THE SECRET OF BEING UNPOPULAR

 

I haven't been on here for some time. I shall be back but I will now place the PDF or a WORD of my book The Secret of Being Unpopular. 

This is the title of a book with poems and it includes the poem of the title name. It is a sub-section of my so-called Infinite Project. I park it here not as being published per se but as an extra place and also to see how it comes up on the 'black space'....I will put one on my other Blog which is really part of this Blog but should contain things more accessible etc.  For now I want to show I am still kicking and interested and also have another record of the poems and also the final poem which was, at one stage several hundreds of pages long but was indeed far too long. 

[As usual I shall put some images up relevant or not. Images in books I like. Especially biographies and so on.]

 It has always amused me, although I didn't plan it, to write based on a writer whose who work I don't really know. I have read some of Meredith...his poems and as well, I am fairly sure I read The Egoist, I started in on Sandra Belloni which I want to finish. I read Dickens I think at the age of 12 or so but not Meredith as far as I can recall. 

I regret not learning (well enough) languages to read the French in French and Germans etc but not just European poets and novelists etc. One would like to know every language. I don't see hierarchies...or they are not my cup of tea shall we say. I still read widely and shall report also on my Dewey Decimal Project inter alia....Here hopefully is my manuscript: 

Here are the first poems, section one which are earlier than others and or reflect those earlier 'more direct' poems: 

    I'm slowly upgrading this post.... See how it goes....

                                         

                                                                    

Contents
Introduction iii
Part One: The Last Word Shall Want a Word
 

 

1 both for- 4
2 Is She Safe? 4
3 if only i wasn't myself 5
4 I've Cut Off My Own Head 5
5 How Can I Explicate 6
6 Dr. Beetle 7
7 La Mujer 7
8 In the Pub 8
9 Flowers 8
10 My Mother's Death 9
11 from my ‘Chain of Poems’ 9
12 V. O. L.V. O 13
13 Ilya Repin 14
14 The Machine 15
15 This Bread 16
16 Mongolia 17
17 Report from Iso-Man 18
18 Bikini 19
19 Winter Song 20
20 Monarch Butterfly Chrysalids 21
21 Bertolt Brecht's Poem of a Burning Tree 22
 

Part Two: Hands machines sad hope and: ‘…we open the book, we shut the
book, it starts again yet ends. Yet it urges you on, this fatal command…’
 

22 The Hand 23
23 the hands are reaching 23
24 The Girl 24
25 After the Funeral 24
26 thus you machine man 25
27 My Hand 26
28 The Mighty and Liquid Bones 27
29 After “Leda...” 28
30 the machine music moves 29
31 My Voyeur 30
32 Tonight, the Theatre is Dark 30
33 Adam Withershins 31
34 Blackness 32
35 For it had not always been as now 33
36 The People Were Ecstatic 34
37 “They are waiting.” 35
38 The Question of Entrance 35
39 and 36
40 Not In ‘Locus Solus’ 37
41 Out 38
42 The Pulsing 39
43 Happens 40
44 The Razumovskys of the Quartets 41
45 Clowns 41
46 Foreward backward 42
47 Realism 43
48 The Revela— 43
49 Holy Night 44
50 to swell a progress 45
51 Escher 46
52 Untitled 48
53 The Sad Song of The Toothless Whore 49
54 The Arrogant Swans of Silence 50
55 Where Has She Gone? 51
56 For Those Who Feel 51
57 Veronica’s Song 53
58 Humpty Empty Back Make 54
59 Composition 56
60 snow might 57
61 the dust gathered light 57
62 Murdered to Rose 58
63 number 5 58
64 Gareth Farr’s Wasp Factory 59
65 LOVE 59
66 Glass Swan 60
 

Part Three: Victor Taylor, my son. How he lost his eye. His troubles.
67 The Policeman Still Has Two 62
Part Four: The Secret of Being Unpopular – the questions the thoughts,
 

68 The Secret of Being Unpopular 64
 

Notes to Poems 120
Biography 122
Acknowledgments 122
 

 

‘The Secret of Being Unpopular’
Introduction
The first part of this book (in three ‘Sections’) includes some more 'direct' poems that signal
later poems. Perhaps read certain of my poems as if is a kind of music or art work or a type of
dramatized 'enactment' influenced by many writers and experiences. Perhaps also the
documentaries on TV by Oliver Sachs. Also, Beckett, various modern and postmodern and
earlier poet 'traditions' and concepts of Mannerism. Also, an attempt to evade, keep moving
as did Mao's revolutionaries, or Te Kooti et al. Influences from all aspects of life and my
reading which is ongoing. Poems not necessarily in chronological order. Some of the newish
poems written are more consciously 'artful' such as the title poem and say ‘Humpty Empty
Back Take’ (explores the 'arrow of time' concept), and ‘Glass Swan’ where I need some notes.
But mostly notes are not needed. I use either a kind of Ekphrasis or a form of Work-Art as I
call it. A process. Emotion and the impossibility of certain knowledge are a part of all, and so
are 'references' to the loss of my own mother in 1998 and other events and sadness loneliness
& love. Perhaps my middle and most common poems resist interpretation. (But underpinning
them is a fascination with what is, and with the ability of the human mind (which is
paradoxically what is or could destroy us and other of Earth’s creatures) and also questions of
what can be known or not. Hence Bronowski’s: The Ascent of Man, books such as those by J.
D. Barrow on cosmology, science and philosophy as esp. in Impossibility: The Science of
Limits and the Limits of Science. Knowledge, even that we can know too much, and the
questions of Being and the deep mystery of life and death is inherent or “behind” everything.
As I say for “strategic” reasons these attempt to resist interpretation. But not all. Recently
reading of Christopher Middleton and his wide range of modalities and styles has “given me
permission” to change and move.
Yes, postmod and Theory interests me, and the Language Poets, inter alia, have influenced
me, but I have my own slant on Theory.
It may seem I omit the ‘local’ but this is not the case of my general philosophy, as can be
seen on my EYELIGHT Blog. How to use material? It might be argued that the lack of certain
“local” or regional references inculcate or indicate a, hopefully, unique (insofar as that can be
postulated), ‘way’; which also hopefully points to ‘a wider way’. All of which might seem
vague. Perhaps this is ‘Art-guilt’. But my experience in life is very much embedded that of a
working-class background (my father was an Architect (who had been a Fitter’s Mate but was
keen on some poetry and was excellent in drawing and art). We lived in Panmure in the 50s
and 60s which then was largely but not exclusively European population and most of my
mates were ‘working class’. That said, I don’t want to put myself in a box. Ideas and methods
change. Life changes. Ethical, ecological and historical concerns I do have but will leave them
for possible essays, stories and possibly later poems. We are in — all times seem critical and
tragic — difficult times. But, well, when I did Latin, reading of those perhaps 2000 years or
more ago they lamented their times with: “O mores! O tempores! O miseri humani sunt!”,
“What (decline in morals and ways), what times, what stressful times!” How wretched is
humanity (in these days) and so on, loosely written and translated.
Part One: The Last Word Shall Want a Word.
 

1.
 

both for
 

both for the visual and polysemantic ambiguation of its textual
dynamic and the tensile power that is generated by Towersey's
technique: letters are jammed and crammed together into a continuous
and seemingly random scream whose wall’s morphemic madness maddens and
fascinates.
 

is impishly insidious with his short, stabbing sentences, and an
ominous use of repetition.
 

2. Is She Safe?
 

It's 3.30, I'm awake— too much caffeine.
Shadow, Mum's grey cat, rushes in.
I get up and open the front door, rattling the handle.
The other cat rushes in. I think:
'The cat on the mat eating a bat.'
I look out at the neighbour's house.
The porch light's on – what's she scared of –
a rapist? I stand there thinking about the infinite back regress
and the problem of free will. Maybe we just machines, eh? No?
Could I be a rapist? Are we all latent anything?
I pick up the white cat and hold her gently and rub it and
talk to it like a mother to a baby.
The woman next door's too young for me.
Even if there is a God, who made him
and when the Universe began and —What began the—?
 

The other night, that blond, same age as my daughter...
the neighbours heard the scream.
They say the bastard's a dead man –
he's fucked, they'll get him wherever he goes.
Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.
What more strange, putrid, miraculous, god-like,
fantastic or contorted the human brain?
Shadows dance in the lighted box.
The blind and beautifully indifferent universe.
I shut the door and eat a grapefruit and sugar –
it's as delicious as the original garden.
I think: the sad and gentle mad, the savage,
sharp, psychotic knife.
 

I open the door and peer like a puzzled Hitler
out of his bunker at the woman's house next door:
The light's still on. Is she safe?
 

3. if only i wasn't myself—surely the words wouldn't
just sit there:
carved, seemingly stone, and terribly unsurrounded -
surely then -
i could concentrate on my next thought...
 

                4. I Have Cut Off My Own Head
 

            Now that I have cut in savage sadness
                                this hanging hate;
                        there bleak is still in me
                a Phantasmagor of nightmare.
                                Weird this World.
                 

                   I spin to my self-destruct,
                   and devils' dreams explode with cackling flames,
                   and today, in this sun-hell of cicada-maddened world
                    that is hot and still and red:
                    beats my brain with omnipresent negative.
 

                            I am a statue
                            with a red pumpkin for a head.
                            I have committed
                            all metaphors of cut or kill -
                            the blood of my empty,
                            once-was-life, congeals around -
                            from darkness, the ranting
                            laughter of maddened fiends.
                             

                             My friends turn to magpies
                            made from marzipan. They are coloured
                            with bright blue faces.
                             She whom I loved is dead in my head.
                             She walks the world like a Walt Disney thing.
 

                            I have cut off my own head.
 

5                                           How Can I Explicate?
 

What do I know? What can, will, will be, will
ever be known? Real or psychological sword
in the guts ripping up, or the bomb, poetically
blowing away the maker's face.
He is so stupidly, (rightly?), avidly, caught up in it all, that
we laugh – at a distance, but not he –
the guerilla – he will issue instructions,
as well as obey. There is meaning (he thinks)
because he saw – “Hold it there! Could you stop
it just there, just there: yes! Yes! That frame...
As I thought, the usual atrocity. Mind you, he was
there, in the thick of hate:
They shot the daughter and pissed on her dead father's pate...”
Yes, he, rightwrongfully, discerns a pattern, and hence;
a solution. At least those doing war deeds or merciful missions
(all a-terrible-tangle of means in the scrum of ends means), lose
their selves: but it requires a powerful draught of drugging, training
in madness, or, you might fluke like the only sperm or the im-
probable arrow to the exploding imploding target. Oh: that drug, that
drug of knowing for sure –
These days in this bloody turmoil, before the waking (Will we-they?),
oops, sorry, I'm so sorry...No I can't, just can't: I can't bugger it, Christ!
I can't staunch it friend (the blood I mean that the desert has
soaked so much of – poor Lawrence, poor Turks, poor
humans – yes, I saw the film / and / I agree, it's awful / But (and I
abhor it), hell yes: Hell....But just think, you might need to kill one day;
simply to live. You know, some go quietly, others can’t wait: this
livin's getting' me down, but then (this off my tangent, some fucker looks
at me, and he smiles: so I bulb up, brilliant with light – like a light!
Anyway... Who knows what's what, who's who? (It's all running away:
talk about Churchill (he's dead but hell well the controversy goes on and
that gives me som- (But (bugger it all) I'm getting lost and these
political fanatickings are beyond my pen –
No. It was more befit that I turn that sight of the old woman, seeking
an education: who (I saw it) tripped and fell on the campus, ahh –
blood on her face – and shame – futility, cruel old nature, waste of search?
No – seek all knowledge, lady: treasure it more than money or endless power.
And I, I look, sometimes, into my mother's eyes.
       She has greater widow reason (this is personal now) to cry
than I, freed from my spouse, and silly woody house....
But I saw I think in her: the trapped silence, the caught things
I know nothing of – How can I explicate, say, great doings in Russia,
when my mother, my old and lonely mother –
lives another language, and; my father, beyond all reason, is zero:
and I cannot even cross the bridge to love?
 

6.                             Dr. Beetle

                The beetle creeps in with his black bag.
                Dark, remote, single-minded Dr. Beetle.
                There is he says, turning his strange sad-dark eyes to me:
 

                "Something – something –
                                    deep inside –
                                    I cannot tell you."
___________________________________________________ __________________________________
7.                                           La Mujer
 

                            The beauty of the woman
                            makes us sad, because
                            it is uncatchable, untouchable
                            like the scent of music, or
                                a magic drink, a potion:
                             and we, we who were not
                            invited to this earth -
                                  we are insatiable…
 

                            The beauty of the woman
                            - she is a goddess in disguise -
                            cannot be spoken:
                                but it causeth
                            a gigantic shudder
                            thru the loins of the
                                           universe:
 

                    Lovely wild and thinking thing.
                    As if, frozen in a stone
                              a vision of a city
                                collapsed into a dust, that
                    Generates in a rose:
                        The joy and anguish of a bone
  

8.                                             In The Pub
 

The pearls on her dark neck
her flashing eyes,
her soft, over-painted purple lips,
her youth, her goddess loveliness,
the subtle hints of perfume and of pulse;
and all the other
excited mysteries of her body’s
sexual machinery—
recalled to my mind
that photograph in Mallowan
of a crushed egg-white-woman-skull,
surrounded by gold and deathless lapis-lazuli,
excavated by Sir Leonard Woolley,
lovingly, from the Death Pits of Ur:
numbered with precision
with all the other dead,
about 4000 B.C.
 

9. Flowers
 

These flowers.
White twistings –
clouds on green stalks,
explode in mushroom-delicacy.
Silently they shout: “Life!”
Not far, my cat, in the sun,
liquid Sphinx,
sleek enigma,
subtle Siamese:
curls contemptuous.
Unquestioning,
Unaware he is a part
of evolution’s procession.
A stopped still:
sunlight illuminates —
Here is seen:
The cat, the flower, the man, the dream.
 

10. My Mother's Death
She wasn't ready for Big Bad Death.
he came about 10 pm.
She was alone. I wasn't
there. The Universe.
She wasn't ready.
And nor will you be you, you bastard!
You won’t – she wasn't ready
for that last, “sweet shuddering
buggery” of a “dying” descent
into or through
the final obliterating or renewing plunge
as powerful as a fuck
in the probably godless space
to a very Nothing:
peace ecstasy or hell –
or whatever beautiful blackness or
absolute zero: not even cold.
All I know is my love and how I couldn't –
say anything. What wasn't said.
The agony of recall
__________________________________________________________________________
11. from my ‘Chain of Poems’
 

discussion
we could discuss life, love, the
Universe, sex: and death, taxes, philosophy (in other
words, or science in other words)
- we could cover all topics
- politics
we could explode in rage at each other,
we could fight to the death over
an idea
probably some huge, fiery idea, elemental and pivotal:
but nothing would change
me
I have done many high, good, noble: but many stupid, and some
quite horribly selfish and hurtful things in my life
- I wish I could, I wish I, (I?), could undo those hateful things
and have been and be in love with all – all beings, and the fields, the roads, the leaves, the motor
cars, and all creatures of all kind – the fearful, the ugly, and even the arrogant or the sick –
- I wish my love could fill all spaces
but this is the talk of a fool. It is impossible, the time has gone –
but let’s imagine it was so, and let us be gentle
Sebastian
Sebastian my grandson staying the night.
He is beautiful, of course
- I check if he is asleep
does he want the light on
in the wash-house
to give less dark?
“It’s o.k.” he says.
I switch on the outside light
so that there is beautiful dark and some
soft light.
spot
what is a mark, a spot?
why do we link these points?
Immense jump from straight lines to
the rich complex geometries of
Riemann, Gauss, Poincaré and others…
I once read about Poincaré in the Howick library’s
Encyclopaedia Britannica –
…of how he argued Relativity, and
his (like Giordano Bruno’s) endlessly recurring Universes
It is said that these men such as Einstein think in different ways:
“I frequently find myself thinking in images” Einstein is said to
have said…
Bruno was burnt for his ideas. (We kill for the Idea.)
… vast, strange, universe … so many in pain.
But Life, like a huge Engine –
pumps on…things seem ceaseless…
vast strange, vast strange:
grim old bright grin Man
…things seem
night cap
i am relatively old
(everyone is)
i wear a woolen cap or hat as
i am now quite or nearly bald…
But I am thankful for life
--------------------- -----------------------------------------------------------------------
Teeth
I just brushed my teeth -
This too, is a beautiful act.
------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------
life
I am reading Is This a Man by Primo Levi.
He survived hell, he survived Auschwitz.
He, it is believed committed suicide not long
after that book was published in English.
We think of the millions, and Celan, and Anne Frank.
What, except platitudes, are left us?
Life we must keep contract with.
Let us live as well as we can.
----------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------
bells
the curve, the silver, the gold
the simple ‘clong’ or ‘tong’
of a bell -
the endless seas (not far a Tui sings)
-------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------
politics
all men, all women, all: even
the ‘good’, the reformers, the world changers:
all die
------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------
change
good-bad
bad-good
------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------
poet
I said I was a poet –
In fact I insisted vociferously:
but the SS men still kicked me to death
------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------
I talk
 

I talk to myself, AND, yes, I do indeed talk back, for who else wants to or who else
would listen?
So I have long discussions and disputations with myself: these
conversations go on frequently – arguments ensue and great speeches
of enormous historic significance take place. You have no idea.
And there is more – songs are sung, and great bursts of sound, chuckles, mad laughter, joyful
mirth is heard – and comedy speeches – and Lashings and lashings of verbals and verbals and
verbals and – such wonder!
It is great fun – a kind of licit madness
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I make a speech of great, nay, vast historical significance
It ws: “…thank you.”
------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------
“And once I wrote…”
…the last word shall want a word.
…and:
we beat strange
we beat strange
we beat strange
the sky is above us
______________________________________________________________________
12. V. O. L.V. O
The great snarling
square-faced truck
with a steel yellow tray
grundles to a halt:
and like six elephants
bulls and hisses
and stamps to a stop.
It grins and roars.
It’s got ‘bout 12 wheels
and it flashes its big ears
of mirror wings and its
snout is yellow as bright
with V.O.L.V.O. Volvo!
Smack right written on its kisser.
Is it, I wonder, something
that drove out of a long
American poem?
But the big yellow truck
just keeps thundle grundling…
It’s not going to stop for me
- it might have meaning
or it, it just could be,
a big fuckin’ truck.
I curse the noisy bastard
and a young man jumps out
complete with balls:
he swings into the house where
the woman is:
And I curse him
And I curse the spring
And all the bloody noise.
But I cant do fuck all about it.
The truck man leaps back in
and the truck and it squeaks and
squeals, and blats like a pig’s arse
or a rusty screaker and hells the Hell out of here
13. Ilya Repin
Ilya Repin. Who is he? Have you heard of him?
I have: today I received a book about him.
A book full of colour. A book of paintings and portraits
in which I discovered Ilya, the Russian artist.
Not 'till then much known to me: but Ilya
painted Tolstoy, Pushkin,
Mendeleev and Mussorgsky.
Mussorgsky of Night on a Bare Mountain,
Mussorgsky, the inebriate clerk, the composer.
He also painted legends and the poor –
like the barge-haulers, desperate
in their physical agony, their faces wrenched.
But Ilya also presents beautiful, thoughtful
women. And strange and 'ordinary' men
like Vladimir Stasov. Stasov looks
from the page, and out –
in his vast brown coat
and black Russian hat
and Tsarish beard goat long
and seems to catch me by the eye. It is like
he has reached out and grabbed my balls
with vice strength. He is saying:
'You bastard! You bastard! Look at me!'
Also in the book is Yakov Palonsky,
brilliantly dishevelled, his face squiggled into
a fierce moment: his stare not fierce, but fiery:
strong eyes and intensity mix with soft
charcoal and finer lines. In looking from
Palonsky to Stasov (two men you might see in
Auckland today) they are saying to me:
'We were like you, we also loved and grew and fought:
we were cowardly and brave. We had our fears, our
secrets; our pathetic or titanic visions. We also
walked, fought or fled.'
On paper, in paint, all these people: all these haunting faces.
The woman who brought this book said:
'I found it, quite by accident, quite by chance. Repin, I found him.'
She looks at Eleanora Duse and says:
'What is she saying? What is that look? A proud stare! What is it?
Interpret it—!'
I cannot reply. I am dumbed by this book.
Such is the power of Ilya Repin.
14. The Machine
we gotta get down there
down there and show you guys
the machine the machine is mean
man and its there it lives like
a lung but we gotta get there
we got here but where is there
we gotta get there man I know
you know but its mean man
and what I mean man is its
gunna get ya or we gunna
get it and its there its a machine
it does something which does
something to something but we gotta
get cross town and down to
that god-fuckin’ mean machine
with those wires man what I
mean is we gotta we gotta we gotta
cause its that time man I
mean what you mean we
mean no thing but we gotta
get down there to that lean
that big black lean machine
where everything is green
and here’s Dean with his machine
so we gunna we gotta we
all gunna fuck down there
and fuck with that mean thing -
but we loves it cause it does something.
 

15. This Bread
I would not think that this wine
I drink can be the blood of Christ;
Or this bread I eat was once his life:
To me, it is only a soft and tasty, unsymbolic
wheat born thing. It was loaded from the back of
trucks and carried into shops.
This bread I eat
Enters me, is softened in my mouth,
Made a bolus,
Travels down
And is cut by acid in my stomach.
Then by life magic
It enters my most un-Christ-like blood –
And in snipped up molecules, crosses membranes down
And diffuses in my cells.
And I am Man
Bread eating man.
Oat of Life
Sustain me – refuel the endless engines of my brain:
Unsymbolic
My heart pumps systalticaly. But why do
Strange musicks wrack my working brain?
It is said he was a carpenter,
was reborn,
Given thorn
and made fires for the wondering. I love old stories:
But I do not deny that the last word shall want a word.
I consume made by labour bread
kneaded by human hands, needed.
Visions and shinings
catapult my heart. High,
I revisit golden fields with golden wheat –
But when I wake –
bread is still bread
and for my life, I eat.
 

16. Mongolia
It remains there –
Don’t talk to me about it!
I don’t want to know. I won’t listen. I won’t:
It’s in my head. I know, there’s snow, and
probably camels - do they have camels? Snow?
And do the irrit camels shake their sleepy
heads when the snowflakes touch?
What are they doing now? Eh?
Does the daughter emerge from the tent?
Does she breathe the cold night?
Did she dream?
Her language is hers. Her Mongolia~
Is not my Mongolia. Is it?
But what about White Mountain?
Is it still there? Eh?
It was cold last night. Was it?
And what of the Man. Was he inside Mother?
Later he stood outside, pissing –
the hot yellow steaming stream
meandered forth like a new life:
the stars descended to gather in its fate. Did they?
He looks up. Does he look up? Does his Woman sleep?
And the leopard, the snow leopard, does it
shift and twitch? Does it?
Never tell me
17. Report from Iso-Man
Again the Woody-Wood-Pecker Early morning laughter
is a good enough description. This heart pain is not a medicine.
Waking that day, you: you expected joy, because everything, like headlines,
was day after day - and you couldn’t. You had hoped for ebullience to blaze out
of crannies, but instead, or because of, there was only a clever clue:
John the over and under man who could have been
at Pompei - of course because you thought of it
and were trying to impress them - but the women just turned away, and oil was oozing like erotic
black stuff: The next day, which blurred into mirrors, there was a terrifying rumour of a man who
reacted. All this reminds me of that day she and I (young) (silly) (hot) and (rashly) - wrote A loves
B on the sand, when she was certain: but I have tried to control that part of my Universe.
But the waves? It has all ways puzzled me, that that thing we did, which was a spell,
was erased into our lives - but the next day:
We made it! There were millions and gifts and guests;
And I caught out a lot: laughing, but, they, took:
Absolutely no notice. So I went right to the top!
You were so proud! You looked at me! Yes, and then I returned to the then-now
and those bloody Woody-Wood-Pecker birds with their early morning madness. They clacked.
They awoke and it seemed all surreal and giggly about a meaning they kept from me. . . So I
asked for assistance, but there was no one, so it became something rushing off just
as I was looking carefully into and prying and wincing at the blurr: which was the rev,
the rev, the revelation which soap-Slipped—Whaaeee! out of my hands, fuck it, so I returned;
but they saw and - simultaneously - turned their backs so that a certain percent, say of the subset
of x million of the subset z, quite at once; slit their throats. Death was falling over
itself all over the bloody place.
Then I remembered! - the baby waving bye-bye, and the little hand, but I was not: repeat not,
fooled. I grew up to be a rugged All Black or something, but I never forgot the Fifth Curve.
So. I had exhausted my options. I took some annual leave from the human vacuum
and began to recreate The Hand: the gigantic Hand old-growing in centurious seconds, became.
But then it wrink-wrenches clamps shakes and began to dissolve. or it
gets weaker weaker weaker, slowly:
They all watch, they are tranced! — This is a show! The brave fingers
like a fly-spray dying spider...at last! at last!
Give up, and the dolly: the dolly drops!
Squeaking with freedom! The Head. The Head is feebly. The Head turns. The Head.
But twenty stories down, and squashed across A car, the dead dolly is dead, so dead -
It declined to comment: kept dignity; Refused to be drawn. So...
So we filed it under Section Z2347.
 

18. Bikini
“It was an itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka dot bikini
that she wore for the first time today.”
something like that – the sexy fifties following the
naughty forties. In those days we heard the cosmic comedy
laughing out from Trinity the physics poetry – Sanskrit speaking of Oppenheimer’s
thousand suns – and the Incredible Brain
like a mad penis poking up from the slime of time whose ‘beginning’ was …
…but what could we all do, what can we do now? All those reactions, chains …
It was the time of the Milk Bar, great fire balls, and the machine gun murders –
Bassett road. Those days we went to the ‘flicks’ at the ‘flea pit’; and
Sante bars, I loved them: thin and dark and sweet as molecules,
full of them, full of the certainty of pleasure (Bikini – that, the tiny shattered fragments
inspired the engineer, those tests, nuclear, and then the ‘nuclear family’ and the bikini
herself, you could put it in a bag, sex to go: (greatest inventions):
we could follow the decay curves, the body, and the blast we all had or
expected, somehow, someday…)
But the white milk choc, and those gob-stoppers, changing colours like
the times, as Islands and people were shafted & shifted, and now we
were the beginning of power and good old death:
“You haven’t got the guts to fuck me!” the hot blonde by the alley way
tore in, in their lovers’ quarrel, teen-angel, maybe something primal, transmitted
through the air, the cellulose: flick flick flick…
and the Bodgies, the Widgies; the chuddy gum, winkle pickers, the slick-backs.
“Chicken!” as they jumped in front of a car to dare or die: or head-to-head.
maybe to go like James Dean. Those were the days:
they did the ton down Pilky Road on Triumphs or BSA’s. None of this Jap shit:
It was then that old Ash dreamed that Daffy Duck was the devil – comes of
goin’ to the flicks with O’Hara the same day he read Milton. The Bikini made
Millions, and Bond cured the world: there were no bombs loaded onto
Korean hospitals, no! No people machine gunned on innocent streets; no blood:
it was all a movie (and later, much later, we all read The Things): the sinister ‘Nips’ were
always ‘evil’ in their MIGs:
the Yanks always won, we were happy, and felt safe at night.
So it was Milton and Daffy in love, and away they walked, hand in hand. Sex and
songs began. We became knowing, loving every minute of the Talking Horse and
the Stooges (all Three): and the Terry tunes: ‘Moonshine’ was to come later.
We knew nothing in those cider days when wagons rolled.
Nothing of mass or Mass – critical, or other.
At night, in sleep, great balls of light.
____________________________________________
Note: The Things is a book written in the 60s re consumerism etc by the innovative writer
Georges Perec.
 

 

19. Winter Song
long winding words that, somehow, enclose
worlds of wonder and are sometimes as
intricate difficile and marvelous as coils
of green gold; do hide, or rather, obscure, the truth: if
truth there be – but are sometimes
in this onerous world, necessary, even “just right”: like
polyphiloprogenitive, the word by which Eliot begins his sermon poem: but
it is natural that certain sometimes simple plain, or non-doubling
unprovoking words, by their very seeming innocent, are thus accused
and create illusion of simple openness,
while all around the ogres of our hearts are complex dark,
and eventually allow all things all times sometimes
to accrue to difficult: life is or can be difficult
and I and you are assailed by alternating hardships hopes joys which
interchange yet by dint of self-resolve and reciprocal care
and dignity of thinking less harmful or “evil”
thoughts, we somewhat master, and are less than overmastered
by this our life which for many like myself
is good and allows to me such things as comfort: food, music
when I want it, and a garden: - much neglected now but, well; those
Cineraria shall first peep forth, and then
the Freesias, my favourite flowers, for
with my wounded nose, it is one of the few I can smell, and it is
a joyful joyful thought to think on them that shall spring in spring like miracles, such as
those daily as of breathing or the acts of consuming food and light.
Let water flow from taps in all lands: let no human lack, and none to stay
in too long a darkness of their soul: un-consoled and wanting, alone
and lonely, and thus or because, unloving.
I would do such things for you...
but human kind is not so kind. Nor
are words so simple or so straight as I have fingered: as if I were blind.
I cannot know it all, or any, if at all:
but when I see my child, I seem to know,
and hear an ancient call: and then
I write it complex simple or simple hard
for the sake of heart or light or love
or of a madman's burning art
 

20. Monarch Butterfly Chrysalids
 

There on the curtain hanging
against the morning window
my father would hook
the green chrysalids with
their spark-gold eyes.
Then: the wings unfolding
like a satellite's sun sail
or an antenna in space –
There! They pump – the King's wings:
The Monarch –
Waking, testing by slow waving, each.
Now the regal fly,
master of its moment – will reach.
It is orange black brown with
fold-in wings and lines like
lines on glass: why? we kids
always wondered: oh!
The symmetric pattern! Eyes, face:
black and spotted white like
the lights of a velvet fuselage:
oh, and why did it lie so long
in the dark, so long: and then erupt alive:
Those were golden gilded days
— someone had crafted them:
and each second, each breath,
had been painted with a paint
so precious that everything glowed.
Some Great Thing knew us then –
it entered us our hearts and
pumped the moth with life.
And a piece of Church glass flew away.
 

21. Bertolt Brecht's Poem of a Burning Tree
 

I will interpret
Bertolt Brecht's poem
of a tree burning.
The giant tree burnt
in screamless sadness
in shoutless despair.
For he was a big, dumb,
kind tree. His great beard
of leaves
Enflamed the forest
around:
flashed in lights of fear.
light darker lighter dark.
The fire tore round
his trunk -
his coke black trunk – and
at last, with eyes grief
great and glazed
like a god of old Greece
He crashed forward in
a fiery collapse,
flat on his face.
I say Bertolt foretold the coming
senseless murderous burnings of Europe;
the holocausts, the coming of the mad men,
the stupid stomp of jackboots —
the imbecilic, tragic waste —
the black human husks;
the amputation of nations and children burnt.
I say Bertolt, the Communist, foresaw the war
And the tree was our heritage —
Europe's Asia's Africa's
America's, Polynesia's—the World's.
The tree was The Tree of Man. The human tree.
The tree crashed down and foretold doom.
And this was a warning—Brothers, Sisters, wake!
Be ever alert, keep sharp your knives,
Oil your guns.
__ __________

_______________________________________ ________
Part Two: Hands Machines Sad Hope And: ‘…we open the book, we shut the book,
it starts again yet ends. Yet it urges you on, this fatal command…’
____________________________________________________ ___________
 

22. The Hand
 

The hand, grasping, clasps a black pearl,
within whose universe
man-things
doom out their destinies.
Meantime, we spit out pips of light, and
horses pause.
 

