(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.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Sunday, February 12, 2006
blog of revelations VI: Profetësi (from the Beak)
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)
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)
Saturday, February 11, 2006
blog of revelations V
(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.
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.
Friday, February 10, 2006
blog of revelations
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.
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.
Thursday, February 09, 2006
blog of revelations IV
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
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
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.
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
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.'
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.'
Sunday, February 05, 2006
blog of revelations I
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.
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.
Sunday, January 29, 2006
the art (from 'The Beak's Poems)
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
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
Sunday, January 22, 2006
the whale
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?
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?
Friday, January 20, 2006
ruling classes
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
cliches revisited
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?
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
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.
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.
Sunday, January 01, 2006
happy st. nik's day
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.
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.
Sunday, December 18, 2005
other editors
Other editors and publishers are reminded that pieces taken from this blog should be acknowledged. Those taken elsewhere and credited can be removed from this blog on arrangement.
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Definitions
الحياة
دماء متكررة
خبرات وقوانين لم نتعلمها بعد
دماء متكررة
خبرات وقوانين لم نتعلمها بعد
الحب
المساعدة في وقت الحاجة بالجسد
والصور التي تريح وتدفع إلى
التجارة
صورة من صور الإنتقال
واحدة من أجل الأخرى
الحياة أو الألم واحدة من أجل الأخرى
شيء بدلا من
الكذب
الوعد بالمشاركة في التجارب
بدون قوانين، تعريفات بقوانين متغيرة
تعيش كل أشكال الألم بالإشارة إلى أصول خاطئة تؤدي إلى:
ألم
يحتد عندما ترقص الأمراض من الجسد
دون تحكمإلى مصير محتوم
الحياة ترقص في الرأس والدم
في عالم تتمثل فيه الموعظة في خسارة الكرامة
المتقوقعة في كوب
صورة بلا حراك
كما لو أنك ترقص فوق الحجارة
دون ألم
كما لو أنك ترقص دون حراك في الحياة
لتظل طفلا يسعى لإكتشاف نفسه
المساعدة في وقت الحاجة بالجسد
والصور التي تريح وتدفع إلى
التجارة
صورة من صور الإنتقال
واحدة من أجل الأخرى
الحياة أو الألم واحدة من أجل الأخرى
شيء بدلا من
الكذب
الوعد بالمشاركة في التجارب
بدون قوانين، تعريفات بقوانين متغيرة
تعيش كل أشكال الألم بالإشارة إلى أصول خاطئة تؤدي إلى:
ألم
يحتد عندما ترقص الأمراض من الجسد
دون تحكمإلى مصير محتوم
الحياة ترقص في الرأس والدم
في عالم تتمثل فيه الموعظة في خسارة الكرامة
المتقوقعة في كوب
صورة بلا حراك
كما لو أنك ترقص فوق الحجارة
دون ألم
كما لو أنك ترقص دون حراك في الحياة
لتظل طفلا يسعى لإكتشاف نفسه
translated by
Covadonga de la Campa
from 'The Beak's Poems'
(The Beak is a character in the novel The Borderline: Casebook Translations)
Political
سياسي
قلت لأمك
انني طبيب
لم أذكر إسمي بالضبط
كان شكلك جميلا
وكنتي مبللة
وجميلة المحيا
أفضل
هذا هو إسمي
إسمي الحقيقي
أمي
ما إسمك؟
انني طبيب
لم أذكر إسمي بالضبط
كان شكلك جميلا
وكنتي مبللة
وجميلة المحيا
أفضل
هذا هو إسمي
إسمي الحقيقي
أمي
ما إسمك؟
translated by
Covadonga de la Campa
from
'The Beak's Poems'
(The Beak is a character in the novel The Borderline: Casebook Translations)
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
chairman mao is dead! bobby sands is dying!
But this is about a Teacher.
The teacher had objected on the grounds he knew nothing about pig farming. His objections were easily overruled by an appeal to his own statements about ‘a new sense of adventure’.
The Department of Education was easily agreeable. In the Republic of Ireland, the teacher found, Protestants are as zealously a protected species as are whooping cranes and the blue whale. Pigs were not.
Making up 4% of the population and with an enormous unfinished historical role, they must not only seem to survive but must thrive as a community in the new Ireland, this in spite of their distressing habit of dying out without a whimper and dying out from democratic participation with equal voice. So it was no problem to transform a Canadian English teacher into an instructor of pig farming in Ireland. They were overjoyed in the Department that they’d been asked to do anything to implement the constitution. They hired an atheist Canadian to teach the prods. He had an Irish background (don’t they all).
The stewardess in the hotel had found her thick and exciting tourist transformed into an Irishman embroiled in pigs, factions, patronage, and given to hanging around in pubs talking about EEC regulations and sport. She was disgusted that he’d become sincerely Irish, was becoming Catholic, and so was making fun of everything. Rotten foreigner! She should have stuck with the Frenchman.
It was no relief to her that his complications in North America had followed him to Ireland. The wife, whom he had been trying to divorce for years in America, had seemed promising in every respect. The woman had actually followed the teacher to Ireland, bringing their child and several friends with her, to study Economics at Trinity College. The wife had written with marvellous transparent duplicity that she ‘had been coming to Ireland anyway’. In the same letter she’d denounced the teacher’s move to Ireland as part of a master plan to thwart her freedom of movement. She accused the teacher of knowing her plans, but imperiously stated that he would not prevent their fruition. Meanwhile, the divorce procedures carried on in America. It was all so delicious, the stewardess thought, so Dublin. It had the flavour of Grafton Street, of MacDonald’s hamburgers, of tacos and American television serials.
But the teacher became more parochial. He designed a project for his class to study the whole problem of Irish pig farming, and became obsessed by it. To the stewardess this was worse than entering a pub brain contest, believing in the Femorians, or singing ‘Lannigan’s Ball’.
