James and the desk; a Dr Who story

 Fiction and expressivity

"Something within me or is it outside of me?" wrote James "compels me to put these words inside the haven of my morning pages notebook rather than into a laptop computer. To let my thoughts become themselves here on the paper where they are not attached to the Empire of the like. I am reminded time and time again of Winston Smith sitting round the corner from the TV screen in 1984. It is not paranoia of being observed that compels me to write on paper but a desire for the visceral truth of haptic resistance. Something like that anyway. It’s the pleasure of the feel of writing that helps my thoughts to become. Perhaps this is dangerous to ideas which demand a more direct route and digression, a consequence of writing on paper, will always favour expression. This is why we seek simplicity, as I do, but do not trust it. Throwing cake at the Mona Lisa was a seismic event but what did it mean what did it express? And so to the idea," James tried to go on, touching the top of his high forehead and thinning hairline, "the idea is that access to expressivity is the reason that fiction in is a useful way of being or indeed becoming."

"I’ve got to thinking this because of how wonderful I find early episodes of Doctor Who and how they trigger a felt intensity that is hard to place. So essentially if we take the idea that the universe makes itself known through expressivity and that creativity is the fundamental dynamic of the cosmos, then the early episodes of Doctor Who, particularly the Pertwee era, contain the material vitality of creation and clothing assemblage interwoven with a joyful expressivity of story invention. This expression of the cosmic expressivity we inhabit is allowed to become because it occurs within the region of a genre. So why do we now expect even Doctor Who to belong to the communication model of the Empire of like communicating and telling us something about diversity and issues such as anorexia or body dysmorphia? Of course I am not saying it is bad to feel something about these issues but reducing access to the felt understanding that material vitality expresses is a bad thing. The prescriptive communication of ideas is a bad and difficult habit to break. The anti-obsfucation police arrive and take you away for asking too many rhetorical questions. We tell ourselves that the modern human is essentially functional and when they are not they are free to express themselves as if expressing yourself was a sidebar to the functionality of real life where the truth can be communicated. What I want to express is that fiction in is an opening to felt understanding by which I mean a pre-cognitive region of knowing with feeling and intuition. This is the region of synchronous events. Just imagine if we could live in synchronicity because our culture of fictioning was expressive of our part in the intra-activity of the universe's desire to express and create. So Doctor Who not only expresses a desire to create an opening into this realm of potential to feel in an expanded mode with the visceral thrill of the extra-embodied encounter, it also very likely expresses how we feel at that specific time in a cultural materiality. So the modern Doctor Who does indeed express our retreat from the vital matter to the terrain of the communicated identity update as potentially diverse but ultimately incomplete because of the loss of rapture and excess the functionality of communicated messages demands." James put down his pen and stroked his beard wondering if he had actually managed to convey even an iota of the idea that seemed so clear as he had lain in bed that morning, having overslept due to the strangeness of the end of week bankholiday.