Rip It Up & Start Again

6:25 AM - 7 Oct 2011

That title is a book by Simon Reynolds on the post-punk period. Great book I thought. Not what is on my mind, though the title works for my ruminations at present.

The classic modernist gesture within any artistic medium of reducing it to its bare minimums.

Subjective destitution and traversing the fantasy in lacanian psychoanalysis.

Atomizing then reassembly; some things kept, the rest discarded.

There are other examples, many. Rip it up and start again. As a strategy, I'm attracted to it. But I wonder how well it generalizes. Don't dreams sort of work this way, shredding memory and events and scattering them to be wound together by desires one can't quite grasp? Then we wake and start again.

Back to psychoanalysis, if analysis works to undermine the fantasy supports, is that akin to ripping it up? & if, having traversed one's fundamental fantasy, then there is a moment of freedom in which one can choose… to be different… is that starting again?

Rilke's You must change your life, flits through my head at 6:53 am. I've tried to sleep twice since 2. No luck either time. The alarm is set for 9:50 and I'm due to be coherent and active for 3 hours on campus then a party tonight.

An old friend D.S. who used to get these bouts of wanderlust where he'd sell off much of his stuff planning to use the money to travel or move or something. I don't remember him ever leaving, but he tried. Later he did (I dunno if there was a yard sale beforehand or not).

It is Friday morning, the 7th of October. I last left the fortress of solitude on the 30th of September. I've been trying to rip things up, but sometimes I seem to get no grip, and lack the strength to tear them out. Thwarted, I make another cocktail, smoke another, pour some media into my head and drift.

Castle Lowther (no shit)

Now I'll polish off the soldier at my elbow and go back to bed to listen to the world waking up, the children will begin squealing in an hour, with luck I'll sleep a bit before the alarm strikes. I want to dream of the library in Castle Lowther and all the books there and to rip them all to shreds before starting on the walls.

When does the starting again start?