And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?
- Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric” (1867)1
… live, live even more intensely.
- Julio Cortázar, Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (2008: 367)2
I
Structures of desire
Last week, I introduced Spanish AI model influencer, Aitana, who, whatever fate may wield, it won’t be a bullshit job3.
This week, we have ELVIS, resurrected in the form of the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security (ELVIS) Act put in force last Thursday by the Governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, to protect the intellectual copyright of artists and Nashville’s lucrative industry from unauthorized use by artificial intelligence.
Both take me back to ChatGPT having a stab at Nick Cave, an event which precipitated the Australian singer-songwriter and Bad Seed to respond in kind to a question from a reader who wrote in to The Red Hand Files to ask him what he thought of songs being written in the style of Nick Cave, with: “…the apocalypse is well on its way.”4
Moreover, country singer and American idol host, Luke Bryan - vocal in his support of ELVIS - says he’s been getting songs sent to him on his phone that sounded like him and that even he couldn’t tell the difference.
All of which brings me to Suno, a “new AI music experience” to “help you break the barriers between you and the song you dream of making” (by taking all the labour out of it, seemingly).
No instrument needed, just imagination. From your mind to music.
- Suno AI
On perusing Suno AI’s website, one finds a rotation of prompts.
You can “make a song about anything”, “make a song about the moon”, “make a song that feels how you feel” or even “make a song for lunch”.
All good so far, then.
There are also “trending options”.
Or, you could opt for the Suno Valentine’s Day Experience and be in with the chance to win a bouquet, which, capitalising upon nostalgia, claims to be:
…inspired by the age-old art of the mixtape. It's approachable, playful and, at times, touching. The Atlantic's Andee Tagle put it best in The Enduring Romance of Mixtapes. It's a chance to say,
"I see you." Or perhaps, "I want you to see me."
Share the songs you send and receive on social media by tagging us at @suno_ai_ for a chance to win a bouquet of flowers and three free months of our best plan, Premier. Enjoy, and thank you for helping us spread the love with Suno this Valentine's Day.
<3 Suno
On clicking the link, I land on a powdery blue 💙 on an otherwise black screen.
This makes me sad.
There is too much space around the 💙, and nothing’s happening.
I guess it could be a glitch at my end, or a download speed hitch. But my tristesse is soon abated as the 💙 BURSTS OPEN with a call-to-action to Get Started.
What is the name of your Valentine?
I type in “Ben”.
Where did you and ‘Ben’ meet?
“Asda”.
But the next question appears with such haste that ‘Ben’ and I could have met anywhere, and Suno wouldn’t have cared.
What makes Ben special?
Easy peasy. “He can pick me up.”
Suno seems happy with that, but then wants my email, so I exit the site. No song for ‘Ben’, then, but I’ll live. And so will he.
Nobody trusts the technocracy anymore. People suffer from it.
- Gioia, 2024
I’ve written previously on the role of speed and consumption in the structuring of desire (the coordinates of which are fantasy). Seduced by short-cuts which offer this without that, ‘convenience’ tends to do our decision making for us. As Žižek reiterates, our enjoying products without their malignant properties - which can also double as ‘passive activism’ - gets played out daily in our habits of consumption: coke zero, coke without the sugar; coffee without the caffeine; sex without sex; Starbucks without the guilt, as signs convince us that our loyalty is helping save the children of Guatemala, and what’s more its included in the price for free (see “Forever Chemicals”).
The problem with PR, though, or ‘libidinal engineering’, as Fisher put it, is that: “Literally nobody is convinced by PR, you’d have to be an imbecile to believe it… When we hear that Upper Crust is passionate about sandwiches, we know they’re not, we know nobody is passionate about sandwiches, right… We don’t believe it but it’s still capable of making us doubt what we know.” (cci collective, 2016: 00:15:45-00:16:47)5 The sandwiches are convenient though.
On the subject of convenience, Tim Wu, professor of Law at Colombia University, contributor to the New Yorker, and author of The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (2016), coined the phrase “the tyranny of tiny things” in his much read New Yorker essay “The Tyranny of Convenience”.
Wu maintains that ‘convenience’ is the most played down and miscalculated of forces, doing our thinking for us, and curbing other options, which may well be more enriching. Convenience also rejects process. In this time-saving utopia, anyone can do anything, until they can’t.
Devotionals
Devotionals are daily exercises, meditations, liturgical tasks, songs, a reading plan, essay, maybe even a re-stack. Yet the word is burdened by asceticism and religious overtones, self-sacrifice, abnegation, even masochism (as with the mystics). Such practices may lead to God; but what if God is already here?
There?
A small brown bird lands on the balcony. Non-descript, with no distinguishing features they lock eyes for ten seconds or so, then it flies off. In that ten seconds or so she is rooted to the kitchen floor, bare foot, and body electric, knowing she can't hold onto it, whatever it is.
