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Definitions

الحياة
دماء متكررة
خبرات وقوانين لم نتعلمها بعد

الحب
المساعدة في وقت الحاجة بالجسد
والصور التي تريح وتدفع إلى

التجارة
صورة من صور الإنتقال
واحدة من أجل الأخرى
الحياة أو الألم واحدة من أجل الأخرى
شيء بدلا من

الكذب
الوعد بالمشاركة في التجارب
بدون قوانين، تعريفات بقوانين متغيرة
تعيش كل أشكال الألم بالإشارة إلى أصول خاطئة تؤدي إلى:

ألم
يحتد عندما ترقص الأمراض من الجسد
دون تحكمإلى مصير محتوم
الحياة ترقص في الرأس والدم
في عالم تتمثل فيه الموعظة في خسارة الكرامة
المتقوقعة في كوب
صورة بلا حراك
كما لو أنك ترقص فوق الحجارة
دون ألم
كما لو أنك ترقص دون حراك في الحياة
لتظل طفلا يسعى لإكتشاف نفسه

translated by

Covadonga de la Campa

from 'The Beak's Poems'

(The Beak is a character in the novel The Borderline: Casebook Translations)

Political

سياسي

قلت لأمك
انني طبيب
لم أذكر إسمي بالضبط
كان شكلك جميلا
وكنتي مبللة
وجميلة المحيا
أفضل
هذا هو إسمي
إسمي الحقيقي
أمي
ما إسمك؟

translated by

Covadonga de la Campa

from

'The Beak's Poems'

(The Beak is a character in the novel The Borderline: Casebook Translations)

chairman mao is dead! bobby sands is dying!

But this is about a Teacher.

The teacher had objected on the grounds he knew nothing about pig farming. His objections were easily overruled by an appeal to his own statements about ‘a new sense of adventure’.

The Department of Education was easily agreeable. In the Republic of Ireland, the teacher found, Protestants are as zealously a protected species as are whooping cranes and the blue whale. Pigs were not.

Making up 4% of the population and with an enormous unfinished historical role, they must not only seem to survive but must thrive as a community in the new Ireland, this in spite of their distressing habit of dying out without a whimper and dying out from democratic participation with equal voice. So it was no problem to transform a Canadian English teacher into an instructor of pig farming in Ireland. They were overjoyed in the Department that they’d been asked to do anything to implement the constitution. They hired an atheist Canadian to teach the prods. He had an Irish background (don’t they all).

The stewardess in the hotel had found her thick and exciting tourist transformed into an Irishman embroiled in pigs, factions, patronage, and given to hanging around in pubs talking about EEC regulations and sport. She was disgusted that he’d become sincerely Irish, was becoming Catholic, and so was making fun of everything. Rotten foreigner! She should have stuck with the Frenchman.

It was no relief to her that his complications in North America had followed him to Ireland. The wife, whom he had been trying to divorce for years in America, had seemed promising in every respect. The woman had actually followed the teacher to Ireland, bringing their child and several friends with her, to study Economics at Trinity College. The wife had written with marvellous transparent duplicity that she ‘had been coming to Ireland anyway’. In the same letter she’d denounced the teacher’s move to Ireland as part of a master plan to thwart her freedom of movement. She accused the teacher of knowing her plans, but imperiously stated that he would not prevent their fruition. Meanwhile, the divorce procedures carried on in America. It was all so delicious, the stewardess thought, so Dublin. It had the flavour of Grafton Street, of MacDonald’s hamburgers, of tacos and American television serials.

But the teacher became more parochial. He designed a project for his class to study the whole problem of Irish pig farming, and became obsessed by it. To the stewardess this was worse than entering a pub brain contest, believing in the Femorians, or singing ‘Lannigan’s Ball’.

The teacher would take his students to slaughterhouses, study the road system, bewail the non-development of the ‘infrastructure’ and especially of telecommunications. He would buy Irish and denounced the influx of foreign capital. He would ask to withdraw from the EU. He left the stewardess in tears.

Ranting that the Irish pig industry only operated on the fringes of the European market, he lectured his students on the necessity for value-added manufacture, mutual aid farms, and more intensive tillage. And worse, he subscribed to the Farmer’s Journal. He phoned back and took the stewardess to livestock auctions. She accused him of being a new type of stage Irishman. He only began to lecture her more earnestly, while growing fat from drinking stout.
Then he discovered ‘Porcine Hepatitis’. It seemed that the EU had initiated a program under the category of ‘aid to historically-deprived nations that suffer from big-power-bloody-mindedness’ to grant to Irish pig farmers a sum of money to offset losses incurred by having to sell to fringe markets. For every pig carcass sold abroad, under terms unlike those that tradition had achieved for German sausage-makers, or manufacturers in Britain of ersatz steak and kidney pie, an Irish farmer got a certain cash grant. It had something to do voting patterns in the European Parliament.

Consequently, hardly any prime pork was being produced. Mysteriously, only low-grade stuff like that usually sold domestically began to be sent abroad. It seemed that, because of an outbreak of ‘porcine hepatitus’, Irish pork could only sell to fringe markets.

The teacher’s project group, ostensibly drawing up a report to enter a contest sponsored by a major pig cooperative that most of their parents dealt with, began to do intensive and often underground investigation.

One student found syringes in his father’s piggery that contained a substance the teacher had analysed. It was a serum to induce porcine hepatitis. The syringes had been manufactured by the P.G.P. corporation, which also manufactured the wonderful musical kitchen gadgets and other household devices on the market that the stewardess had had installed in her mental fantasy flat while she contested dreams with the teacher who was always going on about a cottage in the country, children, and an incremental post. She wanted no cottage. She wanted to be kept.

The stewardess had pointed out to the teacher that the term of reference under which the contest could be won was: How does the co-op benefit Ireland. She argued that this meant they should praise the co-op, win the prize, and after a certain amount went to the school and charity and so on, his promised bonus could go towards a musical cooker for her new flat or a trip to Miami.

The teacher had gone strange. He ranted about plots to undermine Ireland by introducing mindless, banal, addictive American atmosphere into the country. He went on about an artificial economy, a dependence on tourism that generated a fog of romantic historical obscuranticism, and insinuated that someone was trying to hook the Irish with a kind of hypnotism on a caricature of themselves. This, she knew, was impossible.

The teacher saw the project as a forum to expose all. He swore his students to secrecy, while whipping them up to ever deeper investigations. They were very enthusiastic. Madness was much better than mitching, and a good way to fill the time until the beginning of the one summer of real heterosexuality allowed them between the dormitory and the return to the farm after graduation to marry with cousins.

Being Irish, the stewardess could not disentangle herself from the disappointing un-North American blockhead, especially now that he was becoming Irish and mad. She had to stay involved with him, if only to the extent that she was able to gather material to slag him to her friends. Besides, she had hope. The divorce went through and he was going to inherit from someone.

The words of several priests echoed in her ears: ‘It is all for the best’ and, ‘You never can tell how it will turn out.’ These words she remembered from when she’d asked the priest to advise her how to cope with a friend who’d come out as a lesbian and was threatening suicide.

The teacher regarded her resigned form in the opposite chair. ‘I love you deeply,’ he said. ‘I’ll do anything for you.’ Then he added, ‘And I’m going to catch Mr. P.G.P.’

‘Get out, you bog-runner,’ she said quietly.

‘Mary, Jesus, Joseph, God save us,’ he said as he got up to leave the room.

The stewardess was thinking to herself, ‘What a fecking country.’



(Part 2)

Mr. Peter Gunn-Phitre, landlord, the retired teacher and self-appointed Irishman was at home. Gunn-Phitre was not his real name. But he had inherited.

His morning ritual was to take his breakfast in the Red Room which overlooked an artificial pool surrounded by transplanted cedars. Each instant the morning mist revealed a different array of detail as it lightened and evaporated with the rising sun. Mr. Gunn-Phitre first saw only the thick and long lawn and a tiny border of dark water outlined in dew-wet rock. Then the outline of a carved stone fountain emerged, a boy with an urn, overhung by dark and conical shadows on the far side of the rippled and now brownish-black pool. The trees stood out rounded, dark green their branches intertwined with creepers. Beyond was a low stone wall with a wide ungated opening into a field of rye. One and a half miles of rolling field dotted with sheep and aimless cows appeared to Mr. Gunn-Phitre in seconds. An avenue of trees to the right snaked forth from the mist and conducted the main entrance along the half mile to the large gate around which clustered a village. The village appeared in the mist as several slate roofs and two church spires.

Landscape, thought Mr. Gunn-Phitre, emerges in reality slowly and in parts. Only in literature can you have the whole thing at once in a big dollop. He thought to himself in didactic sentences, as if teaching a lesson. The eye at first only seeks the relevant, Mr. Gunn-Phitre reflected, as directed by the soul and allowed by nature. Fools of authors sin against reality when they serve it out like mashed potatoes.

Mr. Gunn-Phitre forced himself into self-instruction. He looked out the window and sipped at his coffee. To non-hypnotists, he thought, people must emerge the same way. But he checked his thoughts, saying to himself, no, that’s not true. They get a bit of detail and then they impose a whole story. And, if they have any training as sociologists or psychologists they’re even worse. He chuckled at his thoughts. They then read into their picture all sorts of information and stories, actually trying to impose a character. As if, Mr. Gunn-Phitre reflected, I’d first seen the lawn and imagined the rest as the park of my house in Kent and not in Ireland at all.

Suddenly Mr. Gunn-Phitre thought of love. And, as was his way when his musings had been on a subject not hypnotism, his reflection leapt from disciplined thought and reverie to present itself to him as a kind of report, as simple sentences elaborating only what was necessary and flying unevenly over non-essentials and comprehension-only-for-indulgent-comprehension’s-sake. He was proud of this, and it was an enjoyable answer or gift to the fools of authors.

Love only takes place in space. Recent confirmed example: stewardess and simultaneously motel desk clerk. Negative example: story. That is, deviation type of ‘my story requires your story’. Example contained in report on teacher investigating pig operation.

The key is love as motive and pain in action to remove pain, as feeling, even though it exists as pain. Click, click. Self-sacrifice and so forth. Commonest deviation is love as incident taken for granted. Often done in innocence and resulting in formal social lobotomisation. When done with experience takes on variation of avoidance of social forms that have nothing to do with the appearance of love. Click, whir. Criminal code with no crime. Inevitable mathematical certainty such a code will ultimately condemn an innocent.

