marcwycliffe

2006-06-17T17:13:00.000+02:00

The relief of not living.

The BBC is running pseudo-big-picture 'features' about the World Cup. This is where you pretend to get into the social analysis, safe in the knowledge that soon you can cut back to the pumping thighs and super-slo-mo, ejaculatory strikes by burly midfielders. It's like an insurance policy. Totti's a fascist, yes. Yes he is. But also a great player. Handsome too, don't you find? The game's the thing. And the look.
Thus it seems there are amputees in Angola who play football on crutches and so on. The World Cup has validated their cause, raised their profile. There's also a cholera epidemic, but nevermind. Those 11 men in Germany going out in the group stage will resolve the legacy of that 30 year civil war. Angola lost 1-0 to Portugal, but that can't obscure the importance of the fact that they're there, can it? The rainbow game returns from the ex-colonies to triumph in the former home of eliminationist racism. Gooooooooooooooool!!!!!!!!!!! The historical synthesis smells as good as the players' deodorized armpits. When it's all over, the cholera will still be going on, but everyone will feel more relaxed.

Clearly we need some changes to the rules. First, all the professional pundits have to go unless they're genuinely articulate. So Martin O'Neill can stay, but big Ron and Christophe Dugarry et al. have to go. In their place we'll have post-modern philosophers. The BBC will have Baudrillard, ITV will have Slavoj Zizek. At half time he will discuss the dual function of the stadium in the twentieth century. The Velodrome d'Hiver full of Jews in 1941, Bari's home ground packed with Albanian immigrants in 1990, the Taliban watering the centre circle with the blood of unfaithful wives, the junta in El Salvador broadcasting assassinations live, nationwide from the National Stadium. His monologues, during which he will smoke constantly while wearing sweatbands on all members, will be broadcast to the crowd over the P.A. system.

Second, the players need to be less coddled and less rich. Win bonuses to be replaced with massive personal fines for losing, progressively levied according to annual individual income; the latter will be printed on the back of players' shirts to illustrate the radical inequities between, say, Togo and France. Zinedine Zidane is to be banned for life from endorsing any more useless commodities.

Third, TV rights will be sold with a clause obliging the media companies to organise and broadcast a parallel tournament along the lines of the Disabled Olympics, in which unrecognised nations will compete for a golden prize. Tibet, Taiwan, the Kurds, the Quechua and so forth. Anyone can enter as a nation - familes, groups of friends etc.

Fourth, Figo will have to sing an R n B ballad before every match he plays in and the Argentinians will have to apologise to the cameras on behalf of the junta. The England team will all grow their hair and beards.

Fifth, Socrates' doctrine will be adopted as the offical slogan of the competition:
"I'm struggling for freedom, for respect for human beings, for ample and unrestricted discussions, for a professional democratization of unforeseen limits, and all of this as a soccer player preserving the ludic, joyous, and pleasurable nature of this activity."

Ample and unrestricted discussions. Exactly.

2006-06-08T22:23:00.000+02:00

Du passé faisons table rase.

In January and February you could have made me eat dinner with Anne Geddes and I wouldn’t have batted my heavy, tear-laden eyelids. I’d have sat there like a human screen-saver, making the appropriate noises and signs. Anne would have ranted on about the incredible preciousness of newborn life, the rain would have smashed against the window panes, I’d have daydreamed about becoming a rich, responsible management consultant and everything would have been mais vachement comme il faut. Falloir: heavy overtones of submission and legality, Luciferian necessity and solid, pornographic obedience - with that pseudo-voluntary gloss.

In winter you can be fined, you can watch star academy in the evening, you can borrow money to go to a shitty ski resort where there’s no snow. November to March is a sort of plastic corridor, like the thing that trails wildly behind the ambulance at the end of E.T. The paramedic at the wheel is the Devil.
It panics you, but in a screw-tight way: you splinter but the wood is dry.

