semestral classifieds / redundant span 003

May '22

In this month’s edition of redundant span Semestral Classifieds [Part One] there has been plenty of data entry, of box-filling. So I apologise in advance if it feels like I am simply filling in spreadsheets – design doesn’t always feel that creative. Or perhaps it’s only as creative as you want or let it be.
Bertrand Russell wrote about what he called the Tristram Shandy paradox – which I don’t really understand but seems to be that if it took you a year to write about one day of your life, your art would never be able to catch up with your life – even if you managed to learn the secret of eternal life. And over the last few years we have all been endlessly reminded of our own mortality.
I suppose this is the first part of that hoary old thing – a pandemic diary – a reprieve from the soul-searching and sourdough bread-baking. I realise this makes it sound off-putting and please do not read the diary as in any way attempting to raise my year as anything special or unique. Do not trawl the diary for autobiography. I don’t think anyone is really interested in the quotidian ins—and-outs of my life, especially one in the stasis of various coronavirus-enforced lockdowns. I think, finally, it is simply material, it’s just matter that needs to be manipulated in some way. It is a thoroughly ordinary read. But reading it now in April 2022, it still has that particular stench of 2021, when we were supposed to cope better after we all got vaccinated, veering from lockdown to lockdown in a kind of fever dream that made us feel that it wasn’t so bad, until it got bad and then we felt guilty for however bad we had it, or didn’t have it. To be truthful – and I suppose that is important when we’re talking about a diary, I am not really that bothered about the diaristic element. It’s simply a readymade, an objet trouve.
It’s funny but I started this diary writing as an exercise, putting together 2 or 3 rather abstract and opaque sentences that might pithily sum up my day but I quickly became annoyed at my opaqueness and lack of clarity and plain-speaking. Weirdly, documentary details became far more evocative than some self-conscious wordery. I wanted specifics. I have a really poor memory – everyday things just don’t stick. I have a loose and associational image-track where the images don’t quite add up, like parts of a city that I don’t know how to get to or how these areas might connect. My memories refuse to be legible. I thought writing some of this down would, through some physical effort, pickle some of these images in vinegar, like revising for an exam. But I wrote this diary on an iPhone app, recounting my days to myself in the blue light of my phone last thing at night.
A few years ago, I had attempted to start a kind of semi-poetic diary on Twitter but quickly met genuine opprobrium when what I considered to be composite and opaque entries were read by those people around me online as being personal criticisms and diatribes. I came to understand quickly what we all know now that the twitter-sphere is not a place of nuance or metaphor, and that in this context, poetry simply equals bad faith and cowardice. I, attempting to tconsider everyone’s feelings had managed ironically to piss everyone off by not speaking plainly and to the point. It caused ructions with friends and colleagues. Online everything is a personal attack.
I think more and more as I get older – and this diary is evidence of this process – that all that matters is the everyday, that it is in everyday life as actually lived, with all its contradictions and confusion, that gives the lie to the demagogues and the ideologues [of which last year had its fair share]. It is perhaps in the everyday that we find some resistance and some freedom. But there was precious little of this in the first few months of 2021.
And a little aesthetic distance always does wonders.