My book, based on a true story and my real experience is about a special class for gifted savants aged 11 set up in Ottawa during the build-up to Nuclear stand-off to provide special education so as to lay the foundation of a future elite to manage Canada after the anticipated holocaust caused either by Russia or the U.S. When the Armageddon starts they were to be moved to the Diefenbunker located five miles from the school. But this plan is tentative based on the evaluation of the success of the class and on the outcome of an upcoming election.
Admission to the class was based on the crude IQ testing of the period which itself was evolved from German war practice to rapidly select officer candidates for the SS at the war's end. The Class in Ottawa are all tested frequently and those who fall below the 'sigma 2' category are purged.
The class is managed by two psychiatrists using experimental pedagogue including three tiered reading groups, visiting lecturers, sensory deprivation in the teaching of mathematics, mystery visits in the class bus etc.
A naturalist poet visits the class. The designer of The Avro Arrow comes, the Director of the UFO monitoring station just outside of the city, a mechanic who fixes McCormack cars and the agriculturist who has developed high yield 'Bytown wheat'.
Two classmates, Tim and Dorothy, fall in Love. This is how the book begins. They are turning 12. They walk to school together talking of love and the world. They talk of their families. Tim is poor. Dorothy's parents work in the national research center. The two are attacked by French-Canadian thugs. They watch the seasons. They share lunches. The river floods.
The chidren's best friend, Marcus Barcus, the son of a Lithuanian defector, an atomic scientist, disappears. They search for him throughout the city and surrounding countryside. Another classmate disappears. This is reported as a suicide attempt. Several classmates reach puberty. There are clandestine drinking parties. The search goes on.
There is a spy scare involving Tim's father who is a low ranking soldier. Several strange weather phenomena take place. American television begins. Lester Pearson talks of Peace-Keeping. The Queen visits (perhaps to discuss relocation of the Commonwealth in case of war). Tim is in a choir that sings for her at a reception. He looks at her boobs. Others in the choir are in a Nazi inspired street gang. The Americans talk of preventative annexation. News emerges of Canadian war crimes in Holland. It then disappears.
Canadians are accused of being not nice and bad brokers by American Senators. Sun fish fill the Ottawa river. The By0-Town canal built as a strategic defence against the U.S. is gentrified. There are rumors of a second Bunker and another class. The second bunker is said to be preventative and meant to be sealed until after half-life passes.
Tim and Dot run away for a day. They go to an area near Smith's Falls where 'Bottomless Lake' is.
A meeting of parents is held who vote to discontinue the class so their kids can have normal lives. Those voting against dissolution are the parents of Aspergers kids. Before the class ends the National Film Board makes three films about it for show on television. Only one is shown. It is called 'The Special Ones' and is about pioneering techniques for education of the gifted. The second is of a mock UN assembly of tiny kids with squeaky voices talking of the world representing places like China and Ghana. It is called 'The Present World'. The third is a series of interviews. With Tim, with Dorothy, With Marcus and with others. It is called The Future. No-one knows when the one was done with Marcus. These are archived but unavailable for release to researchers.
There is an epilogue on 'What they are doing now'. But it only mentions Brenda, Francis, Gordon, both Johns and Billy. Some readers may recognize these people who are presently prominent in Politics, Science, Info-Tech business and the arts. Some of their present activities in their present circles are outlined briefly.
There are to be reoccurring images of rocketry (with firecrackers, vinegar and soda, wiring and radio waves). There will be references to primitive rock, especially songs about dreams, and to Lithuanian folk wisdom. There will be discussions on mathematical theory, history, literature and medicine carried on by Tim and Dorothy. The title is 'Tim and Dorothy'
What do you think?
Monday, December 05, 2005
Saturday, December 03, 2005
comment
Dear Blur Orange.
The basic thing you seem to be saying on this Blog and in 'Seance for the Dead Arts' is that the enclosures created by the narrative, especially by post modernism and modern fascism have undermined all that breaking through and passion of the past and that this, if it remains unchecked, will result in an age of banality and perhaps of apocalypse, beginning with the death of mind and imagination. YOU SAY WE SHOULD BREAK OUT.
Fair enough. But what do you propose to do about it?
In my reviews on "Internet Essence" and elsewhere, I give a little advice. I suggest you take note.
Keep at it!
Albert Conningham
P.S. ON YOUR BLOG YOU SAY THAT SAINT PAUL SAID THAT THERE WERE EIGHT TYPES OF FAULTY VISIONS OF LOVE. IN FACT THERE ARE NINE AND SINCE SUFISM WE ARE STILL COUNTING.
The basic thing you seem to be saying on this Blog and in 'Seance for the Dead Arts' is that the enclosures created by the narrative, especially by post modernism and modern fascism have undermined all that breaking through and passion of the past and that this, if it remains unchecked, will result in an age of banality and perhaps of apocalypse, beginning with the death of mind and imagination. YOU SAY WE SHOULD BREAK OUT.
Fair enough. But what do you propose to do about it?
In my reviews on "Internet Essence" and elsewhere, I give a little advice. I suggest you take note.
Keep at it!
Albert Conningham
P.S. ON YOUR BLOG YOU SAY THAT SAINT PAUL SAID THAT THERE WERE EIGHT TYPES OF FAULTY VISIONS OF LOVE. IN FACT THERE ARE NINE AND SINCE SUFISM WE ARE STILL COUNTING.
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
ANNOUNCEMENT: book publication
DEATH'S DOORS: ORIGINAL FAMILIES, PROPER PRIVACIES, AND MENTAL STATES
and
RED THE NILE, BLUE THE HILLS
and the poetry book
ONE POEM FORWARD, TWO POEMS BACK
have been published this November by Blue Orange Publishing.
and
RED THE NILE, BLUE THE HILLS
and the poetry book
ONE POEM FORWARD, TWO POEMS BACK
have been published this November by Blue Orange Publishing.
spake the paper buddha
WoooEeee!
Let’s face it. What you do is fictionalize your own memory to impact on people. Yes you do sunshine. The fictionalising is for your sake and so too is most of the impacting under the guise, sometimes, of instructing and inspiring. Yes sure, but sometimes of loving or of seducing. Sometimes even of getting even or getting compensation- especially for life and death. Sometimes to rob and kill. Or getting a feeling of a safe middle place between contradictions. Or perhaps just innocently adjusting your projected personality and upgrading your culture for material benefit.
Those that can’t or don’t or won’t do this can be frequently defined by institutions as being nutsy outsiders and treated accordingly. You are warned potato head!
But with writing it gets spookier than that. First of all the memory is already a fiction written by your personality as a justification. Secondly the memory is twisted and distorted by desires and dreams as those in turn are turned around by the memories. Third, there is the clamour of all that culture outside yourself with its structures, official and collective images and either effusions and meshed filters or volcanic impingements and determiners smashing into your process of fictionalising. That is spooky isn’t it?
Spookiest of all is that as you make a fiction you find that all the narratives, not just your own but everyone’s and everything’s, are untrue and moreover that something else is trying to get out. This is dissonant and different. Do you let it? If you don’t it isn’t writing. It is the leisure industry or college, dream manufacture or propaganda in advance of some awkward unnatural act- when the point is that dreaming must end. It is always ending actually.
Wake up snot chomper!
There is a sleeping amnesia that governs every age. That is culture. With it the judges forget they were criminals. The rich forget their poverty. The smart forget their stupidity. It masquerades as sanity but it is in fact very unwell.
Its narratives seduce the desiring. The unfinished. You.
With it institutions take on characteristics of the unbalanced.
What is before your senses disappears constantly. What you remember is forgotten.
And (he then spake an aside)…..
Aside: America you have used weapons of mass destruction on your own people. You have shot your own dissidents. You are violent and have crossed borders with evil intent. This is what you have created your focussed, self referencing, gibbering projected and officially only acceptable culture to forget. This is your autism. It isn’t true autism like mine or yours. Autism in an individual is a way to cope- in an institution it is a stance- a danger to us all.
We won’t waste our lives in your nightmares.
And then he said: Piss off!
Let’s face it. What you do is fictionalize your own memory to impact on people. Yes you do sunshine. The fictionalising is for your sake and so too is most of the impacting under the guise, sometimes, of instructing and inspiring. Yes sure, but sometimes of loving or of seducing. Sometimes even of getting even or getting compensation- especially for life and death. Sometimes to rob and kill. Or getting a feeling of a safe middle place between contradictions. Or perhaps just innocently adjusting your projected personality and upgrading your culture for material benefit.
Those that can’t or don’t or won’t do this can be frequently defined by institutions as being nutsy outsiders and treated accordingly. You are warned potato head!
But with writing it gets spookier than that. First of all the memory is already a fiction written by your personality as a justification. Secondly the memory is twisted and distorted by desires and dreams as those in turn are turned around by the memories. Third, there is the clamour of all that culture outside yourself with its structures, official and collective images and either effusions and meshed filters or volcanic impingements and determiners smashing into your process of fictionalising. That is spooky isn’t it?
