The Lazy Eye

  We are living, as it were, at the membrane of metaphor and memory. In fugitive anticipation of the boatmen's songs, of arrivannce, hotel stationery and the daily crossword. Unsurprisingly, my writing is an act of infidelity- I skim and skip my way around your words, through your memories and moments of being, and hold myself accountable for their suspension. As a mnesic trace...as remnants for my part of the world, where the aromas of coffee, slow-cooked curries, and cinnamon from the avenues and alleyways of your home town are a contested inheritance. An inheritance of loss, almost; the affective residue of the unsalvageable past kept alive by the cities they inhabited in their displaced condition.  Perhaps this is also why I find it easiest to insert myself into the urban text, into the home as an ethnographic self, because it is here that my performativity is most ‘at-home’ with its self-made otherness.  Perhaps this is why, between field notes and narratives of memo...

Back home, the curious selection of cutlery in which tea gets served has always been, for me, a subject of great intrigue. Very seldom does one find themselves holding a proper tea cup; paper cups are the usual, and on rare occasions, you might spot someone drinking straight out of the electric kettle (which does resemble an oversized coffee mug, to be fair). How does one talk of 'home'? In my hunt for a definition, I keep falling back to these peculiarities- on an assortment of landscapes, soundscapes and their associated quirks, rather than  the situated physical space  of a conventional suburban, single-family  home and its  sub-ingredients. Perhaps the lucid interval of a dreamless medicinal slumber- the comforting fiction of normalcy, the rapid, unmappable erosion of  memory  and cognition. The memorial excess of a keepsake journal- bus tickets to first dates, conference schedules, and lengthy hand-written notes- the necessary, logical instability of f...