tomfool

I have no strategy or preferences. I am only needy. The main thing is I like readers. Love them, hate them. That's why I do stuff now.

But there are problems. One is that I have no place. I never chose a spot or a context. I just went promiscuously from one landscape to another, one discourse to another. I have origins but no place. Therefore no network, no magnifiers, no social capital, no machine.

The other is that my craziness about authenticity means I have no way, at a very late date and age, of allowing editing anywhere near me. I have thirty years of notes and a recently released imagination, so I am unusually prolific, although not on a yearly average. And I just don't let anything catch up. Not book making, not anything. In this, I write through people, a kind of resonating, despite the plan. I am the worst kind of writer. Not the tiniest bit elitist, not an aspirant genre monopolist, always leaping, leaping, around.

Even though that all is true, due to my story, it does leave that story, a strange story, which is strange to market. I'm not an outlaw academic, an urban contrary, an abused middle class survivor. I'm an old deported guy, years in the bush who, like Alice, has, bemused, come home having missed the entire narrative of the century, accompanied by the white rabbit, talking in tongues and completely detached from mainstreet perspectives.

I need a Tom Fool editor and a network.

I sent a book, The Bush, to a big New York publisher, or at least my son did, and they wrote back saying that it had got to the final committee or something. I may be in a few slush piles. I ain't someone sent down from Oxbridge so slush it is. And I don't fit any small press house styles that I know.

Need a tomfool agent or editor, need discovery. I need someone to make a project of the collected works (now in the garage or on the hard drive).

review

The book is by Jon Halliday and Jung Chang.

I think it illustrates that Mao can be read, in addition to having aspergers, as having a simplifying iq bound to the will of a narcissistic personality disorder, that is, the attitude that the only narrative is theirs, that their rightness or their wrongness is always the issue, and that blaming comes in a process which comes before the situation is analysed.

It is also intersting that the guerrilla war things he did were really ways of avoiding risk and commitments that he could be judged on later, and that he could judge others on later, i.e. a leap to the sidelines.

When not doing that he advocated simple chaos and reversals of sense to take ownership of the order to follow.

His adherence to Marxism is like an adherence to Ezra Poundism. You say whatever you think it is that justifies your literal self.

It took an apocalypse for people to believe that, and a coterie of other personalities seeking daddies.

I think it is a great murderous fear of an undergrad student gone monstrous. A mommy's boy with no mommy. It seems that a narrow world, confined to his owm bed, was needed justified by denying the legitamacy of the rest. Competitive with reality.

And let's face it, a bad poet.

God, narratives, when will we be free of them!

ladders

There are degrees of some things, sort of ladders or levels of incarnation. This is in my favorite book.

Did you ever get blamed for something the cat did? The usual thing is knocking over a Christmas tree or cracking a TV screen. Isn't it?

Those happened to me with Zorro, my second and third cats.

The first Zorro got jammed in a factory chimney, it was mad for crows, and caused a combined atom bomb, UFO alert in Ottawa South for which I was not blamed.

Zorro the third tried to bring down a gazelle leaping in fear during a program on Serengeti.

Zorro the second was after a blinking light on the tree.

Those are some of my direct experiences of degrees of false accusation.

The first one for me was an accusation of atheism, even of being in league with the devil, in order to spoil Christmas. That was me and that was my motive in that particular world.

It made sense. The tree had fallen on the booze table and the sparks woke gran who thought it was the Germans again and hit dad who then awoke too saying out loud an ancient curse which may have been what burnt the so-called turkey.

The second time, the TV one, resulted in a complicated accusation of communist inspired economic and cultural sabotage calculated by a devious mind towards destruction of the nuclear family.

Mom took one look at that cracked TV and said 'either the TV goes or you go. Which do you think I will decide? I can't afford to fix up both'. She was referring to her continued psychologist bills while reaching for the front door security baseball bat.

'Don't blame the fucking cat you little communist devil" she said.

Another similar, but a higher degree, of false accusation, was experienced by those firemen in Baghdad yesterday.

They were answering an emergency call to control a market fire, including a problem of some still burning people, caused by a suicide bomb.

They were pulled over on their way while riding in their new aid gifted, rehabilitation of the nation, fire truck by American troops , and after being unable to prove they were not fleeing the fire and had not hi-jacked the truck, were shot. Four of them. Shot dead.

The difference in degree so illustrated is Gnostic. I feel some empathy therefore. I lived on earth in Canada. I experienced a metaphor of identity death. They lived in hell and got the real thing.

And who created their hell on earth? Don't blame the cat.

The law of sense and mind applies to Iraq.

The law of sense and mind is that we all really know what the truth is in our souls, the truth of what is really happening and we all know what needs to be done in our hearts.

We know this even if we live in the rainbow light at the base of a shit colored prism looking through it searching for the cat that's gone to blame.

We know, but won't usually see beyond that to know more that there is between us and what we know a prism made by those minions of Ultreye who rule the present world order.

The law of sense has a 'corollary of silly ideas' which is that those who have them will hold on to them forever unless they become accountable for their implementation by forfeiture of their butts.

Tony Blair and Baby Bush cannot be tried for war crimes in their own countries. There are degrees of true accusations, and thoughtful legislation has already been passed in their own homelands to put into place those diabolical degrees of blamelessness.

But they can be if they go to Canada. They can be if they visit Rwanda for that matter. Check that out if you wish at the same time you can check out the story of the fireman above and the other stories elsewhere of rape burning party wager games, snuff movies and so on, that may even now be emerging through the prism of your news.

Here's more. British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq are now signing separate peace agreements with local insurgents, including 'Islamo- Fascists' and, in Hellman province, with the underground representatives of the people, including Taliban.

Canadian troops should be encouraged to do the same in their areas and avoid the development of degrees of participation in war crimes of the sort for which they became world famous in Somalia with their Viet Nam derivative and Disneyland inspired helicopter questioning. They do not want to suffer a degree of false accusations emanating from the top of the ladder to hell.

have made my peace. It will remain at it until I am wronged. I have not made a peace with terrorists but I have no instrument I have faith in to rely on to secure me from them except myself, friends and family. I recommend you and your pets to do both of the same. Then the trials can begin.

I will try to get my tenant's association to make peace and my street, Hyde Vale, too. We will also get a sign, I hope, that terrorists are not welcome on pain of death, nor are the bloody tree nappers at Christmas time (Gnostic New Year). We also should get larger speed bumps.

And a feeding station for cats, a species I have never blamed and certainly if I had ever once even a little have long ago forgiven for I never, ever expected them not to be cats. I knew what they were.

I did expect more of Americans and do of fellow Canadians though. Maybe Canada should make separate peace? Or it too should dissolve, at least culturally to avoid association and blame. And the ladder.

costume parties

Costume Parties

In the cosmology I adhere to Halloween is the beginning of three significant days. On Halloween the souls of all the dead who were sinners, and not saints that’s the next day,, are released by a guy who I’ll explain below, to scurry all over the earth to search for their graves. If they call on you, you must feed them.

The next significant day is Christmas. That is when the souls and separate memories of dead family return home invisibly, or partially visibly, in various sizes, and moods. They don’t come back the way you remember them. They come back home literally. That is partially what was going on in Bethlehem.

In my area, a quite parochial one, you laid stones from where the dead were buried to your door. They are supposed to rest on the stones as they come slowly painfully to your house. But some say it is because there memories of the way are so different.

The dead participate in the holiday feasts, the ones held to give a positive characterisation to what is really going on, and even tell jokes or alternatively break up relationships , cause fights and settle scores by introducing deadly gossip.. You must feed them.

Those who rise and see no stones can go anywhere. Those who were murdered and buried, perhaps secretly, may lay their own stones to their killer’s door. Rejected lovers can do a similar thing with splintered bone.

If you can’t lay stones, say your dead are in another country you put out a candle and hope for the best.

The final day is Valentines Day. That is when the souls go back to their other place. Between Christmas and Valentines Day they all have been doing as they wish. Some observe wars; some go back to school, some hold hands with others and whip up winds. Some cause diseases.
Anyway that is the cosmology.

A lot of the very important memory objects I have are associated with Halloween. It is when things happen. I have been in an intense struggle with my memory lately. One reason is that I have reached a point where I am remembering more than I am forgetting. This is very uncomfortable. It is uncomfortable because the other thing is that like most people I believe my memory more than any so-called truth presented by academic quacks or loo narratives. Like most people I regard myself entirely spiritually, no matter how I see others and how hard I pretend not to. Everyone secretly believes they live an entirely spiritual life and they justify their actions in that context. Their memory is a record of that in images. In that respect it is a form of poetry. It can be a kind of writing too where the inner integrity is to record the actuality of the images and their relationships, and not mess that up with an imposed external narrative structure or sets of associations.

So at this time of year I regularly revise my obituary in anticipation of Halloween. It is a kind of retrospective New Year’s resolution. I recommend this exercise to everyone. The one I chose last year was Beshkati in style. It said: 'He struggled all his live with immortality and lost gloriously. He struggled with infallibility and lost consistently. Let him be forgotten and rest in peace.” I’ll say that when they come knocking with their infernal jokes wearing their funny guises.

2.
In this context it is appropriate to enter once again into the eternal question ‘who is dat guy anywho?

I will start with the Tar Baby. For those of you who don’t know the Tar Baby it don’t matter. The only necessary context is that I am talking about a fundamental B’rer Rabbit apocrypha.
B’rer rabbit is an avatar of dat guy. He represents the other, and in some instances precisely the other, to dominant narratives. But it is deeper than that.

B’rer rabbit pleads with his enemies every time they catch him not to throw him into the briar patch. He describes the briar patch as a place of great horror. A place of darkness and doom. He is so oppositional to them they always do throw him there.

That is where he lives.