The teacher would take his students to slaughterhouses, study the road system, bewail the non-development of the ‘infrastructure’ and especially of telecommunications. He would buy Irish and denounced the influx of foreign capital. He would ask to withdraw from the EU. He left the stewardess in tears.
Ranting that the Irish pig industry only operated on the fringes of the European market, he lectured his students on the necessity for value-added manufacture, mutual aid farms, and more intensive tillage. And worse, he subscribed to the Farmer’s Journal. He phoned back and took the stewardess to livestock auctions. She accused him of being a new type of stage Irishman. He only began to lecture her more earnestly, while growing fat from drinking stout.
Then he discovered ‘Porcine Hepatitis’. It seemed that the EU had initiated a program under the category of ‘aid to historically-deprived nations that suffer from big-power-bloody-mindedness’ to grant to Irish pig farmers a sum of money to offset losses incurred by having to sell to fringe markets. For every pig carcass sold abroad, under terms unlike those that tradition had achieved for German sausage-makers, or manufacturers in Britain of ersatz steak and kidney pie, an Irish farmer got a certain cash grant. It had something to do voting patterns in the European Parliament.
Consequently, hardly any prime pork was being produced. Mysteriously, only low-grade stuff like that usually sold domestically began to be sent abroad. It seemed that, because of an outbreak of ‘porcine hepatitus’, Irish pork could only sell to fringe markets.
The teacher’s project group, ostensibly drawing up a report to enter a contest sponsored by a major pig cooperative that most of their parents dealt with, began to do intensive and often underground investigation.
One student found syringes in his father’s piggery that contained a substance the teacher had analysed. It was a serum to induce porcine hepatitis. The syringes had been manufactured by the P.G.P. corporation, which also manufactured the wonderful musical kitchen gadgets and other household devices on the market that the stewardess had had installed in her mental fantasy flat while she contested dreams with the teacher who was always going on about a cottage in the country, children, and an incremental post. She wanted no cottage. She wanted to be kept.
The stewardess had pointed out to the teacher that the term of reference under which the contest could be won was: How does the co-op benefit Ireland. She argued that this meant they should praise the co-op, win the prize, and after a certain amount went to the school and charity and so on, his promised bonus could go towards a musical cooker for her new flat or a trip to Miami.
The teacher had gone strange. He ranted about plots to undermine Ireland by introducing mindless, banal, addictive American atmosphere into the country. He went on about an artificial economy, a dependence on tourism that generated a fog of romantic historical obscuranticism, and insinuated that someone was trying to hook the Irish with a kind of hypnotism on a caricature of themselves. This, she knew, was impossible.
The teacher saw the project as a forum to expose all. He swore his students to secrecy, while whipping them up to ever deeper investigations. They were very enthusiastic. Madness was much better than mitching, and a good way to fill the time until the beginning of the one summer of real heterosexuality allowed them between the dormitory and the return to the farm after graduation to marry with cousins.
Being Irish, the stewardess could not disentangle herself from the disappointing un-North American blockhead, especially now that he was becoming Irish and mad. She had to stay involved with him, if only to the extent that she was able to gather material to slag him to her friends. Besides, she had hope. The divorce went through and he was going to inherit from someone.
The words of several priests echoed in her ears: ‘It is all for the best’ and, ‘You never can tell how it will turn out.’ These words she remembered from when she’d asked the priest to advise her how to cope with a friend who’d come out as a lesbian and was threatening suicide.
The teacher regarded her resigned form in the opposite chair. ‘I love you deeply,’ he said. ‘I’ll do anything for you.’ Then he added, ‘And I’m going to catch Mr. P.G.P.’
‘Get out, you bog-runner,’ she said quietly.
‘Mary, Jesus, Joseph, God save us,’ he said as he got up to leave the room.
The stewardess was thinking to herself, ‘What a fecking country.’
(Part 2)
Mr. Peter Gunn-Phitre, landlord, the retired teacher and self-appointed Irishman was at home. Gunn-Phitre was not his real name. But he had inherited.
His morning ritual was to take his breakfast in the Red Room which overlooked an artificial pool surrounded by transplanted cedars. Each instant the morning mist revealed a different array of detail as it lightened and evaporated with the rising sun. Mr. Gunn-Phitre first saw only the thick and long lawn and a tiny border of dark water outlined in dew-wet rock. Then the outline of a carved stone fountain emerged, a boy with an urn, overhung by dark and conical shadows on the far side of the rippled and now brownish-black pool. The trees stood out rounded, dark green their branches intertwined with creepers. Beyond was a low stone wall with a wide ungated opening into a field of rye. One and a half miles of rolling field dotted with sheep and aimless cows appeared to Mr. Gunn-Phitre in seconds. An avenue of trees to the right snaked forth from the mist and conducted the main entrance along the half mile to the large gate around which clustered a village. The village appeared in the mist as several slate roofs and two church spires.
Landscape, thought Mr. Gunn-Phitre, emerges in reality slowly and in parts. Only in literature can you have the whole thing at once in a big dollop. He thought to himself in didactic sentences, as if teaching a lesson. The eye at first only seeks the relevant, Mr. Gunn-Phitre reflected, as directed by the soul and allowed by nature. Fools of authors sin against reality when they serve it out like mashed potatoes.
Mr. Gunn-Phitre forced himself into self-instruction. He looked out the window and sipped at his coffee. To non-hypnotists, he thought, people must emerge the same way. But he checked his thoughts, saying to himself, no, that’s not true. They get a bit of detail and then they impose a whole story. And, if they have any training as sociologists or psychologists they’re even worse. He chuckled at his thoughts. They then read into their picture all sorts of information and stories, actually trying to impose a character. As if, Mr. Gunn-Phitre reflected, I’d first seen the lawn and imagined the rest as the park of my house in Kent and not in Ireland at all.
