ben marshall corser

ben's interweb

Tombstone – or ‘Just that enough time has passed...’

Ben
(circa 2018/19; photo: Ben 2019-01-01; below is the text from Luke's BDS tribute for Ben)


Just that enough time has passed such that another slab of residue can be removed, smelling of piss and ash. The confidence in depression building all the time, in other words, my tombstone is steadily rising to meet me by process of sedimentation.

Knowing "what it is" feels good, not knowing is the worst. By definition, not being able to properly attribute names to one's anxieties is a disability with unknowable consequences. The impact can range from feeling that when someone asks you to *pass the salt* - that some euphemistic communication that you don't understand is being attempted, to something like blindly hacking and slashing at those around you to get them "off your back”.

Quite a range.

Understanding what is your "place" and what is someone else's territory isn't the same thing as the game of labelling intangible worries to render them tangible. The former requires the real research, however informal, of entering different spaces at different times and in different modes, making comparisons, *testing the water* and repeating already-tried actions to see if they yield the same result; feeling your way through assumptions in an absolutely physical way.

Once we're there, and have a somewhere that permits us in our reflective mode (however it is achieved; by force, by attrition, through the compassion of others) then work can start on producing sets of names for things that need looking into.

What most people would call “having somewhere to sleep”. The reason for making the distinction here is to invite consideration of the asymptotic(1) space that exists between eyes-open and eyes-closed.

My claim is that it is in this space that names are produced, this is that space from which names can spring.

Playing a role at all, ever, makes you scum. That means, having it be possible for you to expel(2) the limits of your self, expression, manifestation, etc. That means you are sitting back in someone else's chair, and you know full well that chair is rented.

Fuck you.

And basically all I can do is "E36, they won't let me go forwards so there's only one option; going sideways, E36". The promise of nothing but tombstone ahead, just a bug-person in disguise behind some kind of half-baked royalty-type figure. Flitting from one leaf to the next in traditional style. Must to go sideways, E36.

Learning to recognise one's own hunger and having the resourcefulness to address the issue; how we build [a] post-apocalyptic wasteland on top of the real world. Something approaching illness, not quite it, but too close for comfort.

"Solutions now!" runs the cry, nothing to be done. Nothing to be done but wait.
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1 (of a function, series, formula, etc) approaching a given value or condition, as a variable or an expression containing a variable approaches a limit, usually infinity. (Mathematics)
2 original text missing, expel is a guess


¡Que haya luz! Kerenza ha yeghes da! Dad/Andrew x

A video of Luke

A variation (the third one I have written) by Andrew

I would like to propose a variation...a bit like those variations in classical music (I guess)...
...sort of playing from Ben's musical score, and interpreting it to make explicit the way I play it/the way I read it...
I sometimes try to tell Ben what I think he means in his works - especially his writing, and this is one of those attempts...

Tombstone - 3rd variation