JoannaGeldard

Observations from a foghorn

Well lackadaddy I was on the road again…to Kendal hardly compares to the noise of LA brutal and sad, loneliness sounds only louder when the din is at its worst.[1]

Man walks out of cafe with a cup without a saucer, takes a look into the liquid and promptly pours it into the gutter. Cup is put down on one of the spare tables outside and he walks away in disgust rolling up. Class.

Grey clouds were heavy with a patch of illuminated light over the marina. Everything was in Black & White with sharp minor contrasts. A white sail, black figures – the shadows of the world were out to play. New Mexico Prairie broad solitude – perfection can be palpable experienced, whether on seeing grass bend in the wind or observing how a stellar petalled flower glows on the prairie’[2]

Over the road staring directly at us was a white haired man sitting in a wheelchair. Dignified, utterly handsome he sat and looked from beneath the tree. It was a portrait on a summers day upturned in a cup of coffee and the sticky rays of sun that had us stuck to chairs.

Walking down the street and the sun streamed behind and the grey cloud amassed in front, the first signs of a downpour. As if in alarm one streetlight alerted us by switching on. The rain came down in our faces and we ran through filled gutters and laughed.

Walking casts a spell, metronome, sway and thoughts sift and settle into caresses and grooves. Liquid thought woven with observations.  Walking casts the mind a void and rushing in – as a cup is submerged in water are the minor and the major keys of thinking and picking. The colour of Kerouac is drawn in  detail through human existence; his replenished void – the silent sensation of detached happiness[3]. ‘If used to look in my mind for the unwritten page/if my mind was empty enough I could see it’[4] as much a part of Kerouac manifesto to drive, empty, replenish in a metronomic fashion.

The ocean is deathless

The islands rise and die

Quietly come, quietly go

A silent swaying breath

I wish the idea of time would drain

Out of my sells and leave me

Quiet even on this shore[5]

Cumbrian escapades and the coastal path means walking at a level of seagulls and birds of prey hovering over gorse. The drop down towards Whitby unveils the heathland with, on the one hand a small lighthouse atop a whitewashed and blacked out chimney house; the other a fleet house with a duo of foghorns. The sign ‘trespasses keep out or you will be shot’ hangs on a pretty white picket gate.

A portentous sound[6]   the negation and absence of noise but the weight of a word spoken with resonance. As Proust recalls ‘so stifling was the pressure upon that part of me where is was forever inscribed, of that name which at that moment when I heard it seemed fuller’[7].  The weight of all previous occasions can outweigh and crowd out all other thoughts – silent utterances.

Distinct calls and electrode pulses of 21^st century unrecognised there is no silence anywhere. The making of sounds appears all around. Disturbed nature and disturbed silence, an idea of the sublime that whispers at beyond or recognises a desire of something mildly sacred. Doris Von Drathen quotes Lamedusa from Gattopardo ‘small sounds are the priests of silence’[8] and perhaps the nearest we come to describing within our being – silence.

Psyche perception resonates depth and infinity hinting at a deathlessness. In conversation with an artist we talked on silence and the oft connotation of death at a writing residency (Writing East Midlands). Silence of the after. But silence is never ultimately soundless, it can pulsate, thrum, zither perhaps we lack words. There is a book called the encyclopaedia of snow therefore I endeavour an encyclopaedia of silence through the wanderings of those travellers who record the sound within their beings. There is no getting lost in the sea of silence i can always lasso the moon as Jimmy Stewart would say.

‘I walked down the highway to Sabina, eating black walnuts from the walnut tree. I went on the SP tracks and balanced along the rail. I passed a watertower and a factory. This was the end of something’[9]

Fragmented, yes, interrupted certainly but so is the silence between. ‘A silence that falls when the stars have folded over, you fall asleep after the others around you – the last one to notice sleep has come. Poor lost sometimeboy’.[10]

‘Why Yass’

With a sunburst extraordinaire and the ‘flare’ fiery flicks the foghorn  blazons, creating a tidal wave of gravity from the radio and expanding the kitchen ten fold. The weight, as if atlas had the world on his shoulders, bears down through the silence. Its veil of previous, suddenly claps its quiescence.