B’rer rabbit made the Tar Baby. The Tar Baby is just that kind of fat black squirming baby that you want to touch. But B’rer Rabbit pleads with you not to. So you do and you get stuck there with your senses tarred over sucked in with the struggling lumps of the other fools.

B’rer Rabbit can be Friar Tuck, the apocrypha Friar Tuck who waits by the stream like a Templar to offer to carry poor sinners across. Then on the other side he hits you with a stick and makes you carry him back as the stream widens and widens.

Or that scorpion. You know the scorpion who swears to the crocodile that he will not hurt him but rather help him if only the crocodile carries him over that same stream. At the other side, to the protest of the dying, stung, crocodile the scorpion says ‘what did you expect I meant anyway, I am only a scorpion.’

But he is Loki, the joking, pesky, nearly fallible, almost evil human, truth telling uberdivinity called ‘the liar’ by all the Goddesses and Gods. Dat is the one who was so precise in imagery and characterisation of everyone in Valhalla that Odin sewed up his moth with catgut. But the words still came.

And there is the one called Satan in that complete fantasy of Christianity deranged Victorian banalogues. I mean though the real guy who met the real Jesus at the edge of the wilderness just after Jesus had been there meditating, perhaps on his obituary, maybe on taking up a career as a performance poet, for forty days.

I know exactly the spot. Others do as well as there were witnesses at the time and the whole thing was recorded. The spot is on the top of a cut in the canyon wall of the desert plateau overlooking Assuit. Near there are caves in which various mystics, including the poor guy proscribed by Emperor Theodosius, and whose followers were massacred like the Cathars were later, caves where those mystics through the centuries thought about the encounter, remembered it, recalled it and some wrote about it, or even re-enacted it in the realm of imagination and memory. There are some there now.

Jesus had gone back to Assuit inspired by some nostalgia when, seeming to all as a basically unemployed carpenter and mason; he had reached a career crisis. Assuit was where he and his mom and dad lived after fleeing from Bethlehem, having not been registered in Herod’s fatal death cult tax net. In Assuit, Jesus had learned his P’s and Q’s from Philo, the Jewish neo-Platonist travelling tutor and carpentry and masonry from his dad. Jesus went there to hang out for awhile in the old hometown and visit the desert as you do when you are in Assuit. He wanted to chill.

But dat guy, Satan, Loki, B’rer Rabbit, whoever , met him at the desert edge and pointing down to Assuit in the Nile Valley, its only three miles wide there, and said first how is it going guy? Got your gig figured out? Know what 'cher gonna do?

Then he said ‘how would you like all the kingdoms of the world, you can have them, the whole lot if you just forget your origins a little. Let go fellow, live a little.’

The last bit was just a diversion. What few realise, but the witnesses do, are that, let us call him Satan, and did not himself (or herself) want the bloody kingdoms of the world. And isn’t interesting that he was in charge of them then? All the kingdoms of the world run by that guy. He was the boss.

But Dat guy didn’t want the job. He wanted Jesus’ life. He wanted it then and the gig to be. He wanted the rep. He wanted to wander around in the desert and meditate. He wanted to ride on asses backs, he wanted to have a virgin mom, he wanted to curse God on the cross and rise from the dead, and he wanted to be a rung in the great trialectics of life. He wanted to be the magi. He wanted in fact to trick ol’ Jesus into taking a load off his back. He wanted to trick him into touching the Tar Baby. Into seeing what that kind of shit was really like. He wanted him to be the real son of God to take off the mask and put on the costume.

So what really happened next? Do you think back home in the briar patch on the other side of the stream he will start to talk straight?

texts about aspergers (verse one)

Texts About Aspergers

1.

A Serious Poem About Aspergers.
(Not, for example, for Ass purgers)

As a buzzy
you haven't seen
fragmented windows
reflect reverse thoughts

of a Frisbee changing direction
at a glance to
mirror the sense of harbour seals
and the perverse madness of ants
cold water empathy reflecting

cold fantasy and sunbeam
jokes at essences of terror
floating over the park in broken verses
revealing drops in the water

mimicking pains shattering against
orders of poetry and lost in
the behaviour of black light
of air born sea animals

and gusting laughter
silent under circling
beauties of mind
embracing absolutely particular
chaos.

reminder

If you are reading this, please read the archives -- it is all novel.

the wedding

The Wedding
to Umana bint Kualib

West Indies Packet to Montreal
With news about two weeks before Christmas
But six weeks travelling

About effects
Of the promulgation of the doctrine
Seven years before that in Rome

Precisely
In Chile, December eight,
Eighteen sixty five
At the Church of La Compana where
Three thousand two hundred seven
Ladies of the higher classes

Declared virgins, are praying
For Immaculate Conception
Young ladies

and a few men with
the poorer with children
in back

Those richer
Declared in front
without
but one to be revealed

The month for the Virgin
Is ending, a miracle is coming
Everyone knows.

In a Church festooned
With twenty thousand lights
Large candles crescenting
At the foot of Mary

Communicating fire to her draperies
Spreading to all parts
To rain from the roof
In great drops

Escape blocked with outside rescuers
And the men
climbing over the poor

The ladies falling in all directions
Arms torn from bodies into heaps
Roof and steeple cascading

After fifteen minutes only
wall shards remain
climbing upwards
over two thousand black bodies

Upwards of twenty cartloads were removed
by Christmas

And this news arriving
to a declared fiancé in Montreal
far after that Christmas
when he was secretly
made a priest.

the image that fills

Sneaking Rimbaud back again too you guys?

How he loved sea journeys,
high banked empty overland in
bubbled green mountain on animal back.

Java, Harar.
Arrive and run, turn

live in fever
write nothing in
some other arms

Think about distance
the image that fills space
between

the development of style

...the development of style and the measure of originality paradoxically came from the transcendence of self by killing the ego in all its forms--symbolic, real, complementary and oppositional. It came from both the destruction of the false narrative of self, which was inevitably cliche, and by the confrontation of the dead other, the frozen memory of the word deflated and dropping into oblivion. By the architecture of that. By the projections of self sitting and mocking, like birds on a wire. To transcend and destroy self and to flee from the dead memory of the world, one had to see the fear and kill it. This was difficult when your tools were only imagination and action based on that. What happened first you knew is that confronting fear brought memory to life and originality. It connected with the deadly other. The ego quivered. It desired passionately the shelter of cliche and stereotype diving into them like an ostrich into the ground. In its fear and morbid desire it could no longer laugh, love or anything as the energy for this came from outside, from the senses, from the coordination with the mind from the other's electrifying of the imagination. But it desired that love.


-This is an excerpt from the short story 'RE: CANADA BANANA', which appears in the upcoming book: RE: THE DEAD ARTS -- THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF RICHARD RATHWELL.

summary of the political program of the party of gnosis (bektashi)

1 To begin at the final point, anyone who says that they represent a group with any identity at all is a fraud.

2. To go on, anyone who says they have correct ideas is a charlatan.

3. It is proposed that the world requires continuous regime change from the smallest association up to the gates of heaven without exception.

4. Any growing institution should be dissolved into component parts or even smaller and nicer ones. This includes superpowers into deserts, forests and mountains.

5. A general compulsory disarmament is proposed beginning with the elimination of the reasons for arms. Mental disarmament should generally precede political disarmament.

6. There is nothing wrong with boundaries of any sort.

7. Social privilege should be based on social investment including that of the generations.

8. Basic individual needs being met and exceeded should be the only responsibility of the collective endeavour.

9. Continuous incivilities are punishable by death

10. Violations of sustainability are punishable by death.

11. Privacy should be left alone.

12 Any wealth not destined for public culture or social investment is theft.

13. There is no excuse to harm a child

13. Everything else is also to be ultimately unregulated.

summary of bektashi definitions

Summary of Bashkati Definitions

History: Is what didn’t happen

Identity : (of a person or group) is what they definitely are not, never were and are not becoming

Memory: Is the other way of saying what is happening now

Apocalypse: is the usual thing

Narrative: erases truth

Image: disguises beauty

Poetry: precedes science

Love: is the enemy of empathy

Destiny: is a dead end.

interview

Excerpts from Birthday Interview with Richard Rathwell

BOP: On what did you base your book 'Red the Nile, Blue the Hills'?

RR: The original idea is taken from some translations I did myself from Rimbaud’s Ethiopian poems. There was also his journal of his trip to Java which a copy of is in my family. Like all of my novels it is a road trip mainly of images. In a previous novel I took the images from false primitivist painting. In this one it is from images done by artists whose religion restricts them from representation. It is also a true story.

BOP: Many have said the poems in your Book ‘Poems from the Beak’ are bossy and didactic. Some say they are ‘know it all’. Did you do that on purpose?

RR: I would prefer that to being called Aspergers prematurely. In fact the poems are adapted from poems written in the youth of one of the characters in my novel ‘Borderline: Casebook Translations'. The book depicts several identities psychologically as they are seen by each other. It is a prequel to a Fleuve Roman. The Beak is a central character. She and the others all have casebooks published elsewhere. I contacted and visited all the characters recently, fifty years after the events to see what they were doing now. The Beak was the only one I couldn’t find. I don’t know where she is. Some of her poems won awards but she is largely forgotten. Yes she did know it all.

BOP: Another thing that is said, frankly, is that you write as though you hate readers.

RR: I have loved all the readers I have initially written for. Really. I have made many of them characters. I try to do authentic witness. To do this I write in such a way as to avoid as much usual structure and reference as I can, I don’t mean stereotypes and clichés but everything that comes with you. I write slowly when it was hot. I just want to stay on the trip and see what appears there without leaving it for some dreaming. It is hard to do honestly and keep at it no matter how simple and uncharged it is or askew with syntax. It isn’t fun. Like when I realised I had seen a twenty foot high dog in the desert and then forgotten it because I was in the midst of an argument on Literature, or what I actually did when friends were murdered. Now I am writing by going through communities and reflecting them. So the discourse is developmental. It isn’t entertainment. It isn’t just processing by form. It is to get something. It requires participation a bit .

