Angel Dust

Curtis

Lemme tell you about the night Fiddy got shot. Shit. Fuckin' night that was. What I remember bout it, that is. It's hazy. Hazy as the smoke from a blunt. A serious blunt. A badman’s blunt. I'll tell you what I can recall. There're some gaps. Wouldn't be a night if there weren't, would it. Course, the memory kinda blanks a bit after we linked up with DMX. Y'all know that if life isn't like a dream after linking with D, y’know, hard to remember, you know he's in that place he sometimes goes, that place where it is only him and the devil, and you know he's hurting like hell, aching in his blood... No such night. He was on form. Big time. Flowing like cosmos, get me? He'd just written a new song. It was about this time he got blazed with these greasy hood rats in England. Naturally, he has some reservations about the U.K. He can't with take anywhere that has estates rather than hoods all that seriously. He finds it funny that there's such a thing as a rapper from Yorkshire. Pussyhole's main influence was Dylan Thomas he said, creasing the fuck up. Still, some things impressed him. Shit, he said, it might be where Prince Charles and Camilla live and all, but those wastemen in the London made Brooklyn crackheads look like Sidney Potier. Then he shook his head. Then he said it again, shit. The song was called For The Boys Hitting The Pipe I Still Got Love For You. He'd read it graffiti’d on a door near a public library in Hackney and it moved him. He dropped us a few licks. Y'all know how emotional he is. Who else could write, say you want to fight me, fight these tears. Seriously. He was ballin' his eyes out as he was spittin'. It was tight. Gave a brother hope. But that was post 9/11. America wasn't ready for that shit. No time for redemption. America was raw as diaper rash, and just as cranky as the baby. Y'all remember how Bush announced the period of grieving was over. Y'all remember how long after that was? Two weeks. Shit. If y'all catch me no longer mourning all I've lost, it'll be me I hopes is dead. If you see me stoppin' droppin' liquor for my fallen boys, my bitches, my homies, my loved ones from back in the day, my dogs back from the block, y'all know, my friends, Warren Beatbox, Sally Alleyway, Welfare Wendy, Gentile Joel, Black Sinatra, Rabid Ruby, White Barry White, Will Spliff, Billy Suicidal, Fanny Howe, Tranny Davis Jnr., Evil Jesus, Elizabeth Rotten, Johnny Cotten, The King of The Juice, Tennessee Tennyson, and Sister Sisyphus, then my black ass seriously ain't worth the fine skin that the good Lord graced it with. Cos' the thing is, as y'all know deep down, when you love a dog, a dog loves back. Alive or not. So if any of y'all see me dry eyed over all my boys that I left behind when I hung my rag up in the kitchen, boys back from the motherland, boys havin' it harder than y'all can imagine, then you'd be right in thinking that all I be is rank meat making a shameful parody of mortality. I'd hold my hands up and admit to that and take a bullet for it. But, no, that ain't me. My grief breathes inside of me. Trust me on that. Damn son. I’m shaking. Enough of that shit, else I'll be the one starts ballin' my eyes out. Let me get back... DMX wrapped up his bit and Fiddy silently nodded in his direction. That from him is like winning the Nobel or some shit. On that he bounced. He bounced higher than Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. Seen that shit? I prefer the books. Momma read them to me when I was little. She used to say, you can have all the money in the world and move a million miles away from it, but you'll never escape the ghetto of the mind if you don't read, Winston. That's how I got my moniker. I was reading at recess and some kid pulls me up on it, so I told him, badman's read. Course, I backed it up by giving him a little lick. Had to. No one fucks with BadMan Winston, Claire Verona said, and it just kinda stuck. She was sort of queen of the school. I wonder what she’s on these days. You should have seen brother, you really should have. I could have married that girl, I really could have. Course, I'd moved on from Winnie the Pooh by the time I hit High School. Still, tho, I get do get sad when I see the cartoons. That's the problem with Disney. It turns everything into a product. Thing is tho, you can't put a price tag on what's real, what's felt. That's why I despair at some of this modern hip hop. The money hip hop that Fiddy, saddens me to say, was a key figure. The rap trap. It's taken the Disney blueprint. Sell, sell, sell. Still, hip hop survive that shit. As Public Enemy will tell you, too black, too strong. It'll break the chains. Y'all know what I mean, a chain of gold is still a chain. My favourite character in Winnie The Pooh is Piglet. You know I got little time for pink skinned Motherfuckas, but Piglet's aight. Most of those cracker bastards though, they just don't relate. It's because deep down they jealous as hell. Seriously. You know what those silly fools really feel towards a brother. Envy. One of the seven sins. They envy us our persecution. The sufferance. The dignity of the flesh. More shit you just can't buy. They're jealous cause the only motherfuckas that fucked them up is themselves. They can't justify their bullshit, so they go beyond. Beyond bullshit. That's why the cops broke so many black bodies last year. Broke them like bread... I despair at times. Fuck the police. Seriously. Fuck this land. I mean it. How do you go from having a brother behind the desk in the oval office to having a klansman? That's why it's the Whitehouse. Damn, show me a brother who can't relate heavy to Eeyore and I'll show you a fella frontin' harder than uncle Tom's nephew. Selling you  more shit than Pharell Williams skipping down the street singing about being happy. Shit so dumb it should be sang in a clown costume by someone with a whited up face. Y'all know what I'm saying. I'm a get too furious if I keep on... DMX bounced and we hit da club. It's probably no big secret that fiddy was pushin' at the time. Naturally a motherfucka piles up a lot of enemies in that game. Well, Fiddy had more enemies than Christ had disciples. Like Christ, I saw Fiddy rise from the dead tho. It was that night. Fiddy got shot that night. Fiddy got shot hard. Shot not once, shot not twice, but shot nine motherfuckin' times. Follow? Here's the thing though, Fiddy didn't give two shits. Fiddy didn't give a solitary shit. Just danced it off. Motherfucka was too high to die. Motherfucka was already in heaven. We'd been doing Angel Dust since the a.m.

