Psychogeography

As my friend says, one evening, walking home from the bar, Edinburgh is both continuously in turmoil and yet continuously still. The violent expression of its kind of life plays out over the tranquil, expressionless mask of the city. Everything has already been done: is inevitable and ineluctable. Behaviour on both the personal and the historical level seems cyclical. To live in Edinburgh is therefore to practice acceptance: to accept cyclical movement. Time is certainly not under your control and you have to learn to live with that.

It is November and walking home late at night you suddenly are walking through a lunar space: the sky is a silent big void of stars, the wind is small and picked-out like jagged fingers, that very sense of reality, the sense you have which is so subtly different in waking-life, for instance, compared to in dreaming, changes: you feel the thinness of everything here, the sense, the very atmosphere of things being real is less substantial. Geological time, as opposed to human time, can be most keenly felt. You are walking in vastness: spatially and temporally, on those nights: and you feel a little tipsy, a little intoxicated by it all.

From Arthur’s Seat, or from the window of a room peaking out from one of the upper-stories of an academic building, the skyline: the low city peaks, the Seat itself, always terminates in a gossamer band of fog. From the Seat you can always see the sea: unexpected, as the sea always is, a violent yet seamless interruption to the aerial solidity of things. The erupting spines of the Seat’s gorse-bushes, or the cities’ long low huddle of spiny roofs, even the fierceness of the rocky horizon, seem cradled in the distant ebb and wash. The sea makes itself felt in the strangest places: and once you have some vague awareness of its presence, that awareness never vanishes, like a haunting.

***

Rereading Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and not sleeping occasionally to try and write has made me think a lot recently about insomnia and its more insidious opposite....:

There are two ways of accessing the underworld:

Continuous sleeping (Persephone)

And Insomnia (Orpheus).

The Persephone of My Year of Rest and Relaxation is my twin: my sister. Trust me: that spoilt pretty blonde girl is the poet. The poet, of course, alone, is the drive that creates a psychological universe, as opposed to a singular psychology. (That is why there can be no singularly true psychological biography of the writer: the writer is not singular.)

Insomnia: the male, the Orphic road to the Underworld. The road is paved with some very strange obstacles, but the Underworld is no hallucination: it is the space in which you dream with every sense more forcefully than the waking feel of things.

Insomnia is the path of the intellect to the Underworld: but it is only a temporary road.

Endless sleep draws Hades out of you into the shadow-muffled world that was once the zone of your waking-life.

Insomnia is simply a more obvious journey in that it seems like a journey: a descent. And then you arrive: at some indefinable moment everything is different. The previous actuality of things is now simply a flimsy mask worn by absence itself. Can you imagine hearing everyone with that same watery insubstantiality of the voices in dreams: while knowing completely that you are awake?

But anyway: one can sleep too much or too little.

***

Some housekeeping:

To a friend worried about his social life:

Dear W—,

Before you worry about having no active interest in speaking to those who claim to be your friends, first be entirely comfortable in yourself and do not question your own drives. It has taken me right up until now to know that I should not be apologetic about what I want to do and how I want to live: no matter how uncommon that living is.

For all my life: both from the “natural” restrictions of blindness, and from the overt attempts of others, I have always had the fatalistic sense that maybe a quarter to a third of everything I want to happen: to have, to do, will be satisfied. I haven’t lost that fatalism, but I have lost any sense of apologeticness about pursuing those desires. That is the right that living fully as yourself at the top of your voice grants you.

***

To a commenter on my last post:

Dear angry commenter,

You are my first hater: & I rejoice in your existence. To have haters means that you have made a difference: that the force of your utterance has resounded through someone’s living, feeling moment.

As to your comments, you are right, and I freely admit that I was wrong: the alcaic was indeed brought into Latin by Horace, it was not a common metre. In fact the alcaic was one of Sappho’s forms and was imported into Latin by Horace: as was the fashion of the Romans, to take the wildness of Greek invention and domesticate it to the point of banality.

However, my dear hater, you make my own point for me, a little. If, indeed, the alcaic did seem strange and foreign to Romans, why use something as comfortably familiar as the rhyming couplet to support it?

Anyway, I liked your comment because it dripped with the contempt of the well-educated, the university-professor, the academic. The return of poetry to the autodidact, the self-taught, the imaginative, foretells the death of the academic mindset which squeezed poetry to a tenured and minor corner of our society. Rejoice! rejoice!

Until soon friends…