This essay is the third in a series comprising Rolodex Dreams; How They Arise; Headful and Life with the Snippets

In the Strength Weekly essay How They Arise  a species of elusive mental event is referred to on a number of occasions. Such events are frequent, brief, fleeting, barely perceptible, partially formed, wispy and indistinct – they are not quite ‘full’ thoughts but take up at least as much time and space as thoughts that are deemed useful or important. They are routinely and necessarily suppressed, overlooked or ignored and widely viewed as irrelevant and dispensable by-products or waste products of an otherwise fundamental and essential streaming process.

It could be said, however, that by designating these products as dispensable their suppression is more readily achieved. This observation would only have value if the elusive moments could be shown to have some meaning or significance. The essay referred to above expands upon this notion.

It has occurred to me since writing the essay that while the delivery mechanisms of thought are not well understood, the apparent lack of significance of some mental contents may preclude an analysis of another influential set of phenomena.

Freud did not believe in ghosts but, in a consideration of the processes of repression, wrote ‘a thing which has not been understood inevitably reappears; like an unlaid ghost, it cannot rest until the mystery has been solved and the spell broken’ (‘Analysis of a Phobia in Five-Year-Old Boy’, (1909). Also known as the ‘Little Hans’ case). Ten years later, in ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) he proposed that ghosts are manifestations of unresolved psychological issues.

In the Freudian account unresolved issues can be personified (or ‘ghostified’) but in addition it may be the case that it is not just the content of these issues that animates the ghostly apparitions but the manner of their entry into consciousness.

Elsewhere Freud wrote that ‘The human mind, while guided by reason, is also an abode for intangible yearnings, much like the way ghosts linger in the periphery of our consciousness.’ There is a distinction be made here between ‘intangible yearnings’ and ghosts that ‘linger’. The former are invisible but the latter have a lingering presence that can be seen. At some point a threshold is crossed and the intangible is transformed into the visible.

Everyday mental life features, in addition to coherent chains of thought, countless partially formed elements of mental process – snatches of conversation, passages of nonsensical words, floating faces, unsourced images, not to mention a confetti of fragments from films, TV and newspapers, splinters and slivers in transit from the high and low points of encounters, conversations, greetings and farewells, wisps, traces and snippets that appear and rapidly disappear, registering as unidentifiable glimpses that are experienced as disturbances at the very periphery of consciousness.

That these bits and pieces and scraps and sherds are generally considered to be disposable may not only reflect the view that consciousness must be constantly decluttered if it is to operate efficiently but also that the very elusiveness of the particles of clutter marks them as untrustworthy. This may induce uneasiness and anxiety or, for some individuals, indicate the intrusion of mischievous or malicious supernatural entities. It seems likely therefore that while some ghosts certainly carry concealed weapons others are simply all mouth and no trousers.

In this reading, ordinary mental life is a minefield of potential mishap to be stewarded in time-honoured fashion by processes of repression and suppression. These operations are largely second nature and mostly efficient. The risk, as ever, is that the baby is suppressed along with the bathwater. The disposable is consigned to oblivion but the baby must find ways of getting back into circulation. This may entail subterfuge and an eventual role as a bit part consigned to the edge of the stage where the disenfranchised and the homeless hang out. They can walk through you if they feel like it but you can walk through them if it helps.

25/03/2025

Related Essay:

Life with the Snippets

This essay is the second in a series comprising Rolodex Dreams; How They Arise; Headful and Life with the Snippets

It’s got to the point now where just about everything I think reminds me of something else.

But that’s what thinking is. An unbroken stream the successive components of which are invariably linked to each other in some way.

While the stream is ‘unbroken’ insofar as thinking is incessant it will, of course, be constantly interrupted by events in the world. The stream will register events, which give rise to associations, some of which are ignored (not without being registered however fleetingly) and some of which are awarded status. Events will reroute any apparent direction being taken by the thought stream prior to their impingement. The continuous flow of thought is, nevertheless, maintained.

So the phrase ‘reminds me’ in my opening sentence is intended to distinguish between an everyday flow of thoughts enhanced by an apparent sense of connection and the same thing comprised of apparently disjointed fragments. The former would be based on sequences of memories in which one thought brings to mind another thought that has characteristics or qualities in common with its precursor. The connected thoughts have the distinction of remaining ’on topic’ for a period of time while those that do not readily reveal their connections may be seen as in some sense homeless.

The idea of sequenced thoughts having something ‘in common’ suggests a connection that is readily recognised. It may also be that apparently random thoughts are, at times, actually connected to their precursors but these connections are not recognised. When this happens the subject may assume that there are no connections to be found and this, in turn, encourages the ‘randomist’ school of thought, which is essentially anti-psychological and consistent with dominant cultural tendencies.

It would be wrong to imagine that ‘in common’ can only refer to similarities that fall within the classes of topics presented by the thought that appeared to initiate inspection. If I find myself thinking about butterflies I may well be reminded about other butterflycentric events or observations but I may equally entertain thoughts that have scarcely any explicit butterfly content. The original thought, which is only ‘original’ for the sake of this argument, also has its predecessors, none of which may have had butterfly content but did contain elements that provoked the subsequent emergence of the butterfly topic.

It may be, for example, that the brief sight of a receding number 43 bus makes one think about butterflies. If a granular inspection of links between the bus and the butterfly were carried out (How would you even begin?) it is conceivable that microlinks could become apparent. Or not.

My opening statement suggests that there is something noteworthy in thinking things then finding that these thoughts conjure further thoughts.  This may simply be a description of all thinking processes. The reason such a bald assertion is resisted may be because when we think ‘What on earth is the connection between what I thought two moments ago and the thought I had one moment ago?’ we assume that the apparent absence of connection means there is no connection – ‘That’s the way the mind is, it just throws up thoughts at random.’

Much of the above implies that thoughts can be seen as discrete events that have a beginning and an end. It is likely that if it were possible to replay a ‘thought’ in slow motion it would be seen to contain a number of associated elements, each of which also deserves to be designated as a thought.

It would be a mistake to muse overlong on perceived similarities between files stored on a computer hard disk and memories stored in some way in the mind. Digital files are inert. Memories/thoughts/experiences stored in the mind carry a charge. That is why they are stored. Perhaps only 1% of them are ever called forward. Perhaps every single one of them exerts an influence. Perhaps they are never ‘turned off’ and therefore always inform the subject’s mental life, if imperceptibly.

On the other hand if the borders of each thought were barely distinguishable then perhaps all mental activity during waking hours should be seen as one continuous thought that is suspended during sleeping hours and resumed the following day. Topics may change but they’re all part of one thought.

Then again such a sweeping declaration is of little use. It would not be possible to get a reliable answer to the enquiry ‘What are you thinking about?’ without the thinker making a rapid edit of a passage of thinking that involved nominating a beginning, an end and some contents.  Which is generally what happens anyway when such a question is posed.

There is at large a disquieting eagerness to regard the various activities of the mind as a poorly curated collection of the random, the disposable, the irrational and the useful. It is convenient to suppose that the latter is the dominant mode and the rest are what you have to put up with. Indeed why, one might ask, are they there at all if they do not have a purpose? What’s the point of them?

A more fruitful assessment finds that an apparently trivial or dispensable thought, if not dismissed or allowed to disappear, comes briefly into consciousness for a reason: it was related in some way to its precursor. As was the latter’s precursor. This approaches a condition in which all thoughts have precursors but it does not follow that all thoughts are therefore important. The delivery process, in fact, may be more interesting than many of its products.