Notes by former teacher. Love appears. He consolidates it as story – house, kid, etcetera, not as such but as story. Ossification. Blah, bloah. Atrophy of language and body followed by contrived experiment. Contained unburned pain. He says, ‘See it through.’ Then he says, ‘Didn’t work.’
Stewardess: silly imagined me opposite of some essence. Pattern zig-zagging through history. Some dead end, illusion of life by repetition. But now a danger.

Love only takes place in space. Motivated by alien hypnotism. Stick with the country. Sty with the land.

The notes halt. It was ten thirty and a tour was being conducted through the Morning Room. Mr. Gunn-Phitre rose swiftly and disappeared through a door concealed behind one of the long curtains on either side of the window. He lingered with the door slightly ajar to listen to the guide.

‘This is the Red Morning Room, also completely restored in the Regency Style by the Gunn-Phitre Foundation. The lawn, park, and demesne were originally laid out to recreate the vista of a similar house also owned by the Gunn-Phitre Foundation in Kent.’

‘Say, girly,’ interjected a stage American accent such as is usually affected by American tourists when, confused, tired, and overloaded in every sense, they can no longer be themselves but have to rely on their culture. ‘What are the taxes on a place like this?’

Mr. Gunn-Phitre nicked a bit of lint from the right lapel of his suit and pushed the door slightly more ajar in order to better hear the guide’s answer to this query.

‘The government does not tax any houses open to the public nor any improvements to such houses,’ the guide explained. ‘They feel that those who have special responsibilities within the national mix, for example great wealth, should be allowed the free development of those responsibilities. Thus, great collections are not broken up, but rather are kept intact as part of the national heritage. Similarly, great families and foundations are also preserved.’

The guide then returned to the prepared presentation. ‘All of the furnishings here are in the Regency Style and are, in fact, mainly reproductions manufactured in Detroit.’ This part of the presentation was only authorised when the tour consisted mainly of Americans, and was meant to appeal to patriotic pride.

‘Ironically enough,’ the guide continued, ‘the originals are also in Toronto, having been purchased by the Roots Museum of Romantic Ireland. The originals can be seen during the annual Automobile Circus when they are on display in a leading Toronto furniture store. If you follow me now, we’ll enter the Grand Gallery.’

‘Excuse me, miss, but could you answer me one thing. I mean, I’ve asked everyone but no one could answer me this one thing.’ It was the same American voice.

‘What is that, sir?’

‘How come the North ain’t part of the south?’

‘If you’ll ask me that at the end of the tour, sir, I’ll have more time.’

‘Sure thing. Thanks.’

There were two types of tourists -- those that knew nothing and would forget whatever they heard, and those who knew more about the Regency Period than is credible and merely wished to bait the guides. This group must be composed entirely of the first, thought Mr. Gunn-Phitre as he lit a cheroot, because the guide was going on in an unauthorised manner.



(Part 3)

‘The long gallery was completely hand-carved from obsidian by Eskimos brought here by Lord Horace Witherspoon, grandfather of the present Lord Walrus Witherspoon and previous owner of the house. Lord Walrus Witherspoon, as you may know, is presently confined for his own protection after being assaulted by Lady Constance Witherspoon. She was, it seems, under the mistaken assumption that he was the spirit of her groom, Spurs, who had betrayed her during the hunt ball last season.

‘The one exception to the Regency furniture,’ the guide continued, ‘is the Tudor Revival chair which was used, of course, for reviving ladies who had fainted due to news of reverses they suffered in the War of the Roses.

‘The painting over the carved asbestos and magnesium fireplace is George Romney’s Portrait of the Artist’s Wife. Romney was Fenian Lord Mayor of Dublin and later became an American Senator like his illustrious namesake. The artist was a friend of his with whose wife he was having an affair. As you can see, she suffered from migraine and had a rubber arm. The present owner is her grandson.

‘Through the window you can see the Church of St. Mug which is dedicated to the patron saint of the parish who used to levitate in the presence of pagans. She was captured by Queen Maeve and employed to carry baggage in the days of the Kings. The church has the distinction of being the only church in Ireland within which Cromwell did not stable his horses.

‘Beyond the church is the ancient Anglo-Finnish tower house after which the township gets its name, Ballyfredsthing. This tower house is reputed not to be haunted, and is owned by an American who bought it as a summer home so that he could escape his roots. It contains an Iron Age fireplace on the third floor around which the tower was built in the 16th century.’

In cultured rhapsody the tour exited from the Long Gallery while Mr. Gunn-Phitre descended the concealed staircase to the subterranean rooms. Knocking on a padded door, he whispered, ‘Carmen, Carmen, get up. There’s some people I want you to meet.’

From above, the sound of the next tour could be heard as it entered the Red Morning Room. The house, to fulfil the tax regulations, was open from 10:30 a.m. to 10:45 and, consequently, the tours had to be rushed. An American voice, the female equivalent to the previous one, was saying, ‘I'm an O’Neill from the Bronx O’Neills. Are there any O’Neills in this neighbourhood?’
‘Oh yes,’ answered the guide, ‘this was their central bog or Ri. The Celts, as you know, were matriarchal cannibals tracing their lineage through the line of incestuous liasons between aunt and nephew. O’Neill is the hereditary name for cooks of the High Kings. In fact, the they’re just after losing their chief. Begorrah, who was your aunt’s nephew?’

Begorrah?

Carmen emerged from the room and followed Mr. Gunn-Phitre down the darkened hallway. He stopped at a large brass inlaid door and flung it open.

The room was large and very high, almost square. It was dusky rose in colour with floor to ceiling windows closed off by white curtains. Through a gap in the curtains of a far window could be seen an outline or a brick ruin. The central piece or furniture in the room was a long marble table, a sort of surgical table, cluttered with a half dozen typewriters and a newswire machine. In the room was a cooker, a double-doored refrigerator, a wall of books in a glass-fronted case, and several cots with lace covering lumps of bedding. Against the wall near the door leaned twelve new carbines. Typing at the table, eating, lounging on the beds, cooking a kind of stew, pacing, squatting on the floor, and reading the tickertape were about a dozen people of all ages in various degrees of casual clothing.

Mr. Gunn-Phitre swept the room with his hands, saying, ‘These are the Gnomes.’ Then, turning to Carmen, he said, ‘Gnomes, this is Carmen.’

‘At the cooker, Carmen, is Slug,’ Mr. Glmn-Phitre continued. ‘She cooks, but mostly is backwoods mellow, the product of two hundred years of American making-do. Nothing puts her off, neither armed attacks nor outbreaks of plague. She makes sure everyone is fed, washes behind their ears, and doesn’t mind the yelling. She’s from Snake’s Knob, Kentucky.

‘The woman at the tickertape is Victoria.’ He waved his hand in the direction of a rather obese woman in stretch pants and a sweatshirt. The woman peered at Carmen with small eyes encased in flabby wrinkles that were part of a network beginning at her jowls.

‘Victoria,’ Mr. Gunn-Phitre continued, ‘is a West Briton. She lives nearby in an Anglo-Norman tower house which she has converted into a pinball parlour. On the grounds was an 11th century church reputed to have been built by St. Mug. She tore it down and had the site made over into a video-boutique. The locals call her Mrs. Cromwell.

‘The fellow typing and snorting is Cahill. We call him The Bishop. He was born in Limerick, but has become more Irish than the Irish. If you try to drink stout in his presence when the head hasn’t settled, he’ll fight.’

He has an EU grant.

The Bishop turned from his typing as Mr. Gunn-Phitre asked, ‘Any news on the police, Bishop?’
‘Yes, they’re still trying to tie you into that murder in the motel. They’ve dropped all other investigations, hoping to get you on the big one. They’ve decided to put you under constant surveillance and have hired an informer. They can’t prove you were there.’

‘Who’s the informer?’

‘It’s me,’ said the Bishop.

‘Bishop is our public relations officer,’ Mr. Gunn-Phitre explained to Carmen.

The Bishop had returned to his typing, but shoved the typewriter aside when Mr. Gunn-Phitre asked, ‘What about the National Police assassins, Bishop?’

‘The last meeting of the International Agency to Control Embarrassing Global Goings-on,’ said the Bishop, ‘reconfirmed the mandate given them by the Federated Committee of Secret Oligarchies to Eliminate with Prejudice Identifiable Movers and Doers. The National Police arm has been given an increased budget. Their zip team is now searching for you on Bulgarian canal boats. They think you’re a Ba’hai.’

‘Will they find me in Bulgaria?’

‘Several times. They’ll all be finally released.’

Mr. Gunn-Phitre continued with his introductions, and the Bishop began to change the ribbon on his typewriter.

‘There are more things on heaven and earth,’ Mr. Gunn-Phitre was saying to Carmen,’than are dreamed about in the little systems that to most people are dished out as reality. The real business that goes on is usually unbelievable. Next we have the sisters.’

Two tall, long-necked women in olive drab fatigues were sitting on a cot looking at a photo album. They both had shoulder-length hair and wore wire-rimmed glasses. They looked up simultaneously.

‘Sister One is a graduate student who did her thesis on Sufi poetry. I think you’ve met a friend of hers. Sister Two isn’t.’

Next he indicated a very thin, very young, very pale girl with a face that contained in the proper order a nose, two eyes and a mouth but that looked as though they had been drawn on. The girl had picked up one of the carbines and was staring down the barrel.

‘Trixie is from Dublin and she is our ideologue. She hates everything. She’s provided major position papers on projected trends and growth-in-purchasing of assorted cultures. Often she is prophetic through a unique gift in understanding what is missing in the formation of individuals, classes, and nations. Thereby she knows what’s going to get them. A lot of times she just acts like a soulful bopping teenager.’

Mr. Gunn-Phitre then nodded his head towards a young woman sitting at the table sipping tea. ‘Drusilla,’ he said, ‘is simply pleasant. Being so, she offends and disorients everyone, often filling them with insane envy. She asks well-dressed gigolos at garden parties, ‘What do you do, anyway?’ but most pleasantly. She once said to a transvestite peer, ‘It must be such a lonely life for you’.’