Suddenly Mr. Gunn-Phitre thought of love. And, as was his way when his musings had been on a subject not hypnotism, his reflection leapt from disciplined thought and reverie to present itself to him as a kind of report, as simple sentences elaborating only what was necessary and flying unevenly over non-essentials and comprehension-only-for-indulgent-comprehension’s-sake. He was proud of this, and it was an enjoyable answer or gift to the fools of authors.
Love only takes place in space. Recent confirmed example: stewardess and simultaneously motel desk clerk. Negative example: story. That is, deviation type of ‘my story requires your story’. Example contained in report on teacher investigating pig operation.
The key is love as motive and pain in action to remove pain, as feeling, even though it exists as pain. Click, click. Self-sacrifice and so forth. Commonest deviation is love as incident taken for granted. Often done in innocence and resulting in formal social lobotomisation. When done with experience takes on variation of avoidance of social forms that have nothing to do with the appearance of love. Click, whir. Criminal code with no crime. Inevitable mathematical certainty such a code will ultimately condemn an innocent.
Notes by former teacher. Love appears. He consolidates it as story – house, kid, etcetera, not as such but as story. Ossification. Blah, bloah. Atrophy of language and body followed by contrived experiment. Contained unburned pain. He says, ‘See it through.’ Then he says, ‘Didn’t work.’
Stewardess: silly imagined me opposite of some essence. Pattern zig-zagging through history. Some dead end, illusion of life by repetition. But now a danger.
Love only takes place in space. Motivated by alien hypnotism. Stick with the country. Sty with the land.
The notes halt. It was ten thirty and a tour was being conducted through the Morning Room. Mr. Gunn-Phitre rose swiftly and disappeared through a door concealed behind one of the long curtains on either side of the window. He lingered with the door slightly ajar to listen to the guide.
‘This is the Red Morning Room, also completely restored in the Regency Style by the Gunn-Phitre Foundation. The lawn, park, and demesne were originally laid out to recreate the vista of a similar house also owned by the Gunn-Phitre Foundation in Kent.’
‘Say, girly,’ interjected a stage American accent such as is usually affected by American tourists when, confused, tired, and overloaded in every sense, they can no longer be themselves but have to rely on their culture. ‘What are the taxes on a place like this?’
Mr. Gunn-Phitre nicked a bit of lint from the right lapel of his suit and pushed the door slightly more ajar in order to better hear the guide’s answer to this query.
‘The government does not tax any houses open to the public nor any improvements to such houses,’ the guide explained. ‘They feel that those who have special responsibilities within the national mix, for example great wealth, should be allowed the free development of those responsibilities. Thus, great collections are not broken up, but rather are kept intact as part of the national heritage. Similarly, great families and foundations are also preserved.’
The guide then returned to the prepared presentation. ‘All of the furnishings here are in the Regency Style and are, in fact, mainly reproductions manufactured in Detroit.’ This part of the presentation was only authorised when the tour consisted mainly of Americans, and was meant to appeal to patriotic pride.
‘Ironically enough,’ the guide continued, ‘the originals are also in Toronto, having been purchased by the Roots Museum of Romantic Ireland. The originals can be seen during the annual Automobile Circus when they are on display in a leading Toronto furniture store. If you follow me now, we’ll enter the Grand Gallery.’
‘Excuse me, miss, but could you answer me one thing. I mean, I’ve asked everyone but no one could answer me this one thing.’ It was the same American voice.
‘What is that, sir?’
‘How come the North ain’t part of the south?’
‘If you’ll ask me that at the end of the tour, sir, I’ll have more time.’
‘Sure thing. Thanks.’
There were two types of tourists -- those that knew nothing and would forget whatever they heard, and those who knew more about the Regency Period than is credible and merely wished to bait the guides. This group must be composed entirely of the first, thought Mr. Gunn-Phitre as he lit a cheroot, because the guide was going on in an unauthorised manner.
(Part 3)
‘The long gallery was completely hand-carved from obsidian by Eskimos brought here by Lord Horace Witherspoon, grandfather of the present Lord Walrus Witherspoon and previous owner of the house. Lord Walrus Witherspoon, as you may know, is presently confined for his own protection after being assaulted by Lady Constance Witherspoon. She was, it seems, under the mistaken assumption that he was the spirit of her groom, Spurs, who had betrayed her during the hunt ball last season.
‘The one exception to the Regency furniture,’ the guide continued, ‘is the Tudor Revival chair which was used, of course, for reviving ladies who had fainted due to news of reverses they suffered in the War of the Roses.
‘The painting over the carved asbestos and magnesium fireplace is George Romney’s Portrait of the Artist’s Wife. Romney was Fenian Lord Mayor of Dublin and later became an American Senator like his illustrious namesake. The artist was a friend of his with whose wife he was having an affair. As you can see, she suffered from migraine and had a rubber arm. The present owner is her grandson.
‘Through the window you can see the Church of St. Mug which is dedicated to the patron saint of the parish who used to levitate in the presence of pagans. She was captured by Queen Maeve and employed to carry baggage in the days of the Kings. The church has the distinction of being the only church in Ireland within which Cromwell did not stable his horses.
‘Beyond the church is the ancient Anglo-Finnish tower house after which the township gets its name, Ballyfredsthing. This tower house is reputed not to be haunted, and is owned by an American who bought it as a summer home so that he could escape his roots. It contains an Iron Age fireplace on the third floor around which the tower was built in the 16th century.’
In cultured rhapsody the tour exited from the Long Gallery while Mr. Gunn-Phitre descended the concealed staircase to the subterranean rooms. Knocking on a padded door, he whispered, ‘Carmen, Carmen, get up. There’s some people I want you to meet.’
From above, the sound of the next tour could be heard as it entered the Red Morning Room. The house, to fulfil the tax regulations, was open from 10:30 a.m. to 10:45 and, consequently, the tours had to be rushed. An American voice, the female equivalent to the previous one, was saying, ‘I'm an O’Neill from the Bronx O’Neills. Are there any O’Neills in this neighbourhood?’
