The Life-Illusion

Here is another old blog post from a while back. I've always been interested in literature and art as a way of documenting locality and home. Home is a concept central to the discourse of modernity and one that is often weaponised by reactionaries. In this piece, I'm attempting to illustrate how home is really a space of mutuality, a place where borders can be let down and new social bonds forged. 'The Peasant Wedding' by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1567) “You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.” (From The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin) Home is a different mode of being to travel, a different velocity of perception. Like getting off a bike and walking, you enter a different state of consciousness altogether, your thoughts seem to slow down, spread out. At home, you fill the corners of the room, memories and feelings hang about certain objects,...

(front cover to the 1982 Picador edition of Autobiography) I have decided to delay my PhD application. I am perfectly happy with my subject and my proposed thesis, but I don’t think it’s the right time in my life to be doing it. When I start a project, I usually have to focus all my thoughts on just that one project. Every waking moment will revolve around rehearsing the argument, finding faults or cracks in the logic, changing perspectives, absorbing new information etc. And, with the other projects and elements of my life vying for attention, I simply do not think I can fully dedicate myself to several years of just this project. I think that I have always had a spatialised way of thinking. To me a project, be it an essay, a piece of fiction, or even a book I’m reading, exists as a world in my imagination. To dedicate myself to this project is to dwell in and explore this world and, in this sense, it is like keeping a house. Satisfaction comes ultimately not from the ful...