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.

a winter journey home

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.

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.

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.

yonder

I don’t care, New Orleans. The only thing worth caring about is the infinite reach of our mind through galaxies and the meandering of the Holy Spirit dispensing freedom. And besides I was arrested there on a noisy street sleeping in a stolen Thunderbird.

But not for the Thunderbird. It was for suspicion, suspicion mind you, of the murder of someone I never found out the name of.

Arrested with me were David-Michael-Zeke -- the guy with three sets of identities -- and “fish eyes” who may have had a vitamin deficiency or perhaps a hormone chaos of some sort. They were sleeping in the Thunderbird too and were both as white as me on a black street under neon.

I feel some peace now that this street is under five feet of standing water but you can still loot the top shelves from the liquor store. I have a greater peace that something big is returning the city to the gulf and the people in it to a continent of smell, death and humid survival.

I have nothing against them. In fact I know some. There was the self-described former senator , drunk and chronically pukey but with a good straw hat, torn a bit thrown into the cell with me and the others and released early. Not like us. There was the cheerful guard who said he had pissed on our worm sandwiches. He had spat in the Toxic Tang.

The bloody marine released without charge in the morning before we were is maybe still in the National Guard, somewhere else or who maybe now is there “helping” the ten thousand poor people locked up in the stadium ready for deportation for their own good to prevent looting treasures in the black city from those tall buildings with the emergency generators still on to keep their logos burning. The logos are reflecting on the rising water. Is this how the whole thing will end -- in floating shit?

I was released in the morning after the last minute attempt, a reduced charge from murder down to vagrancy, was dropped. I had ten bucks. They never got on to David-Michael-Zeke. They never got on to the Thunderbird. They hadn’t heard of the place on the plates. Manitoba, where the fuck is that? Might as well be Bongo Land.

So all the rest of us were released with contempt. We three whites and ten thousand others who were arrested that night for suspicion. Out for the time being. I was advised to leave the city and the state. To evacuate. The judge did not understand my accent. He thought that when I said “not guilty” I was asking for orange juice. He told me that this was no time for that. That is how far I was away from home. He told me himself I was too far. The cops asked if I was one of those Cuban niggers. They said I should go back to Africa with them. I actually did that. Just as he said. Just as I was told.

The others, like now, went on to their promised land.

That old Holy Spirit is flooding the mind with analogy. Other places. Animals two by two, the spires of Atlantis. Bombed, flooded , drowned, covered in locusts, burnt and scattered into the desert. Blasting through a nebula on a million tortured comets. The neurons of something prophetic.

No, I don’t care, and this is a terrible thing because once I did so much.

Death's Doors Excerpt 1: a landscape

‘Like every Canadian,’ the uncle proposed, ‘he has three discernable natures. All without evil. Often without interest as well.’

‘There is a formless general Canadian social nature, nearly inert, but busy when it decides to be busy, creating little intricate smug parochial hierarchies and gibbering about pleasant simple dichotomies, saying nice things but saying them insincerely wherever it goes. I saw a lot of this in my newspaper office. This first nature seeks middle things and desires good feelings in everyone. It is not deep and certainly not to be trusted to make sense.

‘It has no discrimination. But it will discriminate. It will decide things; it can have opinions like to not like Toronto but rather like Vancouver, not like the country but adore the city, not want to work in the government but rather in a small business one day, but not in the sales department or accountancy, it would prefer to be a teacher. Not an American idea in its head. Or so it thinks. No, not ever that. Not ever a banal cultural warrior thought, a stupid know-it-all idea. Not a plotter against humanity. Not refined but a good teller of wise anecdotes and tortuously polite.’

The uncle, who had written a novel on the war dead and had had a collection of his articles published as well as a textbook, elaborated on the second nature provided to each Canadian by their massive expanse of empty landscape. It was their nature.