Drusilla smiled at Carmen, pleasantly, and said, ‘It’s all such a war, isn’t it?’

‘Seated beside Drusilla is Angela,’ Mr. Gunn-Phitre went on. ‘No one knows what keeps her going. She was once the Rose of Tralee. She is purely imaginative and lives in a world of her own peopled with wonderful vulgar characters who upset her. These experiences make her sensitive. She’ll know in an instant what your strengths and weaknesses are. She’ll pass you a cup of cocoa before you even realise you’re depressed.’ Angela smiled up like a pixie.

‘There in the corner are Mr. and Mrs. They disagree with everything we’re doing and, as soon as they leave, will most likely inform the authorities. They are so tied up in each other they don’t see either kindnesses or hostilities directed against them.’

Mr. and Mrs. took no notice of Mr. Gunn-Phitre’s words but carried on chattering to one another about ‘who relates to whom best’.

A small round blonde woman, barefoot and with an oblique and many-times-broken nose, was sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from a magazine. Mr. Gunn-Phitre waved a hand in her direction and said to Carmen, ‘And this is Heddy. She’s German and doesn’t understand ordinary English. She’s read all the philosophers and, through translations of their texts, has taught herself a kind of a language -- a dialectics of the nous, right, Heddy?’

‘The spiral movement of spirit degenerates from the source to the materialising object, Paul,’ said Heddy.

‘Selma and Draco are missing,’ said Mr. Gunn-Phitre to Carmen.



(Part 4)

Mr. Gunn-Phitre then spoke to them all. ‘I’ll leave you all so to get introduced and explain our little co-operative. Carmen is from our New York branch and is of Irish descent. She was once a stewardess. She’s an expert on pig marketing and breeding. Like all of you she keeps a journal, so the word according to Carmen can be put on the shelf, too. You can tell her everything. I’ll be back in a while for the meeting on how to handle things. Then we’ll play our little game, who am I.’

Carmen grasped him momentarily by the wrist and asked, ‘Who is Selma?’

‘Oh,’ he answered with a chuckle. ‘She’s passion wanting to become. Everyone likes her. She’s the equal of us all.’

He turned and left the room.

‘Who’s Draco?’ asked Carmen of the group.

‘We’re not like he said at all,’ answered one of them.

Victoria was clunking across the room like a scene from The War of The Worlds. She was asking ‘What is the real Ireland’?

This is the prequel... the real story is on http://richardrathwell.blogspot.com/

six thirty

Children were blown out of their beds. Someone phoned the BBC and said everything had gone black but he found his friend. They couldn’t get out of the door because it was twisted but they could go down what was left of the stairs. He thought he wasn’t hurt. The BBC person said ‘I don’t know what you are talking about’. Later she apologised. That was after one thousand mobile calls, texts and video pictures. They heard firecrackers in Taunten and plane crashes in Westminster and in Hamel Hampstead the roaring was followed by a pressure blast and then explosions.

Someone else phoned and said ‘It is coming from the refinery. I have smelt gas there for two weeks’. Thereby giving the cause before the event happened.

We all have become prophets. There is a collective mind which is free of the official narrative. We were trained by the London bombs. We knew the man shot then was not a terrorist. We knew the phone system had been shut down and now we know the cloud approaching us is toxic even though the police announcement says it isn’t. ‘Then why is it black mommy?’. Some of us heard the car alarms yesterday. We thought an earthquake was coming. I awoke before the windows rattled.

Everyone knows of the vast petrol vapour bombs the Americans used in Iraq. Everyone knows that heat and flame with metal and plastic makes toxic fumes. Everyone knows the wind direction and everyone is phoning their lovers before the cloud comes and they shut down the phones again.

It is another officially designated emergency incident. Everyone knows how fragile this society is. When the Member of Parliament comes on to reassure us as any incident like this is immediately political and he has instructions in a manual everyone knows he is bullshitting. The company spokesman comes on after the MP and says that their first thought is to find their employees so they can’t say anything else now except there has been an incident. The blue orange flames at this time are 200 feet in the air. It turns out that only two employees were there to watch over sixty million gallons of leaking aviation fuel. They are missing but this isn’t official. The spokesmen say we are not to worry because it is an industrial area and not a suburb. It was early morning. For him.

Except we do worry because some of us know the workers who were up in the early morning in the factories there making chips for the MacDonald’s in the city the next day. Some of us have friends in the sink estates next to the refinery fence. Some of us even know the gypsies encamped in the scrub.

The news stations now ask for video phone shots of the flame. They are now competing for extra-ordinary coverage. Fools creep close to the flames with their mobiles. As usual the police and firemen hurl themselves towards some unknown horror.

By now all of us know about the bad safety, the rotten town planning, the official narrative of political spin. The explosion was only thirty minutes ago. We all know before the Prime Minister, before the head of the Police, before the hospitals.

Bhopal, Baghdad- the smoke is coming. Children blown out of their beds! It is my duty to record it.

Two days later what is being called the cloud of death is falling towards the city with fine particles of highly toxic metals and plastics. No-one from the health services has mentioned the fragility of life or the temporary nature of this stage of capitalism. They have advised against the use of face masks unless we have been issued them already.

There has been no loss of life but the loss of thousands of designer Christmas frocks and tons of exotic liqueurs in the destroyed industrial park. A man says that they are not draining the heavily polluted Grand Canal (I thought that was in Venice but no, it is in Hertfordshire!) to combine with the foam from all over the country, the national foam resource, to smother tank twelve which is the centre of all fire, that is unless tank seven cracks in which case here we go again. They are being careful not to pollute the ground water which would be impossible anyway, like this fire was, because of the high tech safety precautions the company uses. Very high tech. They know what they are doing these people. They do the nuclear plants too.

A person interviewed later says they have seen foam at the plant for two weeks. That person was standing by three cars melded together buy the 1000 degree heat which, says the fire chief, could never rupture the remaining tank containing an unknown liquid. Behind him is a picture of boats on the Grand Canal carrying the pipes from the very heavy duty pumps previously used to drain those welsh floods last year.

What an exciting fire. Much better than the underground bombs in the fall because of no sudden loss of life (the carcigens are long-term) and all of has just as good time and place defining superlatives. It gives meaning for a few weeks this fire. Then there will be the inquiry too next year. That will be political drama. The whole thing is huge and just like a movie.

What superlatives? The largest peace time fire in Europe ever that’s what! That qualification only because of Dresden -- although I’m not sure about not counting when the Channel formed in the great volcanic world rift before that ice age. But it can be now seen from space (but who is looking?)

There is oil burning over things everyday and bombs fall everywhere though. The difference is that this has a local story, a narrative structure. We are contained now between the Thames and the Black Cloud of Death. We are waiting for it to fall. We know now that we have always been waiting here between cloud and river. At least I have. One woman says that first it was the doodlebugs, then the V2’s then football hooliganism and immigration, now this! What next?

The chief fireman says that it is almost out but in many ways it is worse than ever. No-one should be concerned. That is why they are closing the roads.

The apocalypse is continuous and I am in it! It is all around in small particles. It is all contradictions and all dissonances. It is so bad it is actually good for you. It is disappearing from our understanding like flames under foam. I am in it! Are you?

sent for editing 4

Dear Editor,

Here is another attempt.

I was away in Pembroke with my father who drove a Ford rusted through the floor from salt against the snow. It was Halloween and he drove through the early night from Ottawa with a guy who smoked cigars in the back while I was supposed to hide in the place by the wheel well on the floor next to the chair-high seats in the front and make no noise. He was a taxi. His new idea. Dad was thinking about whether he would run as federal candidate for the co-operative commonwealth organisation or try to get a real job as a civil servant which as a bogus war hero he could. Also he was thinking how his wife and war bride had run away mad again looking for some piece of Britain on Ottawa’s Bank street which she never could find and of course she was wondering why she ever met a lying Canadian and left her Mom’s house but of course again she knew deep down it was because of the rationing.

When we dropped the fat guy off and his cigar was gone we discovered a sheet drawn across the civic square showing a silent three stooges cartoon for free amidst thousands of masked people, bears, devils and big breasted ladies, a few Hitlers, skeletons, while I rode on my dad’s shoulders for the last time laughing in a paper bag with eyes as he was still a man then as he was just back from the war only a few months and had not yet figured out what soul to give up for a wife and child. It was then the three stooges on the sheet strutting and poking as the wind blew the sheet and people gave beers to others in uniform, like my dad for Halloween.

I went again with him and the Ottawa Boy Scout Hockey Team to play the twenty second troop of Pembroke thugs and as usual the heater in the car was broken and the wind blew between the seats and floor bolts because of the salt rust. The snow like small skies against the windshield and through the cracks as freezing usual. We met the other boys on time, some were crying and we played in a dream. I lost a toe.

The next time through Pembroke again I went without dad with a bad ticket on my way to sing in a civic bonding exercise between us protestant English and catholic frogs in Montreal. Mom and dad didn’t understand it but the school insisted. It was the Messiah and the Huron Carol.

I was feverish with flu and far from home. My mother had jumped from the car four days ago by the Ottawa museum and disappeared in the blizzard. My dad had buckled his holster the next morning (he had a black one) and gone to work against the communists. I had never seen a cathedral before like that one in Montreal and sang with visions of Mary. That was Montréal. I now live in Paris and London.

But in Pembroke I only saw a vision from the bus of the three stooges in the snow. Playing and strutting. Curly in a hat. Mary cheering. In the game I scored the winning goal but dad had gone to make a phone call.

sent for editing 3

OK, editor, here is my latest:

Tim loved Dorothy and Dot loved Tim. When they reached eleven they had already done that for one year.

In that year, the second year of the Special Class, they would meet by the run-off pond not far from the canal to walk to school. Tim would leave his bike hidden in the bushes. Dorothy arrived on foot. She brought enough sandwiches for both their lunches and an apple for Tim’s breakfast.

In spring the polliwogs in the pool had long strings from where their penises should be, drifting in the clear water. In winter the heads of frozen frogs dotted the ice. In summer there was no school so Tim sat by the pond or rode his bike into the centre of town with Marcus and the Billies. Dorothy was at the cottage.

Tim had to go backwards on his easiest route to get to the pond to meet her because he lived down in those houses where the river flooded. Dot lived in the places with big porches on the rise by the high school.

