Sunday, December 18, 2005
other editors
Other editors and publishers are reminded that pieces taken from this blog should be acknowledged. Those taken elsewhere and credited can be removed from this blog on arrangement.
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Definitions
الحياة
دماء متكررة
خبرات وقوانين لم نتعلمها بعد
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
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؟
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)
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
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/
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?
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?
Monday, December 05, 2005
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.
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.
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?
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?
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?
Saturday, December 03, 2005
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.
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.
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