Yes, Yiss, Yass to Frisco, Yass to Mexico, Yass as the wisest words Yasss as polar opposite to No and without negation of no. Or is it just a break in the silence of a perpetual state? Dean Moriarty says to himself ‘Why Yass’ as he announces plans ; Lewis Carroll says yes to the ghostly ghoul who comes to visit him in Phatasmagoria; Lampshade, Kerouac’s jazz loon figure, says yes –  though as the trembling body in water.[i] And Kerouac, well,  he anticipates the ‘vibration of a really joyous life’ and Dean announces ‘alackaday’ – YASS is the foghorn boon to the thrum and resonant skin which passes over all things.

Receiving the world in the raw often gives the instinctive yes the drive to put oneself outside of self, it is vulnerable and positive. The most active word, like yeast frothing the strawberry wine, is a  chemical energy as we meet our outside. Yet yes is a word that turns over, as all around it is No, silence even ambivalence.

Through various interviews Kerouac argued that the definition of ‘beat’, counter to popular interpretation for being beaten and a loser , was in fact a derivative of beatitude and beautific. It harks back to the harsh realities of labour filled life of the lower classes and the exhaustion that follows. It is this exhaustion and ‘darkness which precedes opening up to light’[ii]. More pertinently a loss of ego and almost giving rise to some religious illumination in other words a beautiful openness that allows the seeing of time out of its historicity, time from above and through a meeting[iii].  The term encapsulates those associated with that counter culture and appears to gaze at chaos as it gazes directly back and neither have fear.

Kerouac talks of the darkness and turmoil preseding such openness but what of after? Perhaps Zizek can help  as he talks of the sound of silence and there is always a silence after the Foghorn blast. But Zizek[iv]  demonstrates that silence is transformed from negation and nothing , over to positive vibration once sound breaks upon it.[v]  He even refers to it  as violence. I don’t believe this is to be misunderstood as an act of violence but as the sensation of a violent pull, pulse and wrench to awaken and call upon a response. Sudden responses which are often the truest and most revealing. He does allegorize this to a political situation and Derrida does the same referring to action and violence as the only turning point/ key to change. This is why it  obviously heralds revolution in order to transform. But Zizek’s reference to the Yes of sound and as transformative is subtler than this supposes. Perhaps because the turmoil is often within, and in finding resolution with the politics and structures of life. It is double edged unfortunately.

A preferred conclusion is, even in existing within a series of Nos, hearing no, borders of no, no is void. A void waiting to be filled ….with Yass – such sass! I prefer to see No contained in a vessel that is yes or no as a void filled with yes. In order to say yes and keep repeating, it is possible  to stare into the vaulted void and create our wrench of yes.

If Derrida and Zizek thought this was political and I’m talking generically rather than their specific historical perceptions I do not consider yes to be just a convenient counter to no and nor does advocating yes make  justificable  all the no’s to those without, the no that retracts food to the hungry, or to accept the mediocre excuses for why austerity will undoubtedly cause mass suicides and that it is fair to say all must receive same treatment despite handicaps. In this case Yes is better as an anger over wastefulness, green washing and whitewashing, maintaining yes to perplexity at the myriad of possible right choices over what to purchase trying to support fair trading, recycling and how some of this still in the end seems to reach global monopolies.

On a recent trek to the gridded land of Magna[vi], Sheffield  our performance group (name still in flux) checked  the place last month. The vast empty ceilings and huge voids appeared to fill me! Caverns and abyss where molten steel vats sat, the Furness that still seemed hot despite its dormancy suffocating the air at the top of the building. Seeking unusual spots for projecting light and vision of heritage, workers beating time to some beat. Soundscapes and sculpture part of the course in order to capture this rhythm this ghostly visitation of industry which established so much, wreaked so much and created an activity. This spatial stasis is palpably missing its activity. The vibration has left to leave a new character of silence.