 

23. the hands are reaching
 

the hands – they are reaching, reaching up the rope, the deep-stranded rope of gold that
descends the dark shaft – reaching up the rope, groping
they mass and grope up the rope - trying to reach the bright red void
that flashes with the power of devastated violins - in their agony to escape death
or is it to lift them from the dim unmuscular light to the higher ecstasy?
the screams were never heard
we walked, after the music, among the pillars in moonlight, surrounded by faces and
the grins of knowing hands
the forms near the light, if seen at all, were remote
we spoke who and why?
voices – the voices (we knew them) – were everywhere – and the hands
the dead hands – were all unmoving
and the ropes, the hands, the machines - the machines of gold – were trapped –
our converse continued – and we walked on
 

24. The Girl
The yellow toothbrush in the orange cup
That leans against this studded black
night-backed window has nothing
to do with this poem. Nor has
the Dettol bottle, or the cactus plant,
green as a green shield beetle.
Nor has the pen in my hand
that spreads its blue trail
vein of wandering thought.
Nor has this Vermeer painting of
a maidservant pouring milk
have relevance...Or does she?
Why do I think of Anne Frank?
I’ve recounted my fingers --
it’s just past midnight -
they are ten in all.
There is nothing remarkable about me.
The girl looking back at me
from her private eternity
with the yellow headdress
is so beautifully ordinary.
 

25. After the Funeral
  

 disappeared inside the television where an enclouded shade of dark
curled into itself in a blue eternity and snuck past the window frame column
and behind sad sung. thoughts. the record rumbled. I am here.
the blue is true, is blue. words. The other world. Busoni.
He's not in there though, is he?
shouldn't there be
some pattern? Shouldn't the news
return: "You are alive. You are."
seal, and candles. Leapt....
a salver is brought in. A tear grows immense in the neo-light. It was...
in there you could see things differently. You could be stilts
or a man on stilts, sticking out. You could be the settling dust
or the very softness itself. What could you be? Where has she gone?
What? Eh?
where have all the coloured balls they ask—and the tops, and the
liquorices with three colours? & their black tops? And
the Lambretta—what happened to the Lambretta?
and what about all the breath and thought and work
and the hope, the endless scrubbing, cleaning,
making meals, arguments—the extraordinary way
the sun, the road, the sweet sad road—
what happened? Speak amid the terrible regrets and love. What was it
I wanted — want? What did you say? Who am I? How many:
it all can’t bear itself, there are a seeming endless of
child joys and tears: fear, hands reaching for apples
where, whence, what: who am I?
the transgressions, the failures
and the moment intense
 

 

26. thus you machine man thus you machine man
you machine man thus you machine you
thus machine man you machine man thus thus
so thus you cracking cracking cracking so
you machine you machine you machine you m
achine man you you you machine you machine
e man thus you thus you machine man machi
ne man machine man thus you mechanical ma
chine
semen gunpowder whose inseparable
petrol love is loop-clocked modern
as a computer animal to clickclick the double
intent of gearcog-chopchop clock mad brain
whose interest value belies the hidden skipping
in the chewing gum streets:
whence our knowledges
are of steam drains and the ones
who croaked about The Void.
 