From the pond they would walk to school. They sat together in Special Class. But first they would spend time in the shallow, dark valley near the cement fence in a tunnel of bushes which overhung the path. Dot asked about Tim’s people and he tried little tricks on her. They didn’t work. Especially his voices.

Dot could conclude in her head a sum after following a string of fifty changes. For example take one, and then add five, take away three, divide by seven and so on. Those were addition, subtraction, multiplication and division but not yet logarithms. But so could Doctor Agnes who would test the class on the summing trick once a week.

Tim dropped out after ten changes. But Tim could put on a skit like where he was Pissaro and he would say what he thought when he first met the Incas and before Pissarro calmed down and became Spanish again. This was before Tim had read much on it. He was good at that. That time he made a breastplate of cardboard. No-one else did as well as Tim on those acting out things although Jeff once brought a saxophone to do Marco Polo.

Doctor Agnes asked them all to make sputniks that year at Christmas. She brought balls of Styrofoam which Tim had never seen before. They stuck toothpicks in them and pretended to be dogs barking from space. Doctor Agnes was very angry when some of them didn’t bark loudly enough, especially Gordon and Scott. After they had barked, they all sang ‘Oh Canada’ and exchanged presents.

sent for editing 2

Yes I knew your mother. Why do you ask? I remember she didn’t go out of doors. It was as if when she got settled she shut out.

She was a woman who believed in cliché and stereotype more than her instincts and experiences. She constructed for her inner self a completely imaginary respectability in a radically storied world. And there she lived if she had to kill to do so.

She imagined the life of her children, you and Hank, from the biographies in newspapers of parent murderers. It was all drugs and knives. She imagined the schools and courses you took from TV sitcoms. Things were on your blackboards, dangerous things with arrows and the names of all the well-known neighbours. Shakespeare and Napoleon, Hitler and Einstein.
She knew all about the neighbours, the folks on the street, even though she had never seen them. The foreign lady who had strange visitors. The slut in the housecoat.

She imagined herself the one who respectable people were dying to meet. Some had spoken to her.

She didn’t like me or any of your friends. We were encouraging matricide or at least making fun. We weren’t respectable.

She had been in prison hadn’t she? Or been a collaborator with the occupiers?

sent for editing 1

My book, based on a true story and my real experience is about a special class for gifted savants aged 11 set up in Ottawa during the build-up to Nuclear stand-off to provide special education so as to lay the foundation of a future elite to manage Canada after the anticipated holocaust caused either by Russia or the U.S. When the Armageddon starts they were to be moved to the Diefenbunker located five miles from the school. But this plan is tentative based on the evaluation of the success of the class and on the outcome of an upcoming election.

Admission to the class was based on the crude IQ testing of the period which itself was evolved from German war practice to rapidly select officer candidates for the SS at the war's end. The Class in Ottawa are all tested frequently and those who fall below the 'sigma 2' category are purged.

The class is managed by two psychiatrists using experimental pedagogue including three tiered reading groups, visiting lecturers, sensory deprivation in the teaching of mathematics, mystery visits in the class bus etc.

A naturalist poet visits the class. The designer of The Avro Arrow comes, the Director of the UFO monitoring station just outside of the city, a mechanic who fixes McCormack cars and the agriculturist who has developed high yield 'Bytown wheat'.

Two classmates, Tim and Dorothy, fall in Love. This is how the book begins. They are turning 12. They walk to school together talking of love and the world. They talk of their families. Tim is poor. Dorothy's parents work in the national research center. The two are attacked by French-Canadian thugs. They watch the seasons. They share lunches. The river floods.

The chidren's best friend, Marcus Barcus, the son of a Lithuanian defector, an atomic scientist, disappears. They search for him throughout the city and surrounding countryside. Another classmate disappears. This is reported as a suicide attempt. Several classmates reach puberty. There are clandestine drinking parties. The search goes on.

There is a spy scare involving Tim's father who is a low ranking soldier. Several strange weather phenomena take place. American television begins. Lester Pearson talks of Peace-Keeping. The Queen visits (perhaps to discuss relocation of the Commonwealth in case of war). Tim is in a choir that sings for her at a reception. He looks at her boobs. Others in the choir are in a Nazi inspired street gang. The Americans talk of preventative annexation. News emerges of Canadian war crimes in Holland. It then disappears.

Canadians are accused of being not nice and bad brokers by American Senators. Sun fish fill the Ottawa river. The By0-Town canal built as a strategic defence against the U.S. is gentrified. There are rumors of a second Bunker and another class. The second bunker is said to be preventative and meant to be sealed until after half-life passes.

Tim and Dot run away for a day. They go to an area near Smith's Falls where 'Bottomless Lake' is.

A meeting of parents is held who vote to discontinue the class so their kids can have normal lives. Those voting against dissolution are the parents of Aspergers kids. Before the class ends the National Film Board makes three films about it for show on television. Only one is shown. It is called 'The Special Ones' and is about pioneering techniques for education of the gifted. The second is of a mock UN assembly of tiny kids with squeaky voices talking of the world representing places like China and Ghana. It is called 'The Present World'. The third is a series of interviews. With Tim, with Dorothy, With Marcus and with others. It is called The Future. No-one knows when the one was done with Marcus. These are archived but unavailable for release to researchers.

There is an epilogue on 'What they are doing now'. But it only mentions Brenda, Francis, Gordon, both Johns and Billy. Some readers may recognize these people who are presently prominent in Politics, Science, Info-Tech business and the arts. Some of their present activities in their present circles are outlined briefly.

There are to be reoccurring images of rocketry (with firecrackers, vinegar and soda, wiring and radio waves). There will be references to primitive rock, especially songs about dreams, and to Lithuanian folk wisdom. There will be discussions on mathematical theory, history, literature and medicine carried on by Tim and Dorothy. The title is 'Tim and Dorothy'

What do you think?

comment

Dear Blur Orange.

The basic thing you seem to be saying on this Blog and in 'Seance for the Dead Arts' is that the enclosures created by the narrative, especially by post modernism and modern fascism have undermined all that breaking through and passion of the past and that this, if it remains unchecked, will result in an age of banality and perhaps of apocalypse, beginning with the death of mind and imagination. YOU SAY WE SHOULD BREAK OUT.

Fair enough. But what do you propose to do about it?

In my reviews on "Internet Essence" and elsewhere, I give a little advice. I suggest you take note.

Keep at it!
Albert Conningham


P.S. ON YOUR BLOG YOU SAY THAT SAINT PAUL SAID THAT THERE WERE EIGHT TYPES OF FAULTY VISIONS OF LOVE. IN FACT THERE ARE NINE AND SINCE SUFISM WE ARE STILL COUNTING.

ANNOUNCEMENT: book publication

DEATH'S DOORS: ORIGINAL FAMILIES, PROPER PRIVACIES, AND MENTAL STATES

and

RED THE NILE, BLUE THE HILLS

and the poetry book

ONE POEM FORWARD, TWO POEMS BACK

have been published this November by Blue Orange Publishing.

spake the paper buddha

WoooEeee!

Let’s face it. What you do is fictionalize your own memory to impact on people. Yes you do sunshine. The fictionalising is for your sake and so too is most of the impacting under the guise, sometimes, of instructing and inspiring. Yes sure, but sometimes of loving or of seducing. Sometimes even of getting even or getting compensation- especially for life and death. Sometimes to rob and kill. Or getting a feeling of a safe middle place between contradictions. Or perhaps just innocently adjusting your projected personality and upgrading your culture for material benefit.

Those that can’t or don’t or won’t do this can be frequently defined by institutions as being nutsy outsiders and treated accordingly. You are warned potato head!

But with writing it gets spookier than that. First of all the memory is already a fiction written by your personality as a justification. Secondly the memory is twisted and distorted by desires and dreams as those in turn are turned around by the memories. Third, there is the clamour of all that culture outside yourself with its structures, official and collective images and either effusions and meshed filters or volcanic impingements and determiners smashing into your process of fictionalising. That is spooky isn’t it?

Spookiest of all is that as you make a fiction you find that all the narratives, not just your own but everyone’s and everything’s, are untrue and moreover that something else is trying to get out. This is dissonant and different. Do you let it? If you don’t it isn’t writing. It is the leisure industry or college, dream manufacture or propaganda in advance of some awkward unnatural act- when the point is that dreaming must end. It is always ending actually.

Wake up snot chomper!

There is a sleeping amnesia that governs every age. That is culture. With it the judges forget they were criminals. The rich forget their poverty. The smart forget their stupidity. It masquerades as sanity but it is in fact very unwell.

Its narratives seduce the desiring. The unfinished. You.

With it institutions take on characteristics of the unbalanced.

What is before your senses disappears constantly. What you remember is forgotten.

And (he then spake an aside)…..

Aside: America you have used weapons of mass destruction on your own people. You have shot your own dissidents. You are violent and have crossed borders with evil intent. This is what you have created your focussed, self referencing, gibbering projected and officially only acceptable culture to forget. This is your autism. It isn’t true autism like mine or yours. Autism in an individual is a way to cope- in an institution it is a stance- a danger to us all.

We won’t waste our lives in your nightmares.

And then he said: Piss off!

why am i interested? i wonder how stuff happens

The notion is that there is a kind of spiritual truth which is intuitive and authentic. The people who insist on facts are either tippy-toeing around this or are a kind of prurient hypocrite of imagination nudging and winking at the obvious resonances. Afraid to speak.

A good example is Sigismondo Malatesta who stirred up the renaissance in every way he could. First he was the world’s best and first anti-hero loser. He was a hired gun who lost most of his battles but came out ok through pragmatic deals with the enemy and breathtaking treason. The next is that he marketed himself with simple symbol (the plant trampling elephant), pop poetry and celebrity deed (saying he would strangle the Pope). He got good press being called sodomist, raper of nuns, traitor bastard (true but removed by papal decree) and sacrilegious joker (ink in the Papal font).

He symbolically brought to Italy from a lost battle the bones of a man, an arch neo Platonist and actual unknowing ideologue of the renaissance so in a stroke thereby connecting Greek Classicism through Byzantium to himself. He gets therein to be called first Renaissance man. This is followed up by art patronage and building really good forts.