Now it’s a whole different story. The June Days ™. But not ™. Fresh necessities spring forth, the porn stars go on holiday, urgency melts, walls warp, scales fall from eyes like rain. The eyelids are light and baby soft. Precious almost. France too goes on holiday, for Pentecost, and you get the impression that it might never come back. Seat Anne Geddes opposite me at dinner once more. She is initially brash, recalling her tirade of six months earlier and fresh from seating a tot in a hollow melon. But I have no shoes on and there’s a light spraying out of my eyes like a hail of white pollen. Anne Geddes looks at me and chokes on a pistachio. I accuse her of cannibalism and so forth. Anne’s wattle trembles in the solar wind of my critique. In the many cameras hung from her withered, drooping frame, the film begins to yellow and burn.

In March go and run in the park by the lake and slip on the mud, tread in the swan turds, get overtaken by teams of marathon-hardened Aryans, but in June...in June walk down the street. The revolving sign swallows itself and reappears with the phone number for ‘SOS Incest’. Turn left by the Bourse du Travail and overtake a little old lady. On the wall a brass plaque announces the Organisation Centrale pour Hygiène Social. Follow the road, named for an eighteenth century general, down to the park. The grass is covered with babies in nut green hats.

2006-06-08T21:54:00.000+02:00

Lieu Dit.

Recurrent dream: the skin is very pale, a little fat and studded with big brown moles, their surface as round and smooth as muffin tops. The colour of cooking chocolate, all over the body, an inch apart, sufficiently protuberant to caress easily. On the thighs they’re scattered prolifically, like an aerial photograph of a battlefield. A couple on the balls, hidden in the folds at the back.

Pick gently at one on your cheek; nudge, tease and discover all at once that the nail slides under the edge, between the skin and the rubbery dome of the mole. The mouth waters and a mild nausea flickers.

You break down and become operable, as if digging out a splinter or surveying the steel puncture of an injection. Engineer eyes. The body swallows into a kaleidoscope of its components. Under your back the sheet rubs against the mutltiple bumps that carpet you. Between thumb and forefinger the mole does not slip and sweatless, you twist it. It turns, with the faint, generous resistance of a screw in new wood. Fission.

There arises a lust for purity, like a shooter’s desire for empty cartidges, or a drunk’s pleasure in the squeak and glide of another easy uncorking. An uncompromisingly external perspective.

Starting with the legs, you ease out the moles and watch as the little craters softly fill. You let it flow; trust in coagulation. The evacuated moles have an hour glass shape, a consistency between jelly and rubber, both inviting and escaping compression between the fingers. You flush them away and stand in the bathroom, covered in blood from the waist down, and contemplate the stomach and chest. A long way to go.

2006-05-25T11:38:00.000+02:00

Keaton

I will be good; I will be good.
I have set my small jaw for the ages
and nothing can distract me from
solving the appointed emergencies
even with my small brain . . .

I will be correct; I know what it is to be a man.
I will be correct or bust.
I will love but not impose my feelings.
I will serve and serve
with lute or I will not say anything.

If the machinery goes, I will repair it.
If it goes again I will repair it again . . .

The rigid spine will break, they say –
Bend, bend.

I was made at right angles to the world
and I see it so. I can only see it so.
I do not find all this absurdity people talk about.
Perhaps a paradise, a serious paradise where lovers hold hands

and everything works.
I am not sentimental.

-Elizabeth Bishop

2006-05-21T13:48:00.000+02:00

Pick-Clop

The morning calls, like God, to those who will hear. Otherwise the morning seems open and susceptible to prolongation. At 2.05 pm, the morning is still potentially on, a little dried, but on - dry and hot, like a hob left burning.

Some market stalls are still there and though nothing is fresh, and many families have almost finished lunch, you can still find cheese, bread. The procession of clouds interrupt the sun, and when it speaks again, electrically all of a sudden, there is a sense of waking. In this way, with enough dexterity, you can hop among epiphanies and keep a small smile. Your shadow stays close behind you, and your face appears unlined, although behind it, the flesh is pulverised, like a sodden loaf.

