Blue Orange

TIM & DOROTHY release

2007-10-22T10:00:00.000Z

Blue Orange is proud to announce the publication of the novel Tim & Dorothy by Richard Rathwell with superb illustrations by Rebecca Draisey (shown here).

In the mid-1950s actual wars of the new bi-polar superpower war coupled with Armageddon hangover created a great anxiety.

New science, new nations, new politics spawned monsters of consciousness and a phantasmagoria of new political and social reason.

In Canada a scheme emerged to test all the children over a wide area with the assessment instruments of the day. They were shortlisted, shortlisted again, filtered and whittled from every child down to only forty. The children then were placed together into a class where they remained for four years. They were taught by PhDs in educational psychology. They were taken to art galleries, archives, laboratories and parliaments. They had their own bus. They researched historic events and visited sites. Radical pedagogical methods were used exclusively. They had regular speeches and presentations to make. They had committee work. There were constant research assignments. Extreme experiments were conducted such as intense mathematics classes, three weeks straight, math only, in a darkened basement from fractions to logarithms. How much could they learn? How fast?

The kids were all 10 when the class began and approaching 13 when it was closed. Tim & Dorothy takes place in this time and in this class, and was published on the occasion of its reunion.

Below is an excerpt.

"More snow and darkness. Tim’s feet said ‘cold, cold’ from inside his runners. His runners were soaked. They were saying ‘wet, wet’. The snow got behind his windbreaker collar and melted on the top of the Perry Como sweater his mother had won at Bingo. The rivulets went down into his undies. The sweater was the best thing he had. It was lime green and Dorothy loved it. He could sing Perry Como and hummed him now. He wished Dorothy was here. He would tell her his plans for searching for Marcus.

Tim knew he loved Dorothy and that Dorothy loved Tim. When they had reached eleven they had already done love for one year according to him. In that year, the second year of the Special Class, they began to meet on spring mornings by the run-off pond not far from the canal to walk to school. Tim would leave the bike he had then hidden in the bushes. That was until that one was stolen. Dorothy arrived on foot. She often brought enough sandwiches for both their lunches and an apple for Tim’s breakfast.

In spring the polliwogs in the pool had long and translucent strings which dangled and twisted from where their penises should be. Dead fat lumps of polliwogs wrapped in gossamer drifted in the black water around the outlet pipe from where ducks would graze on them. In winter the brown heads of frozen frogs dotted the ice. Now, in late autumn, the pond was completely covered in waxy gold, red and orange leaves inviting a leaping run and a drowning. They would dare each other.

In the summer there was no school so Tim sat by the pond waiting for Dorothy on her way to the library. Or if he knew she had gone shopping with her mother he rode a bike, if he had one, one he found somewhere, up into the centre of town. Once he did this with Marcus and the Johns as cover, all planned by Marcus in advance as a mission. He would follow Dorothy and her mother around as she shopped. It was wonderful just to see her in her weekend dress with the lace collar and her white socks with mirror black shoes. When Dorothy was at her family’s summer cottage, or when she went to Europe, he would call on Marcus and they would walk to the park and talk or go to the free museum. Marcus didn’t do sports.

Tim had to go away from the direct route from his house to the school to get to the pond to meet Dorothy because he lived down in those houses where the river flooded. Dot lived outside the district in one of those places with big porches. Marcus lived there too but high up on the hill. But his was a rented house not owned forever like Dorothy’s. The government rented it for Professor Barcus.

From the pond Tim and Dorothy would walk to school over the canal bridge past the Italian grocery. On the days Marcus was driven in the car that came for his father they would be alone. Even when they got close and there were other groups of kids they would be alone. They sat together from the beginning in Special Class until the seats were rearranged. Then he sat by Marcus in front of Doctor Liz’s half of the teacher resource desk.

Sometimes when it began to warm and the snow had melted in spring he and Dorothy would spend time on the bench in the shallow tunnel of bushes which overhung the path to the park. This was when the bushes had flowered and they wanted to talk of things. Dot would ask about Tim’s life at home and he would ask her about Spain—she had gone to museums there and seen breastplates—or would try his little tricks on her. He would do a sudden bear. Those didn’t usually work with Dorothy, especially his ghost voices that came straight from his head, she saw through them.

Dot could carry and conclude in her head the correct sum in the class contests after following fifty changes. Like take one, and then add five, take away three, divide by seven, no cancel the last three and take the original and multiply by five and so on. Those were not just addition and subtraction but multiplication and division. It was soon to be logarithms. But Doctor Agnes could do that to. Doctor Liz couldn’t. It was never her who would do the contest each week. She would take down the notes. Tim dropped out of the contest after ten of the big changes. He could do the sums as they ran but had no memory for the big shifts.

But Tim could put on a skit in their acting out history classes. Everyone liked the times he was the one; like when he was Pissaro and he said what he thought when he first met the Incas and he did it as a former pig herder, because Pissaro was that and not a hero, but at the same time as being that pig herder he was mad for gold and also he loved the Chief Inca who was so calm and dressed in colourful feathers not like a smelly priest and this made Pissaro unusual and hard to do because he was fearless with only a few men in the face of thousands and he killed someone he almost worshipped because he would not say where the gold was hidden. Tim did this one before he had read up much on it. He just felt it. "

dis course

2007-04-21T13:44:00.000Z

BLUEORANGEPUBLISHING IS A VENTURE CAPITAL INVESTMENT ORGANISATION, NOT FOR PROFIT FOR US, INVESTING IN POETRY VENTURES AND IN OTHER WRITING.

We have a prejudice to create or resurrect rare books, do joint ventures and construct interlocking lists, to enable a print-based literary community, locally and internationally, an independent singularity, and to support guerrilla marketing and fun and challenging social events, as well as to maintain ramshackle and aggressive independent distribution in opposition to mainstream E-Armageddon and similar anywhere on earth and at home. Any idea considered.

Dis course and Dis tribution! Dis Sonnance!...

RULES OF THE RIVER

2007-03-11T09:35:00.000Z

Blue Orange, in alliance with DaDaBaBy, announces the publication of the poetry book RULES OF THE RIVER by Richard Rathwell with artwork by Pierre Coupey and edited and created by Jamie Reid, with a cover by Carol Reid.

For orders, email thedeadarts@gmail.com.

topple

2007-03-11T09:29:00.000Z

I clarify 'topple.'

I mean topple artistically in the political sense, especially as an example of the practice of communalism in the arts, as a corrupting influence on culture, and as being anti-discourse and market.

And a bunch of other antis. He is clearly a damaging terroristic sort of guy.

And an impediment to the free market.

Also not seeking the marvellous in the real and seeing a thing in its own sake.

I do not mean topple in the mental sense. I know Mr. X has always been missing a piece of gnos.

