REVIEW - 'Accepting Reality: The University Years' - Saimon A. King

‘Accepting Reality’ is Saimon A. King’s second collection of short fiction that, as the title suggests, documents the writer exercising his skills in a more rounded, reflective and accomplished manner than his first collection ‘Confronting Reality’.  Initially a mutual correspondent of mine, King has since become a good friend, and it is pleasing indeed to see his highly idiosyncratic and scatological style growing in strength and confidence; occasionally lapsing into flights of absurdity and solipsism, but further expanding in breadth of influence and subject.

Growing up in Chile, only moving to England at age 11, King’s prose contains within itself the ambivalence and aloof alterity of the natural ‘outsider’, most discernible when occasionally attempting to characterise the quotidian or the mundane, as opposed to his preferred portrayal of the beleaguered obsessive, lost in a tempest of solitude, introspection and isolation-induced despair.

He often takes as inspiration the lives of figures such as Olivier Messiaen in a touching story reflecting on the transcendental quality of art (‘Quartet for the end of time’); the obscure pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus in a story about all the chance moments of history expunged in the flames of time, while others manage to resist the perpetual flux to become mythology (‘Consigned to Mythology’); and the Russian writer Nikolay Gogol who, in a fit of spiritual despair, was impelled to destroy his work (‘Burned Manuscripts’).  The intellectual intent of these experimental pieces is evident; King is seeking to explore the parameters of his own psyche, his foibles and motivations through the lens of these seminal true-life figures.

Written over a period between 2011 and 2014, the stories gain in strength as they progress which is promising in and of itself.  What is equally promising is that, in parallel, the initially overt influences on his work begin to fade to the periphery; evidence of a gradual but very definite formulation of his own ‘voice’.

Indeed, the first story ‘8pm in Buenos Aires’, depicting the protagonist’s wanderings around the Argentine capital having just watched Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris’, resurrects several of those foremost South American influences as ghosts – Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Roberto Arlt.

King’s predilection for political theory, for philosophy and for the creative arts frequently enforce their weight upon the texts; more than once reflecting upon the importance of the literary canon and intellectual enquiry as being the most profound mode of existence.  There seems to be a constant tug-of-war between rational pragmatism and irrationality, even nihilism, being waged through the stories alongside a quest for understanding and self-realisation (most successfully, I felt, in the Borgesian tale ‘The Hermit and the Despot’).

For all of his periphrastic ambition, King’s style is still, one can discern easily, of an inchoate form (as he himself concedes in the Preface, ‘several stories are clumsily written’).  He occasionally seems to stumble over his own feet with jarring turns-of-phrase that sit more than a little uncomfortably; delinquent phrases tossed like stink-bombs down the otherwise elegant corridors of his prose.  He can be prone to the odd clunky solecism (for instance, ‘verminous liquid’, ‘motes of dust coaxed over...’), and clichés that do disservice to the high-minded frame of the narrative (for instance, ‘drink like a fish’, ‘I slept like a log’, and particularly, a cringe-worthy sexual metaphor involving Dracula).

Such quibbles regarding a formative writing style aside however, the wealth of imaginative ideas is palpable, particularly, to my mind at least, in the pieces that King himself appears keen to disregard in the afterword.  There is the joyously nonsensical absurdism of ‘Hit the North!’,  in which an inhabitant of a flourishing neoliberal South of England takes a bizarre journey to the nuclear wasteland of the north, encountering Mark E. Smith who has become the immortal leader of a mutated Fall.  There is also the Freudian screenplay ‘My Vinyl Fetish’ in which six characters, five of whom appear to be different manifestations of King’s personality, sit around and discuss Captain Beefheart, Van Morrison and Bach records.

Ironically, where King’s writing is at its most comfortable, assured and imagistic is the incidental piece ‘Valperaiso’ (dismissed in the afterword as an experiment in naturalism), which belies the versatility and future potential of his work.

