anger mis-management
Over the last few weeks I had been quietly amassing notes for a blogpost provisionally entitled ‘empire, inland’. By last night I had two and a half thousand-odd words, some entire paragraphs but many of them just sketchy outlines of arguments or even just fragments, individual sentences, even phrases or subtitles I thought clever. But, while the argument wasn’t fully worked out and, as Sarah pointed out, some of it was not exactly running along unfamiliar lines, the point was that I was writing again and that this felt good.

Half an hour ago I tried to open the draft to continue this process. Somehow, it is gone.

I’ve lost drafts before, of course, sometimes much more substantial texts than this. But I haven’t been happy with much that I have written in the last five months or so and I was getting happy with this. Also, with my memory rapidly reaching a point I will home-diagnose as acquired brain injury, I need notes like never before. The idea of trying to reproduce something - even something only a few thousand words long (dense text though) - is not one I can contemplate as part of some abstract, unemotional exercise in reflection. It makes me wish I’d gone on that killing spree last year and saved myself the hassle of dealing with my having apparently accidentally erased something which admittedly probably feels better in what passes for memory as unrecoverable achievement than it would as a draft of something I need to decide whether to post or not. (Plus I just re-watched They Live, - which someone I know described in their Honours thesis as the story of someone who accidentally puts on a pair of Chomsky’s glasses - and the whole angry-blue-collar justified-paranoia justified-mass-murder narrative is now retrospectively interpolating me like a cop on a loudspeaker.)

I still don’t really know how it happened. It doesn’t feel like Freud made me do it i.e. like some parapractical expression of unconscious desire, and it isn’t an easy mistake to make, technically - and I haven’t been taking Stillnox or any other drug which makes me lose time. Or not that I remember. Rather, I’ve had too much time, insomnia lengthening yesterday to over twenty waking hours for example. Which is when it must have happened.

Off the top of my head, the draft contained:

(i) discussion of the category of the ‘event’, not in the sense of Badiou or anything/one like that, but in the straightforward sense of the quality given to the crude empirical facts of something like 9-11 which distinguishes it from any other mass murder or similar occurrence (almost wrote ‘event’) which fails to be, I don’t know, eventual? Not about the scale of direct consequences - non-events can have massive such geopolitical consequences without being such an event, without our lives continuing in an ever-lengthening shadow of endless aftermath.;

(ii) discussion of certain non-events I presented as exemplary in some detail - the Highway of Death in the 1991 Gulf War, and the subsequent blockade/sanctions of Iraq and associated mass death, and the blockade/sanctions/military assault on the people of Bougainville by the PNG and Australian governments being another. The latter, being less known, was given some historical detail, mainly to highlight the role of the Australian Labor Party in this deliberate policy of mass murder/generalised terrorism/counter-insurgency - years before the ALP’s role in the 1991 attack in Kuwait/Iraq and subsequent blockade/sanctions/deliberate death of hundreds of thousands.

But beyond the need to point out the ALP’s routine involvement in homicidal policy - what with them now being our leaders and all - the draft was supposed to develop into a reflection on mediation and representation and on everyday existence and the spectral geopolitics of reification. While my damaged brain may have difficulty reproducing much of that draft, if anything the process of rethinking and rewriting such a critique of representation and mediation should be at least as promising as it was last week when I began to think I was actually starting to think again.

As a final note, I’ve long planned a post about Sarah (she is in the last image, and not the baby), a woman I love so much it might seem almost insane to some, unless they know her well enough to realize how impressive she really is, has become, continues to become. (She is sitting next to me right now, using the other computer and wearing a vest which she made yesterday, an object which in itself is more stylish than everything I own or ever have owned - a fact which has no relation at all to anything else I say about her here.) I just don’t really respect many people. A long time ago now I started to recognize how much I respected her, and that respect has only grown since then, so much more than I would have ever imagined possible. Those who know me will, I think, realize that this is more of a compliment than it sounds - even if it sounds arrogant, misanthropic and loving.

Anyway, I still intend to write such a post one day.