That meant he saw life, being of private income, as a kind of troublesome circle of support and praise. Later, after failures, this became a sort of auto erotomania in a playpen pretending with friends to be winning a horse race.

Because he has invested so much in building his place in a circle of similar gnos, including an anti-art, anti-activism gnos, his unsettling attraction to the poem, to me as a nineteen year old 'barging into intimacies', and his attraction to your reckless out of the box commitment, and to the rest of my my life, and yours, created the completely unbalanced response. It is a sign of a damaged person and declining mind. He particularly sees the artist as a betrayal, someone getting outside of the punishment/reward circles he should be in.

X by the way can never have a friend. The guys in the play pen aren't there for that.

His problem is that the book is attractive. Its ideas are beyond him.

This cannot be if he is X. He is attracted. This cannot be. He loves it. This cannot be. It doesn't love him. So he must fly at it. Negation of the negation. Spending a life demeaning what he desires, he has toppled himself.

He will be a figure of fun and he is beginning to know it.

assessing asses in Albanian

2007-03-11T09:10:00.000Z

What methods of assessing donkeys in Albania can teach us all.

First of all before we begin let me tell you there are several international charities committed to dealing with abused donkeys and giving them peaceful retirements. I urge you to seek these out and donate.

Next, as an aside, the Albanian name for donkey is 'gomar'. In other forms, the diminutive and the plural, it can mean automobile tire or motor mechanic. Albanians, as we all do, do not like to give up their roots easily as time passes and things change. The language works in a way, for example, that the word turkey might become, through a construction like `small talk turkey', a parrot or, equally, a poem.

Now I am entering into this discussion not as a dilettante. I did assess donkeys in Albania and I do know how to make love in Albanian. The root is 'duo'.

There is a right way and a wrong way to assess anything in Albania. In fact to do anything. If you do it the wrong way you are called a gomar. If you are a gomar in Montana, however, you might be a congressman, and son of a congressman. But not in Albania.

Donkeys can be assessed in a way usefully applied to Chinese cats. That is, it doesn't matter whether they are black or white but whether they catch mice. That is cats in China and only in certain classes. Donkeys of course do not catch mice except by accident when eating. I was assessing them as to whether they can climb a mountain carrying a burden. But the principle is the same. It is the same as with poems. They have different colours too, like donkeys, but that doesn't matter much in terms of their purpose.

What is the purpose of a cat in Toronto or Vancouver? The same difference.

Anyway we gathered a bunch of donkeys in Albania in a mountain valley town called Puke which means something like Puck. That is a playful spirit in many languages. You can name a donkey 'Puck'. Or a loved one, or a town. You can say `te duo Pucki'. But you can't say 'te duo gomari' neither in the day nor night. That is indescribably wrong. Well in Albania maybe not in Montana. This is away in which donkeys are different from poems and people.

I paid an Albanian to help assess the donkeys for three reasons. One is that I knew nothing about the art or science involved but wanted to learn at a fair price and two the donkeys would be carrying pipe up through a guerrilla zone and the helper was probably one of them. Guerrillas not donkeys, although every Albanian is a gomar about something to every other one.

Finally it was because they were not his donkeys or a relative's.

He was from out of town (from up the mountain actually).

This worked as the donkeys were not stolen, nor was the pipe. However the water pipeline we built to the town was blown up, but only after it was completed and the donkeys had left. Evidently the guerrillas thought we should pay rent for the mountain.

As you do for a donkey.

Like a poem, or love, or a cat you do not assess a donkey as to whether it is good or bad, whether it is strong or weak, a strong donkey is not necessarily good for anything. Whether it is merely beautiful or well bred. You do not assess its relatives and birthplace.

You do not assess it by hitting it with a stick and calling it names. In fact in Albania this is particularly useless as the worst thing you can call anything is 'gomar.' I know this because I am published in Albanian.

You assess it as to whether it is fit for purpose. As a thing in itself for a purpose. Can it get up that mountain with a load of pipe, never mind how it behaves or how it does it because that is up to the donkey person with it. But can it do it?

Because that is the beautiful thing, the true thing, the purposeful and consequential thing. The thing in itself about that old donkey, or young one or three footed one. It is that right donkey for purpose. There can be no other except another like it.

Assessing a donkey is like reading in some ways. You don't do it by calling the book names. You don't do it by wondering how Jesus might read it, or do it the way you might skin a caterpillar, or make love in Albanian.

When assessing donkeys for climbing mountains you don't do it bycopying the way the fearsome donkey whipping bully in the next valley assess donkeys. That is you don’t learn to see donkeys his way or you will get hit, like a gomar assessing, too. That is the same as with reading or loving.

They were beautiful and true those donkeys in a long chain going up that mountain, pipes on their backs, honking and wheezing, doing it in their own terms, in the rain and sunbursts, to help create a line for clean water down for the little kids in Puke. Whether they knew it or not.

Just as they should be. And I donated to their charity for that reason.

waves

2007-03-11T09:01:00.000Z

This is in the category of 'I thought you would never ask and you didn't' or 'I can't resist ducking even if I'm not punched'. It is a backchannel gone bad about the recent discourse. But so what.

I am grateful for everything, most of which was soulful rage at police criticism but some of which was support for my being.

Rules of the River is an object made partially of translations. The first poem in it is a mature poem which is ferocious about the limitations of depicting a complex horror and way that horror works on the person's vision. The rules of it. It is a stitching of fragments showing external editing. It is literally done outside of me. It is about an actual incident dealt with by poetry. Translated to poetry. It maps the eye and mind moving to 'take in' that horror.

The second poem, the series, is a game the reader is invited to play about poetry. It starts with a very 'young' poem (the basic thing was written when I was nineteen, I translated it a little later to be the work of a quite dark, fragmented woman in a book I wrote called "Borderline: Casebook Translations", then I contained it in a chapbook called "Poems From the Beak" which was to have been written byher. But forget that. It's over. Get on with it.)

That poem was chosen for the game ruthlessly. Not because it was goodor bad but because it was a fit subject, authentically happened, and had a kind of feeling good to throw to mutilation and fragmentation and then try to bring it back, to see what it was. Like me. The fragmentation comes from the 'others' like the other languages, images, words, ideas, realities.

The first poem is not mature but has a voice of apparent weary and wary experience, like it actually is.

That first poem then deals with the frustrating limitations of vision as an exploration of both language and how the eye works with images, and the pain of that. It is too a fragmented poem but this time one that isn't resolved except by the pieces of the image it is moving over, or that are is going through it, like a Prism. It just can say what it ends up with as the input shifts.

It is trying to get at a woman and a river.

