Horseness Is The Whatness

On Joyce, Ali Smith, self-fashioning, and the constant rebranding of everyday life

Mark Wallinger, Half-Brother (Exit to Nowhere - Machiavellian) 1994–5 | Tate Britain

How do you get your education then? he said.

We choose to be educated by things bigger than something so small it can be worn on a human wrist, I said.

What other way is there? he said.

I gestured with both my arms to everything around us.

I don’t get it, he said.

Ali Smith, Gliff (2024)

I have recently found myself wondering about freedom and the reasoning behind our finding solace in little prisons of our own making. Refusing to act because it’s too embarrassing. Too cringe. Not fashionable. Uncertain. Not prestigious enough. Waiting for something that might never come. Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won't come this evening, but surely tomorrow. I have been reading a lot of Seneca and a lot of Ali Smith, and thinking about the fact that we are losing the art of opaqueness, of appreciating a lack of linear sense. Why is Seneca in the same sentence as Smith, you might ask? While remaining impressed by the fact that the shallowness of online culture is rather a reflection of the shallowness of the human experience, the fact remains that while most of us are probably aware that sycophantic behaviour is quite unappealing without being told so by a philosopher from Ancient Rome, most of us will still happily surrender to it if the opportunity to give in presents itself. End-of-the-year parties with people you hate, Secret Santas with co-workers you pretend are your friends, ignoring personal boundaries for the convenience of others. And isn’t that just a bit mysterious, how for humans, convenience often trumps freedom?

Ali Smith’s most recent work, Gliff, is a delight. She has famously rejected calling it a dystopia, and her novel is too brilliant in its own way to be summed up by that kind of categorisation. If you read my previous post here, you will probably find a common thread—from Nick Cave’s muse who was not a horse, to Stubbs’s painting, which is described and discussed in Smith’s novel that also brings a horse hidden in its cover. Horses abound in the novel, and so in this not-so-logical search for diversions from twenty-four-hour newsreels, sycophantic fawning online that is usually a disguise for covert advert inserts, and clickbaity content, I have been trying on different ways of articulating life, language, and art: “Will someone/Find out what the word is/That makes the world go 'round,” sings Grian Chatten in Horseness Is The Whatness. That word, in Smith, is certainly gliff, a rather mysterious one in its own way.

Gliff is a horse rescued by two children. Gliff may yet rescue them. He was facing the abattoir. They face ‘re-education’.

Gliff is a momentary resemblance, a transient glance, an impulse. Gliff means to glimpse, to frighten, to glare. It’s a misspelling (did you mean ‘glyph’?), a mishearing (did you mean ‘cliff’?), but not a misnomer for Ali Smith’s new book.

The meanings of ‘gliff’ fill the pages – even as they fade from a scribbled note ageing in a character’s pocket – inviting the reader into a game with language, trying to keep up with puns, with the dark implication of farcical events and with a runaway horse. ***

On its turn, that song’s title comes from Joyce’s Ulysses: “Horseness is the whatness of allhorse,” says Dedalus. I have never quite liked Joyce much, but I am slowly surrendering to him on some level, in the sense that his opaqueness has its charm. When done competently, it can be remarkably straightforward in unexpected ways. So that’s the particular horse that I’ve been riding, trying to work harder at establishing and enforcing boundaries to find and produce meaning. I am in academia and have been actively online to some degree for at least half my life, so I feel that puts me in a position where interrogating why and how I do things is a never-ending kind of labour. I feel uncomfortable with the vanity that comes with it from all sides. I appreciate academia for its love of questions and am likely to never leave it, but it feels necessary to always interrogate it and to do things in an intentional manner rather than just going with the flow. When we grow accustomed to looking for answers without courting the questions, things like the cult of AI happen. To find meaning in teaching in times when students have trouble sitting still and paying attention for longer than only a few minutes because they are so conditioned to the quick reward dynamics of doomsday scrolling, how can you regroup? It’s not just a matter of choice; these things bear a neurological impact that is simply not being addressed enough.

I have recently watched The Substance, and it made me think about how the demands of others make monsters out of us; how easy is it to give in to expectation, to readjust our sense of what is acceptable and what is too far. To become wholly disconnected from ourselves, strangers in our own skin. I have been wondering if there is any way to post things on social media without contributing to this project of desensitising. The word content sounds a bit cursed at this point. So I have been looking to do things in my own terms as much as possible. I’ll write my stories, I’ll read long, obscure books. I’ll make my own plans.

I do not want to settle into what is more convenient; I want to keep on asking questions. To not always make sense is to allow oneself to find the right question to ask. Gliff.