‘Oh yes,’ answered the guide, ‘this was their central bog or Ri. The Celts, as you know, were matriarchal cannibals tracing their lineage through the line of incestuous liasons between aunt and nephew. O’Neill is the hereditary name for cooks of the High Kings. In fact, the they’re just after losing their chief. Begorrah, who was your aunt’s nephew?’
Begorrah?
Carmen emerged from the room and followed Mr. Gunn-Phitre down the darkened hallway. He stopped at a large brass inlaid door and flung it open.
The room was large and very high, almost square. It was dusky rose in colour with floor to ceiling windows closed off by white curtains. Through a gap in the curtains of a far window could be seen an outline or a brick ruin. The central piece or furniture in the room was a long marble table, a sort of surgical table, cluttered with a half dozen typewriters and a newswire machine. In the room was a cooker, a double-doored refrigerator, a wall of books in a glass-fronted case, and several cots with lace covering lumps of bedding. Against the wall near the door leaned twelve new carbines. Typing at the table, eating, lounging on the beds, cooking a kind of stew, pacing, squatting on the floor, and reading the tickertape were about a dozen people of all ages in various degrees of casual clothing.
Mr. Gunn-Phitre swept the room with his hands, saying, ‘These are the Gnomes.’ Then, turning to Carmen, he said, ‘Gnomes, this is Carmen.’
‘At the cooker, Carmen, is Slug,’ Mr. Glmn-Phitre continued. ‘She cooks, but mostly is backwoods mellow, the product of two hundred years of American making-do. Nothing puts her off, neither armed attacks nor outbreaks of plague. She makes sure everyone is fed, washes behind their ears, and doesn’t mind the yelling. She’s from Snake’s Knob, Kentucky.
‘The woman at the tickertape is Victoria.’ He waved his hand in the direction of a rather obese woman in stretch pants and a sweatshirt. The woman peered at Carmen with small eyes encased in flabby wrinkles that were part of a network beginning at her jowls.
‘Victoria,’ Mr. Gunn-Phitre continued, ‘is a West Briton. She lives nearby in an Anglo-Norman tower house which she has converted into a pinball parlour. On the grounds was an 11th century church reputed to have been built by St. Mug. She tore it down and had the site made over into a video-boutique. The locals call her Mrs. Cromwell.
‘The fellow typing and snorting is Cahill. We call him The Bishop. He was born in Limerick, but has become more Irish than the Irish. If you try to drink stout in his presence when the head hasn’t settled, he’ll fight.’
He has an EU grant.
The Bishop turned from his typing as Mr. Gunn-Phitre asked, ‘Any news on the police, Bishop?’
‘Yes, they’re still trying to tie you into that murder in the motel. They’ve dropped all other investigations, hoping to get you on the big one. They’ve decided to put you under constant surveillance and have hired an informer. They can’t prove you were there.’
‘Who’s the informer?’
‘It’s me,’ said the Bishop.
‘Bishop is our public relations officer,’ Mr. Gunn-Phitre explained to Carmen.
The Bishop had returned to his typing, but shoved the typewriter aside when Mr. Gunn-Phitre asked, ‘What about the National Police assassins, Bishop?’
‘The last meeting of the International Agency to Control Embarrassing Global Goings-on,’ said the Bishop, ‘reconfirmed the mandate given them by the Federated Committee of Secret Oligarchies to Eliminate with Prejudice Identifiable Movers and Doers. The National Police arm has been given an increased budget. Their zip team is now searching for you on Bulgarian canal boats. They think you’re a Ba’hai.’
‘Will they find me in Bulgaria?’
‘Several times. They’ll all be finally released.’
Mr. Gunn-Phitre continued with his introductions, and the Bishop began to change the ribbon on his typewriter.
‘There are more things on heaven and earth,’ Mr. Gunn-Phitre was saying to Carmen,’than are dreamed about in the little systems that to most people are dished out as reality. The real business that goes on is usually unbelievable. Next we have the sisters.’
Two tall, long-necked women in olive drab fatigues were sitting on a cot looking at a photo album. They both had shoulder-length hair and wore wire-rimmed glasses. They looked up simultaneously.
‘Sister One is a graduate student who did her thesis on Sufi poetry. I think you’ve met a friend of hers. Sister Two isn’t.’
Next he indicated a very thin, very young, very pale girl with a face that contained in the proper order a nose, two eyes and a mouth but that looked as though they had been drawn on. The girl had picked up one of the carbines and was staring down the barrel.
‘Trixie is from Dublin and she is our ideologue. She hates everything. She’s provided major position papers on projected trends and growth-in-purchasing of assorted cultures. Often she is prophetic through a unique gift in understanding what is missing in the formation of individuals, classes, and nations. Thereby she knows what’s going to get them. A lot of times she just acts like a soulful bopping teenager.’
Mr. Gunn-Phitre then nodded his head towards a young woman sitting at the table sipping tea. ‘Drusilla,’ he said, ‘is simply pleasant. Being so, she offends and disorients everyone, often filling them with insane envy. She asks well-dressed gigolos at garden parties, ‘What do you do, anyway?’ but most pleasantly. She once said to a transvestite peer, ‘It must be such a lonely life for you’.’
Drusilla smiled at Carmen, pleasantly, and said, ‘It’s all such a war, isn’t it?’
‘Seated beside Drusilla is Angela,’ Mr. Gunn-Phitre went on. ‘No one knows what keeps her going. She was once the Rose of Tralee. She is purely imaginative and lives in a world of her own peopled with wonderful vulgar characters who upset her. These experiences make her sensitive. She’ll know in an instant what your strengths and weaknesses are. She’ll pass you a cup of cocoa before you even realise you’re depressed.’ Angela smiled up like a pixie.
