A Final Note by Paulina Wilson

Well, he doesn’t care much for consistency with names, so I don’t see why I should. You know what they say about signifiers anyway. So, here, whoever I am, I am, all bright eyed & perky, ready to critique the whole bloody mess now so fortunately behind us.

And on what basis, I hear my academic friends ask. On the business of having been dragged through the whole briar patch, start to finish & beyond, that’s how. I’m no follower of any head cults – the fact this name was used to stand for that of a ripped apart toy dog indicates the problem, not a viewpoint – which was a difficult one on that occasion, I can tell you.

Let’s start negative, carrying on from Little Friend Sarah. The whole thing’s relationship to any other people than Our Poet, let alone to the many female people it mentions, is odd – there are acts of calling out to specific individuals, in some world outside the poem (hi there!), as family, friends, poets (hmm? maybe). Do you believe this? I hear nothing. These shouts are silent. These people don’t actually inhabit this poem as it lays its pretensions out. An interesting try, and we can’t blame the poem so much as its instigator. Personal not textual weakness here.

Within the poem, names occur & often recur (like mine and yours, Sarah). Do we have any sense of our existence? Are we used in a way which enables us to inhabit as human beings this space we’ve been put into? I haven’t experienced this. We can have another of your “cunning avant-garde tricks” again here – all demonstrably textual illusion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Water offa . . . I tinks we knows dis one, squire. Indistinguishable though from wasted opportunities to deal with any higher order complexities than playground games with levels of meaning. There’s lots of stuff, yes, about people – but no people, just names there. No wonder the nearest approach to them is as vagrants, or unlikely revenants, scrambling up a Kentish beach, illegal immigrants in the populist fantasy.

So the whole political line trails off here also. A politics not based on actual living people is just what, to give him his credit, Our Poet warns us against. But if he can’t manage it either, you’d have to be a profound Adorno adorer to find this enterprise worth pursuing any further. He’s not writing an ideological critique of society & culture & poetry, he’s writing a poem (while occasionally indeed pissing worthwhilely on the pretensions of such critiques).

Utopia occurs in pieces, many of them so damaged as to be valueless (a C.A G.T. again). There’s cooking, a far more popular & useful art than poetry. There’s the consequent communal eating. There’s happy hippy child rearing. There are moments of communal action. There’s hanging around in various urban spaces. There are isolated but frequent pretty visual images (some entoptic). There’s a warm sticky cosy messiness of language, which, OK, at times is worthy of note. (Did you really not think that, Mr Veerses?)

Am I (were they?) (were you?) expecting too much from all this? If we think of what a poem can do, does this do it? Well, probably not much. It’s too long, with an excess of glutinous connective tissue produced by the ritual operations Our Poet compelled himself to engage in – a good way of cutting off personal responsibility. “You can’t criticise this, it really is a non human delusion set”: C.A-G.T.#3. It could have been either much more disturbing, a genuinely holothurian experience, or even more boring (also a genuine holothurian experience). I expect, in fact I know, he fiddled his rules too much. But the gamble which might have justified all this non neurotypical glossogenic apparatus failed to come off. The very existence of this piece of writing here demonstrates such, don’t you think?

Think of this then as the stake thrust into the defeated revenant’s heart to still & extinguish it for ever. Or the trepanger’s trident thrust into the bêche-de-mer & uplifting it into a dry & empty eternity. He, Our Poet, had thought (characterologically privileged information here) of a third sequence. Thank god (or whoever, whatever, nameless etc) that’s just not possible now. The returned dead of Old Albion shall be stuck here still, in Our Little Ingerlund (Prime Minister & Lord Protector: Msieur Farage, 1st Marquess of Thanet). The poem cannot prevent that one bit.

Can any poem prevent a future? This tries at times. As Paulina, I feel bound to advise you to take the notion of the recurrence throughout all history of the emergence of high status elites as a larger scale cycle than the class conflict process – dependent on wishful idealist thinking on Charlie Marx’s part. Where we end up is always determined by the application of coercive power, not any other factor. That’s pretty low level & obvious stuff.

So it may not lead now to “our completed expansion.” Whatever might, it’s probably not going to be a poem. It might be some of the emotional ideations invoked in the poem & mediated through its language – though such feelings can lead, & have led more often, to nightmare destruction rather than communitarian paradise. As Our Poet likes to point out, when state structures fail (like beginning now), power usually devolves to those best suited to grasp it – those most willing and able to steal & kill. Might be wiser to try & avoid that stage. And think too, my little friends, of what the 2011 Riots which lie behind much of these poems, & much maybe of your politics, actually achieved: a few deaths, a lot of broken glass, a temporary redistribution of trainers &c. Maybe some urban regeneration projects. And at the end free passes for police murder yet again.

