I went to see Moonage Daydream yesterday. I won’t try and describe what happened then. As usual, whenever something involving Bowie happens I find myself getting into every corner of myself, so much so that it’s clearer than ever how weird, cowed and destructive the idea of myself actually can be. It was good.
I want to say something instead about the preceding half an hour. That time in the cinema before what I want to watch happens. I’m a far less frequent visitor to cinemas than I once was, so that when I do go I tend to be struck by what has happened to that half hour or so.
It’s become something that disgusts me. I want to spit it out like a bite of a rotten apple.
All I see are the pained bodies of people who seem more cut off from themselves than ever. People filming themselves doing things I can only imagine they might barely remember (because they are filming themselves) or driving cars as if in a monochrome dream. Trying to think through any of this is trying to make sense of psychosis. Try this instead and see what it makes you think:
Reading Donnel Stern’s Unformulated Experience (2003) over the weekend I found myself bumping up against a familiar thought. There are few people able to write about those thinkers usually categorised as ‘post-structuralist’, and very few of them are psychoanalysts.
Post-structuralism, like all the -isms, means far less (I agree it has to mean something) than it points to: a tendency towards mastery, control, synthesis, call it what you will, that suits universities in their commercial activities;. Writers like Derrida and Foucault become complicating nodes in some kind of a Big Thinking project, revisionists of how life happens, authors for the academics who embrace ismitis (a terrible complaint), rather than writers who wrote for anybody.
Stern’s clinical thinking is a great help. The alliances he forms with characters like Merleau-Ponty I find far less so. Unformulated Experience has one reference, for example, to Husserl (p. 253), which in the context of discussing experience seems rather like forgetting to tell a visitor to London that the Underground map is not drawn to scale.
Something like that. A distortion. Difference. You need to spend a lot of time with someone like Foucault, or Derrida; and then with other people who have tried to do the same, before you can have anything to say. Wouldn’t an analyst think that? Following the connecting power of –ism is to allow a rot to set in.
I listen to David Lynch’s weather report most nights. I remember watching his films when I was young and feeling sometimes so disturbed that I couldn’t sleep. These days his reports help me sleep. Whatever happened?
Those who know me well will understand I have a certain fascination for the game of cricket. (I believe cricket is far more a game than a sport, sport usually seeming very boring to me.) I enjoy cricket’s capacity not to conform to what usually passes as a sport: that is a kind of plug in activity which does all it can to distance itself from the effects of the weather, the crowd and so on so that the competitors are able to do their thing. Cricket does almost the opposite. Matches are delayed because of the rain (regularly). The ball is designed to behave differently depending on how wet the grass is, or how soft it is. Pigeons, dogs and tigers have stopped play. In fact special laws have been devised to account for animals interfering with play – or for stubborn things like oak trees that are allowed to remain within the field of play (which happens even at almost the highest level of the sport).
Cricket has umpires who apply and interpret laws, rather than rules. These days they are aided by technology which, because of the kinds of decision they are asked to make, only seems to make the process of deliberation more complicated. An umpire misjudging the direction of a ball is one thing; discovering how impossible it is for technology, interpreted by people, to do much better is another. … or for that matter to realise how wrong many umpires have consistently been (LBW decisions, where a batter gets their leg or some other body part in the way of the ball and the stumps, now being regularly awarded to off-spin bowlers whereas in the past these were rarely believed to be possible).
Anyway. This is all a kind of preamble to a thought about what makes people tick. To tick like the most extraordinary watch, a hyper-chronographic atomic marvel of a thing that delights not just in its reliability but in its flair. A watch like a suit by Cristobel Balenciaga.
An English batter, Johnny Bairstow, recently performed some ultra-extraordinary feats. He put them down to ‘me being me’. Not to be distracted by pundits, technicians and coaches who may have known a lot about cricket but in the end knew very little about him. For him to tick he needed to work with people who knew what made him tick. I watched him bat and saw someone less tense, more immediate, more decisive, more powerful and more inventive. More assured. Even when he made a mistake he then did something that seemed to stop it continuing as a mistake might (the effects of mistakes can in fact be wonderful).
Life is full of people who will tell you how to do life, but be careful of listening to people who haven’t taken the time to know you. Their take on life simply may not fit. And as anyone who enjoys clothes will tell you, any suit that doesn’t fit is a problem, but the ones that almost fit yet don’t are the worst. They blur something.
Any cricketers out there, I would love to work with you.
