the m john harrison blog

Looking at the wintry afternoon light come through the kitchen window & fall on everything there, & wondering how many quantum reference frames have to collaborate/interfere to make this scene appear the way it seems to us, & how unstable it must all be down at the smallest lengths of time & the smallest bits of things that occupy them; then multiplying the kitchen & the kitchen window by a whole universe of frames that spin off–or into–the conditions that encourage the event the “kitchen” seems to me to be when there are human beings in there making a cup of tea, I think: if you believe–or claim you believe–that a “debate” would be sufficient to deal with that, or sufficient to deal with the somehow coming into being & the going out of being of just a fraction of a second of that–even as perceived from the single but insanely cumulative & almost instantly passing frame we might call “the kitchen today at 16:02” –then I can only repeat after MacNeice, “‘There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses'”.

That night he dreamed he was back in the cloister. This dream was to recur for the rest of his life, presenting as many outcomes as iterations; from it, he would always wake to an emotion he couldn’t account: not quite anxiety, not quite despair. He dreamed the white blur of Julia Vicente’s face watching from the shadows, immobile and fascinated until the procession of search-and-rescue teams found her and bore her triumphantly home on a stretcher in the bald light and shimmering air of the plateau. The fountain seemed to roar silently. The cloister cobbles softened and parted in the heat, encouraging Cave to slip easily between them into the vast system of varnished-looking natural tubes and slots which, he now saw, underlay everything. It was cold down there; damp, but not fully dark. He could not describe himself as lost, because he had never known where he was. He heard water gushing over faults and lips in tunnels a hundred miles away. Full of terror, he began counting his arms and legs; before he could finish, woke alone. A feeling of bleakness and approaching disaster came out of the dream with him. His room was full of cold grey light. 5am, and traffic was already grinding along Caledonian Road into Kings Cross. He made some coffee, took it back to bed, opened his laptop. Although he knew it would mean nothing, he emailed her:

“What can any of us do but move on? How?” And then: “Did I ever have the slightest idea of your motives?”, to which she could only reply puzzledly:

“Of course you did. Of course you did.”

–from “Cave & Julia”, 2013, read it in You Should Come With Me Now, Comma Press 2017.

The amazing AV Marraccini on “exile from a place you’ve never been”. Just as I leave Twitter. Damn. Also, obviously, see Maria Stepanova. & “saudade” in general. This is where I was 2005/15 & will be again, even though I say “I no longer feel this”. Because when you are in a kind of found exile from your own context since seven years old or earlier, how can you not? Wish I Was Here deep dives this, but on its own terms.

The more often you’ve been in a place, the longer you need to settle in and observe on each subsequent visit. The adrenalin of first impressions can only be replaced by patience and a slow gaze. The Fish Hut, The Net Shop, The Mermaid: the rhythm of the line mirrors the topography of chip shop space, rooflines stacked and staggered up the side of the hill, then the hill itself rising above them as a backdrop, but also so grassy and wooded as to be a kind of counter-statement. I looked at something, a building, I forget which one, and thought: “The gentrification of the formerly gentrified.” I also thought: “‘The girl behind the counter’s name was Alice.’ Punctuate that.” Seaside towns are always trying to contrast art and rubbish–rusty wires & engines, seagull shit, food wrappers–and say the one is the other. It isn’t either. A material world contains its contents. (Though it constantly encourages a sort of ekphrastic impulse.)

Sad to leave Twitter, but there you go. Recent events were the final straw, obvs: but I think the long term reason is that I could never bring myself to call it “X”, which is just too close to the Muskian psychodrama for someone of my age to manage. Twitter was a feeble name, but X is infantile; & fifty years of the infantile is what ushered us through the gates of Trump Babel. Etc. So for the moment I’m social at https://bsky.app/profile/mjohnharrison.bsky.social. Professional enquiries to Will Francis at Janklow & Nesbit.

All the voices that ever spoke to you, the million real events you didn’t even take in: the things you did & the things you didn’t; the things you heard and what you said in response; everything you then forgot; what you accepted, what you rejected, what you welcomed or resisted, picked up and put down, everything you valued in the experienced world. You’re like a cake now, you can’t be unbaked: you’ll never be returned to your separate ingredients.