The question of importance deserves attention. Is it only important thoughts that are the products of a chain? Were this the case then would thoughts deemed unimportant not arise at all? That is, would they be held back or extinguished before entering consciousness? This is clearly not what is happening – when the mind is not task-focused it is generally delivering an unbroken stream of thoughts most of which are not important. But who or what imposes these evaluations?

While not all but possibly most thoughts are felt to be unimportant this view does not lead to the conclusion that they are electrical misfires – an inevitable side effect of a complex and largely unfathomable system of brain activity.

It may also be the case that there are thoughts of little importance that simply fail to rise into consciousness. Like the denizens of a low sperm count, they fall back before achieving what could be registered as a presence. Obviously this is speculative – if some thoughts ‘fail’ for some reason, how do we know they ever existed in the first place?

So is there such a thing as a chain-free thought? That is, something pops up, it is not noteworthy, it disappears, it appears to have no precedents that might have generated its brief appearance. One would have to be singularly alert in order to register mental events that evaporate so rapidly.

The procedure of ignoring mental events is, however, worthy of consideration. At some point the sheer and unceasing volume of unimportant thoughts that enter into consciousness must be dealt with. Thoughts that provoke a certain degree of discomfort are subject to repression but plenty of lightweight material gets through and their provenance is not deemed worthy of investigation. Something pops up, it is of no interest, I shall ignore it. And I shall ignore the fact that I have ignored it because life is too short to waste on waste. This is not repression, it can be compared to the serving of an NDA where the issuer serves it upon themselves. It’s an ergonomic supplement.

We have little evidence to encourage the view that any thought that ‘comes to mind’ is the product of a virgin birth compared to a thought that is generated by memory, external events or interaction between these. To insist upon the possibility of a mental event devoid of provenance tends to a magical position in which the mind is a fount of ceaseless invention.

The mind is, however, also a fount of ceaseless invention. New ideas, for example, in the most general sense, did not exist before they came to mind but if it is the case that nothing is ever forgotten then their antecedents may be innumerable.

The notion that nothing is ever forgotten is outrageous – where is all this stuff stored? Given that nobody knows (yet), it is equally outrageous to assume that if something cannot be recalled in memory it has left the building.

If all novel ideas or thoughts have their antecedents then these components should, in theory, be quantifiable. Some of the components may well be identifiable but it is likely that some will not be in evidence. It will not be possible to look for them given that their absence is not detectable. The need to regard ideas and thoughts as having a recipe is understandable but recipes of this order may turn out to have been lacking a complete list of ingredients. Not that you’d know.

It may be the case that some elements of a recipe will be both essential to the recipe and will never ever come into consciousness. Which doesn’t mean that they are not there.

It is unlikely that an attempt at establishing lineage will progress beyond the identification of a very small number of ancestral elements. While it may be possible to tell oneself “I was thinking about horsehair and this made me think about Luxembourg” this is merely a recollection and may consist only of highlights in a stream of consciousness. We may never know whether or not there were interstitial elements in the transition from horsehair to Luxembourg.

Perhaps there are drugs which will enable the subject to examine horsehair with the aim of uncovering its link to Luxembourg and beyond. It’s interesting to note that, to my knowledge, in none of the journalism or literature on powerful psychoactive or hallucinogenic drugs is the capacity to reverse engineer thought to a granular degree mentioned. Profound and possibly life-changing insights are among those revelations routinely scrutinised but this should not be confused with the etiological project to illuminate and examine the components of serial thinking.

Extraordinary triumphs of invention and innovation are achieved every day by exercises in thinking unenhanced by central nervous system stimulants and unsupported by a detailed understanding or knowledge of where the fundaments of thought originate or how they might be recognised.

That said, the primary focus of this essay is on the mental conditions in which everyday thinking, regardless of content, takes place.

In 2021 the field of machine learning underwent a step change when OpenAI launched DALL-E, a text-to-image model that could generate digital images from natural language descriptions known as ‘prompts’.(DALL-E. (2024, Nov 14). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/DALL-E)

Large Language Model AIs are activated with instructions or prompts but their instructors do not know what results to expect. The gap is closing insofar as there is emerging a connoisseurship of the language of the prompt that enables assessments of what constitutes a ‘good’ or ‘successful’ prompt.

Alongside the image generators DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are text generators, such as Chat-GPT, driven by LLMs. Both types of generator draw on huge collections of text and images taken from the Internet. Both are said to generate new and original content – content that has not been thought or seen before.

The generative technologies purportedly feature a break with modelling based on either structures of consciousness or what are imagined to be structures of consciousness. The excitement in some quarters suggests that technologies which collect then reformulate/reassemble/recombine or, in some sense, quote from or ‘render in the style of…’, are seen as halfway to some kind of intelligence, be it human-like or machinic.

The generative models certainly overrode one of the obstacles to AI design, namely a predisposition to anthropomorphism that has limited the scope of emerging systems by restricting them to a superficial and mechanistic analysis of the operations of the mind. The vast amounts of ‘scraped’ data will inevitably include a quantity of useless information that has been sucked up in the megascrape. Given that one person’s ‘useless’ is another’s essential component and that neither of these persons can be aware of all the information upon which they depend, the presence of the kitchen sink in a data set casually regarded as containing ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ can only be encouraging given our tendency to ignore or discount many categories of mental events in the interests of mental hygiene.

It would be uncontroversial to note that both our own minds and the data bases exploited by AI contain vast amounts of information and that the purpose of these accumulations is to synthesise novel forms of information. It is probably the case that most people do not know how AI text or image generators work or how information that we humans absorb is memorised, reproduced or becomes part of a synthesized event such as a thought. While experts assure us that the assertions of technophiles regarding the inevitable rise and rise of AI platforms up to and then beyond the capacities of the human mind are fanciful, some of the quite recent convulsions in AI engineering give pause to such blithe dismissal.

Returning to the notion of useless or unimportant thoughts, if an individual suffers from anxiety, as increasingly many do, then unimportant thoughts may acquire adhesive qualities out of proportion to their importance. Anxiety has no axe to grind – it will adhere to anything in its path. It resides as a potential in all minds, a dark lake tending to overflow. It is a mistake to assume that only events or issues that would be expected to make the subject anxious will make the subject anxious. Anything can make the subject anxious. Which is where strength of mind comes in. The application of such a strength can hold these tiresome irrelevances at bay. This is not an athletic achievement – most people just learn how to do it. It involves an ability to evaluate a constant stream of mental events in order summarily to dismiss most of them. Clearly this is an imprecise art but it is a skill, exercised throughout our waking hours. The skill is embedded, it will function efficiently despite being barely perceptible. It lies somewhere between suppression and ignoring.

In relation to personal thought control there is strong cultural support for the no-nonsense school of conscious, willed suppression – criteria for the exclusion of, say, irrational, accidental, disgusting, guilt inducing and gender threatening thoughts, are easy to come by and widely discussed. These anti-psychological remedies can be summarised as either ‘Don’t think about it’ or ‘You probably need to be busier’.

The situation at Berghain, the exclusive Berlin nightclub founded in 2004, widely regarded as ‘the most famous nightclub in the world’, is instructive in this respect:

The difficulty of getting into Berghain is almost as legendary as, or more legendary than, the club itself. (How To Get Into Berghain and Why Not To – Joseph Pearson. The Needle https://needleberlin.com/2015/01/12/how-to-get-into-berghain-and-why-not-to/ )

Visitors to the club must join a queue that is always very long; waiting times range from two to six hours and permission to enter is denied to 50% of petitioners. Aspirants have no idea of the criteria exercised by the door staff. After 30 years no one has any idea. Sven Marquardt, chief bouncer, has been interviewed on a number of occasions and has never spilled the beans.

