do something

On foot to Brancaccio, a notoriously disaffected suburb just south of the old city of Palermo, towards the church of Padre Giuseppe ‘Pino’ Puglisi: a Roman Catholic priest who in the early 1990s was outspoken in his criticism of the church for its silence towards organized crime, and openly confronted the pervasive mafia presence in his San Gaetano parish. 

As a community priest renowned for his patience and good humour, Puglisi focused on trying to foster the cultural and social conditions for a gradual erosion of fearful acquiescence and omertà, establishing recreational facilities and educational support for young people that affirmed possibilities other than that of criminality, and, from the pulpit, quietly insisting on the incompatibility of Christian values with criminal activity. 

Provocatively in this context, he marked the anniversary of Paolo Borsellino’s death with a commemorative mass, and invited members of the Antimafia Commission to a school debate. In the face of repeated threats, he refused donations for religious festivals from those in odore di mafia, and rejected a mafia construction contract for church repairs; the doors of the church were firebombed. 

Finally, on the morning of 15 September 1993, his 56^th birthday, the embattled priest was shot at close range outside his home beside the church. According to one of his killers who turned state witness after arrest, as they approached him he smiled and said, “I have been expecting you” ('Me lo aspettavo’). His well-known rhetorical question, an interrogative challenge to inertia, passivity and tacit complicity that is still associated with him, was taken up and echoed in graffiti around Brancaccio and elsewhere: “E sé qualcuno fa qualche cosa?” ('And what if someone were to do something?')

In the summer of 2012, the Vatican formally recognised Puglisi’s ‘martyrdom’, and set in motion the process of his beatification as a saint.

---

listen

One can look at seeing.
One can’t hear hearing.
Can one listen to listening?

I asked you to come so that we might talk about it. I asked you to come so as not to be alone in thinking about it.

Last summer, I wrote the following fragment. It started out as a map of the mechanics of hearing. Hearing is not at all the same as listening, I know, but hey it’s a start:

“Auditory canal to tympanic membrane to the chain of auditory ossicles (hammer, anvil, stirrup) to the labyrinths of the inner ear and the cochlea (snail). An epic micro-trajectory through membraneous, bony and fluid connectivities involved in the process of ‘transduction’ – that is, the translation of the complex frequencies and intensities of sound waves into electro-chemical signals. The intimate immensity of these intricate architectures, and the poetics of their namings: hammer, anvil, stirrup, snail. The construction of surreal conjunctions, assemblages of the organic and inorganic, the artisanal, the disciplinary and the animal. The rhythms and sounds of the points of contact in a smithy’s forge, in equestrian training, in the passage of a snail, and the trace in its wake”.

Noise is the forest of everything. Some people hear music in the heart of noise. And sound itself is surrounded by its own sound.

There are many ways to listen.

“Words are everywhere, inside me, outside of me … I hear them, no need to hear them, no need of a head, impossible to stop them, impossible to stop. I’m in words, made of words, others’ words, what others … the whole world is here with me, I’m in the air, the walls, the walled-in one, everything yields, opens, ebbs, flows, like flakes. I’m all these flakes, meeting, mingling, falling asunder, wherever I go I find me, leave me, go towards me, come from me, nothing ever but me, a particle of me, retrieved, lost, gone astray, I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their setting, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet …” (Beckett)

The wireless imagination … Voices surface, peel off, tone after tone, tones stored in history: his master’s voice, the roaring rally, the frightened child, the dying parents, the secret sigh, the quiet hello. And all for free, without the blue-folding crackle of monetary exchange …

How to bring attention to things without bringing things to attention?

Let us inhabit a large modern city with our ears more attentive than our eyes. Let us see and touch and smell and taste with our ears. Let us let sounds be themselves.

Sometimes speaking produces little more than ‘the shadow of speech’, as Maurice Blanchot suggests: ‘a language which is still only its image, an imaginary language and a language of the imaginary, the one nobody speaks, the murmur of the incessant and the interminable which one has to silence if one wants, at last, to be heard’.