Then come the translations. Not completely Babblefish, not much, but however limited and ruled by the way in which the poem tries, with eye and mind to do absolutes by moving through changes, hurt but helped by that as well. It had a personal background in looking at some of the translated poetry in each language and knowing some people. It has references and associations. But each part is on its own, outside of me, from the integrity of choosing the original, to giving it up, so that each one continues the game and reveals things also on its own.

The overall object ends up being, I think, like heraclitan waves (how rivers work in physics and philosophy), if you read it out loud, and consists of some poetic curiosities of how the meanings were found. It does invite the reader to make poems outside of themselves in language. And some do.

It is also furious in voice, pained, as it keeps going on, the rules keep changing, the absolutes contend. Sometimes redemption. Sometimes not. Sometimes alive grasping, sometimes not. That is a fair play depiction. With optics. At cost.

The eye context provided for this game by the artist's work is that in part the artist's work requires the eye to move around too, with the mind and make a narrative, which it can't do. It has to leave the art stand. The artist's pieces reflect on one another in a way like the poems do, and vice versa. My contention is that by doing that, observer is invited, in images and limitations, and works of fragments integrated somehow by the art itself, to try to get at something, perhaps beautiful in a new way outside themselves. Visual art is a translation of the real in optics. And interaction (dare I say dialectic!)

Even if it is only the beautiful horror of the rules just about a river and a woman, and a poem, and trying to get it.

The book is an object. It is a made object by many hands and adiscourse of them in selection and execution which is interesting as an event. As an object like its makers it has biography.

Well put together and edited. Bless them all. And it should be dealt with as a thing in itself. You don't need explaination of course, unless you want someone to participate in another way.

But what do I know.

are you afraid of ghosts?

2007-03-11T08:50:00.000Z

Are you afraid of ghosts, Mr. X?

Your piece on Mr. Y's Rules of the River was not a review of the poetry contained therein but an attempted character assassination of both Y and one of the editors, who I believe created an excellent publication. Reflecting on this I can only assume that you were trying to smother these two voices, to stop Y at least from coming in from the cold, or to return from the heart of darkness. I wonder what causes this unease, this fear you obviously have for the two. To dedicate so many words to hurting them and to stopping them from being read – which is patently, by the way, counterproductive – in such a personal and vicious manner will only make your readers question your own security, and also what really happened all those years ago. It is certainly not anyone else but you who seem to be stuck there. Is there something in there you are not proud of?

I laughed when I read that, in your paranoia, you sensed Mao lurking in the two poems. I laughed when you stated that in one of them Y ‘implies that he’s been conducting espionage for some Maoist NGO in Egypt or Somalia, or wherever.’ As you state yourself, you know little of Y's actions since he was a young man, and obviously have not seen much of the world or seem to care much about it. Incidentally, in Egypt he worked for an organization called Terre Des Hommes, which works to protect the rights of children – I doubt that he was conducting Maoist espionage on them. In all other contexts he was doing similar work, and if you had been googling responsibly you would have come to the same conclusion (although you’d have probably still proceeded with the attack regardless). You may need to expand your horizons, Mr. X, and move on. For the past thirty-five years, unlike yourself, Y has had a career in the real world. He was not in ‘the heart of darkness,’ at least not metaphorically, not in the ‘murk,’ not in the ‘wilderness (where is that exactly, Mr. X? Anywhere outside of your own experience?),’ and he was certainly not ‘institutionalized’ as you imply (one of the most unimaginative and savage attacks your clumsy article contains). There were no Maoists, Mr. X – in your irrational unease at seeing Y's and the editod's names haunt you again you must have gotten you overexcited and maybe a little paranoid.

Your rather concise critique, added like a postscript to disguise the slander as a book review, of the poetry itself is just as misplaced, clumsy, and anxious, and typed with just as much bad faith, as your ad hominems which form the bulk of the piece. You criticize the poetry for being ‘obscure and insinuative rather than articulative,’ and for coming ‘with no accompanying contextualizations.’ As your readers will know, this comes with the territory of poetry. Even if you disagree, it is certainly not a valid, God-like criticism of anyone’s work. The poems are not even obscure by anyone’s stretch of the imagination (well, perhaps by yours).

As for the contextualizations, you seem to ignore your friend's excellent artwork which would resonate clearly with an objective reader, rather than one who’s pulled out the dagger before opening the book. And for the record, he was shown the layout prior to printing and was very happy with it, and happy with the outcome, and therefore your objection to the workmanship and descriptions of his work are misplaced. It may seem odd to your readers that the artist, who you obviously admire, colluded with Y on this work, which, if I can hazard a guess, you will not be nominating for any awards. Could it be that the artist liked the poetry? Could it be that your readers will to, if shown it? Is that why you are afraid of this haunting? Also, hilariously, you take the title of ‘Rules of the River’ literally, and offer as a critique the fact that the name of the river itself is not stated. The river isn’t the Nile, and Mao isn’t paddling along it, Mr. X. There are more things in heaven and earth.

I am glad, though, that you admitted not being able to penetrate the poem’s eleven rules, because ‘they are evocative rather than disclosive statements unlocated in a delineated landscape.’ I think Y would have no trouble agreeing with this, although I’m not sure he would apologize for not delineating a landscape you would recognize (downtown Toronto?). I might also say that one rule at least should have seemed quite disclosive to you, quite easy to penetrate, even in your state of nervous excitement – ‘the law of lek: everything fights back.’

In any case, I urge you to type out the first poem on your website and let your readers judge for themselves.

I also can’t help but balk at another curious falsity that you have asserted: that Y had attempted to court an ex-wife of yours. I wonder why this troubles you so. I also wonder why you must resort to this sort of attack in what is supposed to be a book review. Did she mention that Y had read Rules of the River to acclaim at a major conference of poets? Did you? Did you ever think that it might be true that there is a street named after him in Uganda, or a tree in India? Or is it beyond your capacity to say a good thing about people who try to produce a book? Maybe you have had no trees named after yourself, Mr. X. It also seems to me that all your criticisms apply to you rather than him. From your piece I can guess why not. ‘Egomaniacal monologuing’? Check. ‘Composition without intellectual responsibility, discipline or research’? Yep – was your piece responsible? Was it disciplined or researched? ‘Cognitive contraptions’? Check – again, your piece on Rules of the River was an interesting study. ‘A man who doesn’t appear to have altered his intellectual procedures or his attitudes towards others in three and a half decades.’ Check – how many enemies have you made with this sort of slander, Mr. X? Perhaps it is time to confess. ‘What a waste’? Well, we shall leave that for the river to decide. Certainly not you.

