Land Rent and Surplus Value

I am four hours and some odd minutes away from the minute of my birth. Forty-nine years have I been alive, some days more so than others. And here I sit in my whore’s skirt with a penchant for bologna, beans and Bacon’s triptychs. Now it is some twelve hours past my arrival into this world, twelve hours of fretting over a presentation to be presented tomorrow on Ricardo and Marx, land-rent and surplus value. Fucking capitalist swine! Surplus value=capital interest, a Marxist stick in the eye, bastards. Good night and may clods rest.

The Other Columbian

Okay, so Rod taps up to the ringleader and belts him one in the mouth, a kilo of heroin juggernauting into the air, Rod grinning like a gibbon. The other Columbian, the one with the gold necklaces and bad skin takes a swipe at Rod, who sidesteps him and upturns the table sending talc and baby laxative all over the place. The other, other Columbian, the one with fenny teeth and chancy eyes pulls a carbine from the back of his trousers and says, ‘fucking fuck, now look what you’ve done.’ Rod knees him in the mons Venus and says, ‘over-acting eh, I’ll friggin show you over-acting,’ and throws an elbow into the side of his jaw, feet tapping like a dervish on PCP. I awaken with my feet callipered in my sheets, check to make sure my poster of Sidney Poitier is still on the wall at the foot of my bed, and place my feet on the floor gingerly.

The Dream

Last night I dreamt I worked in a gentlemen’s club with Rod Steiger. He was dressed in a light blue pullover, rayon slacks and wearing scuffed tap-shoes. He kept pushing up against me like he wanted to tell me something important. His face was grayfish pale with flecks of blue and turquoise. His chest hair was frizzed and stuck out like boxtwine. He said he never met a woman he didn’t like, though some were skinnier and others fatter and some just plain frail, and preferred redheads to brunettes. When I asked him why he over-acted he replied, ‘fuck you blond boy, it ain’t none of your damn business!’ The Columbian drug dealers who were cutting heroin on a table in the corner by the imported beer whispered, ‘shush, or we’ll blow your brains all over the fucking Heineken’.

Heroin and Heineken

The Evil Genius Inside Me

There is an evil genius living in my shoulder and in the corset of my back. He is the villainy that crushes the discs in my neck, the degeneration; the ramshackle. I awaken with the bones in my neck tamped like sheared nails, my postured limited to crouching and hunkering. I am a curvature. Should this continue, which it will regardless of my writ to the contrary, I will surely curve into a perfect C, thereby dispensing with the need to imposture once and forever.

Pork Bellies and Hedges

This is the new world, the same old new world they promised us, the one they made out of string and clothes pins. This is the same old world with the same old promises, the new world that they promised us, the one they made out of string and clothes pins. This is the world they built out of electronic money and banknotes, pork bellies and hedges. This is the world they built out of sneakers and handbags, the world they built on curved spines and missing fingers. The world they built out of towers and shinning glass, out of slums and barrios. This is their world, not mine.

William Utermohlen

Artist charts his slide into dementia, Galerie Beckel Odille Boicos, Paris.Six self-portraits by artist William Utermohlen chronicle his experience with Alzheimer's disease.Utermohlen was diagnosed at the age of 60.The first in this series (top left) was painted in 1996, just prior to diagnosis. By David Derbyshire (29/06/2001) © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005

Not Even Close

This is all new to me, this newness. This is not what I supposed it to be, not even close. Why this and not that, or that and not this? I am stymied. Why is it that one thing is this and another that, or one that and not this? I am confused, addled, not quite with it. Where to begin when all the beginnings are the same, identical and interchangeable? This is not supposed to happen, this battlement and confusion. I once saw a man with a pole for a leg; he scrabbled across the top of the pavement like a match, a fiery cockscomb in his wake. When I asked him why he had a pole for a leg he answered, because there were no new legs to be had, so I jimmy-rigged this one out of a mop handle and yoke. I see, I said, not wanting to make eye contact with him, a mop handle and yoke, very industrious indeed. He winked at me, the folds in his eyelids snapping, and headed up the pavement, his pole-leg waking and corseting. I looked down at my legs, the left one then the right and said, I’m close, very close, but not quite there, not yet at least.

The Table The Chair The Vestibule

The day began with me thinking that Descartes was a buffoon, a comical evil savant. As the day drew on (against my protestations to the contrary) I felt more affectionate towards the father of modern philosophy, even though my reason cautioned me against it. Once I allowed the trappings and hogtied(ness) of my epistemic self to loosen up a wee bit, a fraction perhaps, I came to the conclusion (something, conclusions, I seldom have, or come to for that matter) that he wasn’t such a bad fellow after all, in fact I began to like him, in an unreasonable sort of way. Fuck the wax and ions, the molecules and extended substances, screw the table the chair the vestibule and the foyer, maybe Descartes was on to something, and I, being such a caddish philosopher, had to admit I was mistaken, a buffoon, an evil savant with a head cold and a bad sense of sense.

Mazlov's Pyramid

Children in Purgatory

That glint in your eye that summons me up from the depths where the penitents weep into the sacs of their eyes; children in purgatory; ice flows in mastoids; the witness that is life lived in absentia. You will understand when there is nothing left to understand, the logos forgotten, the reason for knowing lost to forgetfulness, bad memory and weeping eyes.

My Neck As Seen Through Xray Glasses

Rickets and Spondylosis

The cramping has started in the legs, high up in the thighs and along the ridge-muscle. They told me about this but I suppose I wasn’t listening, not yet at least. They said it would get worse, the pain and ache and palsy and rickets, but I didn’t listen, didn’t want to hear what they had to say. There is very little I can do to assuage the pain such as it is, so I must put up with it, learn to live with the pain and ache and palsy. My toes, they’re okay so far, so I suppose I am blessed. When they start to go I’m doomed. I need my toes to balance myself with, as keels or rudders; without them I’ll be lost, keeling over, and that I will never do. Before that happens I will be done with my toes all together, have them removed, incised from my feet and thrown willy-nilly into the trash heap where my other body parts are, the ones that have worn out and are of no use to me anymore.

Willem de Kooning

Red-Blueness

Invariably there are too many variables, and this in itself is invariable. A sky, for instance, is a variance of blues, cobalt, cerulean, indigo, Prussian and so forth, a blueness that is variable yet invariable. Outpost the blue, relegate it to a red square and you end up with a blueness enshrouded in a red-redness, a variance of blue, red, blueness, redness and blue-redness. We cannot experience the blue without experiencing the red, allowing it into our perceptual field, our blue-redness, our red-blueness and so forth. The invariance is found in the variance of the invariability, the constancy of thought turned in on itself, an inversion, as would have it, a random constancy of thought. In this manner we are left with, or are brought to, a random series of reoccurring events over which we have so little control, as the invariance of their variability inverts the very possibility of knowing what the variance is. The constancy is found in the randomness, the invariance of the variance, the possibility that the same thing, the same event, object in our perceptual field will occur again, bring us back into the constancy of thought, the holding of the thought, the blueness, the red-blueness, the blue-redness in thought, even if just for a moment, a brief moment. Solipsistic, yes, perhaps so, but a constancy of solipsistic thought, a variance, a possibility, a fleeting image, object, event, happening crossing into out perceptual field, into the random reoccurrence of our lives, our made-up lives.

Nothing