Maybe a Canadian hadn’t seen any of the expanse or landscape, but he knew it was there. It was the one thing that made him the most smug and talkative. He thought it trumped everyone else’s myths. For this big expanse he expected universal awe. As for himself, he was blinded to most of any features of any other place except by facile comparison. Landscape ate their minds, those Canadians. It was a landscape that swallowed most of the stories about it, made them into cartoons and cute fairytales. A not-known space, not even one imagined adequately.

essay on true literature

C’mon now, be serious! All literature is only writing that is both derivative and unique. At the same time. That’s all it is. If it is just the one or just the other it isn’t literature. It is just writing.

And another thing. It is an object. It has to be somewhere. If it is scanned, it is just scanned literature. And I’ll tell you why.

It is all in the history of the thing. Recently it has all been in the history of publishing and marketing. Literature as part of production and markets. Before that it has been projections from places and professions. Like priests, universities, magis and prisons. Graveyards and generals. That sort of thing. Establishments and celebrities. Literature as part of the positions of knowledge. A membership.

Before that it was just the stuff from those putting onto objects. Stuff that came from songs and images. I don’t mean the words and pictures. That’s just writing. I mean the songs and images. Even stick people or humming.

They were objects to use to try to move thinking and feeling and so enliven the outside and inside. The ones that worked, that was going to be literature. They started to add to the original derivatives some of that uniqueness and some carried over uniqueness to that new derivative. Before that everything just moved in the mind and in the world without literature all the way back to the original mind and body.

With literature you are not trying to just stimulate readers. Yes you need those for literature too; they are part of it.

No, not tying to excite or please them. That’s just writing. Nope, you’re also trying to work with them to get to something somewhere. Move it around a bit. Get it to work again if it isn’t.

But what about stuff that isn’t in the history of literature? Is it literature too? I ask you that seriously! And I’ll tell you why I do. I have a book here, I don’t know who wrote it, written in pencil as a copy of something which my friend read before he went away and died. I haven’t had the time to read it myself.

It’s called ‘1001 Tales by the Exile in Dementia.’

Is it literature?

He said it was really, really good.

what about the game?

I have met lots of Canadians who leave Canada both to find wars and to find peace (only a few to 'make' peace). You immigrated to Canada because there was a kill-off of class , tribe or nation somewhere.... the kids go back and out as a kind of deathly fun. To get away from the community and do something for real. Recently people came and still do come in to get away from wars. Recently the kids go out and back again. There are rings of peoples in every town. There are kids of immigrants in every agency.

I am just being stroppy about Magic Mountain. I have got annoyed with Faustus, creature of the state. They are both about art and politics and death one is centered on people, one on image.. Stroppy, stroppy me.

What about the game? What about madness? You think you are depressed. Ha!!!!

some sort of descent

Red Nile excerpt 1: a death

The winter winds had been born in the central desert; there they divided into spinning arms each hundreds of miles long. The weakest scythed into West Africa attracted by pressure troughs in the Atlantic. In Nigeria they became the dirty, dry, maddening, endlessly blowing Harmattan. The strongest arms broke away, rotated, divided and then divided again to spin across the desert north to Cairo in a chaos of gust and squall.

From southern Assuit to Cairo many of the winds spilled down from the desert plateau into the narrow valley cut by the Nile. From over the rooftops in Cairo they descended into the streets in moaning pulses that exploded on the ground into torrents of fine, dry, drenching sand that instantly covered the oven lid, transforming it to a brown mound.

From Cairo, the winds bubbled on across the delta to swirl over the sea. When they reached the beaches, the winds quickened, passing over the waves as beige and yellow clouds. As the clouds rose, hammers of clear air smashed into the sea mist. Some of the squalls bounced on the pressure and incoming sea breezes to return to shore in small wet furies.

The weather caused wild wave patterns down the Nile. From Assuit through to the delta and to the sea feluccas and tourist boats were rocked. On the Mediterranean into the Ionian Sea the waves were tumultuous at the mouths of the small harbours and bays. In Albania they blew from the port of Vlora over the mountain passes to Gramsch.

In Egypt trailing gusts drove the surfaces of marshes, lagoons and wetlands over coastal roads and into delta towns. The windowless cement hut in Raz El Bar where the dead engineer had holidayed before he retired was flooded. The waters left patterns of shards of cracked shells on the street in front of it. The road to the hut was littered with heaps of rubbish and piles of dead birds woven with reeds and small stones.