In The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (1979 [1945]), the American essayist and poet Lewis Hyde redirects that classic text on gift exchange and reciprocity, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (Essai sur le don: forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïque), written in 1924 by the French author and anthropologist, Marcel Mauss, to the lives of artists, with latter chapters on Whitman and Pound, respectively, (who remained abjectly poor and subject to monopoly capitalism without patronage). Mauss surmises that gift economies operate in accordance with three obligations: 1) giving; 2) accepting, and 3) reciprocating, and that gift exchange should be a “total social phenomenon” (cited in Hyde, 1979: xv). In gesturing towards an economy of the creative spirit, Hyde’s overriding concern is “the gift we long for” which “[…]irresistibly moves us” (Ibid: xvii). What moves us though, can be a mystery.
Hyde then illuminates upon the word’s etymology, in that: “[t]he root of the English word “mystery” is a Greek word, muein, which means to close the mouth” (Ibid: 280)—pursuing his line of flight, in that gifts are mysteries, drawing upon anecdotes by Neruda, and others. Yet mystery depends upon the capacity to be enchanted; and we are living in deeply disenchanted times.
III
The primacy of things
Heraclitus contemplated the ontology of things and concluded that everything flowed: πάντα ῥεῖ (panta rhei), and that the only constant was flux. But his perception ran counter to the other pre-Socratic philosophers, including that of Plato, who, after Parmenides, (the philosopher of changeless being), deduced that the natural condition of objects was rest.
In most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890)6
‘Transformation’ is tricky to quantify then, yet consciousness raising depends upon it. It’s worth noting that funding bodies espouse such terms, as appropriate research outcomes within which to package ‘impact’; yet such a rationale demands, problematically, that, as artists, we know what we are going to make before we make it. Playing this game demands a certain trickery. Outcomes must be known and quantified in advance, which leaves little interest in making them.
In terms of physical transformations tied to identity and masquerade in my own work, I have harnessed coloured wigs, costumes, projections and masks to hint at narratives or “conceptual continuity” (cf. Zappa, 2006)7 via the emergence, or shoring up, of a personal signature aesthetic.
‘Transformation’ - as a path to promotional remuneration - has, of course, been commodified within the workplace, via the annual performance review (APR) or professional development review (PDR); and the mushrooming wellness industry, which spawns life coaches coaching life coaches and “lightworkers” flogging masterclasses and “spiritual fixes” to the guileless, in which transformation is bound up in the ethos of optimisation. We can always do, and be more—the neoliberal fantasy. These products and services assume that we are out of touch with ourselves, or that we do not know who we are, but some influencer in her early twenties does (see my lockdown poem “Zoom to God” (2020).
When it comes to change though, as the psychologist, William James, first identified back in 1890, people after the age of thirty rarely do. We know this of partners, and of ourselves. We may desire to change, recognise we need to, and try to do something about it. Yet we are predominantly defined by our past and discombobulated by our possible futures, operating within an ‘achievement society’ (Han, 2015)8 which falsely leads us to believe that we ‘can’ (Han, 2017)9 do anything— until we can’t.
In the U.K., class permeates every bedrock, and yet to bring it up in conversation is risky proposition (which could even put you out of work). But class never goes away it just gets squeezed into other forms. Besides, there are more trending propositions: IP and a carousel of equality, inclusivity and diversity workshops being drawn up as we speak by ever burgeoning and omnipresent administrators who litter their emails with such buzzwords and booking forms. More to the point, a quick look at the staff profiles, and it becomes clear there is not much diversity in sight. However, perhaps, as the independent academic, Sara Ahmed, contends: “The most inventive academic work comes from those who occupy precarious positions,” as opposed to those more ingrained within the institution, engaged in “institutional polishing” (Binyam, 2022).10 Moreover, ‘lived experience’ is a term used in qualitative phenomenological research which is now being appropriated by other disciplines. It may appear empowering, in prospect, but it can also conversely shut down debate and counter-arguments when applied (emphatically) to one’s life. For a neat rebuttal upon this subject, though, I’d turn to the late Michael Sugrue (RIP), an American historian and professor of philosophy (1957-2024).
In 1992, Tom Rollins, of The Teaching Company, was recording a lecture series to be televised called Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition. Yet the speaker got stage fright, and so Rollins persuaded Sugrue and his colleague and life long friend, Darren Staloff (see the all too brief Mike and Darren Unplugged), to lead the lectures. No PowerPoint slides here, just an immense passion and knowledge of the Western canon delivered with astonishing pace, charisma, and rationale. Sugrue’s lecture on “Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: The Stoic Ideal” remains one of his most viewed. Sugrue hadn’t been well, though, for many years, and very sadly succumbed to metastatic cancer in January of 2024. When my friend WhatsApp-ed me to say Sugrue had died, I actually cried. One moment someone’s there; the next, they’re not.
It was more than that, though. The last time I’d seen him, he was on a live stream, asking where everyone was, and unable to understand why people who’d registered hadn’t shown up. He was still getting to grips with the tech., and calling out to his daughter, Genevieve, (who uploaded all his lectures to his channel, and was on hand in the other room). He’d been recording his lectures from home, talking straight to the camera, from his side room, and, for a time, sat on a plastic garden chair. Yet, the upload schedule became more sporadic. Testimonies flooded in to the comments section from all backgrounds; those without any formal education, the curious, the bored, the dispossessed, and those with criminal backgrounds, who said Sugrue had turned their life around. This is the internet at its best. I appreciated his dry and laconic wit, precisely because it wasn’t sarcasm. And when they got onto the subject of ‘lived experience’, he sallied, drinking horn in hand: “What then is ‘unlived’ or ‘non-lived experience’?”