As oblique, ambiguous, even knowingly difficult, as many of these efforts undoubtedly are, they demonstrate just the kind of absurdist and subversive literary mind that in years gone by may well have thrived but nowadays seem lamentably redundant.  The challenge for King now is to iron out the occasional clumsiness, hone his voice further and embark upon something more substantial, of a longer form. It’s encouraging to believe that this strange creature of creative flight is only just learning how to stretch his wings.

Check out Saimon's blog here.

Tearing the city at the seams #24 - The story of John Rae reimagined as a charting of London's Northwest Passage

The sky was an aquarium blue as I disembarked from base camp at Elephant and Castle and made my way to the starting point of my London expedition, a homage-of-sorts to the great Arctic explorer John Rae.

Born in the Orkneys in 1813, Rae trained as a doctor, joined the Hudson’s Bay Company and proceeded to undertake several major Arctic expeditions, charting incalculable stretches of coastline and having strong claim to the prestigious title of being the first man to discover the final link in the mysterious and elusive Northwest Passage.

But it was his discovery and reportage of the shocking fate that befell the doomed Franklin expedition that would transform him from a lauded ‘hero of the age’ to a vilified outsider who found high society, including even the likes of Charles Dickens, sworn to shun and discredit him of his phenomenal accomplishments.

In honour of John Rae then, my own expedition would be to chart a course north from the City and attempt to navigate a Northwest Passage across the top of London, reaching the promontory of Hampstead Heath.  From there I would proceed southwest to Holland Park and the house in which Rae died in 1893 in relative obscurity; and from there east to Westminster Abbey where last year a memorial plaque was installed, bestowing to him at last the commemoration that was withheld throughout his life.  

My journey began on Fenchurch Street in the navel of London’s bloated belly, the street on which the Hudson’s Bay Company offices were situated.  I gazed up at the swollen thumb of the 20 Fenchurch Street (or ‘Walkie-Talkie’) building, and down at the deserted foyer with its escalators continuing their vacant rotation, marvelling at the elephantine hubris of such a development.  A lone man sat islanded at the reception desk, recalling to my mind the security guard of the empty office building in Mike Leigh's 'Naked' - the man with the most boring job in London.

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the HBC was a pioneering fur-trading enterprise with outposts scattered across Canada and the Northwest Territories, with intrepid explorers like Rae on their payroll. The discovery of a Northwest Passage that would provide a link between Pacific and Atlantic oceans was a highly lucrative commercial proposition, allowing easier trading routes to China and the East.  

It is impossible to comprehend today, in a world of GPS, Google Streetview and satellite technology that can plot coordinates with keyhole precision, that not so long ago vast expanses of the world map were blank unknown spaces, annexed off by our own physical limitations hindering our ability to conquer them. That being said, heightened knowledge is not necessarily conducive with better understanding, often merely shifting new straits of ignorance.  I would contend that the majority of Londoners today are increasingly disconnected from their actual physical surroundings, the distances between places, the ways in which sections of the city stitch together as one complete whole, and are more au fait with transport routes and mapped directions that they obediently follow with little more cognisance than an orange avatar being lifted and dropped onto a new street.

My interest in John Rae stems as well from the fact that I plan on using his character and experience as a loose inspiration for a central character in a new novel I hope to begin writing soon. In terms of discovering a narrative territory, I am still faced with large amounts of 'blank space' that I continue to stumble forwards hoping to uncover and reveal to myself.

I had been hoping, perhaps rather perversely, for a flurry of snow to descend in time for my walk, for Arctic conditions to imbue my efforts with a little more verity, but alas I was deprived. Nevermind though, for it being January, my breath was still mushroom-clouding before my face. I had also, in the week prior, been racing through Ken McGoogan's excellent book 'Fatal Passage', a thoroughly persuasive encomium to John Rae, and as a result, my imagination was enough to cast a blizzard before my footsteps, animating each surface with frost and each building a different berg of ice sculpted by the elements.