All would-be Berghain patrons feel they should have a plan. Plans are discussed not just in the queue but in the days before travelling to the club. It may be that the door staff have seen it all (they have) and many people in the queue expect this to be the case. Perhaps, then, the best plan is to have no plan. Just be what you are. Wear what you want. You can’t read their minds. But it’s still worth considering what not having a plan might be like. It shouldn’t, in fact, be hard to act as if you don’t have a plan. You could work on a look, a manner, then act as if this wasn’t a plan.

The door staff are endeavouring to weed out those who attempt to fool the door by portraying themselves as worldly in all worlds. Given the high levels of rejection, the staff have claimed for themselves an uber-worldliness that compels aspirants to examine themselves at every level, including style, comportment, demeanour, degree of self-possession, absence of obsequiousness and lack of eagerness. Berghain is a gay club yet does not discriminate between gays and straights. That said, it has otherwise succeeded in distilling then inoculating its supplicants with their most destabilising preoccupations, delivering to many of the more suggestible ones a withering and disdainful rebuff.

Sure, not every rejected clubber will traipse mournfully away from the grey slab of Berghain consumed by the worms of self-abnegation. But as a working model of a courtly style of imposing abjection it has a violent purity.

Berghain disdain only works because it homes in on our latent sense of unworthiness. Not only that but something Berghain-like seems to be going on in our minds anyway, something that has no connection at all with nightclub protocols. But in this analogy what is the club? Who are the people queuing?  Where is the night?

We have ourselves and we have a constant flow of thoughts. Which of these is us? There is me and there’s what goes through my mind. Are these things supposed to define me?  It doesn’t seem fair. Half the time I realise I’ve been thinking and I’ve completely forgotten what it was about. Then there’s all the stuff that’s so random and irrelevant to anything that the entrance door morphs instantly into the exit. But then there’s the stuff that should be instantly disowned but not because it’s trivial. It’s simply offensive. It’s shameful. It drifts in on the tail of a harmless whatever but it’s not you. Okay, it came up out of the back of your head but what can you do about that? It’s a terrible thing to think. But it didn’t stay long but now it’s gone. I should think so too. Certainly not the sort of thing I want in my mind, so fuck off out.

We police the threshold.  We will not be soiled by the incoming. Or ‘the uprising’, if you must. As for the night, is it out there or in here?

This is the Berghain model in action but transposed to the realm of interior hygiene: I’m rejecting any thoughts that I consider disreputable yet my mind is blithely delivering stuff that I find shameful and would make me an outcast were it disclosed. This state of affairs is intensified by the withholding from me of any information as to the nature of the boundaries I may have crossed.

If there were anything of value in mental events coloured by anxiety then it would lie in their potential to encourage an engagement with the world rather than the psyche. The world would be tested to determine if the anxiety were justified.

If an unticketed, substandard thought could somehow be captured and subjected to reverse engineering designed to reveal its lineage, would it lead back to a thought or a memory that was important in some way? Possibly. But this assumes that only important thoughts generate a cascading effect. What if all thoughts generated this effect?

The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas observed that

During the day, we have hundreds of psychically intense  experiences when we conjure ideas from an inner medley of body experience, unconscious memories, and instinctual response. Each experience is fragmented by the associations it brings up: we bring together many factors only to find that whatever lucid ideas we have are broken up in the process. Psychic life during an ordinary day, then, is an endless sequence of psychic intensities and their subsequent fragmentations.

Bollas. C. Cracking Up – The Work of Unconscious Experience, 1995. p4

The mind, if it were not significantly regulated, could allow into consciousness all the streams at once. This would not create a meaningful experience so much as an immersion so overwhelming that the subject would beg for the off switch.

You can argue that the ‘disjointed flow of fragments’ is also powered by memory – it’s just that we don’t recognize any links between the fragments.

I‘m not referring to the ordinary thinking mode where you have a thought and it makes you think of something else. Where one thought follows another and much of the time it’s because you want it to. Where there’s a connection between the thoughts and it’s a simple, straightforward one. Without such effortless connectivity thinking would be exhausting. In fact it’s hard to imagine how it would be if, like the telephone engineers who kneel before dark green junction boxes in the street, we were routinely obliged to test countless connections before finding one that seamlessly unfolded from its precursor. (The engineer, of course, is looking for the one that doesn’t work, not the myriad that require no attention).

There’s a temptation here to imagine that that’s the way cavemen thought: laboriously moving from one dead end to the next with no idea of how to move in a useful direction.  It can’t have been like that. Suppose the next thought never came – the caveman would waste away like an apple on the ground.

Take two lines on the London underground system. The Northern Line and the Victoria Line, for example.  Much of the time you can’t see any connection but if you get out at Euston on the Bank branch of the Northern Line you can see the entrance to the Victoria Line a few meters away. You can stand on one platform and see the trains pulling in or out on the other platform. You can go down into the Northern Line and come up out of the Victoria Line. Nobody is concerned to find out how you made the connection. The connection, nevertheless, is the Tube system.

I’d prefer to believe that the thought and the memory were joined because if they weren’t then your brain is just firing off for no particular reason. Does that seem likely? What function would it serve? Is it not equally likely that conscious mental contents that appear to have no purpose are actually coming from somewhere? That they have departed from somewhere? And therefore that stored memories and thoughts enjoy a dynamic potential which will result in every stored component being in some way incomplete and therefore never having the capacity to arise as a sole mental event? Which would mean that there is no such thing as a sole, unitary mental event.

Or maybe you had the thought because the memory prompted it. The memory, just before it becomes conscious, generates a precursor in the form of a thought. Which sort of suggests that the memory wants to get out. Do they want to get out? Are they not content with just being recalled? Perhaps if they are not recalled they want to get out. Which suggests a certain urgency: queues of memories jostling for some fresh air. But that would mean that there resides, within us all, myriad snips, clips, shorts, maybe even features (probably not) that are waiting for their moment in the sun. They’re not just stacked in the vague labyrinths, cupboards and libraries, they’re waiting for their chance.

I think the reason I’ve got to the point where every thought prompts a memory is that I like the idea of it. I like the idea of long timelines feeding into the hub of present perceptions so that every instant of now is orchestrally enhanced at no extra cost. Allowing such an array to be apparent takes an effort, although there are those for whom such an unchecked abundance is an affliction.  You can read, for example, about people with strong synesthesia who find all this chronic and exotic connectivity exhausting, as in that documentary where the woman found Piccadilly Circus overwhelming because everything bright or moving or noisy set off colours and sounds and tastes and she just wanted to get out of there back to the countryside to which she had, some time ago, retired in order to get some peace and quiet, some tastelessness.

There are those people, who are generally foolish, who think that dreams are the product of the brain randomly flipping through the day’s contents, cleaning up or decluttering after a day out. These people should, if they can’t actually work it out for themselves, read some books. Not that they would because clearly they don’t give a fuck. I have no time for them, actually. They are living a life of luxury. Insofar as it is luxurious to disconnect and thereby considerably simplify your days and nights.