Spookiest of all is that as you make a fiction you find that all the narratives, not just your own but everyone’s and everything’s, are untrue and moreover that something else is trying to get out. This is dissonant and different. Do you let it? If you don’t it isn’t writing. It is the leisure industry or college, dream manufacture or propaganda in advance of some awkward unnatural act- when the point is that dreaming must end. It is always ending actually.
Wake up snot chomper!
There is a sleeping amnesia that governs every age. That is culture. With it the judges forget they were criminals. The rich forget their poverty. The smart forget their stupidity. It masquerades as sanity but it is in fact very unwell.
Its narratives seduce the desiring. The unfinished. You.
With it institutions take on characteristics of the unbalanced.
What is before your senses disappears constantly. What you remember is forgotten.
And (he then spake an aside)…..
Aside: America you have used weapons of mass destruction on your own people. You have shot your own dissidents. You are violent and have crossed borders with evil intent. This is what you have created your focussed, self referencing, gibbering projected and officially only acceptable culture to forget. This is your autism. It isn’t true autism like mine or yours. Autism in an individual is a way to cope- in an institution it is a stance- a danger to us all.
We won’t waste our lives in your nightmares.
And then he said: Piss off!
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
why am i interested? i wonder how stuff happens
The notion is that there is a kind of spiritual truth which is intuitive and authentic. The people who insist on facts are either tippy-toeing around this or are a kind of prurient hypocrite of imagination nudging and winking at the obvious resonances. Afraid to speak.
A good example is Sigismondo Malatesta who stirred up the renaissance in every way he could. First he was the world’s best and first anti-hero loser. He was a hired gun who lost most of his battles but came out ok through pragmatic deals with the enemy and breathtaking treason. The next is that he marketed himself with simple symbol (the plant trampling elephant), pop poetry and celebrity deed (saying he would strangle the Pope). He got good press being called sodomist, raper of nuns, traitor bastard (true but removed by papal decree) and sacrilegious joker (ink in the Papal font).
He symbolically brought to Italy from a lost battle the bones of a man, an arch neo Platonist and actual unknowing ideologue of the renaissance so in a stroke thereby connecting Greek Classicism through Byzantium to himself. He gets therein to be called first Renaissance man. This is followed up by art patronage and building really good forts.
He made a temple to his love for Isotta, a new kind of worshipful lust, confirming rumours he murdered two wives to deify the accepted illicit. He filled the temple, converted from a boring church to Saint Francis, with astrology and mystery. The daughter of one of the murdered wives is well known to have started the genuine symbology of the Tarot making arch mysteries out of a renaissance combination of core Mediterranean divine parapsychology and her own family dysfunction: Isotta, the high priestess, Il Papa, the excommunicator and Sigismondo the only person ever made the bishop of hell by papal decree, hanging upside down, not Christ but something else. The person of Sigismondo inspired the dollar sign, initial entwined with Isotta’s and modern anarchism as the negation of the negation.
The fall of Byzantium and the rise of anarchistic trade prepared all this for him, the Venetian imperialism, the City State. The residue of the gods sprang to life through the church which failed to see divine porno in the mannerist art. His profession, condittori and poet made him able. The model was created for every land developer and stock broker since.
There is also Ellen of Aquitaine, who claimed she was reborn and would be reborn, who created a slinky language by commission to justify her power gained as if by high magic through inevitable but cunning marriage which melted the similar poles of the world, the French monarchy and English, married all her neighbours in fact to save the house using the poetry of troubadours and the imagery of Eos to soften minds hardened by the Monks among resentful but bemused peasants and gobsmacked courtiers. Where did she come from? Aquitaine of course and the science of the Nunnery passed on by a hundred unwed mothers, daughters of murdered wives and the Tarot. She was the founder of reading clubs, the troubadour court.
Pound didn’t say any of this. But Fox Channel would if it could. Instead now we have Barbara Bush and Rumsfeld as most spiritual truth has been left to the banal to celebrate.
Every version of the world is prepared first by poetry. Then the miraculous story takes place and long afterward it is understood again when the dead return to life.
A good example is Sigismondo Malatesta who stirred up the renaissance in every way he could. First he was the world’s best and first anti-hero loser. He was a hired gun who lost most of his battles but came out ok through pragmatic deals with the enemy and breathtaking treason. The next is that he marketed himself with simple symbol (the plant trampling elephant), pop poetry and celebrity deed (saying he would strangle the Pope). He got good press being called sodomist, raper of nuns, traitor bastard (true but removed by papal decree) and sacrilegious joker (ink in the Papal font).
He symbolically brought to Italy from a lost battle the bones of a man, an arch neo Platonist and actual unknowing ideologue of the renaissance so in a stroke thereby connecting Greek Classicism through Byzantium to himself. He gets therein to be called first Renaissance man. This is followed up by art patronage and building really good forts.
He made a temple to his love for Isotta, a new kind of worshipful lust, confirming rumours he murdered two wives to deify the accepted illicit. He filled the temple, converted from a boring church to Saint Francis, with astrology and mystery. The daughter of one of the murdered wives is well known to have started the genuine symbology of the Tarot making arch mysteries out of a renaissance combination of core Mediterranean divine parapsychology and her own family dysfunction: Isotta, the high priestess, Il Papa, the excommunicator and Sigismondo the only person ever made the bishop of hell by papal decree, hanging upside down, not Christ but something else. The person of Sigismondo inspired the dollar sign, initial entwined with Isotta’s and modern anarchism as the negation of the negation.
The fall of Byzantium and the rise of anarchistic trade prepared all this for him, the Venetian imperialism, the City State. The residue of the gods sprang to life through the church which failed to see divine porno in the mannerist art. His profession, condittori and poet made him able. The model was created for every land developer and stock broker since.
There is also Ellen of Aquitaine, who claimed she was reborn and would be reborn, who created a slinky language by commission to justify her power gained as if by high magic through inevitable but cunning marriage which melted the similar poles of the world, the French monarchy and English, married all her neighbours in fact to save the house using the poetry of troubadours and the imagery of Eos to soften minds hardened by the Monks among resentful but bemused peasants and gobsmacked courtiers. Where did she come from? Aquitaine of course and the science of the Nunnery passed on by a hundred unwed mothers, daughters of murdered wives and the Tarot. She was the founder of reading clubs, the troubadour court.
Pound didn’t say any of this. But Fox Channel would if it could. Instead now we have Barbara Bush and Rumsfeld as most spiritual truth has been left to the banal to celebrate.
Every version of the world is prepared first by poetry. Then the miraculous story takes place and long afterward it is understood again when the dead return to life.
sunny day
You said my last notes were cynical. You said you don’t think Soviet Russia was a last stage of Feudalism or that Chinese society presently is. You don’t think fascism was a revolution while the Beatles were not.
Nope.
Technology was never a revolution nor was some great big idea. In itself neither sort of thing has even changed governance. They may have provided entry of some sections of people into political and cultural classes but they haven’t changed either structures of relationships to resources or ruling narratives. They certainly haven’t created new types of people only new strata among the old ones. But fundamental change? Never. New ways of bonking and new ways of killing are not revolutions.
You are entranced by the seduction of the narrative.
But the real thing to look at is the spectrums of the narratives. Where does it lead you? Narratives of origin, significance and place contend without ceasing. They do so especially ferociously in language but also everywhere there is any symbol and any harnessing of spirit by institutions. Narratives contend so without let up in every form. The dominant one in any place is called truth or history or good. The others are literature, art, lies nonsense and madness.
Narratives are not revolutions but they are certainly creations.
Humans are subjective. They require subjectivity to cope and sustain. The subjective goes with having only five senses and a mind. Stones don’t need it. Subjectivity controls information, gives ground for alliance and provides common weal. Even when being objective a human is subjective. The human is subjective within family, within even tribe but usually in some civic or institutional interest maybe a nation maybe a stratum. They are ra-ra and ga-ga for their narrative. Gets them through the day. Gets ‘em a job. The images and stories of that object, their own story-thing fight to overcome all contenders and give more place and structural alignment to sustenance, to empower, to collectivise. To avoid death of self. So they make stuff up. Or rather they make something out of chaos. Depends who is winning and who is fighting.
Who is dying who is dead.
Do you suspect history is a lie? That something else really happened and is lurking there? For example that thousands were starved to death in American governed prisoner of war camps in WW2. Or that the Islamic insurgents killed on the border were actually Assyrian tribal wedding attendees. Was Richard the Lionheart a useless French philandering killer-bitch and his poor brother John only trying to hold things together and pay the rent? Did your father really fight in the war? Was Karl Marx arrested for drunkenness in Clerkenwell? Are Democrats anti-democratic, are Communists anti-communists and Republicans for Monarchy?
Depends.
Do the workers get paid more than their labour is worth in some places? Is money irrelevant but access to debt the determining factor in society? Was Mother Theresa an abuser and scam stealing from the dead? Is there any true statistic for nutritionally related murders in America?
Tell the truth.