This prolongation, this deferral, nourishes a variety of idols. The Baal of brunch for instance, served until 5 pm, for 18 euros, in reverence of the infinite returns to sleep. Wake at four and the eggs are still waiting, on the boil, yolks magically soft. The morning is plasticene, and your maker's hands shall do as they will. What elasticity appears to surround you! Yawn all you like as you read the menu. The ashtrays are clean, the water is cold; outside, the chains of the bicycles are sufficiently greased.

2006-05-19T18:57:00.000+02:00

Archive Chèvre No. 2

The unsought, silent companion of a whole afternoon, allocated by the lottery of the library computer, uncannily resembles a spouse of 43 years. You never talk to one another but you’re always close enough to hear the other scratching. You know their rhythms and foibles, you know how good they are at Solitaire and how addicted; you know what their intellectual passions are, you supervised their nap, they yours. Possibly you even fancy them. Particularly as it grows late, and the empty places around you both multiply, a lifeboat sensation of mutual reliance develops, the range of conversational gambits considered grows narrower and deeper, teetering along the lip of the lost.

‘Kerastase, right?’
‘I’d like to sing to you.’
‘I think we’ve done so well, don’t you?’

It is abandonment when they go, and the shocked temptation is to start up, to call out, to remind them of the obligation, the trust, the accumulated mutuality. Take comfort in your stamina, or leave first?

2006-05-15T21:03:00.000+02:00

The heart is a nest of spiders, that abscond and seek
Under the afternoon skin, like itched
Knees under a blanket.

In the elbow of my glasses there caught a long black hair,
Like a crack wandering across my eye and I plucked and
Plucked at the box of space before my nose, trying to get it.

Do not love sclerosis, or mistake eight legs for cunning, but hear the bow stretch;
Joue le con.

2006-05-11T22:30:00.000+02:00

Qui s'accuse s'xcuse.

So accuse others and jump back on the hook, no? Zola? But it depends. If you accuse people in the shower, as I'm wont occasionally to do, in the morning - as though the water cleans the dream residue off my tongue, and the soap mixes with words; as though I'm gurgling like the plug, in chorus but in reverse - then it doesn't much feel as though you're building a solid scaffold of self-incrimination, or even understanding. It's really the workaday ecstacies of control: turn the hot up, lean against the plaster, pronounce foul curses against your enemies and friends. Say all those beyond-the-pale atrocities you hadn't the bad character or strong feelings to generate on the spot. Say 'fuck' a lot, as part of this, especially to older people, grandmothers, religious aunts. Demolish the self-serving, castigate the righteous, carefully illustrate their role in the germination of your disappointment. Your global disappointment, your crafted nihilism. Adjust the hot water and let a little run into your mouth. Hurry through the rest of the day so you can get back to the retroactive monologue. Purge your maternal feelings, ignore the circular, the round. Think in darts, remember you're on the top floor. If you're still in the shower, you may look like a prune now.
A prune.
So beware! Turn on the cold! Orphan yourself! Or else your enemies will prosper, your fidelity will be exposed as a sad stunt, a moral impotence, a dogmatism, a canine madness that laps around at the floor, eyes closed, remembering the teat.
Don't take it all so personally. Towel down, find some clothes. Riffle through the post. Run out of deodorant? Throw in some paprika, or some honey. Intimacy cannot count, it is unlike your bank manager. Were intimacy to inherit, intimacy would give it away, to larcenous charities that are really cults or mafia fronts, all of it. End in the gutter. There are no debts in intimacy, there is only the chance for recognition, and if you want to say that there is solidarity in that, by all means. Feel betrayed? Get out! It's a gigantic cavern and you can fit through the entry hole. You won't have to wash for a week.

