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ALASTAIR BICKLEY
For my sa4qe contribution I chose some
passages from Fremder, making it clear that, contrary to
appearances, they are both in fact the product of Russell Hoban.
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Being is not a steady state but an occulting
one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion on the
wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that
we find the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The
flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world;
subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The
eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip that
shows it 24 stillnesses per second, making real by an act of retinal
retention, the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers
kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop, but below the threshold of
conscious thought the eye sees and the mind savours the flickering of the
black.
Gosta Kraken, 'Perception
Perceived - an unfinished memoir' (Jonathan Cape, 1987)
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...to this I supplemented:
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When I ask people if they experience being as a
smoothly continuous state or a flickering one they always say it's smoothly
continuous for them. For me it's always been flickering. Not that I've
actually seen the black between the pictures in my eyes but I've sensed it in
my brain and for that reason I don't make any assumptions about reality. Can
it be that the chair that I sit on is only rythmically and repetitively but
not continuously there? Why don't I fall to the floor between therenesses? How
do I manage to flicker synchronously with the chair?'
Helen Gorn, diary, 17 August
2016 |
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I printed off 10 copies at work and next
day headed for central London. I left one on the bus when I got off at the
Aldwych. Then at the
National Gallery, I folded a
couple of them into copies of the free gallery plan available at the new
entrance and then reinserted them into the pile. Then I left one by the
screens in the little coffee bar a bit further in.
After this I went to the little room
where Hoogstraten's peepshow with it's little dog Hendrick (featuring in
Amaryllis Night and Day and more lengthily in Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer)
stands and left beside it ...Difficult to be surreptitious about any of this
as the place was packed but it is remarkable how people generally only see
what they expect to see, and no-one seemed to notice, despite the garishness
of the paper.
The I thought I might go to
Westminster Reference Library next door for a couple of long-haul insertions into a tome or two, but I found
it was closed for refurbishment. To salve my frustration I went to the
Salisbury public house in St Martin's Lane for a pint and left one there.
Finally I inserted one cigarette-like between the fingers of the sculpture of
the resting ballerina in Broad Court near the
Opera House.
It was fun.
- Alastair
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