I am sending you another of Y's works for you to review – Re: The Dead Arts. I think he’s done well with the title, don’t you? Boo!

the secret's daughter

2007-03-01T10:20:00.000Z

The Secret’s Daughter
by Aine, blue orange writer

I am the secret,
I hide in the shadows,
In the dark is where I lurk.
No one knows me
And my daughter never tells a living soul
About me,
About who I am.
I’m kept closed up
And locked up
In an unknown place
That not one person has ever been,
No one ever dares to go.
Their too afraid and scared too go.

My daughter exists,
She lives on this world
And she keeps me a secret
And nobody knows why,
They don’t ask
And she never talks.
My daughter walks, and she breathes.
I am her secret
And she is my daughter
Only she and I know the truth.

Everyday I watch her grow more beautiful, wonderful,
Good and right.
She goes to school and is well educated,
Qualified and well trained for the world
And her future is right ahead.
I seen her come and go, out and in.
She’s bright, light, clear and pure,
Even innocent and too real and true.

She doesn’t live with me anymore,
She moved out when she was old enough to go,
She use to sneak me out for important events
Like graduations and other events
She even snuck me out for her wedding,
The day when she got married to her husband
And now she lives next door to me,
With her husband and her children, my grandchildren.

My daughter is living the life I’ve always long, yarned and desired for.
That I always dreamt, hoped and wished for
In all my life.

On some days and nights I watch by the window,
I witness her children play,
I seen them come home from school,
I can hear the sounds of joy, life, excitements and happiness,
Even laughter rang loud and clear like the sound of bells ringing,
It sounds like little angels.
My daughter, my incredible and beloved daughter,
I wished I told her that I love her,
I wish I have gave her everything she ever deserved to have
And much more,
That I’ll move heaven and earth just to be by her side,
And hold her close and near me tightly and tenderly, gentle
While singing sweet songs.

All I am now is a secret, a secret that not one person will ever know.
I am the past from long time ago
That reminds unknown from the universe

My daughter just buried me just last summer,
After I died mysteriously
And I just left this poem for her to read.
No one must know about this poem that I wrote,
Just me and her,
I am her secret mother, she is my secret daughter,
The secret’s daughter.

ANNOUNCEMENT: RE: THE DEAD ARTS

2007-01-07T07:26:00.000Z

Blue Orange Publishing is delighted to announce the publication of Re: The Dead Arts, the Selected Writings of Richard Rathwell, with book design by Lee Chapman of First Intensity and cover art by Jessica Kolokol. Many of you will have already read extracts on this blog.

It will soon be available in the United States via SPD Books for $18.95/£12.95, as well as in some bookstores in Canada and through this site by sending an email request to thedeadarts@gmail.com. Its ISBN is 0955 1627 0X.

Back Cover:

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 journeys out of the place encased.

I want witness. I want report and it is better about a kinf 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 a 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.

tomfool

2006-12-07T18:32:00.000Z

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

2006-11-25T13:02:00.000Z

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

2006-11-04T11:51:00.000Z

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

2006-10-17T21:32:00.000Z

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)

2006-10-02T15:41:00.000Z

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

2006-10-02T15:36:00.000Z

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

the wedding

2006-09-22T18:50:00.000Z

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

2006-09-17T16:54:00.000Z

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

2006-08-26T13:41:00.000Z

...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)

2006-08-13T09:26:00.000Z

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

2006-08-06T10:50:00.000Z

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

2006-08-04T21:43:00.000Z

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

2006-08-01T06:16:00.000Z

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

2006-07-28T18:10:00.000Z

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

2006-07-28T07:39:00.000Z

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

2006-07-13T20:35:00.000Z

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

2006-07-05T21:31:00.000Z

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

2006-06-12T16:20:00.000Z

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

2006-06-01T19:21:00.000Z

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

2006-05-29T11:48:00.000Z

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

2006-05-28T21:56:00.000Z

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

2006-05-23T18:03:00.000Z

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

2006-05-15T14:34:00.000Z

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

2006-05-15T09:56:00.000Z

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

2006-05-04T09:40:00.000Z

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

2006-04-27T22:55:00.000Z

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

2006-04-24T08:57:00.000Z

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

2006-04-19T10:05:00.000Z

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

2006-04-07T13:48:00.000Z

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

2006-04-06T13:07:00.000Z

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

2006-04-03T20:13:00.000Z

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

2006-03-30T12:39:00.000Z

'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

2006-03-27T18:55:00.000Z

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

2006-03-27T18:04:00.000Z

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

2006-03-27T16:04:00.000Z

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

2006-03-23T16:36:00.000Z

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

2006-03-22T13:40:00.000Z

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

2006-03-21T18:27:00.000Z

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

2006-03-10T19:20:00.000Z

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

2006-03-07T10:43:00.000Z

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

2006-02-28T12:38:00.000Z

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

2006-02-26T12:03:00.000Z

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

2006-02-25T16:26:00.000Z

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

2006-02-21T19:54:00.000Z

(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

2006-02-21T18:50:00.000Z

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

2006-02-19T10:46:00.000Z

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

2006-02-16T11:02:00.000Z

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

2006-02-16T10:26:00.000Z

(from Baktashi essay on self)

Of Apostles

Only Judas

Understood

Prophecy, value

Acting well

And redemption.

blog of revelations VIII

2006-02-15T11:28:00.000Z

( 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

blog of revelations VII

2006-02-14T15:48:00.000Z

(from Fatima in Translation.)

Mind from senses, soul from mind

To intellect trained by creation

With spirit and suffering

Sees god but self

Even hero, even martyr

Is limited.

announcement: new site

2006-02-12T16:44:00.001Z

A Blue Orange writer has a new WEBSITE:

http://www.richardrathwell.com

announcement: new site

2006-02-12T16:44:00.000Z

A Blue Orange writer has a new WEBSITE:

http://www.richardrathwell.com

blog of revelations VI: Profetësi (from the Beak)

2006-02-12T14:08:00.000Z

Kur fëmijët
marshojnë
dhe zgjedhin ç’të shkatërrojnë

është koha e vdekjes
dhe kohë e harruar
kur fëmijët marshojnë

e shkruajta këtë përpara se ta përjetoja
por më mirë që e jetova
midis palmave

kur zemra flet me fjalë të ftohta
dhe zëri dridhet, dhe kur
gjithçka shkon më thellë se
ligji i gjykimit

dhe ty, ndonëse i ri, të duhet të vdesësh ndërkohë
fëmijët fillojnë marshimin

shiu vështron qënie të deformuara
humbet objektin e tij
dhe shkatërron të njohurit

e shtegut të zymtisë

gjithçka e ndarë

këtu në këtë çmendi
një jetë e re fillon dhe vdekja triumfon
frymëmarrje, bukë, dashuri, emra të rinj

dhe gjak për të ushqyer
atë që është tharë

e kam jetuar
fëmijët marshojnë

por rilindja nuk është mënçuri

(from 'The Beak's Poems', translated by Iris Rathwell and Evis Carcani)

blog of revelations V

2006-02-11T12:06:00.000Z

(a fragment from Fatima)

The signs are around to signify the seventh kill-off.