He made a temple to his love for Isotta, a new kind of worshipful lust, confirming rumours he murdered two wives to deify the accepted illicit. He filled the temple, converted from a boring church to Saint Francis, with astrology and mystery. The daughter of one of the murdered wives is well known to have started the genuine symbology of the Tarot making arch mysteries out of a renaissance combination of core Mediterranean divine parapsychology and her own family dysfunction: Isotta, the high priestess, Il Papa, the excommunicator and Sigismondo the only person ever made the bishop of hell by papal decree, hanging upside down, not Christ but something else. The person of Sigismondo inspired the dollar sign, initial entwined with Isotta’s and modern anarchism as the negation of the negation.

The fall of Byzantium and the rise of anarchistic trade prepared all this for him, the Venetian imperialism, the City State. The residue of the gods sprang to life through the church which failed to see divine porno in the mannerist art. His profession, condittori and poet made him able. The model was created for every land developer and stock broker since.

There is also Ellen of Aquitaine, who claimed she was reborn and would be reborn, who created a slinky language by commission to justify her power gained as if by high magic through inevitable but cunning marriage which melted the similar poles of the world, the French monarchy and English, married all her neighbours in fact to save the house using the poetry of troubadours and the imagery of Eos to soften minds hardened by the Monks among resentful but bemused peasants and gobsmacked courtiers. Where did she come from? Aquitaine of course and the science of the Nunnery passed on by a hundred unwed mothers, daughters of murdered wives and the Tarot. She was the founder of reading clubs, the troubadour court.

Pound didn’t say any of this. But Fox Channel would if it could. Instead now we have Barbara Bush and Rumsfeld as most spiritual truth has been left to the banal to celebrate.
Every version of the world is prepared first by poetry. Then the miraculous story takes place and long afterward it is understood again when the dead return to life.

sunny day

You said my last notes were cynical. You said you don’t think Soviet Russia was a last stage of Feudalism or that Chinese society presently is. You don’t think fascism was a revolution while the Beatles were not.

Nope.

Technology was never a revolution nor was some great big idea. In itself neither sort of thing has even changed governance. They may have provided entry of some sections of people into political and cultural classes but they haven’t changed either structures of relationships to resources or ruling narratives. They certainly haven’t created new types of people only new strata among the old ones. But fundamental change? Never. New ways of bonking and new ways of killing are not revolutions.

You are entranced by the seduction of the narrative.

But the real thing to look at is the spectrums of the narratives. Where does it lead you? Narratives of origin, significance and place contend without ceasing. They do so especially ferociously in language but also everywhere there is any symbol and any harnessing of spirit by institutions. Narratives contend so without let up in every form. The dominant one in any place is called truth or history or good. The others are literature, art, lies nonsense and madness.

Narratives are not revolutions but they are certainly creations.

Humans are subjective. They require subjectivity to cope and sustain. The subjective goes with having only five senses and a mind. Stones don’t need it. Subjectivity controls information, gives ground for alliance and provides common weal. Even when being objective a human is subjective. The human is subjective within family, within even tribe but usually in some civic or institutional interest maybe a nation maybe a stratum. They are ra-ra and ga-ga for their narrative. Gets them through the day. Gets ‘em a job. The images and stories of that object, their own story-thing fight to overcome all contenders and give more place and structural alignment to sustenance, to empower, to collectivise. To avoid death of self. So they make stuff up. Or rather they make something out of chaos. Depends who is winning and who is fighting.

Who is dying who is dead.

Do you suspect history is a lie? That something else really happened and is lurking there? For example that thousands were starved to death in American governed prisoner of war camps in WW2. Or that the Islamic insurgents killed on the border were actually Assyrian tribal wedding attendees. Was Richard the Lionheart a useless French philandering killer-bitch and his poor brother John only trying to hold things together and pay the rent? Did your father really fight in the war? Was Karl Marx arrested for drunkenness in Clerkenwell? Are Democrats anti-democratic, are Communists anti-communists and Republicans for Monarchy?

Depends.

Do the workers get paid more than their labour is worth in some places? Is money irrelevant but access to debt the determining factor in society? Was Mother Theresa an abuser and scam stealing from the dead? Is there any true statistic for nutritionally related murders in America?

Tell the truth.

Can you hear the most gibbering flawed robots repeating endlessly that they should be followed to freedom? Do you hear the most self-interested whining of their immortal sacrifice? Do you hear thieves screaming of what they are owed? Do you see obsessive routine called imagination?

In the darkness of night.

Do you suspect that modernity is going backward? That the march towards reason and peace turned around at some point to stumble backwards through banality to barbarism and apocalypse? Do you see that in politics and art? Do you hear it in news casts? Strange, you may say. I remember when the world was governed on the basis of a secular principle to ensure fair play and discover and develop objective analysis.

Didn’t Iraq have democratic parties and a constitution with international treaties? Wasn’t the Caliphate a centre of modernisation? How did it become a dark age? Weren’t civilian casualties at one time counted? Didn’t witnesses tell the truth so help them God? Or is all history like this?

Here is the coffee. Sunny Day. (Think I’ll read Richard Rathwell’s Death’s Doors.)

idiots can make revolutions

A revolution is a completely new dispensation. It involves the replacement of one ruling political class with another. More importantly it involves a restructuring of the control of resources.

The political class overthrown is not necessarily homogonous. It is more likely that it is a spectrum of interests and presentations but the whole spectrum has one essential purpose but can have completely opposing interests. It can, for example, be there to dominate a national economy but be within itself competing between sectors for determination of that policy, say for guaranteed investment and special state protection.

The conditions for revolutionary change are made of iron. First, the ruling group must be so divided, weakened and discredited that it cannot rule. Second there must be economic conditions that lead large sections of the population to the conclusion that they cannot sustain themselves with the present dispensation, third, the power of official institutions must be withering in certain geographic, institutional and cultural areas. Fourth, there must exist an alternative force that seems sufficiently disciplined and creditable to declare an alternative which has contacts in key institutions. Fifth, a majority of people must believe in a simple universal policy formula if only for a short period of time.

A revolution can never happen because a population suddenly believes in some nuanced system of ideas that an elite has propagated or either in the infallibility of an exceptional individual. Remember, revolutions may not be initiated initially by a mass but they succeed because of mass participation. The mass, believing revolution to be in their interest, is crucial if only to remain passive. Usually people in large and key institutions as the army and media acting in a complementary way are actually the decisive element.

If a significant part of the population adopts support for an idea or an individual this is not political change or economic change. It is a cultural change that will result only in cultural movement in the old system as sale of DVDs and records or increases in donations. Nothing takes place that is revolutionary unless the conditions described above exist. Anyone claiming any other thing is a charlatan. Revolutions don’t happen by thinking and chanting.

The revolutionaries may not even have good ideas. In fact they may be idiots and what they actually do to reorganise society may have no resemblance to what they said they would do. They may actually act in some bold but completely ridiculous theatrical way.

What happens after a revolution is that the preparations that went on before it to change the spectrum of forces and ideas no longer have validity. That is another objective of revolution, an end to idealism. There is afterwards a new spectrum and new validities. Institutions are reworked and culture is redone. Institutions are made to control resources and prevent alienation of power from groups. They are not made to reflect spiritual truths or natural law. A revolution is the reworking of the structure of culture as well as politics and economics often as violently enforced stupidities. These will have support if for the mass the issue of sustainability is settled.

Revolutions are the fast-forward or rewinds of history. They are not a talk show or a rock concert. They are not a university seminar. Revolutions are the violent replacement of one group of vile, exploitative idiots by a group of unformed amateurs in conditions of chaos. The chaos may be triggered by environmental collapse, war, epidemic or divine wind but it is managed by people and it is people who try to benefit from it.

my name is tim

My Name Is Tim.

My name is Tim. I have Aspergers syndrome. I am an Aspergers.

Now before we go further let me explain that Asperger's Syndrome is not a disease any more than CleverDick syndrome is or CuteBunny Syndrome or CompleteWanker syndrome is. It is rather a way of life based on a way of perceiving. Oh yes, it can be diagnosed. But so can bloodymindedness.

Lots of doctors have made an industry from Aspergers. Good for them. But it won’t ever fit into a doctor’s template. You can tell this by what they say. They say it is on a spectrum. Do you know what is on a spectrum to an Aspergers? Two prisms and a rainbow.

Aspergers people know who other Aspergers people are. In fact other Aspergers are the only ones we remember clearly. The only ones we appreciate in our own way. Like the appreciation of cats.

Some analysts have gone through literature and history to see if they could determine who high-end Aspergers was. Yeats is one named, Malcolm Lowry another, perhaps Da Vinci. But also Adolph and complete species of Homo erectus.

I am high end Aspergers. I got this way not only because of my brain chemistry, DNA and the peculiar way my neural insulation allows bolts of connections. I got this way because they gave me an IQ test twice. First time I was sixty. Second time one hundred and eighty five. Between the two tests I had figured out the rules.

How is an Aspergers? First of all if you are not Asperger’s let me tell you. I can follow your thinking before you do. And I find it annoying mainly because you connect all wrong. Some say we have no imagination, no language, and no memory. I can remember your youth when your mind changed. I remember it from seeing you the first time. I get joy from the idle movement of a horse in a field of snow. I see the images in a how a bomb unfolds in the desert.

Aspergers in Love: I see only my love as through a tunnel, a tunnel to only one reflection at the back of a room. Aspergers as a friend: I hunt down every hidden brother and the few sisters with magic. I offer stringed stars and sounds in a row. Aspergers at work: I will wire the ideas perfectly so the project grows like a rogue wave from the sea floor.

Aspergers who talk and write, or dance and sing, or for that matter do anything do not do it for the scholars and relatives who will attend their funeral. They don’t like leisure consumers. They love to play with the shifting eye in the flung mind.

When Aspergers rule the world, hey! And they will dear thing: There will be no correct line. Every movement will be a dissonance resolved of the basic part uniting all the chaos for that moment. The Holy Days will change. This year for falling water. Next year for words beginning with Dis.

*******

Tim Too

This is Tim too and the other thing about Aspergers.
You Buzzies! We call you that for you are those whirring, bloated obvious things.
You bore and bother complaining of dead minds of frozen concrete but that is real and you did it wrong. There is sense in every detail. I won’t answer flakes of snow.