The evening before, the only fishing boat that had risked a trip out from the port of Raz El Bar had difficulty threading the narrow opening between concrete abutments to get back into the harbour. It surfed in high on the swells from the deep water, its hold empty, moving sideways until turning sharply, almost at right angles just as it reached the narrow harbour entrance. The boat hovered there an instant, seemingly on the spray and in the sky. It then jerked itself around, turning, keeling over, and knifed in close to tipping, with its masts at acute angles to the sea. The boat righted at the last moment, hurled into the calm inner harbour on a dying wave, scraping its sides on the jetty behind the seawall.

Because of this, the fish stall next to the cigarette cart in the Cairo street, the fish stall run by the family from Raz El Bar, was not to open on the morning of the explosion. There were no fish. The stall for cigarettes had therefore set up in its place.

On the other side of the Mediterranean blown sand descended over tourists in Delphi to their astonishment. Sand clouds were seen over the water opposite Vlora. They obscured from two Italian patrol boats a ship crammed with women and children which had below decks an additional cargo of newly manufactured small arms and ammunition. The arms would be landed secretly and then, as arranged, travel on across Europe to Ireland by railroad and ferry. Others would go on to West Africa. Police in several countries would exchange information about the markings on the barrels.

Hailstones fell on Jerusalem and some screaming howling was heard in the sewers under the souks in Alexandria.

To the proprietor of the Cairo market cart, the man who had pulled a cart from his home four kilometres away each dawn to this street for ten years, the man who had now just moved the cart slightly away from his usual place in order to be in a better spot, a lovely spot just where the fish cart usually was, the fish cart owned by the Raz El Bar family who had not come this morning as they had no fish, to this cart proprietor the sudden death of the retired engineer was miraculous. The death composed itself to him first as a note from an invisible instrument, as a sudden unfamiliar castanet sound, a drumming clatter, and a harsh wet whisper blended into one.

i am a citizen of the modern absurd state

I am a citizen of the modern absurd state. It is a place in which you can be summarily executed for vaguely resembling an Ethiopian while acting above suspicion.

I can be arrested for wearing a t-shirt praising the prime minister while in front of the parliament buildings while fifty people next to me dressed obscenely as Americans go scot-free.

My family have lived continuously in Britain and its sovereign predecessors from the Domesday Book and before. Yet I can be deported for having a different sense of linguistic tone than the chief constable.

Look it up. You can be deported if you quote Ghandi approvingly in what he has to say about violent terrorism. Technically he justifies it. You might even say he glorifies it.

Where will I be deported to? Would it be to places my ancestors did not live in but died in? Vimy Ridge? Rourkes Drift? The Plains of Abraham? Some of them burned Washington.

Would I be deported to the country where, by an accident of war-time lust I was born, considered by some to be the most peaceful country on earth and where I was tortured by the police for eight hours to near death before being rescued by nuns? It is a country that has legislation that would probably reject me.

I want this absurdity to end. Are we at war or not? If so, why? That is the basis of this. The prime minister won’t tell us exactly. It is his secret. Are we? And if not, why not, with all this gathering danger?

If we are in an ideological struggle with those who hate freedom. Let us implement what is necessary to defeat it. Let us go on a war footing. Let us deport citizens who hate freedom or even dislike it a little to countries that absolutely loath it. Let us put the heads of those with dodgy ideologies such as those that link terrorists treacherously to the wars we are fighting that they say they are part of, a link the prime minister says is absurd and perhaps soon to be illegal, let us put those heads on pikes.

If we are not at war let us stop doing things where absurd explanations become plausible. For example that the Prime minister is not fighting terrorism but actually sticking it to political opponents by creating conditions in which his declining popularity is bolstered by Churchillian myth and his opponent’s views succour thought crimes.

I read the biographies of the successful terrorists and the bunglers. They were the ones who cunningly avoided all the intense security work of a decade. Yet they were espousing terrorism in mosques, fighting with moderate Imams, visiting training schools in Pakistan and selling inflammatory texts on the street every week. But security never heard of them. One was a concocted criminal. Most were citizens. Thank God the next potential lot can be stripped of that. That will get the buggers next time!

