And here we are for the final installment of Pennine Street Trespass No.3, a trespass in which nothing was trespassed, no rules were breaking, no animals were harmed. The texts are lost and the route wasn’t even the route of the High Street, and not in a good way through the Carpenter’s Estate or wherever, but in a pleasant jaunt down the canal under threat of rain. Maybe one uber-text is the only way, but to what end? What would I do with it once I’d written it? Or even more succinctly, what is point?
What do I think these bits of stuck-together quotation are doing, or are for? Are they accompanying text of a photo essay, which stops being a photo essay really once you have accompanying text? Are they sources for me to mine to make the fitted-together-cards piece – yet another rumination, another turning-over, another extension? Shall I write this text and then destroy it or deconstruct it in some banal way? Pull words out of it, circle others, and sit back, pleased with myself.
Without the print-outs there is no rule, there is no reason to include or exclude any text or any quotation. Part of what the readings were doing was anointing those texts, declaring them to be ok, to have been part of the work. They had been heard, even if only partially, they had been presented for hearing. Like when you get a degree and the certificate says you’ve been admitted to the degree of which sits oddly against our idea that a degree is something you get. The texts were admitted to the little canon of this project. Whipping out a bit of Borges that hasn’t been read out feels wrong, then, against one of the rules of the project I made up. When is it just a silly game of showing what writers I’ve heard of? Or, when is it not that? What do you show when you quote the bloody Borges storylet about the map the size of the empire? That you’ve read Iain Sinclair? Which I’ve not (much). When does not having read someone become a point of pride? We could stand around outside seminars snorting at the idea of actually reading Deleuze.
Maybe the prideful bit is actually having gone to find the blessed story in a real book, rather than just reading someone else’s quotation of it which has been found by their researcher consulting the same book I have. Did they sit on the floor of that aisle in the library and frustratedly flick open the volumes to rule out the Spanish ones? Presumably they had some sort of more sophisticated approach. But in the end, who wants to read another going-over of God hasn’t Borges really put his finger on it? Poor Borges, a victim of psychogeography. Can referencing something that has become such a commonplace do anything beyond taking part in the Oh Godding? I don’t know about irony – but can it do anything more than affirming the quoted? Can it function in any worthwhile way – can you kill your quotational darlings, but publicly? A piece of writing should use its own material, not tick off reading lists. The material should be there because it has been selected, because it gives or tells or illustrates or reinforces or underscores or even proves. So is quoting On Exactitude in Science more a shibboleth then, telling other psychogeographers, Look, I know what I’m talking about, you can trust me, I’ve read Borges. Is that what it means? Because they won’t have read Borges, meaning really most of his published work, not a paragraph-length story. But why should they have – they needn’t. I haven’t even read Henry V, and any old dickhead can get a copy of the St Crispian’s Day speech online. Or however it’s referred to by people who are actually familiar with it.
I’ve stepped aside from the point. What are the Pennine Street texts supposed to be or do? I like my little story but then I like first drafts of poems. I can’t really change it unless I can work out something of what its point is, or if point is too weighty, then its shape or its logic. As you can do with a poem, as it moves along, and you develop a sense of what is working and ask what that bit is doing and why it seems to work, what that declaration is, this bit is working well. And you can say things like, what if you left off the whole first stanza? And you can try it and see.
This could become an incomprehensible jumble. Maybe it should stop, for a while. It’s taken so much of my time already. Not taken it away, it’s not a goblin. The Goblins of Hadrian’s Interchange. Doesn’t everyone know that you shouldn’t lurk under the Bridge of the River Lea for fear of being plagued by ghosts, ghosts of not-died children from poems and ghosts of women riding bicycles, perhaps ghosts of drivers before they killed the women on the bicycles, ghosts of who they were before their lives permanently shifted, ghosts of Hadrian’s armies, ordinary blokes, ghosts of husbands walking away into the afterlife of the present.
So, evidently I was feeling that the texts needed to be validated in some way, there needed to be this process or action – being read out on one of the walks – that made the text legitimate. There needed to be a way to say this, not this. Otherwise how would you know not to endlessly Humument-ify some bit of Borges, until it’s become fully nothing? So as I was choosing the texts in the first place, I must have had criteria I was using – and I never read out that bit of Borges, despite having it with me. Maybe because the walking wasn’t really about maps in the end, it didn’t feel that relevant. The project isn’t really about maps, I’ve barely strung one together. I’m not sure it’s that much about actual walking either, but is definitely about texts, authors, literature, two places put together, hideousness, money’s weakness. Capital’s local landscape.
Into Ruins 