IV
Space Junk
Space Junk is defunct, man-made debris hurtling principally in Earth orbit. It was also the title of my third album: the 34 track, five-piece, three-hour cosmic magnum opus (2023). I had intended to put this thing on vinyl but it was an ever unruly composition, which underwent three incarnations. Excess was kind of the point though. All this debris floating about up there, and what to do with it? Because I am sat looking at his book on ecstatic truth, teetering on the edge of the table, and I have written about him previously: “it occurs to me that in its stubborn propulsion the album mirrors any one of Werner Herzog’s protagonists: “rag[ing] against the world in a grand and explosive manner”… “whose visions exceed their grasp,…” 11
Intentions of transferring the album to a physical format began to seem redundant, issues arose, including the high-dynamic range on several tracks, which the cutter advised would have translated as surface noise on the vinyl, suggesting a test press instead. I had the DDPs printed but they were spread over five discs, as curated. Aesthetically, and in terms of its lyrical narrative, I could not sequence the tracks coherently onto the limitations of a 33rpm. The songs were running over, I was running over.
When it came to the release, I considered ‘drip-feeding’ singles, or doing one a month, to build audience. But there was no audience. So in the end I decided to just release it like a purist in one go. And it felt good. what became important was the release: to let it go out into the world. Ironically, the more I worked on it, and the bigger it got, the less I cared how it would be received. The album was released into the ether on 29 September, 2023 whilst I was sleeping in a bunk bed in a mixed dorm in a surf lodge in Esposende, Portugal. As David Grubbs writes in his introduction to his book on John Cage, Records Ruin the Landscape (2014) “all albums are a confrontation with the world.”12
Regarding the production process, I was concurrently learning how to use Logic, having opted to do the mixing myself, rather than outsource it. This executive decision may have come to have been the most crucial one in the process, as it resulted in me having full control over my sound world. Through this method, the process of mixing was one of listening, over instruction. It was anything but convenient, though. I virtually lived in monitoring headphones, traversing, the city, mixing and bouncing in cafes. I even had to have an MRI scan as I developed some kind of weird tinnitus, a buzzing in one ear. I was also experimenting with cocooning single-takes in textured, sonic landscapes, via freesound.org, a sound library to which users upload their sounds voluntarily, with various creative commons licenses.
In terms of gift exchange, and as part of the virtual commons, such democratic and utilitarian software subverts the problem of hierarchy which has always prevailed in gift economies which are an “erotic commerce, joining self and other, so the gifted state is an erotic state (Hyde, 1979: 163).13
One minute, I was building in a primal Cornish sea scape, embellishing and creating texture around the interior sound of my own mouth clucks (see the opening instrumental, “Glory Skin”); the next, manipulating the sound of a tin can being strung along a desert road in the Arizona Desert into an outro. Through all these reiterations, though, the title remained constant. It came from a WhatsApp family thread on signing up to go into space via email, to which my Dad hit up: “What about all that space junk up there?”
The thing about ideas is we don’t have one then we do.
As the visionary American filmmaker, David Lynch puts it (2017): “Desiring an idea is like putting a bait on a hook and lowering the bait into the water… (0:18-0.22). The thing is to be true to the idea. (1:22-1.26) “…ideas that could take you out of drudgery work.” (2:06-2:10)14 In this post, as an extension of my song making practice, there is the sense of getting lost in the material to emerge through it. We make music as we make life.
Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable,
Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused, …
- Whitman, (1867, lines 52-58)
On completing the album, and orbiting works, including its 54-page digital liner notes, the previous year’s broadcast tour in Venice (2022), I walked roughly 300 kms on the Camino Portugués coastal route from Porto to Santiago de Compostela in October, 2023 - via a boat trip on the Variante Espiritual - averaging 25 km per day and carrying a portable Blackstar amp (2023).
My rucksack weighed in at 13 KG at Edinburgh airport, but this lightened as I went. This ‘stunt’ doubled as both an unconventional album launch and a piece of episodic endurance/durational performance art. I had imagined The Atlantic on my left. I had seen it. And now I was here, doing it. I would Bluetooth the album across the ocean, into the wind. Why not? I planned to forego GPS on the route, instead following the yellow arrows. And I walked out of Porto.
I am helium raven and this movie is mine.
- Patti Smith, “Birdland”, Horses (1975)
V
Exposure
You can’t call it that”, said a friend.
“Why?” I replied.
“Sam. Throwing 34 tracks out there and calling it ‘junk’ seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Besides, there are more commercial prospects,” he said. “What about “Halo”?”
Yes, I had a song called “Halo”, but so did Beyoncé.
Regarding putting out the 34 tracks all at once: “You have no label”, another friend DM’d. “You can do what you like”.
Conjuring album art for a title such as space junk was no easy task. The only space I had to photograph in was domestic, a studio flat. Yet I worked on transforming this space. I sellotaped the Kodak Lumi 150 portable projector I’d used on the Venice tour to the top of the DSLR, and got to work screen-mirroring from my camera reel, which contained a trail of stars and moons. Conflicting light sources became problematic, though. I ended up with around 1800 photographs. In the image below, I conjured a partial eclipse, an orb, and, with the injection of sun, by a Spanish graphic designer, this image morphed into the album art.
