1. Irony
In a description of this sort we have to emphasise that its content is, in fact, positive – a moth, you call us, and we are supposed to be happy – well isn’t every being of equal importance: a moth, a snake, a giraffe, a human; they glide determinedly towards the end of their lives – although it is not only this which determines them to be of equal nature … shopping takes up a great part of these lives (translate this into moth-speak and you will find the very thing I am describing would be signified by the equivalent shopping-signifier) where beings are drawn towards heavily lighted areas; the loneliness strikes us in those moments towards the end of opening hours – the café section closed – which brings a fecundity to the piercing white light under which nothing is not shown, no shadows are permitted to escape … abandoned chairs, coffee machines, bare wooden tables disinfected so efficiently that the only thing you can notice are the countless stains, all help me to the realisation as I’m scrolling through the cotton-blend jumpers that I have been pinned, quite literally, to the shop floor.
2. On Cathedrals
I’ll only speak of two cathedrals – I’ve been to more, don’t worry, they are just the two that occur to me for the point I wish to make (does this mean that my point is invalid for ignoring any other examples that could possibly refute it?) – Chichester and Canterbury … various chapels surround and enclose a centre which it is only possible to defer, there is no single point of knowledge (I do not mean this as a snarky atheist although it works that way as well I guess) and this means that darkness is allowed to dwell, paradoxically, within the church: the very literal shadows caused the architectural elegance; the semantic covering and recovering of meaning forcing one to always believe that there is something hidden … I float within a cathedral, not beholden to its obligations.
3. Architecture and Humanity
The tombs vie for influence within the grandness of the overall architecture … references are caught in feedback loops where Larkin emerges within Chichester, doubled King Henrys enforce historical events in different spots of Canterbury with ruinous outcomes; supporting structures are instituted – arches support additional sections and bear the weight; architecture claims its representative qualities but the individual also claims its own patronage, causing a combined form of objectness parading in a non-dialectical fashion where spectacle takes over from any real event.
4. Thomas Becket
The sculpture floats but is made of pins which either refutes the reality or refutes the imagining; and, of course, the sculpture does not really float, it is held by wires pinned to the walls that no-one must touch unless permitted – this suspension hangs in place for real events as a mark of our only mode of experiencing reality … a proposition lays itself in front of me imploring that we describe history in such a way; that we cannot touch the present from our audience seats and can only imagine the stage which sits there plainly, materially, in full view.
5. Clarity?
We are able to float through positions where there are no stakes, where we can play at faith, play at meaning, touch reality from a distance, escape being pinned down, but this floating loses its power and force as soon as any consequence can be deciphered – you do not get to try out a position, a stance, an opinion and then discard it as though it were a prayer or a jumper … a topological certainty is claimed where even the certainties are constantly changed … painted over, a veneer of the new states its own justification … real events flicker, a solution is given to imagine an alternate reality, an alternate future, but we already have one.
6. A Moth?
A moth I say with a certainty that undermines my willingness to take the position that it is impossible to know anything – we claim ourselves as martyrs able to try on the clothes of any supposed hero: Socrates is too old to be a hero though, and his mode of death far too anachronistic for our hyperreal age … there is always a doubling and here it takes the form of a double irony – that our flighty selves are designed both to escape consumerist trappings as well as to be the perfect marks for cunning advertisers aiming to turn human flesh into profit; that our floating moth structures can gracefully pirouette around the tombs of cathedrals lifted on the weight of an invisible spirituality as well as being too irreverent to ever take those silly get-ups seriously … I walk through Canterbury Cathedral and catch sight of a room filled with different church outfits that I can’t help but view in the same way as the kid’s fancy dress section of the Roman Museum I visited the day before just, this time, for adults.
7. A Tragic End
Rather than an end, we can only claim a pause. Even worse, perhaps there is not even a claim. It seems impossible to know whether an attempted patient summing-up is not in fact a faltering. This seems harder when we note that for all our attempts at any imaginative being we can only summon that which seems somewhat familiar. It is an odd type of sleight of hand to claim to have procured from the ether that which already was and already could be. This is the case with real events. A resolution has already been and it already can be in the future. A type of peace has already been and already can be. So, what are we imagining?
Bann Ister lives in Brighton. They have been published in Cephalopress’ Inksac.
minor literature[s] 