(Avoid the void...
cracking his ice in the sinuous.
cracking his icy crackle of light.
cracking his icy crackle in the sinuous.
cracking his ice in the cracking
cracking cracking cracking cracking
cracking cracking cracking cracking cracki ng crack
27. My Hand
I study it, suddenly aware.
It has been with me so long, and yet
I seem not to know it.
Is it mine? I look at the brown, flesh-folding back
of this five-thing; this murder-thing; this love-thing.
It, as old as I and older, has served me and saved me;
in thousands and thousands of days and ways, and it –
it moves! It is. It is, and is, of – me. So much me
that I forget the miracle of it.
I should know this fold the back my hand – and yet
it is not like anything.
Looking closer it expands to a land:
a strange land, a weird living world: this five-ridged land – spreading
reaching rolling and roving back through all millennia:
So flexuous, so seeming to erupt: its valleys, rivers, fields, cities, plains;
and mountain spurs –
Unfolding the palm, the Central Plain, I note the ‘prints’ – I had forgotten them; the
birth-uniqueness of them – and
the cross-crissing crevices; unreadable, inexplicable;
in this foetal-Carravaggio light-dark I study it:
“Hullo hand,” I hear said: “It has been so long, how are you?”
and as I greet it
and as I curl it in
I see that it is
as animal
as I am – yet
as ‘spiritual’, and as alien and
as deep
with its own secret:
its savage, Coleridgean chasms, echoes, stones, rivers, and its
muscle-bound bones.
For have we resolved ‘the Thing itself’? –
Is this not Edgar curled in the primal, dark, and hopeless mud?
“What muddy man is that?!” Indeed, what Thing?
We have forgotten you, Hand. You are us, we live, and you work,
miraculous machine, by secret device of signals; marvelously you
touch and turn. You have touched, have Been, have
felt flesh or flower or soil: have plunged in cool water:
been cut, bled, scalded, crushed: held pens or pails or bolts, or
made switches switch – or, caressed other hands, cheeks, brows. Touched
in seeming blindness out to a loved one’s face…
And, as now I turn it in to show the five fingernail faces:
(these now so strange beings – praying –
these Moon Men –
they feel silently me to accuse of what I know not:
of what I have or have not done: or, what I, indeed, have, or
could have been; and yet these finical fingernail Face Heads
do not judge…
It is I who lurch at the thought of the years of this, my…
Infinite Hand: and our end too, our finale
and the sad lost love
and the cry that Nothing ever move again:
Yet. We celebrate its Huge Life, its flawed, fatal, living Machine:
this death excretion, this this - this queer screwed Quirk of life,
this twist of stuff: this instrumental Devil-God!
Yet this five-thing, so unknown, so near dead – is so alive!
So alive and so silent beyond accusation or even time itself;
and yet so aware, in its own way, this Familiar; this alien and
all too knowing Thing! Ach!
It shows: it points the way to death.
My Child my child – My Child Hand! – my Bairn, my Child Time –
My mother, my father, my –
And this miraculous of you and me – of we who live:
This Thing, this seeming endless moving Thing –
This mortal miracle, “Fanny, You—
Spurned — You— ”
This living, moving, throbbing – This –
The wild, lost years.
28. The Mighty and Liquid Bones
"There are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio"
we turn our backs to the sea
which we know means
everything
you had ever learnt
about the wind
and the wind's mind
and the sun spinning
as the light like webs entangles ecstasy
whose shape you cannot see
- would be advised
to look away
for there are things
you must not see
and the sea beckons
always to those Orange Others
who fly to it
that they might immerse
in its mighty and liquid bones:
the immense echo
of its dimension
that growls its thought in groans...
you really are ignorant of the sea
and know not that there are mountains
under there that are
higher than Everest -
and nor do you know
as neither do I
that eyes do swivel
in doubling turns
and that the hearts of globes
do crack with light
29. After “Leda...”
that was the way then,
the single poem —
or could it even be
the unitary word,
centred in the orb
of the glisten of
the beautifully blank books,
because
they were puzzled that day -
all things had shuddered
at the taloned shock
of an impossible union:
but they would have these things real -
really real;
ach, these double-bent bones,
we should have known (or did we?)
that it was not enough for ‘b’ to follow ‘a’.
There must be something more!
But it kept leaping
and laughing away,
and they,
as if it were a Traum,
couldn’t stop, those readers, turning:
turning each vacant page -
and outside, the snow mounting,
and one black tree.
(Published in Poetry N.Z. 16. Ed. Alistair Paterson, Brick Row Publishing, Ak.
1998.)
30. the machine music moves
the machine music moves mechanically as it must because it is beautiful and is based on a legal
system of repeats but nothing is yet for sure why should it be after all the law of torts and the thinking
Thinking Thing is there, and we are part of it despite seclusion like a sheep’s or a Boffin’s head, in a
vision of perfect symmetry held in a white drop as if we could know’it all, and there’s need for
change, but who looks on, and who is who who he looks at who he looks is who - but we need all
these people who don’t agree because of the machine, which, despite its penitential and inevitable
inefficiency, is heard to cry out at deep of night to the Great One who is probably dead and ensconced
in a dream of lubricated, or lubricious cavortings toward spittle. And flesh, words that send shudders
up my spire wire’s spine loom; one would naturally much prefer to be the vision inside a technical
robot, whose doom scenes see wire mass everywhere, and, how does the spider know, because he,
too, is a constructor – or is it because the music nags us back down the drain pipe into a parallel
universe of incomprehensible equations, or a crazed jumble of electronic, electrical, and machine
parts pushed into an eclectic enclave, whose triumph is its denseness, or the enormous significance
of an endlessly looping musical track which your great great grandmother could well have enjoyed:
some post—Stochausian, post – Varese etc, not something tame like
The Songs for a Mad King:
but it all passes, even the wind machines, and the ape-shaped eyes, death thoughts, leaves, corpse
valleys, memories, inscriptions…you turn back to The Romantics, for there is something about you,
something nobody can see: as if you were the one in the centre of a gigantic sound-shriek, batting up
all hell; and no one gives a fuck, especially with everything turning into grey-gold.
something like a cat looking into your face.
31. My Voyeur
Trapped inside a poem, or an idea, we climb inside or outside the room, or slam shut the illumined
book, unfinished: splatting the answers—and it, if it which it if it then opened—
the insect logic smear-shape will be there—still not death—still only Wasness, seen we
think…strange document…
So we must read on and on and on and away from the real, not partaking—in fact—must rapidly
passage the passages—and the—the diagrams of things, the ovoids, and the unreal sexual pushing us
out and into and beside and dragging changing us back in—to become the ideas, ourselves—the story
having never been told—she, the Lustre one, beautifully delicate as a smudge—yet inviolable, for if
savagely Philomelled—death would be die, we know we read, as in sexasm—nightingaled: so we
trudge out past the pillars and the metaphysics of yes no yes no yes, until, limply, we either back creep
or creep back: consummation being destruction, the story expelling us—the shuddering now—telling
the not-Truth about shining impossibilities, or a dark expulsion and a shrinking phallus, or something
or rather of that ilk—you know—like a, like a...a...molecule in a mass, A Mass. A Mass—whose very
Oblivion, destroyed into light, is...A Mass, sung, and how we were-are not here or there, wobbling
further and further and into the possibility of something beckoning: moving yet—not moving—the
head detached—the body elsewhere, and, like the loop in the story—told ages—and that calm face,
convex, motionless, beckoning and moving—yet not moving—a molecule massing:
It all so nearly almost nearly perfect—but it would be just as triumphant or futile, to walk inside
the words. The loop, the Mass, the claritas: we open the book, we shut the book, it starts again yet
ends. It urges us on, this fatal command to know, and—and—disobey—you yourself—you who are
not you
32. Tonight, the Theatre is Dark
The theatre is dark – empty.
But the actors are there
to the man
sitting alone
at the play.
The theatre is dark
the stage is bare:
but this man has everything!
All he wants, desires, fevers for –
comes true.
He has forgotten
his misery
his hunger for other –
his loneliness.
His brain
enacts
the fieriest, most amazing
theatre.
There he is! He has no one –
But his eyes
gleam dimly with pleasure.
They glow so. The relations
are complex, and drama abounds:
these are lost, slowly these
hopes or loves are told:
and there is anger passion and angst.
It is so extraordinary.
He is enraptured by this great play.
Come let us go. Let us
leave him, quietly. Gently gently...
33. Adam Withershins (For Leicester Kyle.)
Anti clockwise
his unluck held, sexless &
immortal in the bright
& static void - fortunate
stood he sans time until
heard he the first faint
mutating marks -
by which hope
the dream of the
exact dull picture
and the homily hell,
palled him to chronic
thought begin:
Naughty - he might set alight
some burny crackly —
some blood and hate
hate and pain -
to maybe warm him, lively, actious,
to because things -
from cold as death to “poss-death”:
cause “un no”, yet, then, Yes
who nothing knew ‘till Eve:
and he entered her
that day of genetic genesis:
and it all began to begin.
34. Blackness
Beside the dream streams
where the many eyes watch,
and the shiny forkings of rivulets
erupt into babbling -
here you awake, and find
that the great sky of the world
is lustily writing poems
Your death had been one of millions.
You know nothing. You only…
Once you were lively
as shipfuls of bees.
For example, you could affirm the truth of taste:
and you transformed
into the way things always,
like scissors, or sexy girls,
disappear when you want them –
into the way things always are.
But you disbelieved the random sky,
lying about clouds and blueness.
Something – it is long gone –
drives my clamping hand
to crush a daffodil.
You are all these things
everywhere perceivable and something
that increaseth inside you
that absolute, that beautiful,
blackness
35. For it had not always been as now (For Ted Jenner)
For it had not always been as now, but if you wish to whisper me some sweet intended
tenderness, you can, for there must have been tenderness, togetherness, touching. And on some
immortal goat-clapped road our ways did. Never did we panic then. Peculiarly, I’m not that young
couple. She had her arm fiercely round him. It won’t last, part of you, the cynic, says, but freedom
dies not out with the giant oak’s demise; and in the woodlands gay and dark are such flowers, such
blossoms as Schubert or Werter mused. That he drowned, or, as we say, “topped himself”, is the shady
aspect. Did he? After all his Winterreise, for example, or, The Death of the Maiden is such music,
such love’s food I would gladly die for — well, in words I would...
Indeed, it's not now as it was, and, after all, we did the Name Thing. Would we do it all again? The
wind whips the question from your lips and just then a great foot descends to squash you in profile.
It’s absurd, if sad. In another example, the top of a head pops up, like a lid. But life is more than
doublings, there are true ways and straight as just now the agents explode in some de Chirico street
where the sense as of the Unreal hovers so perpetually that nightmares seem normal. In Robbe-
Grillet’s Jealousy for example, or his Labyrinth, the fabled detail endlessly redefines the aching sense
of possibility. The very withholding of plot or human intercession is indeed the terrible power of
everything about to happen. So, think. Think of Jason in The Sound & the Fury by Faulkner. Reading
the latter there is the feeling so palpably transmitted of a thumping petrol migraine, and of minds and
worlds corrupted, indeed evil, except perhaps for Caddy and Benji (who’se the Idiot and who first
doth the tale He tell) and Dilsey the “good nigger”, and maybe the other Quentin who drowns himself:
and to cap it all the tiny preacher…
But this isn’t something on paper. “A great Nothingness came upon me.”
And here must cease my hallowed musings.
“Hullo, I am Herr Götz, and you are under arrest, Mr. Spring.”
I nod, it is time: for all around do sleek things rush
as things thicken and speed to the dark dawn woods.
36. The People Were Ecstatic
Terrible all this thinking. I switched on the silence, destroying the beautiful deviations. The long,
purple, strange man, like a longer Spider Man: clings to the crag. Craggy. And the Grack. And.
Here they watch petrified in un-emotion past the five stones, stolen, at least a ton, where the dogs
bark. Here are the shapes, evolving: and each red of knowing: and the red, the cadmium yellow, the
ochre, the umber, the sienna, and the burnt plains of Spain wherein doth gallop Old Death, looking
for himself.
Quixote resurrect but dumb. Quixote and Pancho.
Lear staggers in and riots to the sneering stars.
The black ink makes shapes. My fingers move. My hand and nerves and fibres, and...
Press back, press back, see the white: rising like itself: and the steam of meaning.
And a bearing. A shell, grooved, 1000th of a millimetre.
They took the engine apart each night -- put it back. They worked frantically -- there could be no
conflict, no duplicity, no cold stabbed backs -- no one speaking. All knew the watchers watched the
watchers but worked on, every night. It, whatever it was, had to be done. It was. Each morning it
was there, the car, the engine reassembled: the same engine, the same car.
“But”, you cry! Nothing is like any other thing. Nothing, we think, is like any other thing.
Nothing is and anything is like and the electrons could be the same. The same is not the same
because the first same came before the other same and it’s gone now what I was thinking.
My hand dis-enjoins my arm and dances on its fingers, runs up the wall, dances, darts past a
crevice, where it is swallowed. But my other hand writes this.
Outside things remain more or less as they have been up until the following. This is where we
come in. And go out. These things must happen, or so it is written as perhaps I wrote it.
And outside it roar-rains. Rains and roars and roars rain. Roars and the cosy. Cosy things. Cosy
things wrapped. Teapots. Cosy wrapped up teapot things. Things in things and things emerging
from things. And tea. And cosys. Tea cosys.
She said "one liners". I was impressed. For where had she come from primeval five years ago?
She said "one liners". Impressed I was.
Thinking is like engines. Thing is a thing. The house travelled. For $15,000 it went back…
All I can say is that Maxwell Smart had a telephone shoe. Shoe phone had he. Spider Man and
Quixote were still to be seen. I and they had been thinking too much.
Things. Often apart do fall not centre to holding. Gyres. Rough slouching Thing. Thing Lion of
slow Slouch Hour around to Nightmare again despite desert birds indignant pitiless stone blank two
thousand vexed. Max stayed in charge and sorted out the bad guys. Blundered into it he did.
Blundered he. Things.
The dogs and the colours all began to bark again.
People were ecstatic.
37. “They are waiting.” (For my great friend, Peter Hunter. Bio-Engineer.)
Yes. There has been birth and breath and birdsong and death. And here, and now, in this time of
place, where light where light, these sensile fingers do twine and twist about the fevered face. They
wait, they wait. Yet I do not wish to leave you, my scene, my stage, my hell, my house. For it was
here that – surely you recall – the deep adumbrations, the violinocellos, the lights, the subtle shades,
and all those who came: their signals – how they breathed and bowed and loved! How the rooms
enfolded them like envelopes in the glazed and timbered cells, and the ecstatic, wriggling
quietnesses. They beckon, they crook: but no – there have been too many meetings here: here, just
here, was once The Great One – and that place was blood enriched, and over here a beautiful
bulbous bubble grew. And the delicate quicknesses, the sharps, the special clashes and the type of
night: how you took cigar as the voices rose to roar – even yes, the terror, the things, the songs, the
cadenced dooms, and the dusty settling that spills and spills: out out into the religious rustlings, the
flashings, the folds, the dragons, the coils – the angels descending. Those reds! Those blues! ….
No, no: as I cast about, there are the tenors who strut about like croaking toads in a symphony of frogs
and bogs. And the dark times gone croak. And the times of newspapers. The apple times, the pillow
times, the erections – all, all already known…And the spoons, the knives, the forks –and the – the
tables: Tabula! Tabula! Mensa! And the chairs! And that chair, that twisted yellow chair: so much like
a chair in its chairness, with its Brahmsian eternity. Great great do not forsake me good God – where
art thou?
“Come on – they are restless, they are waiting: they will have none of this. None.
Here - here is the gun. Take it. You have peered into the papers, walked the usual infinities, read
the books, deciphered the ciphers, sculptured the perfect ear. Your symphony, it was as long as
death. Peter. Beach at Orewa. You dreamed of waves. Waves on waves on waves of waves. There
was sand, and many baths. You smile, the house has such secrets. Come. It is time to turn. There!
Be half-averted, half aside – grin – ever so slightly. Here is the gun, it is beautiful, so beautiful.
Come on -”
Time cringes before the cold, capricious and Aurum lily’s snow-dropped wanting of the violet
scents.
38. The Question of Entrance
to understand what things meant would be tragic. A failure
of nervousness. I can’t gesticulate enough. Ape you me. Thus I.
Disastrous. A bolt. About this time the green and blue music
entered on harrying tip toe to a grandstand cacophony
as if a nation had been slaughtered. Reality kept on: we
couldn’t fix that, but there were pressing intrusions. I want you: you
want. He wants, she wants, they want. Everyone wants. There is a heaviness
blacks the land. What is it with you? It’s...Christ it’s getting hot. Plant something. Are they
caming? Will they be caming? What’s that? Who’s this? And so on as a thousand vermilion
vermin settled in. Ours of course to laud and chuckle over as the chairs rock unattended by
vacant of personas. The wind, apropos of nowt, whips the air and all become involved in the
drama with the chilling fingers and maybe the Laocoön. The death that young men yearn for.
They keep wandering. A hundred thousand died last week and things are everywhere. And they
flash or wink in a violent opposition of clangs, bangs, and clashes of shatter-light. All this and
more: and still more, setting store and we are thus bereft to consider the clammy cells and the
days of April: the days of yore when petrol pingle pangled out of Big Tree Cans until you fucked
with various heads, fucker.
But all this is much more than it is. In fact it is much much more than more than what it is.
Much much... All this being more: I being you and you seeking me and us as we seek you and
indeed ever shall into endless edges. The great sea turns white. And why shouldn’t it? Nothing
is. And yet the Thing playing about his frontage had sleight. Some sort of lusty legerdemain.
Les Main Sales. They are. It all started with: “You dirty boy.” The house leaked like a
palindrome; but never completely as if a savage and incomprehensible music (nationality or
race unknown or irrelevant) was and did deep-guide her quick hand, and the subject of gluttony
shifted, till one, flicking back a strand of hair, scraped back her chair and vanished by virtue of
defaulted surprise. We linguists. I, by the way, am that to be and verify.
39. and
and
the triangles are white and
shift easily uneasily into silence
as a harsh but mortal march
of numbers progress to seethe
in-as-much as nothing is known
or counted the big expanse
waits waits for no expense
as if steel spiders had
become the main object of
their own invisibility and who
are you is a question
just as the big pulse
undulates in all scenes the
movie is concise as shells
when white numbers all dominant
were in calculating these things
the music is totally tactful
and ever tactile ever soft
like a baby’s head and
ever a rain of event
and ever a progression that
still points to begin when
the endless instant of unending
love was mapped beyond abstraction
we who are not what
you and not black not
green not not and surely
white electric as stratagems and zeros
the probe is induced to buzz
these additions these concepts this play
and this white rain
and
40. Not In ‘Locus Solus’
(For John Ashbery)
these sunflowers, these would be suns
are mad with seed: as distance dims
their circles into uniline: they are galactic
those gentle devils: but I forgive them
for the sake of the shapes
and those trees of ending
that smudge in clusters - beyond:
seeing this multiface
in yellow and green
I redream the light machine
that makes eyes of them
because they are the elect, elated ones
in the ten billion page novel
of nothing built of nothing
and maybe one tear of glass
in which sad sea horses race
(these your many gemmed visions
whose lunal precisions
of yellow red and violet green
created by your instruments unseen
and as intricate as wings
or nerveless hands that lie
and clasp a plastic universe
in which nervous sands converse
in tongue filled tomb tones
(that haunt the restless towers of bones)
of something telling de the sea wave’s glint and curl
they could not stand or understand
how grit made pearl
or of a drowning thing’s last wave)
and some kind of blue sized juice
that burns September into October -
that month of yellow nightmares:
we always come round
hit by Kings –
those flores of soles
not in loces –
if the Stare doth thus us cross criss
let itself be ever unshut
on the hands, caked in earth: black, dead...
and knowing Das Lied von der Erde
and how the bees, salt singing sweet,
set up an enormous ZUM — what is, was, and forever will.
(Locus Solus is a novel by the strange genius Raymond Roussel. John Ashbery wanted to do a thesis
on Roussel. Roussel in this or his Impressions of Africa visualizes a huge glass crystal of water and a
fluid that keeps sea horses alive, and Danton’s head is forever ranting!)
41. out
he had a very strong mother
who took him out of his dream
and he shuddered again
because once it was not as it is now,
for we must be something.
but you, you yearn-fear for the
the black absolution,
that envelope of veins
that geners like a river
a “hoo” echo out of a bone ghost,
only if only the stones.
the hard mother might
weaken to a dwarfic or a deaf,
if only the stones could rage in an acorn.
I must awake now
and torch the night:
the walls hunger for graffitos
that’s greater than Twombly.
let’s go out, let’s riot, let’s smash somethin’
because of the father mother, setting fire.
what and where again is in me how howled
some increep, yet there are flashes
you know me, and once i told. She bitch
flung me into the rich arms of those fires
who kinded my death terror.
mother mother of all would not allow
those boy bullies to hack me, and so I winked, and
later my running up caught me -
burning ecstatic on the anvilled evil -
who had often breathed and knew my own knowing,
as a cat knows it is sleeping. these blood
tellings moan like Five Thousand Wind,
and he is complete of his replete, so he is,
setting forth to Flat Mountain. he is no terror
but begins a sculpture and maketh colour of
the return, SKAZ i am seize me, king
of myself on painting walls and white flats,
like my cave before me it’s right to rebel
kill the cops and smash the eye dream,
strong mother, gun; where are we now?
42. the pulsing
poss... if... ...i... the
these … these words…
t…th…the...thes...these things hanging here…...... the y wait – wait for -
meaning -
'the land cries for meaning'
...what is this hooded abscissal charge of [ the ] {l} [?] light in the Russo - gruff Silencio? -
the death all [ones?] hunger for? ...the cry? The Angels… (but it is there! The People are here…
…they would......if only…suck the meaning to themselves.....so....so such......in
so such are they!.........................................I
beg. In. (and …
and these, these other whispers of the possible....'the detail is so great it overwhelms itself and
becomes abstract...'
( the eye ) ( )
…..in the voidal loop, seeking signs....they would spin my helical ones, my matrices, my grand
Abelias, crying out with number for Number!
...oh I love you! ….the dark! ….
…. the ecstasy of the seeking dark, the hands! ................the eyes...the nerves, the limbs.....
the potent latency
( the eye )
…. what could or could have or would (you) have ….... in the Bach Red silence, the node
of could, if only that was (but ‘I am dumb’ to tell the…
….the tender thing, twisting forward...the form, the beginning..... the sheer silence...
(the fuse, the force through, the ‘green fuse’
the pulsing.......
43. Happens
the poetry of happens
down on you number girdered
bird perfect like a grinder
in white of piano teeth
the night cries
baby
bu’ yzigs a’
happy happy
comes the static death of x
not kissed
reflames again again again again again
again again
and the judder juggler
seven spins or seventy seven
winds
like the long night of night—flash
and power powder
thudder thunder thuds
by sing by sweet bad wire
dead of buds
oh cant count; cant count -
but do do do
on on on we climb into the hazy.
big it flares, big that giant eye flower:
and she stood there - beating beating beating
44. The Razumovskys of the Quartets
The Razumovskys gathered silently and with due solemnity
to be amazed at themselves: the enigma of selves, and
the intricacy of theory & grace hovered like a bee engine. They
regarded themselves and thought: ‘We are what began
and ended in an intimate musical eliteness; and a kind of sweeping, if
enigmatic, generosity of pause.’ Thus, they spoke, advanced, retreated, and:
in a perfect four, rotated, bowed, stopped, and looked: wonderfully complete.
Nor did they care about History or the Next Dark Story (but we’ll
Leave all that aside, and the impossible logic of the Grosse Fuge).
They stood: four-square, and staring out.
It astounded them: ‘Who are we that four of us are music
sucked out of “the monstrous immeasurable”? How can it be?
Surely, we are still here? This is no Märchen.
But…well…the Music Man said…it was: “as if we had dropped into a conversation that
had already started” (and): “The expectation builds.”’
But the R’s said: ‘Nothing happens in this most unpredictable of frozen worlds. We refuse
to go away. Our survival is the bizarre strangeness of our astonishment. We knew nothing
of heart or grief: we stood here in garish and negative colour. We were the red and blue
boys. We became a Quartet.’
Nothing keeps happening – beautifully.
45. Clowns
The clowns began to dance as the snow ascended
and flutes were heard in mournful tune:
things fell softly about
and milkweed grew silently
and oblivious: men with death swords bestrid balconies.
Tragedies were re-enacted at every pause.
What I don’t like is the concept of a Supreme Clock that runs
“orders” everything: something malevolent or benign
peering into every human nook and cranny, like a torch beam or a speculum.
The soldiers became shapes and quickly bloomed into method:
whereat a bell was heard to boom
and bees ‘zithered’ or ‘zittered’ here there here there
as if Alice herself had entered the Eternal garden.
A song descended through tulip haze
and infinitely, in magic array, were seen to unfold
petals of strange steel: such delight, such transgression, and
the way the questions get to be asked:
Nijinsky was such a mad another.
Die Bienen tanzten summend und zitternd von Blume zu Blume in Honigekstasen und fröhlichem
Arbeitsspiel....Sie waren die Soldaten der Freude...!” (Johannes von Zeichenstein).
46. Foreward backward
Foreward backward: then here come the march of distribution startle.
see the eagle stare. then went the reverse to space whence Unsteel.
of course you the stars. then if a bloom, Nothing is not not something.
yet a sheer. whereby enormous. once there was as steps. up upon the up.
we don’t do do. as agrarian. i indeed igloo. yet yellow. to unheard the
extent. not facing. not impending. and distributed. could shatter to
unstick the sprig because wire desire. Enough. Ich habe Genug. “Ein ‘cochin’”!
water. Satrebach (?) blue is you. something. something and a cluster.
how a) because, or b) because. thus if thus. WE weren't trunks.
Death. Mrs. Walker walked. Until a-star-surreal astir. or if. and. Dangle.
until snow. there were many Mrs. Smile. It’s not the hand. “a” passes across.
if what who when i. pigs squeal then glory. Who would? Could? Did? i wouldn’t wont do.
but the butter. if doubt—then to condition the champ. singular.
if mesons then gin. i, mightily. into the mouth. Mess. But what?
pig by salient. KEEP SOME ORDER! WE WANT SOME ORDER? Until. IT wants to be Singular.
Desperation by ballot. it declined to decline. Sun. SOARED up to sacrifice. (One metre to One
matchbox:
Six by six by six by six say. Intransigent. Implosion. Pan sudden to spider to black.
You, too, have three heads.
everything is so quietly remarkable.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
47. realism (For Dr. Jack Ross, who first published it in Pander Magazine.)
such inarticulate eloquence as
of the voice out of darkness
that not knows itself, or where
came but is ethered into night
in whose too long time, each
wire, each wrinkle a friend:
it is stupid to say this,
because a pen is a pen, but,
even are we ill with words,
those woman-red clouds as of sun
down again, we behold our
revelation, causing all to
collapse, and our interview with
the fussy mad god unrecorded,
undreamt; unheard, unrepeated:
only are our tongues
(those strangely living things,
those fern), feathered tremble
my father in the fern’s sweet
light
only is the burning, which
itself doth burn, burning
and by touching and proving,
there are, all a sudden now,
skys alive with scrolls
and the folds rolling away
like created mountains —
speechless
48. The Revela —
At first he was in a room. The room had long since
and was dim. Dim and high like a cathedral was the room.
In the usual dark of the long dark light, he saw,
or thought he thought he saw, the window to his right.
But it flashed so that it was on his left. And when he
turned, the window, the only source of light, was not
there. Only the light. Only the long soft beard of milk
white light, fading, gave evidence or credence to the
sensate percept of his sentient, alive, but aging eyes.
He snapped his head rapidly to the right, but he saw,
or felt that he thought he saw, the flash of the window
whipping behind him. He turned his head but it whipped-
or flashed, bat-like, to the front: and consequently
he saw only what he thought he saw, and the beards or
trails or emanations or phenomenom of white light,
seemed to seem to be where the window could have, or
perhaps, should have, been. Standing in the expanding
room at the centre of the expanding universe, and he
himself expanding: he laughed each time the window evaded
him. It was like a game. He shook and shook and, bloody
belly laughed like the first child. It was a game. And
it was that seeing and the impossibility of that revela —
49. Holy Night
In the rumours of the lost rooms
and the passages of the ice aged
Heart of the old young world,
confusion heaps on confusion.
He is a subtle postman comes,
and light laughs
in the corner of his garden’s face,
hinting that behind,
and in his singular brain,
his envelope encloses
his moral mind, folded,
and impossible to undo
with your voice only.
And, then, you ask:
what is this inside this
and that which resides in that?
Nothing will ever reply,
even the silence is a lie:
But we struggle,
stone by bloody stone -
stunned by our words,
dumbed by the casual
horror: numbed by our love,
bitter, alone in this pacing place:
alone in this light tormented place.
But night falls in the footfalled
halls, where the monks tread
in holy mesmery. What are these monks?
Scribing the passages
of time and what they think has been
or what will come,
what tricks of fear
that grow the ghosts
who stretch and die
that more blood be shed.
Fools! But so beautiful
are their miraculous brains, so subtle,
that we remember Bach, and his holy
enrichment of the dark.
50. to swell a progress
the moment caught—the time clasped or lazily gestured at
the relentlessness of the sun and bright trees
the massive microscope trained on the silence
of human hope or hate—something emergent and pastel in a fuzz
of beginning—a quizzical shape bending away from you:
the sexy women and the endless questions
the sad dust keeps popping
as the lanky man chews gum or rides away over the Southern Alps
in his Toyota—the deep voice—in all this rubid resonance
a voice is heard to "cry for meaning" and indeed the land cries for meaning, sobs for
significance, as we might cluster on a beach if
we were still alive:
there is talk of progress, and petrol prices etc
but insanity has its own rewards it has been recorded (somewhere) -
I reach for the pepper, wondering idly, if peripherally, whose hand it is that reaches:
lately the light has become so solid with its own ineluctability I am left
fingering my fingers—where is all that exciting Italian dolce vita they said we would imbibe
in the bemused and hazy vino evenings—laced with sad drinks and wondrous women
dressed only in their vaginas and a small covering—promising so much?
but we are used to nothing happening for ages
and return with slick smiles to the task at hand such as
the clicks and insane toys and all the other cacophanies of the night who scream with
significant laughter as we too disappear down the twisted corridors
with the grace of those who have failed perfectly and we are completely mad and
huge with ourselves
amid the gigantic lobelias and frozen leopards -
the joyful destruction continues
and we recall 'the phenomenological phallus' and the excruciatingly lovely details
it is the details we require—progress was mentioned—but Buzz kept drinking -
we who also read the technical books and wonder about the blue one and the red one and
and the endless miles to fulfill our wire blood needs &
our quietly desperate hungers—our advancing annihilation and the wonder of tree trunks
the black hands writhing and writing everywhere -
—and indeed, the beautiful futility of the impeccable evening
51. Escher
Skull in the eye ! Skull in the eye! Eyeskull. What the fock do you think
you’re doing you fockin’ Dutch bastard? Who wants all that bloody insane
and passionate precision: the exact transcription of reality into unreality?
Who the hell are you, you Kraut, you fockin’ dead genius, with your
bloody shapes? Eh? I’ll give you polly fockin’ hedron, and reciprocal
polys and polly wolly gollies you focken fock.
Why didn’t you just lash out? Eh? like I would have — slashed the paint on
and into fantastic shapes? Where was your sense of— people can’t go down and up
and out to the side? Why didn’t you paint a thousand men & women copulating
in an infinite mirror of reciprocating sucks and fucks? Eh? You bloody
creative square head. Why didn’t you
just let your head explode?
What the hell does: De Pedalternoratandomovens
and all that un-English crap mean
beside the little lizard extremely
stupid six-legged oh “so aren’t I clever
Dadda?” curlying itself into a triumph
of absurd, self satisfied, and segmented
symmetricality? Eh? Is Bugus Mechanicus
showing off to Daddy and Mummy between the
triangles written in your stupid language? Eh?
Fuck me! What’s this hand drawing itself — it can’t —
they can’t do that. They –
…They’re like Dürer’s pictures
of hands. What in Repeat's name's going on?
I don’t need no bloody Dutchman to send
my brain spinning until it disintegrates.
The hand, precisionally drawn, and shadowed,
with proper ligaments, holds a pencil in the
crack or line of the sleeve’s sleeve, and draws
the other one, which, being surprised from
its previous nothing, surprises itself itself by
gradually becoming — the whole thing being set
askance as if you didn’t have mechanical eyes.
Eh?! What’s this leaf, dew-dropped, the little
bulb of water reflecting a parabolicus,
and another leaf, frothed, on top of the other.
Come on! I’m no piece of dog’s crap —
Explain the black around it. It was done
when I was born, or that year anyway. Was
I coming you yellow head? Eh? Couldn’t you find the exit?
The bladder burst, eh? Bloody bumble of bums and balls.
—Just a minute. Yes General? Of course, of course -
Kill the bloody lot, show unmercy –
Now, where were we? Oh yes. What’s your piece
of your bloody face there? What was wrong with the rest?
I don’t want to look into your mad eyes.
I had enough of that bastard Van Gogh
with his churches incensed with agony
beyond agony, nothing to do with what
Vincent was thinking about: the whirling suns
the crazed skies and crows like old flapping ships of death
on the corn-sea as yellow as that yellow mini I just saw out the window
farting down my road. You wont get me to keep lookin’ back every few seconds
to count the hairs on your moestache.
John went on for 500 lines about Parmigianino:
that bloody wonk with the cheese name,
painting himself in a convex fockin’ mirror.
A convex mirror?! What’s that
bloody lizardo mechanico liberto doing
unbecoming from your page set at 30 60 degrees
and u-u-up onto the book, curlfully,
and then onto the set square which
has got a circle which is really a – an ellipse,
and its little hands grip the fausty book,
or the set square’s sides ‘till:
“Aren’t we great”, a tiny Crocodilus becomes
A fockin dragon — snorting King of the castle
on the top of Mount Dodecahedronicus —eh?!
You fockin’ Dutch genius. Fock!
…. And then it turns,
and dissolves back into beginning
52. Untitled (for richard lopez, of the US – poet, Blogger
and friend)
I have spoken, and deliberated, and mumbled, and thundered, at some considerable length,
elsewhere, of the importance, and the veritably sly significance of the inexplicable grey-green
gyrations, and the unaccountable beauty of the mathematics of the banana groves, wherein, we are
lead to speculate, doth fruit the famous phenomenological phallus - that black man passing quietly
about, but, I wish, now, as the shadow from the column itself replaces itself itself with itself in the
continuous illusion of, well, what is out there out there, and what is in there in there - remembering
that the centipede, dead, can no longer—squashed into speechless shades of segments on the wall —
either self-kill or kill self, who is surely- but, as I have, elsewhere, at some considerable length,
attested and affirmed; is equally, and quite appropriately, nowhere — that is, in so far as no self, qua
self, is viewed by them - They Who Watch – a FAILED ERROR, or the smirky triumph felt by some
bastard hidden inside a blister, and peering narcotically at all this truth, and progressing coldly
towards lackingness: that kind of lackingness we all foetal for, and which I need not remind you,
surely, I have elsewhere ---
Anyway, as the sun sinks, despite its convexity, we redig the rich earth, and listen, hopeful we have
not unmeasured ourselves, or created a new kind of monstrous force from some silly aleatoriation -
and that, with all things closed, all tills shut off, something ---
surely to Christ something vitally evil is swimming hotly up from the deepest ocean trench to devour
us, like something out of Les Chants de...which I never did finish....
O bugger it! —All this rivery wisdom is so bloody comparable to hot yellow horse piss, or a man
screaming out from a castle wall to the un-listening Angels:
profound and silent as a whisper in a head of stone.
53. The Sad Song of The Toothless Whore
Neither presence nor absence helps
or even intercedes in the wanting:
something participating in the reassuring
like a disease of speech
or the contradictory bongle sound
of a pipe upon a pipe, leading -
those who secret from themselves,
down ever more
steeper slopes, fast forward to
the no-possibility of
anything greater than the laughter
of a head in a barrel
pondering a spider nightmare-
the mail gets thru, maybe. But
laughter is its own last and best defense.
We tried touching
but it failed - e’en ten million years ago,
because slime is slime,
the blind are blind
and the dying are dying.
I can’t, my skull.
In the meantime, a song is required:
‘ if testic is of zap
what is wooden in the gap
and where and if by goyle grins?
and if the wedge is wood,
is Philip thus and still by this
as perhaps the progress of his grin?’
None of this helps, but in the night
old hands reach out to touch
flaccid skin, ever failing cells.
Our assignment is death, but how?
After all, that black honey
is burning us up: the horribleness
of human love, hopeless,
and the universe opening up
like the sad cunt
of a toothless old whore,
dreaming of gold.
54. The Arrogant Swans of Silence
on the top of her writing
which never ended about the Swans of Silence
it led to the tremor. At this stage ended.
Everything, even Galanthus plicatus
is consumed -- or is that "consuming" or "consumable"?:
which it was it a dark dark draak day today in the
dunkel Tag dunkel Tag dunkel Tag
when the Morepork flew off
as if it knew. For we
fell to our Repast, feverishly writing, and made much of our Report.
Again the needle, again -- again the something. The
Something mumbling of a massacre,
or a scarecrow, a sunrise, a bird, or a million
pepper-shakers. Frightened e'en, he looked
about for a second. Of course.
Topmost the central thing
had enveloped all with
its inscrutable haze, whose
outlook seemed endless yes.
things came down upon us
almost as if
the land had unrolled
like a mad Thinking Carpet for our benefit:
as if we could persuade the meat
not to eat, it being Sunday
and all: and you and I
were horrible Freude in endless dream
of red things gesticulating about white things
barking on the endless ice floes:
as Time Herself swept cynically magnificently past
like barrels their endless rumbling:
or the arrogant Swans of Silence
55. Where Has She Gone?
...pitched beyond any limit of animal bearable: the immense solid of it sinks into and
beyond the now sloughing differential integrate as indeed it undersinks where there are
gaps into which near-black light pours with micro-bubbling voices: whose total clamour
sticks as an unimaginable white bone structure to animalize the complex queer fire as
weird night ascends its green laugh and hideous hand. Yet there is a kind of beauty in
children and the very multiplexity, juncture, and individuation of the perceived
discreetness of things. "I advise discretion" is writ in strange & indecipherable pulsations
purple over the arched gate wherein all who enter do dissolve to be found, themselves:
only in strange codes, and encryptions devious that e'en The Great Green Head is hard-
pressed to bring to satis which, all know, was the word Miss. Tilly giggled over in our
Latin class, so many so many years afar, in long long gone times made sad by silly
memory and tampering with Time Himself. and yet, irrelevantly, as these things transpire,
we proceed with "Ich habe genug": sung with such richness, we wonder what and why
we are in this immense soup bowl of incredulous delicious endings -- endless – that we
forget.
then a bird, held in a nightmare-mesh of fantastic algebras; looks with poetic
perspicacity into our all-knowing, yet probably, black, eye things: these have built out
from the nothing of the nothing to the something something of themselves and it will have
none of it.
from one of the bubbles bursting: something pops out, shouting announcements of hope
despair and joy, and, we too, skip gaily in the half-light: but nothing is known of these
final things, for at this very nunc, mother calls out that dinner is ready, and, indeed is on
the table. Tabled...
"Eat up. We are together again, my son. These things shall resolve and pain lessen: for
indeed it is true that: that huge Latin dictionary by Lewis & Short I got for you, which
you treasured yet somehow lost, is e'en now gone: but there is yet time. Outside the birds
descend and – see, look – my garden, and my lavender: where play and indeed, endlessly
do hum, the eternal and beauteous bees. Bumble bees too we need for the climbing beans.
Remember these deep truths my son. Life is long and brief. Eat: I command and implore
of thee: for these things have I sadly, in love and care, prepared for us."
56. For Those Who Feel
I hired Van Gogh from the library —
No, I didn’t —
I didn’t hire Van Gogh —
I hired the painting of him
from the Panmure library:
There, self-wrestling on my wall,
his painted pain.
I lean back in my bed,
and watch him warily —
and he has been watching me ever since:
You know the one —
whirling background
like the mad granulations of the sun,
or a blue-green fire,
curls, blue-flowing onto his jacket...
And recall that jagged
haggard look of torment —
red beard flaming his unshaven face.
Just another lonely man:
Not a wizard —
a genius, yes,
but solitary, haunted.
Is this then our condition of knowing
the repeating wonder of the ever-birthing world;
the dazzlings,
the intense shinings
like the sun in your rear-vision mirror,
and the ecstasy of music,
that only child-sight
keeps fragrant,
as age dulls;
and Time screws us up like
a demented writer tearing out his writings —
making balls of dead paper failure:
Is this our price to sense?
Crisp apples remind the youth,
but later, death grips his shoulder —
there’s always a price — you name it!
Anyway, Van Gogh and I, continue to
Regard each other’s face:
he, or his work, is a greatness.
So much said
So much unsaid:
Poor Van Gogh — you were still reading
the world’s song — when you shot you —
you made a choice —
Love, isolation, genius:
nothing was enough,
or is enough,
for those who so deeply feel or fear.
You bled the last of your rich red pains…
They expired into your yellow, red, green
and purple flaming dreams and loves,
weird and magical as yellow spiders in black fields.
57. Veronica's Song
The light of life, dark-edged by death is how we view the mountains and the fever's
restlessness of. Things move, always, toward the dawn. I must concentrate. “These
days, these days....” she declaimed, “we live inside all the fantastic operas of wind
and song where apples in golden feet
perpetually clamber the ladders of uncertainty; and said ladders, whose
hope is the ultimation of their entering into a new round of rock rages
and the potential variables seen distantly to forever spark sometime with
electric eyes in the eagle far lands, indeed are propped against the castle
itself: where, as you have long been apprised, the tiny ones mount and
by and thus so is made to awaken into a rich new life such as “the
all frozen History of the Procession of Innocents” and the icy
Fabulae of Encroachment who are eternally repeating themselves–
and whooshing spears are screaming and stinging
their reminders of the notorious harvests and hells and hopes;
wherein all finally collapses into a corrective joy whose
Ode outreaches and out-Freuders the tall cupboards of the
vertical sea that rises daily like an immeasurably
high Moby Dick of Whiteness; and thus indeed into All-thought
and All-resolution and into all that creamatic daunsinage —
and verily those leaps and claps of high fives and fading sadnesses
intermodulate the transformed white potentiality of The Possible —
whereat Great rockets are seen stupidly shooting and shouting upwards
to a muscle-bound hulk of delicate fading into the soft image
of the terribly golden but sullen spike?” Here she paused.
It was like a song. What did it mean? She asked. None, including us,
could say. Our previous puzzlements had nothing to of this
august amalgam. The woodlands around were alive with all those things:
the ‘mires of complexity’, and the passion of water over stone: and
the eternal movement of mice.
Wilkins stared at the plain and then later at the stairs and wondered.
Something, in the dark centre, all unseen, was writhing. Convulsing.
All entered this place, and there was at least a kind of order. Veronica has
something, indeed, without knowing it she was often ‘onto something’.
Her frequent musings solved not, but pointed a way, or several ways. You had
been thrust untimely into this horrid place before your time. (Of course you
could descant, or espy… Often you entered beside an Impressario.) You kept
your bib dry. Clouds gathered, and The Hand, in all honesty, pushed all away.
Had not each, in their time, known of the rumour of Whyness? The sad dark
was sure if not yet final. Computations were made and remade (in a certain
thorough and incomprehensible staring of that special, lovable, and hitherto
unseen, insanity.) Thoughts in loops fell off crowded shelves. Those who
slept in That Time, shivered, as if Geronimo had gone crazy againe, and great
impatient cracks in great glass appeared: as all collapsed and inter-lopped:
and nothing fitted anything else.
The nightmares came later… Meanwhile a great bat whooshed past
58. Humpty Empty Back Make
If only sitting on a wall, considering the nature of all things
and that the world was all that it was
we could recreate the miraculous of an automatic gearbox:
the planetary gears, the wonderful worlds, just
by logic and how the way is forward into the shadows
where those we had encountered
were laughing or smiling but in ways
our dream couldn't explain.
we sought things and went down:
after millions and without a second
we had arrived to greet shyly Humpty:
this gave us pause, for were we not in King Country?
we thought of all possibilities realising this was Lie as
indeed caverns opened and we cried lustily into their echoes
as we were not afraid. But should we have been?
I read the inscription that was forever not far although endlessly
changing and behind, in the passageways, Metal Men on fire
were clanging and cooking up a storm...Their electric sex guitars exploded with
ideas....
this was our find:
read you this and you will soon know of
the reading and the feeding of it, despite the sneering
statue's visage in the desert staring at the lone and level sands
which were, as you were cognisant, stretching
far away...and I...The Mighty...looked indeed on those works.
but we will save all that for later:
this is what we deciphered in the cave light:
"Here are: 'multiplicity of centres
leading as in
assonation to detonate
under the car
precocious
destruction like Humpty –"
So, this was it was it! We stared up at Caterpillar.
all was always there tomorrow. What could we say?
we were caught in the theory of everything and the clinging vines
began to clutch ever more feverishly....
the Hookah was withdrawn then the smoke sucked in.
was this then what we had come for? Humpty was on the wall
and yet he was still there. Nothing had moved. we had spread
into endless differences and no one was stopping us.
the logic was perfect, but something was missing. we were especially concerned
about the lengthening shadows as the day was wound down
by the circulating hooks of the tired janitors.
These were everywhere…and the King's Men? Up they galloped. Up they came. And
the roses were…were…were…ex-ex-x-x executed.
Humpty came together, disobeying the arrow of time.
this was a message. We felt it we put our ears to the ground as all good Pilgrims do.
could we reach the river? would we die in the right way?
would we need pomegranates or shekels? rich! how did we play this game? was it a
game? 'There was much sport in the making...' he chuckled.
We were expectant. I don't want to go through all that terrible logic again.
the infinite waves are racing toward us. we dive into a morass. we are
consumed inside Meaning. there are endless meanings but only one or there
are none. the byways the subways the overways. all-ways do to The New Land lead.
we were intrigued. here, somewhere, over there, over the horizon: was History. we
could call ourselves Techno Men or (singular) History Man. we had eternal
cornfields spreading and expanding before us. we spoke of ourselves. we were the
enormous expanse. grass to flesh. and death was inherent. we came to an agreement
with death. we didn't wish to be out of the picture. the movie must go on.
So, here, Gertrude intruded…(as someone commented). vastly we laughed.
we moved. we wondered idly about The Wall. Why was Humpty on the wall? Soon
the Walrus would swagger up snidely. we needed vinegar. we needed all kinds of
paper work. the wonder work of Man's hands. What a piece of thing is Man! How
noble in aspect! How infinite his Jest! How immense the sand grains and great the
Cave Mouth. were we alive or dead?
Humpty went backwards, defying the arrow. We all laughed at this movie as we
knew it couldn't happen in all time.
and it wasn't happening. we were in illogic logic. we were
almost alive. A Great Chuckle was Heard. these things from
the ancient days to you I relate. we whirled the sling. Dave got
in a good shot. down went Gol. this was getting good. this was
one thing following another. going backwards to the endless beginning
we were no time on our knees…
…but we abandoned all that. we tore off fresh sheets of paper…
...we would write some more in the morning.
What of what Kings would we be?
In any case They all celebrated The Great Death, everything about which we
immediately failed to recall forever running backwards
in a wall of wind.
59. Composition
By keeping the mystery at bay with its sheets of clouds, and Big Nose thundering in the torment of
that which is not only a far far better thing I do, ad nauseam, but which is brought in with the big
bright sheets of steel to mirror the vacant music —
thus redefining the poker in the ashes, and searching for gleams with a butterfly net of light, and
finding to all our consternations, neither the living or the dead, hopefully.
But now we’re in the supermarket by the burning coffee packets — and there you stand!
I saw you, shrinking, as the sedge withers and no birds sing as you conspire to bless the fruit, and its
oh so Belle Dame Sans Merci or ‘Autumn’ itself oozing its expectorations of words like “plump” or
“gourd”, which, by knack, I’ll die myself to be still so schoolboy loving - the point about the
Romantics old Possum made -
And so and thus I’m discovered here, procrastinating behind the arras: here with my big-as-truck
lights- baby eyes, so excited how the packets of things, how the pictures, how the moving, how the
colours – the numbers, the people, the illusion of order: rather like a maniac in a mirror, saluting
himself as the violin sparks up romantic, and there’s a rousing rondo
as the city is slaughtered into seeds.
60. snow might
snow might work to make of it
a supernatural beauty as the
extreme curvature of the glances
of things are integrated into
the sweep of snow and
the trapped sense of everything
until we are placed or replaced
by history whose edges
begin in black lines
on a blank white map
whose wicked obligatory
is never more than a deposit
into the possibility
when cold is thundered
through all things alive or dead
as Horse makes his way
to the coffee stand at the lonely
hour when so much is dependent
that those who droop are
carefully ignorant of the
endless energy of artists
or the mystery of sex drives
and thought as if
a container of light
crossed by signals or black wire
might erupt in a neuron to race
in a horsed yet controlled frenzy
of motionless light alert: and
snow might erupt into plum purple hate
as if the art thought was
maybe something like a claw of distance
61. the dust gathered light
as perhaps
an angelic bumble bee
who greater than his size.
as if the silvery wing’s
incipient shudder
reminded him.
the tendrils were tender
as if a muscular
percipience
argued tendentiousness:
or a wing curve
is something
if not even not more,
whose escape velocity
described a design’s death
because there are thousands
under blood, whereupon the stones.
62. Murdered to Rose
i’ve been murdered to rose not really my dear white one, why rose white. why. why rose. not dead
really. i rose. my murdered. not really my i’ve. not really. not really to rose my white. dear. dear
one. dear murdered one. white to rose. rose my dear, dear rose. murdered really, murdered. not re-
ally. not my white one. one. one white red rose. rose rose white dear. rose rose my white. my one,
my one. rose i’ve been. rose i’ve not. rose i am. rose. murdered rose. rose dear murdered really
been. been. to. been to murdered not. really my rose. really.
‘ive. been. murdered. to. rose. not. really. my. dear. white. one.
my dear my dear my dear my dear my dear my dear my dear my dear.
my rose white dear rose one.
have murdered not really to rose not really to rose my white my white my white.
my rose! not really not really my dear white one.
63. number 5
ice findings: and there was a mystery
into ice findings as we edged
we edged and the huge thing. it
was there. that we knew. why. only
in golden tumbles full of many whitenesses.
and it was then. it found it. you
reached past me: we clasped forever. all
was beginning. the everlasting seed. as if.
ice night. sweet to never. never let. just
bathe, and all tumble on is the gold
on black: all plush the sharp sign. it
blazed out of the black like an irridescent plum. it
had what it took. it took what it had. it was luscious. and
the sounds. they were deluscious. the sounds had soft found
the ice light: the illumined room was brain-sized. and hands.
hands were quick, soft, dextrous yet always
were finding. no one can know. no one is allowed in. but if
you are out, you are in: and we turn the key as big as the door.
the key. the ice brass key. it is clever this trap. ecstatic sap.
big to blue to head. ice findings. we will. and you and you and, you. be.
64. Gareth Farr’s Wasp Factory
there were hints of telling me something came the Music. microscope. there were
hints, telling Me something. That’s how it came what is it telling me to gloom, and
thus beyond something and Beyond was sound. and they were yellow, beyond
Stripe, beyond stripe and utter. Utterly. thus it rose, clang. thus buzz, like an insane
Wasp it whipped itself and dying. you know, wolf, how to Sound there spun new
and ancient thunders to thus confirm. unmanned, It turned, as all sky turns, and
History turns, and all Time. If all Time was now, where would we then. Eternally
to present before. again, again i Slip on the bottom rung. I’m not dead, and the
Eye-Speech is by Devils filled, is there hope the Giant is wounded and why. Yet it
is telling me something stupid hawk and conservative. all, all could burn, all could
be Formaldehyde. do I love you and now we make again, everything Froze.
nothing except everything ceases until i remind me you. again yet again i Ascend,
ancient as a dead drum. up i go, And the sky becomes me, until i hear again,
nothing there is to above me, something sleek. Sleek as feather snow. some event,
and my Hand holds a globe of steel. i am. it is all very strange. how are you do
come in, i think about You deeply, and everything is lovely, if only the Divine Rose
would yet reflame into song light. Something holds me high. Only I can say lovely,
being thus am i terribly shaken, and am terribly not. And what am i.
but then. then. Then the nudges, the winks, and the dark blue innuendoes behind
dark blue windows, and Sailors, drowned sailors, the innuendoes of sailors, of
sailors Drowned, of a thousand sailors drowned. Sailors who dream of sound and
song, and i’ve been Murdered to Rose, not true my dear one.
and they speak and tell, speak and Tell, as tiny silicate sounds
shriek and break In microscopic spots
65. LOVE
Your absent presence transcends me white bird and I am lost.
Let us descend this agony.
Moon pearl—seen
sends them blind and mad.
I could whisper “love” into your every cell.
This day we arise we know not where, and the blackness bursts.
You whose eyes have awoken gods, incinerate my soul with gentleness.
Their graves were mountainous.
I cannot diverge - but the sea god rears, and
the gigantic horses of applause burst in our ears:
we who live again in black
resplendence, like a vision of shining coal.
‘I was the shadow of the wax-wing slain / By the false azure of the windowpane / I was a smudge of ashen fluff – and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. / And from the inside too, I’d duplicate / Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate: /
Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass / Hang all the furniture above the grass, / And how delightful when a fall of
snow / Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so / As to make the chair and bed exactly stand / Upon that snow,
out in that crystal land!’ Pale Fire by Nabokov.
66. Glass Swan
It was then I saw ‘a swan of glass carried by’.
Startled by this development,
I hunched into the hill of myself, as
the blaze of dying time and the blue-backed expanse
of the sky exploded silently.
Glass everywhere became and in showers we relived
endless mirrors and slices everywhere silicate.
I could not see for a great light, a great grace.
But it didn't help, for I believed not enough
and felt only terror when we with joy did shine.
Then he equated, calibrated, summated....
All was nut-shelled. All. It was greater than Deathstein,
or Bach. It was all. All. I was sort of 'The Way, the Truth, the Light.'
But what could we do with it?
How, I asked, could I live with this truth?
I cogitated and played with wax
until ergo: and I walked, imagining things.
Oft times sat I then in caves
convinced by shadows: or I turned toward the greater sun:
or I was the measure of ALL, or the Clock itself:
or I awoke to find all Ks had changed, only to revert, smilingly.
Sometimes I was blind. Then I saw. All. It went hard with me.
Once I was 'chosen', only to fail. I was indeed, perfectly failed.
Days we raved to It on Setebos: days and times we seemed to know:
but the isle was full of false trails, non-sequits: and nothing made sense:
I might have been a god: nothing stayed in my head:
I made puzzles I could not live inside: like "How could he not make
a second Self?" and "He hath made things worthier than himself."
Thinketh me much to much (too much) until all raged:
but everything seemed glass. Many had glass eyes, but could see:
this we were informed. And they understood how to see:
how a hand from many sides (or any) yet had five fingers, not two:
how five wasn't two. How everything greater than itself -
if thought was - was an Immortal Unicorn of Form. That, they intoned,
clinched it. Case closed. I averred. But what do I know?
For millenia I froze like the glass itself. I have known glass, have
tasted glass, touched glass, spoken with glass:
and hath with water danced on glass.
I was the great liquid crystal of glass. A window of glass
through whose crystal lands they pass eternal down crystalline seas of time...
A swan, crashing into that glass, could become the beautiful shadow.
Then a hand, white on black night, tapped on that glass.
It was insistent: it had God and hell in its sound.
What was it? What do we know? No reply. No return.
Frozen, embalmed, absurdly proud: would it ever sing?!
These questionings were irrelevant. I was my own measure:
but nothing of this or even of totality could I ever convey to you.
I then moved the Sun. It flew into space. I became the Sun. I was
the Sun. Everything flew. Everything was alive, afire, and made of War.
Millenia. I built a house and learnt to speak again. I walked the lanes
that converged with increasing purpose.
I have forgotten much, in this land, this crystal land.
Then I slept, and they flew about my head. I was near dead (dreaming).
Reason had fled, but I kept faith, I presented all monstrosities:
all were depicted. My face, always there, somewhere.
I bent reason. Kept covenant. I left everything in. I bore witness.
______________ ___________________________ _____________________ _____________________
Third Section: Victor Taylor, my son. How he Lost his Eye His Troubles
______________________________________________________________________________________
The next poem [my late friend, Nick Owens also wrote a poem re the event], I feel, needs definite commentary.
It was first written in a different form. The incident that caused it to be written took place in 1990. I had moved
to Panmure I have edited it and added a voice, a kind of dream voice, beginning: ‘Something (near incoherent)
speaks: “Those who….”
That I put as if it were words coming from a dream, and like, many of my poems, a deliberate ambiguity is
exploited. The Police are not 10 feet tall, nor do the bash things to bloody lumps. G. M. Trevelyan points in his
A Social History of England out that the formation of a Police Force in England by Peel, meant that tragedies
such as the so-called massacre at Peterloo in 1919 (St. Peters Fields) did not recur. (Although a good book to
read also would be E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class). At ‘Peterloo’’, Hussars were
used and many people were killed. They were protesting for a better and more democratic voting system and
or conditions as there was great suffering among people of the middle and working classes. Shelley’s poem
‘The Masque of Anarchy’ (almost a revolutionary call) wasn’t published in his life. As time went by England
passed many reforms and the state of England, in relative terms, became more democratic, liberal etc. It would
be hard even now and especially then (just after the Napoleonic wars when those in power feared a kind of
Jacobin revolt and so on) for a ‘First World’ liberal democracy as Fukuyama calls them, to have what
constituted elements of a National Army to interfere in social and judicial issues. We now, partly due to reforms
initiated in England have almost universal voting and good judicial rights, and yes, overall, a good police force.
In England in 1919 and in the years before, there was a very much higher crime rate and far more acts of
violence than now.
However, the state of humans is, in many ways, still, even in NZ or “enlightened” nations, are still far from
what we might have.
But this is not a naïve attack on the NZ Police or the Justice System, nor quite a political poem per se, as
‘others’ are noted in and around the Court. My son had suffered a lot of bullying at school and also the effects
of my own marital breakup and other factors led him into depression and despair and he ran off one day (in
central Auckland) with a knife, saying to my daughter Dionne that: ‘This is it!’ He tried to cut himself and, quite
inebriated, he ran around the district and into a property. The owners, seeing the knife, naturally called the
police and helicopters and so on were soon on the scene. It was getting dark. Attempting to disarm my son, a
policeman missed his arm and struck his eye, causing the eye’s complete destruction. The focus of the poem
is on this tragedy. The police had to arrest my son and he was charged with assault. The poem was written
not too long after the trial. He was not convicted. The incident (it could have been worse) was traumatic for
Victor, his mother (Mary Manoah) and sisters, and myself. This incident informs much of what I have written
since. Even though my Blog Eyelight was not named for this, this aspect of my son’s eye lost (and the use of
‘eye’ or even ‘e’ and much else) came to permeate throughout that ‘project’ and the Infinite Project. (If people
want to know more about the political side of Shelley, Richard Holmes’s book The Age of Wonder is a great
book and includes information on the Romantics, Herschel the Astronomer and musician, and Cook’s and
other voyages, especially that financed by Banks, to, partly, observe the Transit of Venus and explore the then
relatively unexplored (by Europeans) Pacific. Also, he discusses the science of those times, and the
experiments by the Royal Society which I think indirectly led to Mary Shelley’s great book Frankenstein.)
This poem reflects the one I read, soon after the trial, at The Shakespeare Hotel, and is almost, part of it,
unhinged. The focus should be on the actual event. (I have somewhat re-written it). More terrible things happen
each day. Our police may be among the best in the world. This is not to say they are not, in some cases, biased
etc. But those questions divert from the actual event which means my son lost an eye and it increased his
decline into depression and to Schizophrenia. However, Victor is much better these days and is writing poetry
also. I have three children, I love them all, and I live with Victor and he is, indeed, a gentle (but courageous)
man. We help each other.
67. The Policeman Still Has Two
In the place of Justice, at the Court,
I sit among dark, strange, beings.
People brush past.
Lean lawyers, men in suits, chat
with savages. Street girls smoke
and laugh. A fat, sad man, is fined.
A transvestite titters.
(Broken and unbroken people.)
The Judge hardly glances
at a boy, nervily shifting in the dock;
He has only one eye. What does it see?
A dark woman, as elegant
as a queen, sobs from an interview room:
I hear: “Both of you have, the...guilt/
The grief...” Or was it "burden"? A lady in
uniform walks past. I wait.
My son has one eye.
Lawyers from behind their ties, explain.
My son has one eye.
The dark night has gone.
Something (near incoherent) speaks: “Those who
have been destroyed by those they destroy
are kept for the wicked Ogres
in their sneery woo wah wooh wah
waspy cars. They club the Guilty Night to bloody lumps,
Like Weeders in a jungle, they are ten feet tall
and they are green
and they are red
and they spit death blue
and they are cruel to be kind:
and their great, bulging
Yellow eyes, burn merciless and blind.”
My boy has one eye. One!
The other one was burst…
He had run outside and cried
that a big in him had died.
The eye, infinitely aware, was all life long
in it's marvelous/ billion-step creation / billion-step making.
One…
(After vast tine unfolding
it shone in a baby’s face.
It grew to manhood.
A policeman, dutiful: burst it with a baton.
The eye was as beautiful as every eye.
My boy, my green and gentle boy: has only one eye.
Victor cried for help -
They smashed away his eye.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Fourth Section: The Secret of Being Unpopular
________________________________________________________________________________
68. The Secret of Being Unpopular
Only those, such as Master George Meredith, who
have mastered the lost art of “tedious amusingness”
can truly be accused of the futile but beautiful
pursuit most diligent of that high mission
that is “the secret of [its] unpopularity”. Thus, this,
we: drawn by erotic convolutions of loops of words,
and the fire of tedious repetition and ridiculous hope,
do deeply master like the sedulous apes we are.
Only then, (appareled in the “glitter of eternity”),
and with vestments thus divest, can we, and
indeed They, even begin to “crawl toward death”.
Indeed, our fops, our dilly Dandys, hop toward the mire
in sore mock of life, in mock of love…and yet, we
have a special place (possibly a Palace place) for
them. For they tried. No one it is we know who
not have tried we don’t give our greetings toward
in our effort to out-clever those shrewd shrews:
mad mumbling marvelous gorgeous apparel all glittering
in the smokelessness. Thus we make or unmake our ways.
The madness of…
For to whom is such an ambition of total annihilation
and self-destruction not deliciously attractive?
What indeed is it that we assail, nay, essay, to do:
we slaves of Montaigne with our tormented
needs, spelling our love of signs and sighs, our lust to be:
at least to continue to be after our own ignominious or
glorious decease? But when was death, the death of
any being or thing once alive, or the demise indeed of
any idea or thought or impulse or whim, “glorious”?
Put “glory” to the many corpses of History – interrogate
the dead. Put it Dante to them they “died for freedom” and
they will wish to you they had lived for life. Most would be
terribly perplexed, e’en frightened. And indeed, History continues
to kill: Bang! Bang! Bang! It all goes, getting louder and more more.
And we, indeed, are “put out” and embarrassed by our own silliness…
For we slug on through waves of mud and horror, even on the good days…
What, they might interrogate, is this wonderful freedom?
Is that what the Americans do so loud fervently in the world?
Bomb for freedom and democracy?
We could add, and “who put the mock in democracy?”
Clever clever clever clever. These political musings lead us
off into brown dreams of twisting lanes turning to a copse
where in summer by the stream, the thrush and the nightingale
are heard by the red or yellow flowers: and the dark mutter
is forgotten. We have plod our weary ways and move now as in
a mellow mist of deep blue miasma toward some ghost or
Spirit in conspiring Autumn: as we crackle across the dry leaves,
and step into or through the hectic red: the music follows, and tells
endlessly of the sweet songs and the nothings so eternally whispered.
What are we? Tormented. But Spring is coming up in about fifth place.
Good old Spring! He, or she, remakes us; whatever we are.
The apple wagons creak forward as told, and we are now
less cold and surely a rising sanguinity begins
on our soft cheeks to bloom. Later sex is to be invented
by such as D.H. and then all the vituperation will start.
But we are still left musingly in the heaved hills where
the good dead lie, or not: theirs is a true lie. For who
could resist being in such a great poem of time?
Who could resist being to bloom unseen
and waste their sweetness? But was it a waste?
None can say, the dispute continues, but the fiction is wonderful and
Dad would start it: “The ploughman homeward plods
his weary way, and leaves the world to darkness, and to me…”
And THAT is indisputable.
My grandmother of Kettering or Bedford or wherever she came from
was a Gray, born in India. Kipling and Forster’s India. India’s India.
Here (it is here), one starts giggling in the face of the idea of
‘mokopuna’ and ‘ka mate’ etc. It is here we
realize that, all along, the mad laugh of The Official Lunatic has driven
these designs, these sighs I mentioned, not to mention all
the writing, the chemical-spiritual signals whose import is
totally beyond us: having sped away in the latest
high revving high compression Jap-mobile.
…all the King Georges nod simultaneously. They are wise
with their infinite ignorance of anything.
Which is indeed our problem. After all, we, like the Mad Ones, or in fact,
like Lear, the Fool, Cordelia (all to die much to Dr. J’s chagrin and despair) –
we are slowly forgetting everything as we too become a hand imploring
from the mud, or a Thing stiff and stuck in Hitler’s Big Idea:
we and the millions: just imagine those terrible corpses
were yours, your sons, your loved ones: it rings so true
it cannot be denied…and yet they keep on celebrating
this masculine madness, this genetic horror of
progress or some other such idea
spreading its arse flaps.
Rictus Rick walks among the uncaring dead
and counts the plusses, as there are always plusses:
In fact, come to think of it, there are all those lovely
white ones, the seemingly endless rows, so
white and neat, so meaningfully white and so
bone clean – continuous, they, that shine, could be a milky way
a way to be milky and sweet like the condensed milk
we used to have.
“Are speaking of wars and time and suffering?” a wise friend had spoken.
Look for a book, find something to write about. “Look at those books
you were trying to sell, chaotically arranged. To your left to your left…this one
could be a subject…what about this one? Surely it involves the big questions?”
He was right, I thought my friend, he even suggested a silly approach…You are a
poet, or try to be, he said, and poets are all, or most are, mad…invoke the Richards,
invoke the maniac laugh. But don’t go Pounding.” No, I agreed, I had no great love
that Pound, great poet as he was, for certain culture, or views on usury etc etc….
My problem as I put it to my friend, is that I am, well, I am not interested in ‘being angry’
with history, or an angry anti-Savage Colonizer ((However, I decided to study that poem and Avia’s
work in the book of that name and it is ‘growing on me’ so to speak. And the question such as Avia
face is how to ‘shock’ or animate people as well as write interesting poetry. Her attack on Cook is
ridiculous if taken on face value, but good and not so ridiculous as a ‘way in’ to a kind of poetic
historical-political poem and overall, it galvanized me to further read about Cook and or more of
NZ and Pasifika history. (Indeed the history, the anger, the being ‘angry with history’, this is all
futile but perhaps one admires the attempt). Although I am not Samoan I did study that language
when I was in my ‘protest days’. My ex-wife was part Samoan so my own daughter Tamasin is now
involved (professionally and personally with Samoan people as she looks into her ‘origins’ I
suppose) … I can talk but I have always regretted ‘getting angry’ [see Dr. Wayne Dyer of ‘Your
Erroneous Zones’ for this] but indeed despite the “advances” (they are not ‘advances’ such as
correlations (they are Functions in fact of) between Liberal Democracy and prosperity etc, as
Fukuyama describes them, Capitalism and Democracy.) we still have the present debate and indeed
a complex, indeed tragic history etc in and of NZ or Aotearoa [My name sake the 19th Cent.
Minister RT, wanted to call NZ ‘Te Ika a Maui’, despite being a Pakeha he wasn’t ‘all bad’…!] and
Pasifika, but to understand it we need to understand as much of ALL history as we can)] but this not
my approach per se]: but I had, while being as inaccessible as any stupid Computer Being could
ever be, with any wooden, limited, and ultimately flawed simplicity (although I can see that that
very ‘simplicity’ as I indicate here, can be a positive weapon in some cases, but as well as attack
there is say, Te Kooti’s guerilla methods, his cleverness in evading the NZ Govt soldiers et al and
also the ‘paper war’ that is still far from lost, confusing as the issues can be of the Treaty and the
Waitangi Tribunal. Despite the tragedy of the Pacific as written about by Vltchek)) … Mine then is
more a phenomenological and ontological as well as ‘epistemological’ ride: I realize that one is
‘doing something’… and people feel, and thus misinterpret…In any case I took the quotes under the
photographs … and ran with them … of course a lot of silly stuff came into my ‘poem’ and now I
felt something was wrong… But what was is wrong is History… or history is just what it is… and
my reality is mine…that is all I can do is do what I did…even if I had no actual intention… But as a
Madman…maybe a less insane Moosbrugger… I could speak… So, I edited some things.
[Useful here might be Andre Vltchek’s ‘Oceania’ and e.g. ‘Black Flu: 1918’ by Geoffrey Rice and
any other NZ and relevant other history books. But we have attend to all history, guilt is not
involved. Guilt or worry are, indeed, quite futile as is anger. Yes, there are wrongs but let us be
still…Let us consider these things, perhaps in the depths of the night. We are all suffers on Earth.]
The point here is: there are no theories to prove. All attempts at theory to ‘better the world’ or
explain wars etc etc have failed. Science doesn’t help. Science can do a lot of good but it also can
lead to … even to destruction… Humans are feeling beings, logic, masses of facts, great
Universal Cosmic Theories of all kinds, all these things are toys if humans cannot live and love
together. And nothing cures death. The big issue. I start with a pseudo-Romantic allusions (many
actual allusions or rewrites, as, for example, I know many of the poems in question very well) …
Then I “chose” (by chance) the Holocaust… But one might perhaps choose the Inquisition, or the
30 Year War, or all the horror and fascination of human history… but de facto it is also fiction as
Herodotus is. A great sweeping fiction. Faction. The English patient in the book by Ondaatje, reads
or has his History read to him. It is the semi randomness of Herodotus…which echoes somewhat
the ambiguous way the bomb defusers etc see WWII, and as to who is on whose side…the
mysterious patient is a Nazi agent…but it doesn’t matter…History knows that humanum est errare
and indeed deeply fallible… So, all I can ask is for you to recite the Lord’s Prayer, that beautiful
thing. Or to fiddle with a stone. Or let us add: Forgive us our wrongs, forgive us our
unknowingness, our folly. Science is and always will be futile in ‘deciphering’ ultimate questions…
and indeed so will all other disciplines… we are not answering the whys the scientist says, we are
talking of the hows… But even this is shrouded in mystery. (Of course, science and maths [maths
versus language*, maths learning is not important, language is, massively] can still be used… But
there is no final knowing: ‘The last word shall want a word…’ there is always a question to an
answer…always another query… there is no end to our questions… But we have, somehow, to
continue to live, to be… somehow… * E,g. An article in a Maths Journal written by a
mathematician discussed how mostly mathematics is never used by the vast majority… but we all
need to communicate well and to be kind and we need, as Auden writes in a poem somewhere: ‘to
love one another or die…’ We die in any case….nevertheless…
So: we continue (“And it’s about time” the voice sayeth…
They are much better behaved dead ones than those in the book
Nazi Germany, a New History by Klaus P. Fischer.
Who’se to blame? God? If God made The World, then
Evil God is to blame. If it is just something that exploded
silently everywhere into everything and everywhere out of nothing
and into time, then the Huge Nothing is to blame…interrogating the
silence of their suffering we see, every day, people calling on God
in this wilderness called the good earth, this wondrous place. Or
is it? Let’s blame Hitler’s mother, here she is, Klara Polzl (1860-1907):
she died the year after my father’s birth in England. Later, in the Scouts
in the 1927 Denmark Jamboree, when there was so much to hope for, he
told me later: that the Germans sang so beautifully…as indeed now Angelika
…i.e. Angelika Kirschlager is singing Bach.
Is it HER fault? Or Bach’s? Did he overdo the religious stuff? Or Durer’s?
Or Gunter Grass’s? Hesse’s? Or Musil, Seabald, Rilke or the Manns’?
Hitler’s mother! Proleptic She. She out the pic:
A mother. One rocking the eternal cradle, her eyes are … But we all have mothers…
There and poor old brutal Alois, the two of them from “…actors in search of a Play…,” crudely
alone, no Author to be found: methinks Crookback played bad tricks on them:
But here is list of the photos in case you forget:
Here is: Field Marshall von Hindenburg, Friedrich Ebert, Karl Liebknecht,
Rosa Luxemburg, Hitler’s mother, Hitler’s father, Hitler as an infant, Lance Corporal Hitler, Hitler
[et al ] at the Munich trial, The Adolf Hitler Shock Troops [off] to German Day in Bayreuth
September 2, 1933; Hitler fraternizing with storm troopers; Braunschweig Party Day, October 1931
[all this History!!]; Hitler’s Cabinet including Blomberg; Alfed Rosenberg [Rose Mountain], Nazi
racial philosopher and Reich Minister; Himmler, architect of the Holocaust [we need our
architects]; and, inter alia, General Werner von Fritsch, Commander in Chief of the German army.
Such men! Such intelligence of design!
But there’s more!
There’s: Hitler at the Nuremberg Party rally, 1936; [the] League of German Girls [Oh how they are
hitlering and flagging! What Sparks!! Such jolly youthful joy!!]; Hitler with children, Hess, Speer
and Hitt looking so happy!; and there’s Hitler and Leni Reifensthal!!; and young lovely Eva!; and
Benito! Hurrah!! Hi there Benito baby!!; and there’s the Windsors!; and Chamberlain [good old
jolly Chamby!!]; and Studenstzn at an Ordensburg!!; Kristallnact!!; and the Book Burning!!;
and, … straight out of a book… the images; and lovely young Frau “Bauf Jugendherbergen und
heime” [Hoorah!!!]; Jubliant Viennese greet the annexation of Austria to Germany, March 1938;
Hitler declaring war on the Yanks; “Give me ten years and you will not recognize Germany.” Adolf
Hitler, 1933;
But there’s EVEN more!
Here are: Slave laborers at Buchenwald concentration camp; and the old and young “On the way to
the gas chamber”; and here, arms out like Christ, a decaying bone man; and here:
“Turn your gaze to the hill of corpses, spectator of contemporary history; turn for a moment within
and think: This poor residue of flesh and bone is your father, child, your wife, the person dear to
you! See yourself and the one closest to you, on whom your mind and heart depend, thrown naked
in the filth, tortured, starved, killed.” Eugen Kogan.
*
But rightly you say, there was much more to come: we can mention Vietnam, Algeria, Africa, and
latterly Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo. And Israel-Palestine, the invasion of the Ukraine. It is,
it seems ad aeternum miserum. And we can gather an hundred thousand books on life or history or
psychology, and point to the ingenious makers – Meredith among them – and
And what? What?! I’ll tell you ‘What?’ me boy!” What? Is Meredith and his ilk to blame?
Do we stop the laughter, the “cleverness” you mentioned? Can there be words, or laughter from the
dark…
No, the answer is Nothing. The nothing coming of nothing wrapped inside nothing the huge
illimitable and illegal enigma of arrival and the end of the beginning’s endless end – for George is
innocent, I assure you, nowt’ll come of not readin’ him. (And perhaps reading Steven’s ‘Snowman’
So what is YOUR game Knowman? [He knowed no Noman so he let No-Man go man.]
Is it blamable on the Bloody Big Biblical Big Bang? “What was the matter with the matter?”
It’s like this. I’ll put Bach and Pergolesi at one end and such as Sid Vicious and Stockhausen at the
other, with a dash of Jazz and some Charles Ives, or even Stevens in the Nigger Graveyard,
Whitman’s imagined beard, aflame; not to mention poor old Pound…and Charles Bernstein’s
‘Pounding Fascism’. It’s all in the mixmess. Auden was the man for this sort of thing. Lately I’ve
been reading, post Ashbery and Berryman, Carol Ann Duffy, Carson McCullers, and bits of others:
including the Manhire of children dying…
*
What will you do? Will you take the sword?
No, blessed are we that Forgettment is ours in this sad Time.
Do you peruse the flower light and the dust of sounds?
Yes and no.
Where are we?
We are. We are monkeys in madland. But…
There’s hope?
Thaskaflo lookafs as g twh a aslkd gfns goooen fooosk awwaefy.
Schasolck w sooesaqhk? Ikasflor… Aaaackk!!
By that I presume you keep up your reading? Your thinking? Do you Reason?
Reason not – too much – we can only live. Live. Live and make. Touch, and show. Show…
*
But who’se to blame!? What do you advise? What message can ever be construed from all this
darkness, or even more sad; this endless richness of human thought, these words, this or that
dilemma: the million and one pathways taken or not: the blood, the words of love, wisdom, hope or
hate? O not? And yet this seeming disaster of what we seem, randomly, to be?
What, “after the novels, the teacups…,” what are we left with? (And must wait, must stand and
wait…
We are left with ourselves.
To know?
To know and love: but more, we have hope…
Hope! We are corpses, hopeless:
Repeatedly falling into slush or fire, and
The horror of Nothing.
“Is This a Man?”?
Yes, Primo Levi – how did he end, after all his witnessing?
Did he fall, or did the Cynical Shadow shove him?
To his death? Down the stairs…his works remain. (Yet he may or
may not, although we like to…
Works? And the dead, the brutally or sadly dead? Shall they awaken?
Joyce’s? Ibsen’s?
These ideas are ours, but yes, we reference those great works: for their
Depth. Their deep feeling…we hope we are more than repeaters.
We echo, and we hope, but nothing can be certain. And yet we remain –
Connected.
So you still read? You still strive to strive?
Together we shall make: it is an endless making this mystery, this sad joyful mystery.
Then let us sing:
*
Quagmire in pursuit of total whiteness in blackness into what they had hoped at the very least was
the possibility of an echo substantiated in a transforming storm the laden possibles trudging
unwillingly to work to wit to woo and who are you is the Great Cry ascends the sky the lark oh the
lark let us celebrate the cerebral lark as ascends in choral total the ecstasy beyond being or the
meaning of light that is indeed genug and what and why you fly the sky there is loss and smoke and
what spires are there in this flying turmoil as no man or woman knows if there is a receding sea or
whether the animal erotic has now become all as we fall and re-fall in our dilemma of signals whose
interchange was noted by Z in an awesome display moving away from solidity to a tenderness the
night itself feels loth to bear as who could or would not feel thus loth or loath or lowly; and now those
hollow and savage cries crowd round us: we fear our friends and begin to confuse our foes none
knowing for we have only love and that seems strong but we are only flesh and fatally fragile.
Quantum is strange and we cannot conceive the paper men who burn forever inside the impossibility
of things or who could start this so wonderful so beautiful so terrible No. And it was then they
examined the writing only to be disillusioned for the millionth time as if numbers were of any help
because it was known that the Man of Numbers had the key to child magic in Huge Toy Land: whereat
a child of 10 or so, excited by volcanoes, is so wonderful and young as all were are once and we strive
oh we strive. What are we what is it what what what what what what what what wha……..?
*
bolt locks but then John felt in his pocket
the lumps of stone-like stone
at least were real, he thought
then we traversed the
but the green place wasn’t green
it was or seemed to possess
a peculiar odour of
“everness” which Marian noticed
who put the motion in emotion?
Politics is death: the blue blue Ocean
and many do not as they were
Urged: it has been said of me but.
Consequent the words were
terribly twisted like an old
wire face peering out of
London or perhaps Athens
Riding the bicycle to deliberate death
was a courageous act but was it.
mortar mortised in a haze of seeing
The Radar kept searching.
Bats. Let me sing of bats.
It was believed he saw glimpse.
It was gold. He fell in love.
[They shuddered in their young
rich and lonely ecstasy:
somehow the word silk
was in the difficult poem.
What. I can’t.]
*
But as you and all the Richards know this is surely completely incommensuale and quite absurd,
given the general situation we are discovered inside. It has been and no doubt will endlessly be, if not
soonly, argued, and way beyond argument itself, that the truth as itself, is itself, creeping up behind
us…
They made their way to the. If only that fragment. It was then the. She was so. Arranged. The
numbers. …. wh….it…lov…Her….Then the sail appeared. Stars are.
*
The Hopeful Song.
If a million million automatic typers typed
every second every minute every day and endlessly
Something sometime somewhere perfectly
Would on all that surge of words and marks appear –
In someway somehow mysteriously
As hands are formed or infinity, is made by giant minds
To disappear.
Clack and tap and clack and tap the automatic writers rap –
All through the endless seeming Question Time
Of everything; and why it is this Babel babble clap
of hands their marks and syllables and flights
Created chancely as the automatic TypingTyper types…
And then appearing in the clacking night amongst that
Sound or fury of the million typers’ automatic type:
Who out do out,( but Hatter mad in Madland, for clacky clack and on they play),
A message out: shaky meaningless or in some way
Rational to those who seek and play, or make
The answer sure of everything, a hyper Hype
We all await, or a muttered mud of meaning slake
Our metaphysic thirst, as if a Bat,
Huge and true and swift, had whooshed on past,
Crying knowingly in surety of space of The Eternal Hat –
Then after that and this and that and that
Time would cease and all would cry
That now the Day had come for sure a sky
Blue as Beauty within whose eye
All that ideal Ideation strange and almost true
And all those thoughts so right or odd
Would now reveal that atomic automatic Mystic Glue:
And the Torment of the Infinite semantic swirling sea,
And pulsing Dreams that still do whirl in Thing,
As light might endless sing,
Or twisted spin – never ceasing in the Huge Revolve
And shimmering of the cold all knowing lovely eye
of a long dead long forgotten Deep Sad god.
*
Down the bloody stairs with you you slacker! You are guilty of being crimed against:
of Grand Victim Larceny. You surely are aware the trouble you put the authorities to when you chose,
as indeed it is clear to US you did, to hurl yourself in a savage and callous act, off the bridge or down
the stairs or in any other way, either “secretly” or in a sudden moment of madness or “forgetfulness”
(at least, as We know, you will claim this with a kind of knowing and cynical surety we have come to
expect of you monster victims). The case is beyond analysis. There are no ambiguities. Or none we
can’t deal with, with, (well, with some strange formulae that really mean nothing, but look impressive,
exciting even): something like a Runic Cube.
And for the sake of Piss, don’t give us all that stuff about whatever it was about being alive left you
a quivering Psycho. We KNOW you were in the Camps, we KNOW your father blew his brains out
with a .38 after shouting; “Hey son, come and look at this!” We KNOW that. We know about you
also, The Eternal Victim in the Eternal Trial. Are we expected to collapse in terror or grief or hysterical
laughter: laughter so loud and long it would spread out like a radiating NUCLEAR boom impossible
to stop until everything in existence or ever likely to be or to have been in existence, fell to the floor
of wherever he she they or it were domiciled in hopeless and terrible laughter? No!? We are NOT
stupid. We know your kind. You DON’T fool us fool.
*
We, and you, are intent on being unpopular. As far as we are concerned, Nothing is listening, and
while it was said that “nothing comes of nothing” we have seen Cantor’s sets, and how, in some
instances, two Null sets generate a set of units. We have seen this revelation, divine or otherwise. So
we retreat into our Meredith, for to us, he is all the rage. We don’t use devices, we use husty dusty
bulky books. Good old dumb born bulky Bolshy books. Go! We implore, but they stay staring up at
us like salivating and devoted dogs. Ours is hate-love and we love to hate the ones we hate to love…
to hate…. to love. This is all perfectly true: because we know Everything, which is in fact, the same
as knowing Nothing, which is how we know about Nothing and know nothing and (some might say)
there is no Nothing.
*
We Recall Meredith.
smokelessness. Thus we make or unmake our ways. The madness of…
For to whom is such an ambition of total annihilation and self-destruction not deliciously
attractive?
What indeed is it that we assail, nay, essay, to do:
we slaves of…
*
THE CLOCK
Walking on an unnamed Beach, they happen upon A Clock:
A vast Time Piece. We of course, have full knowledge of what is a clock and what purpose it signifies,
how it makes time and measures itself, how it is greatly True and regular, with escarpments and a
pendulum, and much more of its mechanical guts. We designed it.
But these primitives. They own no watch. Have never seen no watch. So how can they know its
meaning or its purport? So, we have placed clues.
They begin to worship the marvel and the mystery of The Clock. It is remarkable made. Then, after
hesitation, a brave one enters the strange clock (secretly, for the clock is to become sacred and a
forbidden place). Into the ticking heart of the Great Timer the brave, curious one, creeps. He takes
note. He confers with The Rebels. The sun moves, the hands move. It has hands. The clock was surely
designed. It has been placed here. Nothing so marvelous complex could random assemble. It must
surely, they Postulate, have been designed by a Designer.
Perhaps the Designer is Dead? Perhaps It was Mad? Nay, nat sae.. For surely this is a Thing that
Measures Time. This they conclude. It seems it has been there always. Or does it Make Time?
The Tribe, who discovered this Only Time Machine, decide to tell all. The Others begin to think
about it. Think about it. Think. Begin think. Begin again. Begin. Begi. Beg. Be. B. B …
It is not long before all members of The Tribe are driven to suicide by the Insanity of Knowledge or
the Madness of the Possibility of their being a Designer. Or Not.
We told you we were The Makers, but we lied. We drowned in The Sea of Time. We have or are
said to be “The Voices of Time,” but we are no longer here. We take a last look about.
We don’t exist. We don't even Dance to the Music of Time....
*
But you might say, that is surely a lie, or a distortion. And indeed, even we, who witnessed the
above ramblings, are dubious of its provenance. We suspect the 'Devil of The Knowledge Delusion'
Let’s think this through. We have the Great Clock, The Mutter, The Inconclusion. But we have also
Life, and Love, and much else. It is dilemma terribly twist and strange is this last Act that ends...
But we must make some attempt:
The delicate, intricate Nothing
- transcribing the silence,
until the nerves become, like Debussy’s:
the scintillant radiant spirals
world-leaping, of
a Spider Genius whose cobweb
