peter morrison 2012

somewhere along the line, between there and here i think i flickered once or twice too many times. it seems the only logical explanation, the experienced gaps in time that account for the last week, or two...

i had visitors, so found my distracted, unsure what my plans were for the day of fourqating. which left them with a flickering, unsubstantial/unsubstantiated kind of spontaneity.

on my recent re-read of fremder, i had noted page numbers in my phone. so minutes before going out the door for the evening, i grabbed phone, yellow paper, and a fremder. and with those three objects i scrawled out, in huge hurried letters, the following two quotes from that novel:

What I like about Badru is that its so much what it is, so much the appearance of itself printed on the very thin membrane that we call reality. On the other side of that membrane is the endless becoming that swallows up years and worlds, Badr al-Budur, Mikhail’s Intergalaktik, even the dream rats and their sacred objects, in the darkness of no remembrance.

...

Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillness blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip of celluloid that shows it twenty-four stillness per second, making real by an act of retinal attention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lover’s kiss, the shots are fired the horses gallop; but bellow the threshold of conscious thought the eye sees and the mind savours the flickering of the black.

- from Fremder

my brother and i nipped into a book shop, late on in the day, before moving on to the next steps of our insubstantial plan. there i found of books that were on "sale", one piece of yellow paper was thrust into the pages of iain banks' The Steep Approach To Garbadale - which seemed appropriate given he is a scottish writer and these events took place in scotland. (think quick with this logic thing...) the second piece of paper was thrust equally hastily, and sneakily into a copy of ben aaronvitch's Rivers of London. this too seemed appropriate, a curious london novel, for a writer who wrote so much about london. the banks is one of his rare ones i have not actually read, however i would recommend aaronvitch's novel, an enjoyable read.

anyway, that was my belated qatation.
yours flickeringly.
peter