So I will be silent for a while. For 4 minutes 33 seconds, perhaps.
But remember that there’s no such thing as silence. There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. Every milieu is vibratory. There is always something to hear, always something to see.

Silence is all of the sounds we don’t intend. Accept any interruptions. And silence always involves a silencing.

'I have a sound inside me that scratches to itself and I am not allowed to listen. When I open my mouth, it is a hum that dogs notice, and they come to me and wait' (Ben Marcus).

A PERIOD OF SILENCE

Thank you. It’s surprising (is it?) how much can come out of what we call ‘nothing’. If we listen.

The sounds of things say on the level of that which is not yet knowledge. And all matter sounds all of the time. We know that the lilies are extremely busy.

What is the sound of a hair breaking free from a scalp, and falling to the floor? Or the sound of ants walking in the grass? What is the sound of a cumulonimbus cloud forming, of dust rising and settling, of a pheromone released, of an eye blinking and refocusing? What is the sound of an object in a photograph? What is the sound of hope? The sound of light? And is the memory of a sound, the sound of memory?

Human hearing is severely limited. We can only detect sound waves when they vibrate above 20 times and below 20,000 times a second. And many sounds are simply too small to be heard with the naked ear. They require another listening, a listening beyond the ear. They require the silence of an animal noticing.

Migrating birds can hear sounds as low as one cycle every 10 seconds, which they use to navigate. Blue whales use infrasound of around 20 hertz to communicate across vast subaquatic distances. Further up the frequency spectrum, male rats squeak rhythmically in ultrasound as they mate. Insectivorous bats create pictures in sound by using echolocating clicks at up to 200,000 hertz – at 200 clicks per second. At such frequencies they can perceive a midge 20 metres away. They can identify size, weight, flight speed, direction, and type of insect before plucking their prey out of the air. Dolphins can focus high-frequency ultrasound in bursts that function as sonic weapons. A targeted beam of ultrasound is emitted to resonate a fish’s swim bladder, stunning and fatally disorienting it. A cockroach uses highly sensitive hairs on its back to detect the air current created by the footfalls of another cockroach; it listens to variations and displacements in the movement of air …

La Monte Young wrote musical compositions that occur in the fluctuating spaces between acoustics, physiology, and imaginal cognition, often at the brink of human audibility: - Build a small fire in front of the audience. - Turn a butterfly loose in the performance space.

There are many ways to listen.

Chinese and Japanese incense connoisseurs say that they do not smell, but rather ‘listen’ to incense; their relationship to the resonance and transience of scents in their passage from materiality to immateriality is auditory. Sounds, like smells, are volatile, ephemeral; they appear and disappear.

Is listening intrinsically more passive, peaceful, respectful, open, democratic and spiritual than speaking? Or is it active, individualist, dissident, imaginative, grained and flawed, a partial redirecting of the geometry of attention that inevitably falls victim to hearing’s blind spots, as it were, its ‘acoustic shadows’? Isn’t listening itself particular, a mode of negotiation and mediation and interference, a desire-machine whose processes produce their own signatures, their own creative noise?

One might listen in such a way as to consider sounds according to their size. Erik Satie, for example, claimed he was a ‘phonometrographer’, a measurer of sound, rather than a musician or composer. He wrote: ‘The first time I used a phonoscope, I examined a B flat of medium size. I can assure you that I have never seen anything so revolting. I called in my man to show it to him. / On my phono-scales a common or garden F sharp registered 93 kilos. It came out of a fat tenor whom I also weighed’.

One might listen in such a way as to attune oneself to the inaudible signals saturating the air around us. The Pythagoreans, for example, believed in the orderliness of the universe, the reverberant ‘harmony of the spheres’, the hum of everything-in-its-right-place.

Or perhaps one might make oneself receptive through the prostheses of technological amplification. In the mid-Sixties, John Cage wrote a piece called Variations VII, in which: ‘There were ordinary radios, there were Geiger counters to collect cosmic things, there were radios to pick up what the police were saying, there were telephone lines open to different parts of the city. There were as many different ways of receiving vibrations and making them audible as we could grasp with the techniques at hand’.