2006-05-11T18:51:00.000+02:00

Taxidermy

One of those arch metaphors, like a finger slammed in a door, that everyone knows. Tape on the beak with cunning solvent, wiggle the claws into their dessicated, gummed sockets, flatten the fur carefully around the wooden haunches, throw out the ick. Here's me, stuffing Marceline and Mado P'tits Pieds, for the benefit of parched Francophonie, high only on glue-fumes so far:

'Là-dessus, elles demeurèrent silencieuses, penseuses, rêveuses. Le temps coulait pas vite entre elles deux. Elles entendaient au loin, dans les rues, les pneus se dégonfler lentement dans la nuit. Par la fenenêtre entrouverte, elles voyaient la lune scintiller sur le gril d’une antenne de tévé en ne faisant que très peu de bruit.’

Der-my I say! Duh! Me! It's me under the fur! I have wooden haunches but I walk well, especially near water!

I like that hot moon, playing the metal ribs of the antenna like a piano. It's a hot moon from a hot summer when a meteor passes close to the earth, causing the tarmac to melt and everyone to be awake all night. A fragment breaks off and spins into the arctic sea, where it lies steaming. Marceline never does or says anything without the gesture or word getting qualified with 'doucement'.

Back on Rue Basfroi, time runs slowly. The birds chirp and chip away as though they can't get it right and won't graduate till they do. They're wedged in. The lock doors won't open. There are loads of mistakes to make at this time of day, from eating more than a quarter of your baguette on the way home, feeling stuffed and having a cup of tea for supper, to deciding not to do anything until you've shaved, to the big-time, take the bottle of Chartreuse and go read in the cemetery-type errors. There are also the middle ground imbroglios, the flesh wounds of the evening choice war, caused by a lack of familiarity with the flat terrain: try talking to someone in the supermarket, buy much more than you need 'for that family sensation', sign up for a marathon in the autumn, take the train to the Tuileries to go running.

It's not that careful a process, taxidermy. You'd want to sell it as a highly convenient means of aging: a well-known and trying process - reduced to convenience! Can't imagine the next 40 years? Get stuffed!
But it's not an exact science, as I said. You'll have to rely on the expectations of your interlocutor, so never talk to strangers. Insure yourself with an economic and social context, a psychic letter of introduction. Keep talking about neutral topics: the relaxation of life with cheap crockery, onto the Greeks, the pleasures of bare feet, anecdotes about schoolday swimming, teachers called Mrs Gill, veruca socks. Keep going...
Eventually you won't notice either. The glass eyes will feel less cold, you'll be able to to go running anywhere, you'll never have to shave again. Recall Mr Bean at Christmas: he's lonely, he wants to do it right, he ends up with his head inside the turkey. That's the logic.

2006-05-05T15:11:00.000+02:00

Archive Chèvre # 1

The old men. Rambling about, sighing vastly when they sit down, exclaiming viciously when the sunshine falls on them: 'merdeputainqulbodelfaitchiéyahhh'. White hair streaming about; zero sense of opportunity cost, zero library depression. They're either researching the key to all mythologies or just looking up dirty books; they constantly ask for help with the computers. In the café there's a raddled patriarch of about 135 wearing huge plastic safety goggles. He's got a coffee and THREE kit-kats, and he eats them without breaking the bars off. Just chomps in, and the crumbs spray onto his goggles.

2006-05-05T00:03:00.000+02:00

Civilized...

http://gprime.net/video.php/wickedfoosballshot

Courtesy of Wingrave Productions.

2006-05-04T21:28:00.000+02:00

Canals.

Wake slowly and you think in water, duvet-green, in which thoughts barrel past like seals, purring and nodding, black-eyed and sleek. Doubts roll along you, like a crumb along the floor, perhaps glass, perhaps bread. The pleasure of not breathing rises again, like a lovely nausea, and pushes your head and feet down first, and pulls your pelvis up. You sift down, trying left and right, trying so as not to choose, like waving until you're out of sight. Going back down, into the li-chi green, lying softly on the bottom, not all the vertebrae touching, fat as a water-baby, I saw you at once. From behind, walking, so full of care. I saw you as though from a plane and you wore a skirt and your legs were thin, thin as you like, and brittle.