'Fatal Passage' paints a vivid impression of Rae as a consummate adventurer in a very classic sense;  an unrivaled 'snowshoer', huntsman, navigator, capable of traversing incredible distances in the most frigidly harsh conditions. Not only this, but he was almost a post-colonial figure, considering the Victorian-era attitudes of the day. He maintained that the best, perhaps the only, way to survive in those Arctic climes was to respect and learn from the native tribes of Inuits encountered there, ingratiating within their way of life, befriending them and treating them as equals instead of uncultivated inferiorities as the received wisdom of the time decreed.

From Fenchurch Street I plotted a course towards Liverpool Street, keen to get clear of the abundant collossi of commerce with the glassine fronts and glacial steel forms. My head was humming with the evidence of a mild hangover, which gave me cause to reflect on how already I was trailing so far behind John Rae's good character. He seldom touched alcohol, already having discerned through his medical training the implications of over-indulgence. Likewise he refrained from smoking, as I recalled on passing a shiver of young girls huddled in the doorway of a clothes store, their breath exaggerated by the plumes of cigarette smoke. One rather charming anecdote in McGoogan's book tells how on one expedition he was relegated to a separate igloo from those of his companions as they puffed away on their pipes as a barrier against the intense cold.

My route took me through the Bunhill Fields cemetery and onwards up Goswell Road to Angel. By this time, the nomadic herds of Islington were beginning to migrate up and down the peninsula of shops but, refusing to be diverted, I forged on up Liverpool Road before darting inwards to the quieter Barnsbury estates. With its cul-de-sacs and avenues, I could detect the inhabitants were snowbound by their Saturday morning lethargy, with not even the promise of Upper Street's bustle to rouse them.

This was far from shocking, given that given that the glorious morning sky had now curdled to a milky grey, and maybe even warning of rain, a part of me still hoped, an avalanche of extreme weather to be lain like a gauntlet before my steely resolve.

I veered westwards along the dreary stretch of Tufnell Park Road, starting to decipher the aching whimpers from my legs and my enthusiasm for the first time beginning to thaw.  Once I began the slow ascent of Dartmouth Park Hill though, and began to glimpse the fenestrated canopy of the Heath between the terraced rooftops, I was sufficiently fueled by the promise of having successfully charted a course across the northwest climes of sleepy suburbia to continue apace.  I wasn’t to be fazed by the Highgate locals in their assorted knitwear, brunching languorously in fancy delicatessens, and I marched upwards and onto the Heath itself, swinging around to see the Shard in the distance like a shining stalagmite.

 

Considering that I could procure a band of huskies to whisk me south, I approached several of those out walking dogs to try and trade some of the whale blubber that I had brought as my sole provisions. Exuding, as the majority did, an air of aloof diffidence, I decided against such bartering and endeavoured on to the peak of Parliament Hill.

There I marveled at the cityscape stretched out before me and the distance I had traveled over the course of a single morning.  Framed by the blue sky, the buildings appeared like an armada of ships landlocked in a vast ice-field, waiting patiently for the sun to heat up enough and allow them to drift free once more.

I sat for a while to survey the scene and recalled to mind the legacy of John Rae.  In 1854, he was tasked with journeying again to the Arctic to try and discover what had happened to the expedition of Sir John Franklin, another renowned British explorer, who had set sail in 1845 with 128 men, to try and claim the missing piece of the Northwest Passage puzzle.  Having made camp for the winter in the punishing environment in which he seemed to thrive, Rae came across numerous Inuit natives who, after much questioning and the corroboration of several Franklin artefacts found in their possession, enabled him to ascertain the horror of their fate.

Landlocked by ice around King William Island, and blighted by lead poisoning from the tin cans they had taken with them for food, Franklin and his men apparently began trying to make their way southwards, before eventually resorting to cannibalism in a desperate yet vain effort to stay alive.

Luckily I was in little danger of succumbing to the same eventuality, fuelled as I was by my cache of whale blubber and Toblerone; but nonetheless, I certainly wasn’t ruling it out definitively.  I left Hampstead Heath via a muddy isthmus, and began to plod along the plush townhouses of Canfield Gardens.  From there I darted across the Kilburn High Road and on in the direction of Maida Hill.