Not that dissolving gas while images break through air cut with clean steel knives and hang still.
You are on both sides of your nose while I feel one hundred and seven small stones under frozen water near the green fountain of brass grapes webbed in sparkling wires.
I want no cure.

Buzzy romantics are always incurable
Buzzy condolences always go out
Buzzy country is always living- what is the sense in that?
While dawn feathered flames slice the pond
And wet night in cold clear morning means sponge snow, cheese under glass.

Spider like your mom brain kept in touch
Not now
And I won’t answer either.

oppose memoirism to the death!

There is a great evil threatening our civilisation and that is memoirism. The memoirists are the enemy of truth, imagination, intellect and above all memory. Memory frees. There are getting to be more and more.

Some one ought to do something about them.

Everything in life fails and that is its beauty. Everything fails, that is, except for the spirit to live. For the memoirist there is no failure and there is no spirit. There is only the absolute uniqueness of their ordinary self illuminated to death by their infinite, visionary common sense.

How is the memoirist formed? He is formed by failure taken badly, especially by that experienced in the cradle. It is not that wonderful mixture of fruity foolishness and ruthless boiling and crushing that makes life’s liquor for the memoirist. What makes sense only is that life itself that has failed the memoirist. It has failed to recognize the absolute value in their particular banality and the sparkle of their own ordinary experience. The memoirist began the writing of memoirs at the time he began to speak and momma didn’t listen. His mission was confirmed when some fool did. The determination intensified when that fool turned away.

Poetry, ha! A dead art says the memoirist. I gave it up myself in college. Radical change? Nonsense, says the memoirist. I have never changed and look where I am today. Why should anyone else bother? And I’ve been proven right haven’t I? You should have listened. If you didn’t I will tell you again.

The memoirist doesn’t want anyone to actually be anything in particular. Anything that is that is not a consumer and admirer of his memoirism. Are you Moslem, ha! We had a few in my home town and they behaved properly let me tell you. They behaved like my friends. Let me tell you about Mohammed, no better yet, I’ll tell you about our blacks. Were you tortured by desert bandits who only stopped because the sheep they were cooking caught fire? Ha. I cook mutton at home all the time and it never catches fire. Is he a painter? Ha. What an idiot. Everyone watches tv. A radical? Ha, I wouldn’t waste my time on that! We don’t do things like that around here.

The giants I knew, says the memoirist, are elevated by my familiarity.

The places I have been are monuments since defiled.

The memoirist often says ‘everybody knows’ where nobody knows but he then goes on to make clear that only he knows and if you are saying the same thing he knew first.

The memoirist recommends his failures to everyone as understandable, excusable ultimately glorious and necessary successes. But they shouldn’t try it. It wouldn’t be the same.

The memoirist is the enemy of ego. No-one should have one. They should organise their self on the basis of his memoirs. As for superego, forget it. No need. And if anyone wants to do a few riffs with narcisstic personality disorder, forget that too. That has already been taken. There is only one allowed at a time.

What do you call two memoirists? A historical époque.

A memoirist as a leader initiates a hunt for dissidents, especially those who saw those real mistakes made in real time with perspective.

A memoirist as a lover says ‘there you go again’ and becomes the horned beast.

Do you have a memoirist inside yourself? Ask yourself this: when was life perfect? Or to say the same thing another way, when did it stop and lose a dimension? Or when did my martyrdom begin? When was my memory thwarted? When am I not believed!

Ask yourself, what was the original sin? No really, the real one. Was it the one done to you? What are the real commandments? Thou shalt not err in human ways against my mind? Who were the real myths? Forget Olympus. Was it those you believe you bested? Where is paradise? Is it where you believe you rule? Where the smell of your sanctified thought dominates?

Some bloody café where the five customers know your name? Some ill-attended meeting with one speaker?

The memoirist achieves immortality. And he does this without much suffering. The rest of us achieve death by accepting dismemberment.

How is the immortality of the memoirist assured? Through the reduction of creation and the diminishing of the laws of the universe. By the avoidance of irony, story and song.

There are other words for memoirist. It can be pragmatist, citizen, comrade, professor, even just a clever guy.

But Memoirism is a ferocious journey backward into the night. The memoirist is actually that creature before human thought comes. It is the voice of the dying DNA.

That creature remains the same throughout evolution. It is hairy and stupid. Its purpose is to induce flight so it can flee. Its defence is projectile memoirs. It growls, it farts, it shoots ink, it stinks and hurls from its cage dead bits of self.

Do you know a memoirist? Is there one in your neighbourhood? Someone ought to do something.

something

Just thought of some terms of dissonant symbolic abuse from the Bitter Exile (not you or me but a mythic one, like John Bunyon or Quixote or my favorite: Rimbaud come home fat and liquored up from Africa and burned out from slaving). And thought of a context for them.

The poor guy comes home after 20 years to prove to himself that with the local, or anything else based on imagination, you can't really leave it let alone get back again. He meets people and has adventures, discusses old times and writes back to Africa, say to a friend there, perhaps some mad Canadian general in some tent somewhere in the Bush who is trying to make sense of a genocide, he writes to that friend explain things at home.

How about that he writes about how the aging, nearly dead, 'archbitchup of cantslurry' sent from abroad so long ago to ensure the faith sends curses the general with his far from last dying breath or how the 'the rump parrottment of poets' is still blocking the senses after so many decades of sloth or how the 'local academy of extreme faux' only hires golems or that 'The Church Of What Really Happened Yesterday in the Assembly of The Exclusive Pentecost' has been formed on a government grant. The returnee will explain that authenticity has become a misdemeanor and there is a secret language based on babbles in bubbles. The old gang have been possessed by posses of demons of the banal kingdom and everything golden is missing.

The series that covers this, a poetic series or a novel is called 'Missing in Action' (Return of The Exile From Dementia). Just a thought.

fun

In the book I will send you if you so request I am trying to demonstrate that plot is a very stupid and poisinous thing when it is associated with genre and worse, stereotype. Worse yet with judgement or dictate. I am having fun with this.

The other thing I am playing with is the structure of imaginations, that is one imagination unfolding into another. In some places it is ancient, to religious, to more religious, to political, to images, to mind, to something entirely different...

The thing I think about locality is that you can't get out of it. You can't get outside although you may see outside. Even with natural sciences or medicine you have the outside of your own place inside. A double hermetic. You are back when you go away wherever or whenever you are.

All images lie, all visions are incomplete, all connections are imperfect because of this something else that you have seen, that appears. In this case even when the words are over.

literary conflict

I am advised that Brecht said beauty was something like the resolution of contradictions. There might be something else to it -- some sort of catharsis. Something happening with input from somewhere. And connected to higher or lower truth somehow. Maybe with glue.

But what is more interesting is DNA 'spellings'. There are different ones for determining intrinsic and extrinsic experiencing of beauty. Or of the associative rest as joy, exhilaration, peace, anxietylessness and divinity.

The intrinsic individuals as ecstatic, asperger poets, prophets, martyrs, daffodil loonies have one DNA 'spelling.'

The extrinsic people as paedophile priests, home wreckers, cannibals, Trotskyites, department heads and people with narcissistic personality disorders have another.

The reason for these differences is evolutionary experience. One 'spelling' evolved in people with allocentric experiences (as walking with Gods, Legged Dolphins and Aliens). They needed to experience divinity to engender community solidarity. They needed hard wiring to be able to cohere as a group to face life both efficiently and gloriously on mountains, grassy savannahs and open water singing songs and seeing heaven. This gets into the DNA place for soul to conduct the body and senses and into the DNA receptor for spirit which comes from outside (in language, art, nature) to kick start those souls. Body, soul and spirit connect. Like in a snake or a cheetah. Here every group member has a way. They share a spirit.

The other bunch, the extrinsic, the autocentric, evolved in tepid swamps and stony deserts eating one another and fighting over who would be the new priest and so get the juiciest pieces of the last one. This sense meant a hard wiring was necessary in the group to engender sloppy and sentimental response in rote to slogans, clichés, genres and manifestos in order to mesmerize the slowest to march smiling into the cooking pot after kneeling for you know what. In this group the most rancid DNA does the eating, the pallid DNA does the kneeling and singing of Hosannas. Body is eaten, soul is swampy, spirit is disconnected. Like in fruit mold. Mmmm. Looks good, tastes good, feels good.

excerpt from someone else's novel

I am Hope. You can call me Hope. Hope is my name for all the registrations. But I also have my birth name and my small name for the village. There is also my tribal name and the name I will have when I will say my new faith at my marriage. The secret birth name is from my mother to fool the evil spirit who is envious of the beauty of a child. It is in the language of women from the time we had queens. It means “To die in the quiet of the storm”. “Hope” is what my mother and father wanted to give me, as a gift, and is their feeling for me. I am writing this for Mister Jack. It is a gift to him. I write on the paper my father bought me.

My nickname is “Storyteller”. It was mine as a small girl. My sister, Chastity, was given the name “Mangoes” but that was when she went to school. She is my twin. I had that name too. When she was small Chastity was “Knife”. She was then thin and bony like me. When I marry I will have the name of a wife of the Prophet and Redeemer and so will Chastity.

Chastity is my holy twin. She is gifted to me by fate. She is my dearest womb friend. I will be forever true to her. Because she is so much to me I can write her story for the world to see her true character despite all her temptations and all the gossip. I hope my story can be a poem, a song, a movie. It will be like the novels read by Mister Jack about family and love. This will show all how we women are and how we suffer. We suffer more than Oliver Twist or King Lear or Madame Heathcliffe or our great nation and Governor suffer which things we learn of in school. I will show that Chastity is a clever tall girl and proud. She is the tree of fruit of her father and grandfather, of her mother and grandmother.

I am writing this novel book also for my teacher Mister Jack. It is his present. He said to write a holiday story so I would not forget. By doing so I know shall praise him. His language is pure as the purest of tongues and his skin is as soft as this paper. He knows all the foreigners but he is their tallest and smartest. Some are as pigs but he is as a king. He is visited by new vehicles. He will return to his land of green hills and strong music and the best markets. He should take this with him to his country. It is a land of constant water where many get rich as my mother’s brother’s wife’s cousin on the other side of my family. I long to see it. Although some say she is a witch. My mother says she is a doctor.