The Struggle

The Fall

Broadcast unannounced last Halloween on BBC2 before Live At The Apollo, The Fall was shown with neither introduction nor credits. The measure it took to catch as large amount of the casual viewer as possible, scheduled immediately before a crowd pleasing comedy show, running at around the length of a political broadcast, one wonders if the filmmakers didn’t want the piece to have a moral impact. Almost like a cartoon b-movie during the war years. A warning against something. Satisfyingly, it also works as a little trick or treat in keeping with the hi-jinks of the evening it was shown.

  Anyone who has seen Under the Skin will be aware of the kind of work Jonathon Glazer and Mica Levi can create, so it is just as well it came out of nowhere, out of context, eschewing anticipation and obverting preconceptions, for it’s a great little shock, a poetic piece that gives the audience the jitters by disturbing them into engagement rather than scaring them to the point where they have to close their eyes.

  You can watch by clicking the image below.  

In analysis,

The film starts with the shaking of a tree. The next shot is of a gang surrounding the man who has fallen to the floor from his refuge point amongst the leaves. Everyone wears masks. The aesthetic is a blend of the oriental Noh play tradition mixed with occidental symbols of Melpomene and Thalia (the expressions of tragedy and comedy that have become the symbol for drama in the West). A trial of sorts takes place. Glazer’s visual reference points seem to be a combination of Goya’s The Third of May 1808 and the photographs the soldiers took of themselves torturing the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Thus the notion that the man on trial being an individual who has wronged the society and is facing justice becomes an unlikely conclusion, and it seems much more probable that he is someone trying to evade the oppression of a corrupted authority. Levi uses traditional instruments on her soundtracks while utilising modern sound technology. This takes the film out of any time period past or future. This accentuates the suggestion made that authority has been power’s insidious tool throughout the ages. A timeless tyranny. It is a warning not to see the atrocities of the past as done and dusted. Oppression mutates, it doesn't end, the set design just changes over the ages. The trial concludes with a hanging. The gibbet opens from under the condemned man’s feet and he plummets. However, he doesn’t stop plummeting. The rope around his neck is not connected to a branch. The rope keeps falling after him. The hangmen look down from the top of hole, as people peer down a well, to see the man descend out of sight. Satisfied, they skip away. However, a long way down the man has caught himself by wedging his legs against the walls of the hole. He takes the noose from his neck and the rope falls and falls and falls and we can’t help but think that there is no bottom, the fall is endless. Slowly the man looks down, and then he eventually looks up. Does he cease the struggle and let go and fall, or does he hold on and start the long arduous, quite possibly impossible, climb back up to the top, and out, of the pit and go quite probably back into the hands of his persecutors?

  Glazer has said that he likes the idea of a short film being like trying to compose an articulate sentence. I think The Fall is something like the following two.

   In conclusion, the film forces the viewer to consider the protagonist’s options for themselves, does one either commit one’s self to the difficult climb onward into inevitable uncertainty and little possibility, or resign one’s self to the fall into endless inconclusion? The film advocates that we be brave regardless of the sparsity of hope.

i. the moon is not only beautiful, it is so far away

  I'm thinking about how life changes after something seismic happens. Something that takes us outside of our way of living. Outside of how we thought it was. I’m wondering if it’s a bit like coming back from the moon. I wonder if we don’t come back with a different point of view. Coming back to Earth from the moon is written about very well here lazenby's moon.

  It’s funny to think that already within the space of a fortnight we have a delineating sentiment. Already we’re starting to talk about before the virus in the same way people used to talk about before the war. And now we have a life during the wartime delineation. During the lockdown. And there shall be a hereafter where it will be after the lockdown even if not after the virus. The lockdown is an unimaginable difference to some. An existence outside of hyperreality. It’s been described as surreal, but really is it anymore so than the way were living? Something I’ll be interested in seeing is the immediate fallout of after the lockdown.
  I’ve a funny idea. Not amusing. Just funny. There’s a book that Kurt Vonnegut wrote when he was an old man who’d earned his wrinkles in both thought and biography. It’s called Timequake. I looked up the term timequake in the OED and it lacks a definition. I’ll try..

Timequake.  noun

A timequake is a fracture in the space time continuum where all existence is put in a timewarp where they have to relive the last ten years of lives their as an observer, as in the great timequake of 2003 and when everyone was transported back to 1993 and had to relive the same thwarted flirtations, the same bad hairstyles, the same culinary mistakes, the same corny jokes, and the same deaths of those they held dear over the last ten years again. Hardly a barrel of laughs.