Disappearance of memory. Demise of identity. Increased drowning in empty metaphor.

Plagues of stereotypes cause blind dementia.

Ice caps melting while narratives form of oil free futures.

Practical things to create abstractions.

Imprisonment for freedom, wars for peace, reasoned genocide.

See gated churches of virtual worlds.

Freer right and market as elect ascend.

Ungodly selves burn.

blog of revelations

2006-02-10T09:15:00.000Z

The Blog of Revelations

I suggest you join with me to write an essay. I am going from time to time on this blog to illustrate my bits of this proposed collaborative effort. I would especially like professors of popular culture and sociologists. Also folks.

1. Most of the blogging and chatting going on has as a meta-theme the decline of America (perhaps into something nicer like grassland and small kingdoms).

2. There is both an intra-text and a market developed around this. There is monopoly, poverty, addiction and madness. There are rules and laws. There is syntax and tax tax.

3. There are features of the phenomena that resemble events in Venice after their empire collapsed or events in Florence when their civic policy became networking and loans. That is, there is a renaissance going on.

4. Like most renaissances this one has become mannerist. Myths are becoming psychosis, history is being rolled over into modern dress, carnival and burning. We will renew the classic. We will know we are there by the beautiful synthetic colour.

5. The blogs and chats atomise culture. The post modernists hit the retro modernists, those who know it all hit those who are just developing the new retro modernist stereotypes. Then there is the war to blog about. And culture. And celebrity. Then there is too that rapid American Balkanization to component landscapes and narratives. As usual memory is what didn’t happen, tradition is the newest thing and reality is the obligatory cliché. Then there is resistance, nostalgia for artificial worlds. Writing oneself as a cartoon.

6. This occurs in an age of surveillance to enforce normalisation.

7. A word about the narratives of other nations. Take Canada for example. Canadian prisms have always been parochial. This is a sub-narrative to the great winning of the world by American folk. The faux parochial is commercial parochialism. The faux memory is memoirist. These are political stances that serve the master in the decline, serve in the generation of the new panoptic, the invisible Ultreye, gatekeeper of the access to the fruits of this morbid decline.

8. The blogs and chats are an accumulation of associations in short triggers. Because of this they check off phenomena, the phenomena are covered. That means it will burst out again seeking to be grasped. The hole gets bigger, the wind howls.

blog of revelations IV

2006-02-09T10:14:00.000Z

Uninterpreted and partially translated fragments from Baba Bektashi:

When the soul hears its song, it stones the gypsy.

The dancers leave, the holy return.

A cradle falls, a killer dies.

Doubly love the Sultan as his reign may be short.

Egoist, permit no problems in your world; saint, no solutions.

If you have seen it all before, you are blind; if you have heard it, you are deaf. As for knowing...

A dervish can fart.

-Hank

blog of revelations III

2006-02-09T10:12:00.000Z

Proverbs from Baba Bektashi:

Panic brings worse consequence than its cause.

Being dissolute puts one beyond criticism.

It is easier to imagine people than to know them.

It is easier to report dreams than to see truth.

A fool has great honor in his own village.

-Hank.

blog of revelations II

2006-02-09T10:01:00.000Z

My grandfather-in-law (baba) married three times and in between he went to Chicago where he was part of a secret society. This society published an underground journal of news. It may have supported itself in traditional mountain brotherhood ways. Baba travelled and worked all over North America. He sent home money. When he came home he lived on the family mountain top but he travelled down from there often selling secret and magical antique charms and ancient painted Icons to both Moslems and two varieties of Christians throughout the nation. The charms and paintings came from within three steamer trunks he brought back from Chicago.

Baba himself was a Bektashi. His lodge, and perhaps his own great grandfather, had hosted Byron when he was in the valley below Limon, my grandfather's village. Bektashis are a large mystical order of active poets celebrating the redemption, melancholy and life of creation. They attempt to get through the veils of cant. Byron discussed their outlook with them when he was in the area and there is a folk memory of this and a few contemporary poems. Some of these are referred to in a manuscript I have from my father-in-law which is by several generations of family poets stanrting in the 16th century.

Did I say Baba had at least seven known children? The Greeks tried to steal some of them in a Balkan war to be used on their farms and for worse and in so doing wiped out most of Baba's small village. No one will say if any of their children were taken or their wives raped.

Fifty years later, just as the Communist regime collapsed, as an Aid official I investigated this area of my Grandfather's birth and death as well as a few other mountaintops and also some pestilant marshes. I was checking for certain individuals in the emptying prison camps that had been constructed for dissidents and their families and also in the attached so-called 'orphanages' which had actually been filled with bastard sick and starving kids and which still had quite a few naked down's syndrome children chained to the walls, and also other people that had been said to have been impossible in an authentic socialist state.

I kept updating my Red Cross list of the missing which kept growing day by day. 400, 500, 600. 'The Greeks are at it again' explained the orphanage administrators fat with baklava bought with the money they had got from recent sales in the newly free and uncontrolled labour market.

Did I say Baba was Albanian? Yes he was. From his many sons and daughters known about, two are buried on the hill of the martyrs, they were gunmen against Nazis, one is a retired general and one other, the youngest known ,who is still living was the one who married a pre-revolutionary princess. Her father had saved the revolutionary leader from death in his youth as the party was forming but that is another story. One only recently considered true although it was known for thirty years.

The youngest known son of Baba did become a ranking party official, a professor of applied ideology who in the famous 'affair if the cows' contributed to the cleansing of the party of an enemy clique and is one of the reason's Hohxa's ninety something year old wife who now lives in a state beyond memory in a small bungalow is not in prison. It is easy to visit her if you have the right credentials. The youngest son and the dictator's wife (the guide's closest true comrade) notoriously enthusiasticly supported the declaration of atheism as the state religion at a private party. The dictator was said to be in China at the time.

All grandfather's sons were classified by the party apparatus as peasants from the mountain and therefore to be trusted in party posts and in the final analysis in their ideology as long as they didn't dis the leadership whether that leadership, apparently alive, was dead or not.

But, if you have been following the narrative so far, you would see that they were actually Americans, children of a suspected gangster, perhaps one who had his name anglicized to 'Clinton' at Ellis island. They could be siblings to Greeks or perhaps Canadians.

They are Moslims now, true believers (but some belong to a secret order).
Me, a grandson-in- law, restored a church of sacred mediaeval icons. A blessed event in national history. Which is how I may be remembered.

All of the above is true and I can prove it. I got the evidence on my last trip.