is seemingly perfect, as if
thought through, reflects
in the gorgeous dawn…
- then things are
careful, for
the music is never more
rhythmic or mad than Design –
yet, transmuted by human hands becomes
more restrained: and touch by touch
a subtle unnamed thing is built –
ideas (gesturing) are fit inside it, they
have emerged from the
Creative Zero –
the intensity of Possibility
is in our fingers –
for we have possibilities unknown and
endless –
loud or soft this Music intricate moves –
The Dancers, eternally, lift in Grace
*
Magic
The stories grew out of stones or they slithered under and into the cool crevices like burning snakes
where truth hides or grows, or is engendered: those of those who dream and are indeed inflicted
with such rashness as Meredith, or those of his time and space and that specialness we and you
always yearned for in the years to come despite the blindness of those who watch or the tick of that
which in the terrible exciting tock is ticked when time is faced with time, or indeed light is re-joined
to time: it is these things we share with the beasts or the fauns whose life outside, wild in the wild,
we keep forgetting until that great moment: that decision point to be forever certain and even safe,
is arrived at: then we rush off like the wood cutter’s daughter to the horror of all the good people:
then sex is engendered, which, horrible as it is, is wonderful as otherwise you and I and many others
would not be here…
But nothing shall deter the stories, they, like the soft smoke from ancient pipes, become blue
from their very existence, their birth from stones into burning snakes to dive into the “eternal night
of death when the lovers can be together,” it is then that everything happens: golden are the wanderers
of the dawn reaching out to the great ideas of the sun: it is thus known that the stories expanded or
shrank or became History, like, say, the sing-songs of London town. It was as children we listened to
our gentle English mothers. Over and over they read the songs and how ‘the bells of Saint Martins’
and how it went:
Oranges and lemons sang the bells of St. Clemens
…as wonderful, innocent children wondered. (Later Awful Reality appeared with his nasty dental
tools and his awful “development” and his Progress…)
…but the stories kept growing, unknown to us, who were growing in our own Diversity. The garden
had begun and there had burst the fruits and Things from the rich soil: all things pushing Forth grew
gravid with my expanding seeds. Then were the miracles of enzymes and the chemical amazement as
light entered leaves – those Great Engines of growing things – and we witnessed the Magic of a shoot
erupting from a split bean: and then arising, determined, and unstoppable. The Impossible Magic of
it. Reality surrounded us, but remained Invisible, and ours became an inexhaustible, and unknowably
but wonderfully Chemical Joy.
Then the pumpkins exploded like great green boulders to rage across the fence, knowing no human
‘territory’.
Later, dim-witted persons would greatly silly concern silly concern & fill fill foul foul endless
urgencies and tablings and the terrible gray News Events of Great Human Moment about ‘World
Affairs,’ — and all those Politicalitical Boronaliticaliticals and, and Others, so grossly tormented,
damned by Detaliatrivialia would come to ‘believe in things,'! Would you credit it, in this Age of
Deathstein! This Age of that work by Brunton: Moonshine, that strange great work...But we, The
Knower Children, stayed there: I was rooted primordial in the midst of virulent stones and savagely
wonderful stories. I believed nothing and loved All things...or so tried, like The Ancient Mariner …
for I was on a painted sea in a painted ship! I was in Sargass stuck amid the writhe and the damned
souls... but when I blessed the All, all was redeemed, or so it seemed as I had dreamed... But then I
drew away, I soared....
I became the King of All England and All Time and I breathed the woodsmoke of the early evening
air, never forgoing Memory, and I, and they, “didn’t know we were alive” – we became greater even
than England or Time or God. We knew Nothing except the story of our existence and the pure eternity
of The Cell.
It was then we decided a Song:
The stories grew from stones,
The moon evolves, revolves:
Bright faced but dead:
…but we never now admit death as each of us moves further into The Forest where all ends, all
begins.
Thing makes Arise: and we begin to believe, if only for a short span, in ideas and ideals. But we are
clever Brains. We have becoming Word Machines. We share Purpose and we purpose to busy on the
earth. I SPY A BIOLOGALISTICAL ALL KNOWER MAN!!
…an old man, nervously fiddling with his mustache, hopes by some Mantra, like “touch wood,” to
placate whatever it is out there that needs placation.
(Craig Raine’s poem about his mother’s death and the erotic hair removal, was moving but awful
and very disturbing: and is not quite what we had in mind this cold afternoon. (
The man, previously mentioned, who emerged from the deep earth stones: once tried to “grow up”
but realized much later in the night that the phrase was meaningless.
We cannot too bear that human reality kind much. Want we fish and chocolate not now but forever
as we into the do rock dural Rock... and it all is rediscovered in Australia by an egg, or as we know,
the forests have been burning for there for thousands of years to regrow and get revenge on the other
things. But dream it and then the stones are aligned as time explodes nothing again but we enter the
place it is not what it is but we are here.
We turned to windward. The sea was jolly. We heard the Great and Beautiful Scream and laid back
among the approving primroses to share Nature’s terrible and timeless trance as if the Things under
foot would ever deign to re-emerge.
*
Mr. Meredith is one of the worst and least attractive of great writers as well as one of the best and
most fascinating. He is a sun that has broken out into innumerable spots. The better half of his genius
is always suffering eclipse from the worse half. He writes with the pen of a great artist in his left hand
and the razor of a spiritual suicide in his right. He is the master and the victim of a monstrous
cleverness
Clack and tap and clack and tap the automatic writers rap –
'Three quarks for Muster Mark' – three quacks for Meister Mach Three machs for a mark mark -
three marks for a quark: Quack and quark and make your mark for it all begins to spark! Quickly
quickly quack & Quark and mark your make you mucky Making Mark of Quoark…mark quark mark
quark and queeky quark Quiggly quickly quip quack quack Mack and Mark for it do darkly dark:
Its derry dark and in the park the plaque is stark…..Three things for Three other
things…three ….3….3…..3……3 exp base e 24….Bone sleep gives it time. Disperse. When? It
grumbles and shines. Why? Pig it drops the sequence. Pervasive. The shadow is itself. Today we go.
Feel. It doesn’t go it. Let’s Do something. We. Please. Qs. Incidentally. By the way. Chop. Chop.
Hullo Marian…it is so: so something. “Look at the Rothko”. Don’t (now) look at Rivers. It’s staring
at you. There’s a bone man come. What is ash. “Help me.” What myth? Shoo. Milk. Oceans of. The
colour. The great spires. “I only wanted some sympathy!” The never never. Cant. Have to. Cattle to
there. I love you. Animals? Think? History. How German germane is it? Things awake. Time. Google
Googol. Pit. Bugger! Terrible things we said. Terrible fury. “Stop him! Please stop him!” Do.
Something. Say you love her, or him: Say your love. Show your love. Care. Hopeful. If a million
million. “Dead Souls” Mad then he went. Xerophilous? Rock? I’ll out Zero YOU! Arrow. Sharp.
Meredithy. Dab hand. What? Come in. Under the shadow. Red. Cradle. Poor woman. Sad. These
fragments…the la s t w o r d s h a l l w a n t a w o r d
The voice of my education said to me, he must be killed….
{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{ }}}}}}}}}}}}}}
-----------the pen of a great artist in his left hand and the razor of a spiritual suicide in his right. He is
the master and the victim of a monstrous cleverness which is neither to hold nor to bind, and will not
permit him to do things as an honest, simple person of genius would. As Shakespeare, in Johnson's
phrase, lost the world for a quibble and was content to lose it, so does Mr. Meredith discrown himself
of the sovereignty------- 'The heart of light, the silence.'
TAMATE TAMATE KA ORA KA ORA ! ...the terrible voice of my education….
{{{{{{{{{{{{{ If a million million automatic typers
{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{
}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}If a million million typed with millipedic
speed... }}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}
}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}...automatic typers...recreation or
reconstruction of human society. Indeed, one of the distinctions of this book is the way Mendelsohn
wrestles with the tradition of commentary on Genesis and relates it to the attempt to represent the
Holocaust. Consider, for example, his commentary on the commentaries on the story of Lot’s wife,
who was warned not to look back on the fiery destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Of course she
does turn around a}}}}}}}}}}}}}} If a million million automatic typers typed } If a million million
automatic typers typed If a million million automatic typers typed If a million million automatic
typers }}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}
}}} automatic typers typed If a million million automatic typers typ-
}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}
Will Opak get there? Painting numbers to the end…?
Walker walked. “The Great Dawkinsinian Delusion”…. ‘I have loved the Bible all my life…’
dfdfqiiisdfgfg$&^%!@$&^%!@$!@!@__!@_!_@_!@_!_@_!@)!(@*)!@(
*_!)@(_!)(*_!)@(*_)!@(*_)!@(*_)!@(*_)!@(*_!)(@*_)!
***)!_()!_(*!)(****_)!*_)!(_)!(_)!(*_)! Dostoievsky
þÕ∞∞∞∞Œ )*_!)*_)!*_)!(_)!****#&$&(gegg*VBBVSKLEOA But who’se to
blame!? What do you advise? What message from all this dark, or even more sad; this endless
richness of thought, these words, this or that dilemma: The million and one pathways taken or not:
the blood, the words of love, wisdom, hope or hate? Which Selfish Genesis Fische can we point to?
And truly I was afraid...
____________________________________________________________________
Life sprouts from the soil of death, Kamate kamate ka ora ka ora, See the women sway as if
in a ballet…
In the dance of life -
Entranced their eyes
The Dance of Life, the Dance of Death; Dance dance dance to Life.
On Sunday I saw leaves float up from the garden fire:
I could not and cannot conceive of that fire’s centre’s heat –
the cut hedge burning. Ash Sunday. I noted the ashes were the souls of
dead writhed leaves. Perhaps they floated from the frantic flames
that were like Beings jumping to leaf-parachutes;
Black ash parachutes.
In the ash I saw nothing. Nothing.
**************************************
Enter the cathedral,
listen to God.
Hear the silent explosions of your footfall,
Here, with awful care, pace this place
where ancient curved columns were hewn from silence –
Or tongue-less men placed them.
Here. Gaze up to the perfect vault – arch-tense, tensile, graceful: violent in self-contort.
Here, in this place, speak the unspeakable. Here! Now! Now! Curse God – blasphemér!
Ka mate ka mate ka mate ka mate ka mate ka mate
Here, now, in this place.
Peer into the cathedral. Look within your father’s head.
Here, cantatas of joy Sang in his temple.
My father, who now is ash, Had touched the earth:
His eye, mind, ear, were to colour words and music tuned: missed no subtleties of violets
juxtaposed on shaded green…
Gloried in the lovely light. Colour was breath Shape was heart Form was blood. Such his mix,
And to the boy who came, he told about the stars; spoke kindly to the boy who came:
showed him the wonder, the texture, the simple intricacy of diverging leaf veins:
Nature’s Structure, designed to pump sap or blood: the seething babbling blood, that
thunders round the frame of man, Round my father in red rivers ran.
He spoke to the boy who came And agelessly lifted him.
Flesh and bone To dust to ash to stone.
Brown leaves, Twisted, turned, charred in a million variations, Cluster in the garden:
They had been squashed by a merciless hand, And have the form of petrid agony.
Yet, they are content, and Lie still.
I wake to grieving this Xmas-coming morning, for we are two fathers grieving in our joy.
Listen, and hear the tui’s belling song, and in that song, recall you are a man, a father yourself.
Enter the Cathedral enter the Cathedral enter the Cathedral of Words and Light.
***************************
Kamate kamate
Kaora kaora
Death life death life
Death death death, Life life life –
Life sprouts from the soil of death,
Kamate kamate ka ora ka ora
See the women sway in ballet; in the dance of life -
entranced their eyes
Ka mate ka mate ka mate ka mate ka mate ka mate
Ka mate ka mate ka mate ka mate ka mate ka mate
Ka ora ka ora ka ora ka ora ka ora ka ora
Ka ora ka ora ka ora ka ora ka ora ka ora
_____________________________________________________________________________
…You said that was your original way into plagiarism.
KA: When I first started writing, I was influenced by poetry, mainly the Black Mountain school
of poetry, so there’s a bit of poetry in that book. I was searching for my own medium. The
middle section of the book interested me more than the other sections because I was working in
a sex show, and this middle section was based on sex shows, diaries of sex shows. I was very
influenced by Burroughs, so I was really writing out of a kind of “third mind,” through
Burroughs and the sex show diaries. It was during the hippie days when sex was fun, when
everybody slept with everyone else. I had another point of view, having seen it from the 42nd
Street angle. I became politicized.
“The world is the work of a delirious God!"
...the fire hidden in the world shall
annihilate all matter, shall consume itself...
the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back
...Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. Confusion amounting to
nothing. Despite precautions. If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. The old so dying
woman. How simple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any
shift to be.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EGF: You say Burroughs was an influence on you.
KA: Oh, he was my first major influence.
EGF: Can you say what in Burroughs you admire or took?
KA: I came out of a poetry world. My education was Black Mountain school—Charles Olson,
Jerry Rothenberg, and David Antin were my teachers. But I didn’t want to write poetry. I wanted to
write prose and there weren’t many prose writers....
On Sundays float u I saw leap from the garden fire: I could not and cannot conceive of that
fire’s centre’s heat – the cut hedge burning. Endlessly the golden arrows seek the unreachable
shore.
“Why did I write all of these texts?” In fact, I wrote the second part of Don Quixote first by rewriting
texts, out of a Sherrie Levine-type impulse. Then I wrote the first and third parts later. The Lulu
segment had been commissioned by Pete Brooks as a play. And I think I did the Leopardi part early
on as well. Then I actually had an abortion. While I was waiting to have the abortion, I was
reading Don Quixote. Because I couldn’t think, I just started copying Don Quixote. Then I had all
these pieces and I thought about how they fit together. I realized that Don Quixote, more than any of
my other books, is about appropriating male texts and that the middle part of Don Quixote is very
much about trying to find your voice as a woman. So whatever feminism is there is almost an
afterthought, which does not invalidate the feminism in any way. I don’t say, “I’m a feminist,”
therefore I’m going to do such and such. A complaint people have had about my work is that I’m not
working from a moralistic or ideological tradition. I take materials and only at the end do I find out
what’s going on in my writing. For instance, while writing it, I never considered that Blood and Guts
in High School is especially anti-male, but people have been very upset about it on that ground. When
I wrote it I think it was in my mind to do a traditional narrative. I thought it was kind of sweet at the
time, but of course it’s not.
EGF: Sweet is not an adjective I would use to describe it.
KA: It’s about kids and kids are sweet. I was really in kid time when I wrote that. So that’s a
very roundabout way of answering your question.
EGF: What about the schizophrenia and plagiarism. You said that was your original way into
plagiarism.
KA: When I first started writing, I was influenced by poetry, mainly the Black Mountain school
of poetry, so there’s a bit of poetry in that book. I was searching for my own medium. The
middle section of the book interested me more than the other sections because I was working in
a sex show, and this middle section was based on sex shows, diaries of sex shows. I was very
influenced by Burroughs, so I was really writing out of a kind of “third mind,” through
Burroughs and the sex show diaries. It was during the hippie days when sex was fun, when
everybody slept with everyone else. I had another point of view, having seen it from the 42nd
Street angle. I became politicized.
“The world is the work of a delirious God!”
…the fire hidden in the world shall
annihilate all matter, shall consume itself…
…Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. Confusion amounting to nothing.
Despite precautions. If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. The old so dying woman. So
dead. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else. Where no more precautions to be taken. No
precautions possible. Cooped up in there with the rest. Hovel and stones. The lot. And the eye.
How simple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be.
Gently gently. On. Careful.
------------------------------------ -------------------------------- ----------------------
This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence.
It is the artist's function not to copy but to synthesize: to eliminate from that gross confusion of
actuality which is his raw material whatever is accidental, idle, irrelevant, and select for perpetuation
that only which is appropriate and immortal. Always artistic, Mr. Meredith's work is often great art:
a companion for Balzac and Richardson, an intimate for Fielding and Cervantes. His figures fall into
their place beside the greatest of their kind; and when you think of Lucy Feverel and Mrs. Berry, of
Evan Harrington's Countess Saldanha and the Lady Charlotte of Emilia in England, of the two old
men in Harry Richmond and the Sir Everard Rolnfrey of Beauchamp's Career, of Renée and Cecilia,
of Emilia and Rhoda Fleming, of Rose Jocelyn and Lady Blandish and Ripton Thompson, they have
in the mind's eye a value scarce inferior to that of Clarissa and Lovelace, of Bath and Western and
Booth, of Andrew Fairserviae and Elspeth Mucklebacket, of Philippe Bridau and Vautrin and
Balthasar Claes. In the world of man's creation his people are citizens to match the noblest; they
are of the aristocracy of the imagination, the peers in their own right of the society of romance. And
for all that, their state is mostly desolate and lonely and forlorn.
His Defects:
Mr. Meredith is one of the worst and least attractive of great writers as well as one of the best and
most fascinating. He is a sun that has broken out into innumerable spots. The better half of his
genius is always suffering eclipse from the worse half. He writes with the pen of a great artist in
his left hand and the razor of a spiritual suicide in his right. He is the master and the victim of a
monstrous cleverness which is neither to hold nor to bind, and will not permit him to do things as
an honest, simple person of genius would. As Shakespeare, in Johnson's phrase, lost the world for
a quibble and was content to lose it, so does Mr. Meredith discrown himself of the sovereignty of
contemporary romance to put on the cap and bells of the professional wit. He is not content to be
plain Jupiter: his lightnings are less to him than his fireworks; and his pages so teem with fine
sayings and magniloquent epigrams and gorgeous images and fantastic locutions that the mind
would welcome dullness as a bright relief. He is tediously amusing; he is brilliant to the
point of being obscure; his is such a helpfulness or extravagance as to worry and confound.
That is the secret of his unpopularity.
And when the Syrians of Damascus came to succour Hadadezer king of Zobah,
David slew of the Syrians two and twenty thousand men.
----------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------
1 After this opened Job his mouth, and cursed his day.
2 And Job spake, and said,
3 Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, there is a man child
conceived.
4 Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it.
5 Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the
day terrify...
6 As for that night, let darkness seize upon it; let it not be joined unto the days of the year, let it not
come into the number of the months.
7 Lo, let that night be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein.
10 Because it shut not up the doors of my mother's womb, nor hid sorrow from mine eyes.
11 Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?
12 Why did the knees prevent me? or why the breasts that I should suck?
13 For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest,
17 There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest.
18 There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor.
19 The small and great are there; and the servant is free from his master.
20 Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul;
After dispensing with the concept of the Noumenon, Sartre outlines the binary distinction
that dominates the rest of Being and Nothingness: the distinction between unconscious being
(en-soi, being-in-itself) and conscious being (pour-soi, being-for-itself). Being-in-itself is
concrete, lacks the ability to change, and is unaware of itself. Being-for-itself is conscious of
its own
The “noumenon” cannot so easily be dispensed with. The problem begins with a miss-
definition of 'things-in-the world’, and the further error or confusion arising that there are
'separate' “substances” in the world. [In fact, it is not something that can be defined.] This
misunderstands that the World is All that it Is etc. It assumes that there is a binary of something
borrowed from modern Physics including various ideas, but we can rename Everything as say,
Schopenhauer's “Will”. This would be a Monism (there can be no other -ism of this kind, that
there is a Something is simply defined...Even if we can have this “materialist or Physicalist”
Universe, it means nothing...Thus Descartes is almost rescued as he can still 'believe in God'
as he did...as long as D. recognizes there are now Existentialists and Postmodernists etc
etc....Kant is also safe and great as are all those old and perhaps some 'new'
philosophers....Regardless (or because of) Nietzsche's clever and very good comments in
Human all too Human etc no one has (or does not have) any certain knowledge of say 'an
eternal soul' or indeed of a thing in itself, or the thing in itself: and / or the immanent nature
of the world (everything) which cannot be known. This he should have seen as an
'existentialist, but he (Sartre) is paradoxically also a Marxist-- and for reasons unknown
Marxists assume they know (which they don't) that there is no 'metaphysical' aspect of the
world...no unknowable God etc... But we simply do not know. Science is not about the whys
of things it deals only with how. Scientists are not Philosophers, they are technicians telling
us where the petrol tank is, what the battery is for and how the engine works (electrical or
other) .... but they can never say why it works.'
…. as the object-in-itself does, man, as an object-for-itself, must actuate his own being.
(And this is in fact Nietzsche's idea in his (wrongly defined) over man (derives partly
from Emerson’s ‘Over-Soul’). The self-determining human. Also, Emerson has some
similar ideas....
He is tediously amusing; he is brilliant to the point of being obscure; his is such a
helpfulness or extravagance as to worry and confound. That is the secret of his unpopularity.
Sartre next introduces the related truth that the being-for-itself possesses meaning only
through its perpetual foray into the unknown future. In other words, a man is not
essentially what one might describe him as now. For example, if he is a teacher, he is
not a teacher in the way that a rock, as a being-in-itself, is a rock. In truth, the man is
never an essence, no matter how much he....
8 Even as I have seen, they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same.
9 By the blast of God they perish, and by the breath of his nostrils are they consumed.
10 The roaring of the lion, and the voice of the fierce lion, and the teeth of the young lions, are
broken.
Sartre explains that as a conscious being, the for-itself recognizes what it is not: it is not a
being-in-itself. Through the awareness of what it is not, the for-itself becomes what it is: a
nothingness, wholly free in the world, with a blank canvas on which to create its being. He
concludes that the for-itself is the being...
The characteristic act of men at war is not dying, it is killing. For politicians, military strategists
and many historians, war may be about the conquest of territory...or…national honour, but for the
man on active service war is concerned with the lawful killing of other people...it is not murder,
but sanctioned blood-letting...[with] the consent of the vast majority of the population....
...through which nothingness and lack enter the world, and consequently, the for-itself
is itself a lack. The absence it signifies is the absence of the unattainable synthesis of
the for-itself and the in-itself. The being-for-itself is defined by its knowledge
Let us pray oh let us pray for Deathstein's Soul and Opperhimmel's great poems and hydrogen
and carbon and the surging spirit of Heimlichkeit....for indeed we recall that protogroanic eye and
where fly, great flies...their purpose? The salivation of my soul...and oh la, that lustreless protrusive
eye that from the endless slime doth stare at the scene...and we have poor Henry James in sight,
slick and green, for we love him so...and we dream for 'I have wasted Time and now doth Time
waste me.'
of Being not in-itself. Knowing is its own form of being, even if this knowledge is only
of what one is not and cannot be, rather than what one is. The human can never know
being as it truly is, for to do that, one would have to be the thing itself. To know a rock,
we have to be the rock (and of course, the rock, as a being-in-itself, lacks
consciousness). Yet the being-for-itself sees and intuits the world through what is not
present. In this way, the being-for-itself, already wholly free, also possesses the power
of imagination. Her pale face, framed in a borderless cap, was more wrinkled than a
russet apple … Even if absolute beauty (to Sartre, the absolute union of being and
consciousness) cannot be apprehended, knowing it through its absence, as in the way
one feels the emptiness left by a departed loved one, is its own truth.
13 He taketh the wise in their own craftiness: and the counsel of the froward is carried headlong.
14 They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope in the noonday as in the night.
15 But he saveth the poor from the sword, from their mouth, and from the hand of the mighty.
“Jesus blood never failed me yet for he loved me so. This one thing I know...” [endless]...
Delving into the ways individual aware of our own presence. The gaze of the other is
objectifying in the sense that when one views another person building a house, he or
she sees that person as simply a house builder. Sartre writes that we perceive
ourselves being perceived and come to objectify ourselves in the same way we are
being objectified. Thus, the gaze of the other robs us of our inherent freedom and
causes us to deprive ourselves of our existence as a being-for-itself and instead learn
to falsely self-identify as a being-in-itself.
In the last segment of his argument, Sartre … What is striking, therefore the lengths some
commentators will go to deny the centrality of killing in modern battle...But in the three conflicts
examined [by Joanna Bourke in An Intimate History of Killing, London: Granta Books, 1999. [Bourke
knows there have been many wars but her study of that of the Allies in the First WW, the 2nd WW
and Vietnam, Korea etc. Underpinning is her argument that this is a societal but mainly male-driven
“nightmare”. Bourke's books should be read, and re-read: like say Ann Frank's Diary, or Rape of Vietnam
by Harold Salisbury, as well as say, Stephen Graham's Vertical, and such as Jonathan Kozol’s Savage
Inequalites showing the continuing discrimination by White Power and indeed by those white or black
or whatever who have money or privilege, how they continue to keep these inequalities alive. This is
not to say that this shows this can be avoided, it may just be the way The Terrible Process enacts
itself...Who is to know?]
Gently dip but not too deep / For fear you make the golden beard to weep.
Thus, at the summation of Sartre’s polemic, an incredible sense of hopelessness dominates
the discussion: I am a nothingness, a lack, … descriptions of human ontology is a question
Sartre does not attempt to definitively answer. This avoidance of reaching a definitive point
of philosophic conclusion is in many ways intentional, however, in keeping with nal style
and the existentialist maxim that there are no theories that can make a claim to universality.
As Sartre the most essential characteristic of being is its intrinsic absence of
differentiation and diversity. Being is complete fullness of existence, a meaningless mass of
matter devoid of meaning, consciousness, and knowledge. Consciousness enters the world
through the for-itself and with it brings nothingness, negation, and difference to what was
once a complete whole of being. Consciousness is what allows the world to exist. Without
it, there would be no objects, no trees, no rivers, and no rocks: only being. Consciousness
always has intentionality—that is, consciousness is always conscious of something. It thus
imposes itself on being-in-
…. What of the Night? The doctor’s head with its over large, black eyes, its full
gunmetal cheeks…. shadowy interior...” Doctor, I have come to ask you everything you
know about the night.”
only through the knowledge of what it is not. Consciousness knows it is not a being-in-
itself and thus knows what it is, a nothingness, a nihilation of being. Yet, to Sartre, despite
the fact that the for-itself is nothing, it exists only in its relation to being and thus is—
I PROPHESY The blind man will beat you / With an ivory stick / From a castle in Spain
From the beginning of Being and Nothingness, Sartre displays his debt to Nietzsche [and
thus Schopenhauer] through his rejection of the notion of any transcendent reality or being
that humans can know which might lie behind or beneath the appearances that make up
reality. That is, the experience of appearances is reality. Although this does imply an
emptiness, Sartre does not see it as a negative truth. Freed of the search for some essential
form being, we, as conscious beings (all beings-for-itself), are empowered in knowing that
our personal, subjective experience of the world is all the truth there is. We are the ultimate
judge of being and nonbeing, truth and falsity.
And, frankly, I find it difficult, almost impossible, to consult works of this kind. Which is,
perhaps, all for the best … Uncomprehended, it is lovely, and mysteriously haunts the
imagination with its peculiar magic….
The how they relate to each other is to think of being-in-itself as another word for object
and the being-for-itself as key concepts of Sartre’s vision of the world are the being-in-itself
and the being-for-itself… way of understanding another word for subject. The being-in-
itself is something that is defined by its physical characteristics, whereas the subject is
defined by consciousness, or nonphysical and self, or some of the attributes of an object or
being-in-itself. It thus follows that [Nota Bene: Sartre patterns his work on Heidigger’s
Work Sein und Zeit. (Being and Time).
MAINLY I WANT TO POINT TO THINGS – IDEAS ETC FOR PEOPLE TO
REACT: TO MAYBE MAKE THEIR OWN WORK OR WORLD PER SE. “MAKE
MAKER MAKE... EVERYONE WE THINGS WE CAN ALL CONTRIBUTE.
, delusional, (only) in the mind, dreams, what is false, what is fictional, or what is
abstract. At the same time, what is abstract plays a role both in everyday life and in
academic research. For instance, causality, virtue, life and distributive justice are
abstract concepts that can be difficult to define, but they are a only a rarely a equaled
a with a pure delusions a. Both a the a existence a and a reality a of...
I then saw a clown of motley wearing: it was a Great Clown who of motley
was wearing, and he entered,
bowed, and walked The Stage bearing a sign. It said:
WITNESS YE: WITNESS THE INFINITE SAD-JOY OF
GOD’S LOVE
toward reality, as in "My reality is not your reality." This is often used just as a colloquialism
indicating that the parties to a conversation agree, or should agree, not to quibble over deeply
different conceptions of what is real. For example, in a religious discussion between friends,
one might say (attempting humor), "You might disagree, but in my reality, everyone goes to
heaven. "Reality” can be defined in a way that links it to world views or parts of them
(conceptual frameworks): Reality is the totality of all things, structures (actual and
conceptual), events (past and present) and phenomena, whether observable or not. It is what
a world view (whether it be based on individual or shared human experience) ultimately
attempts to describe or map.
Certain ideas from physics, philosophy, sociology, literary criticism, and other fields shape
various theories of reality. One such belief is that there simply and literally is no reality beyond
the perceptions or beliefs we each have about reality. Such attitudes are summarized in the
popular statement, "Perception is reality" or "Life is how you perceive reality" or "reality is
what you can get away with" and they indicate anti-realism – that is, the view that there is no
objective reality, whet
Many of the concepts of science and philosophy are often defined culturally and socially. This idea
was elaborated by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific in 1966. Western philosophy
Philosophy addresses two different of the topic of reality: the nature of reality itself,
and the relationship between the mind (as well as language and culture) and reality.
, ontology is the study of being, and the central topic of the field is couched, variously, in terms of being,
existence, "what is", and reality. The task in ontology is to describe the most general categories of reality and
how they are interrelated.
IT IS YOUR TURN: MAKE MAKER MAKE– FOR YOU CAN—
HAS THE BEAUTY OF FUTILITY YET WE PROCEED
In fact, many analytic philosophers today tend to avoid the term "real" and "reality" in
discussing ontological issues. On the other hand, particularly in discussions of objectivity
that have feet in both metaphysics and epistemology, philosophical discussions of "reality"
often concern the ways in which reality is, or is not, in some way dependent upon, say...THE
WORLD IS ALL THAT IS THE CASE the vague notion of a common cultural world view,
or Weltanschauung! The view that there is a reality independent of any beliefs, perceptions,
etc., is called realism. More specifically, philosophers are given to speaking about
"realism about" this and that, such as realism of some object depends upon the mind or cultural
artifacts. The view that the so-called external world is really merely a social,
or cultural, artifact, called social constructionism, is one variety of anti-realism. Cultural
relativism such as morality are not absolute, but at least partially cultural artifact.
---------------------------------- -----------------------------------------------------------------
about what exists claims that "true" knowledge of reality represents accurate
correspondence of statements about and images the
...is all this talk of “justice” nonsense, after all, we cannot show that man has a free
will...and we cannot predict...the reactions...
actualinakloo;rimagesareAttemptnyumanscanpoint to the RockyMountains and say that this
mountain range exists, and continuestexisteven if no one is observing it or making statements about
it.Beingature of being is a perennial topic in metaphysics. For, instance Parmenides taught that reality
was a single unchanging Being, whereas Heraclitus wrote that all things flow. REPETITION IS
TRUTH. The 20th century philosopher Heidegger thought previous philosophers have lost something
isZinceexistienceivout essence seems blankassociated withothingness y philosophers such as Hegel.
...his childhood experiences are a backdrop for the major theme, man's relationship with a
god who may not even exist .... not without complications and ambiguities....
The slightest ledger of the still shadow is dominated surely by the imagined figure, whose face
we never see…
May I never be at peace. / May I never be reconciled to life, nor to death either. / May
my path be unending, with death its unknowable goal.
God is merciless. Those who say he is good do not know him. He is the most inhuman
thing there is. He is as wild and incalculable as lightning. Like lightning out of a cloud
which one did not know contained lightning. Suddenly it strikes, suddenly he strikes
down on one, revealing all his cruelty. Or his love – his cruel love. With him anything
my happen. He reveals himself at any time and in anything...The divine is not human; it
is something quite different. And it is not noble or sublime or spiritualized, as one likes
to believe. It is alien and repellent and sometimes it is madness. It is malignant and
dangerous and fatal. Or so I found it...
And as far as I can understand, he is both evil and good, both light and darkness, both
meaningless and full of meaning which we can which we can never perceive, yet never
cease to puzzle over. A riddle which is intended not to be solved but to exist. To exist
always, to trouble us always …
He has made me very unhappy. But he has also allowed me to know a happiness
passing all understanding. He has, and I must not forget that...What would my life have
been without him? If I had never been filled with him, with his spirit? If I had never felt
the bliss that poured from him, the anguish and pain that is his also, and the wonder of
being annihilated in his blazing arms, of being altogether his? Of feeling his rapture, his
boundless bliss, and sharing god's infinite happiness in being alive? [The human and the
divine and everything else appear intertwined to an extent that is not always fully realized.]
There's always a dwarf – always he's a, or could be, a demon, or he or she intrudes – and there's
always a Holy Man emerging blazing and perhaps surrounded by Demons and the Rapturous Ones
– and the Holy Man emerging with Fire, and firestorms leaping from his Head – and he always
announces a great message of things to come – and All is announced before and after – and then
stands a Saint in gold and red – and the grieving but joyous Lovers who follow, and there is The
Corpse – gashed; and followeth the erotic Penitentials, sometimes a young woman with beautiful
frame and sweet breasts – and with the nubile beauty the youths and the jaggéd, the lost and the
hopeful, and the woman in rapture – and awaiting a message or that violent sacred Penetration –
the blood-red ecstasy – The Eternal orgasmic writhe – and we wonder – and again re-read The
Brothers Karamazov – for, despite these images, the strange eternities of vision, these voices and
the Corpse and the Sad Face and the why of these Images, and the Bird on the Golden Bough,
these charged things we ask: what, what do we know?
Shane Hollands, if we can define: one of New Zealand’s great poets? Here is the
beginning of the title poem of his book: the atomic composition of the seeming
solid…the days before our journey were a / fusion of dread and rapture / leaving. I
considered myself already gone // … (and then, later): ‘I will soar when I’m ready’….
In ‘i am all your rivers and none of your dreams … there is not a moment so dark as
your eyes / the recognition / the pregnant politeness of loss // ….’ and then of the leaving
‘…. the unsolicited twist of a hungry belly ….’ There is something gentle yet deep in
these poems … in a later poem: ‘… your tears a cold river / your words were wind
chimes /which rang in my ears and reverb like summer cicadas // though I thought I
was frozen / I could never be bebroken / I burned / I burst into flames // if I were of
steel / the plume would have tempered / instead ending up cinders / in the absence of
roses / our flames were our flowers and / ashes became of our kisses…’ And there are so
many great poets I come across. These are revealed by careful reading…But everyone has value. LET
US VALUE EVERYONE…. And, in the light of war, hunger, sadness, death and love …. let us try
to love….to be loving….and to value EVERYONE… I am no one, I am the fool of time… ONE DAY
NO ONE WILL KNOW ME OR YOU…. But let us live and love… let us hope… as with
Schopenhauer, perhaps solace can be found in our flutes... our light, our dabbling… Was he right?
We must stop? To evade the Will? To become nothing? To never replicate? The questions are endless
and bitter the black wind from nowhere….
THE UNIVERSE IS ALL THAT IT IS – GOD IS IN AND THROUGH ALL THINGS
Nihilism represents an extreme negative view of being, the absolute a positive term Reality Tunnel,
by which he means in the eye -- I SPY A BIOLOGIST! but not others, Finitism rejects infinite,
quantities. ultra-finitism accepts finite…certain I wonder. A physical feeling as if I were
drumming slightly in the veins: very cold: impotent: terrified As if I were exposed on a high
ledge in full light. Very lonely. L. out to lunch. Nessa has Quentin; don't want me Very
useless. No atmosphere around me No words. Very apprehensive As if something cold and
horrible – a roar of laughter at my expense were about to happen. And I am powerless to
ward it off: I have no protection. And this anxiety and nothingness surround me with a
vacuum It affects the thighs chiefly. And I want to burst into tears, but have nothing to cry
for Then a great restlessness seizes me. I think I could walk it off – walk; walk till I am
asleep. But I begin to like that sudden drugged sleep And I cannot unfurl my mind: apply it
calmly; unconsciously to a book And my own little scraps look dried and derelict And I
know that I must go on doing this dance on hot bricks till I die This is very superficial I
admit For I…burrow under & look…Looking into the heart of light, the silence…
He is not content to be plain Jupiter: his lightnings are less to him than his
fireworks; and his pages so teem with fine sayings and magniloquent
epigrams and gorgeous images and fantastic locutions that the mind would
welcome dullness as a bright relief. He is tediously amusing; he is brilliant to
the point of being obscure; his is such a helpfulness or extravagance as to
worry and confound. That is the secret of his unpopularity.
and intuitionisms are realistic about objects that can be explicitly of numbers existed
hath in addition to the physical (sensible, concretal world). ‘I do not know / when I
was told / that men must go / to glut the mould // Or was I told / or did I know / I
must grow old / and earthward go? // I cannot say / if youth knows or learns / that
man the clay to earth returns.’ Recent is the mathematical universe hypothesis...
Many “love” war, are fascinated by war and combat and slaughter...but as with all such things
they are also terrified and traumatized by it...thus we cannot understand the human except as
a surviving animal via Darwinian theory. In the end we have to concede, each has a Caesar,
an Attila, a Hun, a Hitler or a Goebbels. Each of us contains an insane man inside. Even
women are not immune .... Wars are caused by.…By what? The human psyche evades us. Is it
Hegel or Plato’s Thymus? And Fukuyama talks of ‘recognition’. We want to survive. So, the
other has to die...Or not and we can thus enslave. Later the slave arises in time...
Ergmark'soleostulateist: All structures that exist mathematically also exist
physicallywhatinthesense that "in be considered a form of Platonism in that it posits
the existence of mathematical entities, but can also be considered a….in that it denies
that anything exists except mathematical objects. Did Darwin sit at his desk, in fear of
God and in unknowing terror to publish…his great collections, his beetles, he fiddled with
them endlessly in horror of nothingness or this tearing and replicating…certainty had
vanished. Enter SS, enter the Joy of the Bomb…Enter The Endgame…
________________________________________ ______________________
The problem of universals is an ancient problem in metaphysics about whether universals
exist. Universals are general or abstract qualities, characteristics, properties, kinds or relations,
such as can be regarded as sharing or....The realist school claims that...
This book aims to put killing back into military history.
are real – they exist and are distinct from the particulars that instantiate themere are various
forms of realism. Two major forms
arePlateonicEeralismanAristotelismrealismontheotherhandistheviewthatuniursalsre reooal
entities, IT IS QUITE IMPOSSIBLE FOR A STATEMENT TO STATE THAT IT
ITSELF IS TRUE buttheeggxazistenceisedempendenton
articularswhatexeemplifoythemadditional SO STRANGE, SO TWISTED
STRANGE, THAT HE GREW INTO HIS OWN
STRANGENESS…HumanmoindIdealists………….denieooroubtheexistenktuff
objetsindependentothemindomeAnti-ealistzwhoseontologicalositionisatbjects
outside the mind do existerthelessoubthependentxistenctimespace.
Ka mate Ka mate Ka ora Ka ora!
EMO, for me, in contrast to Nights, was more problematic. While with Nights I found I read through
the various narratives (which in that book as elsewhere in the trilogy is discontinuous yet has the
effect of an ongoing “story” as compelling as anything by Ovid or in the 1001 Nights), I found EMO
more highly resistive, or I was not “tuned” to it. Unlike Gabriel White, in his discussion of The
Imaginary Museum of Atlantis, I largely ignored the abstruse and mysteriously arcane symbols and
images that appeared on the verso of the book with reference to medieval and religious codes and
mysteries. Largely ignored, but not totally: as these images and diagrams etc, as with EMO, in fact
add to the fascination of the book. That is like all books in the trilogy it is immediately “eye-catching”
and the visual effect of the book (even without any concentrated interpretation of its meaning) is itself
like that of experiencing art – when that art as it does so much outside the tidy bounds of “normative”
writing – becomes totality of many media and rejects being either a “novel” or “poetry” or “painting”.
In fact, it is a complex of all genres, or is potentially so. Joanna Paul, whose work Ross references in
EMO a one point, was largely misunderstood in the way she brilliantly integrated language and the
visual.
However, my attention at that time focused on the raison d’être of Nights. EMO, for some reason,
seemed a much more difficult book. And, at an immediate level, none of Ross’s books are easy. But
very few significant, disturbing (and EMO can be disturbing), challenging, or important literary
works are “easy”. We don’t want or need easy or accessible, or what is fashionable or popular, we are
not children, and we all read a lot. So, it was inertia that held me back from “getting into” EMO, and
once the train of my ennui began to move, I was goaded by my confrontation, my struggle with, EMO
the text, work, novel, or project, to wrestle meaning. I engaged with EMO, it threw me to the ground,
I rose up and cursed it, I struggled again, I launched into Google and, I consulted books, I read whole
books, I read much on Ross’s many Blogs…finally I was thrown to the ground and stunned into
awareness, albeit one with some reservations nagging me, of the immensity of this book called EMO.
.... sex, violence, Fantasy, Gothic and of irony, an ultimately engrossing and enchanting tale, or a tale
about writing or of writing magical tales. And whatever else it is, EMO is homage to Story and the
pure magic of The Tale.
For while EMO, seemed, at first to me, and thus might seem to any other reader, to be so replete
with such a bewilderment of images, themes, symbols, and ideas that it caused me, as above, to
wrestle. It was hard to ‘break into’ EMO. It may even seem dry and resistive at first, but as one
proceeds the book is ‘redeemed’ by an intensity of concern and a powerful conscious presence, felt
or experienced in the dialogues in the opening section between the protagonists (who I will refer to
as The Writer and Eva Android), and the sad letters of Eva to Eva von Braun (I know— but it gets
weirder!) or the strange one-sided e-versation by the “helper” who is assisting “Ovid” or The Writer
(again) in the final part of the book. And the book has wonderfully crafted dialogues. The effect of
these is almost eerie in its subtlety, and illumination of thought and feeling. For, together with the
richness of its structural complex, and Ross’s fascination with The Arabian Nights; and Ovid, his
exile, and his Metamorphoses, and indeed with the “transformation” book The Golden Ass, EMO is
itself is a book of stories within stories. It also has or is “generated by” magical myth inside its main
“story”, like The Golden Ass by Apuleius, which has a major, beautiful mythological story of high
love and mystery, the famous ‘Cupid and Psyche’ chapter (which influenced a major poem by James
Merrill). This story, like the story of Beauty and the Beast, which “interrupts” the first part of Ross’s
book, is both sheer beauty and redemption (given the rather hostile and near inhuman atmosphere of
that and other parts of the book). And also, while it is complex, and may seem weird or bizarre to
many who accustomed to less “tangential” literature, in structure and form, EMO is, on one level,
ultimately about the human dilemma. It asks questions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, the writer, writing, ‘art’,
mystery, personal relationships, the occult, cloning, robots, the incursion of technology in our lives,
“high” and “low” culture, history, horror and Sci Fi, fantasy, consciousness itself, compassion, and
madness. Madness and ‘blindness’ in their real and mythical, or symbolic, aspects play significant
roles. Blindness is major leitmotif throughout the work. Blindness as moral blindness, blindness as
blindness: and blindness as in “seeing”. There is history of great thinkers and poets who were “seers”,
or who by becoming blind were given the gift of prophecy (like Tiresias), or writers such as Homer,
Milton, and even James Joyce (who was very nearly blind most of his life). And, in the first part of
the book, The Writer (unnamed), is blinded by women crying that he is (as Ted Hughes was accused
of being), the murderer of his wife. He was, but it turns out that blindness is linked to madness and
his murder could have been an act of mercy as his wife was driven mad when she witnessed her own
father (another Ovid / Oedipus figure) doing vivisections on clone-androids who spurt real blood (to
the thrill of most spectators, but when he sees his daughter in the crowd he immediately blinds
himself). Her husband is himself later... But Eva remains loyal to him –so we have another theme –
fidelity.
But EMO is not simply a modern or postmodern rerun of various Greek and....
------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------
Crush tread, trample distinguish
put your choice in the hands of the town
clerk, the army stuffing its drum.
Poems in The White Stones focus on questions of symbolic referential coherence and figural
determination. The ventriloquised, cacophonic texts of Brass tend to different, although not unrelated
questions: are there limits to poetic language? Is poetic language radically heterogeneous, and if so,
what is left of the form, (or gestalt), of art? Does poetry give access to a hidden order of meaning, or
is it simply a play of surfaces? Is poetry finally more than a collection of utterances under the heading
'poetry'? From Mallarmé onwards, the 'obscurity' of modernist writing challenges tacit assumptions
about the nature and function of poetry, eliciting ontological questions about the purity or impurity
of the poem in relation to other modes of discourse. In Prynne's poetry, obscurity is combined with
excess: there is always more language, more reference, more signification in an expenditure which
may or may not be concerned to recuperate some core of meaning from its riot of utterances. Prynne's
poems mime the signs of readability only to withdraw them at the moment the reader believes
intellectual purchase has been gained by keeping an unknowable absolute, or infinity as its
interpretative horizon, romantic aesthetic preserves a gulf between meaning and intuition which
sanctions an inexhaustibility of interpretation itself.
................................................................... ...........................................................................................
... although the act of killing another person in battle may invoke a wave of nauseous distress,
it may also incite intense feelings of pleasure. William Broyles was one of the many combat
soldiers who articulated this ambiguity. In 1984, this former Marine and editor of the Texas
Monthly and Newsweek explored … contradictions inherent in telling war stories...[ex
soldiers were said to not want to talk about their war experiences as they were too terrible] …
Not so, Broyles continued, 'I believe that most men who have been to war would have to
admit, if they were honest, that somewhere inside themselves they loved it too.' How could
that be explained to family and friends, he asked? … reunions were awkward occasions
precisely because the joyous aspects of slaughter were difficult to confess in all circumstances.
To describe combat as enjoyable was like admitting to being a blood-thirsty brute: to
acknowledge that the decisive cease-fire caused as much anguish as losing a great lover could
only inspire shame...Broyles … argued that the thrill of destruction was irresistible. A bazooka
or an M-60 machine-gun was a 'magic sword' or a grunt's 'Excalibur':
all you do is move the finger so imperceptibly, just a wish flashing across your mind like
a shadow...and poof! in a blast of sound and energy and light a truck or a house or even
people disappear, everything flying and settling back into dust.
[War was like sport, and started when children played war games....] {But there was more
to war...killing had a spiritual resonance and an aesthetic poignancy. Slaughter was 'an affair
of great seductive beauty.' [as in J. G. Ballard's great works such as Crash and The Atrocity
Exhibition etc … there were aesthetic preferences for killing....some preferred napalm.}
Marines favoured the silent omnipotence of napalm...while others...preferred white
phosphorous because it 'exploded with fulsome elegance, wreathing its target in intense and
billowing smoke, throwing out glowing red comets trailing brilliant white plumes'. The
experience seemed to resemble spiritual enlightenment or sexual eroticism: indeed, slaughter
could be likened to an orgasmic, charismatic experience. However you looked at it, war was
a turn on.
------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------
Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, described time as an a priori notion that, together with
other a priori notions such as space, allows us to comprehend sense experience. Kant denies
that either space or between(or duration of)elevents)(thougvhspaceanTyII;I;ime
ACETELYNE!are-eldobe transcedentallyidialiisense or not to B mere iters suchterm
"possible world" gobacktoLeibniz'seoryo’ possworldssedt’analyse ecessity, ossibility,
animilarodalotions:odal-ealism&istview))notably$$^opoundedbyewisatall possible worlds
are as real as the actual worldregardedmerely34iery-0u2-oneamonganifiteeO09o???/
logically possible worlds, some framework to— THE WORLD IS FLAT – FLAT AS
A PANCAKE
--------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------
What? 100 million?! Invent something, but keep calm:
“Repair thou quickly hence to thence, and, as if it ‘twere thou’s own heart thou
held, Knowing that to lose or drop that beating spring of life, God’s pump,
would be certain forfeit of thou’s own life, Fast heeling on that bumble
fingering: Treasure convey this my particular intent To that matter, whose
import is as vast As giant mountain quakes that oft do shake and fright our
mighty globe –
Oh this greatly troubled spheroidic world!
--------------------------------------------------------------- -----------------------------
....one of the unsolved problems in physics…Initially, the term "theory of everything" was used
with an ironic connotation to refer to various overgeneralized theories. For example, a great-
grandfather of Ijon Tichy, a character from a cycle of Stanisław Lem's science fiction stories of the
1960s, was known to work on the "General Theory of Everything"....
One thinks of the beautiful naivety of the young couple writing that fascinating
history of mathematics...so many women, so great at maths and science, denied the
right to speak or lecture…
...it has been mooted (I quip, like W. I get sicke of this 'glorificationne of Scyenze' which comes about
as Scyenze can help Big Monny to making more and more of the Big Monny) that the unsolved
problem in Physics is defining Physics...which some naughty people conflate with mathematics...one
of those (many) perhaps fascinating but useless things people amuse themselves with....so that
Physics itself, or the definition of that discipline, becomes 'the unsolved problem'... Alan Loney has
a line in one of his books (from memory, I have the book but I am in full flight): 'What am I doing
with a word like 'ontological' in the bush?'... I think this is in his (very good if not great book
Sidetracks....Loney, who did much for poetry...Innovative, very very talented...
bEing and Othingness)
I have to concede that I haven't read this book I use this as it was easy to down load...I like his
novel 'Nausea' which I seem to have been reading and re-reading for years, and some of his plays and
so on...Sartre was keen on sometimes randomly attacking men even much larger than himself...with
Camus and de Beauvoir a complex of the French Existentialism developed...Precursed by Heidegger
and back to Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky et al...But I wanted an easy text, easily downloadable to
"embed" things in....Like putting a meal in a 'base' to give it "strength" or whatever Chefs call that art
of food making...POCKET ENCYCLOPEDIA – The Great Lakes – Ontario, Huron, Superior,
Michigan, and Erie – together form the largest freshwater area in the world. Heavy industry has
caused severe water pollution and in some areas it is dangerous to eat the fish or swim. (Sounds like
NZ, sounds like the World). V. famous Tullio Crali’s Nosediving on the City (1939)...Futurist
celebration of speed and terror...the new power of the bomber to embody the long-dreamt Fascist and
Futurist fantasies of systematically destroying cities and societies from above…the terror bombing
was treated as aesthetic events…thousands over thousands were killed by German Italian and later
US and British bombs…then the Allies killed between 1 million and 1.2 million urban civilians during
their [fire] bombing…that this terrible campaign took place explains why Robert Lowell refused war
service, was jailed…initiated ‘confessionalism’ his tortured and great poems…The destruction of
these cities was carefully engineered…the chemical comp. of the incendiaries tailored targeted cities
using authentic copies of German and Japanese houses…these were war crimes…there were no good
guys…GTTGD ….pilots returned to base…the firestorms in Japan killed 900,000
civilians…NUXUMD … the stench of death…1945 German soldiers burning dead civilians’ bodies
in Dresden after British and US bombing… But there’s more…drones, then helicopters…(Now the
Israelis, 30,000 to 2000 or so, and all the others…)… a US Apache…’Look at those dead bastards,’
one pilot says, after the first shells explode and bodies lie dismembered…’Nice!’ the other
enthuses….Minutes later as a van driver attempts to come to the aid of the first victims, he is attacked,
too: several people die and two children within the vehicle are injured. When they become visible
one of the crew remarks: ‘Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids to the battle.’…
The condition on which human reality [this is Sartre's translation of Heidegger's famous
term Dasein, which many translate as "Being-there"] can deny [nier] all or part of the world
is that human reality carry nothingness within itself as the nothing which separates its
present from all its past. Orakau (31 March –2 April 1864)…Orakau was arguably the most
famous battle ever fought on NZ shores, even if the reality of what took place was far more
bloody and brutal than often recognized./Orakau was notable for the diverse tribal
affiliations of the defenders. Present were Tuhoe, Ngati Kahununu, Ngati Tuwharetoa, Ngati
Raukawa, Waikato, Ngati Maniapoto and others. It was estimated that at least twenty
women – possibly 100 – and an unknown but not insignificant number of children were just
inside the pa. After…Rangiaowhia, they were there for their own protection. The British
could not be trusted to not attack non-combatants. / Rewi did not want to make a stand at
Orakau. The site was exposed, lacked a water supply…Brigadier-General George Carey
who led the attack. He divided up his force of 1,100 troops into three separate columns, to
arrive together at dawn on 31 March and quickly surround the pa. Later
reinforcements…the total British and colonial forces…to over 1,400. / An immediate British
assault…was easily repelled…then after some more attempts Carey ordered sapping
operations to proceed…/ Carey’s forces besieged the pa and reinforcements brought heavy
guns to fire into the pa…water was exhausted…2 April Cameron arrived…giving orders to
invite those inside the pa to surrender…to save their lives. To this came the immortal
response. ‘Ka whawhai tonu matou, ake, ake, ake!’ (“We shall fight on forever and ever and
ever!”). The identity of the next Maori speaker is more certain. Mair declared…women and
children could be released and spared…Ahumai Te Paerata, a Ngati Raukawa wahine toa,
stepped forward and replied ‘Kie te mate nga tane, me mate ano nga wahine me nga
tamariki’ (‘If the men die, the women and children die also.’): the pa’s occupants found an
exit and many escaped…[then] a brave bid for freedom turned into a bloody ordeal. As the
men women and children scrambled their way towards the Puniu river, cavalry and other
troops hunted them down through bush, scrub, and swamp. Large numbers were killed in the
subsequent British pursuit… (Of many), many women…were killed, including Hineturama,
a Ngati Whakaue woman of mana, and an unknown number of children. Some were victims
of atrocities committed in cold blood…/Of the 300 or so occupants of the pa up to half were
killed and many more wounded [including] Ahumai Te Paerata, shot and wounded in four
places. The British lost 16 killed and fifty-two wounded. There was nothing noble or
chivalrous...defenders had been unscrupulously hunted down and brutally killed in large
numbers…The effect of the Waikato war was the devastation of Maori land and confiscation
of that land and the enablement of Pakeha to enrich themselves from some of the richest
land in Aotearoa… In the meantime, Wiremu Tamihana stood his ground and would not be
bought off…
But this is still not all, for the nothing envisaged would not yet have the sense of
nothingness; a suspension of being which would remain unnamed, which would not be
As giant mountain quakes that oft do shake and fright our mighty globe….Go
as fast as festinate, and by no circuit dally – this matter cannot sleep, Nor shall
rest my kingly heart, old, and weighted; as I wait and weigh, and weight, these
matters Total up for the rest, who slumber as I ponder. No, my kingly head, so
white with woe, I’ll not to rest ‘Till all these frightful ghosts are soft-sure in
bed: For if we leave this dangling – The… world shall wake in sudden throat –
and slay us cursely, like a Polyphemus, who had But One, despite He Poly. Go!
Fleet thee, fleet!”
heartof thiabsolutelucidity, would have the effect of cutting [consciousness] in two. Furthermore, this
nothing would by no means be negative. On the face of the, beside Nothingness, as we have
seen above, is the ground of the negationnecessarily be conscious of this cleavage in
being, but not as a phenomenon which it experiences, rather as a structure of
consciousness which it iseedom is the human Our action has the beauty of futility
and yet we proceed. You can join in. All can. All can do. All are invited. All can make.
consciousness continually experiences itself as the nihilation of its past
beingomeonedoubtlessillelieve that he can useagainst us here a freedom. But
Heidegger, who is known to have been greatly influenced by Kierkegaard, considers
anguish instead as the apprehension of nothingness. These two descriptions
of anguish do not appear to us contradictory; on the contrary the one implies the other.
First, we must acknowledge that Kierkegaard is right; anguish is distinguished from
fear in that fear is fear of beings-in-the-world whereas anguish is when he tries to
foresee he will face the bombardment, when he asks himself if he is going to be
able to "hold out." Similarly, the recruit who reports for active duty at
the afraid"; that is Yes, darkness, darkness. Then colour was created, and an
infinite number of
forms! There was a sudden display: Everything was afire with colour.
Everything compressed back into the darkness. Shakespeare’s brain grew from
the darkness…. strictly determined, …. I take refuge in reflection; between
my future being and my present being. But a nothingness… as. … … ……. ?
that it constitutes the future as possible. Anguish is precisely my
consciousness of being my own future, in the mode of not-being. exact, the
nihilation of horror as a motive [i.e., as a determining cause], which
has the effect of reinforcing horror as a state [i.e., as an effect], REPETITION IS
TRUTH has as its positive counterpart the appearance of other forms of conduct
(in particular that which consists in throwing myself over the precipice) as my
possible possibilities.
compels me to save my life, nothing There was a lot of darkness,
dark darkness –
and some light. Light – yes! – light! Light and dark…. Less light than dark,
but, more dark than light….
But I loved the dark. Came colour. The light and the dark seemed to know
something…
not yet. Thus the self which I am depends on the self which I am not yet to the exact
extent that the self which I am to anguish by transmuting it into indecision.
Indecision, in its turn, calls for decision. I abruptly get away from the edge of the
precipice and resume my way. The example which we have just analyzed has shown
us what we could call "anguish in the face of the future." There exists another:
anguish in the face of the past. It is that of the gambler [joueur] who has as
if the sight of the gaming table reawakened in us a tendency.....taken his resolution the
day before, he thinks of himself still as not wishing to play anymore; he believes in the
effectiveness of this resolution. But what he apprehends then in anguish...
myself, and now I suddenly perceive that my former understanding of the situation is
no more than a memory of an idea, a memory of a feeling. In order for it to come to
my aid once more, I must remake it ex nihilo and freely. The not-gambling I s
only one of my possibilities, as the fact of gambling is another of them, neither more
nor less. I must rediscover the resolutions which I am. It would be vain to object that
the sole condition of this anguish is ignorance of the underlying psychological
determinism. According to such a view my anxiety would come from lack of knowing
the real and effective incentives which in the darkness of the unconscious This
freedom which reveals itself to us in...for freedom, we shall reply that we cannot
describe it since it is not, but we can at least suggest its meaning to the necessity for
the motive to appear as motive only as a correlate of a consciousness of motive. In
short, as soon as we abandon the hypothesis of [thing-like]
He was lost in a haze of shifting shapes, a hum of machinery, a clatter of meta. The roaring
rumbling murmuring jumble of sound, the routine, the wet, the dreardom, began to absorb, to
sap: and his soul yielded up to the building's structure. For the huge construction had many
aspects of the living. Who could say that its great entangled pipes and tubes weren't the blood
vessels of a Titan? Amongst all that steel and stench, where massive machines and men were
devoted to turning all that was living into all that was dead, with ironways of carcasses
dripping blood and slowly moving, gradually disgorging, their various organs: plunging
pancrea, oozing stomachs; 'shootwards' to the black buckets carrying the strange, smelling
shapes of lungs and fat – the occasional windpipe draping the edge – he felt his mind dragged,
pulled, cut at, and finally disgorged – turned inside out to reveal the vast flooding sea of
hallucinatory horror that could be his mind at its worst, or most intense....Amongst all those
headless things, he could well imagine that those who'd spent several seasons in the deathing
house, had had sense, mind, soul, all torn; and the rest would be dissipating, flowing,
dissolving away; just as the steam arose and obliterated, burred and blanketed, so one
imagined that the souls would be sucked and absorbed into the mass of steel, ot the whiite
walls, or the entanglements of pipes, or the droning, the everdroning, the everdrone of rattles,
crashes and thumps.....Or was it simply that he liked adjectives, had a predilection for long,
flowing phrases, which he caressed as a sculptor soothingly touches a sinuous piece of
driftwood, reluctant to relinquish? Could he have said simply: “I had a very soul destroying
job in November?” I am a soulless soul, turning in the plasmic black white nothingless
something, I Brahma...
bird song. what the tui says. This little song, of a pair of tui, the male and female birds, was
recited by Mere Ngamai o Te Wharepouri, the venerable lady of Ngati-Awa, Taranaki, who gave me
much other poetic lore...The two birds, said she, are sitting on a bough of a tree, the tane and the
wahine, and this is their musical dialogue. The tane says to his bird:
“Te tu e hu,
Te tu e hu,
Te to karekare
The birds feast on the tirori fruit, and then the tane utters this in a flute-like note, prolonged to a
whistle:
“Hu-hu-e! whio-o, whi-i-o!” Thus the nothing which separates the motive from con-
sciousness characterizes itself as transcendence in immanence. It is producing itself
as immanence that consciousness nihilates the nothing which makes consciousness
exist for itself as transcendence. But we see that
attitudes appear; consciousness continually experiences itself as the nihilation
of its past being
1 The old lion perisheth for....
11.To set up on high those that be low; that those which mourn the consciousness of
his freedom, or if you prefer, anguish is the mode of being of freedom as
consciousness of being; it is in anguish that freedom is, in its being, in question for
itself.
Fear came upon me, and trembling
Robin knew that there was no way but death. In death Robin would belong to her. Death went with
them, together and alone...She had a beaked head and body, small, feeble, and ferocious....Jenny
Petherbirdge...She had a continued rapacity for other peoples' facts; absorbing time, she held herself
responsible for historic characters.... She defiled the very meaning of personality in her
passion to be a person; somewhere about her was the tension of the accident....She wanted a reason
for everything and was the cause of nothing...desired the spirit of love, but was unable to attain it....[A-
tumble in his chest, the dark place, the beads of knowledge...and traditional knowledge tends to accrue
gradually and unevenly in communities....One of the most remarkable aspects of the knowledge
possessed by Hohepa, in addition to his formidable scope and depth, was the fact that it was the
inheritance of the accumulated traditional learning that had taken place in an unbroken chain for
several centuries... Then he pointed to a distant blue mountain at the end of the valley.
'And three days walk in that direction is Maungapohatu. That's our mountain. It's our sacred mountain,
but it doesn't actually belong to us. It belongs to God. That's the place where Rua got his inspiration
and thinking from...' On the peak of Maungapohatu, Tuhoe identity was at its zenith. Hohepa stared
out at the staggering scenery all around us...he said: 'With that mountain we are closer to heaven,
closer to the Allmighty. People approach Maungapohatu from all different sides, but when we reach
the summit, there are no sides anymore. Then we are all one people....Here, as the zephyrs of wind
brushed our faces, Hohepa experienced something profound...on the deserted
stretch of dusty road gazing at the shimmering peak of Maungapohatu in
the distance — beneath which spread a mottled landscape of dense bush
and luxuriant farmland — he seemed to fuse with his surroundings. { In the
pursuit of emotional balance and stability, Louise Bourgeois frequently rendered architecture as a
symbolic presence in her sculpture, prints, drawings and early paintings. “As the architectural
consciousness of the shape mounts,” she said: “The psychological consciousness of fear diminishes.”
These forms were invariably personified, with structures exhibiting poignant vulnerabilities, and,
occasionally assertiveness. Figural works took on architectural features, molded enclosures became
refuges, or conversely, traps...sites of personal drama... Bourgeois's attraction to architecture was
rooted in her youthful study of mathematics, which she appreciated for its reliability — it provided
her with a sense of calm and security. [A universe of death, which God, by curse / created
evil, for evil only good; / where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds / Perverse
[Abominable Gorgons!…[“I remember being young. It was summer. There was
endless birdsong / We are content for a long time...for in our merry making... a deep
sweat for that they happened in a house without an address, in a street in no town,
citizens with people and no names with which to deny them. This very lack of identity
makes them ourselves...so I say, what of the night? ...the terrible night?...” ((This chant
evokes an exchange of gazes. Iwi means 'a group of people' and 'ke' invokes the
strangeness of one group to another...in Maori ancestral thinking...(((It was a heavy
darkness, heavy and compelling...There was a vase of flame-coloured tulips in the hall— surely the
most graceful of flowers. Some thrust their heads forward like snakes, and some were very erect, stiff,
virginal, rather prim. Some were dying, with curved grace in their death | … As Julia walked along
the Quai des Orfèvres the light was silver and the wind was soft. The river was brown and green –
olive-green under the bridges — and a rainbow coloured scum floated at the sides. Anything might
happen. Happiness. A course of face massage. / She began to imagine herself in a new black dress
and a little black hat with a veil that just shadowed her eyes. After all, why give up hope when so
many people had loved her? … ‘My darling … My lovely girl … Mon amour … Mon petit amour ….’
Again and again in his lectures Wittgenstein tried to explain that he was not offering any
philosophical theory; he was offering only a means to escape any need of such a theory. The syntax,
the grammar, of our thought could not be, as he had earlier thought, delineated or revealed by analysis
– phenomenological or otherwise. 'Philosophical analysis'. He said, 'does not tell us anything new
about thought (and if it did it would not interest us). 'The rules of grammar could not be justified, nor
even described, by philosophy. Philosophy could not consist, for example, of a list of 'fundamental'
rules of the sort that determine the 'depth-grammar' (to use Chomsky's term) of our language: We
never arrive at fundamental propositions in the course of our investigation; we get to the boundary of
language which stops us from asking further questions. We don't get to the bottom of things, but reach
a point where we can go no further, where we cannot ask further questions.
But the really decisive moment came when came to take literally the idea of the Tractatus that the
philosopher has nothing to say, but only something to show, and applied that idea with complete
rigour, abandoning altogether the attempt to say something with 'pseudo-propositions'...To connect
two things we do not always need a third: 'Things must connect directly....' The connections between
words and meaning are to be seen not in theory but in practice, in the use of the word...Wittgenstein's
abandonment of theory was not, as Russell thought, a rejection of serious thinking, of the attempt to
understand, but he adoption of a different notion of what it is to understand – a notion that, like that
of Spengler and Goethe before him,, stresses the importance and the necessity of 'the understanding
that consists in seeing connections'.…
…for (him) everything depended on the spirit...The lectures on mathematics form part of
Wittgenstein's general attack on the idol-worship of science....
So he had to get to grips with the guts of this thing in the Green Man... he had trudged
up from the 'Offal Department' watching his out for his balance on the slippery
tiles...He was coming to the place. He hesitated a bit before the place. The final altar.
He strained forward, but couldn't see the sheep, cramped in their runs, waiting for death.
They were killing as he approached, and he could see the great chain moving, threading
around the floor in a complex spiral so that it took half an hour before the first dead
beasts came to the weighing office, stripped of its guts and headless – and in fact
looking rather clean and pink. Here, as he passed, the last of the morning's kill waited
in a motionless line, but sometimes an odd jerk, an involuntary muscular spasm,
signified a remnant of life, but mostly they waited, a long line of pink tinted flesh,
hanging like washing which makes a delicate colour in congregation. They were
peacefully at death.... But the first butchers were sharpening their knives.... He made
his way across the floor. Voices began to jabber in his head.…
And truly I was afraid...
Again, as with Goldilocks, the anthropic alternative to the design hypothesis is statistical. Scientists
invoke the magic of large numbers...Now, suppose the origin of life, the spontaneous arising of
something equivalent to [de-oxyribonucleic acid–I refuse to use “dee en ay”], really was a quite
staggeringly improbable event...so improbable as to occur on only one in a billion planets...Our
Western politicians avoid mentioning the R word…,and instead characterize their battle as a war
against ‘terror’, as though terror were a kind of spirit or force...they are not motivated by evil [“evil”
cannot exist in a Dawkinsinian or Darwinian world, and indeed no one can define Evil to be fair
(Nominalism Universalism and the Tripartite Epistemological Theory assuming Truth postulated or
existent must be ABSOLUTE, either OFF or ON, like the humble switch, only TRUTH TABLES and
TAUTOLOGIES around here, Sir!] all that]...and indeed it makes sense, we use evil too much, and it
is banal… we are awash, we are sometimes almost drowning in and with “evil”]. However misguided
we may think of them [how can they be ‘misguided’ in the absence of any ‘categorical imperative’ or
any God or What? …] they are motivated, like the Christian murderers of abortion doctors, by what
they perceive to be righteousness… [they are not possessed by Satan]
BUT - Objects misbehave.
4 Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it.
5 Let darkness, and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the
day terrify This does not happen just at a particular moment in psychic life when negative or
interrogative attitudes appear; consciousness continually experiences itself as the nihilation of its
past being.
11 The old lion perisheth for lack of prey...
...it was as if I had died and been torn apart by blood merciless wolves…I could
create, I could, write and write and live forever in language, become language….
mine ear received a little thereof.
And the tiger…’Tyger tyger burning bright,/ In the forests of the night / What
immortal hand or eye/ Could frame they fearful symmetry?’ …
....earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth...
I’ve got what seems to be sore hip, bugger it, another sign I’m growing old, when I was 7
or 8 the world was magic, I was so energetic and everything was so exciting: I couldn’t
imagine getting old. Old people were in a different dimension. How will I –? (‘Bloody Mary’s
[a female Siberian tiger] footprints on the beach. When I found footprints like these I wish I
could follow them forever. Bloody Mary’s vast territory ran along the Sikhoe-Alin Range,
and stretched inland. Her family played somewhere on the Dragon Spine far in the distance.
/ Diamond dust. The microscopic specks of ice glitter in the sunlight as they float through the
air and land on the field of snow. / In the early spring of each year, Ussuri deer that have
survived the harsh winter pass through the Basin of Skeletons on their way to the coast. The
Great King drew back his lips to reveal his fangs to me. It was silent warning…The gesture
drained the last bit of courage in me. [Good old Darwin there are only about 300 of these
beautiful animals left.…
… and truly I was afraid….He looked round like a god, unseeing, into the air
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nature is a strange factory, relentless is Her fecundity.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Ah, mighty uncertainty!” said the doctor. “Have you thought of all the doors that have shut at night
and opened again? Of women who have looked about with lamps, like you, and have scurried on
past on fast feet? Like a thousand mice they go this way and that, now fast, now slow, some
halting...behind doors, some trying to find the stairs, all approaching or leaving their misplaced
mouse-meat that lies in some crany, on some couch, down on some floor, behind some cupboard;
and all the windows, great and small, from which love and fear have peered, shining and all the
windows, great and small, from which love and fear have peered, shining and in tears. Put those
windows end to end and it would be a casement that would reach around the world; and put a
thousand eye into one eye and you would have the night combed with the great blind searchlight of
the heart.” Tears began to run down Nora's face...”What do they find then, that this lover has
committed the unpardonable error of not being able to exist – and they come down with a dummy
in their arms....” ((Code breakers tend to be odd balls, outsiders, The most important trait is not pure
math skill but a deeper ability to pay attention. Monks, librarians, linguists, pianists and flutists,
diplomats, scribes, postalclerks, astrologers, chemists, players of games, Lotharios, revolutionaries
in coffee shops, kings and queens: thse are the ones who have built the field across the centuries
and pushed the boundaries forward...[ indeed Vivaldi's version was a vernal delight but there was
an unexpected dip into the minor drums during a musical thunderstorm [Figural works took on
architectural features...[Advertisements, Butterflies, Clouds, Faries, Figureheads, Food, Insects,
History, Planets, Categorization mattered to Cornell, though so too did the intuitive leaps and flights
of fancy. 'A clearing house for dreams and visions,' he called his files; part research project, part
stalking, part devotional act{By the mid 30s he had discovered the two great mediums of his
maturity: shadow boxes and films made by re-editing found footage...[He used montage and created
incredible worlds from things of the world and arranged them in the marvelous enclosures of his
boxes, that in many ways revolutionized art in the world....Surrealist and realist and of mystery and
perhaps beauty; [But in his life, devoted to his mother, he acked with loneliness and yearned for
sexual experience and love; deeply shy he had it seemed but one (but perhaps magical) “affair”
which involved it is almost certain, sex and love but she left and the ache returned, the terrible
loneliness returned....; he stalked the streets searching seeking on the verge of madness and
depravity;..He longed to touch, but looking and fantasising were safer and had their own
satisfactions. His diaries are filled with accounts of women and especially teenage girls (teeners he
called them or fées) who caught his eye in the city....[dark entries...sad entries...]; his last years were
the worst – a tribut to him was published in the New Yorker – fame which he had never wanted,
had come. His brother died...Then his mother died. Alone in the house on Utopia avenue, he was
ravaged by loneliness – particularly for the physical contact he had never really managed to attain....
Gobsmack & Flabbergast
…suggestive spillages combining incompatible glazes
Letting colour puddle and pool
Gobsmack’s [bizarre & sometimes disturbing] parade…of forms…presented so elegantly.
So elegantly.
---------------------------------------
are there limits to human language? I s poetic language radically heterogeneous, and if so, what is
left of the form, (or Gestalt), of art? Does poetry give access to a hidden order of meaning, or is it
simply a play of surfaces? Is poetry finally more than a collection of utterances under the heading
of poetry?...In Prynne's poetry, obscurity is always combined with excess: there is always
qwerqwerq
[That “great poem of Logic!”: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. (Wittgenstein). The beautiful
logic poem…]
"'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,' a United States major said today.
He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town
regardless of civilian casualties … “... against the people – the people they wanted to
burn, and to kill and kill and kill... “It's a Milk Powder Factory, Bush me old mate,
just a milk powder factory...”
---------------------------------------------------------
Bouvard thought that Spinoza might provide him with arguments, and he wrote to Dumouchel
to get Saisset’s translation.
Dumouchel sent him a copy, belonging to his friend, Professsor Varelot, exiled on the 2nd of
December.
The Ethics [Spinoza’s book The Ethics*] frightened him [them] with [its] axioms, [its]
corollaries. They read only the passages marked in pencil, and understood as follows:
Substance is what is of itself, by itself, without cause and without origin. That substance is God.
He alone is extension, and extension has no limits: who could limit it?
But although it is infinite, it is not absolute infinity [?], for it contains only one kind of
perfection, and the absolute contains them all.
They stopped often, for a time, to reflect. Pecuchet absorbed pinches of snuff and Bouvard was
flushed with concentration.
‘Do you find this interesting?’
‘Yes, certainly. Do go on!’
God develops himself in an infinity of attributes which express, each in its way, the infinity of his
being.
Where was God? Talking to the Selfish Gena-horror?
‘Ah! That would be splendid!’ said Pecuchet.
So there is no liberty in man, or in God
‘Do you hear that?’ cried Bouvard.
I sayeth: “If God had a will, a purpose, he would lack some perfection. He would not be God.
Thus, our world is only a point in the totality of things, and the universe is impenetrable to our
knowledge, one portion of an infinity of universes giving out infinite modifications beside ours.
Extension envelops our universe, but it is enveloped by God, who contains in his thought all
possible universes, and his thought is itself enveloped in his substance.” (Indeed something of
Spinoza, his possible ‘causeless cause’ (also vid. Boethius read Aristotle’s ‘Metaphysics’)…and
his Immanence, his sub specie aeternitatis, Spinoza’s great Ethics, his deep sensate…Wise, almost
as God. S. the lens grinder in those savage times…” ‘Vit le petit fils! Vit le petit fils! Thus I heard
the French woman her child crying at the Auckland museum with Seb. So on the hill, the
Frenchman, asked: “What is a basin.” I wracked, I had read ‘La Hotel du Lac.’ ‘Une petit Lac.’ I
said. That was Mt Wellington, Maungarei… the Basin is a tidal lake… off the Tamaki River…
As Comrade Dawkins, the Philosophe, sayeth de facto: We have solved the mystery of existence,
we know it all, there is no God, nothing... and he came down the mountain asking the people: did
they not know that God is dead? the spider's eyes peer sadly at us....and I know exactly why we
are here … [and he even dares to deny …] … So we enter The Horror [...but that which is ineffable
remains ineffable...unknowable... there is and are 'no elegant solutions'... All we can do, with
Wittgenstein, is to question...And to question the question….and 'the last word shall want a word'...
we enter the Great Real, of words, that skein wherein we are trapped...forever wondering...forever
failing...forever unknowing..forever... [But it is a Black Box..for which cometh, the chicken or the
egg? A black box, the whole shabang...something is somehow somewhere there somewhy and [
Thus is it the end of Religion, the End of Philosophy? But then can we invoke Fordism? (I jest,
and I mean that in Huxley’s book Brave New World) Long live Fordism! No? Let us pray for our
Brave New World... Let us celebrate the Nuclear Joy...(But Richard Rhodes’ great book The Making
of the Atomic Bomb...at least, like Bronowski he acknowledged the great contribution of Leo Szilard
to that...BUT)… well the Fire Bombing fest of the Allies (hence Robert Lowell went to jail for
refusing war service in WWII)...I point people to Lowell, related to the astronomer and Amy
Lowell….et al… But I also turn to that book: An Intimate History of Killing.… Which I point you
to. But what can we do? Is R.D. right? For me an abstraction cannot be “hunted down”...I once
answered these Iranians and Turks in a local cafe on God, yes or none?...I said that I simply could
not say, no se!*...as in strange beautiful and troubled poems...his pobre hombre poem...What of Dr
Dawkins? ... I myself read biology and other books, I was in the Science Book Club (and what I
loved of that beautifully illustrated Time-Life book on evolution and Darwin’s travels, was, I was
almost mesmerized by it, his study. The photograph of his study with that large table, the books and
specimens...there like Schopenhauer I could be a great pessimistic but deep philosopher or a man
of thought who was forever about to write...what I didn’t know…Darwin or Schopenhauer in their
studies (real ants, spiders and beetles in real savage jungles? (Never!)), read more or Gerald Durrell
that his brother (Larry Durrell’s poetry (strange and very good and also Kingsley Amis who I was
surprised was so good) I have read, I do want to read his trilogies, his poetry I discovered recently
in the Peng. Mod. Poets….) who I left as a teenager intending to be a writer (L. Durrell I mean)...but
Wordsworth Keats Dickens Carol Hugo du Maupassant and much else read I then...my book of
Pasteur, my books by Tinbergen (animal behaviour), Schaller (gorillas), much else...later I read of
the struggle of the Curies...much else have I traveled much in those gold houses...and years later
indeed Climbing Mount Improbable, and The Greatest Show on Earth… These are fascinating books.
As a youth I combined ideas from Wordsworth, Spinoza’s Ethics and my fascination with art and
science...I also became obsessed with Beethoven, Gauguin (via Somerset Maugham of The Moon
and Sixpence, based on Gaugin’s life, and also his stories, his great Of Human Bondage… But I
also wrote and read and read and these days I still do…. What to do with Dawkins? We can only
question, there are no answers...to the men of Iran I said that God simultaneously does and does not
exist, then I ran my version of the Tripartite System (Truth, Belief, and Justification) through their
ears...My idea is based on, in epistemology, of Truth (being defined as absolute in all cases in
seeking a significant Knowledge) and the need for Absolute Certainty of Justification…they all got
into a great and animated discussion, in the end one of them, said: “You are right.” I was amused as
some Christians I know simply wouldn’t even debate this, they would reach for a Bible...but the
idea reflects an idea of Hegel’s, but also others….in any case I realized the only value of this system
of Epistemology was to understand how much we can never know and to realise that most of us,
regardless of what we know...well we only think we know these things, existential doubt plagues
us, we can’t yet turn to Epicurus (most of his books are lost so we don’t really know what the latter
really concluded or thought in total)…What of Dawkins? We always, as humans, tend to default to
a certainty. There is A, not not-A, there is God, there isn’t God. (Men and women, to survive might
follow a leader in a certain direction who knew he had to decide, they might be hunting, seeking,
he had to estimate, make a decision...right or wrong.) Neither matter. Better I feel are those such as
Wittgenstein who simply question and advise maths geniuses to become mechanics and so on…My
book The Wonders of Life on Earth (LIFE), 1961 fascinated me. I got it down. I recall I got that.
(Later I was first in Biology in my school and for a prize got, Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde. I liked my
biology teacher. My brother Dennis got a degree in Cell Biology. He worked later in Chemistry. I
was I was fascinated by the huge range and mystery of living things. Darwin’s story told in that
large book, with magnificent illustrations which I was looking at tonight. Darwins and Dawkins’
analyses are excellent. The mind, Darwin’s idea, beautiful. (Both are thinkers). But if we are to
speak of ‘Divine Intervention’ etc we have to rethink it. Jim Holt’s questioning of the existence of
everything (or why anything exists) still leaves the question. Science can always answer ‘how’
questions, but not ‘why’… complexity or what appear to be absurdities if we consider a ‘divine
Engineer’ are answered via the Philosophic method in the Tripartite System. There is never a
question of Truth, or half-truth, the problem is that on ‘essential questions’ empirical research is
impossible (who could set up a research project proving something as existentially “impossible” as
the existence of Something – we have to use a Monist System (the separation of “physical” and
mental things is a trap. There is One Thing out there. But all we can do is question. Then why
evolution? It is impossible to know. Knowledge is what is impossible to obtain. How do we deal
with that. In his lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, which Turing, also lecturing on the
same subject (but with a more “hopeful” approach), came, something both liked; W examined
Russells problems with his own paradox, Cantor’s strange and fascinating theories, etc etc... later
Godel found a “certainty” that no system such as Russell’s could work and so on… W.’s point was:
“It doesn’t matter.” We can do calculus, whether infinitesimals matter or not, we use mathematics
(some do). We can build bridges. (This wasn’t good enough for Turing!). But the fascination for
me, after reading The Tractatus and PIs by Wittgenstein is finding his real philosophic issue was
that of his own soul. His deliberate placing of himself, in WWI, in the most dangerous place. This
was to avoid suicide. Only thus could he continue with his project...and then he moves cannot be
avoided and the thinker has to ask the unanswerable questions as Life mixes with Objectivity is
useful for to some extent doesn’t exist problem includes all truth a switch is on or off BUT are
NO … can be shown such knowledge leading to a certainty Atheist as impossible as certainty in the
der Got. Der Got might not intervene Got ist… (a probably…brain files something away and
somehow “sees” that something that as Being it thinks “true” (in fact we are, I suspect, wired to
either, say God or no-God) is always subject to both “social” objections existential. So, Dawkins
might wish to pay a visit to Brian Tamaki. I simply don’t know. But I am Dostoevsky’s side, more
or less…human kind cannot bear too much reality. Let us pray for Dr. D and all others:
Our Father, who art in Heaven,
hallowed be thy Name;
thy Kingdom come,
thy will be done
on earth as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our Trespasses,
as we forgive those who Trespass against us;
and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power and the glory,
for ever and ever. Amen.
 