BOP: Is your writing political? Some of it seems to be a defence of gangster states. This has been read in the collection ‘Death’s Doors.’, and in some of the poetry in “One Poem Forward, Two Poems Back"

RR: No. What has been read as political is really an ironical celebration of death and banality meant to bugger it up for something nicer. The other necessary thing is that it does entirely compose an epic, a kind of Fleuve Roman in which the distances between the soul, spirit and body are getting greater. The boundaries are getting more detached. That means the connections are more intense. So it sounds as though the world is at stake. It isn’t. You’ll see this in ‘Re: The Dead Arts 'coming out soon.

BOP: Did you mean just now to disrespect Aspergers persons? That is reprehensible!

RR: My record on the question of Aspergers Syndrome is clear. I have written positively on what it would be like if Aspergers ruled the world. I have also written a factumentary called “Tim and Dorothy” which highlights an actual incidence where this was planned. The proceeds from that go to the Asperger’s Liberation Front.

BOP: so what is next for you, Richard?

RR. I will continue my publishing venture but expand the list beyond the present authors to include the best of dissonant writing. I want it to be an oasis against narrative, especially international narrative which is part of an attempt to get just one. One new initiative is an e-magazine; becoming eventually hard copy called ‘Trek Report’ this is to give voice for new writing of epics, in mind and on ground. The epic has gone missing mainly because of parochial and memoirist writing and the web. The existing ‘Partisan Diary’ will still be a place for the substantial olden times anti-avant garde stuff like “Cows of Freedom “ and “Thought Materials”. I will continue to campaign as I did recently by putting the Sunday Times before the press complaints committee for hate crimes against the development of genocidal absurdities like the United Nations becoming the Mid-Wife of war, the United Kingdom becoming a failed state, the restriction of rights to regime change only to Moslem countries, the development of theories of exchange in the killing of children or of moral equivalencies in chemical warfare, the fact that aid programs are designed to increase famine, the complete destruction of a sustainable planet and so on. There is a public duty after all if only to animals and very short people.

qana

I propose the crushed Qana basement to be added to the album of images that endure to mark shifts of human narrative. It should be depicted with the one of the shot little brother in Soweto and the burned naked girl on that Vietnam road. But not quite Qana no. It isn't the right image exactly for there is no movement of children like in those others. The basement is collapsed and dark. The children are crushed and silent.

So pan the remembering eye rather to the storming of the Beirut UN building, to the attacking of its bullet proof glass with children's bicycle racks.

There died the illusions purchased with the blood of millions in the last century, the illusions which suggested a world where human rights were the core of governance and the illusions that solidarity would bind all communities, all peoples in peace. These illusions are dissolved into new images of smug and certain commentators, the equivalencies that say one dead child here is worth twenty dead ones there, the policy that makes war on lemon trees and old women with equal ferocity.

It is a measure of the recent degradation of the world imagination imposed universally, mainly by the United States government that all human rights (dreams) and all (fantasies of the) rules of law are now conditional. There will be no United Nations. Only one and the tribes. In fact communities are now replaced by realities of monstrous religious and ideological sectarianism organised as armed, irrational, death seeking, tribal polities. Self defence is the only way. I hate that.

And another measure of increased degradation is that a new guiltless con of destiny enjoyed with the narcotic of being a chosen elite has been resold to the American people, and to others, not as a soft golden future fable but as an ever-present grandstand cheer, a cheer illuminated by white phosphorous bombshells while babies burn on the Astroturf as the stadium sinks into the magma. The world's children must accept the game.

I swear it is easier for many to die now in a pack than to live as a human.

Let us make no mistake: imaginative changes both precede and follow real ones. And these changes are made in hell. The United States in this present avatar is in a terminal decline of mind and soul. A decline which matches its economic hysteria as its dying appetites eat themselves. The tipping point has tipped. This is a vision from no brain but from the repititious stomach fable of its right to eternal consumption.

It has deliberately degraded the world away from sense.

Qana shows that. There is no sense there. The present US wrote the script for Qana. It animated the Zionist polity it created against the Shiiite one it inspires in a rage of petulant infantilism. The US is the author of never-ending zoo games, sadism through the bars. It is now losing these games to the animals.

How did these children bring it upon themselves? The people in Beirut attacked the UN building as the idea of world peace and justice which had betrayed them, betrayed them as the Qana building collapsed onto their families. They were attacking failed reason. A dead narrative. They were attacking the senile servant who had drowned the children in the bath on instruction of the burgler. They were attacking the illusion of any solution but apocalypse.

They were revealing in their fury a world of peace only for victors, hope only for a final judgement, charity only to collect the needy for slaughter, rights to kill neighbour children, law for thieves.

They were attacking a new jungle world created by dissolution of all past coherence, a new terrible masquerade.

open letter

preliminary reading: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-2271185.html

Dear Sirs,

AA Gill on Albania (Sunday times July 23) begins by criticizing an inadequate stereotype and goes on to develop it further. He is to be commended on this. I am sure he has enhanced the ease of application of cheap simplicities and superficialities to immigration policy and to policing, something the country surely needs for purposes of its security quotas. In this respect Gill has made a contribution to literature. He has also helped enhance the condition where it is as easy to fill cells as it is for him to fill his column inches. And with the same amount of thought required.

What our country needs is more myopia, hyperbole and stereotype in regards to foreign places and people. It needs simpler scapegoats. Easier ones. It needs more banal symbols and analysis.

I should have liked Gill to describe more the evolution of the gangster state in the rubbish nation he has envisioned. Did this evolution happen the same way as Glasgow's? Did it come from dragon's teeth? From the devil's breath? From inferior DNA?

There is a poor country in the present somewhere struggling to rebuild from several disasters also called Albania. It is beautiful. Its people are clever and industrious. It can hold all the contrary generalizations to mister Gill's vision and more. It is also poignant, funny and interesting. But it isn't so easy to describe those things, except thoughtfully in several dimensions, no matter how true they are.

Doctors from that country treat your children. Air traffic controllers from there guide your planes. Herbs from there sit on on your roasts. You bought their shirts in a famous shop last week. That is not even to mention Illyrians and Butrint, or an increasing compliance to EU standards, or penetrations of Chinese and Indian markets the UK might be envious of. Be afraid. Be very afraid. They could marry someone's sister in a nice way.

From The Editor, The Sunday Times Magazine

Thank you for your correspondence in reply to AA Gill's article on his visit to Albania, which appeared in The Sunday Times Magazine on 23 July. Yours was not the only response and we will be publishing a representative sample of readers' letters in the newspaper this Sunday. In the meantime let me put the article in context.

The author AA Gill is widely recognised for his brand of provocative journalism and irreverent humour which he applies to a wide range of subjects; as a critic and as a commentator. He writes fearlessly impressionistic articles and although most readers recognise and are entertained by his perspective it can and does cause occasional offence to some who may not be familiar with his tone.

I can assure you that Albanians are not alone. Recently he wrote scathingly about the English: "I don't like the English; the lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd. I find England and the English embarrassing." We published that too.

It wasn't the worst - he went on to describe the English in much more disparaging terms and you can imagine some people were not amused. But most were. Our readers understand in the British, a trait for critical and self-deprecating humour and enjoy it enormously. It is a part of the British identity that Gill himself summed up as "Most people share a joke, the English aim them. The English constantly use their humour as an indiscriminate bludgeon. The English teeter on the edge of not being able to take anything seriously; the ability to be solemn, appropriate, reflective. I do it myself."

It is in this spirit that Gill visited and wrote about Albania, as he has, in the past written about Wales, Germany, Scotland and other countries. What most of our readers regard as broad-brushstroke British wit some see as offensive - it is not intended as offence or indictment. Our readers are far too sensible to assume one man's view is either the truth or the reality and the reaction of the large majority is to feel encouraged to find out for themselves. It provokes awareness, investigation and appreciation.

Naturally, one cannot visit a country and write about it and not address its image or stereotypes. And since you raised concerns about Gill's references to Albania's image abroad let me put that in context too. Albania's emerging democracy and economy requires tourism. Last year 16,000 British tourists visited Albania. More will do so this year with British Airways launching scheduled flights from London and the hotel infrastructure growing. Albania's government seeks to encourage this growth.

In writing about Albania it is impossible for any writer to ignore the facts - and those facts, sadly, include many negatives of which Albania and its citizens and nationals working abroad, must be too well aware and it is not this newspaper's practise to ignore unpalatable truths. Albania is "Europe's poorest country and faces a daunting range of challenges" says the British Department for International Development which has distributed over �35million in overseas aid to the country.

Those challenges include corruption at all levels, crime, gun and drug smuggling, the trafficking of immigrants, 'sex slaves' and children. None of these are Gill's assumptions but the result of investigation and research by internationally recognised bodies including concerned Albanian citizens.

Unicef says "trafficking, forced labour and commercial sexual exploitation are daily perils.�" Amnesty International reports that 40% of Albanian women are subjected to domestic violence and no specific legislation exists to protect them. The British Foreign Office advises against travel to many areas of Albania because of widespread gun ownership and crime. The US State Dept advises travellers to Albania "organised criminal gangs operate in all regions and corruption is pervasive. In most cases police assistance or protection is limited. It lists carjacking, gun crime, serious assault as serious enough to advise travellers to exercise extreme caution.

A senior Albanian academic who worked in government in Tirana has researched and referenced "the political class in Albania is generally of low quality and often involved in corruption and crime". The Centre For European Migration and Ethnic Studies has reported "the Albanian Mafia is considered the most powerful [criminal] organisation operating in Italy and that Albanians were responsible for all heroin smuggling into Switzerland and for drug trafficking into Austria, Germany, Hungary, Poland and Belgium.