Can you hear the most gibbering flawed robots repeating endlessly that they should be followed to freedom? Do you hear the most self-interested whining of their immortal sacrifice? Do you hear thieves screaming of what they are owed? Do you see obsessive routine called imagination?
In the darkness of night.
Do you suspect that modernity is going backward? That the march towards reason and peace turned around at some point to stumble backwards through banality to barbarism and apocalypse? Do you see that in politics and art? Do you hear it in news casts? Strange, you may say. I remember when the world was governed on the basis of a secular principle to ensure fair play and discover and develop objective analysis.
Didn’t Iraq have democratic parties and a constitution with international treaties? Wasn’t the Caliphate a centre of modernisation? How did it become a dark age? Weren’t civilian casualties at one time counted? Didn’t witnesses tell the truth so help them God? Or is all history like this?
Here is the coffee. Sunny Day. (Think I’ll read Richard Rathwell’s Death’s Doors.)
Nope.
Technology was never a revolution nor was some great big idea. In itself neither sort of thing has even changed governance. They may have provided entry of some sections of people into political and cultural classes but they haven’t changed either structures of relationships to resources or ruling narratives. They certainly haven’t created new types of people only new strata among the old ones. But fundamental change? Never. New ways of bonking and new ways of killing are not revolutions.
You are entranced by the seduction of the narrative.
But the real thing to look at is the spectrums of the narratives. Where does it lead you? Narratives of origin, significance and place contend without ceasing. They do so especially ferociously in language but also everywhere there is any symbol and any harnessing of spirit by institutions. Narratives contend so without let up in every form. The dominant one in any place is called truth or history or good. The others are literature, art, lies nonsense and madness.
Narratives are not revolutions but they are certainly creations.
Humans are subjective. They require subjectivity to cope and sustain. The subjective goes with having only five senses and a mind. Stones don’t need it. Subjectivity controls information, gives ground for alliance and provides common weal. Even when being objective a human is subjective. The human is subjective within family, within even tribe but usually in some civic or institutional interest maybe a nation maybe a stratum. They are ra-ra and ga-ga for their narrative. Gets them through the day. Gets ‘em a job. The images and stories of that object, their own story-thing fight to overcome all contenders and give more place and structural alignment to sustenance, to empower, to collectivise. To avoid death of self. So they make stuff up. Or rather they make something out of chaos. Depends who is winning and who is fighting.
Who is dying who is dead.
Do you suspect history is a lie? That something else really happened and is lurking there? For example that thousands were starved to death in American governed prisoner of war camps in WW2. Or that the Islamic insurgents killed on the border were actually Assyrian tribal wedding attendees. Was Richard the Lionheart a useless French philandering killer-bitch and his poor brother John only trying to hold things together and pay the rent? Did your father really fight in the war? Was Karl Marx arrested for drunkenness in Clerkenwell? Are Democrats anti-democratic, are Communists anti-communists and Republicans for Monarchy?
Depends.
Do the workers get paid more than their labour is worth in some places? Is money irrelevant but access to debt the determining factor in society? Was Mother Theresa an abuser and scam stealing from the dead? Is there any true statistic for nutritionally related murders in America?
Tell the truth.
Can you hear the most gibbering flawed robots repeating endlessly that they should be followed to freedom? Do you hear the most self-interested whining of their immortal sacrifice? Do you hear thieves screaming of what they are owed? Do you see obsessive routine called imagination?
In the darkness of night.
Do you suspect that modernity is going backward? That the march towards reason and peace turned around at some point to stumble backwards through banality to barbarism and apocalypse? Do you see that in politics and art? Do you hear it in news casts? Strange, you may say. I remember when the world was governed on the basis of a secular principle to ensure fair play and discover and develop objective analysis.
Didn’t Iraq have democratic parties and a constitution with international treaties? Wasn’t the Caliphate a centre of modernisation? How did it become a dark age? Weren’t civilian casualties at one time counted? Didn’t witnesses tell the truth so help them God? Or is all history like this?
Here is the coffee. Sunny Day. (Think I’ll read Richard Rathwell’s Death’s Doors.)
idiots can make revolutions
A revolution is a completely new dispensation. It involves the replacement of one ruling political class with another. More importantly it involves a restructuring of the control of resources.
The political class overthrown is not necessarily homogonous. It is more likely that it is a spectrum of interests and presentations but the whole spectrum has one essential purpose but can have completely opposing interests. It can, for example, be there to dominate a national economy but be within itself competing between sectors for determination of that policy, say for guaranteed investment and special state protection.
The conditions for revolutionary change are made of iron. First, the ruling group must be so divided, weakened and discredited that it cannot rule. Second there must be economic conditions that lead large sections of the population to the conclusion that they cannot sustain themselves with the present dispensation, third, the power of official institutions must be withering in certain geographic, institutional and cultural areas. Fourth, there must exist an alternative force that seems sufficiently disciplined and creditable to declare an alternative which has contacts in key institutions. Fifth, a majority of people must believe in a simple universal policy formula if only for a short period of time.
A revolution can never happen because a population suddenly believes in some nuanced system of ideas that an elite has propagated or either in the infallibility of an exceptional individual. Remember, revolutions may not be initiated initially by a mass but they succeed because of mass participation. The mass, believing revolution to be in their interest, is crucial if only to remain passive. Usually people in large and key institutions as the army and media acting in a complementary way are actually the decisive element.
If a significant part of the population adopts support for an idea or an individual this is not political change or economic change. It is a cultural change that will result only in cultural movement in the old system as sale of DVDs and records or increases in donations. Nothing takes place that is revolutionary unless the conditions described above exist. Anyone claiming any other thing is a charlatan. Revolutions don’t happen by thinking and chanting.
The revolutionaries may not even have good ideas. In fact they may be idiots and what they actually do to reorganise society may have no resemblance to what they said they would do. They may actually act in some bold but completely ridiculous theatrical way.
What happens after a revolution is that the preparations that went on before it to change the spectrum of forces and ideas no longer have validity. That is another objective of revolution, an end to idealism. There is afterwards a new spectrum and new validities. Institutions are reworked and culture is redone. Institutions are made to control resources and prevent alienation of power from groups. They are not made to reflect spiritual truths or natural law. A revolution is the reworking of the structure of culture as well as politics and economics often as violently enforced stupidities. These will have support if for the mass the issue of sustainability is settled.
Revolutions are the fast-forward or rewinds of history. They are not a talk show or a rock concert. They are not a university seminar. Revolutions are the violent replacement of one group of vile, exploitative idiots by a group of unformed amateurs in conditions of chaos. The chaos may be triggered by environmental collapse, war, epidemic or divine wind but it is managed by people and it is people who try to benefit from it.
The political class overthrown is not necessarily homogonous. It is more likely that it is a spectrum of interests and presentations but the whole spectrum has one essential purpose but can have completely opposing interests. It can, for example, be there to dominate a national economy but be within itself competing between sectors for determination of that policy, say for guaranteed investment and special state protection.
The conditions for revolutionary change are made of iron. First, the ruling group must be so divided, weakened and discredited that it cannot rule. Second there must be economic conditions that lead large sections of the population to the conclusion that they cannot sustain themselves with the present dispensation, third, the power of official institutions must be withering in certain geographic, institutional and cultural areas. Fourth, there must exist an alternative force that seems sufficiently disciplined and creditable to declare an alternative which has contacts in key institutions. Fifth, a majority of people must believe in a simple universal policy formula if only for a short period of time.
A revolution can never happen because a population suddenly believes in some nuanced system of ideas that an elite has propagated or either in the infallibility of an exceptional individual. Remember, revolutions may not be initiated initially by a mass but they succeed because of mass participation. The mass, believing revolution to be in their interest, is crucial if only to remain passive. Usually people in large and key institutions as the army and media acting in a complementary way are actually the decisive element.
If a significant part of the population adopts support for an idea or an individual this is not political change or economic change. It is a cultural change that will result only in cultural movement in the old system as sale of DVDs and records or increases in donations. Nothing takes place that is revolutionary unless the conditions described above exist. Anyone claiming any other thing is a charlatan. Revolutions don’t happen by thinking and chanting.
The revolutionaries may not even have good ideas. In fact they may be idiots and what they actually do to reorganise society may have no resemblance to what they said they would do. They may actually act in some bold but completely ridiculous theatrical way.
What happens after a revolution is that the preparations that went on before it to change the spectrum of forces and ideas no longer have validity. That is another objective of revolution, an end to idealism. There is afterwards a new spectrum and new validities. Institutions are reworked and culture is redone. Institutions are made to control resources and prevent alienation of power from groups. They are not made to reflect spiritual truths or natural law. A revolution is the reworking of the structure of culture as well as politics and economics often as violently enforced stupidities. These will have support if for the mass the issue of sustainability is settled.
Revolutions are the fast-forward or rewinds of history. They are not a talk show or a rock concert. They are not a university seminar. Revolutions are the violent replacement of one group of vile, exploitative idiots by a group of unformed amateurs in conditions of chaos. The chaos may be triggered by environmental collapse, war, epidemic or divine wind but it is managed by people and it is people who try to benefit from it.
my name is tim
My Name Is Tim.
