Saturday, August 26, 2006

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.

Sunday, August 13, 2006

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.

Sunday, August 06, 2006

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.

Friday, August 04, 2006

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.

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

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.