old man yells at cloud

on slop, dreams, the weather

I think this was probably one of the last things I posted on Twitter before it finally died (the death of Twitter being equivalent to the point at which I personally stopped using it.) I think the original said ‘I need to teach zoomers how to make potato salad before it becomes a lost art.’ Well, joke’s on me I guess. Look man, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m afraid the big Other who lives in my diary just hasn’t been cutting it of late. And there probably isn’t any way to explain this that doesn’t immediately get into the kind of psychic archeology most likely to make those subjected to it think ‘please just keep a diary.’

I suppose my hostility to the narcissism of even the old-school blog model has probably been shaped by the fact that I’ve spent the last few years shuffling from the editorial underside of the London literary world, in which writing is deemed fit for public consumption only when licked clean of all extraneous gristle, to the world of professionalised analytic philosophy, in which each intervention is ideally nothing more than perfectly chiselled key unlocking a single well-formed problem. These institutions aim at very different kinds of style, but their paranoias both circulate around that old and most English of terrors: pretension, both in the sense of epistemic overshoot and of good old-fashioned cringe. Of course, there are good reasons to be suspicious of pretension, and good reasons that these institutions operate in the ways that they do. But being held for years in their loving embrace does foster the urge to occasionally just put out a big pile of unedited slop into the public realm: the pervert child sneezing luxuriously into their birthday cake.

The problem, of course, is that nobody actually wants to be force-fed your slop. Me and S once had the idea of collaboratively writing a kind of Minima Moralia 2, in which we ranted about the fascistic implications of various pop-cultural ephemera, but without the promise of a devoted cult readership followed by slick Verso reissue 50 years down the line it was hard not to feel like we were just Old Men Yelling at Cloud. And indeed most of my diary entries are, or at least begin as, descriptions of the weather: the most canonically boring subject of all. I’ve always been haunted by that Woolf essay where she says that poets flaunt their immaturity with loving descriptions of the quote unquote natural world. Then again, Woolf herself authored some of the best passages of ‘nature writing’ in the English language. (Aside: hundreds of bad undergrad essays must have been written about how Orlando, or The Left Hand of Darkness, or Anna Kavan’s Ice, etc. use their winter landscapes to think about gender and sexuality, and hardly any about how they use gender and sexuality to think about being really cold. But these are some of the best novels ever written about being cold. And I probably feel cold more often than I feel gender. Although to be fair, I live in Scotland.)

Anyway, is there any greater sign of our total alienation from seasonal rhythms than the fact that weather, rather than being a source of endless fascination and disturbance, is considered the most tiresome topic of conversation imaginable? I always become self-conscious when I talk about the weather, like great. Now I’m a guy talking about the weather. But really I always want to talk about the weather. The weather is happening to everyone. It is the last glimmer of a collective commons into which all inhabitants of a local environment are stitched. Saying that the weather-is-boring mentality is ideological feels a bit like when Badiou said that the stock ‘all men are mortal’ syllogism is ideological (because the State is trying to force upon us all an acceptance of finitude, duh.) But it’s also true that the idea that this mentality serves the function of taming a mythic ecological unconscious into an unthreatening background becomes less implausible once you take into account the fact that second only to the weather in the boring-conversation stakes are dreams and psychedelic experiences. Of course people are often pretty boring when they talk about their dreams and trips, because the phenomenology of these experiences takes a special degree of meta-representational processing to narrativise, but for talented fabricators dreams and trips are the best raw material possible (as attested to by, I dunno, the whole history of art and literature). I know basically every detail of a particular acid trip that W and M had when they were 16, and every time I hear the story it’s newly hilarious and fascinating. And we all know that basically the best thing about sleeping next to someone is getting to receive the sleepy mulch of their barely-processed dream-reports.

So, I do hope to put other things here (maybe even some lay dream-analysis, when we know each other better.) But for now, just a weather report: Edinburgh has been stupidly beautiful these last few days, in that rippling first-glimpse-of-Spring way that makes the British populace absolutely lose their minds. I heard a girl on the bus say that she was ‘dying of heat.’ The meadows were heaving. Sainsbury’s ran out of beer. Undergrads were throwing up at 6pm in the library toilets. And it was fully about 11 degrees, with a pretty harsh wind.

More soon maybe,

x