PERSONAL AND STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL

Stopping the Clocks: Ten Theses on Writing

1.

[bird screeching] 
[ambient music playing] [wind whistling] [bird screeches] [Gus laughs] [indistinct chatter]
— Expats, Season One, Ep. 2 “Mongkok”

Describe your creative process. Be honest. Share your doubts, your struggles, your innermost thoughts. Quote the writers you most admire. Mention Paris. Insert a stock image of raindrops on a window, a closeup of a flower, a lollipop, or a word you find especially powerful.

Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash

2.

“All clouds are clocks—even the most cloudy of clouds.” — Sir Karl Raimund Popper

Plus ça change: Paris is and always will be a layer cake, a millefeuille of causalities and chaoses. It sits on its cracked plate under its smoked glass cloche and it is indescribably beautiful, and you want to sink your teeth into it, but you don’t have a fork and the French use spoons (did you know this?) and you can’t use your hands because only brutes and tourists walk the streets of Paris shovelling food into their disgusting maws. So what do you do? You keep your grubby hands in your pockets and you move on—“Circulez, il n'y a rien à voir ici”—and things move along with you, or against you, through the void, following their pre-determined path, but every so often they swerve. This (thus) is where personal responsibility comes from. The swerve. The more precisely you can predict my movements, the less precisely you can predict where I am. And vice versa. Information gets entangled or absorbed in other things. There is (thus) little point in encouraging a safe set of habitual actions. Forget breakfast, it’s over, lunch will come and go, and dinner, too. You can predict probabilities, the likelihood or unlikelihood of this or that possible or impossible outcome, but only when you know all the terms, and you never know all the terms. So you lose what you know or thought that you knew. It decoheres. The clocks get lost in the clouds.

Let’s start with what is not here, then. These disappeared polyps, my me, your you, lobbed-off lobes excised from existence. It’s a pleasant state of affairs. The Greeks called it ekstasis, standing outside oneself. Mental health experts call it dissociation. I call it interference—disrupting the message, erecting barricades, lighting fires, stacking projectiles.

It’s a way of waiting.

Can time stand still, can time stop? I have no gift for evoking what is inside me, my emotions, my thoughts and feelings, and even less for evoking those of other people, their insides, or their outsides. If I tell you that my saliva mounts in my throat like a wave swollen by melting icecaps, that my teeth are like sheep just shorn, grazing on the hills above Hebron, what would you do with this information?

3.

“Every day brings a chance for you to draw in a breath, kick off your shoes, and dance.”
― Oprah Winfrey

Stambali is a trance state practiced in Tunisia by populations from sub-Saharan Africa and in Israel by Jewish-Tunisian immigrants. It is similar to the Sufi-Aïssâoua trance dances I described here:

Ravel, unravel...

Like the Moroccan form, a Stambali trance state is induced in the initiates by accelerating the tempo of the music and the speed of the dancers’ thrashing heads, arms, hips and legs. Dissociated eroticism and aggression ensue. Followed by the departure of the possessing saint or demon, and a convulsive loss of consciousness.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
― Maya Angelou

What the dancer does, said Merce Cunningham, is the most realistic of all possible things. “The fortunate thing in dancing is that space and time cannot be disconnected, and everyone can see and understand that. A body still is taking up just as much space and time as a body moving... To pretend that a man standing on a hill could be doing everything except just standing is simply divorce—divorce from life, from the sun coming up and going down, from clouds in front of the sun, from the rain that comes from the clouds and sends you into the drugstore for a cup of coffee, from each thing that succeeds each thing. Dancing is a visible action of life.”

Whoever does not dance, said Lucian, does not know what will happen.

Nemo fere saltet sobrius, nisi forte insanit, said Cicero. No one dances soberly unless he has lost his senses. And only those who could not hear the music thought those seen dancing to it insane. Nietzsche.

Did Jesus dance?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, 
How can we know the dancer from the dance? 
—William Butler Yeats

Knowing one from the other is dead easy: the dance is a set or random sequence of rhythmic movements triggered by music; the dancer is the person who performs the set or the sequence. Yeats died playing charades—died of a heart attack playing a game of charades—did you know this? Stiffened like a scarecrow, twitching and jerking something terrible, and the other people playing kept guessing even after he slumped dead to the floor.

Do not accept the world as you find it; transform it into your own. This is what I have learned. This is what I want to share. This is what it means to be human. We are born in the mud, but we pull ourselves out of it. We cut down the forest and build our houses in the clearing. We turn trees into boats and ride upon the water. We make music from bird song, from the babble of brooks, from the bob of logs.

4.