We respect... devastatingly...” and] spirited and exhilarating...would only have been
moderately...extreme horribleness. Let say we are trying to show there is a God or some spirit...What
a Something (Schopenhauer's Will?) or whatever. Inter alia Descartes made a “mistake” [there is [The
Rainbow is re-weavered! We are mad but free. confusion....Capitalism fails...the “people” tear the
scientists [gaps and… [It looms….with his body-soul (Substance Dualism) face of the Eterna—
defeated by epistemology, but his uncertainty enhances and amazes the world.... I am probably mad
also...Dawkins obsessed....as I once...Religio [the argument or speculation.
book....lucid and wise, sed the Tripartite Logical System, we now find no
He was short, to the point of his death... but let's have no complacency...Tony Blair's chief
scientific adviser), both the biological and physical...old college at Cambridge.....[I say presumably
because we don't know...[IF THERE IS NO GOD WHY BE the march of the eyes who knows. Who
see the steel trees - their crisp speech modulated in the morning mauve - and the seeds wait. [Monism
GOOD?...small differences of priority...The boy lay WHAT DOES IT MATTER? prone...there are no
limits....As we stated at the very good
reason, reckon then science has it's great Ballardian moment: a great Super N-Bomb
Scriptures of the old and New Testament a reliable guide to just what to the believe. The Illusion of
the God Delusion. The impossibility of disproving a vast abstraction. “No one owns the land it
belongs to God.” Kereopa…Hohepa, Tohunga.
…being in love for the first time, I made a phrase--a poem about a wood-pigeon--a single phrase, for
a hole had been knocked in my mind, one of those sudden transparencies through which one sees
everything. Then more bread and butter and more flies droning round the nursery ceiling on which
quivered islands of light, ruffled, opalescent, while the pointed fingers of the lustre dripped blue pools
on the corner of the mantelpiece. Day after day as we sat at tea we observed
The Illusion of the God Delusion is a let's call it a 'singularity' or cosmical waves. If something
approaches infinity, in fact if it is paradoxically ['A very important...] greater than Infinity etc....we
are dealing in any case with an abstraction. So n-G is (it can be shown) equivalent to G. Not this: It
can be shown. Not only that but [[abstraction, the all powerful all knowing all seeing …]] [[ or the
Will ??]] or the Whatever of a Single Dawkins comes roaring!...It. Existential doubt fascinating
book....but let's be honest.... Now let us say we have truly magisterial' Ian... Come. Come inside my
structure: My poem. It’s hungry. It loves you. it’s alive. and moves, soft as a snail, like a hammer
tongue. I’m here. But you don’t need to - It’s essential that the big faces - the vast visages - keep
staring from the cloud shapes, the lands of cloud: ship shapes. And the pastels, the haze, the things,
the loves, the ships. The kaleidic colours, the patterns: the march of the eyes who knows. Who see
the steel trees - their crisp speech modulated in the morning mauve - and the seeds wait. [Monism we
must have, metaphysical monism [ No one knows… (rich) time some philosophers discover the
“proof” that this great Substance is shown to be, irrefutably: brusquness, with his own mother...under
Islamic law Thus let this thing be G, or it is true that God exists etc and n-G is not G and we can
throw in---and problems of knowledge mean that re the We cannot rely on naive logic in the [ There
was the Doctor as he trod in a wind gale, shouting his megaphone, since melodramatic--I did not hate
like N or revere L. I took notes … once were pillars, shadows, memorials, brasses, and the scuffling
and eternal sounds of a rustelly pump; the booming immortality and the quitting … my pocket and
thus became more separate … one or two of the seems I saw. 'He sat staring straight ahead of him
that day … existence or not of God our views
… [in stockinged feet,, sighing….Frightened I crouched in a faraway corner. I was afraid of their God.
It was not the God at our mother’s and father’s…I heard the wind howling as the old man turned a
page; he read and sounded like a great Devil-God, my strange eine Groentfader, everything was
frightful and dark. I thought they must be demons. Ja. Ashes are holy. But that awesome God. The
Gott who does not exist! [It is possible, with only an extra anguish, to live in this world I don’t know
as a brainy sexy lovingly energetical redeemed in an absolute minimum and it seemed as if they were
being thrown into a loud whisper, now into a shout…nothing was observable…Anna grew lighter and
more transparent than a tulip petal while…silently they stared…a prayer crept out of The
Wound….Nothing nothing could be… foretold but they ventured to move…being in love for the first
time, I made a phrase--a poem about a wood-pigeon--a single phrase, for a hole had been knocked in
my mind, one of those sudden transparencies through which one sees everything. [Ich bin eine kleine
Nacht Musik... Then more bread and butter and more flies droning. Day after day as we sat at tea we
observed these sights. 'But we were all difference. The wax spine melteth into differentials for each
of us…among the gooseberrial busherry bushes; the clothes blown; the cosmosis; the gutter dead man
in the; the apple tree, stark in the moonlight; the rat swarm; the lustre dripping blue--our white-wax
was streaked and stained by each of these differently…disgusted human flesh; Rhoda cruelty; Susan
could not; Neville wanted order; Jinny love; … we suffered terribly as we became separate 'Yet I
preserved all from these excesses and have survived many my friends, … the panorama seems not
seen from from third-storey window, that delights me, not what: even if that is myself … could I be
bullied at school? How could they make things hot for me?
 