  After the timequake ends, at the precise second where people can continue their lives rather than relive them, everybody just freezes. A kind of apathy petrifies humanity in the same way Ice9 froze the ocean in Vonnegut’s earlier novel Cat’s Cradle and brings an end to man’s existence. A question of free will has inadvertently, inevitably so, has been planted in the everyone’s heads. They are depressed at what they’ve been through. We have to grapple with the idea of determinism. There's a stark ennui revolving around the painful acceptance that the lives we’re living are not necessarily the ones we’d choose. This is true for all (see The Prince and the Pauper for example), but it is most noticeable in the realm of the quotidian, i.e. teachers complaining about marking, nurses complaining about being overworked, waitresses complaining about sleazeballs, prostitutes complaining about cops, cops complaining about being called pigs, students complaining about homework etc &c. Vonnegut illustrates this in the scene where the novel’s hero, Kilgore Trout, the only person not affected by this apathy, and thus not frozen to the spot, looks at the motionless city and tries to wake up the citizens. He runs around and around, wake up, you’ve got free will! he shouts declaringly at the human statues. He spends a long time doing this with no results. Finally he runs into the foyer of a hotel and shouts at the single figure in it wake up, you’ve got free will! Slowly the person in the distance starts to move. They gradually pick up motion. Back and forth they start to move. Free will says the stranger. Why, free will’s a crock of shit says the black janitor as he gets back to mopping the floor. After this Trout amends his message. To revive the people he begins to say You were sick, but now you’re well, and there’s work to do. 
  Of course, the implication isn’t that the sickness wasn’t necessarily the timequake. 
  I can’t fully remember what follows. However, I do remember that it contains a very tender scene afterwards. Kilgore Trout’s swansong. Before he dies there is a ceremony organised to send Vonnegut’s much loved character off. Naturally Kurt is there himself. It would be rude if he weren’t. There’s a lot of love going round. Trout himself is at his most charming. At one point he puts out the idea that Stonehenge was built in a time when the Earth’s gravitational pull was much less and that the ancients could throw around these giant rocks like pillows. I suppose that’s what happens afterwards is that people reconnect. Or, simply, they connect. They've good reason to. they've good reason to do it meaningfully. They develop a human feeling. One which may have been not have been all that there beforehand. Or one that had been lost. 

part of an ongoing series..

GNAWING

Marx and the Mouse

Karl Marx used to write at night. It’s well known. There’s a reason why so many authors write in the nocturnal hours. It’s because there aren’t enough hours in the day. However, if you close the door, as they say, the night could last forever. He’d sit there at his desk, quill in hand, page in front of him, cigar in the ashtray, bottle of port within reach, and do battle with his foe, that succubus feeding off the degradation and misery of man, the ghoul of capitalism, for hours on end upon end. Sometimes there would be a plate of food next to him lovingly prepared by Jenny depending on he behaved that week and the household finances. Often there wouldn’t be.
  O! Prometheus am I, he would cry, this work, this albatross, these buzzards, this never ending peck at my gut, how I am afflicted with it. All his life his the ultramundane shadow of his father’s death to liver cancer shaded Marx’s life. All for what! He’d resume, For trying to enlighten the enslaved! For suggesting there was something other than the dark! For telling Sisyphus to toss aside his accursed boulder! He would despair. I must be the loneliest genius in the world, he would lament. And all geniuses are lonely. He imagined himself Lear, the fool offering him a nuncle to go in place of the crown of his intellect. Tears would fill his eyes. Yes, the loneliest genius in the world. 
  But then, one night; HARK! A sound. Something other than the noise of the scratching of a nib on paper pervaded the desolate chamber. Who could this be, he thought, and, before realising the words forming on his mouth, called out, Papa? Instantly he realised his error and blushed. What a blush. The blush of a great man. If men could die from blushing surely he should have perished. However, more pressing thoughts entered his mind. Perhaps it was an old adversary, some bourgeois intellectual, an agent of mediocrity, whom he’d publicly humiliated, come to taint the work. He sat guarded. No, he thought. The creature, either daemon or mortal, did not sound malevolent. Quite the contrary. It sounded scared. Carefully he traced the sound to its source. Oh look. There it was. A little mouse had found its way into his study. Company. His loneliness lifted. Now how to coax his new comrade- nay, his new friend- to his side. Ah! he exclaimed, once again Lear, this time locked up in jail, abandoned, but now not alone, and he quoted the play aloud, a little melted cheese should do’t. And he put down his plate of scraps beside his chair. The mouse; all eyes, ears, trepidation and fur; approached and nibbled. However, he scurried away before they had chance to get properly acquainted.
  Marx, feigning an air of whimsy, told Engels about this the next day.
  Why Marx, chuckled Engels, it’s not cheese that mice love, it’s chocolate.
  Quite the little decadents, scowled Marx. Yes, quite the little decadents!
  As he made this proclamation Marx wondered where he could pick up a bar of dairy milk on the way home. But how shall I ever be able to attain it, he wondered. Why! By hook or by crook! However else? 

Pentagrams In Snow- Monday 11th

Dear Friends,

Next Monday is the first Pentagrams In The Snow of they year. To mark the occasion there will be a set from Bohman Brothers amidst our cast or regulars and others.

As usual, it is at The Lamb on Holloway Road, from 7.30p.m.

Hopefully see a few of you there.

With warmth,

Sam

December Pentagrams: the light will bend

I hear a tear in the radio static
and see it and melt electric 
into the fibers of your blue, blue dress

starlight peppering the water
in the kitchen sink



------

Friends,
It's the second Monday of the month and with it come Pentagrams In Snow, where we shall tread the boards softly perchance to dream a little dream and maybe drink a little drink or two..