To be free and alive is a wonderful thing
to do what you wanna do
just because you're you
that's your special appeal
you show how you feel
you care about the shape you're in
wonderful wonderful wonderbra
—Wonderbra, 1979

This present document was prepared with thorough access to various registries and historical records. It does not constitute an official history. Its primary objective is to bring diverse texts and artifacts into a usable anamnesis. Other released documents may be combined with the present provided that all invariant sections of the original are included and unmodified. Multiple identical invariant sections may be replaced with a single copy. A compilation of the document or its derivatives with other separate and independent documents or works, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an "aggregate" if the copyright resulting from the compilation is not used to limit the legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. When the document is included in an aggregate, this does not apply to the other works in the aggregate which are not themselves derivative works of the document.

5.

Dragging our unproductive plows down this sterile shore.
Try to quit, the scabrous craving to write
(a bad habit, fatal for many)
Seizes you in its ambitious snare
Grows chronic in your deranged brain.
—Juvenal

In the scholastic tradition, the cellula phantastica, located just inside the forehead and tethered to the optic nerves at the point where they chiasmically intersect, is the cerebral chamber in which sensory data is fashioned into luminous visions—“visual spirits”—that are pushed out to the retinas and at the same time etched onto the inner walls of the cerebellum. This is the source of dreams and the seat of the imagination. Whitman mentions it in Specimen Days & Collect. William Blake, in Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Great Albion, called it the “furnace of Los.” He believed that its sensory messages and spiritual truths were conveyed by larks.

William Blake, Night Startled by the Lark, 1816 - 1820

Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers. You certainly mistake, when you say that the visions of fancy are not to be found in this world. To me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination.

Delivered on the wings of songbirds. O that it were! An exaltation of skylarks! Hark, Hark, the Lark! Ethereal minstrel! Pilgrim of the sky!

6.

“Musicians are the antennae of the race,” said Ezra Pound, his voice a high quavering whine. He was a towering blaze, a redheaded flame rising and dancing in the night. Even people who saw through him, who knew he was a fascist and a fraud and a fool, even they were smitten. He was American, he had that American bounce and swagger, but he embraced something bigger, a public history that spread far beyond America’s puny shores.

He was not afraid to look at the surface of things and stop, examine only that which was directly present before his beady red eyes. “What is important is what is there,” he liked to say, pointing a long bony finger, “the beauty that is there.” His whole Agassiz shtick with the fish:

Post-Graduate Student: "That's only a sunfish."

Agassiz: "I know that. Write a description of it."

After a few minutes the student returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichtherinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject.

Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish.

The student produced a four-page essay. Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.

He gave his life to his art. He gave art to his life. Melopeia, phanopeia, and mythopeia. Language charged with meaning. You never heard him saying, “Oh, the heart! Oh, soft, my love!” You never heard him bemoaning, “I can't go on! I must go on!” You never heard him sentimentalizing. None of that. Pound lived! In the past, yes—“damn this botched world!”—but alive to its every tremor.

The Brain is just the weight of God -
For - Heft them - Pound for Pound -
And they will differ - if they do -
As Syllable from Sound –
—Emily Dickinson

But he was not a thinker. He was an enthusiast. His ideas were pointless or beside the point. In the realm of what is what, he was a popularizing stooge. Wonderfully entertaining, useful even, but a stooge in a giant necktie and a huge flopping velvet beret, his pockets filled to bursting with chicken bones and bits of meat that he handed out to stray cats. He felt no love for these cats, he would never stroke one. Neither did he feel love for the women he sat on his knee and kissed on the forehead. Watching him move and fuss, like a baby, a bundle of nervous responses, a repertoire of frolics and larking about.

After the war they wanted to see him swing. Instead, he was locked up in St Liz. Do what you will, they said. Make of him what you want. We wash our hands.

Then, released, returned to exile, pounding out his Cantos in the brightly dappled Italian sunlight. A madman perhaps (“I found out after 70 years I was not a lunatic but a moron”), but more important, a sacrifice, a proud, braying beast forced up the electrified ramp of the slaughterhouse, punched with a bolt to the brain, dropped into the blood-soaked trough of history, into its dark, whirling blades.

7.

Anamnesis? As in what, recollection? Memorial sacrifice?

Or something transdermal perhaps? And how, precisely, is an anamnesis usable? Serviceable, passable, navigable? Sounds like transubstantiation. Do this in memory of me. Do what? Do something. Make something. Think something. Think and Do — that was the name of the textbooks in the boxes on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald’s rifle was a favourite among big game hunters in Africa. A 6.5 Manlicher bullet to the head will take down the biggest in the herd. Did you know this? Is it important? I’m finding it more difficult to separate what matters from what doesn’t. Who decides? Last night, Frank, who knocks on my door most nights and whom I wrote to you about almost two years ago, ripped the top two feet off a plant in one of the boxes out front. “I was helping you,” he said. “I know plants.” The bent-over man was outside again too, no shopping cart or shopping bags, banging his right foot against the trunk of my maple tree. I tried to give him money, but he wouldn’t look up. “Don’t be proud,” I said. I went back later and put some coins on a tin of cassoulet and placed it on the sidewalk in front of him.