 

13 In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men,
14 Fear came upon me, and trembling, Sartre expands on the for-itself as a being of agency,
[One laughs at Bouvard and Pecuchet but in their tremendous and crazy efforts to learn or experi-
ment with everything and all human knowledge they epitomize something mad but admirable in
the human psyche, and the so-called “spirit of enquiry”. They burn with what makes us (and perhaps
some other mammals) deeply tragic but comic figures in the landscape of the strange and often-
seeming pitiless universe we all inhabit. The search for meaning…they are as intense and voracious
as Thomas Wolfe in his fevered and hopeless search for all of existence, for all, for times past, for
thought past thought beyond thought, and for love…]
EGF: You say Burroughs was an influence on you.
KA: Oh, he was my first major influence.
KA: I came out of a poetry world. My education was Black Mountain school—Charles Olson,
Jerry Rothenberg, and David Antin were my teachers. But I didn’t want to write poetry. I
wanted to
On Sunday I saw leaves float up from the garden fire: I could not and cannot conceive of that fire’s
centre’s heat – the cut hedge burning. Endlessly the golden arrows seek the unreachable shore.
Then there was Amir Aczel’s WHY SCIENCE DOESN’T DISPROVE GOD. R.I.P Amil, and joy
and memory be to thee...for as Auden sayeth: “...We must love one another or die....”
Perne in gyre, perne in a gyre, perne in a gyre...Set me on a golden bough to sing....I shall sing of
Picasso's art or of Crepuscular Man.....and those 'yellow spiders in black fields'...terrible the leaves,
dry and leaping and cracking in their fierce burning, and the staring eyes, the horror, Das Grauen of
Trakl, and but 'What shall we do with the drunken sailor?"..."He came softly, unobserved, and yet,
strange to say, everyone recognized Him...they are irresistibly drawn to Him...[and the Inquisitor,
having seen His miracles, cross-examines him in jail....(the story continues): 'Thou mayest not add to
what has been said of old...for now Thou hast seen these "free" men, 'the old man adds suddenly, with
a pensive smile. 'Yes, we've paid dearly for it....' at last they have vanquished freedom and have done
so to make men happy....'.If it were possible to imagine simply for the sake of argument that those
three questions of the dread spirit had perished utterly from the books...dost Thou believe that all the
wisdom of the earth united could have invented anything in depth and force equal to those questions
which were actually put to thee by the wise and mighty spirit in the wilderness?'...'freedom...which
they fear and dread--for nothing has been more insupportable for man and human society than
freedom. But seest Thee these stones in this parched and barren wilderness? Turn them into bread and
mankind will run after it like a flock of sheep, grateful...though forever trembling...But what happened?
Instead of taking men's freedom from them Thou didst make it greater than ever! Didst Thou forget
that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and
evil?....nothing is a greater cause of suffering....; 