So we get to the discussion on identity. This is of course a process. Identity is an activity. It engages and disengages. What it cannot be confused with is image. That can hold identity. Or it cannot when it is not authentic.

Because

Tradition is the thing least old. Authenticity is the thing least true. Nation is the thing least ethnic, territorial or ideological. Origins are definitely where we didn't come from. Memory is definitely what didn't happen.

Did your grandfather piss in the snow?

What did he write there?

is there a parochial art? should there be?

Why did a black panther supporter try to shoot a Vancouver communist? Or were either of them that?

Who is my favourite American?

And

What is all this dreaming?

Ask Baba:

Bektashi Fable # 1 :

According to the traditional Muslim belief, when one fell sick, one called upon the prayers and the good wishes of those considered god-fearing and pious. In a melancholic state, a man whose son was very sick called on a Bektashi Baba from the mountains; he asked the Baba to come to recite prayers in order that his boy be cured.The Baba, grand-dad, who cannot get out of this duty, accepted the plea and soon arrived at the door of the townsman. Standing near the child, he opened his hands towards the sky and prayed, 'My God, make it so that this boy dies immediately.'

The horrified father grabbed the Baba, beat him and threw him out of the house. Many days later the man came across the Baba on the street and continued his abuse of him, saying, 'Do you remember when you came to recite prayers for my son and, contrary to what I asked of you, you asked God to take his life? Well God did not listen to you and, El-Hamdulillah, my son is cured!'

The Bektashi laughed and responded, 'It is for that reason that I cursed the lad. I have been on bad terms with God lately and He has been giving me the opposite of what I ask for!

Bektashi Fable # 2:

After collective prayer in the lodge and reading of poetry, a Bektashi was praying by himself in the Mosque and demanding more money from God so that he could buy a bottle of raki. A traditional religious man next to him was also praying by himself, demanding more personal faith from God.

The imam noticed this situation and yelled at the Bektashi: 'Look! Do you see what others ask from God, and what you ask for? Alcohol! Aren't you ashamed of yourself?'

Baba replied, 'Everyone asks for the thing he doesn't have.'

blog of revelations I

2006-02-05T23:07:00.000Z

Ultaeye! Ultraeye!
There, not there
round in all directions
filled with mysterious judgement
striking out. Invisible, but the main thing
proving sight.
I have connected all this travel
in the moment between old death
and new birth
when things are strange
and clear hungry
as moonlight
(Risk, guaranteed risk,
is life because you feed, live or are
glorious)
not satisfied because I am settled
like my father and father
before that
the ones who decided in shadow
not to shoot everybody out there
feasting
because of a face growing old
last night on a pillow
like chocolate
in the dark

***

Poem on the fiftieth anniversary of
the founding of Canadian tire
(and to Jack Spicer too)

The mighty git
gee! manitoba!
sent angel tires instead.
(Cheese and ice, so they did eh!)

Four by fours, their light
cars grew him (and hymns)
and wand ring huntresses
hired him (yes they did!)

Cheese ice, urKing is bourne!
UrKing is bourne!
In ex-hell's house!
Glory us.

I say to you!
Snow!
For easter there was a mad woman shivering in my garbage can.
No eggs.
For christmas there was a cat frozen on the doorstep.
No presents. No cards.
On Baden Powell day I was stabbed, knifeless
defending my sister
from the godless
frogs,
frozen blood, thank goodness!
no scars
everyone identically evil
in stiff clean green uniforms
no guns.

Fields of ice to play on
Wolves to take your sandwiches.
Stupid snow jewelling
and covering up everything.

***

Three secret curses
I get emails from Jack Spicer
And three secret obituaries
I may have been a Stalinist but you are always a cuckold.
From the living poet
blitz bits obits
You're asking am I
the right guy
to finish Babel
poem returning
obituary burning
swearing voice
yearning

I...

***

...I wasn't in Khartoum. But I was in Gulu where I interviewed the leaders of the 'Raped Women's Collective' trying to hustle me for a grant in return for their plaster frogs. They hadn't sold a lot as there weren't many tourists. One in fact over a year. Me in fact. Except for the aid guys who thought of the frogs with a project reading 'Gulu Raped Women's Collective'.

But the delegation were there for a day and I was there for a week trying to write a poem and find a plan for the town council (many of whom were related to the rain queen in the bush 100 meters beyond the hotel). I was a consultant. She was an armed prophet.

My room was fine but the guy with me from my delegation from Salmon Arm, Canada, who was a town planner had a room which the mortars of last week had opened the walls of, wanted to complain because of the mosquitos, he said, 'Listen, Hank, I know you like this all and are romantic but I think I am reacting badly from my anti- malarials and something, a jigger you say, has just bitten me so I want to go home,' and I said relax, but when he saw a guy with a big Kalasnikov outside the window was unsure because of the size of the shadow, I said there are small guys too with our towels just outside the window, then he screamed so I got Acholie Annie to comfort him from the bar, which still had a roof. He claimed her on the city council claims form. But they used chemicals anyway on everything. We were trying to start a university but because of the illness he forgot.

So go there poets. Find out.

the art (from 'The Beak's Poems)

2006-01-29T12:52:00.000Z

fair play and optics

at cost

an insight

at great cost (the eye perceives in straight lines)

dividing sectors, crossing the frontiers

like rain, sunset, clearing mist

on window (how is it resolved?)

divided

smashed and joining in light, colour

by such timelessness ordinary

distances receding (the ear hears layers of disturbance)

focus, refocus, knowing, like rain (what remembers this air?)

spins, rising, projected, condensed,

at such spinning. Is it any

wonder that it applies (the wind, the rain)

to both and whirls above (light following tile rain back

to the sun)

so many stories (charged and true each moment)

a people, a place, a nation (lightning, fire)

borders

movement, yet are one

so rich ungrasped (yet money and light stand for beauty

while hating it)

clamouring to be (a woman, a bird, rain)

against everything it was (only not the valleys, the rivers)

serving at birth asking only

rage against determined programme and is (sometimes too close

because of faulty reference)

is maker from, breaker, burster,

automatic from, unrestricted

borne from light, wind, rain

mountains on

fire -- things safe from abuse and distortion

decisive in spirit

step by step

immortal

rising

the whale

2006-01-22T15:15:00.000Z

Since I have an apartment which overlooks the Thames at the deepest part I have an obligation to write to you about that whale.

It went by my place in the dark at about five. My partner was dreaming of me drowning off Ghana and I heard cries from behind the moon. As is usual for events like this (the princess dying, the bombings) I had a feeling something was up. I checked the TV and radio, nothing.

Then at noon there it was. A blue bottle whale which is supposed to be 1000 metres under the ocean off Iceland was in the river at Chelsea beyond parliament forty miles up from the river mouth.