I frequently exposed the hardware too, troubling the footage and blurring the boundaries between artifice and process.
In “The Land of Nod” (Track 2) there are occasions of a crescent moon wandering around the room, doubling in the mirror, turning into two moons, crossing.
Editing this video was an extensive and time-consuming process with fifteen versions having been exported. It was then exported as a vertical video for online consumption. It had been shot in portrait mode on an iPhone, resulting in unpleasant sidebars. The edit contains rapid cuts, and is mostly focused on body parts, the accumulation of which lend it a fragmented visual identity. Towards the end of the video I incorporated rapid cuts and the cutting and pasting of a short clip of me hitching my night dress up my thigh, holding a rose. These edits seemed to be representing masturbation, the repetitive cut and paste; in sync with the themes of Eros and desire running through the lyrics. Audrey Lorde’s (1978) unapologetic essay “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” which argues for a re-vamping and reappraisal of the power of the erotic as an epistemic and political practice and “a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling” (p. 87). 15
The above screen shots show fragments of my body, a hitched skirt, come-to-bed eyes, bubble gum pink lips in negative, the lace on my nightdress, in which various identities or personas get played out in the video via the transversal of colour schemes. On reflection, when editing, some of these personas came to the fore over others, as if in competition. I felt like they were characters. This couldn’t have been pre-empted and only emerged through messy, organic methods. I had also straightened my hair, lending me a demure, physical demeanour, more so than the exhibitionist ‘look at me’ blue wig worn on perusing Venice, and in the music video “Blue Valentine”; or subsequently, the platinum blonde wig I used in the visuals for the final work produced on the PhD, the four-track Blackout Baby (the one cut vinyl which remains unopened).
In the photo below, I’m looking at you looking at me in the mirror: a triadic gaze. Or, I’m looking at me in the viewfinder. Or, you’re looking at me looking at you looking at me in the mirror. The order of looking is not set, we are plastic, mutable. Existing in non-linear temporalities.
As reflexive visual research methods, both photography and video afford ‘defamiliarisation’ (see Shklovsky, 1917, ‘Art as Device’), a distancing method within which to present objects, ideas and concepts in new ways (which Shklovsky and the Russian formalists argued was the whole point of art). Such self-conscious and scopophilic tendencies resonate with those imbued in the American pioneer of 1960s-70s performance and video art, Joan Jonas’s work.
I found myself continually
investigating my own image on
the monitor of my video machine.
- Joan Jonas
Conjuring transformative sets loaded with myth, ritual and personal narrative, Joan Jonas has, (influenced by Borges), continued to deploy mirrors as her ruling prop. As transitional objects - and our first encounter with the libidinal - mirrors have been used to interrogate the entanglements of the body and the recorded image.
Correspondingly, and in terms of the erotic, the French conceptual and performance artist, Sophie Calle, known for her intimate explorations of personal relationships, risk taking, and chance encounters, is known for incorporating bedrooms and hotel rooms into her carnal signature aesthetic16.
VI
How’s your stats?
It’s gone eleven, I’m sat watching the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapse, on repeat.
There’s no sound on the video.
Six people are reportedly missing. The bridge sort of curls, and then folds, in an instant. I press replay, like a tick.
Han reasons in The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present (2016) that the smartphone embodies restlessness, and our over-reliance upon contingency. He coins the term “phonosapiens” (2024).
Han can get away without a smartphone though, I imagine him walking across his local park in Berlin, anonymous.
Me, I can’t even work my job without the Microsoft Authenticator app.
Watching tragedy (re)play out, other headlines surface: DUP leader resigns after sex offence charges and “My one-bed flat’s service charge’s now 16K a year”, I am tethered to this thing.
Apple reminds me that last week’s screen time was 9 hours plus per day. Another video of the bridge pop up on my feed. I wait five seconds to skip the ads, then skip them, then watch the Baltimore fire chief detail the timeline of the rescue after the collapse.
There were multiple people on the bridge, he says, and therefore presumed multiple vehicles in the water.
I boil the kettle.
On the table is a collection of books including Han’s new polemic The Crisis of Narration (2024) in which he’s rallying against “storyselling” over “storytelling” in his signature condensed, almost aphoristic, prose.
I open the fridge. Half an avocado sits on the shelf.
Our narratives have become units of information. But “[i]nformation does not permit any lingering” (Han, 2024: 19).
And this is how our stories are sold to us now, he contends. They are not stories in the traditional sense of the word. The sun is low, setting later after the Equinox. A couple are washing up in the apartment block opposite.
Another resident, who occupies an unrestricted riverside view, has blue white light on that is all too harsh. He mostly watches his 60-inch flat screen TV. Sometimes, there’s a dog in the room.
Han laments the communal fire in place of the digital screen—and our sense of continuity with it.
This is why I come back around to sexuality as a linchpin. Flesh and bones and sweat and moans.
Meatspace.