The profiles seem to me like the classic profiles of patsies and bozos that become provocateurs or informers. How did we miss the chance? It is such an absurd place now that we live in that it is equally plausible we didn’t miss the chance. We took it to fight the real war. Like it is plausible that Brazilians are killed to reassure the public on immigration. Just like it is plausible that here were no weapons of mass destruction and the Iraq war was planned way before any inspectors were mildly restrained. It is plausible that only the ugliest Imams are deported. Also plausible that for two decades the terrorists were kept around and enabled in case they became handy in overthrowing Arab Socialist states. Is the war on Terrorism a war on Gallaway and those who vote for him? Plausible. It is a paradise for bloggers, a hell for democrats.

War or Not. Let’s get off the pot. And while we are at it let us fight the speed control cameras. They are causing all sorts of deaths. Deport those who slow down and glorify slowing!

As for me, I intend to quote Ghandi by the parliament buildings.

I read the obituaries of those who died on July 7. Like many I wept. There was not one that I wouldn’t have liked as a neighbour or friend. They did not die for ideology.

They were ordinary people slaughtered by criminals. By madmen. Let us not make their death absurd.

to break through all this dreaming

To break through all this dreaming.

Or is the point not to? Is the point to all agree on the dream and who we are in it? Is that to make us different people in it? To surround us with wavy lights lit from below...

There are not any oppressed cute little high cheek-boned coffee coloured girls in fetching scarves now joyously going to school in whitewashed buildings. There never were. We are supporting elite religious boys' schools in a different country. There are not grateful women, veiled but cooking delicious unleavened bread and succulent meat over discrete open fires. The schools are in ruins. The people are eating from cans. Their militia are guarding the paths. The Americans are in convoys. The warlords are building some schools for their tribal areas. We did nothing. You can’t. It is a war and chaos. Besides, no one wants it.

Some money has gone to the staff of a sectarian organisation.

Some of the money went for a makeover in Los Angelus for our fundraiser which actually made her late for the fundraising event. She had put little flags on each table sold to celebrities and lady wives of corporate assholes to show fictitious cities where we have fictitious projects in a fictitious Afghanistan now democratic and free. Fictitiously. Her assistant, who represents the products served at the event, insulted the journalist who asked about that. As did the false Afghan. Princess. A Mercedes mama who got a commission. They were all the entelechy of concerned bourgeois.

It is worse than the fictitious crisis with the paid starving baby on a pallet, the mothers running and fighting for food handed out from a truck in the billowing dust. There is also the little child with machete cuts but no sign of the CIA supported guerrillas who guard the camps and herded the refugees there in the first place. All paid for though. The villains, coincidentally the villains of our foreign policy.

I once worked for an agency to whom I pointed out how imprudent it was to refurbish a magnificent historic building (using the brother-in-law of the executive director as a contractor) paid for with money raised on television from children who sold their music and toys in small stands on the street because they were trying to eliminate blindness in other children (filmed in rows, tiny little blind kids, one hand on the shoulder of the next) caused by a worm, a worm eliminated with one cheap pill to be delivered in trucks to remote areas). The executive director got a lovely office.

When I went to the area of the blindness I found a doctor in a lovely house doing nothing. There was another doctor with a great jazz collection who rented her house as the office and got a salary too. They took me to restaurants in the vehicles. Not trucks but SUV’s. For personal use. There were no pills delivered. It was a dreamy landscape of slow moving rivers, desert and colourful markets. There were mansions in palm parks. There were embassy parties. Some of their kids had sold their music and toys on the street before they came. They got new ones in diplomatic bags.

terror, rain, red buses and the route to lewisham

Life has taken on the logic of a dream.

There are approximately five hundred persons on a Docklands Light Railway train, fewer now because of circumstances. Yesterday a young man from Rwanda, new to London, got stuck in the doors; they close so fast at Canary Wharf. The driver said on the loudspeaker: 'Get away from the doors!' The train emptied.

Next to me a young black girl cried 'Not me, not now.' An elderly woman pushed over a suited, briefcased man to get onto the escalator. The driver on the speaker shouted 'No, no, no!' The running seemed like underwater.