Within the strictures of this however there will be another vibratory yes to  ‘yes’. Hegel[vii] talks of the negation of the negation but maybe creating activity within these spaces is the yes of the yes.  Perhaps Magna is as the yes within a hive of no.

Some artists will always challenge what is authentic art and stand in opposition to institution, this is a necessary balance. Some challenge injustices and maintain the complexity of that which does perplex. Where there are borders there may be a counter movement of yes which captures the spirit of the age. However within that yes there is  also a no – a no to being wrought and transformed into beings of yes to all that is trickled down. Not yes men to advocate unjust premises, but yes to anticipate loop holes and niches to avoid being boxed labelled and delivered.  There is never an excuse for apathy – we still need a wrench every now and again to remind us of not yes to above but Yass to tangible veils,  molten magna  rather than luke warm. Or, Derrida has it as a truth that is the singularity of life – immanence.

 Spontaneity, bop prose, surreal-real images, musical dynamics, long lines and soul[viii]. The details hang like distilled raindrops or dew on the dawn’s grass and equally erupt like molten lava. As a manifesto we’re getting there – it rants, playfully weaves in intellect and skilfully hones playfulness. Ginsburg finally arrives at optimism, innocence and the poet Verlaine’s pithy point ‘heart’ which he equals to compassion. Verlaine[ix] talks of tenderness exacerbated through suffering or being outcast in some respect and Dean is certainly cast in this role desperately searching for a place, just not in the mainstream world. Sal gets down soulfully with the suffering of others and counters apathy and the cynicism evident in so much of the real.

Keeping this alive is a hard task when daunted by pragmatics but essentially if we are to engage with originality as artists and have the ability to adjust our psyche’s to explore the contemporary worlds; this is precisely the advocacy for compassion required.  The Yass to immanence; activity reflecting a no to apathy; and echoing a yes to compassion. In this way Silence can be transformed – yes?  And in the words of Ginsburg ‘cutting through worldly veils’.[x]

  Routine/Random/Ritual Spectres

‘Everybody in Frisco blew’[1]; the convergence of events people time places at once serendipitous and paradoxically inevitable the clan of Kerouac’s group as much as they are drawn together push each other away. They don’t care, they’re ready to depart with the knowledge they may never see each other again.

Call it freefall or letting go the intensity of that beat summer climaxed. It’s a peculiar shift in thinking (or think gin, as the spell check always reminds me) when we consider that routine is something to react against but in that there is routinely reacting. The ritualistic momentum of meeting on the breath of ‘right-orooni’[2] to slide into the night air breath relax, drink comes as much a part of routine as getting up for work at 6am.  Or are these rituals and how do you tell the difference?

Magic Lanterns or in my dim memory the Coltar lantern  for colds and flu whilst probably lethal and not recommended these days, was familiar. Young eyes visualise light in the darkness as the shadows leap higher and the light contrasts with great intensity. It burns in to memory and shapes the experience of night. Therefore when Proust recalls the magic lantern of his youth provided for when he felt ‘abnormally wretched’[3] , it is at once reaffirming that this is  familiar territory. Perhaps Kerouac felt that equally the highs of his jazz nights left the impossible task of facing the realities at the end of the trip. The downers.  In wretchedness and instability in Proust as a child, sensitive to a point of extreme aliveness the magic lantern associates fears and removes them to the realm of shadows. The distance is created, the light breaths warmth and keeps the wretched play of thoughts or as one would say the critical crisis of 3am off stage.  It is reassuring that we are not alone as it is a phenomenon that darkens most doorways. It is routine in the development of humanity and at once a habit strangely enjoyable.

Funnily Lampshade in Kerouac’s novel is a guy entering into saloons who jumps on the bandstand and starts singing; ‘He heaves back and blows a big foghorn blues out of every muscle of his soul’[4]. He yells ‘Yes’. This large snap of energy and positive openness, this bright vital pop of vigour is perhaps why Keoruac ‘dug’ him. He immediately contrasts this to someone with big round eyes looking limp. Uncannily Lampshade reminds us of light and the limpness that we find under the magnetism of spectres that in stead of instilling a ‘yes’ render us paralyzed and limp.

