costume parties

Costume Parties

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is where he lives.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

texts about aspergers (verse one)

Texts About Aspergers

1.

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

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

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

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

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

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

reminder

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

the wedding

The Wedding
to Umana bint Kualib

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

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

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

Declared virgins, are praying
For Immaculate Conception
Young ladies

and a few men with
the poorer with children
in back

Those richer
Declared in front
without
but one to be revealed

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upwards of twenty cartloads were removed
by Christmas

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

the image that fills

Sneaking Rimbaud back again too you guys?

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

Java, Harar.
Arrive and run, turn

live in fever
write nothing in
some other arms

Think about distance
the image that fills space
between

the development of style

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. Continuous incivilities are punishable by death

10. Violations of sustainability are punishable by death.

11. Privacy should be left alone.

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

13. There is no excuse to harm a child

13. Everything else is also to be ultimately unregulated.

summary of bektashi definitions

Summary of Bashkati Definitions

History: Is what didn’t happen

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

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

Apocalypse: is the usual thing

Narrative: erases truth

Image: disguises beauty

Poetry: precedes science

Love: is the enemy of empathy

Destiny: is a dead end.

interview

Excerpts from Birthday Interview with Richard Rathwell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOP: so what is next for you, Richard?

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

qana

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It has deliberately degraded the world away from sense.

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

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

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

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

open letter

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

Dear Sirs,

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

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

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

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

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

From The Editor, The Sunday Times Magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Yours sincerely




Robin Morgan
Editor
The Sunday Times Magazine



Dear Sir

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

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

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

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

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

Yours,



Richard Rathwell

Blue Orange

ultraeye redux

Ultreye,
invisible guy, I see in red silver blue

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

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

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

All rational from Ultreye
Invisible guy

101st post

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

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

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

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

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

images will not be displayed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the purpose of the pharoah is to be divine

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

Rules of The River:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Law of Lek: everything fights back

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

from a bektashi cookbook

From a Baktashi cookbook:


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

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

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

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

Making dinner is to cooking as misquotation is to scholarship.

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

Farces repeat themselves, the first time is history.


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

ANNOUNCEMENT

As we approach our one hundredth post.

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

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

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

hay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

from eden

Eve

Father,

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

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

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

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

translated into Japanese

イブの父、

私は神聖な夜の星およびそれらを聞いている隣人の下で私の草の子供の音を憎む。

私はそこにないときそれらを不規則なライトを回す外側憎む。

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

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

translated into English

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

Hate the sound of
the child of grass.

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

And those outside turning the irregular
light to write.

As for the father, as for me,

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

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

As for those all, and as for the mother,

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

Ever there is insufficient compensation
For death.

i gave up narrative

Now I will have to be thoughtful and get syntax.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's what I said too.