In a recent audio article I similarly rallied ‘against content’ partly because I am sick to death of hearing the word (!) but also because I had the impish idea to do something else with it, to run wild with it at gone eleven until it lost all meaning (see ‘semantic satiation’, Leon James (1962)).
Inspired by Sontag’s 1966 collection of essays, Against Interpretation, I began toying with the syllable stress of the parts of speech, in a stream-of-consciousness voice memo.
CONtent (n.) vs conTENT (adj.) CONtent (n.) vs conTENT (adj.) CONtent (n.) vs conTENT (adj.).
It seems that the noun is a CON, then, and the adjective is happy. But seriously, content-first, music second, as the new adage goes.
And you before either.
In her seminal essay, Against Interpretation (1966), Susan Sontag calls for a return to a more primal appreciation of the aesthetic object, refusing to ‘explain’ the work away and thus reduce it to its political or ideological apparatus.
We see this be engineered, of course, whenever we walk into an art gallery or museum, to be greeted with an audio guide, or an interpretive panel, rather than to let the works sink in. The utility is convenience.
The psychiatrist, writer, and former Oxford literary scholar, Iain McGilchrist17, whose life’s work has been the pursuit of his theory of the divided-brain hypothesis, (see The master and his emissary: the divided brain and the making of the Western world (2010), Against Criticism (1982), and the double totemic, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (2021)), illustrates the dogma of left-brained thought, which he regards, through his divided-brain hypothesis, his life’s work, to have permeated institutions, placing a stranglehold upon our lives. McGilchrist, in all his works, calls for an embodied antidote to what he terms reductive materialism. According to McGilchrist, the left-brain hemisphere wants to ‘grasp’ and control the world, it is about control; whereas the right-brain hemisphere wants to explore. It is intuitive, and able to tolerate ambiguity with ease, seeing ‘the bigger picture’, and it therefore holds that it is likely activated when improvising, or being immersed in flow-states. We also have feminist icon, academic, and cultural provocateur, Camille Paglia, and her many provocations on the subject.
VII
What Makes Me Tick
I do, I undo, I redo.
- Louise Bourgeoise.18
The French artist and sculptor, Louise Bourgeoise, known for her unnerving vigour and wardrobe of dark, libido-driven (even incestual) interwoven narratives, discusses ‘happiness’ and its prospective role in in her work, in conversation with Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern.
The conversations goes thus:
FM: Is it unusual for you to make happy work?”
LB: … I transform hate into love. That’s what makes me tick.
‘Hate’ may be too strong a word for many, though. Or just not the right word. It leaves me uncomfortable. Nor do I think it factors into my work. But I could substitute it for various other emotions which do.
Yet the same can’t be said for ‘love’.
Love is love.
VIII
The Book of Falling Words
When a teenager, I was routinely baffled by my elders who offered the following advice: “Do what makes you happy,” coupled with a crumpled face.
Discombobulated by the connotative dimension of what they were saying, (and their ‘spoken costume’19(Tagg, 2013)), I now get that what they were actually saying was: Whatever you do, don’t end up like me.
Do what makes you happy, then, or don’t. It’s not a reasonable ethics to live by though.
As Žižek asserts, on desire: “We don’t really want to get what we think we want” (2012: 00:54).20 And happiness tends to mask as a substitute for what we really want but cannot name (Phillips, 2013 ). Because of our blind spots when it comes to naming what we really want, we convince ourselves that we really do need that new iPhone 15 in Midnight Blue by tomorrow morning, or else; whereas our real wish may more be to return to a feeling, or a state, which eludes us, because it is already lost to us (or, in accordance with Freud, was never there in the first place) (Phillips, 2013).
Such longing is imbued in duende in Spanish, that burning intoxication associated with flamenco; saudade in Portuguese, heard in the yearning of fado, and buried in the soul of a country that has statues of poets over politicians; the Romanian word dor; and sehnsucht in German - a sensation which carries the longing, or craving, for alternative experiences, or indeed, another life.
So, we go about projecting our desires onto shiny objects (no sooner unwrapped, themselves, than bound for delayed obsolescence), which we presume will make us happy, until they don’t. The ‘happiness industry’21 then, seems doomed. Indeed, as Terry Eagleton chides:
…the concept of happiness has moved from the private sphere to the public one.
(2016: para. 2)22
Moreover, in the reputational economy, extracted from gift exchange, and naturalised by social media, it is only ever a proximal goal. We tend to suffer from buyer’s remorse. We either carry on for likes. Or we don’t. We do something else instead.
IX
Antidotes
A literary antidote to much of the above is that of the Argentine author Julio Cortázar’s Autonauts of the Cosmoroute: A Timeless Route from Paris to Marseille (2008)24, an irreverent travelogue and love story written in collaboration with his second wife, Carol Dunlop, and originally published in Spanish in 1983, under the title Los Autonautas de la cosmopista: o Un viage atemporal Paris - Marseille.
Cortázar and Dunlop set out in their VW (called Dragon, in English) journeying for 33 days to get from Paris to Marseille, on a route they had done times over, the imposition being that this time around they would allow themselves only two rest stops per day, the latter of which they would sleep at.
Friends supplied provisions at meeting points along the way. Cortázar kept ‘travel logs’, which frequently interrupt the text.