My name is Tim. I have Aspergers syndrome. I am an Aspergers.
Now before we go further let me explain that Asperger's Syndrome is not a disease any more than CleverDick syndrome is or CuteBunny Syndrome or CompleteWanker syndrome is. It is rather a way of life based on a way of perceiving. Oh yes, it can be diagnosed. But so can bloodymindedness.
Lots of doctors have made an industry from Aspergers. Good for them. But it won’t ever fit into a doctor’s template. You can tell this by what they say. They say it is on a spectrum. Do you know what is on a spectrum to an Aspergers? Two prisms and a rainbow.
Aspergers people know who other Aspergers people are. In fact other Aspergers are the only ones we remember clearly. The only ones we appreciate in our own way. Like the appreciation of cats.
Some analysts have gone through literature and history to see if they could determine who high-end Aspergers was. Yeats is one named, Malcolm Lowry another, perhaps Da Vinci. But also Adolph and complete species of Homo erectus.
I am high end Aspergers. I got this way not only because of my brain chemistry, DNA and the peculiar way my neural insulation allows bolts of connections. I got this way because they gave me an IQ test twice. First time I was sixty. Second time one hundred and eighty five. Between the two tests I had figured out the rules.
How is an Aspergers? First of all if you are not Asperger’s let me tell you. I can follow your thinking before you do. And I find it annoying mainly because you connect all wrong. Some say we have no imagination, no language, and no memory. I can remember your youth when your mind changed. I remember it from seeing you the first time. I get joy from the idle movement of a horse in a field of snow. I see the images in a how a bomb unfolds in the desert.
Aspergers in Love: I see only my love as through a tunnel, a tunnel to only one reflection at the back of a room. Aspergers as a friend: I hunt down every hidden brother and the few sisters with magic. I offer stringed stars and sounds in a row. Aspergers at work: I will wire the ideas perfectly so the project grows like a rogue wave from the sea floor.
Aspergers who talk and write, or dance and sing, or for that matter do anything do not do it for the scholars and relatives who will attend their funeral. They don’t like leisure consumers. They love to play with the shifting eye in the flung mind.
When Aspergers rule the world, hey! And they will dear thing: There will be no correct line. Every movement will be a dissonance resolved of the basic part uniting all the chaos for that moment. The Holy Days will change. This year for falling water. Next year for words beginning with Dis.
*******
Tim Too
This is Tim too and the other thing about Aspergers.
You Buzzies! We call you that for you are those whirring, bloated obvious things.
You bore and bother complaining of dead minds of frozen concrete but that is real and you did it wrong. There is sense in every detail. I won’t answer flakes of snow.
Not that dissolving gas while images break through air cut with clean steel knives and hang still.
You are on both sides of your nose while I feel one hundred and seven small stones under frozen water near the green fountain of brass grapes webbed in sparkling wires.
I want no cure.
Buzzy romantics are always incurable
Buzzy condolences always go out
Buzzy country is always living- what is the sense in that?
While dawn feathered flames slice the pond
And wet night in cold clear morning means sponge snow, cheese under glass.
Spider like your mom brain kept in touch
Not now
And I won’t answer either.
My name is Tim. I have Aspergers syndrome. I am an Aspergers.
Now before we go further let me explain that Asperger's Syndrome is not a disease any more than CleverDick syndrome is or CuteBunny Syndrome or CompleteWanker syndrome is. It is rather a way of life based on a way of perceiving. Oh yes, it can be diagnosed. But so can bloodymindedness.
Lots of doctors have made an industry from Aspergers. Good for them. But it won’t ever fit into a doctor’s template. You can tell this by what they say. They say it is on a spectrum. Do you know what is on a spectrum to an Aspergers? Two prisms and a rainbow.
Aspergers people know who other Aspergers people are. In fact other Aspergers are the only ones we remember clearly. The only ones we appreciate in our own way. Like the appreciation of cats.
Some analysts have gone through literature and history to see if they could determine who high-end Aspergers was. Yeats is one named, Malcolm Lowry another, perhaps Da Vinci. But also Adolph and complete species of Homo erectus.
I am high end Aspergers. I got this way not only because of my brain chemistry, DNA and the peculiar way my neural insulation allows bolts of connections. I got this way because they gave me an IQ test twice. First time I was sixty. Second time one hundred and eighty five. Between the two tests I had figured out the rules.
How is an Aspergers? First of all if you are not Asperger’s let me tell you. I can follow your thinking before you do. And I find it annoying mainly because you connect all wrong. Some say we have no imagination, no language, and no memory. I can remember your youth when your mind changed. I remember it from seeing you the first time. I get joy from the idle movement of a horse in a field of snow. I see the images in a how a bomb unfolds in the desert.
Aspergers in Love: I see only my love as through a tunnel, a tunnel to only one reflection at the back of a room. Aspergers as a friend: I hunt down every hidden brother and the few sisters with magic. I offer stringed stars and sounds in a row. Aspergers at work: I will wire the ideas perfectly so the project grows like a rogue wave from the sea floor.
Aspergers who talk and write, or dance and sing, or for that matter do anything do not do it for the scholars and relatives who will attend their funeral. They don’t like leisure consumers. They love to play with the shifting eye in the flung mind.
When Aspergers rule the world, hey! And they will dear thing: There will be no correct line. Every movement will be a dissonance resolved of the basic part uniting all the chaos for that moment. The Holy Days will change. This year for falling water. Next year for words beginning with Dis.
*******
Tim Too
This is Tim too and the other thing about Aspergers.
You Buzzies! We call you that for you are those whirring, bloated obvious things.
You bore and bother complaining of dead minds of frozen concrete but that is real and you did it wrong. There is sense in every detail. I won’t answer flakes of snow.
Not that dissolving gas while images break through air cut with clean steel knives and hang still.
You are on both sides of your nose while I feel one hundred and seven small stones under frozen water near the green fountain of brass grapes webbed in sparkling wires.
I want no cure.
Buzzy romantics are always incurable
Buzzy condolences always go out
Buzzy country is always living- what is the sense in that?
While dawn feathered flames slice the pond
And wet night in cold clear morning means sponge snow, cheese under glass.
Spider like your mom brain kept in touch
Not now
And I won’t answer either.
Monday, November 14, 2005
oppose memoirism to the death!
There is a great evil threatening our civilisation and that is memoirism. The memoirists are the enemy of truth, imagination, intellect and above all memory. Memory frees. There are getting to be more and more.
Some one ought to do something about them.
Everything in life fails and that is its beauty. Everything fails, that is, except for the spirit to live. For the memoirist there is no failure and there is no spirit. There is only the absolute uniqueness of their ordinary self illuminated to death by their infinite, visionary common sense.
How is the memoirist formed? He is formed by failure taken badly, especially by that experienced in the cradle. It is not that wonderful mixture of fruity foolishness and ruthless boiling and crushing that makes life’s liquor for the memoirist. What makes sense only is that life itself that has failed the memoirist. It has failed to recognize the absolute value in their particular banality and the sparkle of their own ordinary experience. The memoirist began the writing of memoirs at the time he began to speak and momma didn’t listen. His mission was confirmed when some fool did. The determination intensified when that fool turned away.
Poetry, ha! A dead art says the memoirist. I gave it up myself in college. Radical change? Nonsense, says the memoirist. I have never changed and look where I am today. Why should anyone else bother? And I’ve been proven right haven’t I? You should have listened. If you didn’t I will tell you again.
The memoirist doesn’t want anyone to actually be anything in particular. Anything that is that is not a consumer and admirer of his memoirism. Are you Moslem, ha! We had a few in my home town and they behaved properly let me tell you. They behaved like my friends. Let me tell you about Mohammed, no better yet, I’ll tell you about our blacks. Were you tortured by desert bandits who only stopped because the sheep they were cooking caught fire? Ha. I cook mutton at home all the time and it never catches fire. Is he a painter? Ha. What an idiot. Everyone watches tv. A radical? Ha, I wouldn’t waste my time on that! We don’t do things like that around here.
The giants I knew, says the memoirist, are elevated by my familiarity.
The places I have been are monuments since defiled.
The memoirist often says ‘everybody knows’ where nobody knows but he then goes on to make clear that only he knows and if you are saying the same thing he knew first.
The memoirist recommends his failures to everyone as understandable, excusable ultimately glorious and necessary successes. But they shouldn’t try it. It wouldn’t be the same.
The memoirist is the enemy of ego. No-one should have one. They should organise their self on the basis of his memoirs. As for superego, forget it. No need. And if anyone wants to do a few riffs with narcisstic personality disorder, forget that too. That has already been taken. There is only one allowed at a time.
What do you call two memoirists? A historical époque.
A memoirist as a leader initiates a hunt for dissidents, especially those who saw those real mistakes made in real time with perspective.
A memoirist as a lover says ‘there you go again’ and becomes the horned beast.