Yoko Ono went even further, and accepted the inaudible into the technological: “Take a tape of the sound of the snow falling. This should be done in the evening. Do not listen to the tape. Cut it and use it as strings to tie gifts with”. So, a recording of an almost silent event using the technologies of listening, the results never listened to, simply given away. The sound of something that weighs almost nothing, that only faintly registers; nothing seems to change, just a weighing on the mind. The sound of thought as a gift. In the poetics of withholding, it’s the thought that counts …

Or one might make oneself receptive through imaginative engagement with the knowledge of what is really there, beyond the capacities of our ears. Michel Serres, for example, invites us to conceive of the sky not as tabula rasa, an empty space passively awaiting inscription, but as an ‘angel space’, a teeming communicational network, the arena of Hermes:

‘Look at the sky, even right here above us. It’s traversed by planes, satellites, electromagnetic waves from television, radio, fax, electronic mail. The world we are immersed in is a space-time of communication. Why shouldn’t I call it angel space, since this means the messengers, the systems of mailmen, of transmissions in the act of passing or the space through which they pass? Do you know, for example, that at every moment there are at least a million people on flights through the sky, as though immobile or suspended – non-variables with variations? Indeed we live in the century of angels’.

Or one might make oneself receptive through imaginative engagement with what might be there, or perhaps never was there, but just might have been there. Imagine the air itself as one vast swarming library on whose pages are written everything that has ever been said or whispered. According to William Burroughs, we have all accumulated ‘old war tapes. We have millions of hours of it, even if we never fired a gun. War tapes, hate tapes, fear tapes, pain tapes, happy tapes, sad tapes, funny tapes, all stirring around in a cement mixer of voices’.

One has to move in to move out.

I’m totally deaf in one ear, but if I listen carefully I can hear the sounds of my lover pulling her hair back in that way, touching her nose in that way, looking out of the window up at the sky in that way.

Right now I hear weather I hear water I hear snow I hear water everywhere it’s that kind of weather. I hear snow around I very nearly hear the moon and I hear the rain and I hear the mountains.

There are many ways to listen.
Accept any interruptions.

(Text for Forced Entertainment’s Marathon Lexicon, co-curated by Tim Etchells & Adrian Heathfield; Mousonturm, Frankfurt, 2003, and Riverside Studios, London, 2004:
© David Williams/FE)

shuttle 21: (in place of an) ending

'It's interesting to think of the great blaze of heaven that we winnow down to animal shapes and kitchen tools' (Don DeLillo, Underworld, London: Picador, 1998, 82) 
__________________________

Jean Baudrillard: - 'I went in search of astral America, not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces. I looked for it in the speed of the screenplay, in the indifferent reflex of television, in the film of days and nights projected across an empty space, in the marvellously affectless succession of signs, images, faces, and ritual acts on the road; looked for what was nearest to the nuclear and enucleated universe, a universe which is virtually our own ...

I sought the finished form of the future catastrophe of the social in geology, in that upturning of depth that can be seen in the straited spaces, the reliefs of salt and stone, the canyons where the fossil river flows down, the immemorial abyss of slowness that shows itself in erosion and geology. I even looked for it in the verticality of the great cities ...

Here in the transversality of the desert and the irony of geology, the transpolitical finds its generic, mental space. The inhumanity of our ulterior, asocial, superficial world immediately finds its aesthetic form here, its ecstatic form. For the desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.

The grandeur of the deserts derives from their being, in their aridity, the negative of the earth's surface and of our civilised humours.  They are places where humours and fluids become rarefied, where the air is so pure that the influence of the stars descends direct from the constellations. And, with the extermination of the desert Indians, an even earlier stage than that of anthropology became visible: a mineralogy, a geology, a sidereality, an inhuman facticity, an aridity that drives out the artificial scruples of culture, a silence that exists nowhere else.

The silence of the desert is a visual thing, too. A product of the gaze that stares out and finds nothing to reflect it. There can be no silence up in the mountains, since their very contours roar. And for there to be silence, time itself has to attain a sort of horizontality; there has to be no echo of time in the future, but simply a sliding of geological strata one upon the other giving out nothing more than a fossil murmur.

