Lorem Ipsum E-Book

Oli Hazzard

• Herausgeber: Prototype Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 252

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Lorem Ipsum, the debut novel from poet Oli Hazzard, consists of a single, 50,000-word sentence. An epistolary fiction addressed to an unidentified email recipient, the novel is modelled after the Japanese prose genre of the zuihitsu, which means 'following the brush'. This playful, disruptive and digressive novel is written out of and towards a moment of crisis in the ordinary, in which the experience of attention has changed entirely. Lorem Ipsum is also an intimate, singular exploration of being a parent and a child, of dreams, work, fantasies, reading, happiness, secrets, memory, protest, repetition, intergenerational conflict, and the forms of community which appear or disappear based on how we conceive of 'shared time'. It is a book about the foundations upon which we build our lives, and what happens when they are shaken.

Leseprobe

(prototype)

Oli Hazzard is the author of three books of poems, Between Two Windows (Carcanet, 2012), Blotter (Carcanet, 2018) and Progress: Real and Imagined (SPAM Press, 2020), and a book of literary criticism, John Ashbery and Anglo-American Exchange: The Minor Eras (Oxford University Press, 2018). He lives in Glasgow, and teaches at the University of St Andrews.

Lorem Ipsum

Oli Hazzard

Lorem Ipsum

How foolish I feel when I realise that I have spent another day in front of my inkstone, jotting down aimless thoughts as they occurred to me, all because I was bored and had nothing better to do.

Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness

Is love when you don’t give a name to the identity of things?

Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

My mother forgot my son’s name, and as she searched her memory for it, while we were on the phone, as I walked slowly around the Meadows, in the freezing air, I found myself thinking of my first day on the internet, that day so long ago, when I didn’t even know what the internet was, though we had a computer at home, with a number of games on floppy disk, as well as a CD-Rom encyclopaedia which, when I was accepted to grammar school, my mother compelled me to use one day during the summer holidays for research on an ‘independent essay’ she was going to make me write, since I was going to grammar school, on Ancient Egypt, or perhaps just the pyramids, a prospect by which I was both excited—I liked the idea of knowing about Egypt in theory, of being someone who could recite facts about pyramids, the geometrical calculations which made their assembly possible, the symbolic relation between the structure and the environment, the materials used to construct them and the modes of transport used to move such vast quantities of whatever material (my essay was largely a copy-and-paste job) from somewhere far down the Nile all the way to Cairo, though I think I was also slightly fearful of the possibilities such knowledge could foreclose, such as the possibility that the pyramids had been constructed by aliens, which seemed like an appealing idea, not just, that is, the idea that aliens had built them, but that all this highly advanced activity, this impossible technological feat involving, I imagined, lasers and hovering craft as well as Pharaohs and slaves and whips and ropes, had happened thousands of years ago, and that what we thought of as the past was in fact in many senses already the future (an idea which was also responsible for what was so appealing about the universe of Star Wars, it had a dizzying, reversing effect on history, in the sense that it suggested the undiscovered zones of the past might be shown to hold as many interesting things as the future undoubtably did)—and bored in advance, since it would require lots of sitting inside on a sunny day, looking at a screen (as I have been, here, in this small room, writing this to you, A, though with what intention I’m not yet entirely sure) with which I had already begun to self-manage my contact while playing the football game Fifa 95 (which I often think of as my first ‘training’ in some of the principles of selfhood to which ‘modern literature’ would later introduce me, that is, that the ‘I’ is a fiction, that the unitary self, drawn from the idea of the soul, has long been ‘scattered to the wind’, that we all contain multitudes and that je est un autre, these all felt oddly familiar on first encounter, in part because I had spent months of my childhood, cumulatively, controlling a team of eleven players, each with their own qualities and flaws, rated helpfully in the ‘team selection’ interface according to category, such as speed, shooting power and accuracy, heading ability, strength and fitness, and when I played a game with my team (‘Britain’, I think it was, unless I am mistaken, since there is of course no British football team, football remains the domain of individual nations, unlike other areas of life where the category of Britishness comes into play, such as at the Olympics, or on television, or in culture, artists are described as British, sometimes, or writers are British, which seems to me not a helpful designation, since in a loose, semi-formulated way I feel like national imaginaries have more weight and history, or at least more imaginative purchase, than the vague federal category of ‘Britain’—Englishness and Scottishness are not synonymous, we know this, but once you’ve decided on that I suppose the question soon becomes how much specificity can you handle, if you are constantly dividing and subdividing groups of people until they are only named individually, how after all do you make a community (there’s that phrase, ‘negative community’, floating up into my head from something I read at some point in the relatively recent past, where is that from, B, is it, I can’t remember, I was probably only half paying attention to the book I was reading at the time, which is more than I usually pay, sometimes when I’m trying to make the best of this chronic inability to focus on a task I think of reading a book—or, rather, not reading in the presence of a book—as an opportunity for a bit of daydreaming, sometimes I’ll sit myself down in my comfortable middle-class flat in a central area of Edinburgh, with the sound of traffic from the busy arterial road outside dilating and contracting every few seconds, and open something I find really difficult to understand, like some C, and so well-trained have I become at activating in the presence of such texts the trance-like state of a daydream that I only have to read a few sentences, or bump my eyes against the words hegemony or praxis before I feel my brain evaporating and in its place a bubble of perfect, bland transparency taking up residence, a bobbing, jellyfish-like ambience, through which a gentle, pulsing, roaming form of inattention is enabled, guided less by a desire for escape into a particular other world than by a nosing, blind-feeling, burrowing aversion to the facticity of this one—somehow the vocabulary of the unread reading material nevertheless burrows its way into my own—and this experience, if it is an experience, has a syntactical quality to it which feels empty, and luxurious, has a winding, self-delighting, purposeless character, as though everything were suddenly available yet nothing could be retained, which is why when it happens I sometimes find myself saying to myself, dully, self-consciously, ‘I am