I thought on about the scornful opprobrium unleashed upon Rae after his return to England and the publication of his findings. The very notion that such noble and Christian exemplars of Western civilisation could resort to such depravities was a hand grenade tossed into the haughty mores of the time; a ‘naked lunch’ if ever there was one. Giving way to the barely suppressed racism of the time, many expounded the theories that the Inuits – as a savage race – could hardly be trusted to impart an accurate account of the truth, and even could be to blame for having attacked the weakened party.  Rae himself, not prone to these superior tendencies of Victorian England, and knowing first-hand the horrendous conditions faced in such terrain, was ambivalent about the acts themselves, and so was unprepared for the vitriolic tirade that sought to destroy his good name.

Lady Jane Franklin, the widow of the dead explorer, set about a prolonged campaign to, not only besmirch John Rae’s reputation (even convincing Charles Dickens to publish essays refuting the cannibalistic charges), but to appropriate his achievements with regard to the Passage and attribute them to her late husband.  As a lady of high society, a prominent hostess of the ‘Upper 10,000’, she was tenacious in her aim of hoisting aloft the pennant of her own name, reaping the rewards vicariously, managing to manipulate funds time and again for more expeditions to search the truth that she had in mind.

My pace now slowing, my feet beginning to drag, I passed beneath the Westway and through Notting Hill, skirted round the crowds billowing along Portobello Road.  From there it was a mere trot to Lower Addison Gardens, where I reach Rae's corner house in which he lived for the last years of his life until 1893 in relative anonymity with his beloved wife Kate.

I decided to pause and recuperate for a while in Holland Park.  Posh women sauntered past with their dogs, all appearing to cheerfully carry a little bag of shit as though it were a dainty purse.  It's funny how exhaustion seems to refract certain things into a new and absurdist light.

Rousing myself at last, I trudged through the bottom of Hyde Park and finally arrived at Westminster Abbey where last year John Rae was memorialised with a plaque.

I felt the circle had been completed quite aptly; meanwhile the blisters on my feet after my 20-mile slog served as a sharp reminder of my abject inadequacy next to Rae and others like him. It's easy to despair, surveying our habitual slump into technologically-mandated lethargy, office-bound sedentary, and prescribed allocations of gym-bound exertion, that the days of such explorers have long since past, and in many ways they have, together - for the most part - with the misguided conviction that with our Enlightened superiority we ascend beyond all other races and nations.

Once I'd limped home though, I scanned through the news, my attention instantly ensnared by the two men who had successfully scaled the perilous Dawn Wall in Yosemite; proof for the sceptics that there are still boundaries to push and challenges to transcend. 

Charlie Hebdo, satire and freedom of speech

Barely had the soothing bubble bath of festivity begun to dissipate than the world was plunged back into the icy pool of reality once more. Despite the media inundation that followed, the brutal attacks of last Tuesday were not even the most deadly assault of the day - in Yemen a car bomb killed 38 people in an unattributed attack. Even this atrocity paled in significance next to reports of Boko Haram's massacre of around 2,000 in Nigeria.

Make no mistake, this essay is in no way an apologia for the abominable actions of the French Islamist terrorists who murdered 12 people last Tuesday. No one is in any doubt that these were deluded fanatics committing evil acts for which there can be no justification. But here is my hunch...

I would wager that the two men who stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo, in their paramilitary apparel and SWAT team efficiency, were not offended by the cartoons being scribbled inside at all.

Predominantly, the extremists of IS have been found to be 'religious novices' and converts, perhaps not even Wahabbist in their mentality; the type of jihadist who purchases 'Islam for Dummies' via Amazon before setting off for Syria, as two men did from Birmingham last year. They have chosen their targets to inspire the maximum impact and the fiercest response, designed to further ostracise ordinary Muslims in the hope that they will soon be driven in desperation to their fanatical cause.

No, the real people who will have been offended by the cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed (and the 5 million print run of the magazine funded by the French state), are the ordinary Muslims going about their lives in a climate of steadily ratcheting prejudice and animosity. (It's worth remembering that France is the 'tolerant' nation that passed a ban on the burqa and on praying in the street.)