But things are not unavoidable any more than avoidable. Migration, vagrancy, community coming into existence in resistance – OK, these too will exist & survive. Maybe we can applaud how this poem hymns them. That might be worthwhile. And some of the recipes are good. I like the mackerel & cabbage, and would make the Yuletide Pud (but not at bloody Xmas please!). Perhaps, as well, you may get some sense of a writing trying constantly to reinvent itself – following itself but open to (yeah of course, through mere symbolic sampling of) what is around it as language flux, image & ideation & as these drive the process on. C.A-G.T.#4. Some success, at times. Its instability & failure thus laudable. C.A-G.T.#5. Yeah, maybe too easy as much as too difficult. Mere tricks – like all the hard bought canting wisdom of the “socially rejected”.

Despite what he once said, I don’t teach. You learn, from what you will. Take it as you want. No more tricks but yours now.

95. Enochian Translation #6: “You get want I mean now?”

195old

Well, this is fun. I can remember last winter now, with all its crises unresolved. Don’t you? Nothing changed where we are, but after it all, something ridiculous had burst. This first verse is all about the problems of writing poetry in English; true language of the dead who don’t know it yet.

Things, as always, deteriorate, whether left to themselves or fucked up by us; no escape from out of here. The debris of all this, let’s call it culture. Think how desperately far we are from the beginning of time. Unfortunately, there is only this imperfect record of what has led us to this place.

Everyone hopes for personal survival – at the highest order only. They haven’t experienced it yet is the reason: everyone in heaven a princess, a bard, a warrior, a Red Indian chief – the high status elites have taken over eternity too. Stinking rotten mackerel the lot, minimal joy to them always, then off we go, as it’s Monday, again and again.

Are we turtles or men? mice or mandarins, or talking horses & bleeding heads? These compulsions must be uttered by someone, reader. Is it you? the Veer Book Collective (OK, lads, I forgive you & love you)? a small congregation of ale-drinking bibliophiles in Kent (& on our left . . .)? all the young poets in the basement room below (all slightly older)? Just voices then. The laws of avant-garde poetry must be broken up by now – please!1

 

 

1 More stanzas are given in some rather dubious MSS, which can be rendered thus:

88. Enochian Translation #41

188 estrangelo treated copyNothing solid left to return to – that could be a relief. Everything that has happened is irreversible: it’s to do with entropy, rather than iussive poesis. Maybe the triumph of the bourgeoisie, turning out to be the zombie slaves of our new aristocracy (recte: kleptocracy). It is a return, but to nowhere. Think of it as being in hell forever.

Another thingy ran no process on. And what thingy was that? An improvisation of sorts. It can’t work any simple change: it wants the wonder of utter novelty, where something enters from the outside that isn’t there (they tell us). It is gross, disturbing, static in terms of here – in terms of there, a light, casual, generative verb: oh, to tapir, to gryphon, to bleeding head of a dog on a stick, to bird fly out & off at dawn, this dawn, the one that is now. An utter affront to the cryptic smear of events.

A homeless migrant out of nothing is all we are. There are no rights – only the duty of collaborative action to build ourselves a new home, preferably eternal. We’ve landed here, pushed off the boat, & struggled up through the mud & debris of this beach. The first thing we must do is hold a carnival on the quayside to celebrate we are here. Ignore the rain – rather, enjoy how our lights sparkle & waver. Such now is living.

What natural membranes outside to something? Think of sticky interfaces rubbing against your cheeks. It’s at the breaks & cracks, the splits & mirrorings, that something happens. Involutions of boundary layers establish new dimensions, new modes of being. These events form & multiply – OK? We are penetrated utterly through nothingness. What’s here, not here – what isn’t here haunting us & surrounds us. Time to dance thru the wet streets, each single one.

Always the same abased elements here – we don’t care. All our ideals are based on elaborate fakery – hunh? You want divine revelation? Only human, only ever human. Making it up as we go along – tauromachy upon the strand, incantations in the chambers, prayers & ale within the chapel. Bread of heaven, and the people’s beer. These the only materials we’ve got, here in Albion Street: up through the strait gate, turn left.

Again these brief warped children now. Who will they grow up into? Us, us and you. If you’re resigned to this – OK. Let it all breathe as the wind changes & we accept. A friendly cloud blots out the cruel sun. The children still play their violent games. Whoever survives shall be king; but the slaughterer will be the one remembered. It’s hard work, building a civilisation upon this brutish shore. The record is mainly one of massacres & betrayal: all the old giants, ones who’d helped us, put to death. Very well. Here we are. It’s never the right time or place or language. It’s what it is: one actual moment.