Theirs is a hymn to spontaneity, and a rejection of much of what I have written about above.
It’s a melange of observations, and an idea had, and born out, a phenomenological exercise which was anything but convenient—blending slow nomadism, literary prose, autobiography, and photography, interspersed with offbeat drawings, fond anecdotes, and adoration.
The duo’s “anti-expedition” (troubling the genre) is intimate in address, with the couple routinely calling one other by their pet names and inviting the reader into what I consider to be their ‘rearrangement of time’—revelling in imaginative daily rituals, over routine. And this, Cortázar’s final book, is considered his happiest. The experience is saddened, though, somewhat, on reading his tender postscript, for Dunlop succumbed to illness not long after they’d completed the trip, and Cortázar himself died of cancer fifteen months later, in February 1984. Below, is his postscript, written in December, 1982, complete with a drawing by illustrator Stéphane Hébert. Theirs is a call to “…live, live more intensely” (2008: 367). Cortázar wasn’t just writing, he was living.
Whilst it’s axiomatic that good writing necessitates paying attention to the world, as Simone Weil prophesied in her first book Gravity and Grace (1947), “attention is a form of prayer”, and it’s interesting that this quote is often bandied about on social media, as a literary meme. Writing can also be a distraction from and a substitute for living, or perhaps it is living. Regardless, I knew from the outset that I wanted to be an artist who lived and breathed and fucked up and made up, rather than one who wrote about living and breathing and fucking up and making up.
I'll give you my eyes, take me up, oh now please take me up
I'm helium raven waitin' for you, please take me up.
- Patti Smith “Birdland” Horses (1975)
I had been in a significant relationship with a painter, ‘D’, who had ten years on me, who had previously introduced me to Cortázar one summer, amongst other things. Prior to meeting me, D had been in love with a Spanish girl from Bilbao. Her name was Rosa. (As women, we always compare, and imagine, and how could I possibly compete when she was named after the most beautiful of flowers?!) Regardless, Rosa had, at some point, given D a CD of The Pixies’ Surfer Rosa - which was a revelation to me on hearing it - one stolen evening, but also for the cover art alone.
And D - not having a beat in his body - would hardly have come across it otherwise. So, in a sense, it was Rosa, a woman I had never met, only pictured, and not D, that was my point of entry not only to The Pixies, but also to hopscotch. And such is the life of objects.
One morning, he was leaving for work. I was wrapped in a towel (young and beautiful, but not knowing it), when he me a book off the shelf.
“What do you mean I can read it any way I like?” I called out after him, but he’d gone.
The book in question was Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1966), a stream-of-consciousness, and “counter novel”, (as the author himself described it), and the first hypertext novel; written in Paris, and originally published as Rayuela (1963) in the Spanish. It was the Panther version, below. The cover was rough to the touch, and the muted browns and creams in its design matched D, somehow, (probably not a good omen). Gauging that there were roughly three ways I could read this book: in order, by hopscotching, or however I liked; I tried the second - expecting to come to an epiphany of sorts, but no. What Cortázar was teaching me (unbeknownst to me, at the tender age of 23) was that life lay within the flicking of the pages, and my own re-routing of the narrative—I could go anywhere in this book, and I would.
Intrigued by there being no particular ending to this story, but any number of endings, or no ending at all, only possibility, or a recursive loop - I got the inkling that authorial unruliness suited me just fine. Admittedly, there was a ‘Table of Instructions’ to read the first part in a linear fashion up till Chapter 56, and to then embark upon the second half via Chapter 73, but, as I recall, I ignored this too.
X
Auras and midnights
In his seminal text, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), Walter Benjamin alerts us to the “aura” (uniqueness) of an artwork.
When I last stayed over at my brother’s, there was a vinyl copy of Midnights sat on the top shelf of the spare room in which I was sleeping. It’s a beautiful object, admittedly. Swift’s make-up, her downcast eyes, curled with black liquid liner. She’s holding a lighter, with an eternal lick. We know she doesn’t smoke, but we don’t care. She looks good. Lonely midnight blues and introspection. We’ve all been there. Her mouth; expectant. The gradation of powdery blue letters. The off-kilter angle of the flame, immortalised.
Surpassing the aura of the Midnights album cover, are, though, perhaps, the sparkly Eras Tour sets and magnificent costume changes, in between which stages are lit up and transformed into rapturous fairy tales.
Which brings me to the GRAMMYs 2024 best single being awarded to Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers” over Lana Del Rey’s A&W (original title, “American Whore”).
When I brought up Del Rey vs Swift with a friend, he said: “But who would you rather go out to dinner with?” Del Rey would either stand you up, or leave you lingering too long over a naked Negroni or two, before summoning the waitress, and implementing some moody pirouetting, whilst pontificating over the lack of real men left in this God forsaken world—but still, I’d take her over Swift any day, and see where it led me.
XI
Body Electric
Lana Del Rey’s 2012 rendition of “Body Electric” from her critically acclaimed album Born to Die (2012): The Paradise Edition (Special Version) performed with a live orchestra at BBC Radio 1’s Hackney Weekend25 in 2012, is a pounding meditation on desire.