Even Mjaft, an Albanian organisation that seeks to promote and foster international appreciation of the country, listed the following information on its website; 9,000 Albanian children trafficked for prostitution (Save The Children, 2001); 250,000 weapons in circulation (UN 2003).

That Albania is working with the international community to change this climate and the perceptions it enforces does not negate the very serious issues that confront the country and those that would seek to use it as a hub for international crime, money laundering, people smuggling.

In this climate it is understandable that hard-working, educated, God-fearing and responsible Albanians are acutely sensitive to any criticism of their country and fear being stigmatised and stereotyped. I can only apologise if you are one of those who felt that The Sunday Times Magazine was attempting to discredit a nation. It was not.

Perhaps attempting to contextualise and illustrate a country and the challenges it faces while emerging from decades of oppression, by employing a writer renowned for his acerbic wit and his observations, is a useful step in increasing international appreciation of Albania's problems.


Yours sincerely




Robin Morgan
Editor
The Sunday Times Magazine



Dear Sir

I am unhappy to see that you wish not only to defend racism but also bad writing. I have sent on the basis of your response to my initial letter a complaint to the press complaints commission and they have undertaken to investigate my complaint.

What Mr. Gill wrote was in effect a hate crime. I was bemused by this your editorial response and defense by attempting an analysis of social conditions in Albania and the style of Mister Gill. I, in fact, delivered a certain amount of the aid programs in Albania beginning in1992 through 2002 as the Director of various country programs. One of the greatest difficulties I had in getting resources to address the problems you outline below was due to the public depiction of Albanian as a sub-species by what are essentially racists like Mr. Gill.

Racism is the contention that some groups of people have inherent characteristics inferior to others. It is not a rational belief. It becomes a hate crime when the racist causes others harm. It is compounded when they wish to benefit themselves. Mister Gill has made a career with it as a travel writer and a low comic. But he only picks on targets he thinks he can attack with impunity.

Your job as editor is to make sure he is not breaking the law.

Bad writing is obvious. So, incidentally, is being patronizing and spinning. My complaint is about your defense, mister editor, not about Mister Gill's infantilism.

Yours,



Richard Rathwell

Blue Orange

ultraeye redux

Ultreye,
invisible guy, I see in red silver blue

In your middle playground in a tower
broadcasting holograms and text
to our compulsory receiver

Stuccoed songbird
In a perfect cage killed by sound
Of fat, fat bomb

A split plastic train
smiling and musical
In a deep stoney hole

All rational from Ultreye
Invisible guy

101st post

While me, I only believe that language is a field that has entrances from every world. I desire to find in that field ways my mind can go on journies out of the place encased.

I want witness. I want report and it is better about a kind of beauty, an image that is assembled as though for the first time true, even real. And it is in this life, connected.

I want to stay in a group playing in the field.

Don't mind the raw and jagged. The mysterious evil. The burst of blood.

There is the public work to do. The dividing of two into one. The getting out.

images will not be displayed

I just spoke to my one remaining political friend who suggested solutions to those missiles that theoretically could hit the United States. Theoretical weapons are a great danger to world peace. We have found this out to our cost in the last few years.

My friend pointed out that most of the anxiety in the world is caused by the United States. Such anxiety is provoking the development of theoretical weapons and the horrible consequences that follow. It is provoking hallucinations of freedom and sovereignty. It is provoking paranoia and resistance to being liberated. My friend suggested that the problem is a simple one to solve. It is only the institutions of the USA, its culture and social organisation which seem to be involved in the recent disruption, both in mind and body, in theory and practice, in the consolidation of world peace and in the quality of people’s lives. Easy peasy to solve.

The solution to this problem would be to first temporarily close the US borders to prevent egress. Then one would start a program to dissolve the United States into component parts. Vermont would be a good integrated place to dissolve into. Florida too. California also good in that sense; a self standing, sovereign, self reliant locality and narrative of California would be neat. But each new place would be very popular to its inhabitants especially to consolidate new liberated identities. Woodsman, surfer poet, peach grower, turtle racer.

The narrative of a metaphysical YouEssAy identity could be preserved. Why not? It is part of history, but only as a myth like Christianity and with many sects. There could be churches and community centres. But the troublesome institutions like the Army and NASA would be gone. The local identities could then work out new relations with each other and with the world. They could become beautiful and unique, pleasant, graceful little homelands.

The above solves the institutional problem. Next is the social problem. The main strategy in this regard is to outlaw the private ownership of weapons during the transition period. The government will issue official semi-automatic weapons to every adult before it dissolves to be used in the transition period. The last federal institution, the FBD, the Federal Bureau of Dissolution, would make any use of the official weapon except for self-defence and defence of the environment illegal. Violation is punishable by firing squad. Also illegal is the wearing of flak jackets or protective clothing for adults. All children however will be issued with flak jackets and helmets. During the transition, the constitution and legal code will be suspended. The law will consist only of a secularisation of the Ten Commandments to which “thou shalt not pollute” is added. What is left by natural selection, manifest destiny and the grape press of the Gods will be reality. The end of the bad dream.

Yes, the dream, for the cultural problem of course remains. Here the belief in the superiority of American Cliché and Stereotype and the iron narrative of manifest smugness must, temporarily, be crushed. It is a sad thing but true. The FBD will issue a list of ten most wanted clichés. This will be renewed weekly. Clichés will be taken off when eradicated and new ones added. Anyone caught sincerely using such clichés, either as a phrase or as a narrative structure, especially as a personal identity, will be exported. In the place where they find themselves they will be sold into servitude and have to learn the language, the local myths of origin and the structure of the local epic. No cheating with Gilgamesh or Rolande. We’re talking the Wagadu Chant. The funds raised from the sales of stereotypes into servitude would be used to maintain the FBD and, at the point of final dissolution, provide a souvenir album and flag to the inhabitants of the unconfederate states.

The old borders will then dissolve. Everyone would go home. A new era begins.

At last the theoretical missiles and those omnipresent, other-dimensional weapons of mass destruction, the evil doers, the nay sayers and the foreigners will have nothing to target.
There will only be the Oaks of Oregon, The Sea of Misty mountains, Walden Pond, The Green Bayous. What’s the point in targeting that?

the purpose of the pharoah is to be divine

And I’m saying to you that writing, not just poetry or even not just writing but even language and thinking, even the mind and maybe the body too, certainly the feelings and the soul governing what the body does and the spirit which sends it all messages from the writing and language and all the rest of it outside; I’m saying all this has to be wrested and torn from the dead grasp of commercial leisure reading and spiderworked masturbatory doing, stripped out of the clichés or plundered from the box of vocabulary being pissed and dipped into with greasy fingers by every songwriter and sloganeering bullshitter; I’m saying that it should be put back into the ears and guts maybe even onto dat ol' street because we gotta break out of all this dreaming once more. Did you ever notice sweetheart that it’s the assholes at war and mayhem that make the myths from lovely Orpheus to Cowboy Joe? To cover it up and say oh my look at tragic us. But groping the pony at the same time. There’s 2000 novels a minute and a million poemz and they all spin the wheels on the beach until they connect with the otherside. I’m writing from the otherside witnessing the first Armageddon in which the divine is getting real assistance from the animals. That’s what I’m gonna do. Thats what I’m saying.

Rules of The River:

1. Only a corner, a certain limited size of great horror, can be grasped. 90 bodies, not 600. One sinking boat overloaded. Two burning cars. Stained newspaper.

2. Even then you look to dream (the wrinkled blue robes, crushed cellophane, a humming sound).

3. The purpose of the pharaoh is to be divine. To bring a logic to a rhythm, flood seasons, incest, insects and the ducks rising noiselessly above the river.

4. A sleeping dream is rational. In doing it brings an absurd logic to feelings and sensations recollected or feared. The associations are rational. It follows the laws and above the natural. It is not the real world which has broken the laws. They have rotted here.

5. All life seeks to dream, to associate itself with a new size and speed easily grasped. To encompass everything. To connect differently. To feel right through.

6. Dreaming comes faster than making sense. All the men wear armbands (they don't). My loved one is crying (no). They fired at children (but the fathers did do that).

7. Dreams collide, individuals, nations, epochs. With each other. It is a storm of dust.

8. No one can read hieroglyphics (the frauds!) or old ideograms. The new ones haven't arrived yet to be buttoned into the brain. We're detached.

9. Catch feelings and logic in a folding, speeding structure, beginning middle end, not that it is a dream explained, or death of dream let alone reality. Plot, character development, fear different sleep. Forgetting in the morning.

10. Then there is the not dream, the awake! Stunned passive or embracing dream detached. Stunned white light.

Law of Lek: everything fights back

11. Non-graspable things (as chaos). Fathers shoot children, the walls collapse on the pilgrim, non-story things outside reason —outside god-making leak from my dreams.

from a bektashi cookbook

From a Baktashi cookbook:


It is amazing how you think your children are more probably doing wrong than right.

It is amazing how you think your old friends have led wasted lives.

It is amazing how you consider only silently that somehow guilt is shared.

It is amazing that you become passionately independent when others notice things you do badly.

Making dinner is to cooking as misquotation is to scholarship.

If you want to break eggs ask a tyrant for an omlette.

Farces repeat themselves, the first time is history.


Cheat: Cooking for the Distress will appear at some point in the future, published by Blue Orange Publishing.

ANNOUNCEMENT

As we approach our one hundredth post.

The texts of the short stories The Cows of Freedom and The Queen Anne House can be read in full on The Partisan Diary website, and soon the poem-of-poems Prism will be there too.

This blog is and will continue to be updated regularly. New postings will appear at least twice a week.

This blog can be read serially. Each month can represent a chapter. The idea is that it is a work in itself, a whole. There are games and contests inside which can be played.

hay

I am just returned from the Hay literary festival. This is a yearly event in deep rural Wales that someone called 'The Woodstock of the Mind'. What nonsense. It's better. Really.