   [And so, after lambasting the imprisoned God in a
long and savage speech, The Grand Inquisitor, after receiving a gentle kiss, and who tells him he
(Christ) is condemned to the fire, lets Him go to wander the winding alleys of the ancient city...]..."
'Everything is lawful,' you mean?...."
"But the sticky little leaves, and the precious tombs, and the blue sky, and the woman you love!..."
Ivan turned suddenly and went his way without turning back...And let us transgress...!
AND LET US ENTER MYSTERY....AND THE MYSTERY IN THE LANGUAGES......
... what we really aspire to know is what it is like to be a bat, as a bat is a bat;
"...Nagel strikes me as an intelligent and not unsympathetic man... but his denial that we can know
what it is to be anything but one of ourselves, seems to me to be tragically restrictive: restrictive and
restricted.....
'For instants at a time,' his mother is saying, 'I know what it is like to be a corpse. The knowledge
repels me. It fills me with terror:
     “All of us have such moments, particularly as we grow older. The knowledge we have is not
abstract -
“All human beings are mortal, I am a human being, therefore I am mortal" - but embodied. For a
moment we live beyond our death... 'When I know - what is it I know? Do I know what it is like for
me to be a corpse or do I know what it is like to for a corpse to be a corpse?.
...For an infant my whole structure of knowledge collapses in panic, I am alive inside that
contradiction, dead and alive at the same time?.
A little snort from Norma. He finds her hand and squeezes it.... but we rarely press ourselves; we
think our way into death only when we are rammed into the face of it.
Now I ask if we are capable of thinking our own death, why on Earth should we not be capable of
thinking our way into life of a bat?...
'To be alive is to be a living soul. An animal - and we are all animals - is an embodied soul.
This is precisely what Descartes, for his own reasons, chose to deny.
"Cogito, ergo sum," he also famously said. It is a formula I have always been uncomfortable
with. It implies that a living being that does not do what we call thinking is somehow second-class.
To thinking, cognition, I oppose fullness, embodedness, the sensation of being - ...
of being alive to the world...
 

     ... The particular horror of the camps, the horror that convinces us that what went on there
was a crime against humanity, is not that despite a humanity shared by their victims,
the killers treated them like lice. That is too abstract. The horror is that the killers refused to think
themselves into the place of their victims....they did not say, "It is the dead who are being burned
today, making the air stink and falling in ash on my cabbages. "They did not say, "how would it be
if I were burning?" They did not say, "I am burning, I am falling in ash" 'In other words, they closed
their hearts... 'we like to think...But probably it was not so. The evidence points in the opposite
direction: we can do anything and get away with it: that there is no punishment.' "
[!! NO DANTESQUE EVERLASTE !!] [!! NO LEAPING FLAMES!! NO
UGOLINO!! JUST THE NOTHING?]
".... you wonder why the humanists you sneer at looked beyond Christianity and the contempt that
Christianity exhibits for the human body and therefore for a man himself, surely that ought to give
you a clue...
Frankly, Blanche, there is something about the entire crucifixional tradition that strikes me as mean,
as backward, as medieval in the worst sense unwashed monks, illiterate priests, cowed peasants. What
are you up to, reproducing that most squalid most stagnant phase of history in Africa?
'Holbein,' says Blanche 'Grunewald. If you want the human form in extremis, go to them. The dead
Jesus. Jesus in the tomb.'
'I don't see, what you are getting at.' 'Holbein and Grunewald were not artists of the Catholic Middle
Ages. They belonged to the Reformation.'
     'This is not a quarrel I am conducting with the historical Church, Blanche. I am asking what you,
you yourself, have against beauty. Why should not people be able to look at a work of art and think
to themselves, That is what we as a species are capable of being, that is what I am capable of being,
rather than looking at it and thinking to themselves... and...
My God, I am going to die, I am going to be eaten by worms?..."
 

"When she began...when she was young and alive...she saw...for Van Gogh with the bandaged ear
that stood for passion.
Has she carried that childish faith into her late years, and beyond: faith in the artist and his truth?
Her first inclination would be to say no.
Her books certainly evidence no faith in art. Now that it is over and done with, that life time labour
of writing, she is capable of casting a glance back over it that is cool enough, she believes, even cold
enough, not to be deceived.
Her books teach nothing, preach nothing; they merely spell out –
Her books are, she believes, better put together than she is."
Terrible the leaves, dry and leaping and cracking in their fierce burning...and the staring eyes...Das
Grauen!....Out of the deceitful emptiness of a mirror A face rises slowly and indistinctly from the
horror and darkness....and the eternal black— and the leaves like souls leapt from that garden fire that
Holy day of all gentleness and the fear and wanting of all tenderness...The love, the unbearable
sadness of God's love...His sweet loving and the bees— the coming of the bees and the beans, and
that great Day of the Strawberries, the punnets, and Holy Day of the Mother...and....The Dead Souls...'
In God's holy fire....perne in a gyre, perne in a gyre...'] 'The wise and dead spirit of constructive non-
existence.' [[ LEARN TO FAIL]]
"Changes in society are due chiefly to the development of internal contradictions in society, that is,
the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, the contradiction
between classes and the contradictions between the old and the new; it is the development of these
contradictions that pushes society forward and gives the impetus for the supersession of the old
society by the new...A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture..., it
cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained, magnanimous.
A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another...The people,
and the people alone, are the making force in the making of world history."
---------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------ ---------
roots are dull with springing rain. We were caught in a coffee quandry, Tranced into
the Hoftgarten, Where sunlight and sun surprised, smiled, And let us chat in Russin unt
Deutsch, Unt coffee flowed into ourselves, Warming firing, and we stopped, When
April, with flaming hair, Broke out in joyous French...In the rocks of gods In the garden
of rocks In that harsh unshadowed land Where I have forgotten How this strange
conjunction Of striding morning shadows, Inverting rising in meeting, Was revealed to
me - in a handful of - A man with a blazing brow Showed me fear in transformal Primal
dust, until, after the rain of red rocks, I writhed in Wagnerian, That Hitler (and I) so
loved. (But we both loved/feared grails and waters.) We reappeared at the ending time,
And all applauded - The dew sparkling hyacinths Had you shine with smile, And
another god impelled this All. And vast the silence, the heart: The sacred sacred heart...
But God will save Russia....It is different with the upper classes. They, following science, want to
base justice on reason alone, but not with Christ, as before, and they have already proclaimed that
there is no crime, that there is no sin....for if you have no God what is the meaning of crime?
My friends, pray to God for gladness. Be glad as children, as the birds of heaven,...there is only one
way of salvation...make yourself responsible for all men's sins, throw off thy indolence, for thou art
responsible for all things....God took seeds from different worlds and sowed them on this earth,
and...everything came up that could come up, but what grows lives and is alive only through its feeling
of contact with other worlds....praise God in your loneliness...
....I really think loneliness is the worst of all human afflictions. I am alone here
every night after 9 pm, the family are early to bedders – and I sit alone with my
books and think of this long lousy futile war and all the lonely women throughout
the world and the men in camps and holes in the ground tormented with hunger
for women. This is not a very cheerful letter I'm afraid. I am trying to save as
much as I can...
[‘It’s all in the MIXMASS…
Questionmarked the edges
???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
????????????????????????
??
   If a million million automatic typers typed If a million million automatic
typers }}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}
}}}}}}}}}}}}}}} automatic typers typed If a million million automatic typers
typ- }}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}} Will Opak get there? Painting
numbers to the end…? Opak!
 

