Supermarket isle

England in a bad mood.

The attempt to describe anything real- anything not created by words, kidnapped by interpretation, is so conscious an attempt that it becomes self defeating – and certainly arrogant. Philanthropy is a paid for service- marketed to the elite- as well as being ‘free’ within the iron walls of our little supermarket isle. 

Power, hungry, bodiless itself- must take shape only by assuming some arbitrary form- by saturating or lodging itself in someone’s voice box. In disguise as hygiene, health, sanity, good form, refinement politeness, religion- whatever scapegoat it can muster. 

Even between us, it lurks and tries to take the better of a portion of myself as I stare down at the orbs through which your sight shines. We wade in the respiring tide that is the outside, that is separation from this world, and all illusion masquerades itself as reality. We’re left, as Hollywood likes to phrase it, after the disaster has spun its ways on the workings of the world- and yet- because religion’s already made the bodiless soul redundant, our physicality is all still intact- easier to buy– that guttural landscape- that foresworn swamp rooted of all place- that post nuclear debris- it’s our heaven (devoid of the moral aspect) it’s where we can be without the other more synthetic aspects of reality. 

I drink the hard coffee that reminds me of that slowed down time inside your flat. It’s so rare I take a sip, that I’ve been able to refine the taste right down to one place and one context. Moderation- I suppose- is one of those preached virtues, those disseminated ‘truths’ I really accept. 

Maybe I accept more disseminated truths that I claim.

I suspect that sometimes. And more often than not, I dispute what I am- and trap myself in a kind of rhapsody of polemics to prevent myself from getting out and really finding the truth.  Like allegiance to clan, to group, to tribe. Those Western bigamists, royalists, claim that tribe is some feudal (bad, not free market) ruse succumbed to by people too cowardly to resist their basest instincts. Which are of course, famililal. Yes, it goes contrary to the primacy of the individual and the equality of all when incorporated into political systems- and yet- when conscious- it is far weaker in its reach and saturation than the kind of wordless, undescribed (only very rarely spoken about in case study form- like ‘I went in and they all looked at me’) racism we have. 

 Isn’t it better than that kind of moral disdain clothed in education, economics, for the culture and the mode of interacting of those who share London? Share the pavements and the roads and the schools and that whole edifice of numbers - that whole wall of traced dreams. I thought about Handala today. Sham has it too, but in a way that English sighs, pausing, phrases can easily critcise. 

What I mean is not to go as far as to say ‘culture’, ‘shared identity’, and by that, I mean ‘sanity’ and ‘normality’ all tied up in one- is, by definition, exclusive, but that it works best, flourishes and is easiest to communicate, reproduce, disseminate (just go to a British Council Language Lab) when it is. And so, the less conscious, the better and the worse it is. By being conscious of culture’s wily ways upon us, we can be more objective- and thus sever some of its totality, and yet we normally fall over before we are there. Into that deep, pit like chasm of being aware that we are aware and thus believing we are so objective any of our subjective whims or wills must also be immediately objective, because we thought them. You see this anywhere inside the boxes of people’s identities. In the preaching European liberal, in the self convinced modernist Muslim, in the doctor or the teacher- maybe its lack is one of the charms politicians, gangsters  and ‘the author’ as an abstract voice- I don’t mean me- still retain. Because, unless they are completely deluded, they consciously acknowledge that they are on ‘a side’.