Rub out the word

Still grey today but the biting cold has gone. We set off along Blea Gate and walked to Gilsey, returning along the path which runs high along the edge of the moor, through Fordings and Birkslape to Shake Bridge and a rough track that dropped down from a lonely farm, squat against the grey sky, through wind tossed conifers to Thwaitegarth.

We walked back along the river, the sweet scented air full of summer balm, and I felt happy for once.

There’s sense of history in this area that’s impossible to capture in words. The owner of this caravan, Mrs. Metcalfe, comes from a family who’ve lived in this district for years and the tombstones at Barras Gill and Owlands are filled with the names of Metcalfes, Redmires, Wortons and Grimdens. These families must feel such a linear linkage with their past. Mum and Dad went out for a walk this evening and were accosted at the gate of our field by an old salt, a Redmire who was married to a Grimden of the Grimdens of Yealeth Hall, the Grimdens who, with their own private army of 400 men on white horses, turned out to support Edward in his campaign against the Scots in the early 14th century.

This caravan is quite comfortable and it’s equipped with a Calor Gas heater, stove and wall lamps, and we’re wrapped in a hissing glow warm against the grey scene outside the windows. I sleep on a mattress on the floor in a sleeping bag. I’ve brought quite a bit of work with me: The Victim and Herzog to read, a presentation on the former to prepare for Monday next, and Eric Mottram to make notes on.

I’m thinking of collecting together my Burroughs photocopies and beginning a scrapbook/ideas book to experiment with words, a place I can be free of the constraints of grammatical sense and typographical convention and where sentence and word structures can’t foul ideas at their source. There I can be less hampered by my attachment to the final text/bookish form of this journal. It’s an attachment that’s difficult to be rid of . . ..

What did I mean by my comment the other night about needing to take sides? The Burroughs tutorial set me off reading Mottram’s Critical Appraisals and looking closely at the cut-up technique, and I feel enthusiastic about these ideas. They’ve touched a chord somewhere inside and I think of my own struggles to resolve certain questions here.

Rub Out The Word.

This text terrorizes my need—my longing—to catch all things at once and in their truest form and in their very essence. “In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was God.” All these different moments forced into the same unremitting form. Literature is decades behind the other arts because it doesn’t rely as much on the immediate consciousness of the reader. The word isn’t sacred, but a means to an end, nothing more. Why should texts operate only on the one level of time-space, running a narrative plot in a narrow, strictly chronological and sequential way? Literature must depart from its rigid narrative beginning-middle-end style, just as film has done. Film’s editing, intercutting, and juxtaposition appears to operate uneasily in language. New forms demand a hearing and demand time for their exploration.

The Gysin-Burroughs cut-up technique seems to be one way to combat the tyranny of the Holy Word: “The cut-up method brings to writers the collage which has been used by painters for 50 yrs. And used by the moving and still camera. YOU CANNOT WILL SPONTANEITY. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.” Words/texts/language all a complex, well-entrenched and cohesive system of control to limit and delineate the boundaries of ‘the reasonable’ and the ‘only-to-be-expected.’ Cut-up, verbal collage and juxtaposition attacks the power-system of language (by power-system I mean an entrenched control system firmly regulating mind & thought).

Burroughs: “Capitalism is a system of dependences, which run from within to without, from without to within, from above to below, from below to above. All is dependent, all stands in chains. Capitalism is a condition of the soul and of the world . . .”

From birth our eyes and ears are not our own. Parents and the state implant meanings in the subconscious mind, an (unintentional?) act of programming and perpetuation we can intellectually reject, but this material resurfaces unwilled and unannounced like images from a nightmare suddenly remembered the following day. We are unconscious victims of a subtle form of mass control and mass conditioning, minds influenced by TV, by radio, the insidious banter of advertisements, the “condition of the soul.”

No man, no woman is free. We can only be partially free from this. For Burroughs, freedom is freedom from the “cycle of conditioned action,” and conditioning makes freedom near impossible to attain.