More so when Benjamin in his Origin of German Trauerspiel [5]  talked of the repetitious nature of theatre where romantic phantasms, doomed realities were played out mournfully. In fact the double jeopardy here is doomed to repeat this art and doomed to repeat its nature. It was going nowhere and Benjamin sought to close this and release the idea of repetition, allegory and myth into a hemisphere of fresh beginnings not spectred pasts. His notions of the reproduction of the reproduction here[6]  focussed on this idea. Namely that if imitation of allegory was conducted as ideas rather than purely representational the reproduction will ultimately create something quite removed from the original whilst carrying forth its essence, its character. He turned endings into beginnings.

Routine remembering things past the disappointed myth, play in the theatre of routine; failed expectations are the spectres as much so in Art as in life. If we do not pass through the phantasms then we are doomed to repeat through both routine and ritual and the random that seems random is probably just a default setting. But letting go, and the whole world rushes in.

Benjamin also alluded to phantasms or phantasmagoria derived from its technological manifestation as 19^th century spectacle. In other words those illusory phantoms chased in the film and photographic world developed over the 19^th century emerged from magic lanterns behind screens.  He appears to liken this to the base – superstructure in other words our relationships with society through commodity. [7]The artificiality; the phantom of our social structure haunts and are these the haunting of wakefulness at 5am?

Magic Lanterns and spectres; whilst the shadows appear playfully they are also menacing forming spectres which whilst we are afraid of them in the dark only appear with light. While the light in our psyches plays out a safety our terrors become more real. The spectres that haunt[8] – Gibber.

Moose or Mooses  27.12.10

Well the snow drift lifted the appetite for Kerouac’s spirit right away and Debord’s ‘derive’ (drift) settled on the doorstep as did 8 inches during our first ‘cold snap’!  To simply drift sounds positive to be a drifter sounds negative but both usages are common.  Tramping up the centre of a road on compacted ice and with the dull quiet soundings provides an airlock of silence that is completely compatible with the momentum of the pendulum of the mind and is ample opportunity to be both.

There is a pulse beat, a throb that resounds louder and nearer to the surface of the skin as this tramping takes place. The dullness and lack of echo quiets busyness to a steady thrum that seems to draw even the eddies of fine ice to the swing of that walking action. Visiting the trees and finding yourself atop the deep snow so you’re nearer to the arc of tree branches brings about a turn of scale. Suddenly depths are shorter, vision nearer, sharp edges disappear and the sensation to just fall into the snow is very appealing. To allow time to expand without a dedicated outcome and suspend the tick lists allowing the wet substance to temporally dictate.

Sal  and the ‘unimaginable softness’ in the hot sweltering jungle outside Georgia lay absorbed by the earth, the heat and ultimately offered no resistance to the weight of his own body. It is this lying down in unusual places that edits and stops the necessity for the next stop, next thing, and next drive. Much as the two drove on after this jungle experience even Sal commented behind the wheel ‘he was lost in his own reveries’.

Is it the opportunity to drift on many levels that put us out of our own time, out from our roots?

Conversation that drifts amongst easy company touches and alights on many subjects sometimes leaving impressions outlandish, peculiar and unpredictable – the best. There is a sense when warm and bunkered down, of turning over trivia as we found ourselves the other night. Why I’d turned to the Moose, I don’t know but I find them appealing and like the feel of the word. It was over whether they would be called Moose as plural that was debated. I fancied calling them Mooses just because of the silliness of the sound. Then it was apparent that collective nouns were to be collected. From a drove of horses to a nuisance of cats and a legion of dogs to a skein of ducks we mused. North American moose to Japanese Musu . With Musu  we found  Musus to be the plural and herd of moose the collective noun. Although Moose is used as the plural in my obstinacy I’m sticking to Mooses and Musus! You can hear me chanting around the neighbourhood!