The festival is sponsored by the review section of a London newspaper, the dissident TV station and several publishers. Thousands and thousands go. All are readers who have travelled to this idyllic place to discuss good thought about real things, watch and discuss timely films and catch up with thinking. The programme goes for two weeks with films, seminars,and discussions on everything from of the damn war through Savonarola to Dorritos. The village it is held in has the greatest number of bookstores to population on the planet.

I have lately disliked most things. But...I got charmed. Some of it selfishly.

At one point the streets were filled with those reading my books. I was asked both to sign and to explain my views and stance. At one point I sat al fresco in a pub garden while a tattooed lady conducted people to come and meet me. She read passages to great effect to others. I had never seen her before. Nice.

I realized that I liked mind stuff and wanted to write to exchange thought and didn't dislike readers so much after all. Felt better. Images stood up ok. I felt restored. This for its own sake.

I stayed at night a few miles away in a tiny village in a little stone and beam miners' pub that spoke five languages till dawn about words and sustenance, next to a lake you expected Excalibur from.

Wished you were there. Next year I think I will rent that corner of the pub garden for a week and have a tiny organized fringe festival of me and friends and/or their books. I think a hundred academics and reviewers walked by every second. There were book clubs in clumps. We were all so sincere. Several commented I looked like a nice person. Want in for next year? The time is right and world is waiting. I'm serious. I know a way to ace it. I'm serious.

I signed books for lady bishops and Australian gangsters. And that wasn't all.

I moved 300 like a knife through butter. I ran out. And I learned things and told great internal jokes about the chattering classes and those who tour them. And I thought of us guys. I do wish you had been there. I thought of you.

from eden

Eve

Father,

I hate the sound of children on my grass
under stars on holy night
and the neighbours hearing them.

I hate them outside
turning on and off lights
when they are not there.

Father,
I gave lovely ones gifts and dreams
of my redemption so they wouldn't
speak of sins and believe.
They don't

Mother,
I am the only child,
of the only family.
There will never be enough
compensation for
death.

translated into Japanese

イブの父、

私は神聖な夜の星およびそれらを聞いている隣人の下で私の草の子供の音を憎む。

私はそこにないときそれらを不規則なライトを回す外側憎む。

父は、私は美しい物に私の買戻しのギフトそして夢を与えた従って罪の話さなかったし、信じない。それらは

母は、私はグループだけの一人っ子、である。決して死のための十分な補償がない。

translated into English

The father of eve, I the star of the holy night

Hate the sound of
the child of grass.

I hate the neighbour who inquires.
I hate when there is no-one there

And those outside turning the irregular
light to write.

As for the father, as for me,

I gave the gift and dream of my redemption to beautiful ones

And therefore dream the crime that you did not speak
And that does not believe.

As for those all, and as for the mother,

As for me the one person, as for the child just of the gathering,

Ever there is insufficient compensation
For death.

i gave up narrative

Now I will have to be thoughtful and get syntax.

I have been making notes on depiction as dream, as opposed to description as only theory, a word sequence not quite accounting for the complexity and otherness of real things (let alone the supernatural). I think however dreaming can end; end in situations which can be depicted in image and sound. And that is something!

I think that depiction can move to depiction like situation to situation does or can do.

I think dreaming can end, in life as well. With some dreams this is a real good thing.

Thought interests me. Image does more. Reality enlivens. All seems useful.

Now science, guys, is only a narrative to account for observed phenomena in patterns. Like all narratives it must be delusionary. Especially with its laws. That's what makes it work as a narrative. For people who only have limited senses and experience which is only supra molecular.

I think ideology caps living movement. It redirects it to dead self. Dying a lie in thought, memory and deed.

We were in a narrative, it suited our motivation and construction of self to do that kind of pretending. I agree that we sought a finish of things. A final narrative strain.

Then, accumulatively, as a pretending dreaming it was inadequate. I argue it was for the mind and soul, for capture of image.

I gave up narrative all together or mostly. I started lusting for places and words about places.

That stuff not only was inadequate for soul and gnosis, it sure was inadequate for defence of the nation and social advancement of humanity. Didn't hold much romance neither.

Let alone theory derived from practice, (so-called) economic science, even statistical interpretation and no prophecy, no cultural redemption, just shit, less than delusion. No vision derived from practice, even cowardly practice. No depiction, no prediction, no diction.

I believe that really no-one had any doubt about the real, about the Narcisstic personality disorder, the cant and the brutality. And the other racial, continental narrative.

Lenin capped a revolution which was a good idea that the people had. Land Peace Bread. So did Mao, he capped and distorted a simple fundamental desire for living to match his own appetites. But at least that revolution began as real. Stalin was a pure fantasist. The people had no revolution, no idea. They tried to work for a living and he moved them about from cradle to grave in blocks. No idea but his own. No science but his own narrative.

Marx did some depiction and some prediction. Bit of a chancer.

I dragged Mao here and asked him is ideological movement necessary before objective change? Are there two lines amongst people? He agreed it didn't seem so. I asked Stalin about the socialism in one country and culture being for all classes. I asked why when his army was destroyed and people were being butchered he reacted by thinking he had not purged enough otherthinkers and ordered a counterattack. Why the purges, why state farms, why is it now? He apologized. I asked Marx about his inferior races, the superiority of a manual class for generating new ideas,and why he got drunk in Camberwell. I asked him about party norms, committees and inclusive fora, about internationals I asked about dictatorship, about two lines and science. I asked about negation of the negation (say what!). He said oops but seemed confused. He said why am I here?

That's what I said too.

projection

Projection

projection not of
will but spirit
shrapnel in cloudy
haunting,
animating objects in
a new way, not
by memory but by
artefact generating life
or freeing it in bursts from
dead hands, false stories,
dead ends, evil minds and dimensional time
making a surprise
opening a secret door
keeping a broken promise
in your blue jar

what spirit?
made by life, borrowed from life,
consumed by
senses refined and stored by minds,
projected

by creativity and imagination
motivated by love
triumphant ever
banality and death.
a simple thing, photos,
garden, book, ring,
not a cross
or albatross.
spit in face
of those for whom others
have never been a motivation but only
own anxious image
and desperate resentful
holy gratification
in the air.

'Projection' is a poem from an unpublished collection.

'Tim and Dorothy' excerpt

The best time with Tim was in the field of wild grass they had found on an abandoned farm near where Tim’s dad was painting the cottage. The first time they saw it they got off their bikes and began right away to walk sideways into the field sliding their feet together tight on the ground. This made a path through the centre of the field in the grass. Then they made a path just inside the edges. The next time they went they made a diagonal path and a winding circular one. As they slid along side by side they released clouds of tiny insects. Birds circled above them.

They made more and more paths as the summer went on. By the end of summer the grass had grown above their heads and the paths were waving tunnels. The floor of the paths shone wet in dark brown and smelt like molasses.

Their game was to chase each other. The idea was to calculate where the other would go and to catch them where the paths crossed. They would calculate whether the other would run in a ‘W’ or a ‘Pi’. When they met they would laugh and wrestle and then run off again. They did it all summer in that summer before kissing started.

Once Tim had wanted her to pretend she was the Grand Inca and he was Pissaro. That game didn’t last long, it just wasn’t right. She thought it was because Tim knew that the Incas were terrified of the Spaniards who negotiated the destinies of the dead with God in prayer instead of just leaving them. They also killed everything they saw for gold. The Incas could not get their minds to accept that; they thought war should be a beautiful dance of heroes watched by singing women. They loved the dead, especially the ones they ate the hearts of. When she saw Tim thinking that, she knew the game would stop. Another time Tim wanted them to be grasshoppers and ants but that was too difficult. The best was to run and catch, run and catch and run off again another way.

'Tim and Dorothy' is an upcoming novel from Blue Orange Publishing.

Red the Nile, Blue the Hills excerpt: the storm

The sound of the explosion was muffled by a heavy squall of sand and dust blowing down from the desert into the city. The storm had continued for several days gusting with the highest wind speeds measured by the weather ministry since records had begun. In the suburbs, old gnarled trees had fallen onto cars parked on the boulevards. One had fallen through the window of a jewellery shop, which was then looted.

The fallen trees were used in café arguments to illustrate that this storm was the worst ever of all the storms that had ever come in this week, in this season, from any year. The trees had been on the boulevard since the time of the Ptolemys. It must be a sign.

Dust and sand from the storm lay a centimetre thick on the street where the engineer lay crushed. Eddies and tiny whirlwinds spun from around where the heavy lid had fallen. There were muddy pools around the steel.

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.

Red the Nile, Blue the Hills is published by Blue Orange Publishing.

holiday

Holiday

Inside
Outside
A decline.
of fashionable successions
of colourful sterotypes
of decaying monuments
of unageing intellect

none could tell the end of it
in the world
never being
so much booty, samite robes veir,
choicest things,
large women and eunuchs
wicked
curves of swords shortened
cowering Platonic
academics hiding ‘til
Lucretia is born

A time since you paced the boundaries
Under an image
Blazoned in the sky.

some desire

Some Desire

some desire to
live through
Armageddon
to predict it

obsessive stress
of god, not world but
the moving
black priest in a crowd
dust billowing
over the plateau
muddy rain.

claim

CLAIM

Dear Blue Orange Publishing reader.

If you have been reading this regularly you will see that we predicted the following.

1. The half-fish, half-animal missing link;
2. The Gospel of Judas, what it says and who wrote it;
3. The Katrina follow-up;
4. The death of the Whale.


There are quite a few other predictions which are coming true too, which you will know as the outcome of the war...

If you are reading for the first time, search the topics here and see the dates. It is better than Nostradamus and for good reason too! But it still surprises me.

ANNOUNCEMENT

1. From time to time Blue Orange rewards a dissonant raving comment with a gift of one of its series of books, either the Hank series or the Casebook series. We are sending the casebook series to the comment 'What is to be undone' made to our item on the former Bektashi politician. Congratulations.