Desert: luminous, fossilised network of an inhuman intelligence, of a radical indifference - the indifference not merely of the sky, but of the geological undulations, where the metaphysical passions of space and time alone crystallise. Here the terms of desire are turned upside down each day, and night annihilates them. But wait for the dawn to rise, with the awakening of the fossil sounds, the animal silence ...

The form that dominates the American West, and doubtless all of American culture, is a seismic form: a fractal, interstitial culture, born of a rift with the Old World, a tactile, fragile, mobile, superficial culture - you have to follow its own rules to grasp how it works: seismic shifting, soft technologies.

The only question in this journey is: how far can we go in the extermination of meaning, how far can we go in the non-referential desert form without cracking up and, of course, still keep alive the esoteric charm of disappearance? A theoretical question here materialised in the objective conditions of a journey which is no longer a journey and therefore carries with it a fundamental rule: aim for the point of no return. This is the key. And the crucial moment is that brutal instant which reveals that the journey has no end, that there is no longer any reason for it to come to an end.

Beyond a certain point, it is movement itself that changes. Movement which moves through space of its own volition changes into an absorption by space itself - end of resistance, end of the scene of the journey as such (exactly as the jet engine is no longer an energy of space-penetration, but propels itself by creating a vacuum in front of it that sucks it forward, instead of supporting itself, as in the traditional model, upon the air's resistance). In this way, the centrifugal, eccentric point is reached where the movement produces the vacuum that sucks you in.

This moment of vertigo is also the moment of potential collapse. Not so much from the tiredness generated by the distance and the heat, as from the ireversible advance into the desert of time'.

Extract from Jean Baudrillard, America, London: Verso, 1988, 5-6, 11
__________________________

Hello Mick, and Beth,

I'm ending with Baudrillard, not because I necessarily agree with everything he proposes, but because his rhetorical postcards from the road remain provocative for me in terms of driving, the cinematic, the seismic drama of geology, time, 'silence'.

In assembling these virtual fragments over the past three weeks, a kind of ad hoc - and unfinishable - reading companion for your journey, I have often tried to imagine where you are. And I realise I've entirely elided my own embodied movements during that time, a shuttle rhythm of to-ing and fro-ing between work in London and England's (much milder, greener) 'Southwest'.

I have passed Stonehenge six times in different light, and on each occasion have hollered greetings to the pigs on the other side of the road. I've been dazzled by a billowing field of scarlet poppies in bloom. I've watched tiny swallows being fed by their hyperactive parents in their mud-spit nest above a doorway, and cried quietly during episodes of 24 Hours in A&E. And, in the gaps, I've been transfixed by events in Egypt, as well as by the river, the swifts, the bees, the clouds and the sky.

Wishes, to you and the shuttle crew,
 for the journeys home and to come, 
elsew/here ...

Photos: Richard Misrach, drive-in cinema, Las Vegas, 1987; (bottom) William Egglestone

Unhurried departure music: Jem Finer's Longplayer - time lapse film of a live performance at the Roundhouse, London, 12.9.2009 (1,000 minutes in 1,000 seconds). For the Longplayer website, and a live stream link to this ongoing musical composition (currently 13.5 years into its 1,000 year duration), see here

shuttle: intro to elsew/here

"Never did faraway charge so close" (Cesar Vallejo)

Miss Atomic: "Good evening, pagans, Vegans, insomniacs, gorgeous lizards, hospitality peddlers, sweethearts, assassins. Grab your drink, baby, we're gonna be here for a while. We are desert people. We make our homes in impossibility. We hallucinate regularly. We might have magic lamps, or we may be the type, myself included, to play the genies ..." (The Team, Mission Drift, London: Oberon Books, 2013)
______________________

Over three weeks in the summer of 2013, I uploaded daily posts here as a remote contributor to SHUTTLE: mobile desert performance, at the invitation of Mick Douglas, and as part of his Performing Mobilities Network. For the project website, with further details of those involved and a map of the itinerary – an anti-clockwise loop from Tucson to Tucson, via Utah and California - see here. Other contexts are outlined briefly below.