The artist Thomas Grunweld and his Misfit collection of   morphed animals including a lamb and a badger capture the tensions of predator and the vulnerable personified in confusion. I know how they feel.  Wonder what the collective for these would be or would that be a hoard of misfits? Recently Crunch and Dust have been using  animal heads on the shoulders of a gigging musician or DJ  as part of their branding so I wonder whether the hoard and our attachment to personified beasts is precisely  for that term Misfit.

We left Sal resting in the jungle, the insects alighting upon him, biting and himself unresisting to swipe them away. Lying in the snow and gazing up at all the colours of the sky  is silent beauty, a pause before continuing to work out location and situation, direction and navigation. It is these pauses by Sal before any illuminating encounters that allow the brain to catch up with the body and the sensation of disembodied head to become re-attached. We see it in that moment in the Three Colours Trilogy ‘Blue’ by Kieslowski where Binoche lets go of the sugar cube into the coffee, the slow soak up that anticipates thought without defining it. There is a reintegration of what is happening and what has happened. Encounters from the 60’s were given that movement title of Happenings taking place as performance poetry, incidental performance of art  - free, temporal. There is a current mood in the arts to re-recreate encounters precisely because they are immaterial and capture the essence of encounter in its artificial spontaneity and bizarre offerings that naturally occur through life.

We refer to elk and deer but Musus are reserved for folklore and stories despite being of the same. Using ideas and names that are perhaps not vernacular perhaps means being close enough to, the slight shift that suspends us between the real and temporal,  out of time and out of place. Happenings and designed encounters and the devices we use slide us sideways they are at the same time both familiar and unfamiliar. Guernicio one of the drawing masters gives us a perfect example of Misfit with his enlarged foot attached to the head of a beast in The Monster and the peasant. The peasant looks on in horror but is it an outer and exterior moment of recognition of oneself?

The slow down to hearing  pulse beat  appears to forge an integration but suspends one to hear the sound of our own thoughts and picture some unity of them before the forces of persuasion and the next thing pull is into synchronization with pace again.

Sal and Dean found their own encounters and musing s revealing and Proust muses over his musings. Sometimes the simple relish of a word such as Moose and lying down against the tide is an act of beatific resistance and gives ample space beyond the threshold of time limits and constraints to anticipate a temporal shift where all that is misfit precariously balances.  It is slightly weird that despite the wrappings of this season that once past the midnight hour of Christmas Eve there is still a childish temporal shift and we act out of times for a day and if we can forget the nifty gifty aspect for a minute, we simply do not measure anything, no necessary outcome required.

It is a misfit day that doesn’t quite match the rest of things and it suits me to misfit myself; A temporal balanced pause before resuming my pace –  A day which allows this integration and perhaps a removal from that recognition of Guernicio’s misfit.  Elsewhere and for some, I guess it appears to be the opposite. In fact for many it is precisely where this misfit day magnifies the recognition of misfit. The size of one’s feet become visible and dislocation clarified. It is to these that adrift rather than to drift becomes apparent.

A swan standing in the middle of the road pacing elegantly, swinging majestically to the rhythm of his own wonder as the somewhat misplaced stream through town is frozen causes temporal drifting outside of his natural habitat. Lost or adrift, One tall swan neck + a Moose / 1 Musu’s head +  a swan and I walk with him to Derive.

Zombie

‘Spaced’ plays on zombie, Shaun Peg parodies the zombie and zombie is used as metaphor for a social construct of the automaton. What about in the car? Never mind working machinery in a factory there are definitely zombie moment within the leetle white lines and the one way street.

The voiceless, rendered silent by automated activity is just one perception of any travelling down the highway. Drones with rear red lights bottlenecking. Echoes of the petrol crisis, ethical travel, sustainability that isn’t sustainable. It is perhaps rather a silent vacancy and acceptance, a still acknowledgment that we shouldn’t be doing this and the tension mounts as we wait for the crash….except it isn’t coming. We are perpetually suspended in the ‘maybe and maybe not’ crash. Keeps us on our toes, keeps us in fear of actually altering anything too much most of all our own lives.