‘There in the corner are Mr. and Mrs. They disagree with everything we’re doing and, as soon as they leave, will most likely inform the authorities. They are so tied up in each other they don’t see either kindnesses or hostilities directed against them.’
Mr. and Mrs. took no notice of Mr. Gunn-Phitre’s words but carried on chattering to one another about ‘who relates to whom best’.
A small round blonde woman, barefoot and with an oblique and many-times-broken nose, was sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from a magazine. Mr. Gunn-Phitre waved a hand in her direction and said to Carmen, ‘And this is Heddy. She’s German and doesn’t understand ordinary English. She’s read all the philosophers and, through translations of their texts, has taught herself a kind of a language -- a dialectics of the nous, right, Heddy?’
‘The spiral movement of spirit degenerates from the source to the materialising object, Paul,’ said Heddy.
‘Selma and Draco are missing,’ said Mr. Gunn-Phitre to Carmen.
(Part 4)
Mr. Gunn-Phitre then spoke to them all. ‘I’ll leave you all so to get introduced and explain our little co-operative. Carmen is from our New York branch and is of Irish descent. She was once a stewardess. She’s an expert on pig marketing and breeding. Like all of you she keeps a journal, so the word according to Carmen can be put on the shelf, too. You can tell her everything. I’ll be back in a while for the meeting on how to handle things. Then we’ll play our little game, who am I.’
Carmen grasped him momentarily by the wrist and asked, ‘Who is Selma?’
‘Oh,’ he answered with a chuckle. ‘She’s passion wanting to become. Everyone likes her. She’s the equal of us all.’
He turned and left the room.
‘Who’s Draco?’ asked Carmen of the group.
‘We’re not like he said at all,’ answered one of them.
Victoria was clunking across the room like a scene from The War of The Worlds. She was asking ‘What is the real Ireland’?
This is the prequel... the real story is on http://richardrathwell.blogspot.com/
The teacher had objected on the grounds he knew nothing about pig farming. His objections were easily overruled by an appeal to his own statements about ‘a new sense of adventure’.
The Department of Education was easily agreeable. In the Republic of Ireland, the teacher found, Protestants are as zealously a protected species as are whooping cranes and the blue whale. Pigs were not.
Making up 4% of the population and with an enormous unfinished historical role, they must not only seem to survive but must thrive as a community in the new Ireland, this in spite of their distressing habit of dying out without a whimper and dying out from democratic participation with equal voice. So it was no problem to transform a Canadian English teacher into an instructor of pig farming in Ireland. They were overjoyed in the Department that they’d been asked to do anything to implement the constitution. They hired an atheist Canadian to teach the prods. He had an Irish background (don’t they all).
The stewardess in the hotel had found her thick and exciting tourist transformed into an Irishman embroiled in pigs, factions, patronage, and given to hanging around in pubs talking about EEC regulations and sport. She was disgusted that he’d become sincerely Irish, was becoming Catholic, and so was making fun of everything. Rotten foreigner! She should have stuck with the Frenchman.
It was no relief to her that his complications in North America had followed him to Ireland. The wife, whom he had been trying to divorce for years in America, had seemed promising in every respect. The woman had actually followed the teacher to Ireland, bringing their child and several friends with her, to study Economics at Trinity College. The wife had written with marvellous transparent duplicity that she ‘had been coming to Ireland anyway’. In the same letter she’d denounced the teacher’s move to Ireland as part of a master plan to thwart her freedom of movement. She accused the teacher of knowing her plans, but imperiously stated that he would not prevent their fruition. Meanwhile, the divorce procedures carried on in America. It was all so delicious, the stewardess thought, so Dublin. It had the flavour of Grafton Street, of MacDonald’s hamburgers, of tacos and American television serials.
But the teacher became more parochial. He designed a project for his class to study the whole problem of Irish pig farming, and became obsessed by it. To the stewardess this was worse than entering a pub brain contest, believing in the Femorians, or singing ‘Lannigan’s Ball’.
The teacher would take his students to slaughterhouses, study the road system, bewail the non-development of the ‘infrastructure’ and especially of telecommunications. He would buy Irish and denounced the influx of foreign capital. He would ask to withdraw from the EU. He left the stewardess in tears.
Ranting that the Irish pig industry only operated on the fringes of the European market, he lectured his students on the necessity for value-added manufacture, mutual aid farms, and more intensive tillage. And worse, he subscribed to the Farmer’s Journal. He phoned back and took the stewardess to livestock auctions. She accused him of being a new type of stage Irishman. He only began to lecture her more earnestly, while growing fat from drinking stout.
Then he discovered ‘Porcine Hepatitis’. It seemed that the EU had initiated a program under the category of ‘aid to historically-deprived nations that suffer from big-power-bloody-mindedness’ to grant to Irish pig farmers a sum of money to offset losses incurred by having to sell to fringe markets. For every pig carcass sold abroad, under terms unlike those that tradition had achieved for German sausage-makers, or manufacturers in Britain of ersatz steak and kidney pie, an Irish farmer got a certain cash grant. It had something to do voting patterns in the European Parliament.
Consequently, hardly any prime pork was being produced. Mysteriously, only low-grade stuff like that usually sold domestically began to be sent abroad. It seemed that, because of an outbreak of ‘porcine hepatitus’, Irish pork could only sell to fringe markets.
The teacher’s project group, ostensibly drawing up a report to enter a contest sponsored by a major pig cooperative that most of their parents dealt with, began to do intensive and often underground investigation.
One student found syringes in his father’s piggery that contained a substance the teacher had analysed. It was a serum to induce porcine hepatitis. The syringes had been manufactured by the P.G.P. corporation, which also manufactured the wonderful musical kitchen gadgets and other household devices on the market that the stewardess had had installed in her mental fantasy flat while she contested dreams with the teacher who was always going on about a cottage in the country, children, and an incremental post. She wanted no cottage. She wanted to be kept.