In the days after the attack, the West has predictably worked itself into a moral lather of overblown piety with, in my view, a paucity of examination of the maze into which we find ourselves running blind. In times such as this we often turn to philosophy as our guiding light, and indeed, the well-known quote from the French philosopher Voltaire was circulated ad nauseum in subsequent days - 'I do not agree with what you have to say but I'll defend to the death your right to say it'.

Is this not, noble though it may seem, establishing the exact same rigid fundamentalist immovability that the secular West likes to attribute to and lament about religious fanaticism? The right to freedom of speech is not an 'absolute right', it is tethered to the ground by responsibility and the duty to exercise the right in a way that will not cause unnecessary offence or upset.

The events and subsequent reaction have lent themselves perfectly to an examination of the 'tolerance paradox', whereby a purportedly tolerant person who acts antagonistically towards an intolerant person cannot be said to be entirely possessed of tolerance. The philosopher Karl Popper adduced that we are warranted in refusing to tolerate intolerance, whereas John Rawls believed that it was incumbent upon a just society to tolerate the intolerant or else fail by its own standards.

The problem is the question of who is holding the scales of toleration, whose standard of tolerance are we seeking to judge? For this, in my view, is the crux of the issue in terms of the West's response. In our secular, materialistic culture we have relegated religious faith and political ideology to the sidelines as largely irrelevant eccentricities, leaving a vast valley floor of rational pragmatism in which the only way to rise above the fray is to push ever higher the capacity to shock. Shock value is a sturdy yet fickle currency and the problem persists that we expect it to be adequate tender no matter where we might try and distribute the wealth.

It inconveniences nor infringes upon any Westerner's life for visual representation of the Prophet Mohammed to be avoided as a mark of respect, tolerance and appreciation of the strong beliefs of the millions of Muslims coexisting in our communities. Mocking the leaders of IS and the zealots who hoist themselves up as Islamic figureheads are a different matter; they instill in themselves the hubris of a leader and are ripe for satire's stones to be thrown. Satire can only really be successful if the butt of the joke is a figure of authority or powerful institution; it collapses like a deck of cards as soon as the target is aimed at the powerless and voiceless - in this case, the Muslim community (an increasingly ostracized and antagonised collective across Europe).

This same lack of taste was evident with the recent debacle over 'The Interview', in which Americans beat their chests over their freedom to watch films being threatened by tyrannical North Koreans, as I wrote about here. This is why the oft-made comparison with 'Monty Python's Life of Brian' resoundingly misses the point. Apart from very briefly at the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus Christ is not depicted at all, neither are he or his image the target of mockery. Instead, the Python's satirical venom is spat at the hypocrisy of organised religion and the way human's cleave with credulous zeal to hierarchy and instutionalised forms of power and belief systems.

As I write this I have a tome of a book sitting on my desk spanning the career of Gerald Scarfe’s political cartoons, a wonderful counterpoint to Charlie Hebdo’s crude and mostly tasteless etchings. Scarfe depicts all manner of twisted and scabrous depravities – Margaret Thatcher fellating Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush as a primate surveying the smoking ruins of an Iraqi cityscape, and such like. As close to the bone as Scarfe frequently cuts, never is anyone or thing assumed as the recipient of his inked ire who is not in some kind of power position over a multitude of others.

Charlie Hebdo, in their defiant mocking of the Prophet Mohammed, intended to provoke and upset the Muslim community who have next to no power or representation in our Western society and, since 9/11, have had to endure a bloody smorgasbord of foreign wars and ‘interventions’, along with a rising tide of Islamophobia that gathers legitimacy as extremist attacks continue. The elephant in the room throughout most of the media’s reportage, was the fact that the opinions of ordinary Muslims on whether or not they deemed the cartoons to be offensive were by and large completely ignored.

