This series struck upon a different channel. The photographer, I thought, must have been the short dark-haired man who occasionally came in and out of shot, but it was hard to say, as there was also a gloriously imperious woman that might have been his wife (which did not seem to stop either of them partaking in the Alpine Queerdom). The photographs we had been sorting through had thus far consisted mainly of holiday shots. I would not get thrown off track: I could rove over the past and seek out that lost detail to contribute to the great constitution: exhume a dead beautiful feeling, discover a wisp of radical attitude pickled since antiquity, revive revolutionary but lustrous sensibilities long perished. Being born in a body that’s apparently historically impermissible, however, only meant I was not as prone to those traps that lie in wait for Arcadians-the various and insidious forms of history-worship and past-lust.

The classic counterpart traits of the Arcadian, like a fondness for old objects and buildings, and an inclination towards historicised figments, were, as far as I was concerned, much easier to inhabit for white people, who continued to cast and curate all the readymade, ready-to-hand visions. Utopian Personality Types, as a rule, find old things redolent of decay, and can just about put up with new things which are still not the future. (It-paradise-is ultimately to be a collaboration.) They were access to, glimpses of, Arcadia: The Grand Ahistorical Mythical Paradise which is the ultimate project of all Arcadian Personality Types who crave a paradise knit out of visions of the past much like their more illustrious cousins, Utopians, do with the future. These non-existent beams, hurled up from non-existent tree-fringed and flickering bodies of water, were the perfectly normal sensational offshoots of gazing at photos all day. A day’s immersion left the same mental after-dazzle as a sun-glanced afternoon, lakeside. von Reinhold is a Scottish writer, and Lote won the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Memorial Prize.Īfter a few minutes, the rigidity of the black and white photos would, if not depart, then liquify. The following is from Shola von Reinhold's Lote.

Lote by Shola von Reinhold