Little Slaughter, Three Graces Masked, 2012
I don’t need Barthes, Derrida, Lacan et al. to spell out how
every rationale is the outcome of many little slaughters carried out in the
attempt to make some sort of coherent sense.
This morning I was considering how laboriously I struggle even to
identify the real difficulty I am trying to resolve. A spider was
building a web on the external corner of my kitchen window and I thought a
spider's web is a good metaphor for the process.
First of all you have the supports from which the spider
must hang its web - these are the fundamentals which you normally take for
granted - say, for example: 'art is a valuable activity' - but which suddenly seem
less solid when you start hanging the sling of your web to them (what is being
valued, exactly, by whom and on what grounds?!!!). When these supports
shake a little, your thoughts go wondering up and down trying to identify the structural
weakness. It inevitably leads you away on tangents, which eventually, how
every fascinating you find them, have to be stripped out.
Secondly, you start stringing together the main lines of
your web - what strands are you bringing
to your question and are they really relevant? You only know once you
start bearing stress upon them: if they don't hold you have to start all over, yet again.
Then you continue cross weaving, trying to string your
sentences together into a cohesive whole. The pattern is too complex: you
have been running too many strands: they might all be important to you but are
not to the point. So you edit and reassemble the structure, and have a
rest and wonder whether the web will hold even over one night's sleep!
Next day, you look to see if you have caught the fly.
No? Did it slip away amongst all those
deleted paragraphs?
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