like a work of art right now’, or sometimes ‘I’m like an object’, or sometimes ‘I’m a thing’ (I feel embarrassed to write these things to you, A, even though I am inventing your presence), and I feel myself reaching out with my newfound mobile jellyfish consciousness to the other things in the room—the sofa I’m sat on right now (long and low, covered in blue velvet, streaked with my son’s snot), the coffee table with the broken leg I’ve been promising to fix since I broke it maybe a year ago (will this ever happen, probably not), the mirror set too high on the wall for me to see anything but the top of my head, books, arranged roughly according to genre, rug, carpet, lamp, curtains, television, laptop, phone, complex, mysterious and low-level menacing thing, arriving fully-formed out of a set of processes I literally cannot imagine, assembled by machines operated at whatever spatial or temporal remove by the eyes and hands and brains of people I cannot see, not just in the sense that I cannot visualise their bodies at work doing this thing that they are doing—they are doing it but I cannot see what it is, this activity from which a phone eventually emerges—but I cannot imagine their interior lives as they build this thing my hand rests upon, not an overly alarming empathetic impasse maybe, since I basically cannot imagine my own, my own interior life, that is, I often use the word ‘interior’ without even momentarily considering what I mean by it, though I suppose I mean my experience of consciousness, of perceiving and thinking (if that’s even what I do, sometimes it seems like I go for hours without a single bit of language registering in my mind, especially when I’m doing something intensely absorbing and monotonous, like playing Fifa 2013 on my PlayStation, which for a long time before our son was born I would do routinely, once a week, for four or five hours at a time, and during which sessions I would enter a kind of trance that was more like being deeply stoned or experiencing the sensation of a single blow to the head drawn out over a drastically prolonged period (like that performance piece by D, which I’ve never seen but feel like I’ve experienced by analogy many times, in which two figures move towards one another across a stage at such a glacial pace that several hours pass before their bodies touch) than any purposeful meditative state, in the sense that when I finished playing, and got up from the sofa and went to the bathroom and looked at my face in the mirror my eyes were bloodshot (as though the zoom was up to 150%) and my skin was pale and I felt like basic sensory phenomena—the cold of the toilet seat against the tips of my fingers, the sensation of piss struggling through my urethra down my penis and out of the too-small slit at the end (when I piss in such states I sometimes think of my penis as screaming or being sick, and am not unmoved), the low note of non-communicative noise I emit as this process occurs, which is expressive of neither pleasure nor displeasure but is simply a noise of release—have to travel through an additional layer of accreted sediment in order to reach that part of my interior that is alerted to their happening, and I feel like I am emerging from something distinct from sleep or distraction, a state of having been away from language for a while, and returning from the place where I had been—a place in which I ‘thought’ in football, in the sense that the movements of the players I was controlling were expressive of ‘thoughts’ (or maybe ‘ideas’) which I would otherwise only ever become aware of if they were articulated in words—is frightening, partly because it makes me realise how smoothly and soundlessly language can fall away, it offers a glimpse of what it might mean to experience that falling away without the subsequent process of retrieval, of having come back from some kind of brink, which has been happening recently to my mother, she has been away from other people for a long time, forgetting words and memories and future events, living alone (I think about her most, and feel closest to her, in fact, when I am alone—aloneness is her element), watching a lot of television, with which she seems increasingly involved emotionally and on which she seems to depend for companionship, particularly programs like Frasier—a sitcom designed to be screened in the evening but which because of its age is now shown in two-or-three-episode clusters early in the morning on Channel 4, which results, for me at least, in a strangely and gently disorientating alteration in mood schedule—which is a beautiful program, and its protagonist seems even to me very much like a friend, in fact so much so that I found it weird to listen to E’s episode of Desert Island Discs recently and hear him choosing all these cheesy rock tracks and telling these jocky stories, I found it nearly unbelievable—though I didn’t think it at the time in words, but more as a general, hovering cloud of potential impressions—that this man could have said literally every word F has ever said without being more substantially affected by that experience, the experience of being spoken through by this character who I think my mother is in love with in a light, leisurely fashion, when I call her in the mornings sometimes she is watching Frasier as she speaks to me (she only sometimes turns the sound off) and she tells me she is watching Frasier in such a tone of fondness it is as if F were literally there in the room with her, oh, F, he makes me laugh, a habit which makes it difficult to tell if the long pauses that occur fairly frequently in her conversation are a result of a bad line or a neurological deterioration or if she’s just really into the episode that’s on), though I think that when I