Monday, 9th of December
7.30 onward
The Lamb on Holloway Rd

Pentagrams 14: a dance to the end of the shore

Friends,

Pentagrams 14. I'll be reading Poppy & The Rain. I don't know exactly the others will be reading.There might be a couple more portraits from The Sorrow & The Pity Made Flesh (/this is what you get when you mess with love). Come down.


Monday,  8th of October
7.30 p.m. 
The Lamb on Holloway Road

Pentagrams 12: Lemonade

Dear friends,

It's Pentgrams' brithday. At least I think its it's birthday, but it might be the eleventh one. I could look it up in a moment, but I find online archiving unnerving. It's too quick for one thing. It's holographic system of documentation is too at odds with my conception of reality. It values speed over time. Well, I like time, it's one of the things I'm made of (increasingly so (as it goes by)). I distrust speed: the amount of dumb and regrettable things I've done through not taking a little time, lemme tell ya.. No, friends, let's just agree on treating it as its birthday. For it we shall be having celebratory readings which shall be characteristic. To get in to the spirit of things I shall be exhibiting a few works from The Sorrow & The Pity Manifest In Flesh: Portraits by Samuel Kastin.

Oh, and make no qualms about it, there will be cakes & ale..

SK

Monday the 10th of September 
7.30 p.m. 
The Lamb on Holloway Road

Pentagrams 11: Portraits

An event: Monday 13th, 7.30p.m., The Lamb on Holloway Rd 

'I'm no art critic, but I know what I hate. This I don't hate.'
Monty Burns to Marge Simpson regarding her portrait of him

Dear Friends,
Pentagrams In Snow 11 shall be taking place on Monday the 13th. For it we have created a linguistic gallery of portraits with words by writers of my choosing. It should make for a worthwhile evening. For my part I have been working on a couple of pieces that should hopefully have a fragile beauty that some may find difficult, but that anyone who has a heart will understand. We'll see..

And just as there are no words for the surface, that is,
No words to say what it really is, that is not
Superficial but a visible core, then there is
No way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.
You will stay on, restive, serene in
Your gesture which is neither embrace nor warning
But which holds something of both in pure
Affirmation that doesn't affirm anything.
(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=32944)


https://bullgoosesamuel.blogspot.com/2014/03/under-skin.html

 The Ripples In The Water When It Rains Look A Lot Like The Rings In A Tree Stump

When a man is tired of Venice, he is tired of death

-Sian Tamsk

I allowed myself to take one photo in Venice. The city is horrendously over photographed and it cheapens it. I feel sorry for it in the same way I feel sorry for Marilyn Monroe.

    Jazz In Venice, 2018

You can see why it works so well as a backdrop to Don’t Look Now. When one is lost it compels his sense of it. It could never be accused of a place where one goes to, as the mind and body lot like to say, to find one’s center; there isn’t one. Even when you think you have got to grips with the town, come to a familiar place, you turn the corner and find yourself walking through an alley you’ve never seen before, that you’re sure has just appeared manifestly from some neverland, but has of course been there the whole time. Much like how one memory leads to another which leads to another, and so forth, until you’re so far removed from the original memory that you can’t for the life of you remember what it was. You find yourself in an endpoint you have no conception of, and you’ve only yourself to blame, and even he isn’t all that culpable. The map of Venice does not look dissimilar from a diagram of a brain. You’d have to be incredibly literal-minded to be able to make any sense out of the map. To walk its streets, as has been remarked before, feels like a dream.

  As with anything of the mind, you begin to question whether it is real. There you are amidst all these buildings, and all this history, and it’s difficult to fathom how any of it came to be. Surely it can’t be serious. Surely it cannot be. If it is conceivable, it is my shortcoming that I cannot get much further than it might be.

  All the while the sea flows indifferently by through the canals.

  Something about the city is conducive to sickness. To mourning too, though those things are hardly mutually exclusive. That is why it is such a good place to convalesce. There’s something about the sound of it in the afterhours. Water takes on a different persona in the nighttime. Then there’s the mist. It nearly hides everything. However, it stops short of that and allows you to see through it. Rather than hide it, it coats it in a mystery. That thing that connects us all as much open space connects the universe. That connects as much as a looking glass when we look at it the same time. It contains reflections, Brodsky writes of the water, among them my own. All mirrors look the same, though not to different eyes.

  You cannot walk over one of the many bridges without contemplating jumping in and pay a schoolboy homage to Ophelia. A friend of mine tells me that on his stay here he should have like to have held a gun to his skull and relieved it of its tormented contents. Just like Hemingway. There’s probably not a suicide that hasn’t been done. What could be more derivative than death?

Inevitably you find me in a bar. The girl next to me has ordered another Spritz. Campari, I’m pleased to say. I order another beer. I’m going to let the day be whatever it becomes. Like water … (if only this town was a little bit cheaper).

Notes

·         Though the walk ways are filled with little doggies, I have yet to see one cat. Have they all been put in a sack and thrown into the canal in an act of mass felicide? Like Joyce’s Copenhagen, are there no cats of Venice? Or, are they simply confined to the apartment? Either way, the seagulls flood the square cawing out an obscene parody of a cat wailing. They hurl sneering contempt on the whiskered adversaries with relish. Presumably kitty sits somewhere plotting a revenge more exacting than Shylock’s. Like him they may come to find their spoils come to the privy coffer of the state. It always does around here.