The stewardess had pointed out to the teacher that the term of reference under which the contest could be won was: How does the co-op benefit Ireland. She argued that this meant they should praise the co-op, win the prize, and after a certain amount went to the school and charity and so on, his promised bonus could go towards a musical cooker for her new flat or a trip to Miami.
The teacher had gone strange. He ranted about plots to undermine Ireland by introducing mindless, banal, addictive American atmosphere into the country. He went on about an artificial economy, a dependence on tourism that generated a fog of romantic historical obscuranticism, and insinuated that someone was trying to hook the Irish with a kind of hypnotism on a caricature of themselves. This, she knew, was impossible.
The teacher saw the project as a forum to expose all. He swore his students to secrecy, while whipping them up to ever deeper investigations. They were very enthusiastic. Madness was much better than mitching, and a good way to fill the time until the beginning of the one summer of real heterosexuality allowed them between the dormitory and the return to the farm after graduation to marry with cousins.
Being Irish, the stewardess could not disentangle herself from the disappointing un-North American blockhead, especially now that he was becoming Irish and mad. She had to stay involved with him, if only to the extent that she was able to gather material to slag him to her friends. Besides, she had hope. The divorce went through and he was going to inherit from someone.
The words of several priests echoed in her ears: ‘It is all for the best’ and, ‘You never can tell how it will turn out.’ These words she remembered from when she’d asked the priest to advise her how to cope with a friend who’d come out as a lesbian and was threatening suicide.
The teacher regarded her resigned form in the opposite chair. ‘I love you deeply,’ he said. ‘I’ll do anything for you.’ Then he added, ‘And I’m going to catch Mr. P.G.P.’
‘Get out, you bog-runner,’ she said quietly.
‘Mary, Jesus, Joseph, God save us,’ he said as he got up to leave the room.
The stewardess was thinking to herself, ‘What a fecking country.’
(Part 2)
Mr. Peter Gunn-Phitre, landlord, the retired teacher and self-appointed Irishman was at home. Gunn-Phitre was not his real name. But he had inherited.
His morning ritual was to take his breakfast in the Red Room which overlooked an artificial pool surrounded by transplanted cedars. Each instant the morning mist revealed a different array of detail as it lightened and evaporated with the rising sun. Mr. Gunn-Phitre first saw only the thick and long lawn and a tiny border of dark water outlined in dew-wet rock. Then the outline of a carved stone fountain emerged, a boy with an urn, overhung by dark and conical shadows on the far side of the rippled and now brownish-black pool. The trees stood out rounded, dark green their branches intertwined with creepers. Beyond was a low stone wall with a wide ungated opening into a field of rye. One and a half miles of rolling field dotted with sheep and aimless cows appeared to Mr. Gunn-Phitre in seconds. An avenue of trees to the right snaked forth from the mist and conducted the main entrance along the half mile to the large gate around which clustered a village. The village appeared in the mist as several slate roofs and two church spires.
Landscape, thought Mr. Gunn-Phitre, emerges in reality slowly and in parts. Only in literature can you have the whole thing at once in a big dollop. He thought to himself in didactic sentences, as if teaching a lesson. The eye at first only seeks the relevant, Mr. Gunn-Phitre reflected, as directed by the soul and allowed by nature. Fools of authors sin against reality when they serve it out like mashed potatoes.
Mr. Gunn-Phitre forced himself into self-instruction. He looked out the window and sipped at his coffee. To non-hypnotists, he thought, people must emerge the same way. But he checked his thoughts, saying to himself, no, that’s not true. They get a bit of detail and then they impose a whole story. And, if they have any training as sociologists or psychologists they’re even worse. He chuckled at his thoughts. They then read into their picture all sorts of information and stories, actually trying to impose a character. As if, Mr. Gunn-Phitre reflected, I’d first seen the lawn and imagined the rest as the park of my house in Kent and not in Ireland at all.
Suddenly Mr. Gunn-Phitre thought of love. And, as was his way when his musings had been on a subject not hypnotism, his reflection leapt from disciplined thought and reverie to present itself to him as a kind of report, as simple sentences elaborating only what was necessary and flying unevenly over non-essentials and comprehension-only-for-indulgent-comprehension’s-sake. He was proud of this, and it was an enjoyable answer or gift to the fools of authors.
Love only takes place in space. Recent confirmed example: stewardess and simultaneously motel desk clerk. Negative example: story. That is, deviation type of ‘my story requires your story’. Example contained in report on teacher investigating pig operation.
The key is love as motive and pain in action to remove pain, as feeling, even though it exists as pain. Click, click. Self-sacrifice and so forth. Commonest deviation is love as incident taken for granted. Often done in innocence and resulting in formal social lobotomisation. When done with experience takes on variation of avoidance of social forms that have nothing to do with the appearance of love. Click, whir. Criminal code with no crime. Inevitable mathematical certainty such a code will ultimately condemn an innocent.
Notes by former teacher. Love appears. He consolidates it as story – house, kid, etcetera, not as such but as story. Ossification. Blah, bloah. Atrophy of language and body followed by contrived experiment. Contained unburned pain. He says, ‘See it through.’ Then he says, ‘Didn’t work.’
Stewardess: silly imagined me opposite of some essence. Pattern zig-zagging through history. Some dead end, illusion of life by repetition. But now a danger.
Love only takes place in space. Motivated by alien hypnotism. Stick with the country. Sty with the land.
The notes halt. It was ten thirty and a tour was being conducted through the Morning Room. Mr. Gunn-Phitre rose swiftly and disappeared through a door concealed behind one of the long curtains on either side of the window. He lingered with the door slightly ajar to listen to the guide.
‘This is the Red Morning Room, also completely restored in the Regency Style by the Gunn-Phitre Foundation. The lawn, park, and demesne were originally laid out to recreate the vista of a similar house also owned by the Gunn-Phitre Foundation in Kent.’