“Cassoulet makes me fart,” he said. His first words to me ever. “Cassoulet me fait péter.”

The drunk next to me at the bar last night, also named Frank, face down most of the evening until suddenly he pulled himself erect, retrieved his false teeth from the bar, slipped them into his mouth, drained his beer, and chewed off the rim of the glass.

“What are you looking at?”

“You,” I said. “What else?”

He laughed, spluttering glass.

What, precisely. The eighth circle of hell? Or some other pirouetting orbit. He wasn’t even looking at me. Addressing me, my eyes, but looking right through me. Like I wasn’t there.

I saw a man gnashing his teeth and barking like a dog yesterday, another dancing down the sidewalk half-naked, carrying a filthy mattress on the top of his head. Another convulsing, face contorted in grimaces, screaming obscenities.

“Make it new,” said Pound, but how? Take me and you out of the equation, that’s how. You need to move the public, break their hearts, make them leap to their feet and pump their fists with joy or hate, not boob tube them into catatonic submission. Real people, real emotions. Cut the lists and the cheap effects. Stop telegraphing every move. Lower the boom on the casual facts, the creative imagination, the will to believe. Cut to the chase.

“It’ll grow back,” said Frank about the plant. He’s right of course. It will grow back. And then it will die.

8.

“All classes are equal six feet underground.” — Barthélemy, Nouvelle Némésis, no . 12, "La Vapeur" (Paris , 1845)

The line above comes from the “Social Movement” section of Walter Benjamin’s historical materialist study of 19th-century Paris:

Railroad poetry:
To a station 'neath the rails everybody is bound . 
Wherever the train crisscrosses the land, 
There's no more distinction twixt humble and grand
All classes are equal six feet underground.

The quatrain appears just after another one clipped from a different Barthélemy ditty, about the moment in Paris, in 1830, during the Second French Revolution, when armed men simultaneously fired upon clocktowers around the city to stop the progress of time and make the revolutionary moment last forever.

Who would believe it! 
It is said that, incensed at the hour, 
Latter-day Joshuas, at the foot of every clocktower, 
Were firing on clock faces to make the day stand still.

Killing time. Shooting it dead. The reference is biblical: Joshua, while waging battle with the Canaanites, called upon God to give his soldiers more deadly daylight, by halting the sun and the moon: Joshua said to the Lord in the presence of Israel, “Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the Valley of Aijalon.” And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies.

Joshua 10:12-14. According to Joshua 5:2–9, all the Israelites that came out of Egypt were circumcised, but those “born in the wilderness” were not. Arel is the Hebrew word for “uncircumcised” and for “one who stammers as with a foreskin over his lips” and “one who has a foreskin on his ears and cannot receive divine instruction.” This is where the phrase “uncircumcised heart” comes from: “Circumcise yourselves to the Lord, circumcise your hearts, you men of Judah and people of Jerusalem, or my wrath will break out and burn like fire because of the evil you have done.” (Jeremiah 4:4-7): Stephanos, the first martyr, the first witness, shouted at the Sanhedrin, “You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, just like you fathers, you resist and resist and resist!” And the old men ground their teeth and Stephanos gazed into the sky, and he saw the heavens open, and he saw Jesus standing at the right hand of God; and he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and I see Jesus standing at the right hand of God.” And the Sanhedrin screamed and stuffed their thumbs in their ears and rushed at him and cast him out of the city and smashed his head to bits with rocks.

9.

What characterizes revolutionary classes at their moment of action is the awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode. — Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1940

Chat GPT. Chat j'ai pété. AI has the French talking to their pets about their most embarrassing bodily functions. What’s next? You should tear up the proprietary information agreement. Transparency is necessary if we are to have credibility. To “explain everything now” is impossible. Better to do a little with certainty and leave the rest for those who will follow. In time, we are going to have people complaining all over the place that they did not have the opportunity to challenge anything. What is more, we need to protect ourselves.

I wanted to underline that last phrase—”we need to protect ourselves”—to emphasize its importance, but Substack does not have an underlining feature. Why? Bold for weaker emphasis, italics for stronger, yes, but no underlining except for the links? “If used properly,” I’ve just read, “these formatting tags reduce bounce rate and increase average visit duration.” What exactly are these tech bros and their minions up to and on about? Especially the tiresome minions. Underlinings are one thing. Underlings something else entirely. Who do they work for? They don’t seem to know who to point their weapons at and who to let pass. A Turing test requires that the first human being be incapable of distinguishing between the second human being and the machine “by using the replies to the questions he (sic) puts to both.” Are you the machine, or am I the machine, or are they the machines? I’m pretty sure I’m not the machine. I can still feel my heartbeat. I can still hear my blood boil.