Climb out of Tolbiac at eight, like a diver. Look at the others and they're dripping with words and wiping whole paragraphs out of their eyes and sluicing microfilm out of trousers and back-pockets like it's seaweed. They shake their heads so that commas fall out of ears and that man has an index stuck in his hair. It's a ship, a cargo ship, a wreck, a four-master. We're taking a garden to the stars, and for propulsion we read, and the tops of the trees nod in the current.

In the tower of numbers the sun is embedded, like a terrorist's thrown yolk; it gazes at the water and spits at the water and flecks it with wildness. I stick to the pavement and cross on the bridge with the metro, and hear the solar phlegm simmer beneath, as the water flows and fails to bind to its bubbly skin. The metro passes and leaves the soft smell of rubber and metal, the two whipped together as if with a fork and salt and pepper and then dumped across the city. Oh to toss the city and force this smell onto every surface, so we could breathe it in every breath, like smoke, so that it could plaster us like a fluid, so it would not be occasional!

Walk under the bridge and don't speak while the train is overhead and go down onto the Quai de la Rapee. Don't resent the animal spirits! There are girls in duck trousers, like sailors, selling cars over a free drink and passing out flyers. Turn up into the streets around the station, full of signs and follow as though you're driving yourself, as though you're at the wheel of a liner, a ship of state. Pull levers, speak into the voice tube, churn the spokes and fiddle through to the canal. Drop down the steps at eight bells, breathing heavily the brassy musk of weekday flowers and a dozen midges and unsold antiques. In the canal the water waits like sleep. It knows the bottom of the boats, it knows their keels' every dent, their propellers, the equations of their perspex; it knows the ladders and the lock doors. It is there so that it does not forget, it's faithful because it must.

2006-05-01T00:48:00.000+02:00

You notice the power light is off and glance at the plug, and it's leaning backward out of the socket, held in by the lower pins, half in recoil, half spat out; half horrified lurch backward, half eviction. Battery power begins, a matter of time.

A quick note on shuffle and walking home. The genuine walk home is clearly a lost art, like those stained glass pigments that haven't been achived since the 1400s. This is partly because of the invention of the walkman and its white, Appley heirs. Buttoning your coat, feeling your soles' friction on the pavement, feeling your head swim with toxins, narrowing your eyes and raising your collar against the cold; all this should be done only against the sound of distant traffic and puking locals, birdsong or church bells. Done against the injected clarity of Coldplay guitars or Morcheeba vocals or David Bowie's 'Heros', the walk becomes a new kind of performance and one watches oneself as though on television. Fake heroism saturates each step and even the lager-swollen bladder frames its demands in a melodramatic falsetto. Who wouldn't you fight? What retort would escape you?

Still, there are distinctions to be made. This isn't the wrecked stagger or the stay-awake games on the night bus or the paranoid jog across the park, wallet bouncing in a pocket. This is the managed departure, the raised chin, the take-all-comers-but-not-really alertness and the handful of change gripped tight in the pocket to stop it rattling. This is the 'shuffle tunes' walk in which contingency is swollen with meaning. The Flaming Lips come on, like that, as though brought in by a waiter in a silver tureen with a whipped-away lid. And they sing about getting tricked into forgiveness, and it means far too much. 'What is thissss? Are you some kind of hypnotisssst?'
You step around the dogshit and cross the road. You pass an empty playground and look at the big springs on the rocking horses, where they vanish into the white sand, and you wonder how the sand bears the tension, soft as it is, and the fluoresence falls like snow down your raised collar.
There's a piece by AS Byatt in the English Prospect magazine this month. It's about the origin of religious belief, a review of a book by someone who attributes it all to tool-making, and Byatt comes out and says that superstition and the attribution of mysterious power is a way of dealing with the presence of the dead in our memories. And on the shuffling walk home this works well. Because the flukey occurence of the Roots seems so directly tied to late night tea on Amsterdam Avenue, and the happenstance follow-on of Costes Vol. 3 seems a decisive manifestation of the Rue St Honore, and the memories conspire. You feel like a pair of eyeballs, soused in four-euro pints, perched atop a sedimentary bucket of recollections, through which the headphone cable runs like a mine-cord, from throat to heel, spreading electricity through the soil, as long as the battery lasts.