·         More significant than the absence of cats is the absence of cars. This is an obvious point to make but you don’t realise how profound it is until you are once again surrounded by all those fucking wheels. (As I write this a gondola sails past with a long haired gondolier teaching his young buttercup blonde daughter how to use the paddle, (are there any female gondoliers?))

BC

Mary

You should have seen her

sitting there eating plums with the redheaded prostitute

whom she met whilst visiting her son as he was dying

I remember her as a girl

falling pregnant the year after her bat mitzvah

Can you get pregnant through masturbation? she asked

Full to the brim with holy spirit

Wearing a blue summer dress 

in the middle of spring

blood matting it to her body

Smiling the all knowing smile of a virgin

as if she knew something that we all forget

lost in the ways we come to define ourselves

Leaving the village with her teenage husband

led by confused/ confusing stars

scared sacred

Roughly Relating to Plath's Daddy

Through

i

How hard it can be to look at one’s past. To turn to salt at that cold heat that comes from the blue flickerings of charred embers. To be taken back to it time after time, as if on a train, a train back and back and back, taking you to the cold destination where you are immolated on your history. To a gulag. To a lager. That holocaust of the what has been. Not even the survivors survive it. Tell any survivor they survived and they’ll rightly tell you, you must be joking, just look at my scars.

ii

There’s something about the instantaneous that robs us of our experience.  To experience something we have to live it a while. This is why our current culture of the immediate is so degenerative. I remember being on train home to London when a terrorist attack occurred in Paris. My present company kept checking their phone for updates on the story. What insight were they trying to glean from this? They were approaching it as a spectacle. They were partaking in it as a consumer. As a pig hungry for the troth to be refilled with swill. The media knows this and behaves accordingly. It is its bread and butter. It knows people engage with it in a consumptive manner. Therefore, it is a product. As any product it needs to have a selling point. It’s selling point is speed. This is the thing, money famously cannot buy time, however you canput a price upon expedience. Expedience is not something we do to make the most our time, it is what we do when we do not have enough of it. Money aims not to expand time, but to shorten it. This is why our culture has become one of convenience. It is a spiritual suicide. After all, what could be more convenient than death? To make an obvious point, the reason bullets kill people is because they move too fast. Immediacy kills our response. What we are left with in its place is a reaction. This does us no favours in the long run. What does do us favours in the long run is the long run. For the past to be of any use to us we have to nurture it. You have to live it, you cannot buy, nor pay for it to go away. At the time of its conception, the event is too immature to give us an insight. At the time of the event it is just that, an event. We have not given ourselves time enough to truly feel it. The difference between an instant reaction and a considered response is around about the same as the difference between crying and weeping. If you find that statement rather opaque I suggest that you take the time to think about what it means to you. Too give a small clue, we weep alone. Speaking from my perspective as a poet, it is the difference between the inspiration and the poem. The inspiration is embryonic, it needs time to form. If a baby were to be birthed at the moment the sperm fertilised the egg it would surely be too feeble to survive. We have to hold it in our womb for a considerable amount of time come into fruition. Once it is out of the womb we have to look after it. To look after it best we have to let it be its own thing.

iii

   The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

  Are not very pure or true

I’m sitting drinking a black coffee in the Volkstheatre café on Neustiftgasse. I’ve been reading Sylvia Plath’s Daddy. It holds a lot in its three pages. One of the things it has a lot of is disdain. The disdain is levelled at the façade of the mighty, that subterfuge that has ossified and become a ridiculous reality parodying the pure and the true. It is essentially a spit in the face of the affected face that death pulls when it gets us to act as its amanuensis. Looking out the window I can almost see the Heldenplatz. I wonder..

What could be more preposterous than a Luftwaffe?

More contrived than a master race?

More insulting to nature than a caparisoned horse?

More insincere than a group of people marching together for a common cause?

More propagandist than a memorial?

More totalitarian than an enforced silence?

…

At what point does a past become a history?

When does the hand become a clenched fist?

When does reverence for the dead become the self gratification of necrophilia?

When a drama becomes unbelievable the dramatist often counters this by putting spectacular elements into their production. He fills the stage with sound and fury. Problematically, the phonier it is the more the public will deceive themselves into believing it. They have a genius for self deception. They hear the bluster and the blarney and they ordain it to be the truth. To a certain extent they are right, it is genuine hokum. 24 Carat. However, the rest of it is about a sincere of a clown’s offering of a cream pie. Sadly, the mob in its need for commonality and a shared belief are highly susceptible to it. Unfortunately, what they end up believing in is that that shouts loudest. Subsequently a frenzy is stirred up that robs us of our humanity. What this frenzy gets fat upon is an absence. An absence of being questioned, of being called into account. The façade grows even stronger. It eradicates the words such as shame, remorse, sympathy and their synonyms. It does so unapologetically. Impenetrability ensues. It seduces us by telling us we too can become impenetrable. It tantalises us with whispers of immortality. Man, in his childish way, tries to overcome his fear of death by causing it. The murderer becomes fool enough to believe that he is the master of the grim reaper. That he is the one summoning it to the end of his bayonet. The grim reaper goes along with this. Why would it not? It has tricked man into becoming its servant. It has tricked into carrying out its will. He has blindly walked into its servitude and he shall carry the stench of its chores to his grave.