Later a student wearing a rucksack left a tube station downtown singing. It was Bop, Bop, Bop, Barbara Ann. His mobile began to beep. A hundred people scattered. A black cab rear-ended a white van. A television crew arrived.

I think it is partially due to the constant repetition of disappearing news. The official news is that there is no news. Everything is proceeding cautiously and according to facts. Can the public help to identify this plastic container, this rucksack, this blurred face? The official news is supplemented by strange people. They are “security analysts”, “terror experts” and a number of witnesses all called Robert Jones. Robert speaks perfectly and concisely. You see them once and then they disappear.

Police have things under control. The Prime Minister is resolute. He does look tough, younger. His pictures in the papers are in profiled. Is he travelling on the tubes. Every day the news is faster moving. Less substantial. Better. Bad. Psychologists warn of reality.

Worse is the incredible shifting terrorists. Ten arrested. All disappear.
At first, dressed in a heavy coat he ignored instructions, leapt over a barrier and flung himself into a subway carriage filled with innocent people including Robert Jones. He was Asian (that’s what the British call Middle Eastern says FOX). He was shot twice to stop him from detonating a bomb.

You know the rest. Information begins to drip, twist and fog. First off he was shot eight times while being held down screaming. He was Brazilian. He not only had no bomb he had no coat. He did not leap over a barrier he paid using his travel card, like I do. He did not flee police; he took a bus to the station. He was not an illegal immigrant. He was given no warning. He was not even the man the armed team was following. He was hurrying to get in the car before the doors closed. Everyone must agree it had to be done.

I think it may also be the sirens. There are the streets closed because of incidents you never hear of again. There are daily raids of kabob shops and Internet cafes. The machine guns everywhere. There to reassure. Abandoned cars, each with a helicopter overhead, litter the streets. I cannot find a route to Lewisham. Red buses have grown in size. They fill my windscreen like a wall. Their route numbers have horrible significance.

The Prime Minister, dream-like, calls for an alliance of all civilizations to meet the threat. He says we had all gone to sleep. That is why it happened. He will wake us. He warns of twisted logic.

There is a whisper we will leave Iraq. I don’t remember falling asleep.

bombs fail

God love me I pity the terrorists of yesterday. How must they feel? They were on their way to paradise (personally I would decline all those virgins, but they are younger) and the bombs didn’t work. Everyone here including them went home.

They did not immortalise themselves. They undermined the work of the previous martyrs. It must feel so unimaginably bad. It is worst than failing a test. It is worse than being dumped in love (experiences the previous martyrs had before they became Jihadists). You have screwed up the unknowable infinite.

And what else have you done. You have contributed to the world’s fund of general absurdity. As well in London the accumulative result of terror in the public psyche has resulted in the outbreak of a new era in social enterprise in the furtherance of the plastic adaptation of globalism.

For those who are freaking about going into the tubes a charity has formed called ‘Tube Buddies’ (seeking government funding) which will accompany the very impressionable who equate descent into the tube as a descent into the grave on a jolly journey to overcome their fears. They have bottled water and crisps. The financial centre and the Prime Minister want everyone to carry on as normal.

A ‘terrorism expert’ (aren’t they all) on the telly has objected to the tube buddies, urging for extreme background checks on them (many are Australian backpackers) lest terrorists slip among them. He recommends a new agency to do deep checks. He urges the public to be more vigilant. He recommends purchase of a ‘terrorist attack kit’. This contains bandages, water and crisps in case you are stuck on the tube.

The terrorists always ‘slip among’. Commuters always ‘struggle bravely’. Police always ‘proceed cautiously.’ Cabinet Ministers ‘appeal for calm’. Experts always ‘strenuously urge’ those who have real jobs to do something sensible. Business always ‘goes on as usual’. Intelligence agencies are ‘tracking down’. The Prime Minister ‘looks grim’.

No one mentions what is in someone’s mirror. In the mirror is the indiscriminate killing of ordinary working people, the ignoring of the rule of law, the desire to impose an alien ideology and culture by force. And now despair. And, thank God, sometimes incompetence.