Its the vacuity of her stare in contrast to the lyrical denotations. Her teetering, and kneeling in her tulip red dress, mic stand in hand. That voice, rising and falling, dripping and balling, all over the stage: a Dionysian delight.
In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche draws upon The Greek Tragedies to distinguish between the two opposing forces: the Apolloline and the Dionysiac, demarcating their necessary role and merger in the creative act: Übermensch - the will to power - and a template for our better selves. Nietzsche’s is art as affirmation.
It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.26
In his preface to The Gay Science (2001: 3), Nietzsche writes of a: “…sudden sense and anticipation of a future, of impending adventures, of reopened seas, of goals that are permitted and believed in again.”27
In 2019, after a interpersonal undoing, I began a series of poems called My Spiritual Cowboy, which resides on my Google Drive, and which I have long since put to bed.
Touch—the most precious of auras. Below is a poem I wrote and recorded, written at the time.
“Intimacy” (2018)
A waterfall haunts my neck. Pummelling things said. Orange blossom bubbles trail my neck. The shower—fixed— retains a constant temperature. Some people need drama in order to exist, so they create it. I sit in a pool. Algae tide like flash- backs. A lily pad flannel, floats. All we can do is itemise things. Lost soap—swirl— my hand. Chase— a bar of gold.
I’m re-watching this talk at #allofthisistemporary festival because I’m time-stamping these quotes, when Fisher, pacing about, says: “[t]he only time I’m not anxious is when I know I should be doing something else”.28
He then drops in this line on ideology, as being: “… the form of dreaming in which we live” (2016: 00:25:02).
Lucid, even poetic.
Who else would have put it that way?
XII
On walking down escalators backwards
And, the other day on drafting this, it was World Happiness Day, and I didn’t even know! Ta-da! From quantified selves to Mr. Men. Let’s lighten things up a bit around here, then.
Remember Roger Hargreaves’s series? My early Dionysian tendencies may have already been assured as Mr. Happy simply bored me! All that happiness! What could be more boring? And if I had to go out to dinner with one of these chaps, it wouldn’t be him. So who would I pick? Mr. Tickle, now, you’re talking. Dinner would certainly be interesting. But what about Mr. Bounce or Mr. Messy? Mr. Greedy or Mr Jelly? Fun, maybe, but my dream dialectic would have to be Mr. Rush and Mr. Daydream, imagine that.
Which brings me to autumn 2002. I was living in an art studio opposite Nottingham train station with a bunch of creatives all paying around £35 a week for a room. There were no shower facilities, so we used buckets, washed in the sink, or used the gym.
I rented this massive white space. All there was in it were a table, chair and a full length, stand alone mirror. I spent one afternoon positioning cacti plants around the edges of the room, and photographing it—transforming it into a vast white desert.D got the train up to see me. We argued, and he got the train back down, then turned around mid-transit. I had taken some nudes of me stood before the mirror, and put them loose in the drawer. And when he’d gone, so had they. He made out he never took the nudes. I’d been sewing sheets of toilet paper into a massive quilt. And it was spilling over the desk.
I had to get a job, so I took a temporary seasonal position at Nottingham Waterstone’s on Bridlesmith Gate. Once ensconced on the travel floor, I became aware of a funny chap who worked there. He had a laconic Antipodean drawl, and took to calling me up from the third floor.
“Good morning, Samantha.”
He then took to calling me up whenever he wasn’t doing anything else, and even when he was. One time, he walked down the escalator to get talk to me.
On his holiday, he took a whistle-stop tour of European cities and every other day, a new postcard or a photograph, defaced with handwritten marker pen, with absurd and playful messages of devotion landed on the mat. They were always signed: “Yours,...”
I’m reminded of this prompt on dating apps, that asks: “What is the most unusual gift you’ve ever received?”
One morning, on my way into work, I was walking up Clumber Street, when I looked up and saw a GIANT hand drawn MR. TICKLE. Its arms spread across the vertical glass window from the second to the seventh floor. And a strange thing happened last week. The same voice that would ring me up from the third floor, and routinely banish my boredom, fell into my ear, via a Penguin promotional video in a The Guardian review on a set of new biographies on the Australian artist Frank Moorhouse. And when my precarious contract as a bookseller came to an end, I found an unopened and complete box of Mr. Men books mysteriously housed in my locker.
Postscript
With thanks to Graham and Ray at GIOdynamics for this footage. 27/3/24.
“I Sing the Body Electric, poem by Walt Whitman, first published without a title in Leaves of Grass (1855 edition), later appearing as “Poem of the Body,” and acquiring its present title in 1867. The poem is a paean to the human form in all its manifestations of soundness. The respective vigours of male and female, youth and age are equally celebrated, and ultimately the body is equated with the soul.” Quoted from Britannica Academic. Available at: http://academic-eb-com.ezproxy1.lib.gla.ac.uk/levels/collegiate/article/I-Sing-the-Body-Electric/485228. [Accessed 20 March, 2024.
Cortázar, J. with Dunlop, C., (2008: 367) Autonauts of the Cosmoroute: A Timeless Route from Paris to Marseille. Trans. by Anne Mclean. Illustrated by Stephane Hebert. London: Telegram Books.