However, one should not discount the possibility that you can drift into a random firing state. Maybe when looking out of bus windows. This could be dismissed, in the usual way, by the foolish, as typical default activity, as in “Yeah, when you stop thinking that’s what happens.” Like you could ever stop thinking. Like they think that when you’re not thinking in a big ticket in the window way then there is no thought. When frankly if you could stop thinking then what happens would be completely fascinating. Not just some raggle taggle parade of whatever pops up, that has no value – it would be like a holiday. What do they (the foolish) think happens up there? I say ‘up’ because I can’t be bothered to get into where thinking is. I could but I don’t want to. The thing is, in a bus, you should treasure this so-called random stuff. Sure, it might be trivial but that is very much an Idea Under Capitalism where if you can’t use it then it’s useless. It’s a whole way of thinking: the Waste Disposal model. Shit out these worthless and possibly contagious extrusions (or intrusions depending on how you’re feeling at the time)! The mind – we are assured – needs to declutter, to dispense with the countless stored moments that accrue in the course of a day. But why just a day? Surely the mind needs to dispense with all the intolerable crowding lest it create a sediment that will creep upwards to capture the adventitious roots of new arrivals and confuse the process of taking root. Shit out these seething minds!

If the logic of such a position were rigorously pursued, the mind would simply be an intriguing but inconvenient way station through which information in transit passes before deteriorating into meaningless and vaporous particles. In such a model – the intestinal model perhaps – the mind retains a capacity to absorb informational nutrient as a means of securing its continuation but is not significantly changed by the information passing through it.

The extraordinary aspect of all this is that we are all, including the foolish, operating in the dark. Probably ‘with the dark’ is a more upbeat way of putting it. We are surrounded on all sides by continents of dynamic information whose structures, content, meaning, function, consistency, contradictions and accessibility are at best hard to grasp, often difficult to understand, contradictory and unreasonable. I’m referring to the world at large and the worlds within us, the latter characterised, in psychoanalytic circles, as the ‘unconscious’ (plus, of course, what we can readily summon from our store of memories).

The world at large is, in some respects, easier to analyse – much of it being susceptible to inspection because it’s out there and out there is the favoured locus of attention in most cultures. The unconscious is so elusive that it’s easier not to  inspect it at all. But it runs the show insofar as what is perceptible out there is filtered and shaped by it. It also shapes our endeavours and their fruits, the nature of our customs, manners, values, our sense of identity, and the ways in which we develop relationships, ideologies and economic structures.

It was ever thus. But it’s an annoying proposition. Is there any proof at all that these imperceptible forces even exist? A close look at what comes to mind might reveal traces of unlicensed activity. If a licence was not issued then from where does this activity spring?

01/2025

Related Essays:

Headful

Life with the Snippets

This essay is the first in a series comprising Rolodex Dreams;  How They Arise; Headful and Life with the Snippets

The old-school Rolodex, invented in 1956, carried a maximum of 400 file cards. Current models have kept to this limit. All the cards are mounted on a wheel. If the wheel were somehow set to rotate steadily without human intervention then its cards would drop alphabetically into view one by one.

The rotary desk-top device was designed as a data store and memory surrogate but in its capacity as a provider of discrete, framed packets of information it can be seen as a crude thinking machine – the slow-witted cousin of, for example, the punch card data sorting system, introduced by IBM in 1928, that would evolve, under the auspices of Bletchley Park, into decryption machines. The much earlier Jacquard loom, patented in 1804, had seen the punch card used to accelerate the production of complex fabric patterns.

The Rolodex accessed by human intervention i.e. its normal use, delivers something that superficially resembles planned, deliberate, focused, step-by-step thought. Such a thing probably doesn’t exist but an enormous amount of effort to produce it is continuously applied to such a project by our species.

Our experience of thought is generally of a streaming process in which the separation of the stream into component units is not deemed essential unless, for example, it is considered that a problem might be solved by selecting and rearranging some of these units into a plan, an explanation, a theory etc. By clustering one specialised array of units – contact details – into an outsourced collection, the Rolodex eases a small part of the sorting process. It’s a list on a wheel. It does not think, it serves the thinker.

Of the many mental activities not taken into account by sophisticated computing devices, let alone rudimentary mechanical memory aids, is the business of sorting the material that, in human thought, is suppressed in order to achieve momentary focus. A significant category of mental activity is simply missing from the picture. Coders and their programmes cannot take into consideration more than a tiny fraction of factors that seem, like junk DNA, to have no functional significance. That, indeed, is the point of these single-minded devices.

In the case of the Rolodex it’s taken for granted that the other 399 available sets on the rotary wheel will not crowd in on the card you’re reading or that rogue cards will simply appear for a moment then vaporise.

In our everyday minds arise myriad mental effects, some of them thoughts, others thought-like, others mere wisps that vanish within moments of their arrival, routinely passing through consciousness and out the other side. These are routinely ignored. They must be ignored. We all learn how to do this.  Some can do it better than others. The Rolodex, in its modest way, does it for you. The device does not hold myriad filecards that might attempt to emulate the capacity of the mind. It would be at least as big as a small county if it did. The desk would have to be situated inside it somehow. It would be widely regarded as a storehouse of utterly useless information.

In the case of the Rolodex you fill the filecards one by one and clip them onto the wheel. It becomes a citadel of unlikely purity. It cannot dealphabetise itself and it will not generate novelty. It has, therefore, a comforting quality if comfort is to be found in packets of data that arise in single file. It was not, of course, designed to do any more than augment memory and organise data sets.

Staying with it for a little longer, however, imagining a modestly enormous device – a London Eye of a filing system, loaded with numberless bits of information and monitored by a human observer – then, over time, as its great wheel rotated, what appeared at first to be a succession of discrete, unrelated cards would appear intermittently to form classes, clusters and themes. Obviously this would only occur if the human observer were to attribute significance to any combinations and sequences that might crop up. Even if a pattern could be discerned it would probably be construed as unworthy of remark; in the genetic sense, a ‘sport’ but not one with desirable characteristics.

On the other hand, the observer need not find any significances at all, they might simply regard links as inevitable and unimportant.

It’s tempting to compare these discounted instances to the contents of daydreaming – a state of mind in which thinking has no apparent purpose, it just ticks along. It feels like it could go anywhere. (If the thinker has this thought during a daydream the daydream will abruptly terminate.) The daydreamer may not even know they are daydreaming. So little value is conferred that the paying of attention itself is suspended. You could almost claim that most daydreaming is lost as soon as it is found insofar as awareness of the activity is largely retrospective – you realise you’ve been doing it and within moments all that was air is vacuum.

Daydreams often strike us – if we can manage to assess them at all – as random successions of thoughts having no connection to each other. We tell ourselves, perhaps, that this is what unfocused thinking is. It may be the case, however, that the reduced attention paid to daydreams facilitates the emergence of another class of thought, one that is as worthy of consideration as the purposeful organising that shapes much conventionally motivated thinking.

With daydreaming you are off-piste. One moment you’re pursuing a thought and the next moment there is no pursuit. One thing has led to another. But you didn’t particularly notice. You wouldn’t be able to retrace your steps.

Daydreaming is always off-piste. It cannot be initiated and it is not possible to detect the moment at which the conscious pursuit of a thought is suspended, either at the moment when this occurs or in retrospect. The moments that ensue cannot usually be counted, even if they were separable into countable units, which they may not be. It is conceivable that they could go on for hours. But they don’t. Something breaks the flow and the piste is restored within a split second. You may be able to remember where you were before the interruption – gazing out of a bus window, maybe, thinking about something more or less purposefully. But it is, alas, impossible to recall what you were thinking just a split second before going off-piste. If it were possible then you could examine this pre-off-piste thought in order to see the extent to which it might have either enabled or fallen foul of the daydreamed thought that followed it.

