living and the world of the dead is thin, but it needs to be inflected with an awareness of the ongoing exploitation and suppression of the natural world outside the human, or at least where the human/non-human interface is degrading and collapsing.

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Went to the Skellig Ring on the Iveragh on Thursday. From the top of Mt Geokaun we looked out to the Skelligs so recently invaded and desecrated by the Star Wars movie Viking simulacrums. The monks in their beehive cells would have seen the Devil and no doubt called on God to assist them in their spiritual and physical crisis. It’s an unholy and capitalist act of consuming and destructiveness to have used the place of the old monks in such a way—and a destruction of a vital bird habitat. Rock pipits, gannets etc. From up on Valentia Island’s mountain we also saw the lighthouse being dashed by heavy swell, the powdered spray off the cliffs, the old slate quarry... A meadow pipit dashed across the water-riven steep road as we left the place where some of the first creatures to crawl out of the planet’s amniotic waters left their mark in the sandstone.

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Not been able to write as I want to write for days. Anxiety. Have to go to London tomorrow via cab to Cork City, bus to Rosslare, ferry to Fishguard, train to London—a 24-hour journey. It’s the most eco-sound way to travel (and get there on time) but seriously exhausting and enervating.

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Thinking of some poems—maybe Graphologies—come out of Freud’s ‘Mystic Writing Pad’. I used to use these devices a lot as a child and have done some experiments with them re creating temporary poems (whose erasure is never true—palimpsests are left on the surface beneath the ‘erased’ plastic sheet). This fascinates me. Art as permanence is capitalist fetishism and anti-environment to my mind. Things need to dissolve and return, though with such a device it’s just a simulacrum of this vulnerability of text and art that actually participates in the production of extraneous items of entertainment, and damages the planet further. A poem that works as a conceptualisation of the ‘mystic writing pad’, that performs the same tasks of text framed and text erased is more of interest and activist relevance. I want to start working more with the mechanisms of ‘memory’. Freud in 1924 writes in ‘A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’ (1961: 227), ‘The sheet is filled with writing, there is no room on it for any more notes, and I find myself obliged to bring another sheet into use, that has not been written on. Moreover, the advantage of this procedure, the fact that it provides a “permanent trace,” may lose its value for me if after a time the note ceases to interest me and I no longer want to “retain it in my memory”.’ I will not give this text the pleasure of the future of data, of the screen, of personal computing. Too many lies and exploitations of ‘nature’ and people in that (those mines, those mines... Those previous metals... The destruction of entire eco-systems so we can have depth behind our screens, can call up memory as data, can hypertext our way into alternative truths, alternative geographies and ecologies...).