I thought the PM looked freaked.

there is a place

There is a place on the border of London and Kent where a public footpath extends over an open field of grass. It goes down a hill past a roman ruin to a little stream.

Where that footpath meets the road there is a wide parking area leading to a driveway.

My friend went there in his orange mini, parked and left to have a little pee along the footpath in the copse of trees at the edge of the field of grass. He was on his way to work and was caught short after too many coffees.

When he returned a police car was parked in front of the mini. Another screeched into the driveway and parked behind. Two large vans arrived in which police in flak jackets were seated carrying machine guns. A station wagon arrived carrying two black dogs.

The space was full so that when the ambulance arrived with the sedan marked 'doctor' containing two women in hazardous chemical suits they had to park on the road. The dog cars moved into the driveway.

The men from the first two cars got flak jackets from the van where there were spares beside a rotating apparatus disk like a radar dish. The dogs were taken to the copse for their own pee and a crap.

A helicopter appeared overhead.

My friend approached the fattest cop who was struggling into his protective gear. He thought a joke would be appropriate.

'Are you here for me?'

'That depends what you have done, sir.'

'That's me parked there.'

'You shouldn't have parked there sir, not in these circumstances.'

'Can you let me out?'

'In a moment sir. This is a 'Catos' operation.'

My friend didn't ask about that but I have since looked up 'Catos'. That is the police operation in which as a protection of civil rights of persons who are suspected of being terrorists or who fit the profile of terrorists (brown young males) are not harassed or detained without just cause. They are instead followed by teams of snipers and other armed police in case they do something. The Times editorial has approved of this.

'Excuse me sir, but your willy is hanging out. Can you secure it please?'

At that moment a middle-aged woman arrived. She had, according to my friend, a leathery tan under a wide brimmed straw hat.

She approached my friend, ignoring the police.

'Is that your automobile?'

'Yes it is.'

'I have told your people before that you cannot park here. This is a private driveway.'

'But there is a public footpath. The drive provides access to it. That is the law. Besides, I'm not parking. I was only stopping for a moment.'

'I will take your licence number and will forward it to my solicitors.'

'Please do.' He secured his willy.

'Don't be rude to me sir. You are trespassing. This is private property. You have no right to be here.'

At that moment the collection of vehicles began to move. They roared off down the lane following the flight path of the helicopter. The woman looked at my friend's plates and then turned and walked up the driveway between stone gates.
My friend went on to work.

bartyrdom

The big news is that a first edition (and nearly spotless copy) of 'Mayfair', the original and most ancient British porn magazine, plus a slightly stained copy of 'Bondage Weekly', also a first edition, very, very rare, were exchanged for one copy of my 'Borderline' in Camberwell on Sunday. A copy of 'The Bush' was traded for a fine painting and a bottle of wine. A Richard Rathwell impersonator was offered a reading at a literary pub called 'The Green'. The organizer of an Italian saint's street festival said my book had made the festival a success. Don't ask me why. Can Gary Snyder say the same? Can Chatterton?

an electric dream

Some Terrorists.

Everyone has to admit to their shame how stimulating terrorism is. It throws into relief feelings and belief like an electric dream. Anger at the terrorists, at the authority, pity, fear, black revenge, even blood, screaming racism and phobias of all sorts; all can be exercised under the veil of the event. You can mourn and fantasize as over a grave. It is the approach and departure of an evil lover.

I am reading Nietzsche with great sentiment. He had terrible stomach problems like me.

He hated idealism and delighted as a naughty boy in pissing on it. A dialectics of evil. Can it be just that? He loved Paris and Italy. He hated German culture which ruined wherever it went. As does ours. He loved negating and finding that the result was life and creativity to his delight. Like Blake. Imagine him at my age and condition not Marx or anyone.
In this terror incident the news reporters, especially those on the scene, could not see through their dreams and associations to what was actually going on. Naked bloody children running from shots to their heads covered in their own blood and body parts of others including those of black widows.