The wires of the pylons parallel with our roadmaps hover complacently over hedgehog spike horizons in cold morning light. Complacent maybe but there is a tension of waiting – for the inevitable? It sounds a bit doomsday smacking of current rhetoric and mood of austerity and the possible huge gulf to open in education. Perhaps it’s just the weathervane and obscure book I read at school depicting the end of machines in everyday life and a journey towards re-integration. Supposedly at this point lessons were learned and progress was made. All this talk of progressive yet the realities for the everyday seem anything but. There is an assumption that the world can be made a better place changed by a matter of ideals and are we wrong to hope for it? Forgotten are the wars past and current when discussing diversity, change, rich and poor and division. Perhaps instead of a financial based Monopoly board game we should try the ideas ‘Monopoly’. As if there aren’t enough absolutes without the 3 Fates, birth, life, and death without creating more and whilst we’re at it avoiding the 7 ‘deadlies’ and aiming for the 7 cardinal virtues! Impossible! But we are allowed to wear condoms whoopee! Must remember that one…

The range of protocols only reflects the interpretations of how to live. It is these interpretations that appear as someone else’s monopoly. But one size does not fit all and I wasn’t talking condoms! When there appears to be a constant monopoly over your soul, your life, your thought life, health life, mental life everyday life then it is no wonder there are many who are perfecting the zombie look, see Zombie Boy online ( tip off via Matt Hynds). The Cranberries’ song Zombie ‘In my head’ clamours with other voices trying out for the loudest spot and the monopoly on psyche. And perhaps this is the problem with the voices of ideology. They stack up either from those of our past, those of the present and then the ones we created for ourselves out of fear. They’re the hardest. And what is our response to shout back yet another alternative but never the less an ideology. A plan! I rather fancy Susan Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’ whilst it was written for inspecting the image does raise the issues for the need of an interpretation at all. While we pour over minute details perhaps it is best to leave room for manoeuvre, facility to….rather than tighten, clamp, re-arrange and rather didactically order in a Monopoly of rhetoric.

The lecture this week reflected on the Institution and Bourdieu’s claim on the necessity for challenges to it, to both reflect and create tension. He deemed it necessary to avoid a Monopoly, necessary to bring about a negotiated point something that whilst not ideal may provide more facility. One radio guest on radio 4 commented and dismissed the need for protests despite being peaceful ( mostly). These tensions are welcome, good and democratic if only to provide the balance when an ideology seeks to monopolise the minds of others and perhaps the financial market as by product.   While Bourdieu is definitely an advocate that sociology is the site for revolutionary thinking  and while he himself was marginalised it is perhaps this perspective that found him at the pinnacle view that bourgeoisie were policing and had indexed the working class.  Everyday life has gone through many transformations, but I had hoped we were further away from this than it now appears. But then again any totalitarianism would not be so hot either. At an impasse I totally sympathise with Sal for taking off to Mexico. So Fight or flight well Kerouac may proffer something despite being no labelled philosopher on society. But he was a partaker and luminary. He argues for spirit. Ah we’re back onto ideology and monopoly or are we? He makes a point that the past is the root of the future and that a man cannot live without the continuity of both. We talk of the spirit of the age, we talk of freedom of the spirit. He rested on memory that didn’t fix but enlightened and evolved through into the future. Perhaps the zombie can be described as someone stuck in the past or the present but not in continuity with either. Perhaps accepting past and looking how to evolve rather than reject change is the answer. Progressive does  not necessarily mean a fix, revolt or huge change but a shift onto a parallel line that allows us to embrace rival interpretations. Are we in a yet another repeat of the past or are we engaging in the tensions of Bourdieu’s idea to address and challenge to gain some balance or are we  Zombie’s with the scroll of instruction in our mouths. But then again my observation is that there seems to be particularly one instruction prevalent at the minute and that is ‘CUT’, now where have I heard that before? Perhaps it is not those of poor stature that are the zombie labourers at all but those in power with their words.

