Come to the disco

Picture a March morning

I still find the sight of the snow-covered Pyrenees uplifting, awe-inspiring, in the same way as a vast expanse of open sea. Unfortunately it is impossible to ignore the irritating fact that when you can see the mountains clearly from my kitchen window it means rain is on the way. This reminds me of the cycling conundrum – there are those who enjoy pedalling uphill because they look forward to freewheeling down the other side and those who fail to enjoy freewheeling downhill because they can't bear the thought of having to cycle back up.

I really do feel now that my position towards words has shifted. There is something decidedly not new about the language, about language, about the language I use.

Laconic – lapidaire - scissors – scission – iconoclast - demotic (popular).

And the words are no longer mine. They don't belong to me in any way, I did not create them… putting them together in a particular sequence is not such a big deal… It's just like throwing a handful of sand up in the air and "reading" how it lands.

I feel like I've been barking up the wrong tree, or staring down the wrong well. This intellectual uncertainty is certainly related to the feeling of "uncanny".

And it is possibly related to a recent borderline experience … if that is how you describe the feeling of touching a limit. Last week my reading group "à livre ouvert" was invited to read some poetry during an aperitif in honour of the "Printemps des poètes" ... the theme was "couleurs de femmes". One of the colours we chose was black, and my take on it consisted in a list of words that rhyme with "noir" –

Voir, soir, croire, boire, foire, loir, poire

(see, evening, believe, drink, fair, dormouse and pear)

Not only did I read each word with my entire being, but I also mimed the word and the group (there were six of us) backed this up.

It was an extremely satisfying experience. And I definitely touched some kind of limit, my dégré zéro de l'écriture maybe. In any case, it made me feel that the words stand up by themselves. They don't need any fancy sentences to give them meaning.

Reading Zizek,

 I come across perspicuous, which I had never heard of. It is neither perspicacious nor conspicuous.

Zizek reminds me that the unconscious does not take negatives into account. I'm trying to write a short piece about the uncanny in psychoanalysis and I can't get past the fact that I'm a "canny Scot" – in fact, "canny" in my Scottish dialect means "can't". "Ah canny dae it" = I can't do it. "Cawnie" on the other hand means cautious. "Caw cawnie" means take it easy, don't do whatever you're doing quite so hard.

Audio, video, disco - I hear, I see, I learn