So I Live in Glasgow Now
I keep coming back to writing and desire, long dissatisfied by language defined as a system of signs used to communicate. Language - not sight, not sound or the signified, but a more sinister thing - maintains, like a housekeeper, a series of sites readers dream towards but can never reach. This may be what language actually is: a perpetual psychic drift.
And movement is a type of inscription. Brion Gysin, expanding on the cut-up method, spoke about splicing different walking routes. This is to be understood in cut-up’s wider context, so frequently mentioned by Burroughs and Gysin but ignored in contemporary creative writing, as a technique to dispute societal control. A housekeeper has an employer, after all.
I think back to my years as a domestic cleaner. Too poor to afford socks, the fabric dried to my feet after the rain soaked into my shoes. That I couldn’t afford a drink goes without saying. I’d swig clients’ half-empty bottles of wine and feel like a king drinking vinegar.
Language forces escape routes through the culture that produces it. This is desiring, inscription: grooves pushing back and cutting in.
I wrote about my first visit to Glasgow knowing I was meant to live there. I didn’t admit it to myself at first. Having changed city three times, how was this different? I moved to Cheltenham for uni; Bristol for a postgrad that never happened; Birmingham to get out of Bristol, tainted by poverty and a horrible relationship.
This move is not a pull towards but a pulling through: but not another interim. Like Calvino’s Venice in Invisible Cities, Glasgow has the ability to re-inscribe itself. All cities do, but I want to live among Glasgow’s potentialities.
Desire is an erotic epistemology, a disputation of control of which movement is the site resided.
So I live in Glasgow now.