‘Say, girly,’ interjected a stage American accent such as is usually affected by American tourists when, confused, tired, and overloaded in every sense, they can no longer be themselves but have to rely on their culture. ‘What are the taxes on a place like this?’
Mr. Gunn-Phitre nicked a bit of lint from the right lapel of his suit and pushed the door slightly more ajar in order to better hear the guide’s answer to this query.
‘The government does not tax any houses open to the public nor any improvements to such houses,’ the guide explained. ‘They feel that those who have special responsibilities within the national mix, for example great wealth, should be allowed the free development of those responsibilities. Thus, great collections are not broken up, but rather are kept intact as part of the national heritage. Similarly, great families and foundations are also preserved.’
The guide then returned to the prepared presentation. ‘All of the furnishings here are in the Regency Style and are, in fact, mainly reproductions manufactured in Detroit.’ This part of the presentation was only authorised when the tour consisted mainly of Americans, and was meant to appeal to patriotic pride.
‘Ironically enough,’ the guide continued, ‘the originals are also in Toronto, having been purchased by the Roots Museum of Romantic Ireland. The originals can be seen during the annual Automobile Circus when they are on display in a leading Toronto furniture store. If you follow me now, we’ll enter the Grand Gallery.’
‘Excuse me, miss, but could you answer me one thing. I mean, I’ve asked everyone but no one could answer me this one thing.’ It was the same American voice.
‘What is that, sir?’
‘How come the North ain’t part of the south?’
‘If you’ll ask me that at the end of the tour, sir, I’ll have more time.’
‘Sure thing. Thanks.’
There were two types of tourists -- those that knew nothing and would forget whatever they heard, and those who knew more about the Regency Period than is credible and merely wished to bait the guides. This group must be composed entirely of the first, thought Mr. Gunn-Phitre as he lit a cheroot, because the guide was going on in an unauthorised manner.
(Part 3)
‘The long gallery was completely hand-carved from obsidian by Eskimos brought here by Lord Horace Witherspoon, grandfather of the present Lord Walrus Witherspoon and previous owner of the house. Lord Walrus Witherspoon, as you may know, is presently confined for his own protection after being assaulted by Lady Constance Witherspoon. She was, it seems, under the mistaken assumption that he was the spirit of her groom, Spurs, who had betrayed her during the hunt ball last season.
‘The one exception to the Regency furniture,’ the guide continued, ‘is the Tudor Revival chair which was used, of course, for reviving ladies who had fainted due to news of reverses they suffered in the War of the Roses.
‘The painting over the carved asbestos and magnesium fireplace is George Romney’s Portrait of the Artist’s Wife. Romney was Fenian Lord Mayor of Dublin and later became an American Senator like his illustrious namesake. The artist was a friend of his with whose wife he was having an affair. As you can see, she suffered from migraine and had a rubber arm. The present owner is her grandson.
‘Through the window you can see the Church of St. Mug which is dedicated to the patron saint of the parish who used to levitate in the presence of pagans. She was captured by Queen Maeve and employed to carry baggage in the days of the Kings. The church has the distinction of being the only church in Ireland within which Cromwell did not stable his horses.
‘Beyond the church is the ancient Anglo-Finnish tower house after which the township gets its name, Ballyfredsthing. This tower house is reputed not to be haunted, and is owned by an American who bought it as a summer home so that he could escape his roots. It contains an Iron Age fireplace on the third floor around which the tower was built in the 16th century.’
In cultured rhapsody the tour exited from the Long Gallery while Mr. Gunn-Phitre descended the concealed staircase to the subterranean rooms. Knocking on a padded door, he whispered, ‘Carmen, Carmen, get up. There’s some people I want you to meet.’
From above, the sound of the next tour could be heard as it entered the Red Morning Room. The house, to fulfil the tax regulations, was open from 10:30 a.m. to 10:45 and, consequently, the tours had to be rushed. An American voice, the female equivalent to the previous one, was saying, ‘I'm an O’Neill from the Bronx O’Neills. Are there any O’Neills in this neighbourhood?’
‘Oh yes,’ answered the guide, ‘this was their central bog or Ri. The Celts, as you know, were matriarchal cannibals tracing their lineage through the line of incestuous liasons between aunt and nephew. O’Neill is the hereditary name for cooks of the High Kings. In fact, the they’re just after losing their chief. Begorrah, who was your aunt’s nephew?’
Begorrah?
Carmen emerged from the room and followed Mr. Gunn-Phitre down the darkened hallway. He stopped at a large brass inlaid door and flung it open.
The room was large and very high, almost square. It was dusky rose in colour with floor to ceiling windows closed off by white curtains. Through a gap in the curtains of a far window could be seen an outline or a brick ruin. The central piece or furniture in the room was a long marble table, a sort of surgical table, cluttered with a half dozen typewriters and a newswire machine. In the room was a cooker, a double-doored refrigerator, a wall of books in a glass-fronted case, and several cots with lace covering lumps of bedding. Against the wall near the door leaned twelve new carbines. Typing at the table, eating, lounging on the beds, cooking a kind of stew, pacing, squatting on the floor, and reading the tickertape were about a dozen people of all ages in various degrees of casual clothing.
Mr. Gunn-Phitre swept the room with his hands, saying, ‘These are the Gnomes.’ Then, turning to Carmen, he said, ‘Gnomes, this is Carmen.’
‘At the cooker, Carmen, is Slug,’ Mr. Glmn-Phitre continued. ‘She cooks, but mostly is backwoods mellow, the product of two hundred years of American making-do. Nothing puts her off, neither armed attacks nor outbreaks of plague. She makes sure everyone is fed, washes behind their ears, and doesn’t mind the yelling. She’s from Snake’s Knob, Kentucky.