I want him to know of our ways and to love us and I want to show him he has taught me well. Also he must know how we are, for none of us is what we seem. Mister Jack teaches me Methodology about teaching aids for lessons, theatre arts and English. He teaches us the sentence. It is like a magic. He is fixing our school. We all love him. He is our master and lord. Our duty is to please him. He has explained to us how to teach the making of a novel book and about journals. He has taught us about plays and writing in the voices of others. He says my sister and I are remarkable and smart. When I told him after that class that I will go to the hostel and write a novel book he marvelled. He said it is not what he intended but more. But, why not? Our lives are like the great stories. It is then what I am doing on this the very paper my father bought me.

The first man to call Chastity friend, ally and pal was John. She gave him her permission. He said that he loved her and that her eyes killed. He told her that the hair on her smooth body magnets all boys around her. She was cream and butter. Chastity did not heed him on this type of word. She knew it was hard to know what boys mean and she would not be confused. She sang her own song to herself that God would send her suitor and she would hope in God.

Piccolo and John would walk to the primary school with Chastity and me. We were still small enough to have to carry our sitting stones on our heads and our piece of sugar canes in a hidden plastic. Piccolo would call my sister lovely and his ally too. But John would say that she was not Piccolo’s wife, or even practice wife and that Piccolo should go away or he would give him a heavy blow. Men are as jealous as women.

My sister told them that they should shut their marathon talk. They were wasting their time as only God knows her true suitor. Piccolo always had money in his pocket from his father’s coat. He said that if Chastity would befriend him he would give her the money.

Chastity said that she was finished with small, silly boys since a long time in her heart. She danced on the road and sang that she did not care for those who need her love. The head of Piccolo was down in shame. John laughed at him. Piccolo was a soft and funny boy. He died with a fever.

John then said to Chastity that she had a bad behaviour. He said to Piccolo that he should forgive Chastity because she was young. But later I know he agreed with Piccolo for a plan to share her. This was even before our breasts and menses had arrived. John is now in the customs.

John asked me what kind of girl my sister is to refuse to befriend a good looking boy like Piccolo. Later I know that the boys went to the bush doctor with Piccolo’s money to get medicine to rub on Chastity’s body to make her follow them. On the way to the doctor the toe of John hit on a stone and began to bleed. He said to his friend Piccolo not to look and that the blood was like water on a mountain. Piccolo said to his friend that this is a great pity and is the result of beauty which is a magic. There are terrible things the result of beauty.

a small posting for friends in Kansas from the Himalayas

Don’t say I am cold Mother.
I built the schools that fell on the children
I removed the cataracts from grandma’s eyes
Who saw the bodies
After hearing the cries
Die in the cold

So I wonder
That capacity for conversion
Of one hundred thousand living
Is not reversed when earth cracks
To convert the dead

Hoping a stone fell on Osama
And carrying prayers.
The recovery teams, well dressed
Helicopters fantastic, fresh
From chasing nightmares
Now in the world

do you believe that of all the kingdoms He created yours would last forever?

Do you believe that of all the kingdoms He created yours would last forever?

And who is He?

Never mind that for a moment.

What I wish to describe is an epidemic that is coming. Like the flu it started off with a few cases. With me I heard a voice that clearly said ‘Behold the divine slapper.’ I was sleeping on the fourteenth floor of a low income tower block with the window open despite the frequency of condoms blowing in. The sound did not come from the window; it came from the TV which was off. I turned it on and a border at the bottom of a cartoon elf read ‘Princess Dianna has been reported to be in an automobile crash.’

'No she hasn’t,' I said. 'She is dead.' All the previous week she had been in the news and in my office we had been slagging her off. For months in that same office you couldn’t say a thing against her or the government would fire you. And they did. The People’s Princess.

The next time I was in a basement near a river. I was pumped through with drugs to confuse my immune system into thinking I would live. A voice said “Everything holy is trashed.” It came from the TV. I turned it on and a banner read that a light plane had crashed in New York. The banner was under a cookery show with prawns with large capillaries. I said, ‘No it isn’t. It is jumbos’ just before that shot came on with the second plane going through like knife and butter. I had by then left the first office. It was months before I was well enough to go to the second where it became impossible to get money for schools for Afghanistan and Iraq and not just because Halliburton had it all. And a world of interlocked myth darkened us all.

I realised later that I had caught prophecy. It is going around. Have you had it? Now worse strains are developing. Like the flu it begans with a few cases. Then it spread. Like flu it goes from animals to people, those ducks and ferrets that fuss about earthquakes and tsunanis. It spreads from people to spiritual beings and back again. A friend suddenly heard in his sleep during an eclipse that ‘America is building up Hubris faster than shit in the cat lady’s house.’ Then came the hurricanes. He said to me that’s them! That’s them! When they were only red things of the coast of Africa.

I knew about the superdome in advance, I knew about the corruption, I knew about what will happen in Iraq yesterday.

This isn’t your fairground fortune-telling about your love life and your budget travel bullshit. It has mutated. And I can’t turn it on and off like a keg tap for my friends. So don’t ask. It is industrial strength prophecy, multi mutated prophecy, multi-causal prophecy for which there is no vaccine. It is a voice that comes from distant language and images and memory. Oh yes it does. That is, mother, it comes from way outside and from the broadcasting center of the spirit.

And it is about things that are so fucking obvious. Of course those things are now concealed by the history mystery but they are happening, going to happen. Yes there she goes! Wasn’t that fucking obvious. I knew it!

Like the onset of flu. Like malaria.

This prophecy doesn’t come from my own private soul, oh no not from that little IPOD which is all too busy misdirecting my body into its perennial fatal stupidities, which unsuccessfully fight off, as usual, all the clichés and useless life skills injected into its soul’s DNA to try to live forever.

No, it is from the colourless spirit. From way outside. It is from my soul’s infinate boss saying ‘This is the time of the great Satan, you little wanker, watch out what you are doing.’

Then it says ‘Take a look at this. And I see an avalaunche on a thousand little feet skating silently down the mountain, tress snapping before it, snow billowing. It is half the mountain and it is leaving behind a grey and silver flecked emptiness on the remains. The avalanche goes down into the lake, without a wave it disappears but a wave does come up the other side of the valley freezing into cream all the tress there and connecting them with filaments of gold in a setting sun. And a voice says: "of all the kingdoms of the world…"’

I turn on the TV. Someone is saying that we are fighting against those who hate freedom and our way of life.

the thing about every mystery

The thing about every mystery is that with time it becomes a fact. So with my dad we made one when we both said at once that was the second time we heard that sound.
For him the first was in the evening, a damp evening when the birds were weary across the fields just moaning those birds. That was ’27.

For me it was in the desert night crisp, dirty wind and really ball grabbing cold before a call came saying just ignore that sergeant. That was this year. March I think. A month before I came home.

Next day when we got settled a couple of guys from down the street were on the news filling in time from a remote spot with a news reporter from Memphis before the weather came on when one said he thought it was a barge hitting the wall and the other said yaw, it sounded like an explosion.

Dad said yaw, that’s certainly nearly right. He is eighty something now but he can still talk like a school teacher. He said he heard it better than them cause our house was nearer the levee than theirs. He said it fucking was an explosion just like the one in ‘27 when they blew the dyke and flooded us all out. Except it was just us kids and old folks on poor farms then. Were mainly in shacks not like now. Was because they wanted to lower the river before it got to Garden City or into the French Quarter.

I said that I thought it was like an explosion too. I said that to dad when I was checking the fridge the last time. It sounded just like that one that blew up the pipeline and I remember I thought wow that’s the shit hitting the fan and then I saw it was the contractors truck nearby and they done it, then the call came saying forget it. The line was empty anyway. Then the next day the news went on that the prices had gone up at home again because of the terrorists. It was that same sound.

a winter journey home

Red Nile excerpt 4: flying planes can be dangerous

The plane seemed to rise up with a jerk. A silence churned behind his suddenly plugged ears. The plane seemed to be floating, even frozen.

Hank wanted to think something, anything, of his family, his father, his wife and his son. He wanted to think anything of how he felt. But he couldn’t. Instead he thought of another law.

The individual is made up of collections of false memory of false morality built on failed love.

As the plane tipped and descended, Mr. Gunn-Phitre settled back in his seat to enjoy the rarefied sensation that comes to certain experienced travellers, such as he was himself, in potential disasters. Hank had gone asleep or flown to the moon. Where was Hank? Gunn-Phitre answered: the moon.

While flying in general, and in airplanes in particular, especially those which were crashing, Mr. Gunn-Phitre always felt with satisfaction the perfect concentration of all his skills and
knowledge into one powerful frozen force coiled like a tornado.

At last his mind wasn’t being underutilised. His thinking became absolutely, yes, infinitely lucid and his imagination magically concrete. He would get out of course, wait and see, but not just yet. He would savour this moment. Why not. It was exquisite. It was like driving past someone else’s accident. Someone who drove the same model car as your lover. But it wasn’t them inside.

It was you.

Red Nile excerpt 3: Ardfert

This was for those monks the boundary of the world. It was the edge of creation. It was as far as they could get. The stormy sea was like the blazing desert, it was the place where there was nothing between them and God. Or between them and Satan. The headquarters in Ardfert sent people out in small boats after the stormy season to check which of the saints were alive and which were dead and to collect their visions and their dreams.

Red Nile excerpt 2: desert encounter

'Just smell that desert, Mohammed! It’s wonderful, clear and clean, like the aroma of stars. Ah, this cold wind, blowing invisible dust into the night. It is so empty here. Road and sky. It is getting cooler, isn’t it? I should roll up the window. The moon is brighter too.’ Hank stuck his head from the window. ‘What is that ahead?’ He stiffened and slowed.

Beside the road sat a black animal. A dog. It was larger than the car. Twice as large. Bluish teeth shone at its muzzle and green eyes followed them unblinking as they went by. It seemed to have many toes. Its arms were hairless. A smell of honey and burnt pork quickly filled the car and lingered.

Mohammed said nothing. Hank turned and focussed on the road ahead. Neither looked back. After several minutes, Hank wiped his nose. The smell was gone. He rolled up the window.

‘We believe that there are only men, saints and djinns in the world,’ said Mohammed. ‘Nothing else. Not ghosts, not spirits, not monsters.’ His voice was steady but dry, raspy.