The news spread and eddied. What gender was the whale? What had happened to it?
Was something going on with all the whales? Some had been seen fof Cork but not this sort of whale. Two had been seen swimming down from Scotland and one was now off Southend. Was it a partner? A mother?

The whale tried to beach itself. Two men jumped into the river to scare it off. The beaching was explained not as suicide but a way of trying to survive when too weak to swim. The whale didn’t want to drown. It was trying to be a land animal.

And for good reason. It had come past the Thames barrier, the anti-flood gates, the sewer outlets under the ferries and water taxis around barges. In all this it was blind in murky water and its sonar would not work well. Was it crying for other whales?

There had never been such a whale in the Thames.

Thousands gathered. There now arose an order of officials. There was something called ‘official whale sightings’ as opposed to what we could all see. And that was distress. There was a rescue strategy. It couldn’t be discussed yet. We were to stop jumping into the river. There were official experts and spokesmen. They knew not much about whales, their intelligence, their means of communication and their torments. They wouldn’t speculate. But we knew that they are as smart as us, can cry for hundreds of miles. We were that whale.

The people in the bars and on the embankment knew. Some heard the low frequency sounds. But also cynical voices made fun of it. It had come to tell Tony Blair to stop helping Bush avoid
Kyoto. It was fleeing the Japanese. It was Osama Ben Whale come about Iraq (how did it get by the anti-terrorist measures in the river? They had been unbreached since the cold war). The jokes and cynicism were to avoid the feeling of great disaster. We were that whale.

The whale was dying. Its breathing was rapid. It kept trying to swim in the wrong direction. It always faced the tide, the highest, fastest tide of the year.

The commentary was elaborating theses that this whale was showing us something. Could this lead to political events?

I have written that in the next apocalypse the animals would participate on the side of God to undo creation. Probably on the second day. It is what I was thinking.

Others saw whales everywhere. The partner was in the estuary. Another had died in Peckham. Were the ice sheets melting? Someone, a whale expert, spoke of explosions and sonar weapons testing in the Orkneys. The radios played whale related music, the Theme from Baywatch. The record of politicians on the environment was reviewed in a new light. This will show them.

It was too much. A rescue by volunteers, navy divers from an unnamed agency and veterinarians was launched. The whale was hoisted onto a fast barge, wet down with watering cans and the barge ‘raced’, they were saying, down the Thames to the sea.

Information resonated. Someone said that an official embargo had now been lifted so that he could reveal government dolphins were in the river. Then we heard that the whale in Peckham was a dead dolphin not related to our whale.

He could not comment on what was happening in the North Atlantic.

Barges don’t race. We know that. Thousands gathered on all the historic bridges. They ran along the river. We chanted the bridges names as the helicopter broadcast the progress from high above. We knew those bridges. It was so far to the sea. Albert, Waterloo, London. So much to go. Way past the London Eye, past the new Tate. So far to go.

Then it turned the corner to the river in front of my house. There were a thousand gathered below on the railings. Many confused children. They were the reason the whale had been given no name. What if something happened? Everyone was silent. The sky darkened. A thousand seagulls landed on a nearby pier and froze. The air seemed to collapse with their lack of screaming.

The whale was in purple blankets. The boat seemed to crawl. Then it turned past the dome and was gone.

There had been now only one pilot boat ahead and one other behind where there earlier had been dozens of many agencies. It was a small cortège. It was not right.

One hour later, near the open mouth to the sea, near the place of release, near the sighting of the other whale, it died.

I had filmed its passing by. I had shouted ‘Hey Whale’. That’s all.

Many cried.

Next day it was a small item on the news. It had affected more people here than anything since our bombings. We await the autopsy.

What were you doing here whale?

ruling classes

2006-01-20T07:16:00.000Z

Humans associate so as not to be naked temporary ridiculous lumps.Bush associates himself in hope with eagles, big soldiers, mom andthe sacred institutions. The political sub stratum of the chattering classes associates itself with deadly infallible things. It can be God, the people, the founders, ideas. All associations lead to fullblown stories and this is awful if the association is with dead things. It is worse if the story has an army or even a single government department.

The narrative seduces and kills with its bad magic. Its pretended inevitability. Its false sentiment and impossible promise. Its origin of lies.

No politics is ever a science. If it were - it would be experimentaland so know and record that some of the laws it refers too were big screw-ups. The political narratives would not make heroes of its sulphur burned mouldy dead failed alchemists. It would rather reduce them to the chanting and silly comic book banalities to which they deserve to be reduced and transformed. Tommy the Turd–Eating Prince. Some to very bad failed and unread poets who should have stayed at their Wal-Mart desks or alternatively flourished and lived by panhandling on the street as faux Aspergers. Some can be better as little fat big balled ferocious animals in tiny cages.

You know who I mean.

The political sub-stratum in the present should always be accountable in dada and acid. It should not get to write the conclusion of any social narrative let alone the cultural one. Such would lead to annihilation of the human race. It almost has many times. The proper job of the political stratum is to be marvellously incompetent at redemption. It is to be opposed and overthrown hopefully by laughter but it is ok too to do it with contempt. That is everyone else's job as part of living and enjoying it.

You see politicians have personality disorders. They must. It is necessary for their life work. One disorder is that the world is inside their mind except for the bits that need to be controlled. The other is that everything is right or wrong in relationship to their destiny. There are more. If they didn't have these disorders they wouldn't be politicians. They would be great people.

Politicians work for others - usually. They do it for oily, usurious, murderous thieves in their silken turded pantaloons. Or worse. Have you ever imagined what it must be like to be a whore's whore? Did you like it? But if they are ever in charge themselves and without any paying clients they are death incarnate. They will screw the universe for everything. Then they write the final story of self on the people and landscape.

The best times on earth were when politicians were absurdly incompetent and universally ridiculed, restrained, people fought with ribboned sticks, the poets were organised into partying parliaments, the farmers had no landowners and death and life sang scat in the moonlight.

cliches revisited

2006-01-10T14:05:00.000Z

I have written elsewhere that a rant is the emanation of an old argument. It is the rational co-relative of a public bean fart. It relieves distortions and creates a demystifying human solidarity. But only if you don’t do it too often.

There is the contrary too. If there is an unacknowledged elephant crapping in the room it will radically affect your language and behaviour especially when you are asking guests to remove their shoes. It is the equivalent of an avoided martyrdom for a spiritual leader. It makes the divine path seem dodgy.

When I met you on the road to Damascus you asked directions to downtown Toronto.