All of this does not negate the fact that the Muslim community do now, and have done for a while, have some very serious demands to place on themselves in terms of trying to exorcise these demonic elements that have taken root within their faith. Just as the secular West cannot arrogantly expect Muslims to adhere to every facet of our vaunted notion of ‘enlightened society’; so Muslims cannot blindly continue without real and substantial efforts being made to try and reconcile their faith with the 21^st century, as all other world religions have and continue to do so. Primarily this should be focused on a reassessment of children’s education, questioning the literalism of following the Koran, attitudes towards women, and so on.

In the end though, we all suffer from acts of extremism such as this. Regardless of how many gather in the streets, pencils aloft and declaring ‘Je suis Charlie’; at every instance of extremism, governments use it as an excuse to further tighten and enshrine the security state, hacking away at civil liberties under the purported aim of ‘keeping us safe’.  This happened to an astonishing degree in post-9/11 America with the passing of the Patriot Act that ultimately led to the full-blown surveillance of the NSA and GCHQ.

It can already be seen to be happening now. George Osborne gave a commitment to provide "whatever investment necessary" for MI5 to continue their intelligence gathering. Meanwhile, David Cameron has pledged to continue with the passage of the 'Snooper's Charter' into law, which will allow further mass gathering of accessible data communications. So it is, that as we pontificate about the sanctity of free speech, so our freedoms as civilians are compromised by gradual increments that are almost impossible to reverse.

If we accept the unassailable fact that we live in a multicultural society, one that tolerates and accommodates those of all faiths, races and demography, then we have to recognise and appreciate that certain things remain sensitive emotive issues that, if we are to be truly civilised, should be accepted as such. 

Children at school are filled with the humble maxim that 'if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all'. They are taught not to pick on those in the minority or who are different in some way. Why then, as responsible adults, do we abandon these simple humanist principles under the intoxicant of apparent liberality and use the excuse of freedom of speech and the freedom to offend? 

In my view, we subconsciously register just how curtailed we are within our own lives, circumstances and societal systems; in a very real sense we are barely free at all. And so naturally the apparent freedom to say whatever we like and to whomever we like is attractive and hence elevated to an almost fundamentalist principle of Western democracy.

We need to see through this delusion, question it, and reassess our own levels of toleration and understanding. If we fail to do so, then the antagonising of Muslims will continue and worsen, inevitably serving to whip up further extremism, all of which only allows the intolerable carousel of pointless violence to continue to turn.

SHORT STORY - The Room and the Code

...684910 ... 492083 ... 213781 ... The inert silence greeting each entry perforates my resolve in degrees I am powerless to absolve. The digits revolve on their rotary discs, side by side, six in all, conversant in their own private mathematical discourse.

My thumb revolves the first disc to turn 9 into 0. Just once I would like 0 not to follow 9, I feel a transgression of this magnitude could trigger a reawakening of my degrading spirit and suppurating consciousness.

But as the dictates of this higher law demand, 9 must always return to its natural state of 0. Frequently, when I have grown tired of the fundamentals of the code, I tease the disc between between the notched teeth of the 9 and 0, ruminating on the possibilities of some grand vista of numerology lying concealed between the experiential reality of 9 into 0 and 0 into 9.

... 472967 ... 017296 ... 333816 ...

These philosophical deviations can swallow up untold stretches of time and always leave me reeling with mental exhaustion. For what is the meaning of this infinite return, this constant cycle of which there appears no escape? I remain convinced of there being, somewhere between 9 and 0, the opening to an alternate dimension in which all the artifice that comprises my existence dissolves into obsolescence.

492775 ...199099 ...358140 ...656213 ... Metaphysical thoughts aside though, here the code is master and I am it's humble servant. It commands and rules over my every action; before its simple but inexplicable logic I am a creature of irredeemable fault and fallibility. The code is master of my destiny and mediator of my every thought and action.

As much as I might at times become a vulgar leader of my own futile resistance, I am very soon reduced to relying on it once more both for meaning and for hope. The code is despotic and exists to watch over me, and however much I might occasionally waver, I always return to its unshakable order and sanity, indeed I cling to it like a shipwrecked sailor to a life raft.