Do you have a memoirist inside yourself? Ask yourself this: when was life perfect? Or to say the same thing another way, when did it stop and lose a dimension? Or when did my martyrdom begin? When was my memory thwarted? When am I not believed!
Ask yourself, what was the original sin? No really, the real one. Was it the one done to you? What are the real commandments? Thou shalt not err in human ways against my mind? Who were the real myths? Forget Olympus. Was it those you believe you bested? Where is paradise? Is it where you believe you rule? Where the smell of your sanctified thought dominates?
Some bloody café where the five customers know your name? Some ill-attended meeting with one speaker?
The memoirist achieves immortality. And he does this without much suffering. The rest of us achieve death by accepting dismemberment.
How is the immortality of the memoirist assured? Through the reduction of creation and the diminishing of the laws of the universe. By the avoidance of irony, story and song.
There are other words for memoirist. It can be pragmatist, citizen, comrade, professor, even just a clever guy.
But Memoirism is a ferocious journey backward into the night. The memoirist is actually that creature before human thought comes. It is the voice of the dying DNA.
That creature remains the same throughout evolution. It is hairy and stupid. Its purpose is to induce flight so it can flee. Its defence is projectile memoirs. It growls, it farts, it shoots ink, it stinks and hurls from its cage dead bits of self.
Do you know a memoirist? Is there one in your neighbourhood? Someone ought to do something.
Some one ought to do something about them.
Everything in life fails and that is its beauty. Everything fails, that is, except for the spirit to live. For the memoirist there is no failure and there is no spirit. There is only the absolute uniqueness of their ordinary self illuminated to death by their infinite, visionary common sense.
How is the memoirist formed? He is formed by failure taken badly, especially by that experienced in the cradle. It is not that wonderful mixture of fruity foolishness and ruthless boiling and crushing that makes life’s liquor for the memoirist. What makes sense only is that life itself that has failed the memoirist. It has failed to recognize the absolute value in their particular banality and the sparkle of their own ordinary experience. The memoirist began the writing of memoirs at the time he began to speak and momma didn’t listen. His mission was confirmed when some fool did. The determination intensified when that fool turned away.
Poetry, ha! A dead art says the memoirist. I gave it up myself in college. Radical change? Nonsense, says the memoirist. I have never changed and look where I am today. Why should anyone else bother? And I’ve been proven right haven’t I? You should have listened. If you didn’t I will tell you again.
The memoirist doesn’t want anyone to actually be anything in particular. Anything that is that is not a consumer and admirer of his memoirism. Are you Moslem, ha! We had a few in my home town and they behaved properly let me tell you. They behaved like my friends. Let me tell you about Mohammed, no better yet, I’ll tell you about our blacks. Were you tortured by desert bandits who only stopped because the sheep they were cooking caught fire? Ha. I cook mutton at home all the time and it never catches fire. Is he a painter? Ha. What an idiot. Everyone watches tv. A radical? Ha, I wouldn’t waste my time on that! We don’t do things like that around here.
The giants I knew, says the memoirist, are elevated by my familiarity.
The places I have been are monuments since defiled.
The memoirist often says ‘everybody knows’ where nobody knows but he then goes on to make clear that only he knows and if you are saying the same thing he knew first.
The memoirist recommends his failures to everyone as understandable, excusable ultimately glorious and necessary successes. But they shouldn’t try it. It wouldn’t be the same.
The memoirist is the enemy of ego. No-one should have one. They should organise their self on the basis of his memoirs. As for superego, forget it. No need. And if anyone wants to do a few riffs with narcisstic personality disorder, forget that too. That has already been taken. There is only one allowed at a time.
What do you call two memoirists? A historical époque.
A memoirist as a leader initiates a hunt for dissidents, especially those who saw those real mistakes made in real time with perspective.
A memoirist as a lover says ‘there you go again’ and becomes the horned beast.
Do you have a memoirist inside yourself? Ask yourself this: when was life perfect? Or to say the same thing another way, when did it stop and lose a dimension? Or when did my martyrdom begin? When was my memory thwarted? When am I not believed!
Ask yourself, what was the original sin? No really, the real one. Was it the one done to you? What are the real commandments? Thou shalt not err in human ways against my mind? Who were the real myths? Forget Olympus. Was it those you believe you bested? Where is paradise? Is it where you believe you rule? Where the smell of your sanctified thought dominates?
Some bloody café where the five customers know your name? Some ill-attended meeting with one speaker?
The memoirist achieves immortality. And he does this without much suffering. The rest of us achieve death by accepting dismemberment.
How is the immortality of the memoirist assured? Through the reduction of creation and the diminishing of the laws of the universe. By the avoidance of irony, story and song.
There are other words for memoirist. It can be pragmatist, citizen, comrade, professor, even just a clever guy.
But Memoirism is a ferocious journey backward into the night. The memoirist is actually that creature before human thought comes. It is the voice of the dying DNA.
That creature remains the same throughout evolution. It is hairy and stupid. Its purpose is to induce flight so it can flee. Its defence is projectile memoirs. It growls, it farts, it shoots ink, it stinks and hurls from its cage dead bits of self.
Do you know a memoirist? Is there one in your neighbourhood? Someone ought to do something.
Monday, October 24, 2005
something
Just thought of some terms of dissonant symbolic abuse from the Bitter Exile (not you or me but a mythic one, like John Bunyon or Quixote or my favorite: Rimbaud come home fat and liquored up from Africa and burned out from slaving). And thought of a context for them.
The poor guy comes home after 20 years to prove to himself that with the local, or anything else based on imagination, you can't really leave it let alone get back again. He meets people and has adventures, discusses old times and writes back to Africa, say to a friend there, perhaps some mad Canadian general in some tent somewhere in the Bush who is trying to make sense of a genocide, he writes to that friend explain things at home.
How about that he writes about how the aging, nearly dead, 'archbitchup of cantslurry' sent from abroad so long ago to ensure the faith sends curses the general with his far from last dying breath or how the 'the rump parrottment of poets' is still blocking the senses after so many decades of sloth or how the 'local academy of extreme faux' only hires golems or that 'The Church Of What Really Happened Yesterday in the Assembly of The Exclusive Pentecost' has been formed on a government grant. The returnee will explain that authenticity has become a misdemeanor and there is a secret language based on babbles in bubbles. The old gang have been possessed by posses of demons of the banal kingdom and everything golden is missing.
The series that covers this, a poetic series or a novel is called 'Missing in Action' (Return of The Exile From Dementia). Just a thought.
The poor guy comes home after 20 years to prove to himself that with the local, or anything else based on imagination, you can't really leave it let alone get back again. He meets people and has adventures, discusses old times and writes back to Africa, say to a friend there, perhaps some mad Canadian general in some tent somewhere in the Bush who is trying to make sense of a genocide, he writes to that friend explain things at home.
How about that he writes about how the aging, nearly dead, 'archbitchup of cantslurry' sent from abroad so long ago to ensure the faith sends curses the general with his far from last dying breath or how the 'the rump parrottment of poets' is still blocking the senses after so many decades of sloth or how the 'local academy of extreme faux' only hires golems or that 'The Church Of What Really Happened Yesterday in the Assembly of The Exclusive Pentecost' has been formed on a government grant. The returnee will explain that authenticity has become a misdemeanor and there is a secret language based on babbles in bubbles. The old gang have been possessed by posses of demons of the banal kingdom and everything golden is missing.
The series that covers this, a poetic series or a novel is called 'Missing in Action' (Return of The Exile From Dementia). Just a thought.
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
fun
In the book I will send you if you so request I am trying to demonstrate that plot is a very stupid and poisinous thing when it is associated with genre and worse, stereotype. Worse yet with judgement or dictate. I am having fun with this.
The other thing I am playing with is the structure of imaginations, that is one imagination unfolding into another. In some places it is ancient, to religious, to more religious, to political, to images, to mind, to something entirely different...
The thing I think about locality is that you can't get out of it. You can't get outside although you may see outside. Even with natural sciences or medicine you have the outside of your own place inside. A double hermetic. You are back when you go away wherever or whenever you are.
All images lie, all visions are incomplete, all connections are imperfect because of this something else that you have seen, that appears. In this case even when the words are over.
The other thing I am playing with is the structure of imaginations, that is one imagination unfolding into another. In some places it is ancient, to religious, to more religious, to political, to images, to mind, to something entirely different...
The thing I think about locality is that you can't get out of it. You can't get outside although you may see outside. Even with natural sciences or medicine you have the outside of your own place inside. A double hermetic. You are back when you go away wherever or whenever you are.
All images lie, all visions are incomplete, all connections are imperfect because of this something else that you have seen, that appears. In this case even when the words are over.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
literary conflict
I am advised that Brecht said beauty was something like the resolution of contradictions. There might be something else to it -- some sort of catharsis. Something happening with input from somewhere. And connected to higher or lower truth somehow. Maybe with glue.