use the word ‘interior’ what I’m mostly thinking of is dreams, which seem the most deeply interior part of us partly because access to them cannot be willed, and partly because there’s something about them which is almost impersonal—we aren’t really present in our dreams in any way comparable to how we are present in waking life, since when we are dropped into the unvarying in medias res of dreaming, or at least when I am, I feel as if all my self-consciousness, my understanding of the degree of control I have over my relationship with my environment and how I interact with it, that armour of distance, deixis, has evaporated, and as a result I find myself in my dreams to be completely absorbed by what is taking place, as though I had stepped into the cartoon landscape of Mary Poppins (and in doing so, changed into cartoon form myself, though of course that’s not what happens to G) or a computer game or another element entirely, with a distinct set of physical laws to which I am totally vulnerable, an exposing feeling of immanence which at once recalls that feeling of being immersed and disorientated in and by the world which is particular to childhood, a feeling which is so intimate it is almost painful to recall and to observe, but at the same time is also a strangely objective-feeling experience, too, as if the substance of dreams, their essentially neutral core, were in fact not much at all to do with me but predominantly external, the enclosed activity of a world only minimally inflected by the sensibility of an individual subject—and there’s also the feeling that the word interior has something to do with embarrassment, a feeling which is somehow mapped out in the progression of vowels and consonants which constitute the word, one travels in to the interior, which in-ness is followed by a blurred or slurred tear, which transitions into the complex and laboured and, in isolation, vaguely comic ior, which through its conjuring of ‘ear’ demonstrates an alarming self-consciousness—the word has seen you listening to it—and also brings into view the labyrinthine structure of the ear canal, the roots of which extend deep into the dark bodily interior, down towards the throat, which I woke up reaching for last night as I dreamt, as I often do, that our home had been invaded by a man who had somehow secured the right to use all of the shelves in our flat as display surfaces for the various types of domestic ornament he had for sale, snow globes and statuettes, pet rocks, candle-holders, vases and picture frames, all of which were crammed onto the shelves (which still supported all of our everyday objects, books and plants and so on, though they, in their new cluttered and crowded accommodation, gave off a distinctly ‘harassed’ vibe), and when I emerged from our bedroom to question the man about his activity he addressed me with an air of such authoritative irritation—of course I can, don’t you know what time it is—I deferentially retreated to the bedroom to explain to H that, in fact, the man did have the proper permissions and that there was nothing we could do, a dream drawn straightforwardly and with distortions of only minimal inventiveness from life, since a couple of days previously the buzzer to our flat had gone, and I had buzzed in what turned out to be two policemen, one of whom, in the process of ascending the stairs, called up to me in a tone of authoritative irritation, don’t worry, it’s nothing to do with you, at which statement I deferentially retreated without responding from the communal space of the stairwell to the supposedly private space of my own hallway, back into the living room, where, when I reported this non-exchange to H, she stared at me for a moment, taken aback by the ease with which the words of a person in authority had guided me without objection away from the public space which I had every right to occupy back into our private home, I can see in such instances a flicker of anxiety cross her face, generated, I suspect, by the thought that one day a man may intrude into our home and I may be incapable of doing anything about it, a possibility of which I’ve often been afraid myself—though at this stage of our marriage I’m uncertain which of my uncertainties about myself originated from my own assessment of my behaviour and interior life, and which are internalisations of H’s own doubts about me, a strange, ambivalent feeling, not particular to marriage but perhaps rendered more clearly perceptible by marriage, this knowledge of my own self-perceptions having become so braided to another person’s perceptions of me that the two are now indistinguishable, which is, if I’m not mistaken, something like what I is suggesting in ‘Lyric Poetry and Society’ (open, skim-read—and when I say ‘skim-read’ I really mean something more like ‘hover-read’, or something, since what I seem to do when reading this kind of tricky text is pitch my visual focus at some point just before the text becomes fully sharpened and legible and wait for what seem like key words to rise out of the block into a kind of relief, then from these co-ordinates I’ll start to develop a vague, imperfect conception of the writing’s hovering ‘concerns’ or themes, essentially as if I’m looking at a map of a terrain or a painting of a landscape, which we don’t process in a linear way, generally, we dot around from one aspect of the visual field to another without a conception of ‘beginning’ or ‘end’ being imposed, which is what I like about looking at paintings, this sense of their narrative indefiniteness, an effect generated, paradoxically, by their staticness, their immobility, an immobility which seems to me to be generous or enabling, because it can act as a stationary point for a registration of surrounding