 

 

1 Out of the most vulgar of Old Sogdian, I’m afraid, and a very free rendering indeed. Translations do vary widely, especially as the MS is extremely worn & well-rubbed. There is a major alternative reading following.

64. Some Specimens from the Odes Pinned to the Triumphal Arches

Each time you unscrew the head the truths burn out
But reality is not at the bottom of the abyss
Make it now. They hate our way of life
to be a shard of broken glass, shining like life.

Keston Sutherland, The Odes to TL61P (Enitharmon Press, 2013)

 

Career poets are part of the problem, smearing up the polish, drying out the fire; chucking shit all over the place; not being party to the solution; banking on the nodding head ‘the reader’ saying ‘yes, that’s what it’s like’ so as not to know what it’s for, since meaning is easier that way, gaped at through the defrosted back window of the Audi, hence the spring for a neck; we all know where that shit got us: being what we eat.

Sutherland, p 68

 

Poetry evolves from a vivid play of nerves and confusions into sedative aporiae in mock-heroic marginalese, if you don’t take precautions to prevent it.

Sutherland, p 41

 

The driving forces of the universe, the framework upon which it is built up in all its parts, belong to another phase of manifestation than our physical plane, having other dimensions than the three to which we are habituated, and perceived by other modes of consciousness than those to which we are accustomed. We live in the midst of invisible forces whose effects alone we perceive. We move among invisible forms whose actions we very often do not perceive at all, though we may be profoundly affected by them

Dion Fortune, Psychic Self-Defence (Rider & Co., 1930) p 10   < http://chomikuj.pl/proezekiel666/occultus/Dion+Fortune >

 

Any act performed with intention becomes a rite. We can take a bath with no more in mind than physical cleanliness; in which case the bath will cleanse our bodies and no more. Or we can take a bath with a view to ritual cleanliness, in which case its efficacy will extend beyond the physical plane.

Fortune (1930), p 80

 

no such thing as liberty
sunlight and vitamins, misunderstanding
for the gods upon the tree
free from bondage the misguided soul
– cannot trust unless you give a sign
for in this suit we find the Lords of Pleasure

Fortune (1930 & 1935)

 

And all the others together with them took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them, and they taught them charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants.
And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three thousand ells:
Who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them,
The giants turned against them and devoured mankind.
And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another’s flesh, and drink the blood.
Then the earth laid accusation against the lawless ones.

The Book of Enoch the Prophet, translated by R H Charles, (Weiser Books, 2012), VII, 1‑6 (pp 5-6)

 

Mein innerstes Gefühl dazu ist: im Augenblick ist alles zu, aber es kann in jedem Augenblick anders werden. Ich stelle dazu folgende Überlegung an: diese Gesellschaft bewegt sich nicht auf einen Wohlfahrtsstaat zu. Diese Gesellschaft, die die Menschen immer mehr erfaßt, wächst gleichzeitig mit ihrer Irrationalität, und zwar konstitutiv. Solange diese Spannung besteht, ist sozusagen der Ausgleich der Wärme nicht herbeigeführt, der notwendig wäre, damit es keine Spontanheit mehr gibt. Ich kann mir nicht vorstellen, daß es eine bis zum Wahnsinn gesteigerte Welt gibt, ohne daß objektive Gegenkräfte entbunden würden.1 TWA

Max Horkheimer und Theodor W.Adorno, Nachtrag zu Band 13: Nachgelassene Schriften 1949-1972; 2. Gespräche: “Diskussion über Theorie und Praxis” (1956) (S. Fischer, 1989), p 47 < http://platypus1917.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/horkheimeradorno_theorieundpraxis1956.pdf >

 

Das was im Zusammenleben der Menschen als das Richtige angelegt ist, steckt in der Sprache: wenn man sagt, es soll gut werden. Wenn man den Mund zum Sprechen auftut, sagt man das immer mit.2 MH

Adorno & Horkheimer, p 36

 

Wir lehnen nicht die Praxis ab, aber das Verfügen. Weil wir noch leben dürfen, sind wir verpflichtet, etwas zu machen.3 MH

Adorno & Horkheimer, p 109

 

 