But what is more interesting is DNA 'spellings'. There are different ones for determining intrinsic and extrinsic experiencing of beauty. Or of the associative rest as joy, exhilaration, peace, anxietylessness and divinity.
The intrinsic individuals as ecstatic, asperger poets, prophets, martyrs, daffodil loonies have one DNA 'spelling.'
The extrinsic people as paedophile priests, home wreckers, cannibals, Trotskyites, department heads and people with narcissistic personality disorders have another.
The reason for these differences is evolutionary experience. One 'spelling' evolved in people with allocentric experiences (as walking with Gods, Legged Dolphins and Aliens). They needed to experience divinity to engender community solidarity. They needed hard wiring to be able to cohere as a group to face life both efficiently and gloriously on mountains, grassy savannahs and open water singing songs and seeing heaven. This gets into the DNA place for soul to conduct the body and senses and into the DNA receptor for spirit which comes from outside (in language, art, nature) to kick start those souls. Body, soul and spirit connect. Like in a snake or a cheetah. Here every group member has a way. They share a spirit.
The other bunch, the extrinsic, the autocentric, evolved in tepid swamps and stony deserts eating one another and fighting over who would be the new priest and so get the juiciest pieces of the last one. This sense meant a hard wiring was necessary in the group to engender sloppy and sentimental response in rote to slogans, clichés, genres and manifestos in order to mesmerize the slowest to march smiling into the cooking pot after kneeling for you know what. In this group the most rancid DNA does the eating, the pallid DNA does the kneeling and singing of Hosannas. Body is eaten, soul is swampy, spirit is disconnected. Like in fruit mold. Mmmm. Looks good, tastes good, feels good.
But what is more interesting is DNA 'spellings'. There are different ones for determining intrinsic and extrinsic experiencing of beauty. Or of the associative rest as joy, exhilaration, peace, anxietylessness and divinity.
The intrinsic individuals as ecstatic, asperger poets, prophets, martyrs, daffodil loonies have one DNA 'spelling.'
The extrinsic people as paedophile priests, home wreckers, cannibals, Trotskyites, department heads and people with narcissistic personality disorders have another.
The reason for these differences is evolutionary experience. One 'spelling' evolved in people with allocentric experiences (as walking with Gods, Legged Dolphins and Aliens). They needed to experience divinity to engender community solidarity. They needed hard wiring to be able to cohere as a group to face life both efficiently and gloriously on mountains, grassy savannahs and open water singing songs and seeing heaven. This gets into the DNA place for soul to conduct the body and senses and into the DNA receptor for spirit which comes from outside (in language, art, nature) to kick start those souls. Body, soul and spirit connect. Like in a snake or a cheetah. Here every group member has a way. They share a spirit.
The other bunch, the extrinsic, the autocentric, evolved in tepid swamps and stony deserts eating one another and fighting over who would be the new priest and so get the juiciest pieces of the last one. This sense meant a hard wiring was necessary in the group to engender sloppy and sentimental response in rote to slogans, clichés, genres and manifestos in order to mesmerize the slowest to march smiling into the cooking pot after kneeling for you know what. In this group the most rancid DNA does the eating, the pallid DNA does the kneeling and singing of Hosannas. Body is eaten, soul is swampy, spirit is disconnected. Like in fruit mold. Mmmm. Looks good, tastes good, feels good.
excerpt from someone else's novel
I am Hope. You can call me Hope. Hope is my name for all the registrations. But I also have my birth name and my small name for the village. There is also my tribal name and the name I will have when I will say my new faith at my marriage. The secret birth name is from my mother to fool the evil spirit who is envious of the beauty of a child. It is in the language of women from the time we had queens. It means “To die in the quiet of the storm”. “Hope” is what my mother and father wanted to give me, as a gift, and is their feeling for me. I am writing this for Mister Jack. It is a gift to him. I write on the paper my father bought me.
My nickname is “Storyteller”. It was mine as a small girl. My sister, Chastity, was given the name “Mangoes” but that was when she went to school. She is my twin. I had that name too. When she was small Chastity was “Knife”. She was then thin and bony like me. When I marry I will have the name of a wife of the Prophet and Redeemer and so will Chastity.
Chastity is my holy twin. She is gifted to me by fate. She is my dearest womb friend. I will be forever true to her. Because she is so much to me I can write her story for the world to see her true character despite all her temptations and all the gossip. I hope my story can be a poem, a song, a movie. It will be like the novels read by Mister Jack about family and love. This will show all how we women are and how we suffer. We suffer more than Oliver Twist or King Lear or Madame Heathcliffe or our great nation and Governor suffer which things we learn of in school. I will show that Chastity is a clever tall girl and proud. She is the tree of fruit of her father and grandfather, of her mother and grandmother.
I am writing this novel book also for my teacher Mister Jack. It is his present. He said to write a holiday story so I would not forget. By doing so I know shall praise him. His language is pure as the purest of tongues and his skin is as soft as this paper. He knows all the foreigners but he is their tallest and smartest. Some are as pigs but he is as a king. He is visited by new vehicles. He will return to his land of green hills and strong music and the best markets. He should take this with him to his country. It is a land of constant water where many get rich as my mother’s brother’s wife’s cousin on the other side of my family. I long to see it. Although some say she is a witch. My mother says she is a doctor.
I want him to know of our ways and to love us and I want to show him he has taught me well. Also he must know how we are, for none of us is what we seem. Mister Jack teaches me Methodology about teaching aids for lessons, theatre arts and English. He teaches us the sentence. It is like a magic. He is fixing our school. We all love him. He is our master and lord. Our duty is to please him. He has explained to us how to teach the making of a novel book and about journals. He has taught us about plays and writing in the voices of others. He says my sister and I are remarkable and smart. When I told him after that class that I will go to the hostel and write a novel book he marvelled. He said it is not what he intended but more. But, why not? Our lives are like the great stories. It is then what I am doing on this the very paper my father bought me.
The first man to call Chastity friend, ally and pal was John. She gave him her permission. He said that he loved her and that her eyes killed. He told her that the hair on her smooth body magnets all boys around her. She was cream and butter. Chastity did not heed him on this type of word. She knew it was hard to know what boys mean and she would not be confused. She sang her own song to herself that God would send her suitor and she would hope in God.
Piccolo and John would walk to the primary school with Chastity and me. We were still small enough to have to carry our sitting stones on our heads and our piece of sugar canes in a hidden plastic. Piccolo would call my sister lovely and his ally too. But John would say that she was not Piccolo’s wife, or even practice wife and that Piccolo should go away or he would give him a heavy blow. Men are as jealous as women.
My sister told them that they should shut their marathon talk. They were wasting their time as only God knows her true suitor. Piccolo always had money in his pocket from his father’s coat. He said that if Chastity would befriend him he would give her the money.
Chastity said that she was finished with small, silly boys since a long time in her heart. She danced on the road and sang that she did not care for those who need her love. The head of Piccolo was down in shame. John laughed at him. Piccolo was a soft and funny boy. He died with a fever.
John then said to Chastity that she had a bad behaviour. He said to Piccolo that he should forgive Chastity because she was young. But later I know he agreed with Piccolo for a plan to share her. This was even before our breasts and menses had arrived. John is now in the customs.
John asked me what kind of girl my sister is to refuse to befriend a good looking boy like Piccolo. Later I know that the boys went to the bush doctor with Piccolo’s money to get medicine to rub on Chastity’s body to make her follow them. On the way to the doctor the toe of John hit on a stone and began to bleed. He said to his friend Piccolo not to look and that the blood was like water on a mountain. Piccolo said to his friend that this is a great pity and is the result of beauty which is a magic. There are terrible things the result of beauty.
My nickname is “Storyteller”. It was mine as a small girl. My sister, Chastity, was given the name “Mangoes” but that was when she went to school. She is my twin. I had that name too. When she was small Chastity was “Knife”. She was then thin and bony like me. When I marry I will have the name of a wife of the Prophet and Redeemer and so will Chastity.
Chastity is my holy twin. She is gifted to me by fate. She is my dearest womb friend. I will be forever true to her. Because she is so much to me I can write her story for the world to see her true character despite all her temptations and all the gossip. I hope my story can be a poem, a song, a movie. It will be like the novels read by Mister Jack about family and love. This will show all how we women are and how we suffer. We suffer more than Oliver Twist or King Lear or Madame Heathcliffe or our great nation and Governor suffer which things we learn of in school. I will show that Chastity is a clever tall girl and proud. She is the tree of fruit of her father and grandfather, of her mother and grandmother.
I am writing this novel book also for my teacher Mister Jack. It is his present. He said to write a holiday story so I would not forget. By doing so I know shall praise him. His language is pure as the purest of tongues and his skin is as soft as this paper. He knows all the foreigners but he is their tallest and smartest. Some are as pigs but he is as a king. He is visited by new vehicles. He will return to his land of green hills and strong music and the best markets. He should take this with him to his country. It is a land of constant water where many get rich as my mother’s brother’s wife’s cousin on the other side of my family. I long to see it. Although some say she is a witch. My mother says she is a doctor.