At the outset, as the crew assembled in Tucson to begin their journey, I only had loose hunches and fragmentary thoughts about what to post in coming days. As I began another week of work in London, circulating in my mind was a slightly bewildering constellation of material related to deserts, in particular those of the American south-west: driving, dust, sand, light, heat, water, geological ‘deep’ time; ‘emptiness’ as a convenient fiction for the open secret and ‘dirty wars’ of military research; silence, silencing and the toxic sublime; writings by Rebecca Solnit, Mike Davis, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Dillard, Bradford Morrow, Leslie Marmon Silko, JG Ballard, Iain Chambers, Trevor Paglen, P. Reyner Banham, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, John Beck, Lawrence Buell, Stephen Muecke, Erin Hogan, and others; art works by James Turrell, Walter de Maria, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Paolo Soleri, Richard Long, John Wolseley, Richard Misrach, Edward Burtynsky, Francis Alÿs, Oguri, Tess de Quincey and others; films by Michelangelo Antonioni, Wim Wenders, Nicholas Roeg, David Lean, John Ford, Werner Herzog, Gus van Sant, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Sergio Leone; assorted music, from Calexico and Gillian Welch to Ali Farka Toure; and distant memories of my own journeys through the central deserts of Australia in the mid-1980s.

At this stage I didn’t know what of this would emerge in coming days, in posts uploaded on the hoof in the gaps between my ongoing work commitments here - and quite what it would amount to. Hopefully traces of a virtual, associational journey in parallel, a slight re-directing of the geometry of attention that allows for passages between the close-at-hand and the faraway, the actual and the possible … 

Maybe think of them as a bunch of balloons released in to the air. Although most of them might well drift off forever into the sky, the odd one might just be held on to and bob along with you for a while.

_________________________

Email to Mick Douglas, 3 June 2013 

Dear Mick

Thanks again for sharing the SHUTTLE details, and for your kind invitation.

For a virtual contribution/ participation, I'd like to propose something along the following lines: on each of the 21 days of the Shuttle project, 17 June – 7 July, I will post something online – some resources, perspectives, materials related in particular to deserts. These may include propositions or questions, found texts and my own writing, images, sounds/songs, reconstructions, etc. So – traces of a parallel 3-week journey of accompaniment during which my attention here, for a section of each day, will be given over to your group, the route, imaginings of landscapes there, traces of environments here. Cumulatively, therefore, an archive of 21 posts, comprising small invitations and gifts from afar that hope to encourage the possibility of further conceptual and imaginal links, leaks, flows. Associational ripples, modest frictions, 'winds' from elsew/here.

Daily materials would be posted on my blog site skywritings by midnight UK time, each one entitled SHUTTLE and numbered accordingly (day 1 etc.). Along the way, Sue Palmer may contribute some materials about desert flora.

My best to you,
David 
_________________________

SHUTTLE 
Mobile desert performance
17 June – 7 July 2013
www.performingmobilities.net

Ten crew open to encounters. Four thousand miles from Tucson to Tucson. Twenty days. A Chevy van. Sonoran, Great Basin and Mojave Deserts. Known and unknowns. 

A collection of international artists, designers, performance makers and researchers journey through the deserts of the American south-west performing an exploration of the aesthetic, political, cultural and environmental resonances of desert ecologies. As a temporary travelling community interested in movement, environment, and performance, the project crew intend to generate new creative practices and works that shuttle between registers of knowing and unknowing by exploring performances of mobility.

In a journey through seminal land art works, ancient settlements, desert conditions, and transit spaces, SHUTTLE will perform daily processes of creating ephemeral conditions and generating encounters. An initial landing event and a subsequent returns event in Tucson, Arizona, welcome public interaction – including collecting offerings from Tucson residents for SHUTTLE to carry forth. SHUTTLE presents an interval at the Performance Studies International ‘Now Then’ Conference (PSi 19) at Stanford University in Palo Alto, and will inform the development of PSi21 ‘Fluid States’ globally distributed events planned for 2015, in particular the Australian project ‘Movement Forms of an Island Continent’. 