2006-04-30T17:39:00.000+02:00

2006-04-30T15:20:00.001+02:00

I read once about how, after a rainy weekend, literary magazines would receive a larger volume of unsolicited poems. People sent in poems about the rain, in great numbers, and the editors threw them away, presumably. I remember thinking how discouraging this seemed. Not only that people reacted in the same way to the same event, but that this reaction was futile, the stacks of envelopes all collecting in the bin: postmarks and stamps and handwritings dissolved together.

'Fuck those editors', I thought, 'for their elitist strangulation of the weekend poets'; but also 'fuck those idiots, watching the drops slide, slalom, slither, splinter and stick on the glass, fuck their alliteration because it's going in the bin, and their amateurish, carpe-diemish ability to overcome their habitual reticence, and their what-the-hell decision to send it in.' 'Why', thought I, at the time, 'do these people not have the strength and foresight to stay silent? Why aren't they more afraid of joining the herd of meter-ignorant aspirants?'

You see the kind of thinking. On the one hand I disliked the similarity between people, which seemed to deny each person a completely, totally unique potential, and on the other hand I disliked the discrimination of the editors, reflecting not only accepted standards and cultural dominance, but also, more worryingly, the fact that to be good, a poem really did have to be relatively better than others. Similarity and particularity, both heavy, mostly because neither could be got rid of. There was once a cartoon version of 'Watership Down' by Richard Adams. I saw it as a child. At some point men filled in the rabbit warren and all the rabbits were straining to get out, up one tunnel, almost swimming in earth, their eyes bloodshot, their claws finding most purchase on each others backs. This is what the weekend poets, with their mooning through the glass and their scratchy biros, reminded me of. A giant panic in which the vast majority get extinguished. I was quite the adolescent fascist.

It's raining today, Sunday afternoon rain, steady but from time to time lifting the tempo and volume, like a confident pianist at a too-familiar piece. The rooves glisten, completely still, punctiliously obedient to their angles, enjoying the tap and caressing wash of the drops. The aerials stand like herons, pretending to be asleep, waiting for the fish to move.
Because the studio is under the roof the sense of exposure and protection is stronger, like in a car. I took a shower in the middle of the afternoon, and felt a sort of consumer-Promethean sensuousness as the cold drops fell on the roof and the hot ones fell on me. There's a small cubby ledge in there, and you can sit and put your elbows on your knees, let the water fall on your head and back. You can gaze at your navel. As such, it's a bloggerish shower and it was a bloggy experience and I thought neither about the drenched homeless nor about my rent.

Tunes of the day: for gazing through the drizzle-besplattered pane probably Cake, 'Friend is a four letter word.' For the Promethean shower and general Sunday spilt-religion points, Mass in B Minor by Bach. A lot of Hosannas. Other nourishment, Zazie dans le Metro. A girl who knows how to take the initiative. She wouldn't even have been in the warren when the men came. She'd send in poems about mildly overcast afternoons and sunny, midweek middays. And she takes the initiative FROM others. Make no mistake, the cake is of a limited size. She runs away early in the morning because she wants to check out Paris and the landlord comes after her to take her back upstairs. He grabs her arm and she starts screaming and accuses him, in detail to the gathering crowd, of paedophilia. He flees in shame and fear, she wanders on her way.