I regret now that time has passed, that you have been wrongfully criticised by former teachers for not reaching the depths of your potential superficiality. I affirm here in your support as a peer that rather than that you have succeeded beyond our dreams in finding the essence of the commonplaces of your generation. That is only one of your mean feats. You are a guardian of the cultural narrative of the inarticulate. You have called many others ugly, everyone actually, which is so therapeutically devastating for an aspirant soul coming as it does from a leprous iguana. I have heard you mutilate the competent in your mind in the privacy of your own room as a stimulant and inspiration for your minimalist output. I must acknowledge that commitment to professionalism if true is unmatched.

I loved your ‘Cockroach of the State’ and ‘Orpheus Goes to Las Vegas’. I loved the passionate journalism and the opaque opinion you have written over the years on the nuances of re-zoning in Pickle Crow. That denunciation of your High School and old girlfriends for forgetting your conquests, that thing you wrote last year, ‘Paper Cuts’ was it?, was one of the year’s best soporifics! It was quite the anti-dote to Viagra! I have for one referred to that work when teaching others not to confuse you with that fellow who has the same name as you, the Calcutta Burger Eating Champion of 1966, who is still much better known. I wish you had written the planned “From Jonestown to The Stars”. Why didn’t you? Writer’s Tapeworm? I was awestruck when you renounced intellect, imagination, form and content saying they were the sure signs of dead arts like snowshoeing and hum jobs.

The website you edit is the perfect graveyard for retired stereotypes of the seventies. It is the mullet haircut of literary fashion. It is magic realism dragged ruthlessly through the prism of Fox TV. Each posting is more repetitive than the last! How were you ever able to select these few key and fundamental works now published in these your selected works? Or did you write them beforehand in primary school for your mom and then expand them in later life for later rebirth? This is a literary strategy that goobers the mind.

By the way, are you dead?

Borderline excerpt 1

2006-01-10T11:33:00.000Z

Was it necessary? Was I too proud, too pretentious, what did I expect? Where did I make my mistake? I kept my other self always hidden when I could have used it. I had to. I was ashamed of it. Pitiful. Gas. A hero. Good at games. Say little. Think a lot. Cope with grotesques. Bea knew that. Used it. Using it now. She knows how I will take this. All words now. A game. Smart stupid me who never suspected the less subtle bits of the obvious on my shoes. A gibbering animal throwing its stuff at the bars.

They imagined our streets and valleys as ancient shit. I imagined myself that way too.
And we imagined theirs as a paradise but also it had alleys of hairy unburied vermin, leprous hucksters, stinking and preying on our pockets and on our good sense. But we had none left, or we had forgotten it. This really helps, Bea. I see what you mean. Pain reduction. It works.

Yes, we never had anything, we are hairy and unburied and leprous as they were imagining us. Each trying to steal from the other. We hunt and are hunted down like noble animals, those animals that have become sick scavengers. We hunted each other. We cross over, back and forth, us and them, lovers and haters, running and dodging, desperately limping through the line of fire. Guilty carrion in our mouths, back and forth, nearly free, but not, nearly saved.

Separated from each other by imaginary lines. That was pretty good too Bea. Maybe this is worth it. Good game. Therapy.

From 'The Borderline', a novel.

happy st. nik's day

2006-01-01T13:22:00.000Z

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 andspeed 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.

other editors

2005-12-18T13:25:00.000Z

Other editors and publishers are reminded that pieces taken from this blog should be acknowledged. Those taken elsewhere and credited can be removed from this blog on arrangement.

Definitions

2005-12-17T01:47:00.000Z

الحياة
دماء متكررة
خبرات وقوانين لم نتعلمها بعد

الحب
المساعدة في وقت الحاجة بالجسد
والصور التي تريح وتدفع إلى

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

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

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

translated by

Covadonga de la Campa

from 'The Beak's Poems'

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

Political

2005-12-17T01:45:00.000Z

سياسي

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

translated by

Covadonga de la Campa

from

'The Beak's Poems'

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

chairman mao is dead! bobby sands is dying!

2005-12-13T10:03:00.000Z

But this is about a Teacher.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Part 2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What is that, sir?’

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

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

‘Sure thing. Thanks.’

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

(Part 3)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Begorrah?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He has an EU grant.

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

‘Who’s the informer?’

‘It’s me,’ said the Bishop.

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

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

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

‘Will they find me in Bulgaria?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Part 4)

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

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

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

He turned and left the room.

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

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

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

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

six thirty

2005-12-13T09:18:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sent for editing 4

2005-12-05T13:04:00.000Z

Dear Editor,

Here is another attempt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

sent for editing 3

2005-12-05T10:59:00.000Z

OK, editor, here is my latest:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sent for editing 2

2005-12-05T10:42:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

sent for editing 1

2005-12-05T09:46:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think?

comment

2005-12-03T21:42:00.000Z

Dear Blur Orange.

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

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

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

Keep at it!
Albert Conningham

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

ANNOUNCEMENT: book publication

2005-11-30T12:24:00.000Z

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

and

RED THE NILE, BLUE THE HILLS

and the poetry book

ONE POEM FORWARD, TWO POEMS BACK

have been published this November by Blue Orange Publishing.

spake the paper buddha

2005-11-30T10:06:00.000Z

WoooEeee!

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

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

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

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

Wake up snot chomper!

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

Its narratives seduce the desiring. The unfinished. You.

With it institutions take on characteristics of the unbalanced.

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

And (he then spake an aside)…..

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

We won’t waste our lives in your nightmares.

And then he said: Piss off!

why am i interested? i wonder how stuff happens

2005-11-29T23:14:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sunny day

2005-11-29T11:57:00.000Z

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

Nope.

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

You are entranced by the seduction of the narrative.

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

Narratives are not revolutions but they are certainly creations.

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

Who is dying who is dead.

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

Depends.

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

Tell the truth.

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

In the darkness of night.

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

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

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

idiots can make revolutions

2005-11-29T11:45:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

my name is tim

2005-11-29T11:42:00.000Z

My Name Is Tim.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*******

Tim Too

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

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

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

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

oppose memoirism to the death!

2005-11-14T10:22:00.000Z

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

Some one ought to do something about them.

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

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

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

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

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

The places I have been are monuments since defiled.

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

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

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

What do you call two memoirists? A historical époque.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

something

2005-10-24T08:38:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

fun

2005-10-19T08:11:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

literary conflict

2005-10-16T14:49:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

excerpt from someone else's novel

2005-10-16T12:56:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a small posting for friends in Kansas from the Himalayas

2005-10-10T08:08:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

2005-10-03T11:16:00.000Z

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

And who is He?

Never mind that for a moment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like the onset of flu. Like malaria.

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

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

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

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

the thing about every mystery

2005-09-23T09:38:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

a winter journey home

2005-09-14T16:05:00.000Z

Red Nile excerpt 4: flying planes can be dangerous

2005-09-12T12:31:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was you.