VAGABONDS OF THE MARGINS Part 1.

Vagabonds of the Margins Part 1.

As we move across these great cities, people, mere people, are minimised and marginalised in relation to colossal buildings, huge roads, all built to an inhuman scale. We scamper along designated paths, alienated from everything to this side or that, alienated, very often, from each other. Those buildings may serve capitalism or the spectacle, but they do not serve people, or not many of them at any rate, we are kept at bay, or charged admission to them. The roads too, so many of them are designed to allow goods to travel, the arteries of commerce, not of communication. We live in a strange alienated world that regards us as an inconvenience, or worse, when we are not at our task of consuming whenever we are not producing.

So when I speak of "the space that remains" I mean precisely those margins, waste lands, the atopoi, the nowhere that is everywhere, scarcely noticed, the blind spots of capitalism, fugitive, fragile environments offering scant shelter, but nevertheless, it is shelter. These spaces are literal and actual, but are sometimes also figurative, safe spaces of the mind where we can dream and awaken rather than live the trance of the driven life within the bloated spectacle.

I forget which surrealist named his fellow surrealists 'vagabonds of the margins', I like that label a bit too much, it has something of romantic projection, but it does fit. Surrealism was always somewhat marginal, but with the increasing success of some surrealist artists and the development of 'surrealist studies' the surrealists have become increasingly marginal to the image of surrealism and that image increasingly divorced from actual surrealism.
Driven to the margins, we must inhabit those margins more fully, make them ours. Fugitive spaces, engulfed by Capital, only to re-emerge elsewhere. They always do appear again, as the utilitarian world endlessly tends towards it's own ruin. These are spaces where poetry is unshackled from the chains of usefulness, zones of freedom.

THE SPACE THAT REMAINS - my blog reborn

Or so I hope. I have been trying to find a good angle for renewing my old and mostly neglected blog and decided that I would make it more specifically and overtly surrealist. Anybody who knows me and anybody who has followed my posts on Facebook, among other places, will know I have been involved in surrealism for many years. My blog was a sort of bridge between my various interests, but some of the difficulties I had been through led me to stop writing much for a long time. I now feel a stronger itch towards both creative and polemical writing and I think that surrealism offers, not answers or solutions, but certainly perspectives upon the world that are of value to more than myself and few others.
The new title of the blog "The Space That Remains" is adapted from the title of a book by Giorgio Agamben "The Time That Remains" and is intended to reflect how space is dominated by - power, the spectacle, capitalism - and people are too often marginalised. But surrealists have embraced a marginal status, later I may remember who called the surrealists 'vagabonds of the margins' and the surrealist movement has become increasingly marginalised even as more of its image is recuperated. I hope to have more to say about this soon, but I want to write a great deal about both time and space alongside questions of poetry and revolution and, well, quite a few other things that occupy my mind most passionally.
Stuart Inman