If you could do this then you could identify the characteristics of an off-piste enabling thought and deliberately shape other thoughts in such a way that within moments of thinking them you were off-piste. Such a proposal only makes sense if one subscribes to the notion that going off-piste is worth it even if you can’t remember what you were daydreaming about.

The goal is to become capable of lucid off-piste daydreaming. It is not the case that everyone needs to do this. Some will find it useful however.

The tissue is thin. Think of those times when you’re reading drowsily. Someone has been trying to get three lengths of wood to fit in the side of a wall. This really needs to be done. A group of people is still waiting for the arrangements to be concluded. They are standing near the wood.

Excuse me for a moment, I nodded off.

In so doing I dropped into an ongoing situation featuring wood lengths. But now I’m back, drowsily reading whatever I was reading before I dropped off. I can just about make out the tail feathers of the last moments spent within the daydream before I snapped out of it. Something to do with wood. The tissue is so thin. Within a second the sentences printed on the page had disappeared and were replaced with something that apparently had nothing whatsoever to do with what I was reading. The absence of conventional sense in the thoughts and images that ensue is spellbinding. It feels like they could stream indefinitely. There appear to be no constraints other than impending sleep or someone dropping a cooking implement next door.

It’s remarkable how thin the tissue is. We sometimes speak of our dreams with awe, as if we were honoured to be visited by these compressed, elusive packages of bad grammar. And even if we don’t improve the grammar thereby knocking some sense into the irruptions, they often tend to be memorable, if we remember them, despite their lack of legibility. Almost as if there were something irresistible about illegibility. And the thing is, these tricky items don’t actually require a tired or drowsy subject – they find the latter convenient certainly but it’s not as if you daydream only when you’re gazing out of the bus window or similar, you can be wide awake firing on all cylinders and all it takes, in this case, is the fact that there’s nothing much to do until you get to your destination. And next thing you know…

11/2024

‘Rolodex Dreams’ begins to develop ideas that are extended in subsequent Strength Weekly essays:

How They Arise

Headful

Life with the Snippets

Around here real and imaginary characters are shockingly always crossing paths.

Diane Williams – ‘How Much Did You Ever Think the World of Me? (2019)

The mammals of the Oligocene are often described as though they were halfway creatures, semi-formed prototypes: dog-bears (bear relatives that looked like dogs), bear-dogs (dog relatives that looked like bears), large cat-like sabre-toothed hunters that were not true cats, and the most charismatic members of the Oligocene bestiary, the entelodonts, or ‘hell pigs’: each as big as a cow and equipped with huge crocodile-like jaws, a sort of ‘gigantic, hyper-carnivorous warthog’. Not actually pigs at all, they were more closely related to whales.

Francis Gooding – ‘Hell Pigs’, a review of Tim Flannery – ‘Europe: the First One Hundred Million Years’, London Review of Books vol 42, #1. (2020)

Among the many inhibitions that beset my writing for performance there is, in addition to a number of quite severe constraints that I apply voluntarily, one that never relaxes its grip and must be regularly challenged. It has an almost irresistible force and settles on me like a slothful powdery moth coiling and uncoiling its proboscis, injecting a nectar that tames unruliness and blankets the mind with logic. Narrative has a uniquely sedative gravitational pull that, I find, scuppers the poetic pleasures of disconnection and incongruity. Write half a page and groan, even as you strike the keys, as beginnings sprout middles and middles taper to their ends.

It’s hardly a novel thought (it’s hardly a novel) but if you don’t want theatre to tell stories then there are countless alternatives to narrative structure. The first performance script I wrote was ‘Jack, the Flames!’ (1972) and it was significantly lacking in throughlines, coherent structure and character depth. Which is what I wanted. I was in the habit of writing down my dreams back then so I transcribed some of them then imitated them to generate more text. The script was all over the place but Hilary knocked it into shape. For the next few years, however, with subsequent shows, I was bothered by the feeling that maybe I should pay more attention to this structure thing. I tried to put endings on the scripts that felt like endings but they were the weakest part of these works. I was very taken with The People Show back then and they never had endings. Or proper beginnings really. But when I picked up my pen (there were no PCs then) I couldn’t stop drifting into narrative. I’d go for a few pages without it and the next thing I knew I was connecting up the scenes as if they were going somewhere. I just couldn’t stop it.

I found myself doing something I didn’t believe in but it would creep up on me. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a proper playwright, I’d never wanted that. I liked other people’s stories in films and books, no problem there, but I didn’t find their various structures appropriate for theatre. I didn’t actually find theatre’s own structures appropriate, come to that. But when I was about 18 I read Ulysses in my bedroom one summer and that did it. A little while later I read Naked Lunch. After those two books there was no going back. I mean, do you want to live forever in your home town? Between about 1962 and 1972 I was gratifyingly overwhelmed by a barrage of experimental films, novels, poetry and Happenings and moved in circles increasingly populated by adventurers presenting a variety of pathological behaviours. All this was both formative and obliterative. I had so decisively crossed the channel that I couldn’t have gone back if I’d wanted to. To aspire to narrative would have been a betrayal of all that magnificent reading and viewing and hanging out.

But although I felt I had placed myself beyond the allure of the conventional play form, I hadn’t reckoned with the after effects of the 18 years of exposure to narrative that had preceded the meltdown. My parents were not connoisseurs of the arts but in their bookshelves I had discovered and devoured Steinbeck, James Jones, Salinger and Huxley. Throughout my boyhood I had returned time and time again to my father’s collection of Richmal Crompton’s William books and loved every single page of the witty, eventful, stories and their variously naughty, irascible, pompous and vain characters. In all this pre-adult reading I was gripped by the expressive elements on display, including the construction of narratives. But a few years later, the early 60s tsunami kicked in, I read Artaud at university (as distinct from the Eng Lit for which I had enrolled) and thought that I was ready to dance my own steps.

I saw four or five films a week at Uni, in the local cinemas, the local art-house cinema and the Uni film societies. After Uni I went to film school. I had already seen Breathless (1960), Zazie dans le Metro (1960) and Jules et Jim (1962) in my home town and along with my fellow RCA students I then revelled in a three year binge during which it seemed that a new Nouvelle Vague film, or something European with a similar spirit, was being released every week.

It was the thing in my home town to shout out in the cinema. Wags of all classes would bellow witty, indignant, inspired, vocal graffiti at the screen, usually to roars of approval and, in the case of those cinemas with raked floors, the rolling of empty bottles downhill towards the screen. There are many such outgusts that I cherish to this day, among them ‘Shag’er while she’s still warm, mate!’ addressed to the monster hovering above the body of the scantily clad young woman he had just killed; also ‘What about the woodpeckers?’, a riposte to Rod Taylor, in ‘The Birds’ (1963), who has just frantically nailed boards across all the windows and doors in the house under attack by angry birds in order to save Tippi Hedren and himself and then mops his brow and says to Tippi ‘We should be all right now.’