Mick Douglas, Beth Weinstein and crew 
Twitter: @SHUTTLEcrew @SHUTTLEbase 

We gratefully acknowledge the support of University of Arizona, Tucson Museum of Art, Exploded View, RMIT University, University of Melbourne, PSi Performance Studies international 
_________________________

Journey 
June 17: SHUTTLE encounter: projective conversation + SHUTTLE landing in Tucson

June 18-20: en-route encounters: Chaco Canyon
June 21-24: en-route encounters: Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover
June 26-30: SHUTTLE interval at PSi 19 Conference at Stanford Palo Alto
July 1: en-route encounters: Culver City’s CLUI
July 2-4: en-route encounters: Joshua Tree area + cultural laboratories (CLUI, High Desert Test Sites)
July 5: SHUTTLE returns at Tucson Museum of Art
July 6: SHUTTLE encounter: reflective conversation in Tucson 
_________________________ 

SHUTTLE crew 

Grzegorz Brzozowski is a director and script writer working on a PhD at University of Warsaw researching modern festival communities through the lens of anthropology of performance and sociology of religion.

Mick Douglas is an artist making socially-engaged art and performance, senior lecturer at RMIT University, Melbourne, and initiator of journey-based projects that explore the performance of mobilities.

Andrea Haenggi is a New York-based choreographer, visual artist, performer and artistic director/founder of Dance Arts Company AMDaT, who recently established 1067 PacificPeople in Brooklyn New York.

Fiona Harrisson is a landscape architect, horticulturist and senior lecturer at RMIT University, Melbourne, exploring the role that citizens’ relation to landscape plays in the crisis of our times. 

Didier Morelli is an interdisciplinary performer and artist investigating the body as a site for change, exchange, identity and belonging. He is an MFA student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

James Oliver is an artist-researcher and Graduate Research Coordinator at the Centre for Cultural Partnerships of Melbourne University developing performative methodologies of practice-as-research. 

Meredith Rogers makes theatre and performance in mainstream and independent settings, is an honorary research associate at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and co-editor of Australasian Drama Studies. 

Sam Trubridge is a performance designer, artist, scholar and artistic director with New Zealand company The Playground who is currently researching nomadic philosophies and practices. 

Unknown Persons may be given passage during the course of SHUTTLE. 

Beth Weinstein is an architect and Associate Professor at the University of Arizona working between architectural and choreographic practices, and research of American Southwest land art and water issues. 
_________________________ 

SHUTTLE remote crew (artists on board in other locations) 

‘Touring SW American deserts & communities online’: Visual artist Alex von Bergen tours online whilst operating the shuttle base. 

‘Vella vehicle accumulations + Vella Piss Takes’: Visual artist John Vella collaborates with Shuttle crew to collate, collect and respond. 

‘Elsew/here (shuttle days 1-21)’: Writer/performance-maker David Williams is blogging shuttle daily from London. 

‘Postcards’: Neal Haslem sends postcards to lost time in the desert. 

‘The Sustained Doodling Project’: researching the challenges of art in space through a creative collaboration between SHUTTLE and Melbourne artist Annalea Beattie.

Photos, from the top: David Lean during the filming of Lawrence of Arabia (1962); still from Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana (1971); still from Gus Van Sant's Gerry (2002). 'The Desert of Culture' cartoon by Biff (The Guardian)

tree of life

Last night I went to see Terence Malick's extraordinarily ambitious film The Tree of Life, an epic and exquisitely composed meditation on metaphysics, meaning, family and childhood, time, memory, love, loss, change, creation, connectivity, belief, grace, the cycles and phenomena of nature, the miraculous in the everyday (amongst other things).

In one of the deeply troubling scenes in which Brad Pitt's tyrannical father instils fear at the family dinner table, demanding a silence that is a violent silencing for his wife and children, a man in the front row of the cinema leaped to his feet to confront a woman who had been rustling a paper bag three rows back. It had been going on for a while, and it was a bit irritating and distracting. He had clearly reached a breaking point.