‘The poor children really want water. That would do nicely right now, won’t it? Look, the soldiers have water bottles. See, they all have been stripped so that the terrorists could disguise themselves in their clothes.’ Of a hundred bloody children? ‘There is another explosion and more smoke!’

Many naked bloody children are ignored; some are pushed. The smallest seem unseen altogether and scatter in all directions as the many parents ignore one another, them, the troops. One soldier cries. Another smokes. A big naked girl takes a bottle from a small one. She drinks and then gives it to a tiny boy.

‘The gymnasium is now under control and there have been ten casualties.’

This from a person watching armed parents drag corpses out from under rubble while being fired on both by terrorists and their own troops, men who in a few seconds would beat someone to death who may or may not have been a terrorist. This is just as some fool starts another fire — a parent, a trooper, a terrorist — and sets off another mine, ignites some more gas to kill one hundred more children, sucking the air from their confinements where they have hidden after someone tripped and blew themselves up scattering iron shards at knee level to adults but at stomach and head to kids. Lots of people now run into the flames or the line of fire.

The stories emerge and disappear. People do not see things. People see things not there. There are associations and images from other times and places, other places appearing like ghosts here. The story is written and rewritten. ‘A hole was blown in the wall to allow escape’ — but the wall is intact. There is a man in the window, no, the children have been lined up. But there is nothing there.

There was no plan to storm the building, but there was a plan but it wasn’t to ‘storm’. These are volunteers, citizens. No; they are an uncontrolled mob. A passionate mob. They are ghouls. Or not. They are saviours.

The terrorists are under the strict and inhuman control of a soulless leader. He is well known. Inhuman. And so he now is. But they are not controlled. They scatter. Some to the town. Some to the railway crossing. Why the railway? Escape to romance. From horror to local reality in this exotic place?

Some scatter throughout the building. Some surrender, some blow themselves up. Some defend themselves. Some trip. Bang. Some murder atrociously in the worst way they can imagine, targeting the most innocent. They go on murdering. They are attached to all murder.
But there were none here until the war against them began.
To negate the world. We will never know how many perished but we do. Some were never there. Some never will be. In every summary of figures, the addition is horrible. There are two hundred missing, three hundred. Mostly children. The buildings that were cleared now sound again like the echo of grenades. They smoke. They flame. There is shooting among the spectators. It starts up again. It is over. Now to the hospital and morgue.

‘What have these children seen? Will they ever recover?’ What they have seen is now their normal experience in school terrorism as what you have seen is now yours. And what have you seen?

And in one year or two when a colour or a sound reignites what they have seen, perhaps a body part, you will say they are mad and treat them. Or comfort them. You will wish them to see as you do. Or less. But they won’t. Just as the black widows don’t now, another explodes now, and that is all to all vision beyond the veil.

This not seeing is even as I wish to do. Not see but see with and without tears and free from, but guided by, compassion. I who have been a terrorist. But never was.

It is not a terrible beauty. But it is not this either.

butchers

I agree with vertical, sometimes in spirals.

There are movements to otherwheres too which can be out to islands or through magic spots. The cosmologies are intense organizations, with division of labour and interrelationships like families or tribes.

In some African cosmologies it is a resonance of forms holding reincarnated spirits going backward in time and enlarging deep into horizontal space and outwards to origin. The present and local place incarnates them by instances in life. The otherwheres, and others, light up along the tunnel of spirit frames and travel into you. It isn’t a value resonance upwards like, for example, the Gnostics. This is the Shona, butchers of the Ndebele. No good, no evil. The traffic is however still one of angels. Shona see them. They saw them in Ndebele. But they didn’t in me. But I did in them as the trucks of bodies came over the bridge which marked the border. It is the anniversary of that and of Rwanda.

What I find terrifying is not all belief and spiritual experience but one particular belief, one experience, the one about unique characteristics, unknowable to others. This belief renders everyone and everything else less than a ghost. Whether this is justified by a divine history, an ordained, supernatural experience, a unique culture or as chosen, a fate holocausted and God booked.

Or, God save us, by an ordained ‘way of life’.

With this belief no governance or humanity applies. There is ultimately no discourse or exchange. There is no peace or war. There is only possession of purified space and time. The absolute limitations. Purified of everything human but your own, purified of all ghosts but your own.