You, as far as I can tell, can’t hear or feel shit. Conspiracy, as Henry Kissinger once said, means breathing together. Have you checked your respiration? You couldn’t fog a mirror.

You? You who?

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.
—Maya Angelou

From denotation to detonation:

The consciousness of exploding the continuum of history is peculiar to the revolutionary classes in the moment of their action. The Great Revolution [of 1789] introduced a new calendar. The day on which the calendar started functioned as a historical time-lapse camera. And it is fundamentally the same day which, in the shape of holidays and memorials, always returns. The calendar does not therefore count time like clocks…Yet in the July Revolution an incident took place which did justice to this consciousness. During the evening of the first skirmishes, it turned out that the clock-towers…

What if the machine puts the questions to the two human beings? Or if all three contestants are machines?

Is it time for a new calendar? Walt Whitman, “Salut au Monde!”,1856:

What cities the light or warmth penetrates I penetrate those cities myself, 
All islands to which birds wing their way I wing my way myself. 

And then, the last quatrain:

Toward you all, in America's name, 
I raise high the perpendicular hand, I make the signal, 
To remain after me in sight forever, 
For all the haunts and homes of men. 

We, too, penetrated those cities and winged our way to all islands and raised high the perpendicular hands. We, too, made the signals. Will anything we did stay in sight forever? Aesop, that great man, Montaigne tells us, saw his master pissing as he walked along the road. “Are we really in such a hurry?” said Aesop. “What’s next? Will we have to shit while we run?”

10.

And, by God, 
we would have changed it all, 
changed it so they couldn't 
have changed it back 
in a hundred years, 
if only... 
—Richard Milhous Nixon, 1974

Henry Kissinger, Al Haig tells us, said that between January 17, 1949, his last day in a US Navy Captain’s uniform, and January 21, 1969, the day he entered the Oval Office in a brand-new navy-blue Brooks Brothers suit, Richard Milhous Nixon wrote “PERSONAL AND STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL” and “Not for publication either in whole or in part” in large letters across the top of “every fucking sheet of paper put before him.” This begs. Would there have been a point to writing this phrase across “every fucking sheet of paper put before him”? Would it have stopped people from reading, citing, or sharing whatever was written on the page? Of course not. As this “present document” confirms. But let’s say, for argument’s sake, that the science is right, that reality, written down and fully revealed or not, is malleable, that sensible things can and must include contradictory attributes, appearances aren’t “accidents”, entanglements do refute the principle of locality, that there are orbits inside orbits and dancers within dances and action at a distance is not sheer and utter horseshit. Then it follows that we are duty-bound to make certain exhortations along the way.

This is not for you. Don’t read this. Close your eyes. Walk away. Stop.

If only to protect people. From it, from themselves, from each other. But “PERSONAL AND STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL?” “Not for publication either in whole or in part”? I never saw this written on a Nixon document. And “every fucking sheet of paper put before him”? Kissinger used the word “fucking” but not often, and this would have been expunged from the record. ⟨ Expletive deleted⟩

The whole thing sounds suspect.

Furthermore, Pat Nixon was a dancer, a ballroom extra in Becky Sharp and a chorus girl in The Great Ziegfeld. She danced in Small Town Girl and Dancing Pirate. She had terrific legs, but she was no limp-minded Listerine girl, no white-gloved empty head. She was a hard worker. She swept floors, kept books, drove a delivery van, managed a pharmacy. She was a typist and an x-ray technician and a telephone operator. She taught high school. She did not worry about who she was or what she wanted. She was busy and she kept busy, and she had no time for shirkers.

Furthermore:

(i) envelopes and boxes may only be opened by the designated recipient(s);

(ii) electronic documents should be properly protected against access by others;

(iii) documents may not be copied and are not to be passed to a third party without prior authority from the sender and recipient.

Ok?

Thank you for reading. Thank you for believing in me. Thank you for leading righteous lives. Thank you for shaving your heads and wearing the overalls. Thank you for tithing me a tenth of your income. 

Thank you.

PS: The particular “swerve” this piece took was caused by this morning’s breakfast with my friend Richard Siegal, the fabulous dancer, choreographer and founder of Cologne’s Ballet of Difference.

From his Ted Talk (link below): “I started dancing because, well, that's just what we do. We were dancing before we knew about art. We were dancing before we knew about rhythm and meter. We were dancing before we knew about method, technique… We dance, we dance, we dance. This is just what we do. We're creatures who dance. And I believe that when we're watched, when we perform for others, our dancing becomes electric and vivified, and we become powerful beyond measure.”

Please watch.