However, if we use the term alienation and it’s concept of ‘man torn from himself and changed into a thing, along with his freedom’ (Lefebvre, H.  2002), then we perhaps arrive at the very definition of ‘Zombie’ and that can be interpreted at any level in society. Think at this point my attention should be diverted to Kerouac and spirit.

The Light fantastic and One Way Trip

Careening in a zigzag lap of the Timezone installation in the square, blue neon lights and the city space of Coventry is a breathless rush injected by the joy of accomplishment, arriving and leaving. Those artists who like to observe banality no doubt find the simplicity of breathing, exhaustion, the rise and fall of living in the moment fascination itself. ‘Sunless’ by Chris Marker cuts out, just as one girl under the camera eye stares right back, then black.

Dean and Sal as they drive through the jungle outside Georgia observe how time slows with heat. ‘ …a sluggish oily sweat on the brow…and it’s always there because its always hot the year round’. How environment and circumstance shape  time, structure it and even channel our concerns within it. This is the box of time that are, our boundaries. One time can count in significance for many times, one moment can become meaningful against all others. The sense of distance is not necessarily created by time but the installation of boundaries unspoken but clipped; Our limits within ourselves. Dean in all his curiosity and innocence remarks ‘What must that do to their souls! How different they must be in their own private concerns and evaluations and wishes!’ His mouth hung with awe and they drove on in his desire to see ‘every possible human being on the road’.

Leaving Stoke on the stretch of A50, it’s wonderfully open and quiet late at night. Pleiades in August noted, but I’ve found the best moment for keeping an eye out for a shooting star is over this stretch between the warehouses and the border of Derbyshire. It’s not too late in September. Rather than the clear ones across my cine windscreen, there was one arcing over the corner of the rooftop next door as I arrived back. Back. Arriving back in one’s own timezone; the dictation of structure strikes back. We rush through our doors. Halting to sit on a bench that marks a space between leaving and arriving is one way to breach the pace. Dean and Sal often arrive back from their road trips faced with Dean resolving relationship conflicts and Sal completing writing or even beginning. Each had never left their own private concerns but had left their timezone for a while.

Our roadtrips may not be epic or written in annals of literature but leaving the timezone briefly definitely brings optical effect. Like staring into the psychedelic colours of an oil wheel turning slowly a quiescence settles and the constellations on our own maps are re-distributed. There have been brief allusions to Proust on this roll and its here I would like to establish the link. While my own observation that it is precisely the ability of both writers to optically examine time, magnify  its magnitude, brevity and the fantastic ability to squander it, Kerouac  does give us a small magnifier to identify the presence of Proust towards the end of his tale…’I knew it was Dean’s high-eternity-in-the-afternoon Proust.’ Poetic and ambiguous, no doubting that Dean had the ability to step out of his timezone, in fact everyone’s, and enter into his own sense of high priority, eking out of times gone past and shovelling them up close into the present. Proust weaves time, his own time similarly, so it could be a stretch and a tenuous one to claim Dean as the new beat host of time discovered and  Proust the host of continuous reading of 6 volumes on ‘time regained’. Proust’s continuous writing and Kerouac’s kick writing (non-stop) create a similar sense of timelessness and the magnification of minutiae time.

My daughter pointing to the drifting dust picked out in the sunlight, and asks, ‘Can you see that?’ The light fantastic notes the invisible, the banal and the unnoticed. It seems to me the best way is stepping not out of time but simply my own timezone -   Watching air, watching dust, out of time and out of limits. The stare often epitomizes this like the girl in Sunless on which the camera rests then turns to black. The gaze, direct, and at once without aim, folds into a stem of time. Dean was curious about the private concerns and the differences found across environs; ‘Sans Soleil’, ‘Sunless’ or ‘without sun’ does not necessarily mean dark or horror but unnamed concerns like shrinking trousers and a loose stitch. Kerouac and Proust worry the stitch on time identifying with concern yet never naming it merely illuminating the environ by which to observe its passing. It passes through light, unnamed.