Quite why Roger Dibbs undertook to come to a showing of Alain Resnais’ ‘Last Year in Marienbad’ (1961) I’ll never know. One of the artiest art-house films in the world at that time, it had done well at the Venice International Film festival but had, as they say, divided the critics. On one side of the critical chasm were those found it hopelessly obscure, painfully slow, devoid of meaning, little more than a form of torture. Others considered it to be a thing of great beauty, a masterpiece, ‘one of the most influential movies ever made (as well as one of the most reviled), Marienbad is both utterly lucid and provocatively opaque’ (J. Hoberman, Village Voice, 2008).

Roger Dibbs was a very cool dancer who was into jazz rather than The Beatles. He was well groomed in a tasteful European jacket and tie style, something of the lounge lizard about him, and his skills included the throwing of window boxes full of soil and flowers through the plate glass windows of the Lending Library, setting fire to a great pile of old newspapers in my friend’s mother’s hallway and tipping a huge ornamental urn from a pub balustrade onto a white Triumph TR4 sports car parked ten feet below. The police hurried to the last scene and captured half a dozen of us. Dibbs vanished but we resolved the issue by saying to the main policeman ‘Roger Dibbs did it and this is his address.’ He was a vandal, but so well dressed. I call his vandalisms skills because he practised them often, usually at the weekends, and they acquired greater and greater polish as he moved with charm and reserve through the leisure circles of that town in a flat area of the country.

Anyway, after about 25 minutes of vitalisingly melancholy monotone French voiceover as the camera tracked ‘once again, down these corridors, through these halls, these galleries, in this structure of another century, this enormous, luxurious, baroque, lugubrious hotel, where corridors succeed endless corridors – silent deserted corridors overloaded with a dim, cold ornamentation of woodwork, stucco, moldings, marble, black mirrors, dark paintings, columns, heavy hangings, sculptured door frames, series of doorways, galleries, transverse corridors that open in turn on empty salons, rooms overloaded with an ornamentation from another century, silent halls … ‘ there erupted across what, up to that point, had been a poised, unbreathing silence a stentorian interruption from the cheap seats. Dibbs – ‘It’s a load of bollocks, isn’t it, Dave?’

Delighted as I was with his uncouth observation, I didn’t actually agree with Dibbs. I felt his pain but also my own shocked enchantment. I have held Marienbad in my top three for some considerable time and while my own shows are considerably faster paced and regularly feature spasmic, homicidal and tourettish outblasts, the languid, plotless, frozen, dreamy world conjured by Resnais and his screenwriter Robbe-Grillet, with its barely mobile, stately and expressionless actors speaking without emotion or facial nuance is just what the doctor ordered insofar as I find it unfailingly restorative and just plain exciting. Lynch produces similar effects but they, like Fukunaga and Pizzolatto’s ‘True Detective’ (2014) and Refn’s ‘Too Old to Die Young’ (2019), are enhanced by explosive scenes of violence and episodes of manic pace. Refn actually out-slows Resnais – his 13 hour, 10 episode TV show glaciates exquisitely, pushing the envelope off the edge of the escritoire with the ‘Is there something wrong with my TV?’ majesty of the dialogue scenes – every single one of the dialogue scenes – in which characters routinely pause for between three and five seconds between exchanges – to call it a tic makes it sound screwball, it’s a cavernous tock – without ever acknowledging any situational reason for this extreme stylisation. The effect, in all three cases, is to bathe the most routine scenes in unremitting dread.

It helped that I didn’t like theatre itself very much. It was basically very strange but everyone behaved as though it were perfectly normal to carry on like that. The utter oddness of dressing up, learning lines, pretending to be someone else and inhabiting a space bounded by flats, drapes and lights was rarely acknowledged. This awkward other-worldliness was compounded by, in this country at least, the deployment of a range of hystericised (but not invigorating) speaking styles which, at their particular times, were held to be in some way reflective of the way people spoke and thought in the nearby everyday life.

Theatre was clearly stuck and it annoyed me. When I went to see it by accident it made me bad-tempered. But there was so much to be taken from films and books.

Or just today, a bespectacled red-faced man walks past the window. He has a monstrous extra face beneath his chin. It ripples down to his top shirt button. Well, for a second perhaps. The kind of thing that happens when you’re wearing your reading glasses rather than your street glasses. It’s just a glasses thing. Gone with the wind. No big deal. But in that second what a show! A flesh riot in the high street!

Where do these snippettes come from? Do we make them up on the hoof, effortlessly, like nonchalant poets? Are our skills in this regard so fluent that at the least suggestion of an interruption to the flow we activate an elusive but super-efficient mechanism that seals all gaps? Which in turn suggests a certain urgency. What’s the rush? What could go wrong?

It would be a mechanism that works on an anything-is-better-than-nothing principle: if we didn’t fill those gaps, who knows what would press forth? But in the case of the extra face, monstrosity emerged anyway. And isn’t that something we’d rather not know about? So maybe ‘making them up on the hoof’ isn’t the way to look at it.

In fact it’s as if ‘we’ have very little to do with it. We just provide a platform. The images pop up in one piece, ready to go. A bit like an encounter with the Australian stonefish which delivers an incapacitating sting when accidentally stepped upon in shallow seas. We just do the treading – we didn’t ask for the fish.

It is unlikely that there is within us a repository in which resides, say, an image of a monstrous extra face suitable for insertion beneath a passerby’s chin. There is, however, the silent continent, the inland empire, the unconscious which is by its very nature restlessly protean. So utterly efficient is the messaging connectivity that, in terms of filling the gaps, it’s like lying in a tent in the rain – an incessant drumming against a membrane that keeps us dry but if you poke at it the water gets through. Is it conceivable that the rain is always raining? And the only reason we are not constantly drowned by intrusions is because we keep busy?

Were there such a repository then this is how its contents might be stored

The other weekend The Guardian had a story about Haribo suing some Spanish bar owners who were selling jelly bears containing alcohol. The Spaniards, the report said, ‘planned to carry on selling their products in Spain – and to their customers in France and the UK – to show that their bears would not be cowed.’ This raises the question of whether Haribo has a position on cows that will not be borne.

I realise this is not top notch wordplay but it had to be done. Ideally the past participle of ‘bear’ will not be ‘borne’, it will be ‘beared’. This would then deliver the much desired ‘cows that would not be beared’. This, in turn, suggests that the cow will resist transformation into a feared rather than domestic creature.

On the other hand, in the statement ‘Peter and Susan were cowed by dogs’, we will find, lightly concealed, the possibility that ‘Peter and Susan were dogged by cows.’ So much better. It suggests that, under certain conditions, the placid cow will be caninised.

It may seem odd, decadent even, to dwell on such fleeting flukes. To treat them as if they had something to say. It must be said, however, that, in their way, they do approach the Oligocene. (See quote at top of post.) In the Oligocene (I keep writing it ‘Oligoscene’ so I looked up ‘oligo’ just now and what do you know: just a few or scanty. From the Greek ‘oligos‘ (as in oligarchy but I was slow to make the connection) (palaeontologically speaking it must refer to an era of which little is known) (despite the profusion of creatures for which it is known) it is clear that things were coming and going, crossing paths, colliding, blending, unblending, indecisive, changeable, making up their minds, haven’t quite got this but we’re getting there, this will never work, it could go either way, yeah but give it a chance

I was driving along the M4 out of town one time and had to slow down because of a collision up ahead. As we crawled past the police cars a bizarre sight slowly came into view. On the other side of the buckled crash barrier two trucks had clipped each other with such force that their rear doors had burst and their contents were strewn across all six lanes of the motorway. The drivers were talking to the police on the hard shoulder. One truck had been full of furniture – sofas, armchairs and tables. These were lying randomly around on the tarmac. The other truck was a baker’s truck and had been full of loaves, buns, tarts, doughnuts, battenberg slices, cupcakes and bags of flour. The bags had exploded and created a Christmas scene across ground zero. A heavily powdered sofa bore several dainties in odd clusters and ragged stacks, as if impulsively abandoned by two untidy people. Slices of white bread festooned an inverted reclining chair. Jam doughnuts littered the scene like beached anemones. And so on.

