Warm Recollections #32
More from the Bitz Files
As introduced here, these Warm Recollections are random cullings from thirty years of notes files…
It’s not that I’m no good at moderation — I am. The problem is that the second me who emerges while I’m still being moderate has no time for moderation at all, and I don’t realize there’s been a handover between these guys until suddenly I wake up in Mexico married to a wallaby and covered in second-rate tattoos.
Great English phrase: ‘A safe pair of hands’ — surely the highest accolade we have. It means unshowy, dependable, competent — the three desirable qualities of Britishness.
Hell is just like here, but without the magic, the spark. Grass is just grass, rocks are just rocks. And people are just bodies that talk.
These baffled, violent men with their miserable, shrewish wives, hermetically sealed from their dreams by alcohol, poverty and fate.
Roland Barthes: ‘Not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory… but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory.’
As always, if you can think of anyone who might enjoy this Substack, please spread the word.
The quote from Barthes is challenging for me, as someone who loves photographs, has an appalling memory and uses the images I capture to prompt my recall, despite me being aware that they're probably creating false memories. Dali said "The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: It is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant" - maybe that's what photographs offer as their counter-memory, something that's more real, shinier, happier for being false? Btw - my favourite quotes from Barthes are about language "Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire". Love that.
That description of hell is pretty much what depression was like for me. Food lost taste and appeal, music was insipid tinkling or irritating thudding, the sun was just hot... and nothing could penetrate the grey curtains.
Glad I passed through it.