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2) I made spaghetti today.
The mass of soldiers sprawled, no longer poised, upright yet rigid with tension, awaiting the next call.
I watched with beady eyes from above.
Ambush was incoming.
Except this time there would be no snap, no heap of splinters.
Rather, the opposition would creep from all sides, first engulfing the soldiers and then burrowing into them. A limp and tangled mess.
I peered closer, ripe with anticipation, wanting almost to step in, to feel the exhilaration of being subsumed.
And then, I’m sorry to say, a fly flew in, and the water went black.
Inside the black, the spaghetti was a mountain. Not one that could be seen but could be felt, looming.
It’s like the notion of standing on the mountain and you don’t see the mountain. There is actually a wonderful book by Nan Shephard called The Living Mountain, it’s her description of living in the Cairngorms. It’s absolutely stunning because the whole time she is doing this close reading of the environment she lives in, down to the minutest detail, the insects on the heather. But she describes walking on the mountains and suddenly becoming very aware of the inside of the mountain, the bit you can’t see, that most of the time you’re experiencing the external surfaces. And yet beneath that there’s this unknown world.[1]
So now came the process of, in the dark, untangling and filtering what would and what would not be consumed.[2]
Can we escape the forces of the capitalistic state by experiencing the world through our own enormous legs and feet? Maybe. Can we escape by seeing the intensity that eating another flesh provides us? It might be.[3]
The fly became curious about this new arid world and so began to organise it. It sniffed and dissected long lengths of spaghetti, some polluted, some not.
It did not realise that its own presence had caused the gloom.
Small piles began to accumulate. The soldier disarmed.
The fly carved paths through the tombs at the seabed. Those who were worthy became monuments, landmarks to show the way, while others were cast aside, sometimes disappearing completely into the shadows.
And so goes the familiar experience of picking apart.
A simple act of choosing one over the others reveals extraordinary violence.
The injunction, even when it summons memory or the safeguard of the archive, turns incontestably toward the future to come. It orders to promise, but it orders repetition, and first of all self-repetition, selfconfirmation in a yes, yes. If repetition is thus inscribed at the heart of the future to come, one must also import there, in the same stroke, the death drive, the violence of forgetting, superrepression (suppression and repression), the anarchive, in short, the possibility of putting to death the very thing, whatever its name, which carries the law in its tradition: the archon of the archive, the table, what carries the table and who carries the table, the subjectile, the substrate, and the subject of the law.[4]
I cast my awareness from the murky depths to the crockery on the windowsill. That pot, which is mine, is empty; that spoon, mine, inhabits a jug, not mine.
Mug, borrowed, wine glass, broken, saucepan, absent.
I opened my mouth to speak,
Spaghetti: object, subject, object
Fly: subject
Saucepan: object
Me:
I plucked a hair from my scalp, adding it to the stew,
If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt, then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is a system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.[5]
When the soldiers could not understand, they played football.
I, however, made spaghetti.
Bibliography:
Andrade, Oswald de. ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’. Latin American Literary Review 19 (1991): 38–47.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Paperback ed., [Nachdr.]. With Eric Prenowitz. Religion and Postmodernism. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2015.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge, 1992.
A Guide to Eating and Walking | The Brooklyn Rail’. Brooklynrail.Org, The Brooklyn Rail, 2024. https://brooklynrail.org/2021/03/criticspage/A-Guide-to-Eating-and-Walking/.
The Courtauld. ‘INTERVIEW // Phyllida Barlow’. 2017. https://courtauld.ac.uk/research/research-resources/publications/immeditations-postgraduate-journal/immediations-online/2017-2/interview-phyllida-barlow/.
[1] ‘INTERVIEW // Phyllida Barlow’, The Courtauld, 2017, https://courtauld.ac.uk/research/research-resources/publications/immeditations-postgraduate-journal/immediations-online/2017-2/interview-phyllida-barlow/.
[2] Oswald de Andrade, ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’, Latin American Literary Review 19 (1991): 38-47.
[3] https://brooklynrail.org/contributor/Jose-Pena-Loyola, ‘A Guide to Eating and Walking | The Brooklyn Rail’, Brooklynrail.Org, The Brooklyn Rail, 2024, https://brooklynrail.org/2021/03/criticspage/A-Guide-to-Eating-and-Walking/.
[4] Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Paperback ed., [Nachdr.], with Eric Prenowitz, Religion and Postmodernism (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2015), 79.
[5] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge, 1992), 36.