‘It is a big desert,’ said Hank. ‘It goes through Libya and beyond. It goes south to the mid-Sudan. There must be many things in it.’

‘There are only natural illusions,’ said Mohammed. ‘We are taught that. We believe in nothing else.’

‘I heard there are meadows of yellow molten glass in the dunes,’ said Hank.

‘I saw it too,’ came a hoarse voice from the back seat. Mohammed gasped and sat upright.

yonder

I don’t care, New Orleans. The only thing worth caring about is the infinite reach of our mind through galaxies and the meandering of the Holy Spirit dispensing freedom. And besides I was arrested there on a noisy street sleeping in a stolen Thunderbird.

But not for the Thunderbird. It was for suspicion, suspicion mind you, of the murder of someone I never found out the name of.

Arrested with me were David-Michael-Zeke -- the guy with three sets of identities -- and “fish eyes” who may have had a vitamin deficiency or perhaps a hormone chaos of some sort. They were sleeping in the Thunderbird too and were both as white as me on a black street under neon.

I feel some peace now that this street is under five feet of standing water but you can still loot the top shelves from the liquor store. I have a greater peace that something big is returning the city to the gulf and the people in it to a continent of smell, death and humid survival.

I have nothing against them. In fact I know some. There was the self-described former senator , drunk and chronically pukey but with a good straw hat, torn a bit thrown into the cell with me and the others and released early. Not like us. There was the cheerful guard who said he had pissed on our worm sandwiches. He had spat in the Toxic Tang.

The bloody marine released without charge in the morning before we were is maybe still in the National Guard, somewhere else or who maybe now is there “helping” the ten thousand poor people locked up in the stadium ready for deportation for their own good to prevent looting treasures in the black city from those tall buildings with the emergency generators still on to keep their logos burning. The logos are reflecting on the rising water. Is this how the whole thing will end -- in floating shit?

I was released in the morning after the last minute attempt, a reduced charge from murder down to vagrancy, was dropped. I had ten bucks. They never got on to David-Michael-Zeke. They never got on to the Thunderbird. They hadn’t heard of the place on the plates. Manitoba, where the fuck is that? Might as well be Bongo Land.

So all the rest of us were released with contempt. We three whites and ten thousand others who were arrested that night for suspicion. Out for the time being. I was advised to leave the city and the state. To evacuate. The judge did not understand my accent. He thought that when I said “not guilty” I was asking for orange juice. He told me that this was no time for that. That is how far I was away from home. He told me himself I was too far. The cops asked if I was one of those Cuban niggers. They said I should go back to Africa with them. I actually did that. Just as he said. Just as I was told.

The others, like now, went on to their promised land.

That old Holy Spirit is flooding the mind with analogy. Other places. Animals two by two, the spires of Atlantis. Bombed, flooded , drowned, covered in locusts, burnt and scattered into the desert. Blasting through a nebula on a million tortured comets. The neurons of something prophetic.

No, I don’t care, and this is a terrible thing because once I did so much.

Death's Doors Excerpt 1: a landscape

‘Like every Canadian,’ the uncle proposed, ‘he has three discernable natures. All without evil. Often without interest as well.’

‘There is a formless general Canadian social nature, nearly inert, but busy when it decides to be busy, creating little intricate smug parochial hierarchies and gibbering about pleasant simple dichotomies, saying nice things but saying them insincerely wherever it goes. I saw a lot of this in my newspaper office. This first nature seeks middle things and desires good feelings in everyone. It is not deep and certainly not to be trusted to make sense.

‘It has no discrimination. But it will discriminate. It will decide things; it can have opinions like to not like Toronto but rather like Vancouver, not like the country but adore the city, not want to work in the government but rather in a small business one day, but not in the sales department or accountancy, it would prefer to be a teacher. Not an American idea in its head. Or so it thinks. No, not ever that. Not ever a banal cultural warrior thought, a stupid know-it-all idea. Not a plotter against humanity. Not refined but a good teller of wise anecdotes and tortuously polite.’

The uncle, who had written a novel on the war dead and had had a collection of his articles published as well as a textbook, elaborated on the second nature provided to each Canadian by their massive expanse of empty landscape. It was their nature.

Maybe a Canadian hadn’t seen any of the expanse or landscape, but he knew it was there. It was the one thing that made him the most smug and talkative. He thought it trumped everyone else’s myths. For this big expanse he expected universal awe. As for himself, he was blinded to most of any features of any other place except by facile comparison. Landscape ate their minds, those Canadians. It was a landscape that swallowed most of the stories about it, made them into cartoons and cute fairytales. A not-known space, not even one imagined adequately.

essay on true literature

C’mon now, be serious! All literature is only writing that is both derivative and unique. At the same time. That’s all it is. If it is just the one or just the other it isn’t literature. It is just writing.

And another thing. It is an object. It has to be somewhere. If it is scanned, it is just scanned literature. And I’ll tell you why.

It is all in the history of the thing. Recently it has all been in the history of publishing and marketing. Literature as part of production and markets. Before that it has been projections from places and professions. Like priests, universities, magis and prisons. Graveyards and generals. That sort of thing. Establishments and celebrities. Literature as part of the positions of knowledge. A membership.

Before that it was just the stuff from those putting onto objects. Stuff that came from songs and images. I don’t mean the words and pictures. That’s just writing. I mean the songs and images. Even stick people or humming.

They were objects to use to try to move thinking and feeling and so enliven the outside and inside. The ones that worked, that was going to be literature. They started to add to the original derivatives some of that uniqueness and some carried over uniqueness to that new derivative. Before that everything just moved in the mind and in the world without literature all the way back to the original mind and body.

With literature you are not trying to just stimulate readers. Yes you need those for literature too; they are part of it.

No, not tying to excite or please them. That’s just writing. Nope, you’re also trying to work with them to get to something somewhere. Move it around a bit. Get it to work again if it isn’t.

But what about stuff that isn’t in the history of literature? Is it literature too? I ask you that seriously! And I’ll tell you why I do. I have a book here, I don’t know who wrote it, written in pencil as a copy of something which my friend read before he went away and died. I haven’t had the time to read it myself.

It’s called ‘1001 Tales by the Exile in Dementia.’

Is it literature?

He said it was really, really good.

what about the game?

I have met lots of Canadians who leave Canada both to find wars and to find peace (only a few to 'make' peace). You immigrated to Canada because there was a kill-off of class , tribe or nation somewhere.... the kids go back and out as a kind of deathly fun. To get away from the community and do something for real. Recently people came and still do come in to get away from wars. Recently the kids go out and back again. There are rings of peoples in every town. There are kids of immigrants in every agency.

I am just being stroppy about Magic Mountain. I have got annoyed with Faustus, creature of the state. They are both about art and politics and death one is centered on people, one on image.. Stroppy, stroppy me.

What about the game? What about madness? You think you are depressed. Ha!!!!

some sort of descent

Red Nile excerpt 1: a death

The winter winds had been born in the central desert; there they divided into spinning arms each hundreds of miles long. The weakest scythed into West Africa attracted by pressure troughs in the Atlantic. In Nigeria they became the dirty, dry, maddening, endlessly blowing Harmattan. The strongest arms broke away, rotated, divided and then divided again to spin across the desert north to Cairo in a chaos of gust and squall.

From southern Assuit to Cairo many of the winds spilled down from the desert plateau into the narrow valley cut by the Nile. From over the rooftops in Cairo they descended into the streets in moaning pulses that exploded on the ground into torrents of fine, dry, drenching sand that instantly covered the oven lid, transforming it to a brown mound.

From Cairo, the winds bubbled on across the delta to swirl over the sea. When they reached the beaches, the winds quickened, passing over the waves as beige and yellow clouds. As the clouds rose, hammers of clear air smashed into the sea mist. Some of the squalls bounced on the pressure and incoming sea breezes to return to shore in small wet furies.

The weather caused wild wave patterns down the Nile. From Assuit through to the delta and to the sea feluccas and tourist boats were rocked. On the Mediterranean into the Ionian Sea the waves were tumultuous at the mouths of the small harbours and bays. In Albania they blew from the port of Vlora over the mountain passes to Gramsch.

In Egypt trailing gusts drove the surfaces of marshes, lagoons and wetlands over coastal roads and into delta towns. The windowless cement hut in Raz El Bar where the dead engineer had holidayed before he retired was flooded. The waters left patterns of shards of cracked shells on the street in front of it. The road to the hut was littered with heaps of rubbish and piles of dead birds woven with reeds and small stones.

The evening before, the only fishing boat that had risked a trip out from the port of Raz El Bar had difficulty threading the narrow opening between concrete abutments to get back into the harbour. It surfed in high on the swells from the deep water, its hold empty, moving sideways until turning sharply, almost at right angles just as it reached the narrow harbour entrance. The boat hovered there an instant, seemingly on the spray and in the sky. It then jerked itself around, turning, keeling over, and knifed in close to tipping, with its masts at acute angles to the sea. The boat righted at the last moment, hurled into the calm inner harbour on a dying wave, scraping its sides on the jetty behind the seawall.

Because of this, the fish stall next to the cigarette cart in the Cairo street, the fish stall run by the family from Raz El Bar, was not to open on the morning of the explosion. There were no fish. The stall for cigarettes had therefore set up in its place.

On the other side of the Mediterranean blown sand descended over tourists in Delphi to their astonishment. Sand clouds were seen over the water opposite Vlora. They obscured from two Italian patrol boats a ship crammed with women and children which had below decks an additional cargo of newly manufactured small arms and ammunition. The arms would be landed secretly and then, as arranged, travel on across Europe to Ireland by railroad and ferry. Others would go on to West Africa. Police in several countries would exchange information about the markings on the barrels.

Hailstones fell on Jerusalem and some screaming howling was heard in the sewers under the souks in Alexandria.

To the proprietor of the Cairo market cart, the man who had pulled a cart from his home four kilometres away each dawn to this street for ten years, the man who had now just moved the cart slightly away from his usual place in order to be in a better spot, a lovely spot just where the fish cart usually was, the fish cart owned by the Raz El Bar family who had not come this morning as they had no fish, to this cart proprietor the sudden death of the retired engineer was miraculous. The death composed itself to him first as a note from an invisible instrument, as a sudden unfamiliar castanet sound, a drumming clatter, and a harsh wet whisper blended into one.