Graeber, D. (2018) Bullshit Jobs. London: Simon & Schuster.
The Red Hand Files, Issue 218. January, 2023.Nick Cave - The Red Hand Files - Issue #218. One of Cave’s readers writes in with: “I asked Chat GPT to write a song in the style of Nick Cave and this is what it produced. What do you think?”
Also, ‘This song sucks’: Nick Cave responds to ChatGPT song written in style of Nick Cave | Nick Cave | The Guardian, calling it “bullshit”.
“All of This is Temporary. Mark Fisher”. (2016) [YouTube]. Added by cci collective. Available at: <https://youtube.com/watch?v=deZgzw0YHQI>. [Accessed 10 December 2021].
James, W. 1891, The principles of psychology, London: Macmillan and Co.
The MOFO project/object (4 Disc) - Frank Zappa. ‘Project object’ is a term invented by Frank Zappa to describe ‘conceptual continuity’ or recurring themes/characters occurring across his albums.
Han, B. & Butler, E. 2015, The burnout society, Stanford Briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.
Han. B. (2017) Psychopolitics, Neoliberalism and new technologies of power. London: Verso.
Binyam, M. (2022) The Paris Review. “You pose a problem. A Conversation with Sara Ahmed” Available at: <http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2022/01/14/you-pose-a-problem-a-conversation-with-sara-ahmed/>. [Accessed 29 March, 2024.]
Prager, B. (2007) The cinema of Werner Herzog: aesthetic ecstasy and truth. Wallflower, London.
Grubbs, D. (2014), Records ruin the landscape: John Cage, the sixties, and sound recording, Duke University Press, Durham.
Hyde, L. (1983[1945]) The gift: Imagination and the erotic life of property. New York: Vintage.
David Lynch on Where Great Ideas Come From - YouTube. (2017). Added by The Atlantic. Available at: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFsBaa_MEzM>. [Accessed 30 March, 2020]
Lorde, A. (1978) “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”. Available at: lorde8x2sided.pdf (feministarchive.org).
‘The Hotel, Room 47‘, Sophie Calle, 1981 | Tate. Available at: <www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/calle-the-hotel-room-47-p78300>. Accessed 26 March, 2024.
McGilchrist, I. 1982, Against criticism, Faber, London.
McGilchrist, I. 2010, The master and his emissary: the divided brain and the making of the Western world, Paperback []. edn, Yale University Press, New Haven.
McGilchrist, I. 2021, The matter with things: our brains, our delusions, and the unmaking of the world, Perspectiva Press, London.
“Louise Bourgeois: ‘I transform hate into love'.” (2016) Tate. Available at: <http://tate.org.uk/art/artists/louise-bourgeois-2351/louise-bourgeois-transform-hate-love>. [Accessed 15 March, 2024].
Tagg, P. (2013) Music’s meanings. “Vocal persona”. Available at: <https://tagg.org/bookxtrax/NonMuso/NM10-Vox.pdfNM10-Vox.fm> (tagg.org) (Pp. 343-383)
“‘Vocal costume’ is a metaphorical expression meaning those aspects of phonation serving the three same sorts of function as literal costumes do: [1] to more easily carry out a particular activity; [2] to assume a role or to act a part; [3] to signal a particular group identity and/or to con‐ form to a given set of cultural norms. Vocal costumes are something people put on like clothes for any or all of the reasons just mentioned.” (Tagg, 2013: 360).
“Slavoj Žižek. Why be happy when you could be interesting? Big Think.” (2012) Added by Big Think. Available at: <http://youtu.be/U88jj6PSD7w> [Accessed 20 August, 2023].
Davis, W. (2015) The Happiness Industry: How Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being. London: Verso.
Eagleton, T. (2016) ‘The Happiness Industry by William Davies review – why capitalism has turned us into narcissists’. The Guardian. [Accessed 20 March 2024].
Vasof, A. (2018) The Book of Falling Words. [Vimeo] Available at: <http://vimeo.com/249509619>. [Accessed 19 March, 2024].
Cortázar, J. with Dunlop, C., (2008) Autonauts of the Cosmoroute: A Timeless Route from Paris to Marseille. Trans. by Anne Mclean. Illustrated by Stephane Hebert. London: Telegram Books.
Lana Del Rey. Body Electric. Live at BBC Radio 1’s Hackney Weekend Lana Del Rey. (2012). [YouTube]. Added by Sebastian Isla. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGezT1gxE-A. [Accessed 20 July 2023].
Nietzsche, F.W., Tanner, M. & Whiteside, S. 1993, The birth of tragedy out of the spirit of music, Penguin Books, London. This quote is taken from Chapter 5.
Nietzsche, F.W. (2001) The Gay Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
See footnote 6.
This post is pure gold. So much to unpack. Thank you.
Gary, I have to tweak that typo. I noticed it the other day as I’d printed all the posts out and was going through them. Thanks for the reminder! I’m a big fan of McGilchrist’s rallying against reductive materialism & managerialism etc, but also for his gesturing towards re-enchantment. He actually goes as far as to say much if what is going off mirrors right-hemisphere brain damage. As for Portugal, the walk hasn’t really left me. I hope to visit again soon.