EMERGING WRITERS: CHARLIE SOFO

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TEXT      FOR           CHARLIE                  SOFO

This is not criticism (without a specific object, objects from photos, ‘as always’) this is not criticism, but a
strange form of running
of recollection
of movement
therapy
a dangerous operation of turning the inside outside
and I know how you like to feel light
so sorry if this is heavy and leaky
A therapy without an
object,  without  borders,  we  will  try and keep this flexible, the diagnosis moving and I’ll bend my mind
backwards (and we’ll run while writing)
run and we’re hot and sweaty, heavy and leaky.
And rough or smooth?
Charlie  Sofo asks  these questions  silently  around  the corners of his neighbourhood.  Or
that’s what they all talk about, capital ‘P’ pleasure, used condoms marked on a map that clings to the corner,
limbs and arms of a table, lube on a toilet-paper plinth, and give it to me right and the way I want, quick,
jumping rhythms of zooming cats and neon strappy lacy shoes, wobbling.         Moments gone and not
remembered (too intense) but no scenes for viewing and sometimes I think I can really look on the
otherside of that screen
(you nearly let me inside). Throbbing to pulsing, and leaving,
and small adulterated sat-on used up expended expanded inflicted things objects residues anad traces
slammed elegantly on the cool, sexy, shiny, embrace of glass.
Now let’s cool down
go for a swim
  (a frame)
a swimming pool.
In the pool,
within the frame, more things come up to the surface (keep moving) pleasure is now contained
within rectangles, now and sometimes weak and watered down (the risk of slipping) into
‘my charmed life’ the lines of ‘likes’, ‘makes me happy’,
and the ad-men will listen to the trams, the close cropped shots of friends’ faces and a voiceover I
don’t think I can trust (there is no need to fear the medicine men anymore) no         and       they       will
listen to where pleasing is political and to ‘like’ is another form of anaesthetic.
  Numb, bleary, medicated (and the packets of pills that
sometimes surface) we use the rectangle as our friend (the screen, the photograph, the glass, the post, the map) to really forget what we are looking at (the steam from a coffee cup and condensed onto moving fingers) and sometimes the ‘work’ never happens.
Because       there is so much pleasure in looking, in
right angles, in being upright as the world rushes up and down and through my legs and the barrel of my
camera up and down, click flash and flash   flash flash flash, my body now slippery
and smooth as a dolphin’s, teething, breaking the surface of the ocean, coming up for pleasure.   Don’t
flash blinding light, don’t damage the objects, harm the surroundings because a flash is a transaction
between two things, like hands on the surface of a puddle and     Charlie Sofo this is where
your hand constantly hovers.
    Transactions with the agents of the street that defy the order of the fences,
borders, the ground that creaks, the modes of display that dwarf and undermine—
for if there is a loop for this perpetual pleasure, enveloping, quick, sad, stained, minor, to repeat, a course for
it to run, a place where it constantly makes itself
    (the top of the stairs, in Autumn)

it is the site/sight of this small slight rupture and the rectangle you place around it.

A rupture       where the
opening is small enough to get an eye inside, a foot onto, where we’ve put our tongue, our finger, where
we’ve left and crowned our cat. And this is where, after all this moving, I feel I can settle down, or at least
sustain some sort of lingering and refuse to buy into that ‘pure moment of joy’. I/you pack up the pool and
erect a fountain, ropes and ropes of water, excess, rupturing, and it is on the surface of that fountain, on the
wet and throbbing ground, light and light, where I can slip from the outside in again, and the  inside  out,  where
the world, the street springs and falls back down, rendered       rocked       rerouted       reclaimed.