He marched round to her, stood directly in front of her, and said, quite loudly and aggressively, with much finger waving: 'Could you stop that now. I have had enough. I didn't come here to listen to you scrunching your bag, I came here to watch this film ... So stop ... If you do it again, you're out'. Silence as he returned to his seat. After a moment the woman, noticeably upset, turned to her friend or son, whispered something, and scurried up the aisle. A few minutes later she returned and they both left discreetly.

Without a whiff of self-consciousness or irony, this man had re-staged something of the explicit violence from the fiction onscreen. And somehow in our silence we were all complicit in his repressive aggression. Of course he had a right to ask her to be quieter; but was that the way to do it? Was there not another way in which the barely sublimated violence of threat would avoid being racheted up, but instead would be defused or transformed?

When the lights came up at the end of the film, the finger-wagger's face was still red with anger.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in London, riots and looting and fire. Sirens and police helicopters. Further afield, a young English guy has polar bear teeth removed from his skull. And a British soldier in Afghanistan is reported to have kept trophy fingers from the Taliban ...

*****

I remembered an incident on a London bus a couple of years ago. Two kids in school uniform boarded a crowded bus - not enough seats, so one of them sat in the luggage area near the front of the bus, her legs swinging, humming along to her iPod. At the next stop the driver turned to her and told her she couldn't sit there, it wasn't allowed. She ignored him, and comically hummed a bit louder. He shouted, 'You can't sit there. Get off please. You'll have to stand'. No response. The driver insisted, telling her he wasn't going to continue unless she moved. She said, 'Oh just drive the bus will you, or dyou want me to do it'. 'Just get down! It's not allowed!'

Then a sudden explosion, a massive gear change that shifted everything. Her friend, who'd been watching this impasse develop, rushed along the aisle from his seat near the back, and started punching the perspex screen protecting the driver, shouting and trying to smash his way in. The driver flinched and reared away from the perspex, his back pressed against the door. A stationary bus full of frightened people staring at their hands and out the window. Hoping the perspex would hold, wishing it would all stop. The girl went to the front to stop her friend, pulled him away, calmed him down, sent him back to his seat; then she went back to sit in the luggage rack.

A woman in her 60s, at the front right next to the girl, suddenly stood up and very quietly, very lightly, said, 'Hey why don't you have my seat. Please. It's fine. You sit here'. The girl, wide-eyed at this response, said no I can't do that, thanks but I can't take your seat, you're ... Then the woman with a smile: 'No, it's fine, really, really, please sit here, I'll stand. Go on. I'd just like to go home'. She then hugged the girl, held her warmly for a few disarming moments, and then they exchanged smiles and places. The girl now puzzled, calmer, seated. The pressure of the situation released and dispersed.

The bus started up and we were off again.

The woman took up the position the girl had been in, holding the railing by the luggage rack - then after a few moments dropping her bum into it for a moment, swinging her legs, softly laughing at the logic of taking up this same position when there are no seats and your body wants to sit down. A brilliant, funny, human moment of recognition. Then she stood up again, and the journey continued. The same, but different, more awake.


For Peter Bradshaw's 5-star review of Malick's The Tree of Life in the Guardian, see here.

For Jason Solomon's review in the Observer, with a trailer for the film, see here.

For Anthony Lane's review in the New Yorker, see here

smell the rat

I have just spent a Sunday morning reading the paper, and now I wonder why. How much of my life has been spent ploughing through the so-called 'news'? What am I after? It's certainly a very eccentric mode of reading - partial, skimming, distracted, occasionally lingering when something catches my attention and engaging in a more focused way before moving on. A reading environment designed for the minimal attention span ... After so many years I know the geography of the papers well, and make for those sections that may be interesting. I follow a slightly schizo trajectory, unwittingly creating unlikely conjunctions and collages in time, space and matter: arts, sport, politics, conflicts and injustices, telly pages, obituaries, anomalous occurrences etc., and a swift scanning of other stuff via the shorthand of images and headlines: ARREST OVER SHIP-CAT KILLING / BIRD FORCES PLANE TO LAND / DOG OWNERS TOLD TO STOP USING STARFISH AS FRISBEES / CHEDDAR MAN ATTACKED BY BULL etc etc. Sometimes I cut out an item, and put it in a teetering pile of cuttings: usually Mafia references, Italian politics (the latest installment in Berlusconi's dexterous avoidance of criminal prosecution etc.), climate change and weather anomalies, animal stories, book or film reviews. In truth I don't do very much with this vast collection of fragments, a piecemeal archive of where my attention has hovered in the past; it tends to gather dust and offer sustenance to an assortment of tiny paper-munching creatures ...