  Not God but a swastika

  So black no sky could squeak through

iv

  (From Words)

  Axes

  After those strokes the wood rings,

  And the echoes

What comes first, the history or the putting of it into words? Plath describes the language of her childhood as..

  An engine, an engine

  Chuffing me off  like a Jew.

  A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

I can’t help wonder whether it the memory exists without the ability to express it. We have all, more or less, with the idea that memory existed as a construction. That Kaspar Hauser had no mode to express his past left him carte blanc, for example. Now, lets wonder whether the past is made up mainly of memory. It has to be a large part of it. Is memory not made up of words? Is there a chasm between what is expressed and what if felt? For instance, there must be words in other languages to mine that express things that I have no term or phrase to express. Does this detach me from that thing I feel? Am I less able to feel it than the culture that has a word for it? It has been observed that people from different cultures have different patterns of behaviour. Normally this is explained in an historical context, or a geographical one (weather, etc.). Perhaps we could concede that there are linguistic factors also. As a poet one has to try and bridge the chasm between emotion and language (or else we are left with scraps, the void signifier of sentimentality). It would be a cliché to say that Plath lived her poetry. It may also miss the point. She died it. She died gassing herself to death..

  I may well be a Jew. 

The book has a feel of deathbed poems to it. The suicide she had carried within her since being a little girl had reached its termination point. It would have been rather tasteless of the disease to carry on, stringing its vessel along with the parsimony of its reprieves. The dying do not have much by way of what is ahead, just that eternity as expansive and vague as the ocean. What they have in abundance is what has been. Past. This is what Ariel is made of. A very rich song it makes out of it. I’ll tell you why. It’s because it never averts its gaze..

  Stupid pupil. It takes everything in.

Sticky business. It is an echo that does not bounce away.  The term nostalgia has its etymological rooting (roots are prominent throughout Ariel) in the Greek for old wound.  Think of that pick tissue puss that emanates from a scab once it has been picked. It emanates without leaving. One thinks of to stick to one’s fingers as a child. How sweet it was. How unpleasant also. The more you would lick it, the worse it would get. It wasn’t so easy to sever one’s self from it.. Like a marriage. We are wed to our past. For better or for worse..

  And I said I do, I do, I do.

There seems to be a suggestion inherent to the word ordering of the phrase, for better or for worse. The implication of the syntax is that it inevitably ends for worse. Some may find this pessimistic. It isn’t necessarily so. You see, it does not negate the first part, when it is for better, it nearly  is. There can be moments that come out in nighttime far more luminous than the ones that get lost in the fabric of daytime. There is the clarity of after hours. Those moments of calm that come after all has been said and done.

  And then it ends and the peacefulness is so big that it dazes you.

The paradox of one’s past is though it keeps expanding, growing ever older, when we look back at it it puts us in a childlike state. We look back to when we were little. We sit there at the table opposite to the authoritarian who scared us so.  We have inadvertently disobeyed his role. We did that in the act he performed by which we were conceived. Our birth is proof he is human, furthermore, a body, and he hates us for it. He asks us to explain ourselves. In his presence we do not know who we are. All we are when he is around him is him. The very notion that we may be something other confuses us and the words stick in our throat. We hear the start of an assertion, but we, stammeringly, cannot get passed the I..

  Ich, Ich, Ich.

Frightened mice. Eek, eek, eek. The shadows of the past stand in front of us as imposing as a statue.

 

  Marble heavy.

However, then comes the realisation of one’s vantage point. The one of being at the other side of time passed, the hereafter. We find the statue to be that of Ozymandious. That mighty man. When we come to look him in the eye we find that he is no more. He has blown away in the wind of the passing seasons. All that is left of him are his feet of clay.

  You do not do, you do not do

  Anymore, black shoe

V

Breath

Gas fills the room

Coating it in its charity

Like silence

Untouchable

Yet omnipresent

The gentle caress of God

Tiredness desolidifies like coal burning into ash

I close my eyes

And sleep

And ever

Oh, you mighty men

You have now idea

How calm a woman can be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM

The Heart of Saturday Night/ The Heart of a Dog

I was walking around Leeds over the weekend watching everybody tricking themselves into believing that they were having a good time. The lack of imagination was, as you can imagine, unimaginable.

At the risk of getting into keynote speech territory here I wish to share my idea of what the good life is with you. A keynote speech is the speech given to students graduating from their degree. The kind that is formed of platitudes orchestrated together to try and make some kind of life lesson. It is usually given by someone with a significant reputation, who has reached a certain level of success within their field. I, having only the five pounds in my pocket and beer in front of me to show for a lifetime's work, am not qualified to give one. However, I distrust qualifications. Humour me a while. I'm going to give you some advice. (I talk to you as that anonymous you. The you that could be anyone or no one depending on the your predilection. I write to you as I write to anyone I do not know. Idealistically. As if you are a child of light and a dark horse growing up in a mad world taking their point to point navigation from confused stars.)
  The advice is this, when you next wake up in the morning with all those unremitting engagements inevitably playing on your mind over and over as if it were a needle skipping back on a faulty groove, take a moment out and then afterward make this following commitment to yourself, I'm going to give the day to me as a gift. Think of the following lines from a poem..