As well as resembling a respectable site specific installation piece, the spectacle was a fine snapshot of the poetic process which went some way beyond ‘the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella’ to a higher hybridism wherein the battenberg on the scatter cushion was not on it but of it. A creature of a drained undersea world.

the possibility of recognising nature, even distorted nature, which is, after all, a kind of struggle between my interior life and the external world as it exists for most people

Picasso in ‘Life with Picasso’, Francoise Gilot (1964)

Freud, of course, gave us the Slip (in ‘The Psychopathologies of Everyday Life’ (1901)), something of an ur-text here insofar as it introduces the notion of the unbidden utterance – an involuntary speech event featuring the partial expression of unsettling memories and ideas in words which resemble and replace those that would have been spoken as part of an uncorrupted original remark. A similar but visually based principle animates what we could call the space-filler, wherein an often minor, often everyday, occurrence seems to elude comprehension yet is nevertheless, with the speed of thought, framed within an interpretation. The malfunctioning aspect of this operation – the absence of an initially acceptable understanding – features the barely conscious acknowledgement of a gap, a black hole, in the generally unstanchable stream of consciousness. Nature adores such a vacuum. Ever loaded, always cocked, it will spritz the narrative with alternatives drawn from what is probably a vast but uncatalogued collection of all that is inconvenient. A malcontent is undulating a tree. Public order is breaking down. A public good is being trashed.

(An earlier version of the paragraph above referred to ‘unnatural alternatives’ ( 2 lines from end of para) – this is careless. It suggests that the natural is limited to what we know. ) (Picasso saw it otherwise: “…I don’t want there to be three or four or a thousand possibilities of interpreting my canvas. I want there to be only one and in that one, to some extent, the possiblity of recognising nature, even distorted nature, which is, after all, a kind of struggle between my interior life and the external world as it exists for most people….I don’t try to express nature; rather, as the Chinese put it, to work like nature.”)

Reading an article on ‘Little Women’ (2019) in Sight & Sound (January 2020) I glanced at one of the accompanying photos and was surprised to note that Emma Watson had folded her right leg across Greta Gerwig’s lap as she studied the script with the director and cast members Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh. Watson is slight of build yet her bent leg looks quite heavy. Her posture also looks quite uncomfortable.

But, of course, Watson is doing none of this. The ‘knee’ that is seen is formed by the lid of Gerwig’s laptop and her ‘calf’ is Gerwig’s lower leg. The photo is sufficiently dark to allow the casual glancer to fuse the two dark objects into one encircling limb. If the exposure and contrast are tweaked with photo editing tools the actuality of the arrangement becomes crystal clear:

In such a situation if one would be asked ‘Are you seeing things?’ then the answer must be ‘Yes, I am.’ And supposing it were then asked ‘These things that you see – are they worthy of remark?’ then the response should be frank: ‘They are largely useless. Most would be wise to ignore them. There may be those who have some use for them, however.’

It took several minutes to write the three preceding paragraphs and less than one half of one second to misread the seating arrangements in the photograph. Correction of that misreading took perhaps three or four seconds. The economics of this are sufficient to dispel any ideas of the value of the mistake that can never be made again. But I dwell on such phenomena in part because they are so hastily discharged.

These corrections and realignments probably happen throughout everyone’s day every day on the planet all the time. They probably start when everyone is very young, when a mixture of misreading and intermittent realignment is all we have. A little later realignment becomes a more conscious operation as our confidence feeds off a steadily expanding bank of successful adjustments. And of course, as we get older it is as if the need for realignments is greatly reduced, our skills in this field are consolidated and the incidents, if they are noticed at all, have no more importance than an itchy nose. It may be, however, that it’s not so much a matter of skill as we simply learn to ignore events that have no apparent meaning or value.

The crucial achievement of one who has deliberately and perhaps ‘methodically’ developed a paranoid frame of mind is to find, with considerable rapidity, connections and associations between objects and ideas that have no association or affinity. This destabilised mode of seeing lends itself equally successfully to the production of the double image, defined by Dali as ‘a representation of an object that is also, without the slightest physical or anatomical change, the representation of another entirely different object, the second representation being equally devoid of any deformation or abnormality betraying arrangement.’

Ernst, in a lecture delivered in 1935, described the objectives of systematic derangement variously: / the exploitation of the fortuitous meeting of two distant realities on an inappropriate plane / (a) means of bewitching reason, taste, and conscious will / the cultivation of the effects of a systematic bewildering / based on nothing other than the intensification of the irritability of the faculties of the mind /

The paranoid state was held to have artistic value (in addition to its capacity for enabling misery and terror) insofar as it, apparently effortlessly, remodelled the exterior in the terms of some of the more volatile or inconstant currents of the unconscious.

When we did peripheral vision in A level Biology we learned some things that were useful. The usefulness of some of these things was immediately apparent and I have valued them ever since. There are various types of gaze. The dominant one is characterised by visual fixation and refers to the field of vision within the point of fixation – the centre of the gaze. Vision beyond the bounds of the point of fixation is deemed peripheral vision and takes up the larger part of the visual field.

One thing in the diagram that fixates attention is the unusual scope of far peripheral vision. You can see behind you. If you look at the side of someone’s head you’ll notice that the eye curves round the front of the head. Without actually turning the head at all you can exceed what might be assumed to be the outer limits of peripheral vision. There is a visible ground between 90° (approximately the mid-line of either shoulder) and 110° (beyond your shoulder), where straight ahead fixity is 0°. The far peripheral. Out of the corner of your eye.

They told us at school that the far peripheral enabled creatures to move around without turning their heads unduly, to avoid bumping into things and to become aware of threats before they get too close. It is inevitable that things seen out of the corner of one’s eye will often carry a certain weight of menace, usually mild to the point of becoming barely perceptible.

On the other hand, our tendency to misread peripheral information can be regarded as having a survival value comparable to the indisputable advantages of a built-in optical early warning system. It could almost be argued that if peripheral vision generally delivers insufficient detail this actually enhances the survival project insofar as one is compelled to double check just in case one has overlooked a ravening nearby bear, dog or highwayman.

We’re not talking ayahuasca here. This is the straight street, not even the high street. But if the structure of the eye is such that it facilitates both detection and misinterpretation then it is tempting to imagine the capacities of the corner of the eye being extended right across the visual field so that the peripheral eclipses the fixated.

But I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking ‘That’s all very well but how are you going to get to the shops/the cinema/the other side of the room?’ To which I would riposte ‘Yes but is it not conceivable in this case that what would then be seen would be not the consensual external but a marvellous mélange not dissimilar to the dogbear (or beardog)?’

It might be that you would then feel obliged to observe that ‘I am an airline pilot/driving instructor/ person. The only way that would work would be sitting down. And not in an aeroplane. Kindly remove your sewing-machine from the dissecting table.’

The information delivered by peripheral vision is, of course, invaluable but it is also imprecise. If it seems ominous, however, it is not always the case that one need be dogged or cowed by it. You have the option of immediately turning your head and instantly resolving the matter. If you choose not to turn your head then the misinterpretation may linger, which introduces the possibility of savouring the distorted elements connoisseurially: where you do not discard but retain, perhaps in the belief that while it might be distorted it can also be regarded as a free offer.