Most of the time I leave the newspaper feeling dissatisfied. I tend to feel as though I've been 'had', and am left wondering quite what is the nature of the habitual impulse to give over chunks of countless days to this activity. There's certainly something about not wanting to 'miss' things. Even a rather peculiar sense of responsibility, or 'civic duty', an unspoken sense of 'needing to know' in order to be 'in touch' with the world in which we live and thus to be able to take some sort of position (i.e. to wave yet another opinion, often little more than a re-staging of a received, second-hand thought). Of course this 'rationale' falls apart instantly with even the slightest of reflections, revealing its fatuousness and perversity. We know how ideologically loaded and coded every newspaper is. Their titles claim otherwise, inevitably, although all are loaded and rather laughable truth claims: the Guardian (of truth, objectivity, reasoned debate), the Observer (unproblematic reflection of what is), the Times (just as they are), the Independent (free of ideological agenda), the Mail, Telegraph and Express (communicating information swiftly and directly to you the reader), the Sun (a ray of illuminating clarity oh yes). We know that it's not 'knowledge' that is gleaned from this sprint through information and opinion; in itself most journalism offers little more than simplified constructions of 'truths', each of them presented as a realist narrative, like old-fashioned 'history'. These narratives are elaborated from particular vantage points, with assumptions, agendas and blind spots naturalised and (semi-)concealed. So should we not learn to read the paper critically as a kind of post-modern fiction, an elliptical cartography of fears and desires afloat in the cultural and psychic 'air', in themselves constitutive of that very 'air'? To treat them not as registers of 'what happened', but more as a kind of textual seismograph of some of the narrative shapes and shadows at play in our culture?

In particular I have come to view with suspicion the triggers that are employed to attract attention and make stories, and their affective repercussions: their tendency to fuel the paranoid, the conspiratorial, the prurient and voyeuristic, the outraged, and at the same time to induce a sense of a radical lack of agency, an impotence in the face of the 'world'. What is gained from accessing the detail of an unprovoked stabbing frenzy and the subsequent beheading of a sleeping passenger on a Canadian bus? Or of the discovery of a British girl's torso in a suitcase in Brazil? Or of the shooting of a honeymooning couple in Antigua? Or of the threat of a new wave of CJD cases in Britain? Or of 'evidence' that even 5-year olds are at threat from self-harm? What is the nature of the 'pleasure' in reading these stories, all of them from the past few days? What do they feed, and cause to proliferate? Potentially such narratives of violence, horror or fear are reanimated in some form or other in every reader's consciousness. They are seeded in us and inhabit us; their dis-ease becomes part of our psychic landscapes, part of the tone-poem our cortex hums to us, part of our sense of what it is to be here now. And meanwhile, all sorts of other things in our worlds are 'missed' as we fail utterly to be here now, our attention forever elsewhere, addicted to distraction ...

The writer Annie Dillard is critically perceptive on this, as on so much else. She asks: "Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy - probably a necessary lie - that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different? [...] The closer we grow to death, the more closely we follow the news. Year after year, without ever reckoning the hours I wasted last week or last year, I read the morning paper. I buy mass psychotherapy in the form of the lie that this is a banner year. Or is it, God save us from the crazies, aromatherapy? I smell the rat, but cannot walk away. It is life's noise - the noise of the news - that sings "It's A Small World After All" again and again to lull you and cover the silence while your love boat slips off into the dark". (Annie Dillard, For the Time Being, New York: Vintage, 1999, 31-2).


© David Williams

Photo at top by Lewis Hine: '12 year old newsboy Hyman Alpert, been selling for 3 years', New Haven, Connecticut, 1909