I want him to know of our ways and to love us and I want to show him he has taught me well. Also he must know how we are, for none of us is what we seem. Mister Jack teaches me Methodology about teaching aids for lessons, theatre arts and English. He teaches us the sentence. It is like a magic. He is fixing our school. We all love him. He is our master and lord. Our duty is to please him. He has explained to us how to teach the making of a novel book and about journals. He has taught us about plays and writing in the voices of others. He says my sister and I are remarkable and smart. When I told him after that class that I will go to the hostel and write a novel book he marvelled. He said it is not what he intended but more. But, why not? Our lives are like the great stories. It is then what I am doing on this the very paper my father bought me.
The first man to call Chastity friend, ally and pal was John. She gave him her permission. He said that he loved her and that her eyes killed. He told her that the hair on her smooth body magnets all boys around her. She was cream and butter. Chastity did not heed him on this type of word. She knew it was hard to know what boys mean and she would not be confused. She sang her own song to herself that God would send her suitor and she would hope in God.
Piccolo and John would walk to the primary school with Chastity and me. We were still small enough to have to carry our sitting stones on our heads and our piece of sugar canes in a hidden plastic. Piccolo would call my sister lovely and his ally too. But John would say that she was not Piccolo’s wife, or even practice wife and that Piccolo should go away or he would give him a heavy blow. Men are as jealous as women.
My sister told them that they should shut their marathon talk. They were wasting their time as only God knows her true suitor. Piccolo always had money in his pocket from his father’s coat. He said that if Chastity would befriend him he would give her the money.
Chastity said that she was finished with small, silly boys since a long time in her heart. She danced on the road and sang that she did not care for those who need her love. The head of Piccolo was down in shame. John laughed at him. Piccolo was a soft and funny boy. He died with a fever.
John then said to Chastity that she had a bad behaviour. He said to Piccolo that he should forgive Chastity because she was young. But later I know he agreed with Piccolo for a plan to share her. This was even before our breasts and menses had arrived. John is now in the customs.
John asked me what kind of girl my sister is to refuse to befriend a good looking boy like Piccolo. Later I know that the boys went to the bush doctor with Piccolo’s money to get medicine to rub on Chastity’s body to make her follow them. On the way to the doctor the toe of John hit on a stone and began to bleed. He said to his friend Piccolo not to look and that the blood was like water on a mountain. Piccolo said to his friend that this is a great pity and is the result of beauty which is a magic. There are terrible things the result of beauty.
Monday, October 10, 2005
a small posting for friends in Kansas from the Himalayas
Don’t say I am cold Mother.
I built the schools that fell on the children
I removed the cataracts from grandma’s eyes
Who saw the bodies
After hearing the cries
Die in the cold
So I wonder
That capacity for conversion
Of one hundred thousand living
Is not reversed when earth cracks
To convert the dead
Hoping a stone fell on Osama
And carrying prayers.
The recovery teams, well dressed
Helicopters fantastic, fresh
From chasing nightmares
Now in the world
I built the schools that fell on the children
I removed the cataracts from grandma’s eyes
Who saw the bodies
After hearing the cries
Die in the cold
So I wonder
That capacity for conversion
Of one hundred thousand living
Is not reversed when earth cracks
To convert the dead
Hoping a stone fell on Osama
And carrying prayers.
The recovery teams, well dressed
Helicopters fantastic, fresh
From chasing nightmares
Now in the world
Monday, October 03, 2005
do you believe that of all the kingdoms He created yours would last forever?
Do you believe that of all the kingdoms He created yours would last forever?
And who is He?
Never mind that for a moment.
What I wish to describe is an epidemic that is coming. Like the flu it started off with a few cases. With me I heard a voice that clearly said ‘Behold the divine slapper.’ I was sleeping on the fourteenth floor of a low income tower block with the window open despite the frequency of condoms blowing in. The sound did not come from the window; it came from the TV which was off. I turned it on and a border at the bottom of a cartoon elf read ‘Princess Dianna has been reported to be in an automobile crash.’
'No she hasn’t,' I said. 'She is dead.' All the previous week she had been in the news and in my office we had been slagging her off. For months in that same office you couldn’t say a thing against her or the government would fire you. And they did. The People’s Princess.
The next time I was in a basement near a river. I was pumped through with drugs to confuse my immune system into thinking I would live. A voice said “Everything holy is trashed.” It came from the TV. I turned it on and a banner read that a light plane had crashed in New York. The banner was under a cookery show with prawns with large capillaries. I said, ‘No it isn’t. It is jumbos’ just before that shot came on with the second plane going through like knife and butter. I had by then left the first office. It was months before I was well enough to go to the second where it became impossible to get money for schools for Afghanistan and Iraq and not just because Halliburton had it all. And a world of interlocked myth darkened us all.
I realised later that I had caught prophecy. It is going around. Have you had it? Now worse strains are developing. Like the flu it begans with a few cases. Then it spread. Like flu it goes from animals to people, those ducks and ferrets that fuss about earthquakes and tsunanis. It spreads from people to spiritual beings and back again. A friend suddenly heard in his sleep during an eclipse that ‘America is building up Hubris faster than shit in the cat lady’s house.’ Then came the hurricanes. He said to me that’s them! That’s them! When they were only red things of the coast of Africa.
I knew about the superdome in advance, I knew about the corruption, I knew about what will happen in Iraq yesterday.
This isn’t your fairground fortune-telling about your love life and your budget travel bullshit. It has mutated. And I can’t turn it on and off like a keg tap for my friends. So don’t ask. It is industrial strength prophecy, multi mutated prophecy, multi-causal prophecy for which there is no vaccine. It is a voice that comes from distant language and images and memory. Oh yes it does. That is, mother, it comes from way outside and from the broadcasting center of the spirit.
And it is about things that are so fucking obvious. Of course those things are now concealed by the history mystery but they are happening, going to happen. Yes there she goes! Wasn’t that fucking obvious. I knew it!
Like the onset of flu. Like malaria.
This prophecy doesn’t come from my own private soul, oh no not from that little IPOD which is all too busy misdirecting my body into its perennial fatal stupidities, which unsuccessfully fight off, as usual, all the clichés and useless life skills injected into its soul’s DNA to try to live forever.
No, it is from the colourless spirit. From way outside. It is from my soul’s infinate boss saying ‘This is the time of the great Satan, you little wanker, watch out what you are doing.’
Then it says ‘Take a look at this. And I see an avalaunche on a thousand little feet skating silently down the mountain, tress snapping before it, snow billowing. It is half the mountain and it is leaving behind a grey and silver flecked emptiness on the remains. The avalanche goes down into the lake, without a wave it disappears but a wave does come up the other side of the valley freezing into cream all the tress there and connecting them with filaments of gold in a setting sun. And a voice says: "of all the kingdoms of the world…"’
I turn on the TV. Someone is saying that we are fighting against those who hate freedom and our way of life.
And who is He?
Never mind that for a moment.
What I wish to describe is an epidemic that is coming. Like the flu it started off with a few cases. With me I heard a voice that clearly said ‘Behold the divine slapper.’ I was sleeping on the fourteenth floor of a low income tower block with the window open despite the frequency of condoms blowing in. The sound did not come from the window; it came from the TV which was off. I turned it on and a border at the bottom of a cartoon elf read ‘Princess Dianna has been reported to be in an automobile crash.’
'No she hasn’t,' I said. 'She is dead.' All the previous week she had been in the news and in my office we had been slagging her off. For months in that same office you couldn’t say a thing against her or the government would fire you. And they did. The People’s Princess.
The next time I was in a basement near a river. I was pumped through with drugs to confuse my immune system into thinking I would live. A voice said “Everything holy is trashed.” It came from the TV. I turned it on and a banner read that a light plane had crashed in New York. The banner was under a cookery show with prawns with large capillaries. I said, ‘No it isn’t. It is jumbos’ just before that shot came on with the second plane going through like knife and butter. I had by then left the first office. It was months before I was well enough to go to the second where it became impossible to get money for schools for Afghanistan and Iraq and not just because Halliburton had it all. And a world of interlocked myth darkened us all.
I realised later that I had caught prophecy. It is going around. Have you had it? Now worse strains are developing. Like the flu it begans with a few cases. Then it spread. Like flu it goes from animals to people, those ducks and ferrets that fuss about earthquakes and tsunanis. It spreads from people to spiritual beings and back again. A friend suddenly heard in his sleep during an eclipse that ‘America is building up Hubris faster than shit in the cat lady’s house.’ Then came the hurricanes. He said to me that’s them! That’s them! When they were only red things of the coast of Africa.
I knew about the superdome in advance, I knew about the corruption, I knew about what will happen in Iraq yesterday.
This isn’t your fairground fortune-telling about your love life and your budget travel bullshit. It has mutated. And I can’t turn it on and off like a keg tap for my friends. So don’t ask. It is industrial strength prophecy, multi mutated prophecy, multi-causal prophecy for which there is no vaccine. It is a voice that comes from distant language and images and memory. Oh yes it does. That is, mother, it comes from way outside and from the broadcasting center of the spirit.
