no more problems . all problems have been solved

Diana Collier - Ode to Riddley Walker from Steven Paul Collins on Vimeo.

it's a beautiful morning. it sounds like they were running the washing machine upstairs and are now putting the vacuum cleaner round (they must be very houseproud). outside people sound like they're scraping weeds out of the cracks in the pavement and huge refuse lorries reverse back and fore through the narrow curved roadways of fake mews in search of giant booming wheeled containers of waste. 

the giant industrial process of removing our shit and our waste and our packaging has begun like an alien invasion.

horsemouth (and his digestion) seem to have emerged unscathed from eating a pan of rice he left on the side for two days.  he watched a sci-fi movie about first contact with aliens whose gift to humanity is a language that opens the mind up to the future and to the past (sapir-whorf). 

no more problems . all problems have been solved

the right to left (or left to right) sentences you are reading have the arrow of time in them (says the film-maker who shows you one series of moving images after another). and in film we have learned to read the flashback (and even the flash-forward), we activate the resources that enable us to suspect causation and a story in what we see.

the aliens have a language of giant filigree 'O' ideograms. 

this is a radically un-derridean thing to do (or perhaps it's very derridean). in derrida things are haunted by their possibilities, things are haunted by inbuilt instabilities from their extended foundings, things are subject to time.

the film shows the baleful effect of solaris and 2001 in that it goes cosmic as its solution but it does so using the new temporal logic that film affords. (of course, having known linguists horsemouth wonders what they make of it). 

if all problems were in the fullness of time always already solved would not all conversations be angelic (and what would be the point of having them other than that we have always had them). 

--------------------------------------------

so here it is, horsemouth is retired (ok no there's various bits of paper he has to fill in and scan and send off first - but the principle is the same). what will he do with his time? will he get on with his novel now? or his rock opera? 

certainly he's got to get on with the business plan for the communal endeavour (as do the other people who said they would er. who horsemouth is supposed to be leading through this delicate task). here the task is iterative but it must be made to appear that consequences follow from facts, priorities follow from mission statements and strangely isolated values.  

phew the giant clanking machines are gone (at the level of waste it produces capitalism cannot hide its essential nature). 

maybe horsemouth's spaceship visit was just such a waste management machine. maybe horsemouth was looking out of the wrong window when he was looking for them. 

the sky has clouded over. the beautiful dawn already contained the grey day and already contains the setting of the sun. 

what will horsemouth do today?