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.