‘The woman at the tickertape is Victoria.’ He waved his hand in the direction of a rather obese woman in stretch pants and a sweatshirt. The woman peered at Carmen with small eyes encased in flabby wrinkles that were part of a network beginning at her jowls.
‘Victoria,’ Mr. Gunn-Phitre continued, ‘is a West Briton. She lives nearby in an Anglo-Norman tower house which she has converted into a pinball parlour. On the grounds was an 11th century church reputed to have been built by St. Mug. She tore it down and had the site made over into a video-boutique. The locals call her Mrs. Cromwell.
‘The fellow typing and snorting is Cahill. We call him The Bishop. He was born in Limerick, but has become more Irish than the Irish. If you try to drink stout in his presence when the head hasn’t settled, he’ll fight.’
He has an EU grant.
The Bishop turned from his typing as Mr. Gunn-Phitre asked, ‘Any news on the police, Bishop?’
‘Yes, they’re still trying to tie you into that murder in the motel. They’ve dropped all other investigations, hoping to get you on the big one. They’ve decided to put you under constant surveillance and have hired an informer. They can’t prove you were there.’
‘Who’s the informer?’
‘It’s me,’ said the Bishop.
‘Bishop is our public relations officer,’ Mr. Gunn-Phitre explained to Carmen.
The Bishop had returned to his typing, but shoved the typewriter aside when Mr. Gunn-Phitre asked, ‘What about the National Police assassins, Bishop?’
‘The last meeting of the International Agency to Control Embarrassing Global Goings-on,’ said the Bishop, ‘reconfirmed the mandate given them by the Federated Committee of Secret Oligarchies to Eliminate with Prejudice Identifiable Movers and Doers. The National Police arm has been given an increased budget. Their zip team is now searching for you on Bulgarian canal boats. They think you’re a Ba’hai.’
‘Will they find me in Bulgaria?’
‘Several times. They’ll all be finally released.’
Mr. Gunn-Phitre continued with his introductions, and the Bishop began to change the ribbon on his typewriter.
‘There are more things on heaven and earth,’ Mr. Gunn-Phitre was saying to Carmen,’than are dreamed about in the little systems that to most people are dished out as reality. The real business that goes on is usually unbelievable. Next we have the sisters.’
Two tall, long-necked women in olive drab fatigues were sitting on a cot looking at a photo album. They both had shoulder-length hair and wore wire-rimmed glasses. They looked up simultaneously.
‘Sister One is a graduate student who did her thesis on Sufi poetry. I think you’ve met a friend of hers. Sister Two isn’t.’
Next he indicated a very thin, very young, very pale girl with a face that contained in the proper order a nose, two eyes and a mouth but that looked as though they had been drawn on. The girl had picked up one of the carbines and was staring down the barrel.
‘Trixie is from Dublin and she is our ideologue. She hates everything. She’s provided major position papers on projected trends and growth-in-purchasing of assorted cultures. Often she is prophetic through a unique gift in understanding what is missing in the formation of individuals, classes, and nations. Thereby she knows what’s going to get them. A lot of times she just acts like a soulful bopping teenager.’
Mr. Gunn-Phitre then nodded his head towards a young woman sitting at the table sipping tea. ‘Drusilla,’ he said, ‘is simply pleasant. Being so, she offends and disorients everyone, often filling them with insane envy. She asks well-dressed gigolos at garden parties, ‘What do you do, anyway?’ but most pleasantly. She once said to a transvestite peer, ‘It must be such a lonely life for you’.’
Drusilla smiled at Carmen, pleasantly, and said, ‘It’s all such a war, isn’t it?’
‘Seated beside Drusilla is Angela,’ Mr. Gunn-Phitre went on. ‘No one knows what keeps her going. She was once the Rose of Tralee. She is purely imaginative and lives in a world of her own peopled with wonderful vulgar characters who upset her. These experiences make her sensitive. She’ll know in an instant what your strengths and weaknesses are. She’ll pass you a cup of cocoa before you even realise you’re depressed.’ Angela smiled up like a pixie.
‘There in the corner are Mr. and Mrs. They disagree with everything we’re doing and, as soon as they leave, will most likely inform the authorities. They are so tied up in each other they don’t see either kindnesses or hostilities directed against them.’
Mr. and Mrs. took no notice of Mr. Gunn-Phitre’s words but carried on chattering to one another about ‘who relates to whom best’.
A small round blonde woman, barefoot and with an oblique and many-times-broken nose, was sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from a magazine. Mr. Gunn-Phitre waved a hand in her direction and said to Carmen, ‘And this is Heddy. She’s German and doesn’t understand ordinary English. She’s read all the philosophers and, through translations of their texts, has taught herself a kind of a language -- a dialectics of the nous, right, Heddy?’
‘The spiral movement of spirit degenerates from the source to the materialising object, Paul,’ said Heddy.
‘Selma and Draco are missing,’ said Mr. Gunn-Phitre to Carmen.
(Part 4)
Mr. Gunn-Phitre then spoke to them all. ‘I’ll leave you all so to get introduced and explain our little co-operative. Carmen is from our New York branch and is of Irish descent. She was once a stewardess. She’s an expert on pig marketing and breeding. Like all of you she keeps a journal, so the word according to Carmen can be put on the shelf, too. You can tell her everything. I’ll be back in a while for the meeting on how to handle things. Then we’ll play our little game, who am I.’
Carmen grasped him momentarily by the wrist and asked, ‘Who is Selma?’
‘Oh,’ he answered with a chuckle. ‘She’s passion wanting to become. Everyone likes her. She’s the equal of us all.’
He turned and left the room.
‘Who’s Draco?’ asked Carmen of the group.
‘We’re not like he said at all,’ answered one of them.
Victoria was clunking across the room like a scene from The War of The Worlds. She was asking ‘What is the real Ireland’?
This is the prequel... the real story is on http://richardrathwell.blogspot.com/
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