2. Editors of other publications are reminded to acknowledge extracts taken from this blog. Publishers can request items here be removed if they wish to publish them elsewhere.

3. The newest book Re: The Dead Arts is being prepared for printing. Those nominating selections should hurry.

Eve

Father,

I hate the sound of children on my grass
under stars on holy night
and the neighbours hearing them.

I hate them outside
turning on and off lights
when they are not there.

Father,
I gave lovely ones gifts and dreams
of my redemption so they wouldn't
speak of sins and believe.
They don't

Mother,
I am the only child,
of the only family.
There will never be enough
compensation for
death.

Who is there?
I thought you had gone.

If you want to heal
why choose this house?



'Eve' is an as-yet unpublished poem.

from the former Bektashi...politician

'The only leftist politics are the politics of ego and personality.

The only rightist politics are the politics of conspiracy and greed.

Centrist politics are the politics of smug assassination.

Politics is the creation of the degraded dream, self-delusion and reasons for antipathy. It is to make false connections of cause and effect. A politician must be ill, pathological.

The answer to politics is opposition and association.'

re: blaine invasion cont'd

That was a wild thing I wrote for a noticeboard of Canadian and borderline poets. It may interest you as a manipulation of History. If I read it out loud it would be oral history. A friend says none of this happened as he thinks history revolved around the triumphs of his faction expessed as in strange philosophocal events of nine people and a two page newspaper. I say they did take place, and the flamingoes, the milky way freeway and everything else.

re: blaine invasion

I'm not quite sure what I'm talking about except that it has something to do with forming an object, How it is done.

An objective co-something or other of something, like a poem. An object, image or event which is based on rules that an enclosing narrative doesn't have so that what is there, invisible there beyond the narrative or frozen imaginaire is now seen and felt.

This also means beyond the limitations of senses but absolute in them. With Grassy Narrows, the Vancouver prison riot and the Invasion of Blaine as well as the Waterloo university occupation and the two times I was arrested - and as well as the Partisan Street program, I with others created something, an event evidently now gone from most memories as they were and have remained the news image, that were designed to signify one thing, a false thing, a thing meta and under or above reality, but was actually intended to get someone 'in lawful custody' out.

Enclosed warriors, tortured innocents like Student idealists, Communist anti-fascists released by a Caravan of false ethnic wanderers, an invasion of children and picnickers, a crowd of faux arsonists, and a phoney biserker.

That is what the difficulties caused by surrealism are intended to do, to get the reader or viewer OUT. It has an objective, or more like a compulsion or duty. It must be done. To get away from Ultreye (the god-thing beyond panoptic) and take the reader with you. Out.

I saw, when I was last in Vancouver staying in a Hotel on Granville, a history channel thing saying the invasion of Blaine was about the environment and atomic testing. No it wasn't. It was about Cambodia.

I wondered if I was ever there.

The set off of the Native People's caravan from the courthouse was said to be an abortion caravan which did take place but years earlier.

She did a voiceover of the film but it was of native dancers. And me.

'Surreal,' as they say.

the blaine invasion

I was a candidate in a Canadian Federal election. In that election, like the one just passing, the expression one heard a lot was `It's so surreal.' This may be a prism that many are seeing through not only the Canadian elections but life.

I have written elsewhere that I hate the ideology and practice of memoirism, that is, structuring narratives of the past in which the ego plays the starring role. I find memoirism an essential tool of fascism, child abuse, plagiarism and other unattractive coping mechanisms.

But

This idea of elections being surreal coupled with the sensation I have felt lately when people have wondered about my Canadianism, or even my actual existence (including my own family) got me remembering aspects of my political career.

And

I have assured myself that it is not memoirism I am doing because first of all I seem to be the only one who is the slightest bit interested in any of it anymore as something to enhance their own narratives with, and second because the memories always involve `we' not me. And they are surreal anyway.

I realised how surreal they were when I was drinking whiskey in a Vancouver hotel that used to be seedy but was now rather nice watching a political documentary on T.V. And there it was, scenes rendered into narrative historic fact wired into part of the official Canada easily replacing my surrealism. And there I was. Canadian at last! A ghostly image.

First scene was of the time we decided to invade the United States. This act, mentioned in U.S. media as the first time since the war of 1812 and in Canadian parliament as the work of anti-Canadian professional revolutionaries and poets was filmed and shown all over the world. It made, I know, the news in Denmark and was seen by someone who was once a girlfriend who contacted me again.

`We' decided to do it, the invasion of the U.S, originally called a peace picnic, because the U.S. had invaded Cambodia. We thought we would go twenty two miles into the U.S and exchange that for the Parrot's Beak, which is what they had. Twenty two miles. Very practical.

There was a good leaflet and `we' gathered in strength at the Peace Arch between White Rock and Blaine. Then, with a happy sigh, the picnickers, children, drummers and significant others that we were packed up lunches and marched past customs into Blaine and Amerikka under a sunny sky.

As the column of cheerful invaders diminished, people stopping to shop, or getting tired and going back to lunch, a large man ran out of a bar carrying a pistol saying `you fucking communists'. A woman, who I see was a candidate in the recent election, kicked it out of his hands. Some of us cheered. I think she is now billed as a reformist.

After a few miles in, just past a hotel, `we', the core who had ventured forth and a few who had joined us since, turned and went back to the border singing the Huron Carole and feeling very Canadian although some were just learning the words. We had gone only a mile. But it had been an act more literal than what most of the others had done. We took our threats and proclamations seriously.

It was surreal back there, there was a line of a thousand ugly looking, angry, scruffy Canadians, some bleeding, raging in and around the border flower beds who were faced across that border by a line of multi-uniformed American riot police and soldiers, dozens of whom had rifles. It was a lesson in what happens in the meantime if you are ever writing a short story.

Some of the troops had torn shirts, were Seattle Blue Asses, some were so called Indian Affairs, some were Army, some were armed customs officers and some were cowboy-hatted border guards. There was a Coast Guard guy. We went through their lines unnoticed and invisible as we were not actors in that classic confrontation and image. Cops against the people. We joined the Canadians. The Canadians were digging rocks from the flower beds and hurling themat the police. The gates of the Peace Arch had been shut and tied with booster cables. Under the slogans 'may these gates never be closed' and 'children of a common mother' they were closed and someone had defaced the 'mother' with spray paint. As I approached I saw a friend leaping way into the air (he became the founder of a great institution and his name rhymes with `leap') hurling a flower encrusted white painted rock. This photo was on the front page next morning.

The police finally attacked and broke a few arms. In fact they invaded Canada. It was also the first time since the last (but it was a near thing in the war measures act too). The police attack was prompted when a trainload of new cars, including Corvettes, went by on the railway parallel to the road and was enthusiastically stoned! Corvettes! No wonder they attacked. A few broken arms and counter charges later we all went home watched by two (yes, only two) Mounties sitting quietly in their car. As Mounties do compared to the Cavalry. Anyway on the documentary I saw years later in the hotel the voiceover said that the demonstration had been a very peaceful protest on environmental issues and nuclear testing. A prominent politician was interviewed associating himself with these traditional Canadian concerns. The voiceover didn't say `nice' or `boring' but you could hear it there with an invisible smirk. Later it showed the Native People's Caravan which went across Canada visiting reserves picking up demands to be taken to the Parliament where it was attacked on the steps by Mounties. I was beaten again there. But in the documentary some women were met by Trudeau. But I had seen myself leaving in the clip before! The voiceover said it was a caravan about women's rights, which in fact had taken place years earlier. A woman who I knew was interviewed mentioning the rights now won.

There was later the clip of our community human rights campaigningwhen `we' drove at night through the streets informing first nations people and kids about their rights giving them leaflets and numbers of lawyers as the were being rousted by the police during a periodic campaign. The shots were of the rain and the windshields. I complained about to the CBC as romanticising the situation when they were first shown at the time. And they showed again a staged event with police officers I had also complained about. I confess in a movie I made later about mobile clinics in Africa I used the same shot.

Further surrealistically, not in the shot, and more outside the narratives, and in more image defying memory was the guns we had hidden in the trunk of our human rights cars in case the police started a shootout as they had with some Native persons. In the town of Blaine a great number of deserters and some escapees from Camp Pendleton military prison were in the hotel and came back across the border with us. The Caravan went to Grassy Narrows where desperate and near suicidal warriors, some with mercury poisoning and some drugged to the eyeballs were effectively surrounded by Wounded Knee templated Mounties. We took them out.

Later on, following all that I mistakenly punched Chrétien in the nose in a small remonstrance (that should alone make me Canadian but was not in the history documentary).

Yup, 'we', the surreal picnickers, were an Underground Railroad, yup, `we' the barefoot lawyers were people's militia, and yup `we' the surreal gypsy social reformers were following a Clauswitzian dictum on encirclement and not Ghandi.

Get them out! Get them home! Feed them!

My active engaged political career was based on the same dictum I have now in writing. Get them out! Get them out for God's sake from that silly encasing narrative. That beginning, middle and end of the story. Get them out however you can. Get people away from the dead
end roles the official narrative has written for them. Deserter, Perp, Prisoner, Martyr. Use surrealism, use a joke, use the collective power, use the magic image. but get in somehow, anyhow, get out and take them with you.

Take them away from the invisible watcher, the author, the one way glass mirror all invisible but whose presence turns the whole of life into a prison. Take them away from the concocted farce, the tightly structured fiction, the escapist video that has been quietly substituted for Identity, Community Nation and Mind.

`We', it was always `we' (the group makes it possible) failed once during a liberal march for prison reform which was supposed to cover a breakout of some friends we knew were being tortured, some we knew to be very confused and very terrified bunnies indeed. The breakout
didn't work due to a love affair between one prisoner and a social worker.

`We' at midnight snuck out the occupiers of an eastern university building so that the next day when the police attacked there was no-one there (red faced or what, even their dogs). But the demands were forgotten unfortunately. Good demands. They all were good demands.
Most have been met. But not really.