Saccades: A saccade (from Fr: jerk) is a quick, simultaneous movement of both eyes between two or more phases of fixation in the same direction. Humans and many animals do not look at a scene in fixed steadiness; instead, the eyes move around, locating interesting parts of the scene and building up a mental, three-dimensional ‘map’ corresponding to the scene. (Saccades: Wikipedia) In this example the viewer’s eyes will saccade as they track the movements of the saccading eye.

It’s misleading to conclude that visual distortions of this kind are damaged goods. Along with misheard speech and misread texts they constitute a constant but elusive source of inspiration for artists who are keen to examine the sources of inspiration. All that glimmers is not gold, needless to say. A lot of this stuff is off-cuts. But they who denied it supplied it and should not disdain authorship.

Authors are free to develop their material. Many of them would see such development as a seamless extension of techniques or anti-techniques that they employ as a matter of routine. When paying attention to the suburbs of attention is successful, the event may be called ‘a good idea’ or ‘a brainwave’, something that ‘popped up’ etc.

In the well-known but only moderately amusing joke about drunks: Is this Wembley? No, it’s Thursday. So am I. Let’s have a drink. the rewards of mishearing are made clear. The peripheral becomes the contaminant that enters the mainstream and determines its course.

The dominant contaminant is probably not misperceived so much as overlooked. Everyday thought teems with mental events and is accordingly filtered in order to maintain fixation. The thoughts that don’t fit fall away into the wings. We learned how to ignore them years ago. If we were to unlearn those lessons then the beardogbears could lollop out of the woods and display themselves and if we didn’t like them we could send them packing. It’s like going to the gym (I imagine) – the more you do an exercise the easier it gets.

On the foreshore of the Oxfam Book Shop a mint copy of ‘London in Fragments – a Mudlark’s Treasures’ by Ted Sandling. It’s about the people who dig antique fragments out of the mud when the Thames is at low tide. On Sandling’s first ever visit to the shore he spots a fragment of an old clay pipe and initially dismisses it as being simply too ordinary, as mudfinds go. On closer inspection he is excited to find that the bowl of the pipe is moulded to resemble ‘a perfect horse’s hoof, complete with a fetlock and a fine coat of hair.’ The muddy old pipe stem had been misperceived, its distortion overlooked. A thing of the interior was rejected in favour of the mundane. An inverted surrealisation has taken place: the hunter has construed something as unworthy of remark but upon taking it in hand he sees the commonplace morph into a dream object before his eyes. pipehorsepipe.

A t first glance he’s neat and smart – usually a sharp blue suit, a white shirt and a red tie. The outfit rarely changes. Neither do the mannerisms that threaten to compromise the overall composure. The left hand straying to adjust the tie knot, a knot that does not require adjustment. Every few seconds the hand flies there, fidgets needlessly then drops to the side again. And then, after a short while, the sweating. It’s real. It shines under the lights. He’s obviously working hard but part of the attraction of what he does lies in the contrast between the smart outfit and the material that he’s producing. The sweat is therefore a little jarring, perhaps a product of that contrast. It’s not quite right. He will reach inside his jacket or into a back pocket, produce a handkerchief then mop his brow. Even when he’s finished and sitting next to the host at the desk, he continues to mop his brow. And that seems to suggest that he was tense and is still tense and while it helps the act perhaps in the beginning it wasn’t planned but it suited the act and has now become a part of it and, to some extent, is inseparable from it. Rodney has an urgency that reminds us that if you’re going to channel a stream of gags as if they’re just naturally popping into your head then it’s hard work – these things don’t come naturally. Is that what anybody is actually like? They walk in and these compact formulations are ejected twice a minute until time is up?

The gags are one or two-liners on the whole and must, obviously, be separated in some way if they are to make sense. Between each gag, then, comes this small fusillade of tics, the fiddling and dabbing bringing to mind the tugging of the shirt shoulder, the adjustment of the head band and the bounce after bounce after bounce of the ball before it is served by the tournament tennis player. While we don’t doubt that the tennis player wants very much to deliver, with Rodney we wonder if each new set of birth pangs will be the one that scuttles the enterprise.

So although he is superb his persona isn’t relaxed. It is shot through with tremors from the one who, from beneath its damp skin, animates the performance.  In this respect he’s subtler than Woody Allen. The physique  of the latter, his posture and his vocalisation are brought together harmoniously in the character of the whining weakling who will never experience a satisfying social transaction. But when Rodney pushes through the curtains the first impression is of one who is combative. He has a bullish demeanour, bulging eyes and he seems like a man in a hurry. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if he were packing a handgun. He’s wired.

Except that Rodney tells us, from time to time, ‘I don’t get no respect.’ This is his catchphrase. His act consists in his itemising the hundreds of instances in which he has been disrespected. It’s not observational comedy, the overrated genre which, in its disingenuous claim to derive from the clear and nonjudgmental eye of the portraitist, asks us rue our inability to see the funny side of life that’s beneath our noses. Instead it’s where Rodney, who may or may not suffer from low self-esteem when he’s at home, merely opens a vein of abjection then complains about it within earshot. He’s talking to us but you get the feeling that his internal monologue is not that different.

Oliver Stone clearly suspected that there was a thin line between love and hate when he was casting for Natural Born Killers (1994). The self-flagellation of Rodney’s humour could be turned outward, at which point he would become a psychopath rather than a stand-up. This proved  to be entirely the case. Ed Wilson, his character in the much underrated film, is Rodney to the max, unalleviated by nervous tics or the least indication that he may be domesticated to any degree. A masterclass in cartoonish, horrifying domestic sitcom parody, Rodney’s scenes as abusive, ogling, pawing, incestuous father to Juliette Lewis’s rebel girl Mallory are, despite the use of a sitcom laugh and applause track throughout, appalling yet exhilarating because somehow soon the slavering beast will be neutralised and his comeuppance will be as lurid as his fatherly behaviour is beyond the pale.

Towards the end of his amiable work in Cheers, Woody Harrelson was approached by Stone and took the role of Mickey, a natural born killer of a more suitable age for Mallory in the homicidal folie a deux rampage (52 victims) on which the couple embarks after Mickey has despatched Ed with a crowbar.

The first hour of the film is incongruously experimental for a Warner  Brothers product, both formally and in the nihilism of its moral instruction. It is pitched as a satire that will address the enthusiastic attention paid to celebrity killers but is so extravagant and poetic in its means that it becomes, in the same breath, an irresistible paean to unfettered recreational slaughter. The first 15 minutes do not so much test as erase the contours of sitcom convention, setting free an ordinarily muffled content that celebrates, within the frame of a passionate romance between two attractive and murderous young people with a lot in common, the amputation of  sociality that we are encouraged to believe is one of the great privileges of dedicated coupledom.

By presenting Ed/Rodney as the prime and incestuous transgressor Stone creates a space in which the abused and avenging Mickey and Mallory may outdo him as killers yet retain the charm of the natural born. Rodney Dangerfield’s stand-up comedy work is made palatable, furthermore, because it is presented as a species of self-harm but  in the menacing sitcom preamble to Stone’s movie this effect is redirected with the support of, amongst other things, the sound of manic laughter from the laugh track serving to remind us how uniquely thrilling are the pleasures of rupturing taboo.