And it is about things that are so fucking obvious. Of course those things are now concealed by the history mystery but they are happening, going to happen. Yes there she goes! Wasn’t that fucking obvious. I knew it!
Like the onset of flu. Like malaria.
This prophecy doesn’t come from my own private soul, oh no not from that little IPOD which is all too busy misdirecting my body into its perennial fatal stupidities, which unsuccessfully fight off, as usual, all the clichés and useless life skills injected into its soul’s DNA to try to live forever.
No, it is from the colourless spirit. From way outside. It is from my soul’s infinate boss saying ‘This is the time of the great Satan, you little wanker, watch out what you are doing.’
Then it says ‘Take a look at this. And I see an avalaunche on a thousand little feet skating silently down the mountain, tress snapping before it, snow billowing. It is half the mountain and it is leaving behind a grey and silver flecked emptiness on the remains. The avalanche goes down into the lake, without a wave it disappears but a wave does come up the other side of the valley freezing into cream all the tress there and connecting them with filaments of gold in a setting sun. And a voice says: "of all the kingdoms of the world…"’
I turn on the TV. Someone is saying that we are fighting against those who hate freedom and our way of life.
Friday, September 23, 2005
the thing about every mystery
The thing about every mystery is that with time it becomes a fact. So with my dad we made one when we both said at once that was the second time we heard that sound.
For him the first was in the evening, a damp evening when the birds were weary across the fields just moaning those birds. That was ’27.
For me it was in the desert night crisp, dirty wind and really ball grabbing cold before a call came saying just ignore that sergeant. That was this year. March I think. A month before I came home.
Next day when we got settled a couple of guys from down the street were on the news filling in time from a remote spot with a news reporter from Memphis before the weather came on when one said he thought it was a barge hitting the wall and the other said yaw, it sounded like an explosion.
Dad said yaw, that’s certainly nearly right. He is eighty something now but he can still talk like a school teacher. He said he heard it better than them cause our house was nearer the levee than theirs. He said it fucking was an explosion just like the one in ‘27 when they blew the dyke and flooded us all out. Except it was just us kids and old folks on poor farms then. Were mainly in shacks not like now. Was because they wanted to lower the river before it got to Garden City or into the French Quarter.
I said that I thought it was like an explosion too. I said that to dad when I was checking the fridge the last time. It sounded just like that one that blew up the pipeline and I remember I thought wow that’s the shit hitting the fan and then I saw it was the contractors truck nearby and they done it, then the call came saying forget it. The line was empty anyway. Then the next day the news went on that the prices had gone up at home again because of the terrorists. It was that same sound.
For him the first was in the evening, a damp evening when the birds were weary across the fields just moaning those birds. That was ’27.
For me it was in the desert night crisp, dirty wind and really ball grabbing cold before a call came saying just ignore that sergeant. That was this year. March I think. A month before I came home.
Next day when we got settled a couple of guys from down the street were on the news filling in time from a remote spot with a news reporter from Memphis before the weather came on when one said he thought it was a barge hitting the wall and the other said yaw, it sounded like an explosion.
Dad said yaw, that’s certainly nearly right. He is eighty something now but he can still talk like a school teacher. He said he heard it better than them cause our house was nearer the levee than theirs. He said it fucking was an explosion just like the one in ‘27 when they blew the dyke and flooded us all out. Except it was just us kids and old folks on poor farms then. Were mainly in shacks not like now. Was because they wanted to lower the river before it got to Garden City or into the French Quarter.
I said that I thought it was like an explosion too. I said that to dad when I was checking the fridge the last time. It sounded just like that one that blew up the pipeline and I remember I thought wow that’s the shit hitting the fan and then I saw it was the contractors truck nearby and they done it, then the call came saying forget it. The line was empty anyway. Then the next day the news went on that the prices had gone up at home again because of the terrorists. It was that same sound.
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Monday, September 12, 2005
Red Nile excerpt 4: flying planes can be dangerous
The plane seemed to rise up with a jerk. A silence churned behind his suddenly plugged ears. The plane seemed to be floating, even frozen.
Hank wanted to think something, anything, of his family, his father, his wife and his son. He wanted to think anything of how he felt. But he couldn’t. Instead he thought of another law.
The individual is made up of collections of false memory of false morality built on failed love.
As the plane tipped and descended, Mr. Gunn-Phitre settled back in his seat to enjoy the rarefied sensation that comes to certain experienced travellers, such as he was himself, in potential disasters. Hank had gone asleep or flown to the moon. Where was Hank? Gunn-Phitre answered: the moon.
While flying in general, and in airplanes in particular, especially those which were crashing, Mr. Gunn-Phitre always felt with satisfaction the perfect concentration of all his skills and
knowledge into one powerful frozen force coiled like a tornado.
At last his mind wasn’t being underutilised. His thinking became absolutely, yes, infinitely lucid and his imagination magically concrete. He would get out of course, wait and see, but not just yet. He would savour this moment. Why not. It was exquisite. It was like driving past someone else’s accident. Someone who drove the same model car as your lover. But it wasn’t them inside.
It was you.
Hank wanted to think something, anything, of his family, his father, his wife and his son. He wanted to think anything of how he felt. But he couldn’t. Instead he thought of another law.
The individual is made up of collections of false memory of false morality built on failed love.
As the plane tipped and descended, Mr. Gunn-Phitre settled back in his seat to enjoy the rarefied sensation that comes to certain experienced travellers, such as he was himself, in potential disasters. Hank had gone asleep or flown to the moon. Where was Hank? Gunn-Phitre answered: the moon.
While flying in general, and in airplanes in particular, especially those which were crashing, Mr. Gunn-Phitre always felt with satisfaction the perfect concentration of all his skills and
knowledge into one powerful frozen force coiled like a tornado.
At last his mind wasn’t being underutilised. His thinking became absolutely, yes, infinitely lucid and his imagination magically concrete. He would get out of course, wait and see, but not just yet. He would savour this moment. Why not. It was exquisite. It was like driving past someone else’s accident. Someone who drove the same model car as your lover. But it wasn’t them inside.
It was you.
Monday, September 05, 2005
Red Nile excerpt 3: Ardfert
This was for those monks the boundary of the world. It was the edge of creation. It was as far as they could get. The stormy sea was like the blazing desert, it was the place where there was nothing between them and God. Or between them and Satan. The headquarters in Ardfert sent people out in small boats after the stormy season to check which of the saints were alive and which were dead and to collect their visions and their dreams.
Friday, September 02, 2005
Red Nile excerpt 2: desert encounter
'Just smell that desert, Mohammed! It’s wonderful, clear and clean, like the aroma of stars. Ah, this cold wind, blowing invisible dust into the night. It is so empty here. Road and sky. It is getting cooler, isn’t it? I should roll up the window. The moon is brighter too.’ Hank stuck his head from the window. ‘What is that ahead?’ He stiffened and slowed.
Beside the road sat a black animal. A dog. It was larger than the car. Twice as large. Bluish teeth shone at its muzzle and green eyes followed them unblinking as they went by. It seemed to have many toes. Its arms were hairless. A smell of honey and burnt pork quickly filled the car and lingered.
Mohammed said nothing. Hank turned and focussed on the road ahead. Neither looked back. After several minutes, Hank wiped his nose. The smell was gone. He rolled up the window.
‘We believe that there are only men, saints and djinns in the world,’ said Mohammed. ‘Nothing else. Not ghosts, not spirits, not monsters.’ His voice was steady but dry, raspy.
‘It is a big desert,’ said Hank. ‘It goes through Libya and beyond. It goes south to the mid-Sudan. There must be many things in it.’
‘There are only natural illusions,’ said Mohammed. ‘We are taught that. We believe in nothing else.’
‘I heard there are meadows of yellow molten glass in the dunes,’ said Hank.
‘I saw it too,’ came a hoarse voice from the back seat. Mohammed gasped and sat upright.
Beside the road sat a black animal. A dog. It was larger than the car. Twice as large. Bluish teeth shone at its muzzle and green eyes followed them unblinking as they went by. It seemed to have many toes. Its arms were hairless. A smell of honey and burnt pork quickly filled the car and lingered.
Mohammed said nothing. Hank turned and focussed on the road ahead. Neither looked back. After several minutes, Hank wiped his nose. The smell was gone. He rolled up the window.
‘We believe that there are only men, saints and djinns in the world,’ said Mohammed. ‘Nothing else. Not ghosts, not spirits, not monsters.’ His voice was steady but dry, raspy.
‘It is a big desert,’ said Hank. ‘It goes through Libya and beyond. It goes south to the mid-Sudan. There must be many things in it.’
‘There are only natural illusions,’ said Mohammed. ‘We are taught that. We believe in nothing else.’
‘I heard there are meadows of yellow molten glass in the dunes,’ said Hank.
‘I saw it too,’ came a hoarse voice from the back seat. Mohammed gasped and sat upright.
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