change, that is, the environment in which the painting is encountered (J is good on this), certain paintings I’ve seen have acquired the status of a time-stamp on the days on which I saw them, and as such carry with them an atmosphere often severely at odds with the one intended by the work, such as K’s Progress: Real and Imagined, which I saw one very hot day in 2014 at the New Museum in New York, and which depicts a figure at sea, in a boat which is actually a house, open to the stormy elements, and the figure is surrounded by all of the detritus of living and creating things—notebooks, cut-out pictures, photographs, painting equipment and so on—which is a very blustery painting, almost cartoonishly windswept and chaotic (though in the right-hand area the painting opens out, mysteriously and with a surprising fluency, into what seems like another dimension, another aesthetic, through a poster of a winter scene painted from a distance, almost like a memory-bubble extending from the central figure’s head) and yet this largely cold and damp scene is for me charged with the intense vertical heat of a June day in New York, when the heat seems to be less an atmospheric condition than a substance, like honey, in which the city is suspended—next to me on the sofa), except, and here I’m almost certainly mistaken, that L is arguing against the idea of there ever being any original interior sensibility separate from the external society in which it’s situated), it’s a problem that keeps coming up when I teach, my students shake their heads after reading ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and say no, this fetishisation of the individual, of isolation, of ‘freedom from’, this is not the way, but then there’s the homogenising effect of globalisation, which we’re experiencing today and which makes the social changes which precipitated Modernism seem by comparison local and solvable, and that’s no good either, so which is it, and does compromise just make everyone unhappy, and so on—though I am of course aware of the dangers of the nation as a unit of identity, though it seems a disorientatingly changeable idea, as though context were everything and content were nothing, not least since during the first Scottish referendum campaign—I say ‘first’ because at the moment I’m writing (March 28th 2017, 11:01, on the train to Glasgow, a grey, misty day) it seems likely that a second will be called, since, in M’s words, a ‘material change in circumstances’ was brought about by Britain largely voting to leave the EU, though of course a second one may not come about at all, N may persuade the SNP that ‘now is not the time’, in that tone she has which makes me wince even to overhear, you can’t help but feel it will be directed towards you some day, in the way you have directed it towards your own child, ‘now is not the time’, you don’t know what the time is, the time in history or the afternoon in which we are placed, you must learn more and develop a wider sense of perspective in order to see what has happened and obtain the visionary power necessary to see what is always coming rapidly into view, though of course nobody can ever see beyond what has just come into view, no one is ahead of his time, as O, who wrote like a child, writes, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who also are creating their own time refuse to accept, last week I would have assumed that I would know by now whether it is right to say ‘first Scottish referendum’ or just ‘the Scottish referendum’—it would have been odd for those who knew the First World War by its first name of the Great War to later discover that it had been re-named, that it was only the first in a sequence of comparable, numbered conflicts (though, I google, some people appear to believe that the name was given prior to the occurrence of a second war, and that the epithet ‘First’ was given by a general on the British side who described it in an anticipatory way as ‘the FIRST world war’ in a projected sequence of future world conflicts)—but because of the terrorist attack on Westminster Bridge and Parliament (I was in fact on the toilet, having a shit, in our flat on Easter Road, when I saw this news on the Guardian website, and genuinely did call out to H to tell her something had happened and that she should check her phone, and this after having written what I did below or earlier about that being basically the only eventuality in which having a smartphone seemed necessary, and I felt a bit appalled by my writing it, and then while feeling the feeling I described or describe of the event’s insufficiency I also perceived with intense, oxygenating clarity the triviality of my writing, its refusal to really think about what it was saying, I was very harsh on myself for half an hour, and I watched the news live on the television (with the furious concentration of someone intent on changing their life), which I rarely do—we normally watch it on +1, since H gets home from work late and by the time I’ve put our son to bed I’ve missed the beginning, and while I know I could simply ‘pause’ the live transmission I prefer to experience the sensation of watching something according to the rhythms of an invisible, collective audience, even if it is slightly delayed—and it was shocking, initially, what had happened, the terrible deaths of people being run over by a car and a policeman being stabbed to death, and my heart rate went up as I heard it being described—there was no footage, perhaps because the events hadn’t been filmed or because there was footage but the television networks had decided against showing it, perhaps it was too shocking or gruesome or they wanted to avoid somehow glamourising or glorifying the act of the individual—this