In the room there is only myself and the code. The room is cuboid and empty, lit from above not by natural or artificial light but by some strange celestial composite of the two. It throws an opalescent haze down to hover on the walls and floor like an apparition. In any case, I have scarcely bothered to examine its source or origin, it is meaningless to me in the context of the code.

Although the room is compact I cannot say for sure whether I have traversed its boundaries, the antipodal wall is a murky frontierland of unexplored prospects. I feel certain that at some point I have circumnavigated the room but have no cognisance of such a venture whatsoever. The territory of the room holds nothing for me though, being as it takes me physically and mentally further from the code.

Why I am here and my precise purpose for being are mysteries that I have long since accepted I will not divine, perhaps not until the code has been successfully broken. If, when the numbed pads of my fingers have become raw from the continual turning of the numbers, I break away and stare at one of the pale walls for long enough, I begin to see scattered remnants of past events; vague mirages cast across some kind of mystical oasis. Whether these are conjured by my own memory or are summoned by a more ambiguous projection imposing from elsewhere is impossible to discern.

... 696841 ... 563629... Soon enough though they dissipate, leaving nothing but a contrail of awareness in my mind that before very long fades along with them. In much the same way do functionalities such as hunger, fatigue or thirst permeate through me before ebbing away like the dying echoes of some formerly natural state of being.

Whatever strange forms it may once have held, my natural state now is defined by the code. I perch on my knees, rotating and setting the numbered discs into their place one by one. The expansive range of possible permutations is exhausting to contemplate though I know not infinite. At times I drive myself into paroxysms of mild delirium as I recall the failed entry of one combination being attempted again and again by my aching fingers that seem to taunt me with their wilfully limited selection.

There are even occasions when the dimensions of time seem to melt into liquid form in which I can only flounder, until they again recede into ordered stasis. It is at these points that I stare at the code and could swear positive that once the number of discs only amounted to 5, and before that merely 4, as though they were vast epochs that time has blurred of all distinction. Like my fleeting glimpses of hunger or fatigue, my powers of deduction disperse like clouds from the clear sky of my consciousness, and I can do nothing but pursue the code without flinching in doubt.

My faith must remain undimmed, doubting yields scant reward and there can be negligible worth in throwing thoughts like pebbles into the waters of chance, hoping for resolution in ripples that always conform to the same pattern and formation. I cling fast to the belief that my being will transcend this current state at a time intricately coded with my own destiny.

... 097625 ... 996361 ... 643811 ... It may be, I often ruminate, that there is no single code at all and I am merely tasked to sift through the multiple combinations of limited numbers until a point that defies definition. At that point, 9 will cease its return to 0, bringing to an end the rigid laws of mathematics, and a whole new hinterland of experience will obliterate my existence at the very moment that I am transformed somehow from the room.

With that singular hope in mind I continue the turning of the numbers.

Culture - December

Read:

Primo Levi - 'If Not Now, When?'
Naomi Klein - 'This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate' (non-fiction)
John Molyneux - 'The Future Socialist Society' (non-fiction)
J.G. Ballard - 'Rushing to Paradise'


Watched:

'Interstellar' (Christopher Nolan) (at PeckhamPlex, Peckham)
'Blackfish' (documentary) (Gabriela Cowperthwaite)
'Inland Empire' (David Lynch)
'Selma' (Ava DuVernay)
'The Purge' (James DeMonaco)
'Sleeper' (Woody Allen)
'The Sorrow and the Pity: Part 2 - The Choice' (documentary) (Marcel Ophüls)

John Pilger documentaries:
'The Most Powerful Politician in America'
'Nobody's Children'
'Mr Nixon's Secret Legacy'
'Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia'
'Burp! Pepsi vs Coke in the Ice Cold War'
'The New Rulers of the World'
'Stealing a Nation'
'Utopia'


Listened:

'Inland Empire (OST)' - David Lynch & various
Gazelle Twin - 'Unflesh'


Attended:

'The Institute of Sexology' (at Wellcome Collection)