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The Last Gyzym of Conciousness is an occasional journal of poetry and writing, distributed by >> FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE >> The Last Gyzym Of Conciousness Volume 3: Convalescing from the Long Illness of Youth Winter 2004 Some themes, 21.10.03 A weekend of blood and wine - El Cucharrao, bloodied jaws of the red dog on Friday, Guinness swirling, congealing, rubber-necked in the glass on Saturday, more Merlot, Shiraz, Cab Sauv and gunfire at Neil's and Rathbone Street on Sunday... Kara, speaking quietly of the blood running down her arms and legs at Newquay - Sophie's white dress, white walls, asylum-like, spattered with Claret - Khilan Haria, mystery, my friend in Luton, fingering his stitches - four men, big guys, kicking and gouging, the blood seeping up from his scalp... This morning: black, colour of dried blood, and the blue of wine stains: my tongue, my eyes, my shit: all black. Khilan Haria 39 Norton Road Luton, Beds. LU2 IJA 01582 400 163 07961841107 [I lent him three quid to get home from Tottenham Court Road. Never heard back] Psychology Lecture, 27.2.04 Brain not functioning. The effective use of language requires the interaction of memory with sensory input and output. A paranoid labrador in a tin-foil hat. The little men from Sirius are coming - I should know. Today is my day. Aphasia is an impairment of language, affecting the production or comprehension of speech and the ability to read or write. At the edges of the camp, the men lean close to smouldering fires: stroking their beards, shivering, conversing in low voices. Wernicke's Aphasia impairs the ability of the speaker to grasp the meaning of spoken words but leaves the construction of connected speech unaffected. A deaf oracle: output-only. Anomic aphasia is a persistent inability to find the right word, characterised by speech full of vague circumlocutions. The way politicians speak - in fact, the language of all power, which cannot make true statements about things lest it reveal its own hypocrisy. Breaking a sentence on the wheel. The motor cortex, the Arcuate Fasciculus, the angular gyrus... all connected by tracts of white matter, neural pathways subject like all pathways to flash floods, subsidence, trees fallen across the path. Damage to left angular gyrus leads to agraphia: an inability to write. All human communication is aphasic: noisy, disturbed chatterings; hard to establish, frequently misunderstood. White matter, deep cortex and subcortical structures. Let's get back to good old-fashioned methods: make a hole in the skull, two inches above the ear, to let the demons out. Nurse, hand me the Black & Decker: I'm going in. Trepanation on the NHS. Patients develop compensatory strategies to cover up, hide the full extent of the cognitive deficits, the brain-ague. New areas of the brain take over, reshuffle. Not all of the lights in the attic are on - certain blocks disconnected from the city's grid, powered down. A typewriter with some of the keys removed, prised off and swallowed. The lifelong hangover, brain damage, shadow on the the lungs on X-Rays projected onto skyscrapers. 50 foot tumours. Angry pinks and bruised blues: our chromatic heritage. Odd days, 5.3.04 Blood red wine, oozing from the pages of dimestore novels, from the very type, staining the dry leaves... Champagne and chocolate bubbling up from the earth in country gardens on golden afternoons... Carrying your soul in your pockets through city streets and straining it, like loose change, through your fingers... lying down in rooms across the city and offering yourself... the clerk with long blonde hair in the bookshop in Leigh Street... Taken this way and that by fragrant winds, smelling of oil and pine needles, womb-like enclosures in the forest, a carpet of white flowers, pressing on your shoulders and thighs, leaving pollen-edged shadows of themselves on your skin... with the night-watchmen alone in their towers and shelters across the city, watching over, embracing the events and watching them come, feeling the ground shudder underfoot, immense explosions far away, listening for the burr of zeppelins or the distant whine of bombers high in the night skies, making their silent, deadly passes, while you watch, observe and take no action bar bearing witness, seeing the great houses shaken to their foundations, the roofs cracking and falling in with a great roar, afire, sparks leaping up to heaven, wherefrom Earth is suspended, by the golden chain of our attention... Notes and Theories, 15.3.04 From Cover & Thomas, Information Theory: 'asymptotic equipartition theory' roughly paraphrased as: "Almost everything is equally probable." The three towers at Mornington Crescent are filthy, concrete and plastic monstrosities on a desolate corner of land between Eversholt Street and the approaches to Euston Station. They are named Gillfoot, Dalehead and Oxenholm. A gill is a deep ravine, usually wooded, or a narrow mountain torrent. A dale is a wider valley (N. England) and holm is a byre or old stables. Untitled, date unknown Know this as you die: I came here with no thought for your own safety, or for mine. I came here only to collect a debt that was due; a payment owing. I am the Angel of Death, of all deaths, at every puncture in your time; I stand here for no more reason than that. Gabriel Orozco at the Serpentine Gallery, 7.7.04 Circles, half-circles, quarter-circles, one etched against another. The pure works are the most enlightening, but others - the 'atomists' aligning the circles with footballers and cricketers on newsprint - demonstrate the method behind the abstraction, while others, on graph paper, rail or plane tickets and grids resembling Hilbert space-filling curves, show the precision and certainty underlying topographical forms. Transposed to photographs of light breaking through trees, the circles become points of light, motes and specks of dust pooling on the aqueous surface of the eye, sunshine arcing on the camera lens as it bends low, revolves, captures a shirtless figure, leaping high into the air in Regent's Park, a frisbee floating gently into its outstretched hand. The Big Chill, 1.8.04 Mr Justerini and Mr Brooks are very good friends of mine. Nor am I a stranger in the houses of Mr Strong or Mr Bow. I am well received by Mr Red and Mr Stripe, and, if I may be so bold, Messrs Southern and Comfort seem to be getting along like a house on fire. To gossip further, it is whispered in the coffee-houses, and even in society's drawing-rooms, richly dressed in green brocade and hung with tapestries, that the relationship between your humble narrator and the Ladies Mary and Jane exceeds the bounds of what may reasonably be described as friendship. Dog Days, 15.8.04 This morning, I swept the garden for the last time, and the whole place smelled of alcohol, a sweet aroma like stale spilled beer but rising from the rotten pulp of the fallen hackberries, bright yellow and orange beneath the black skin of their shrivelled corpses. The sweet voluptuousness of the orchid-houses, or the Chiswick greenhouses where the great Victorian plant-hunters raised pineapples (are they really grown beneath the ground?), of the back rooms of bars in after-hours clubs, of my bedroom, sticky with sweat, the archaeologist uncovering new layers of some great and thrilling structure already inhabited and abandoned. James Bridle >> FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE >> >> tlgoc@shorttermmemoryloss.com >> |