I'm letting the day be what it is:
a place for a large number of things
to gather and interact-
not even a place but an occasion,
a reality for real things

Then do just that. Be open to the possibilities. Possibly you could draw a bath and watch the steam rise before you dip your head under the water to listen to your hair in the altered acoustics. There are zen masters you can learn from. For example, Huckleberry Finn. He spent a whole book floating down the Mississippi with an escaped slave called Jim. Two drifters off to see the world. It's true, there's such a lot of world to see. Be open to the beauty in it. Take it to heart. This is economical for it saves the cost of going to heaven. Remember, there's a world that's all about us, there's a world within. Find a place where you can just sit and watch the world go by. I could sit in The Cock Tavern on Mare St or the Volkstheatre Café on the Neustiftgasse for a thousand years and still come out as young as a kitten. An observation that I've made is that one is only as kind to one's self as the company he keeps. Surround yourself with good people. they shall teach you how to love. Be open to them. let Susan take you down to her place by the river. Do not become overly reliant on the company of others. Do not partake in society. Do not implement societal expectations on others. Do not allow them to implement them on you. The happiest dog is not the chitsu, the daschund, or the spaniel; it is the dog that is allowed to be a dog; an indo-to-exothermic blob of life made of dream and love, all encased within a finite shell. Once again I advocate learning a thing or two from Huckleberry Finn. Learn from Ferris Bueller. Life moves pretty fast. You can't stop that. Stop holding on so tight. When you form a fist it means nothing else can grace your palm. Hold onto the moment as if holding onto a bird; holding without holding. Let go of the thought, I wish I'd brought a camera. Let Venice sink. Let the crazy and beautiful idea be what it is, a crazy and beautiful idea that for a while almost looked as if it was going to make it. We often preserve the past at the detriment of the future. Culture thrives everywhere folks. Stop bringing out zombie Shakespeare all the time just because he has been certified art. Try something new goddamit. Love literature. You will love people in their purest form, their ideas. What could be nicer than a day in bed with Oscar Wilde or Anne Michaels? Friends, I'm going to wrap this up. If you want a sermon from a bum in  his early 30s you can read the beatitudes you can read the new testament. To bring this to a close, if you give the day to that little bit of you you call me, you will find out who me, in his or her myriad of forms, is. You will come to find out it is a very different thing to that miserly creature, the self. If you find that this is worthwhile, what I would further suggest is that the next week when you wake up in the morning with all those unremitting engagements inevitably playing on your mind over and over, take a moment out and make another commitment to yourself, I'm going to give this life to me. Now that's my idea of a good time.

S.K.

This also,
https://www.facebook.com/events/2068006526822131/permalink/2068006546822129/?notif_t=event_mall_comment&notif_id=1519316013194533

A couple of things

Firstly, an event;

And Lo!

Secondly, a book;

a sotto voce shuffle of words



Sam

GhostSongs

I like these songs..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMTKb-pgxGI


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10d1G7BLWwg


I suppose what I like about them is that they kind of leave a legacy. Epistlets from the dead. I like the Arthur Russell one because it has such a depth. At first you think it's just a standard break up song but then you think about it a bit, you remember he recorded it when he was dying of Aids and furthermore it was only to be discovered posthumously and you realise he's not breaking up with you, he's- by the time you hear it- already been taken away in the hands of another lover.. death. Not many songs can devastate you so delicately. It reminds me of a couplet in Jonanna Newsom's You And Me, Bess that goes, By the time you realised I was dying/ Must have been too late, I believe you were not lying. How do you follow such a line? You L' La Lala/ L' La LaLa..

The Little Prince & The Lamb

The Little Prince & The Lamb

It was not long into spring when the little red mark appeared upon the left leg of the little prince’s white cotton leggings. What was ominous about the mark was that it formed a meticulous little circle, unmistakably symmetrical. The gravity of what the mark signified was realised when, in its place, there appeared a purple mark identical in shape and size with an intensity of colour which could not be dulled by water either from well or river, impervious to the scrubs of maidens both fair and seasoned. The matter was grave but not incurable, such a malady had been cured in the past.

  The prince’s grandfather had displayed such a mark when he was a boy and had gone on to lead a long tempestuous bloodstained reign, dying in his old age, in his sleep, dreaming of battle and glory. To cure the boy the court’s surgeon organised a grand ceremony to be called The Ceremony of Innocent Blood in which distinguished guests from all four corners of the kingdom, dressed in the finest cloths of the land, gathered in the palace’s grandest hall to witness the boy play with the first lamb of spring before the animal was slain and the boy’s mark, then blue almost tipping over into black, was bathed in the blood which had once flowed through the young animal’s veins. It was observed that the boy’s mark disappeared instantaneously. Thus it was ordained that the same ceremony was to be held to cure the prince.

  The prince’s Ceremony of Innocent Blood was organised as swiftly as possible in order to limit any progress his condition may have been making. There were a few problems which arose but the counsel to the crown resolved these matters over a night’s discussion to prevent any hiatus in the proceedings. On the day itself distinguished guests from all four corners of the kingdom filled the hall, wearing garments of sapphire, ruby and emerald, clad in cloths of orange and plum. The hall itself was fitted with a woollen carpet dyed magenta to foreshadow the events of the ceremony, emanating what looked like red smoke in the afternoon’s sunlight beaming through the high windows. The king sat upon a throne upholstered in silk shimmering the colours of a lake in the sunlight wearing rich brown robes. The queen sat next to him on an identical but smaller throne wearing a dress which looked as though it had been woven out of gold. The prince was placed in the middle of the grand hall’s large floor wearing a white night dress.