My political campaign as a parliamentary candidate meant I could dress as a lumberjack (I actually was an automobile builder so still a genuine worker despite the costume). I wore lovely chequered shirts and steel toed boots. I spoke from the bottom of my mouth. I was against war, racism and denial of human rights. Who isn't?

In `all candidates meetings' the audience loved me more than any of my students ever did when I clowned around about Shakespeare. They loved a Looney. They saw I was outside of the deathly false earnestness of the cocoon of simple banalities (the west vs. the east, big government vs. little, old arguments and memoirs). My stooges asked the planted questions (some of whom became very serious academics, one of whom now tragically dead did as much for rights of the disabled as anyone on the planet). I answered well and got no votes. I should have read poems.

None of this has happened now. The official narrative has taken over. Canada. It's surreal.

Have to do something else be someone else.

from the former bektashi...psychiatrist

from the former Bektashi psychiatrist:

'Schizophrenia and paranoia evolved through the eons as healthy reactions to the condition of being human, which through time developed as being the species most displaced and vulnerable. First driven as stumbling fish slugs into the swamps by sleek creatures in the deep waters which were much more attractive and much smarter than us.

'We further evolved as we became humanoids, so useless that we invented containers to hold our food, our sexual objects and our dead. This was because we had so little that we had to save what we had for later. We used, unlike everyone else, sticks to poke with, especially as our teeth were bad and our hands and tongues useless for picking up ants, let alone fending off viscious tree slugs.

'Bi-polar reactions came as a mental disturbace to reflect when we had food and when we didn't, at which times we ate our relatives, loved ones and members of our gang. Mania was for when we had some. Depression for not any left. These coping mechanisms made cannibalism possible. They gave us the imagination and feeling for it. The soul. Other animals evolved none of this stuff. They have a different mental health.

'Anti-social feelings come about in people as a way of adapting to the fact that bigger animals in our species steal almost everything the group gets, screw you and shit in your space while the rest of the group snarls and laughs hysterically praising and stroking the big guy, but you have to belong because the tigers won't have you, in fact quite the reverse. When he was asleep you pissed on him.

'Sanity and vision are the real illnesses; they place mankind within the perfection of the rest of creation, where it never was. Only in its dreams. The job of the psychiatrist is to, through drugs and persuasion, enable sane disorders while overcoming realistic, genetically
determined, responses to the human condition.

from the former bektashi...economist

From the former Bektashi economist

The more you own, the more you lose. The more you grasp, the more gets away.

Wealth like desire is addictive. Any addiction is never to real things but to the declining sensations and increasing symbolism of the drug, a mental addiction to the style of the drug taking, to the ultimate abstraction and absurdity required to be the addict, to the theatre of it all. All the absurdity of economics is based on the reversal of values and laws of dreams. Death is good, scarcity is wonderful, war is opportunity, theft is clever, intellect is stupid, prudence and madness are interchangeable, contract is conflict, service is betrayal. A black magical world of carnival and misrule that everyone must live in.

blog of revelations: from the former bektashi scientist

From the former Bektashi scientist:

'We must not confuse adaptation and evolution with susceptibility and devolution.

'The dinosaurs farted themselves into extinction by the result of their overwhelming dominance and the consequent ecological disorder caused by that. The methane gas they emitted caused a climatic catastrophe of imbalance. The lush jungles from hothouse methane warming were wiped out by a meteoric dust cloud. Adaptability and divergence had gone.

Humans are rapidly creating the conditions for their own extinction in a similar way through geometrically increased evolutionary susceptibility, through organization and harmonisation of everything to them. Having made the whole world over with their greedy unbalanced needs, humans have created the situation that a single virus or temporary shortage can kill them all. This should happen any time now. The last act in their devolution from sea toads.


(This excerpt is not in Re: The Dead Arts, soon to be published by BLUE ORANGE PUBLISHING.)

imazhi

e ulur atje, e sigurt aq sa dhe vdekja është e butë, në vajtim

ajo nuk është prej fragmentë qelqi të thyera, por prej pasqyrash

mbi shami të shndritshme, prej fije argjendi

blu e theksuar mbi gurë të zinj, gati e shkrëmbuar

ajo është larguar, ka ikur, por gjithmonë e shndritshme dhe blu e theksuar

e lidhur nëpër vargje brisqesh

gjilpëra të holla mbajnë mishin e saj, si fluturat pas zemrës

filxhana të ndryshkur shënojnë kohën e saj dhe kuajt vallëzojnë rreth saj

një mbretëreshë në dritë dhe hije.

deri në gju të përmbytur, ata u ngritën

një nga një. dy nga dy, dhe vështruan

ëngjëjt vijnë nga zunkthi duke thëmbuar mbi re

gojë mbyllur, të rruar, gati për të ikur dhe kështu të ruajtur përmes

shelgjesh ndërsa bien nën ndritën e zbehtë.

të armatosur në ujë

mburoja vezulluese dhe bula shiu

dhe kështu shpëtuan duke rënë atje. Atje sipër dhe

në të ftohtë u mbështollën në

vellon e butësisë, fëmijë të përvuajtur

dhe drita e thyer ndriçon prej saj

From The Beak's Poems.

Translated by Evis Carcani.

blog of revelations XII: dis-gression

Dear Jean-Pierre,

Back from Paris. Went to a funeral of a bishop in Notre Dame; he was confessor to Latin Quarter in the '20's, a parish priest in the occupation and finally a kind of priest trainer. The choir were student priests robed in exquisite turquoise. Your interest would be that the hand movements to direct the singers and the congregation were perfectly co-ordinated among several boy conductors. The hands looked like spiralling birds.

It was a plain used coffin. But he must have lived like a king. Nice residence, the Seine, artists, song. And other rites. Lived across the street from Shakespere and company. Lived near the Nazi gestapo headquarters. He believed, according to the presiding Cardinal, that life was a vale of tears followed by paradise.

Then up the twisting streets into a blue sky to Sacre Coeur for the choir of nuns. I was startled by the same hand movements as they sang among candles, the soloists sounding like they knew the most frightful secrets.

I went next to Montmartre graveyard to get more shots of Nijinsky's tomb for my next book's cover. Lovely grave. The sad clown sprawled on it rendered gold by hands seeking blessings is me, I sometimes feel. Foucault has an anonymous grave nearby saying he is a physiscian. Zola has an asshole looking bust. My hands for the first time don't appear in the shots. But a black graveyard cat does, ruffled by a wind til swaying. Then a blue tin sepulchre and next a row of peaked tombs including that of an exiled romanov teenage princess. There is another tomb with an inner light. The row of tombs resemble exactly the roofs of Paris I had taken earlier from the steps of Sacre Coeur on Monmartre. Snow over blue and green. Perhps this is by design of some transcendental tourist board.

I also saw an exhibit of Coptic funery items at the Louvre. Some were from the Egyptian town of Dis near which I once lived in a town sacred to Annubis, about which I have written. Pictures of Annubis and Osiris helping a Christian into the grave. Lots of sculpture of sacred hands. There is a whole cult of these. Especially of John the Baptist of course. There are significant things about those number of fingers extended where are the ones not shown. There are municipal contests about where the 'missing ones' are (as three or two are extended for certain blessings). Pieces are dis-covered. One finger is supposed to be in St. Jean De Marianne in the alps where the Savoy's come from. I saw the church there last year. John's finger is there. I saw a skull of his at the Sultan's place in Istanbul. Post mortuary dis-membership must be so dis-concerting.

But enough dis-gression.

those cartoons

There is a traditional politics which I participated in of violent berzerker upheaval over the magic of symbolic representations. There are the iconoclasts, the sacred cow fun times and in Nigeria and Egypt the frequent mahdis rising up to hack down evil especially during changes of the moon involving burning hotels with beer and shooting at djinns.

This cartoon event was that and also an application of those mobilising politics organised by underground religious issue groups. There was an internationalising faction of Dutch imams travelling around and dining on their issues involving the famous movie. There were the Moslem Brotherhood clone groups in various countries getting voters and even poor Fatah trying to win back support through circus. Here in London the conservative Moslem wing of the labour party and MI5 used it to hijack support from the British pseudo fun-dementedism manufactured by the Blairite press as a justification for enforced globalisation as a poodle of Bushism.

But let us step back for a moment to consider the religious projection and experience of the self and soul. Or more crudely what is the religious high. This is different with different prisms.

I have been embedded in a few religions cultures in a few places. A religion resembling Hinduism seemed in one place to be educating the soul to feel an engagement with a cosmic story, a story endlessly running with fabulous characters, ones you could know and love yet promised at the same time a divine detachment from all anxiety and pain from self so the creation was enjoyed purely without feeling.

A traditional Christian religion, close to Coptic but which is more flexible on doctrine, allowing for greater mysticism for example, promised imminent redemption and love as well as supreme authoritarian forgiveness of the crappy but smug self. This promise is seasoned with present freeways of angels with messages travelling up and down in radiant streams as well as by an absolutely attractive spirit illuminating the whole material world.

The world I lived in resembling a fundamental Islamic sect created resonances through language and ritual with a timeless infinite thing. An unknowable thing that cannot be depicted. But when that touches the self it makes it part of that. You submit to the infinite and join it.

Some of these religions parallel political narratives in which the self can be absolutely certain. Certain of its place, it leadership and its analysis. All of this is certainty in relationship to opposition to the other. The only one in politics this atmosphere doesn’t affect is the leaders themselves.

Which brings us to art. Here the self and soul are educated to see things illuminated or darkened with delight or horror. So cartoons.

information

They talk about God in

Assiut and themselves. Talk

talk. There is no Cairo.


They are cruel and eat babies

(that was the old kingdom though)


I am from much further south.