This was my experience on the border in Gaza. It was like a Shona looking at me for Angels.

Blind Satanic redemptions.
The basis of a lot of mad behaviour.

This day my particular demographic buys plants for the balcony and eats sweets. We buy cars, houses and computers. Holy Rabbits! Sacred Eggs! We walk around. We take it easy. We get ready to live. Everywhere I go today is a target. But it is lovely. I hope the other kind of Angels, the ones closer to here, all fly by and we can get on with it.

the hilltop monastery

On an island I met a very old man who as a boy knew Trotsky. Trotsky would fish for a specific red-skinned type in the sea near his house. He didn't speak to the boy. Once Trotsky pulled a gun on the boy's doctor as the doctor had reached into his pocket for a notebook. The doctor told the boy about it and the boy was terrified. At eighty something he still was. He was now one of the last Christians and Greeks left on the island. He had once lived in its historic monastery.

In Istanbul later I saw the room in the Church of Divine Wisdom (a cathedral/mosque that remains a wonder of the world. It was inspired originally by an Emperor's vision). Here one day a handful of smelly, sweaty old bishops from all over the tiny known planet decided that the church must have only one line on divinity and a murderous institution to enforce it which was placed squarely between God and Us. It was the beginning of everything going bad for creative activity. The assholes. To decide that there under the icons and angels!

The twenty foot gold and blue and still very intensely feathered angels in the dome had resisted the conversion of the church into a mosque. They
still floated high above the rising non-representative and coded Islamic tilework. Islam had never reached to the dome, the dome that was originally built to hold divine wisdom and placed to catch sea breezes in a city of spirit and riots over images.

Back to Trotsky. You read it all here first. It is nowhere else. Not on the web. Don't tell anyone else either or I will know.

The island on which he was exiled and on which he wrote The History of the Russian Revolution, My Life and others and where he organized the spiderweb of the Fourth International is covered with Cypress trees and wild olives. The ancient monastery on the high hill dominates it. Travel on the island is still by horse and buggy. It is now a place for romance and picnics by Turkish youth. It seems to them a place away from the increasingly stricter mosques and the political turmoil of Istanbul.

Trotsky's house was on the beach shore facing the sea and also Europe. It was behind the hill that blocked the view to Asia. During his stay assassins and lunatics arrived by boat regularly and some worked in his secretariat. The house was firebombed mysteriously. Was it by someone he knew?

The island was traditionally a place of exile for misbehaving empresses, mad mothers of the heirs to the sultanate, megalomaniac generals and for others. Trotsky stayed for years, trying constantly to get away. He wrote to everyone.

But not just that. The monastery on the hilltop was in fact one of the first asylums for the wealthy and possessed. They were chained to the floor in front of the crucifix to remain until they said they believed and were cured or they died. Here God would speak to them. The treatment was provided to all of Byzantine and later to the top people in the Ottoman Sultanate for 1500 years (yes to Muslims). The chains on the floor are still regarded as holy relics and are the object of pilgrimages by members of ancient families with hidden histories including from the British aristocracy.

You may know about Trotsky's daughter. She joined him there on his island in the fury and paranoias of his exile. She languished in the heat and gaslight isolation of the place. She became terrified at his predictions about the rise of fascism and of soviet bonapartism. He was toxically messianic to all around him and gathering disciples. He challenged everything, thought of every expedient.

She felt she was going insane. Her father was cold and disdainful. She was bored and frustrated. The kingdom they had was gone.

She was losing faith. The island doctor wasn't to be trusted for the treatment of her shaking and weeping nervousness. Trotsky hadn't time as he obsessively tried to reverse history, to sort friend from foe staring at his patch of trees and bit of sea on the Marmara.

Did he send her up to the monastery?
He could see it every day from his window.
He had to get back to work. She screamed in the sunshine.

In any event she left the island later. In Germany she gassed herself on the eve of Hitler's ascension to power. The friends of Trotsky say it was for political reasons.

I recommend a visit.

It is a lovely place, magical. The horses freed in the evening from their buggies frolic unrestrained in the trees.