What is Philosophy

: people are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent—Wordsworth’s spring or Cézanne’s apple, the silhouettes of Macbeth or Ahab. Then come the crowd of imitators who repair the umbrella with something vaguely resembling the vision, and the crowd of commentators who patch over the rent with opinions: communication. Other artists are always needed to make other slits, to carry out necessary and perhaps ever-greater destructions, thereby restoring to their predecessors the incommunicable novelty that we could no longer see. This is to say that artists struggle less against chaos (that, in a certain manner, all their wishes summon forth) than against the “clichés” of opinion. (WP- D and G)203-204

I was starting to write an invoice and I found this quote in the wrong folder on my computer.  It came at a good point as I was thinking about my encounter with a rat and working out how it would slot itself into the world of research.  The rat is a slit in the umbrella a tear in the firmament.  The loss of this fragment is significant as it must be important and it popping up as I looked for a folder to copy an invoice is testament to my messy note keeping.  This makes me think about slippage and the points that are becoming interesting are these slippages.  Not as art but as moments that transcend the present - become a memory in the act of their becoming. There is a physicality and a reality and although we have some arty stuff in the quote the tear in the umbrella seems to go beyond art.

I have just ordered  What is Philosophy - I hope its not really hard biut it could be useful for my PhD - not a bedrock but a shifting sand to drive in the concrete foundations that will be washed away in the storm - never buy a house in a hole or build on unsure foundations.
Here are my fieldnots about the rat and a reminder and a tear.

I talked myself out of doing a den building competition or having a den building afternoon as a way of getting more kids actively involved as it felt like a workshop and I wasn’t really that interested in workshops.  I felt like I was relaxing into being at the playground without doing an all singing all dancing role and started fiddling with the 360 camera and wondering what it would be able to capture – its playing in the background as I write these field notes and its strange – I don’t know where it will go but I will talk it through with people and work it out – it feels strangely ethnographic and not invasive like police surveillance – perhaps this is because I’m carrying it about everywhere.  It definitely felt like I was hanging out at the playground and this is what I had planned to do but it also felt like I needed to be deprogrammed from trying to be useful.

This became more noticeable as the sinks in the kitchen got blocked.  Both sinks were full of washing up which is unusual as, even if the drain is blocked, water tends to leak out the top of the drain outside rather than sit in the sink.  I genuinely felt a small lift inside, a little flutter as I cleared the cupboards to strip down the waste pipe and find the fat burger.  A strange Lacanian primeval desire to be useful coupled with the unsettling feeling that I was just very deliberately hanging about like what my dad would call a loose part.  The playground has a collapsed drain so I got Sinbad to run the sinks in the kid’s toilets to check there wasn’t a big blockage further down.  I suppose if my brain had been working better I would of realized that it was unlikely that both sinks had got blocked simultaneously but experience teaches you that you come across unpredictable phenomena and double faults in plumbing.  I had once used back-pressure to clear a blockage in my friends Saskia’s shower system – the water ran bright blue for ten minutes afterwards with no practical or scientific explanation. 

Working backwards down the three and a quarter inch tubing I found the T joint where the pipes joined. It was complicated to get to them and I had to pull away protective covers.  Patrick emptied the sinks and I let it run onto the grass. I stuffed my fingers into the pipe to try and find the blockage.  Remembering the blue sludge and life’s unpredictability my fingers grasped what felt like a balloon, tough and rubbery I imagine children pushing them down the sink with a wooden spoon but as I loosened it from the congealed fat and its surface began to pull away I realized it was a rat’s tale. It was attached to a body that was very stuck.  I screamed in a non-gender=specific way and asked Patrick to bring me some gloves.  Not wanting to let go of the rat as like Schrödinger’s cat I was unsure if it was both alive and dead simultaneously.

Patrick seemed a bit irritated at first I thought it was because he didn’t realize what was happening – later he would admit that he didn’t want to get accidentally slapped in the face by a dead rat if it were to fly out all in one go.  Julius came over and Fran legged it saying she needed to get ready for her holiday.  The feeling of usefulness was beginning to fade as I began to gag in that horrible way when you want to be sick but have run out of puke.   I pulled really hard and wiggled and considered moshing the bastard up a bit with a screwdriver.

  

 I asked Patrick and Julius if they remembered the story of the Giant Turnip. I thought it was in Winnie the Poo where they all had to grab hold of each other to pull it out of the ground.  I think it may be a folk tale we all knew it from our various histories - it made me laugh although I was also a bit disgusted.  It was only a baby rat in the end, my Granddad hated rats and along with his good temperament I inherited a probably quite rational dislike for them – he used to say that they “Would be bad buggers if they were as big as donkeys.’   Sinks mended, water flowing, a slight feeling of satisfaction at doing something useful with an overwhelming inner disgust.  I washed my hands like Lady Macbeth and avoided eating food with my fingers.