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November 01, 2005
Hampstead Heath: Glissopraxia
01 October 2005
As I was coming up the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there
A confluence of weird paths has us cross:
Hampstead Heath; we didn't see him
Even when he spoke; as if he had polished
his surface fabric so the gaze would
slide and be deflected sideways
onto a more manifest entity:
Glissopraxia, or the art of
becoming imperceptible.
He had spent months of his life
as an urban nomad, camping in green spaces:
Realising them; creating territories
where were only decayed geoplatitudes:
public spaces protected from use by cliché
habitude and fatigue. He was alive
with the song of the nightingale
and the damp of forest floors
synthesising slowly moisture and sun
even when straddled by dirt-choked highways.
The experiment was not of the order
of intoxicated transgression,
a journey into a personal abyss
which changes nothing, which makes no difference.
It aspired to an order of abstraction
irreducible to interpersonal generality;
an actual puncture of the social,
a living riddle, perhaps a joke.
At once it literally put into practice
a nomadism all-too-often
taken for theoretically sufficient;
and sought the most abstract expression,
the most exquisitely unworldly
consequences of this practice.
But he still retained the modesty to say
the important journeys were the inner ones;
If philosophical questions can only be asked
on the basis of an experiential vocabulary
– the elements of abstract matter, haecceities –
no dogma can tell where these are to be sought.
He left the world without abandoning it;
text messages flashed in dark wet glades;
colleagues noted the rucksack beneath the desk.
He became a secret, an anomaly unknown.
A kind of magic became possible – necessary;
he dipped beneath, into the vastness
of people's incuriosity, their dull ignorance
of that which occurs without their assumptions.
They slid over across, would always do so.
This did not invalidate the proceedings.
Impossible to sustain, self-defeating to generalise,
something happened; What had been proved?
After this crossing we walked on
we couldn't tell what we had met with.
One with us was not yet one
And we felt its strange weight with us.
Saw the whole city from Parliament Hill:
simultaneous ownership and alienation.
Jimi Hendrix's acid-green parakeets
picked grubs from grey tree stumps.
Sky lilac-grey, North Sea dun;
a battleship's flank blocking the smog in
while thunder-filtered sun made blaze up
the westward face of every office block,
and compressed what we knew was green
into fulminating intra-violet.
(Merciful absence of a camera only preventing
a later disappointment, a dull confirmation.)
As if sympathetic to the poverty of signs
it produced its own precis:
A rainbow - intense where it leapt from foliage,
dangling faintly above Canary Wharf's
crock of gold: the only feasible
thesaurus for those incompossible modulations.
Posted by robin at November 1, 2005 12:23 PM
Comments
Welcome back. Impressive you could do 'Canary Wharf's crock of gold.' Anybody could do something with a rainbow, but I doubt they've done that.
Posted by: Patrick J. Mullins at November 2, 2005 10:28 PM
i only say what I saw. Everyone knows canary wharf is _actually_ a crock of shit.
Posted by: robin at November 3, 2005 07:38 PM
I know that. I had thought you were exercising reserve! Now it's just as much my fault that you've let the literal cat out of the poetic bag (just allowing it briefly was not going to hurt any more than that business Adorno talks about with the kind of person who cannot let go of 'identity' for even an instant; I don't think serious political causes are destroyed if canary wharf was known to be a crock of gold for a second or two. Didn't it lose its NAME during that instant?) It was always going to go back to being a crock of shit. But as a crock of gold I could relax a moment from the pain of any thought of the Isle of Dogs post-1980, when it became a Thatcher-years casualty.
I used to see that kind of gold in Paris, you see, and still often in New York. It makes the urban place anonymous all of a sudden--it's like the sense in which some places are only allowed to reveal beauty in perfect weather. Canary Wharf is so odious nothing short of a rainbow may have done. No matter. Somehow I thought you wanted to write 'crock of shit' to begin with, and you didn't, and I was glad: 'Crock of gold' for Canary Wharf has muscle if it can ever actually be. I wish I could have seen it when it was that.
Posted by: Dr. Mulli of 'le tout New-York' at November 3, 2005 11:10 PM