I wanted to write the site map (the site map is what you are reading right this second) because last night I dreamed about my grandmother for the first time since she died (the dream was on the night of 20th August 2023), except in the dream she looked as she did in a photograph taken before I was born, in the early 1990s, at the Yorkshire House (Parliament St lancaster). I never knew this pub but she was the licensee there. Above this paragraph is a photo of her old garden, of which I have a few vague memories, but in my memory the garden was larger. At her wake I met some of the old Yorkshire House regulars for the very first time, where they shared with me happy, impassioned memories of her strength of character. "She was the greatest woman I ever knew!" When people who you love are gone you think a lot about what it means to know someone. When friends come together to share their stories, you see aspects of a person you never witnessed. You hear what people were like before you. In the preparation for a funeral and in its wake there is the space to appreciate a life's multiple parallels, to reconcile contradictions. I will be thinking of her and her contradictions when the books I inherited arrive in the post next week. I am now writing more than two months after this paragraph began, in early November 2023. I do not know when or where the books were bought or where they belonged in the narrative of her life, which was often described as 'chaotic'. Its own massive undertaking, perhaps I should instead commemorate these things somewhere else, or, better yet, keep them to myself. For now I am placing these thoughts at the start of the site map, but later it may become relevant somewhere else. The observation will then have to move, replaced by a new fence.

But where was it all going? (26th September 2025). The words, and the promise of things shifting, hadn’t come to pass. It’s hard to commit oneself to a task when you think you know where it is going and where it will end – like you can already see the statement and its inverse from the start, and so there’s nothing to be discovered in its unfolding. You might as well keep it to yourself. At first I had imagined an autobiography like an empty mirror. I went through all my notebooks from years ago, the ones I kept during the earlier records, trying to collage memory. They weren’t as old as I thought -- it was too painful. Map stopped in its tracks. What it was back then couldn’t step out of the shadow of what it was now. That left me with the present – and I thought, if I just stuck with that, thinking less about ends, it would come easier. It would be about the points where they touch now; just like they say the present is all we have. And so at first there wouldn’t be a conscious structure; you’d cross that bridge when you came to it, by willed happenstance (which is not the same as waiting for the bridge to happen upon you).

A problem with the points where they touch is in their ordering. Above I called it ‘conscious’, so I’ll have to remember to keep that bit in the site map. I called it that because thoughts and images are of course already indexed by crossing systems before even we think we’ve taken a position on something. The problem, and the point, of free association is that it shows your crossings and binds – you are never speaking freely – structures keep you back. And so in this way, content agglomerates, but these structures are hidden – or, harder yet, always reforming, shifting knowledge’s aspects. I would liken it to standing up too quickly and getting double vision: and it is as if, behind reality, a second reality briefly comes unstuck and sits alongside it, and you suddenly realise that everything you thought you had understood about a thing was completely unfounded.

SITE MAP (III): I want to get out of negative blog logic, colonising as it does our self-presentation and patterns of thought. Thank you, Internet, for freeing us from the abecedary, however -- I now want to try and find an organising principle beyond the infinite trough / infinite nowness without newness; the near-instanteous supplantation where nothing can change bcus nothing can take root. At present, the organising principle is upside-down: if you were to read a book beginning with the last chapter and proceeding backwards, there would be nothing compelling you to go back to the start. It is like swimming against the tide. I suppose this site map is like swimming against the tide as well

prog tide

but today is as good a day for swimming as any. 20th August 2023: I have handed in my notice, please let me know if any work comes up (gigs, etc). I mostly write music; as you can tell i cannot really write for literary publications and magazines. step outside of the map now, i think i can get past that, and i have provided enough avenues out in the paragraphs above