..trying to colour inside the lines..

Love Interviewer: Why can’t you be alone without Yoko?

John Lennon: But I can be alone without Yoko, but I just have no wish to be. There’s no reason on earth why I should be alone without Yoko. There’s nothing more important than our relationship, nothing. And we dig being together all the time. Both of us could survive apart but what for? I’m not going to sacrifice love, real love for any whore or any friend or any business, because in the end you’re alone at night and neither of us want to be. And you can’t fill a bed with groupies. It doesn’t work. I don’t want to be a swinger. I’ve been through it all and nothing works better than to have someone you love hold you.




Meanwhile, there’s probably something to be learned from the ‘radically idle’ who consider that life itself should be a sabbatical, rather than stressed-out wage slavery. Nor do you have to be an anarchist to see the attractions in philosophies that preach contemplation and creativity for their own merits. From strategic walkers such as Richard Long (an artist whose work is the trail he leaves as he wanders the landscape) and psychogeographers like Iain Sinclair(whose writing emanates from his urban pavement pounding) to slow foodies, freegans, foragers and flaneurs, doing as little as possible as creatively as possible is the only way of recovering the individual from brutalization by the economy, the machine or, for the critical theorists, the Debordian spectacle. No less a brain than the British philosopher John N Gray concluded his Straw Dogs treatise with an appeal against action. ‘Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?’ he wrote.





the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.



alone with everybody
charles bukowski