  For a long time the prince sat there under the strange silent stare of distinguished guests from all four corners of the kingdom, feeling abandoned to it. Silence filled the air deafeningly, flooding into the prince’s ears as though it were water. He sat unable to move, shrinking into the silence. The silent stare’s spell was finally broken by a small bleat echoing off of each of the hall’s four walls as the lamb was led into the hall. It echoed last within the lad’s heart. Unlike, as with, the previous Ceremony of Innocent Blood, the lamb was black rather than white but because it was the first lamb of the spring the counsel to the crown had decided it were the one to be slain. On seeing the prince the lamb rubbed its head against the lad’s face imbuing his cheek with a trace of redness which had been wholly absent since the mark appeared on his leg. Some of its black hair touched the lad’s brown curls.

  “Now for the slitting of the animal’s throat” announced the court surgeon.

  “So be it” decreed the king as two court hands grabbed the lamb causing it to shriek out a startled, terrified small bleat, again echoing off of each of the hall’s four walls. Again, echoing last in the lad’s heart. 

  “Wait!” cried the prince.

  The hall plunged into silence once more.

  “The mark has gone, I felt it leave just now” he said to his father.

  “Is this true my lad?”

  “It is” he said, showing his father a leg unblemished by any mark.

  “So it is,” exclaimed the king, adding, “yet, let us not be too hasty my lad. Let us finish the ceremony to ensure thy treatment is complete.”

  “No father,” pleaded the prince, saying without a lie, “for if you kill this lamb I shall die. In my heart, I know, I shall die.”

  “So be it,” decreed the king, “as long as my lad, the little prince, lives, so too shall this lamb.”

  So it was that the lamb was allowed to live and the events of that day came to be known as the Ceremony of Unspilt Blood. Only the prince’s sister, the princess, dressed in a dress the colour of a rain, noticed that her brother had shown their father his right leg.

  In the days that followed the Ceremony of Unspilt Blood the prince would go to visit the lamb each afternoon. He would sit and watch it frolic with the same kind of energy that he himself used to exhume before the mark appeared on his leg. This was how he came to behold the joys of spring that year. On the fifth day of making his afternoon visits the prince hugged the lamb by his neck.

  “You look like coal but feel like a cloud” he said before leaving for his chambers.

  The princess had been looking in on her brother each evening ever since seeing him show their father his right leg and for the first four nights she had left feeling quite content, though never fully so, at seeing the lad in his sleep and dreams. However, on the fifth night her brother stirred heavily in his sleep and dreams as though he were drowning beneath the heavy burgundy bedsheets he lay under. With a foreboding dread she entered the bedchamber. Examining her brother’s left leg, now clad in black cotton leggings at his request, she saw a black mark forming where the red mark had appeared, almost shining in its deep blackness, dulling, in comparison, the blackness of the black cotton leggings. No sooner had she seen this black mark begin to form did the prince jolt up, his eyes open, though he were still asleep with a brow overflowing with sweat and mouth agape, staring with abject terror at something she could sense but not see right before him.

  “O brother,” cried the princess, “what is the matter?”

  But the prince did not answer. In despair the princess clasped her arms around her brother. Feeling his sister’s head against his cheek and her black hair touch his brown curls the prince’s consciousness returned to the room and he returned her embrace. His eyes cried warm tears onto her shoulder, shading the crushed velvet of her dress from pink to red where they fell.

  “O sister,” he said patting her black hair, the look of terror dissolving from his eyes as his body relaxed except for a frantically shaking left leg, “such dreams I have been having. I was being swallowed by a black ghost. Such pain my leg is in, too much to bear.”

  “Let me get father” said the princess.

  “No,” cried the prince, “I do not wish it so. He understands me not as a boy but as a prince. No sister, I know my fate. It is too much to bear and too late. One death would feel as though a release as though a passing of a cloud, whereas to die on any other's terms feel as though doom. Not that this may make any difference after the fact but for now one outcome I wish for more than anything whilst the other scares me stiff.”

  Her heart abashed as though it had been struck, the princess touched her brother’s cheek. For a touch between two people who share a history which has become inexclusive to either one of them, entwined, can express the feeling of a moment in a way that no words can and she did not know what to say.

  “Lay your head down,” she said, “and allow me to place a cloud upon your face” as she softly pressed her brother's silk pillow onto his face.

  Lifting the pillow from her brother’s face the princess regarded his calm, relieved expression for a while before checking his left leg. The mark had vanished entirely, leaving no trace on either the black cotton leggings or his skin. Feeling herself caught in between a state of loss and contentment the princess sat at the foot of her brother’s bed and cried awhile, tears forming little red marks all down her dress.

  To mark the occasion of his son's death the king ordered for the black lamb of The Ceremony of Unspilt Blood to be publicly slaughtered in the palace's grandest hall where the distinguished guests from all four corners of the kingdom, wearing the finest garments of the land, finally got to see the blood which once ran through the young creature's veins.  

Amanuensis

I remember the Scots composer
-a lapsed Calvinist-
who once told me that
'there is a deep and dazzling darkness to God'
to which I asked him
'whadadahelladya mean?'
to which he played me a tune
Amanuensis
as the raindrops adorned soft the pane
like liquid earrings the colour moon