increasingly seems to be the policy among mainstream news outlets, and as I say this I realise that I haven’t even seen the face of the Las Vegas shooter, or the Manchester suicide bomber, or the former marine who yesterday murdered twenty-six people in a Texan church, I’m not sure how I feel about that, it’s not that I need an image to pin my feelings about these events to, but the absence of an image of a person responsible for these killings feels counterproductive in some respect, it’s almost like these figures have been relegated or, in fact, promoted to the status of something invisible or supernatural, and what’s frightening about that iconoclastic gesture is that it carries with it the implied reasoning behind iconoclasm when it’s intended as an act of reverence—that is, when it’s considered an affront to the ideal a deity represents to render its image with the fallen materials of our corrupted world—and so the lack of images of the men who committed these crimes transports them from the material world to the realm of the numinous, amplifying their capacity to ‘terrorise’ the imagination, though as I write that I feel unconvinced by it, and suspect that what I am really unsettled by is the absence of a head that proves the person is dead, the way, after someone was beheaded, in the eras when this manner of execution was considered permissible (I touch my own head at the thought that this could ever have been the case, and struggle to imagine myself into the mind of someone—P, for example—who would go to an execution as a form of leisure, or distraction, and also purposefully as a way of marking historical moments (‘I went out to my Lord’s in the morning, where I met with Q [signatory to the death warrant of R] but my Lord not being up I went out to Charing Cross, to see S hanged, drawn, and quartered, which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition’), or the minds of those who would then openly take pleasure in the public torture of another person (‘he was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy’), though in certain parts of the world this still happens—I remember seeing the image of T on the front page of the New York Times, the day we went to the U exhibition, the photograph taken in the moments before his execution, with his executioner standing at his shoulder, and wondering, bizarrely I accept, what I had been doing at the exact instant the image was created—and when it does happen a common reaction is to displace the act temporally, to describe those who carry it out as ‘medieval’, as though ‘modernity’ were not itself more brutal than earlier eras) the head would be held up by the hair to the gathered crowd so that they could confirm that this person, convicted of whatever terrible or innocuous or fictional crime, was in fact truly dead and could no longer inflict harm upon the world—I confess I don’t know if that would be the right editorial decision—but as the evening went on my heart rate decreased, the streetlights outside began to turn on, and I gradually became aware that I was slowly growing uninterested in the coverage, as it began to dawn on commentators and reporters that this was in fact an isolated incident carried out by an individual rather than the first part of some larger plot, which would have been more exciting and sustaining, in some respects, it’s always exciting even if at the same time horrifying to have the veil on the world pulled away a little, as V puts it, and indeed some of the reporters could hardly contain their own sense of disappointment, a feeling which was visible on their faces) the decision about whether to hold a second referendum was postponed, and I’m not sure when it’s been rescheduled for—the idea of ‘Britishness’ was presented ‘in some quarters’ as an antidote to nationalism, as though Britain as a concept had somehow transcended the bounds of the nation-state and was a form of advance upon the petty or narrow concept of identity drawn from geography, language, history, culture and ideology that nationalism represents (I vaguely remember that sentence from a textbook), and yet, as H said this morning, looking up tiredly from her phone, while the baby napped, when the telescope turned around on itself, in the direction of Europe, Britishness suddenly became a distinct national identity which had to be defined by opposition with the rest of Europe, what a fucking joke) I was able to imagine my own selfhood as more-or-less-evenly distributed among those eleven cartoon figures, one of which I would be directly controlling at any one time with the arrow keys and space bar, and the others would be moving automatically in response to that momentarily central figure—and I think even as I was playing then I intuited some relation between that pragmatic, necessary automation of some extraneous parts of the self so that whatever function was being focused on could be performed at optimum level, even as I played I would pick up a glass of water and take a sip or bite from the apple next to the keyboard or continue breathing in and out without giving it a single thought just so that I could score a goal for Britain) since my eyes started to dry and itch after several hours of constant play, a series or compound of feelings, the bored and the excited, I think I anticipated as I sat in the internet café with my mother, looking at a search engine (Ask Jeeves, I think, though that may not have existed in 1997) as though for the first and last time, and unable to remember anything I was interested in or think of anything to write, though I continued to write anyway, as W writes in his zuihitsu (the term for a genre, or perhaps anti-genre, of Japanese prose writing, which came into being with the composition of The Pillow Book