(appears in 'One Poem Forward, Two Poems Back', published by Blue Orange)

eu nu sunt -- I am not

Eu nu sunt Trotsky.
De fapt îl urăsc.
Mi-a plăcut că a murit aşa
chiar idea lui.

Eram un profesor
ce învăţam copilaşii cum să scrie
o propoziţie atunci cănd o parte din pisica mea
era ţintuită in uşă,

Deci, hei, de nu? De fapt
ce înseamna lumea modernă?
Pro tennis, un fandosit poet milionar
o lesbiană nebună – am trăit!!
Comunismul modern a căştigat.

Nebunie! Nebunie! Nebunie?
Am trăit şi m-am convins.
Suntem calzi, avem o viziune bună!
Şi un miros super fin.

Prune şi friptură înnăbuşită
Şi dacă cineva intervine îi vom prăji.

Am un million
şi am trăit ca un miliardar
şi tu
eşti stupid.

Prune, carne şi portocale cu paprika şi usturoi
Multă ceapă tocată.

(Translated into Romanian by Ms. Annie Nadia Lungu. Poems appear in 'One Poem Forward, Two Poems Back', published by Blue Orange.)

blog of revelations X

(more recovered proverbs from Baba Bektashi)

The good natured bring out the worst in people.

Saints attract monsters.

Death's assistants are friends and family. Life is assisted by strangers.

The humble sinner says 'I am you, brother.' The brother says, 'You crook.'

The devil's second curse: 'May you see yourself in another's mirror.'

backchannel post

Dear Blue Orange,

I have followed the site a while. I have noticed that the archives are going backward in time and the new postings are done in advance. I also noticed that there is a thematic unity and even tight narrative structure from the first posting to the last and that it can be read both ways beginning to end and end to beginning and that it also can be read from the middle which keeps shifting. Is this an authentic blog?

announcement of authenticity

Dear reader/surfer.

On reaching 1 000 hits.

Not only are the hits recorded on this blog genuine, but because of the real lives of the real readership where they are each hit may record several people looking at the screen at once or coming back to it a lot in the same session. Real people in strange places. The idea is not to atomize or inflate. Get that fox/google/Macmillan/you udder guys.

four games for poets

1. Poetic Whispers/Selected Works

Start a blog. Find a poem by a living poet who also has a blog and select it. Put it on your blog. Ask that poet to select someone else's and put it on his but only if he will select someone else's and keep the chain going. Link the blogs. The selected poems make an expanding book which can be analysed by blocked academics to find the real state of poetry.


2. Ultimatum

A game especially interesting for critics and observers of Popular Culture. Can be played with above.

This is a variation on economic gaming theory which will model the degree of elitism, corruption and denial of access involved in hierarchies of poets and academics chained to the wheel of diminishing grants, occupation of chairs by cronies and so on where a thousand poets fight over every three available footnotes like rats in a sack over shit. This is where short term memory of friendship and comradeship is so dysfunctional as not to take them back to the beginning of their own sentences -- all this while the consciousness of the nation rots.

Anyway. Form two teams of poets. Those published a lot and those who aren't. The first is team x, the second is team 'why'.

Accumulate enough money (called 'GrantCant') so everyone in x can have $20 (or pieces of silver). Design a book so that everyone in x has two publishing spots (called 'Patron Places') to decide on as to who will fill them. The book can be called 'Critical Community'. Tell each person in team 'why' they can award one 'GrantCant' and one 'Patron Place' to a person in team x. That person can share them or not. Then watch what happens. Can be played at the same time as below. If this game took place with Ugandan poets they would share the silver and the places.


3. Prismers of Parochialism

Find someone around who speaks say arabic or farsi, maybe welsh gaelic or mandarin. Or write to someone who does.

Then, if you don't know anything about that language look it up. See how it goes.What it does. It may even be something like Nigerian English.

After that, find a poem or a something you did that you think might sound good in that language as it is described as being like and which might become animated with that cultural charge ( maybe one yours doesn't have, like national weeping). Get it translated and try it out on the person you have picked. Or get the person you have picked to do it. I found that didactic things come out very lyrical in arabic when translated by Palestinians, or so I'm told. Imagistic things in mandarin of mine are minimalist.

But they are coherent. I was afraid to try Polish but I'm doing a fat chapbook in Albanian. That'll show them. Anyway, after that get a poem back. Change it around. The one you get back is their choice. Don't push for poems about the war. And so on.

There you go, the beginning of world peace. Reverse Babylon. If the other guy wants and needs and if you are linguistically dysfunctional help them with one in English (one thing I found out doing this is that I translate ok into American, better than in Oakville Ontario. Except in West Virginia.)

This game can be played alone or as part of

POETS without BOUNDARIES projects.

These projects are designed to help capacity building of groups of writers in developing countries so that they have their own support organisations to promote access and copyright right and freedom of speech and so on. They do income exchange, joint work, events in-country. The traditional epic writers of West Africa for example or the poor guys who used to be corralled in Stalinist associations but now have nothing. Ask me if you are interested. I have the project description and grant application.


4. The rules and objectives of game four can be found in the Blue Orange novel called The Borderline: Casebook Translations.

blog of revaluations IX

(from Baktashi essay on self)

Of Apostles

Only Judas

Understood

Prophecy, value

Acting well

And redemption.

blog of revelations VIII

( recovered from the front lines)


I have described you Hank as a ‘textist’. You are found out.

So now since you have been outcloseted, let me elaborate.

Your blog is obviously an intertext. It is a space where different imaginations of the present blend and contend. It is where identities tell of their actions and the resulting formations tell of their thoughts.

But where is this intertext located? It is located in the decline of America.

The declines of places are characterised by the attempts at official generation of ever more grandiose myths to recapture the past. Also with ever more bizarre behaviour. America seems to be in a badstink decline, worse and of less weight than Rome but with greater potential for bloodshed. This, despite the fact that America's whole cycle is not even one hundredth the time cycle of Rome although it includes it. And its imaginative territory is not as wide as and no deeper than Mickey Mouse in his fading celluloid grave.

There is some hope however that a constellation of new compact national imaginations and one or two more efficient empires will replace America like happened with Rome. I have called for America's dissolution in order to save it. I have looked forward to the Principality of Buffalo and the Spiritual Republic of California. These could be more bizarre than boring and less exploitative.

Perhaps like with Venice's imperial fall the decline from glory (as middlemen of crusades, liquidator of the children's crusade, drug dealers) may yet be characterised by a much later flowering of municipal arts and releasing of frozen mythic and classic imaginations into psychological insight, intrigue and mannerist fun. A kind of renaissance. A pre-terminal euphoria.

Like with Florence America's decline could result in more furious networking with incompetent and murderous rulers trying to justifythe domination of their phoney republic sleazy culture capital and furious marketing of the human spirit (by falsifying everything including those big lies by undeservedly placing the rulers themselves into an ordered deification of intellect while at the same time selling their people to the devil and to the French). This could be the next ending of history. Or like the Holy and apostolic church there could be an archiving of all sins and glories into catacombs of information too voluminous to be grasped and the conversion of all institutions into secret squirrel clubs of vile sinners, landlords and usurers conspiring and reconspiring to keep the truth game going. A clean slate eternally. Or is that already happening?

Your blog, Hank, represents at this moment of decline a tension expressed from the parochial in the midst of universal disintegration. It is voices and images from some different places and times. One Hundred and Fifty Mile House for example (how far is that from Horsefly?). From Vancouver (in the Canadian Imaginaire the opposite in the inter-text from Toronto). From Toronto, from the sixties, from exiles, from America and from BaAmerica. (Ba is the proto Bantu word to say something is culturally not. For example there is a notorious tribe in Nigeria reputed to be thieves named Chamba. The proper tribe next to them is called Bachamba. The Bachamba hosted the British District commissioner and regional government. The Chamba killed him.)

The present intertext however projects an opposition to the military and imperial dreamworld of continuous mystification, permanent and reoccurring reaction, compulsory public anxiety and constant and progressive training in docility. It is against normalcy of banality and constant surveillance which are the two main politics of the age.

What is the main identity of the age? Like the decline of America, it creates the story and plot of the individual in it through the alienation its official culture expresses for itself, the individual associated with it is in flight.

I know of some such individuals. They wouldn't like your blog. They sought to be giants by imagining a world in which all the things they had fled from were thought out of existence. The family, the locality, the duty (usually to confront responsibility and death), race, religion and so on. One by one flight. Just as America flees reality with its official fantasy so paranoid, so shallow and so without theory and culture, they had fled from nationalities so called for a new nation, had fled from their own cowardice and so called for a cataclysm that would never take place in which they were martyrs, had fled from their own naughty infantilism and so called for purity. One has written `the greatest event of 1969 was the Saskatchewan Student conference’ saying that the stand taken there would lead to the changing of the world. Look up 1969. Therewere other things happening as well. But these individuals attract as America attracts. They attract their own authors who wish to fill the void they occupy with snappy little myths, reworkings of former texts, Rome, Venice, Mao. Tragedies into farces. Empires into Parishes. Another I knew, a terrorist, died in despair on the basis of apocalyptic ecological slogans that described actions which were later undertaken by municipal re-zoners. But enough of that.

Let us cite the Greeks. There was an official called the Theoros. This was the detached non-participatory witness to civic events. Then there was the Proxenia, the advocate in places where they were not from who was also a spy and reporter from the outside. Usually they were poets. They were both necessary in the midst of all the public chaos and contending imaginings of the governing drama for the formation of the objective, that is the momentary and quite concrete truth. Our group is both that.

It is not the voices of a world city or from too many airports. It is not the voice of acceleration, resistance or repulsion. It is an intertext of decline. Therefore exhilarating.

You can provide your own quotations to illustrate the passages above from the recent blog postings.

Or you could argue it is instead the voice of the Decentralised Intelligence Entity which like the CIA wishes to rework the public mind and fill the public eye. But in a different way.


Sincerely,

Corporal B.M McDonald