1 My innermost feeling is that at the moment everything has shut down, but it could all change at a moment’s notice. My own belief is as follows: this society is not moving towards a welfare state. It is gaining increasing control over its citizens but this control grows in tandem with the growth in its irrationality. And the combination of the two is constitutive. As long as this tension persists, you cannot arrive at the equilibrium that would be needed to put an end to all spontaneity. I cannot imagine a world intensified to the point of insanity without objective oppositional forces being unleashed. Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, translated by Rodney Livingstone, Towards a New Manifesto (Verso, 2011), pp 38‑39

 

 

2 Whatever is right about human society is embedded in the language – the idea that all will be well. When you open your mouth to speak, you always say that too. Adorno & Horkheimer, p 5

 

 

3 What we reject is not practice but telling others what to do. Because we are still permitted to live, we are under an obligation to do something. Adorno & Horkheimer, p 109

 

62. Skipping Behind Waitrose for Bêche-de-Mer & Moths

My friend came down into the ‘itchen wherein i was writin’ and as she opened the fridge door i said listen to this opening sentence and launched off out loud into the first sentence after that preface, the one beginning with the line:

“Each time you unscrew the head the truths burn out”

and i like it as a line even though it is set as “justified” prose and read for several lines as if they were / are lines:

“and fly away above the stack of basements inundated

in aboriginal mucus, elevating the impeccable,”

at which point that residual sense of line was forced into a prose flow as the network of thoughts expanded or was tumbled. Conjoining the rigid meat, budget pizzas and devirginated arctic rolls with miso paste, bok choy and basil seed drinks we get cheap here but weirdly sexualizing everything by this point. Later we celebrated Chinese New Year with sea cucumber, spinach and black buckwheat tea and she got a fortune cookie barely containing the extraordinary phrase “what’s the speed of dark?” i came back home sat down to this text, carried on looking back over that long drying cycle of a sentence with its pulsating ejaculatory cadences which at one point i thought had finished shuddering and trended ending only to realise and realize i was clutching at closure saving time and effort and money. in the midst of a bracket …

Closing the open url to thrownness the next throes to open was to Reclus On Vegetarianism where:

“How can it be that men having had the happiness of being caressed by their mother, and taught in school the words “justice” and “kindness,” how can it be that these wild beasts with human faces take pleasure in tying Chinese together by their garments and their pigtails before throwing them into a river? How is it that they kill off the wounded, and make the prisoners dig their own graves before shooting them?”

leaped out at me. I’m not making this shit up! Or, “fortune favors the prepared mind” as Louis Pasteur quipped

from a posting by cris cheek to UKPoetry ListServ, Feb 3, 2014, “opening The Odes to TL61P”

These little things come together we believe
synchronicity & magic moths1 – oh how we like them
hold on to the end to familiar tales
exotic & redemptive

So – OK, we’re making tapioca – really?
that’s it, just portions of the Empire’s mush
will get us there? Not delicious but
stodgy delusions. These long nights oppress
hallucinatory, we appeal to familiar gods (o gelded ones!)
Please bring comfort & our favourite lies. Odd
bits of the real hang on as dead leaves this February

Just add more turpentine! I heard
someone say – but it was just the apparatus creaking
In this city, winter now at fullest splurge
snow on the uplands, mud & mire here
We’ll write this neatly though, keep out the moths
& never eat the bêche-de-mer2 or read another ode
For poetry won’t wash any more & holothurians are a man’s thing
while the moths remind us only of the mess we used to be
There are so many stories in this city – none of ‘em true
but all so convincing: laughter not honour
Keep changing the frame, 24 times shuttering a second
and when the light plays through, don’t applaud, leave
This isn’t the real world, but where we all live
shared amongst ourselves in hatred & bondage, exploitation & love.

All in all, this work appears wasted & futile
each touch to the keyboard a further annoyance
how can we lift our eyes from off this mire
to see beyond the ever-darkening rainclouds?

Mirroring & variation are good – meanwhile
an orgy of streetfood – I mean right off the street
well – everything ends & will transform thus:
what is needed improving like good little ramekins
until you drop them – oh jiminy, it’s split!
the disgusting stuff oozes into the gutter

Welcome to post-apocalyptic country – years
will have passed to get you to this place, all empty
it’s dry then we’re all back skipping behind Waitrose again

 

 

1 Robin Blaser, The Moth Poems (Open Space, 1965) – Blaser somewhere has written or spoken about how the writing of these poems caused moths to appear.

 

 

2 Heidegger’s favourite food. He, too, regarded it as a vegetable, one whose quality was of being thrown down into the depths of the ocean. In fact, though, “they [echinoderms] rank as our closest genealogical cousins among the invertebrate phyla.” Stephen Jay Gould & Rosamund Wolff Purcell, Crossing Over: where art and science meet (Three Rivers Press, 2000), p 143.