Mrs Walker walked. “The Great Dawkinsinian Delusion”…. ‘I have loved
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
dfdiisdfgfg$&^%!@$&^%!@$!@!@__!@_!_@_!@_!)!(@*)!@(*_!)@
(_!)(*_!)@(*_)!@(*_)!@(*_)!@(*_)!@(*_!)(@*_)! !)(****_)!*_)!(_)!(
_)!(*_)!
DostoievskyÕ∞∞∞∞Œ )*_!)*_)!*_)!(_)!****#&$&(gegg*VBBVSKLEOA
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my lands in order? London Bridge is
falling down falling down falling down Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie These fragments I
have shored against my ruins Dayadhvam. Damyata. (Raise to three powers Shantih...
a rather unexpected route, to that subject for Art which so concerned the post-minimalist
generation – the phenomenological relation of subject and object I also read the Technical
Books! …Silver-coated with Humbol enamel, McCarthy’s humble plastic bottles and boxes
assumed the allure of ‘designer packaging’ – those disposable wrappings of luxury goods that,
despite their ample disposability, make the completely frivolous, completely necessary – so that
containers for toilet cleaner or fabric conditioner started to look like video cam….If only I loved
music, that song, at least ‘Imagine’…But, one wonders, did Chapman have a point? (Killed the
messenger…) [No, it is all too terrible, all that…] They were more famous than Jesu…I’m in a
place of talk ... I’m in a place of silence. I’m sending casual time to test. I’m sorting casual time.
__________________________________________________________________________
A Special Birthday Wish – Feb 1995
and every happiness on your birthday
Love from Mum...
I got some blank tapes for you too - keep them here to copy records when
you have time...JoyTylr
________________________________________________________________________
I’m furnished all around me. [...and they know all the birthdays and the deathdays...] I’m more
absent than most. I’m never understood. I don’t know what he looks like. I’m looking at him….
Morning plastic bag thought no sounds ears fall to the side of everything that answers. It’s been
20 years and the glass burns and I cant find my feet. When the coffin falls on a snowy day it
crumbles to green-yellow dust. Who are you? We opposite men, having opened our eyes and
conscience to the question where and how the plant “man” has so far grown so vigorously to a
height—we think this has happened and think that hardness....Forcefulness, slavery, danger in
the alley and the heart, life in hiding, stoicism, the art of experiment and devilry of every kind,
that everything evil, terrible, tyrannical in man, everything in him that is kin to beasts of prey
and serpents, serves the enhancement of the species “man” as much as its opposite does…Is it
any wonder that we “free” spirits are not the most communicative…? As for the dangerous
formula “beyond good and evil” with which we at least guard against being mistaken for others:
we are something different…
 

clashing aversions
Where armies of machining ants clash and time is bent into a ring on the old father’s
finger
and Form, producing a machine-like finish, suggests that there is an absolute,
ultimate form
“...there was a tremendous explosion. My first thought, and I wasn’t the only one, was that I
was trapped in something like that film Towering Inferno...”
they want to scratch out the eyes of their enemies with their virtue
He loves the ampersand. And in you, too, there is much that makes me love and hope
Piet Mondrian “Windmill in Sunlight” (1908) offered Mondrian the pretext to paint a
violent red apparition in which the optical pulsation from the calculated opposition of
primary colours across the reflecting surfaces of his brittle invention:
The tragedy of the angry sneer, its vengeance, trap-ratted cat, crying in the box, cuboid,
deep in the white hexagonal hold, the Drogons searching, phrasically, in the loop back
reactions of dead significations and burning laser beams: it all falling over into the mouth.
They begin to imagine symptoms.
Alone. Splendour. It’s cold. Passion. To cross wisdom. He’s a strategist from
way back. I don’t think she’s playing a game Pete. Prap's she is. Oh Jesus, what a fuck up
that all was. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Go the play. Go to the play?. Go to the play?Alone??
Yes, you’re always alone. Every one’s alone.
To sail the equidistance. Dance on an egg.
If a daddy long legs got drunk and its head grew to the size of an immense baby’s, and it
caterpaultered across the First World War, and all the other deathings, and the moon fell in
shells of ice....it would be time for the first green, hopeful shoots, curleying from the little
garden, hidden from the others, in the oxygenated blackness, and all twenty two fingers in
the perfectly nothing lake.
nothing ever finally resolves, beginning again, makes a change whose origin,
from the process of which was not contained in of what it originated in, whose form, is
actually is something – it gets to another place
when it gets working it keeps on. Switch the light.
NASA SPACECRAFT POISED TO PROBE
RED PLANET
……………………………………………………………………..
Black trees, blue trees, bare trees — Whatever was my life has been returned to me / in a made-
of-trees coffin / killed in action like a veteran husband, its flag / a pitiful consolation
We now can turn to Dent’s poems to see how she manages …by turning alienation into autonomy.
What we might first notice is that alienation in Dent’s poems stems largely from the lyric form: the
poems are … closed off from the outside world and its narratives, and this allows Dent to create her
a language isolated from the politics of … so also lends credibility to her subversion of
those …Throughout the collection, Dent makes no overt address to her fellow AIDS sufferers or the
officials who have controlled the perception of HIV/AIDS … nor does she attempt to locate herself
within a community of fellow sufferers … she suggests that she does not feel any more connected
fellow persons with AIDS than she would to strangers
Consolationless is the tarmac wind, the kickback of the jet fuel fume, / the bulkhead of the coffin
wherein only regret to be alive / alights in contrast. // It burns like eyes burned out by cinders, / a hot
poker waved amidst laughter. // It burns, a torch’s temporary pathway / It burns, the ultimate act of
atonement…but what’s to blame!? What do you advise? ['dis aint me Speakin' if yo waz
wonnereing...] What, Maker Man-Thing can ye make of Tori Dent...her long rich complex, tortured
and dark-beautiful poems? Or those perhaps stranger of Diane Ward's, for example...and others. What
message from this dark, or even more sad; this endless richness of thought, these words, this or that
dilemma. Why Not Paint Coca Cola Bottles? That’s what I like. I want to be a Machine. That’s what
it’s about. I am a Machine. “REPETITION IS TRUTH”, but he had trouble speaking…His Mother
wasn’t allowed to die… [[ LEARN TO FAIL]] The million and one pathways taken or not: the blood,
the words of love, wisdom, hope…” Lurched he them him into the twisted queer and gorgeous
crushing coming of the solid light that rises up up up into the the arched night…all fired with the
multiface, the near rush of wings…. When I saw Him, I fell at His feet like a dead man. But He
placed His right hand on me and said, “Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last, the
Living One. I was dead, and behold, now I am alive forever and ever! And I hold the keys of
Death and of Hades.” And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the
Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him: [And A.H. in those days, at 15, I recall,
his mother was dying. He loved his mother, and despite that he knew nothing of house
work he learnt to cook, arranged to have her in the front room where the kitchen was
near, and showed his love as perhaps not many young men would, getting excellent
meals for her. He was deeply moved. For some reason I think of Dante's La Vita Nuova,
although I only have that in English, not the Italian, and I am not sure of Dante. But
there is something there... but A.H. had not become himself at that time. [Richard,
Frank Lane said, you’d feel pity for Hitler...] He struggled to be what he was. And both
women and men were deeply attracted...fascinated by him (as if he was a beautiful
Devil). He talked all night, not letting me sleep about how he would redesign the ugly
towns we were in, and once we went up a mountain in the night, and as a friend he
approached my father and got me leave and help so I could study music....we can
surely all become anything. The twisting corridors of logical time mean that there are
nearly infinite pathways we are each turned down as Cause acts. But it is true that
some of us resent or fear the world for reasons no other can see or feel...So there are
no “evil” people. This is a nonsense.... We are all the results of endlessness and humans
are tragic in knowing that they die....and perhaps thus there is some Freudian force
that drove A.H. After all, he was hired to spy on the Party that he later took control of.
If it seems God has failed, or one's father has failed... Perhaps these things are not true
but we wrongly mistreat our young people. (These things are in the mind.) And we can
be cruel to one another. Great and terrible even terrifying things erupt or arise from
the accumulations of those infinite forking paths that Borges writes of....We can all
become anything and those we love, might not recognize us as we are thrown into
Time's bitter winds, Fate's terrible twisting Sneer overseeing our every step as we
move toward our ends...And let he who hath never sinned, let him cast the first stone.
And you, reader, who watch this pageant, you two, I adresse thou! Thou art of the
Flesh of all this as was Father Zossima and A.H and the spears and the Lamb
whose...and and the Tree and and and whose fruit.... We know nothing...]
And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads. And there shall be no
night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them
light: and they shall reign for ever and ever. And he said unto me, These sayings are faithful
and true: and the Lord God of the holy prophets sent his angel to shew unto his servants the
things which must shortly be done. [I wanna open them doors….let in the sun...]
They dreamed and ages fell: and they fell from the sky and I caught it— those words — or there
has to be words—and I tell you: 'I 'll Wrreacklickh: for I'll wreack it / I'll teare it / I'll breakk it I'll
kraeckk it I'll braackk it!
And I was caught (as I waited with my gun, my terrible gun) with you on the beach: they fell
from the sky
crying for their mothers
blue eyed they fell from the sky:
'Mutter, Mutter!' They cried I awoke from a dream. Terrible it was. I remembered– and I'll wreck
it, I'll....
But they fell, they fall, they
fell...
They fell from the skies. The babies were tossed into the burning laughing skies....
and then they opened fire for it was life– life you see– the needful death in life:
Terrible. Terrible. What. Are. We?
For it had to happen they say they say they say –
For it was in that Dream –
And it was me. It was me. It was bloody me.
 

Behold, I come quickly: blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book.
And I John saw these things, and heard them. And when I had heard and seen, I fell down to wor-
ship before the feet of the angel which shewed me these things. And he saith unto me, Seal not the
sayings of the prophecy of this book: for The Time Is At Hand ((but nothing can be nothing
can be nothing can...And Yet, Strangely, As sometimes Only the Old Can Be -- he felt
a Great Joy, a Joy that expanded into all Skies. For after all, he had Lived, all was not
good, but there is Life...Let us Pray let us be Still...Perhaps accept. Be. Let us....
He loved the open morning: the first day break. He felt joy (despite his hard dark night hours
down the pit), for he took and also loved his long walk through the dewy fields. He watched
every bird stir in the trembling grass. He tweeted back to the peewits, the hopping sparrows.
If he could he would have whinnied and tweeted and whistled back to the birds in a native
language. He liked non-human things. [On his walk he found the children a small rabbit
which they loved yet it taught them dark rich terrible but beautiful things…].
But what are we to do? How do these things happen? [At this point I draw attention to Ellen
Portch’s amazing art of her Wall. Scott Hamilton, who had studied art theory and philosophy
as well as history {Hence his interest Tonga, Maoritanga and the quirks of history in Aotearoa
(Pasifika, indeed the World really), as well as also Siasau’s art and Futa Helu’s Atienisisi, the
fascinating Tongan University} and his comments on one side that are art-philosophical on
one descending row and the others on the deeper questions of art and Wittgenstein and
Moore…It is worth seeking out the book Wall of the same name as her exhibition ~ 2010} I
think some complex issues arise via Wittgenstein. I am not sure from my reading of him and
his biography hence his own notebooks, that he had said, ultimately anything, but Moore (and
possibly Hamilton) seem to have misread Wittgenstein, whose greatness was to question and
to bring in to doubt certain knowledge. No sane philosopher or scientist believes in that: apart
from the tripartite method in Metaphysics (yes, the foundations of mathematics caused W to
delve into Cantor’s theories etc etc which, while fascinating, like those of Godel et al…these are
not, at depth, the issue. The “issue” is, why? [There is a kind of knowing that is essential for our
way of knowing in the world that is basal so to speak, my grandsons quickly saw this, the oldest
12….and so did W. [But Absolute Knowledge? Plato’s madnesses? What of Socrates who wrote
nothing, living on through Plato and Xenophon, his strange trial where no one answers, where
he tells that the Sibyl has declared him the greatest man on Earth. Why, he asks her or it?
‘Because you know nothing.’ Yet he too, at least in the Dialogues, questions and questions only
to reach Plato’s conclusions…his, Plato-Socrates’ their terrifying Republic. But Plato’s ‘Cave
analogy’ leads to some beautiful ideas. But all seem to point to a horror. [ No. Then there was
W.’s torment and his search for God…and his soul, his duty (hence his deep desire to be a part
of WWI, for himself, his own torment, not some abstract thing such as ‘freedom’ etc) … He
abandoned Theories. It was better in number or mathematics foundation to simplify, then to
question, to use. Thus, for example, contra all the books, he had NO theory of a private lan-
guage. Everything were questions or tautologies and perhaps his pictures and Truth Tables…
But Hamilton’s introduction is worth the book. He writes superbly and is a major NZ writer
and poet. He cares about History and people. [But the reader MUST try to see examples of
Portch’s amazing works, her eerie walls, her fascinating surreal-real scenes of air engines
superimposed on a map of the Kaipara Harbour…Hamilton’s writings and her inventive
works…] And Scott with his interest in Smithyman and the fascinating poets he was always
‘discovering’, his passion for art and ideas and writing, I have to celebrate like so many oth-
ers. And thus he has ‘pointed’ to those terrible wars against the Maori of the King movement
and of course all the others: Tuhoe, the Taranaki tribes, Waikato….And as I write here of
History, it seems that History and such as enslavement or the invasion of peoples’ lands, and
in particular into NZ or Aotearoa, is right now being undermined…the good work of getting
Te Reo going of giving help to Maori and the revival so that the (dubious and often duplic-
itous) treaties have made it into our law in Aotearoa….We face invasion (and the potentional
dissolution of the good work done by Maori for their people in teaching Te Reo and Maori
history etc) and we DO have a class system here. The land here like all over the world is taken
by the superrich as for their self-aggrandisement and the insane nations like the US and
Russia and the mad in Africa etc etc continue. Aotearoa was building. Many Maori refused
to sign the Treaty (the kind of duplicity we see then and after with the enormous unfair
impoverishment of Maori, left, largely with vast areas of land gone, no compensation or
payment. The whole of the South Island for a pittance. Millions of tonnes of Kauri destroyed,
birds destroyed, corrupt farmers decimating and polluting the land…Cannot History take us
back and we ask the people: ‘Can we share your land? Let us know how many people would
be enough? What medicines and help if any do you need?’ But no: a kind of ‘holocaust’
seems to have taken place here, in Africa, the US etc etc… the whole Pacific as Vltchek the
US journalist writes, controlled by the US where nuclear bombs were dropped… As time went
on the New Zealand Company and other corrupt Capitalistic land agents tricked local people
of their land (and few European settlers got much). What did I write here: ‘These factors and
events were opposed by the heroic resistances by Te Kooti, Hone Heke, and those of the
many tribes and hapu of NZ. The Courts under Labour recognized the importance and slowly
the essential Principle of the Treaty and the earlier Declaration of Independence (under the
first Governor, Busby). Now the present Government would destroy all of that and is resum-
ing mining. Mining is terribly destructive of human environments…There is much more to
say. Much has been said. Marx called for the workers of the world to unite. There is much to
be done… Let us invoke R A K Mason: ‘Negro-softly hard / bone-licked clean of desire’s /
least hint come knots charred / from ancient fires… // Now entertain no slow / dark cynic
blood / veins…’ And his friend and comrade? Hone Tuwhare, like such as later Robert Sullivan
and or artists and poets…Smithyman, Hamilton, Leggott, Wystan Curnow and the Edmonds
and Roger Horrocks, Rapatahana of that amazing novel TOA… But there are so many. And
my ‘penchant’ for pessimism (in a jolly kind of way!) can opposed by the young writing now
and to those struggling for housing, wages, while false “wars” against crime (created by
Capitalism itself) and violence (ditto)…and we witness, all over the world, the great Wrongs.
But there are fight backs… (There is (as well as many left wing “clubs”) Vertical: the City from
Satellites to Bunkers, by Stephen Graham, or Oceania by Andre Vltchek, or Robert Fisk’s The
Great War for Civilisation, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, and such as
E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. And there is much about NZ
History including say Judith Binney’s works or Paul Moon or Ranginui Walker, Keith Sinclair,
Claudia Orange, Scott Hamilton himself, and many others, many of whom and Maori. There
is much else in libraries and on actual second hand or new book shops as well as on the
internet on say YouTube or via other information channels…And there are many great
women’s books on rights and also novels. The human and the class struggles continue…rev-
olutions so far seem to have ‘failed’ but we cannot be sure of this as History is a complex
process….it may seem strange in such a “work” as this I seem to be two people at least, and
indeed I am tormented by this divide in my soul but I did take place in many protests in the
late 60s, the 70s and in 1981 protesting the Springbok tour I was batonned at Eden park at
the violent protests. People from those years are numerous, Minto, even C K Stead who still
as I write writes books, and Martin and Murray Edmond have written about these things
(separately), Mrs. Fowler, Dick Fowler, Bill and Barry Lee (who has recently done a PhD on
the Progressive Youth I was in, Frank Lane (who organized activities and protests in central
Auckland), Roger Fowler (also has struggled for rights), and many many others. [Yes, I con-
cede, there is the other Richard Taylor, who is perhaps “pessimistic” but I always feel (if
healthy) fairly upbeat….and there is a strange sense in which I am not myself and these things
in one of my selves matter, in the other they are not a significant but my seemingly ‘mean-
ingless poems’ are perhaps a way to work with these contradictions in my soul. (One can see
I am big on Dostoevsky… (Or is it all just a process, unchangeable, unstoppable, fated…?
And there are and is so more…but then I recall Moosbrugger. We must think of
Moosbrugger. For this above is not me. There is no me. I am more than I. I contain all
things in insane surety or terror indivisible…Herein do I speak:
AT this time the Moosbrugger case was attracting much public attention. / Moosbrugger
was…a big broad-shouldered man…His face expressed good hearted strength and the wish
to do right…For Moosbrugger had killed a street-woman, a prostitute of the lowest type, in
a horrifying manner. The reporters had described in detail a throat wound extending from
the larynx to the back of the neck…stab wounds…had pierced the heart…the cutting off of
the breasts…From such horrors they could not find their way back to Moosbrugger’s kind
face…/
        Now one must imagine what that means. Something that one craves for as naturally one
craves for bread and water is only there to be looked at…Moosbrugger was only a journey-
man carpenter, an utterly solitary man, and although he was well liked…he had no
friend…and everywhere the world was in league against him….[he could not be responsible
for anything he had done, he was insane, but he didn’t want that said, he would rather be
executed or ‘put away…but despite his terrible bloody crimes he fascinated people and
stayed deeply disturbed and sad, yet had great resource…thousands saw his face in the
newspapers, and debated daily re his fate…] “Perhaps I ask, for example, the terrible bullying
in schools might have saved lives…Do unto others and it may or may not be done unto you.
[ He was clearly not normal’ but although obviously it was his diseased nature that was the
cause of his behaviour and set him apart from other human beings, to him it felt like a
stronger and higher awareness of {himself} His whole life was a struggle…as an apprentice
he had broken the fingers of a master who had tried to beat him…[One night he dreamed
of a young woman from the days of Tamaki College who grieved with him as she held
him…she was repentant…How do we heal? [ What attracted Ulrich particularly was that
Moosbrugger’s own defence was obviously based on an obscurely perceptible plan. He had
not gone out with the intention of killing, neither did his dignity permit him to be insane;
there could not be any talk of ‘sexual gratification’, but only disgust and contempt: and
therefore the act could only be manslaughter of…”this caricature of a woman” as he ex-
pressed it. It even seemed that he was demanding his crime [a political status] … fighting,
not for himself at all, but for the interpretation, but for this interpretation of the legal system.
The judge’s tactics [were the usual clumsy ones used of the evasion of responsiblity]: “Why
did you wipe your bloodstained hands?—Why did you throw the knife away?— … Did you
feel no remorse whatever?” … The superiority of a man who has freed himself of a wish to
live is enormous… Clarisse wanted to know what benzol rings looked like, vaguely associat-
ing them with cornelian rings. / “You’re a dear girl all the same, Clarisse.” [They go for walk
in the snow. They are arguing about one Arnheim, a high level admin in the former Austro-
Hungarian Empire, but he could still walk into a meeting of intellectuals and politicos to-
day…Arnheim writes profoundly on seemingly profound things (philosophy sociology poli-
tics art history and destiny love and power and philosophy and ideas: but cleverly, perhaps
insidiously, like Toronto mining executives and apologists for “clearance of indigenes” and
thousands of acres of trees for that “essential oil, or steel, or those vanishing metals to build
huge towers…while others starve or go mad and indeed also “the murder of environmental
and human rights activists and others more ‘in-between’, like these yet not quite as he is not
naïve…”Let me tell you what I have against him,” Ulrich resumed. “Scientific man is something
quite inevitable these days [it is no accident he talks like the Nietzsche of Human all Too
Human and other Rochefoucauldian (de-The Englightenment etc with a dash or Rousseau’s
Romanticism) books of fragments bon mots … it is not surprising as it was he gifted Clarisse
an entire set of Nietzsche’s works for her and Walter’s wedding! … (Ulrich proceeds), and to
repeat: “Scientific man is something inevitable these days. One can’t not want to know! And
at no time has the difference between the expert’s experience layman’s been as great as it
is now. Everyone sees the skill of a masseur or a pianist. Nobody will even race a horse these
days without special preparation. It’s only where a human being’s concerned that everyone
still thinks he is entitled to judge. An old prejudice still insists that one is born and dies a
human being. But once I know that women five thousand years ago wrote word for word
the same letters to their lovers as women do today, I can’t read another such letter without
asking myself whether there oughtn’t to be a change for once!” / Clarice found herself in-
clined to agree. Walter on the other hand smiled like a fakir who is not going to flicker an
eyelid when a hat pin is run through his cheeks. / “All this means then,” he threw in, “is that
until further notice you refuse to be a human being!” / “That’s about it. It has such a disa-
greeable touch of the dilettante. [ Here we might think of Heidegger and even later post-
modern writings, even Foucault…we understand race horses and gambling, but what do we
know of complex economics or the geographical-sociological views and revelations of Ste-
phen Graham’s Vertical? For we might understand earlier tech or activities but so vast is our
world now and so seemingly complex, that the new technologies lead us away from any real
‘understanding’ or Knowledge…Absolute knowledge evades us, Capitalism and globalization
ignore humans on this earth…Musil doesn’t quite get except by certain implications, but he
was deeply aware of great gulfs in our understanding, and he probably was of the prejudices
and “madness” that still begrime (or make more interesting) our alienated fate in the
world…Gambling but not ‘probability density functions, history but let not people under-
stand it too much…I myself lack deeply in the area of history…and who can know or under-
stand modern and international business? Who are the good guys? Who is right and what
and who is wrong? [Let us give more to Musil’s Ulrich: “… But, “ Ulrich continued after some
thought, “I am even prepared to admit something quite different. The experts never get to
the end of anything. It’s not only that they haven’t got to the end of anything today. But
they can’t even picture the idea of their ideas being complete. Perhaps they can’t even wish
for it. Can one imagine, for instance, that man will still have a soul once he has learnt to
understand it completely and manage it biologically and psychologically? And yet that is the
state of things they are trying to achieve! There it is. Knowledge is an attitude, a passion.
Actually an illicit attitude. [Genesis, Paradise Lost, Prometheus Bound, and what of the later
Shelley’s passionate struggle with Prometheus Unbound, even Queen Mab, his great anger
against oppression: and the study of logic had led him and Hogg to their declaration of
Atheism, but he still sees that there is a World Spirit (notes to Queen Mab) …] For the com-
pulsion to know is just like dipsomania, erotomania, and homicidal mania, in producing a
character that is out of balance. It is not at all true that the scientist goes out after truth. It is
out after him. It is something he suffers from. [And Ulrich goes on, in his fascinating or for
some opponents, tedious, way…But Pritchett lauds Musil’s book, and says (perhaps in that
excitement of flourish it is a great thing for a critic to do) that Musil is addictive…). And such
books can be. Proust (no, I haven’t read his great books right through) also has long pas-
sages, perhaps no one so astute but sometimes annoying as Ulrich… for Ulrich wants to be
‘the man without qualities’. He is a latter day, perhaps a universal Baudelaire, of flaneur…the
modern man, nay the postmodern and the post post post modern man or woman ad infini-
tum. As much as Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, Derrida perhaps, Nietzsche and others such as
their more recent inspiration Montaigne, most of whose essays are of Hegel’s dialectic: the-
sis, anti-thesis, synthesis…then that synthesis becomes a new thesis and History struggles
on….Clarrise is going mad, she later tries to seduce Ulrich. She wants him to obtain the re-
lease of Moosbrugger. Indeed Moosbrugger sits in the centre of the huge novel and the
‘problems of crime or good and evil, right and wrong’, these cannot be solved. They all even
visit the jail he and corrupt mad men inhabit. Clarisse there sees no Moosbrugger, no heroic
mad men… And Moosbrugger sits like a jolly and fat black spider with human eyes laughing
or seeming to, at the endless human predicament…which is the process, which is the horror
that is evolution and process, caused by mutations, errors….
_______________________________________________________________________________
__________________
SDUROUP9FHIUWNPCPQIONWPOEIPDFIO-
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aDNSV endless richness 9WNEVIN[0FIGJPSODVBPS monstrous
and, indeed They begin to “crawl toward death”
JFG[OP-0G3902345I-3490-909G-VSRVN- -we(we__)wwch__wh_wf_fh
endless richness
they are tr ap pe d in THE GREAT FORESTS OF TANE
as0956846887=35903467E433423232752-348902351=-140312=-36I9G-
{{{{((((((((________________________________))))))))}}}}
would welcome dullness as a bright relief. He is tediously amusing; he is brilliant to the point of
being obscure; his helpfulness or extravagance as to worry and confound. That is the secret of his
unpopularity.
_____________________ }}}}}}{{{{{{______________________
[SAD ROBOT I ROBOTIC I COP ROBOTIC ROBBER ROB BOB COP BOB MAKE REAL
DON’T HURT HUMAN UNLESS UNLESS UNLESS ROBOT ROBOTS AND THE
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WE HAVE NAMES AND WE THINK AND EVEN FEEL AND EVEN GET TO BE: AND
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WHAT WE WHAT WE WHAT WE WHAT...”neifgsodugpern ooasn afg gh we t e t
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Poor Klara -
 

He is the master and the victim and the time is at hand…
It is said of Fischer that he said near his end: “...touch, touch and those words of love felt and
heard, these, not great heights, are the most deep things, the most beautiful things in life...forgive
me, I have been wrong... for these things I missed....”
we are left, still, with the birds, the brooks, the sky, the music of the night, the grass, the trees, the
skies, the mystery, the energy, the light...we cant but we we can (cant-can?), I'll go, cant, I'll go on....
Perne in gyre, perne in a gyre, perne in a gyre...Set me on a golden bough to sing....I shall sing of
Picasso's art or of Crepuscular Man.....and those 'yellow spiders in black fields'...terrible the leaves,
dry and leaping; and cracking in their fierce burning, and the staring eyes, the horror, Das Grauen of
Takl, and but… 'What shall we do with the drunken sailor?"..."He came softly, unobserved, and yet,
strange to say, everyone recognized Him....they are irresistibly drawn to Him....[and the Inquisitor,
having seen His miracles, cross-examines him in jail....]....(the story continues): 'Thou mayest not add
to what has been said of old....for now Thou hast seen these "free" men, ' the old man adds suddenly,
with a pensive smile. 'Yes, we've paid dearly for it....' at last they have vanquished freedom and have
done so to make men happy....' If it were possible to imagine simply for the sake of argument that
those three questions of the dread spirit had perished utterly from the books...dost Thou believe that
all the wisdom of the earth united could have invented anything in depth and force equal to those
questions which were actually put to thee by the wise and mighty spirit in the
wilderness?'....'freedom...which they fear and dread--for nothing has been more insupportable for man
and human society than freedom. But seest Thee these stones in this parched and barren wilderness?
Turn them into bread and mankind will run after it like a flock of sheep, grateful...though forever
trembling...But what happened? Instead of taking men's freedom from them Thou didst make it
greater than ever! Did’st Thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in
the knowledge of good and evil?....nothing is a greater cause of suffering....; [And so, after lambasting
the imprisoned God in a long a savage speech, the Grand Inquisitor, after receiving a gentle kiss, and
who tells him he condemned to the fire, lets Him go to wander the winding alleys of the ancient
city...]..." ‘Everything is lawful,’ you mean?...."
     "But the sticky little leaves, and the precious tombs, and the blue sky, and the woman you love!..."
Ivan turned suddenly and went his way without turning back...And let us transgress...!
AND LET US ENTER MYSTERY....AND THE MYSTERY IN THE LANGUAGES......
Terrible the leaves, dry and leaping and cracking in their fierce burning...and the staring eyes...Das
Grauen!....Out of the deceitful emptiness of a mirror A face rises slowly and indistinctly from the
horror and darkness...and the eternal black -- and the leaves like souls leapt from that garden fire that
Holy day of all gentleness and the fear and wanting of all tenderness...The love, the unbearable
sadness of God's love...His sweet loving and the bees -- the coming of the bees and the beans, and
that great day of the strawberries, the punnets, and holy day of the mother...and....The Dead Souls,,,,In
God's holy fire....perne in a gyre, perne in a gyre...] 'The wise and dead spirit of constructive non-
existence.'
"Changes in society are due chiefly to the development of internal contradictions in society, that is,
the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, the contradiction
between classes and the contradictions between the old and the new; it is the development of these
contradictions that pushes society forward and gives the impetus for the supersession of the old
society by the new...A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture..., it
cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained, magnanimous.
A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another...The people,
and the people alone, are the making force in the making of world history."
---------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------ -----------------------------------
But God will save Russia....It is different with the upper classes. They, following science, want to
base justice on reason alone, but not with Christ, as before, and they have already proclaimed that
there is no crime, that there is no sin...for if you have no God what is the meaning of crime?
My friends, pray to God for gladness. Be glad as children, as the birds of heaven,...there is only one
way of salvation...make yourself responsible for all men's sins, throw off thy indolence, for thou are
responsible for all things....God took seeds from different worlds and sowed them on this earth,
and ...everything came up that could come up, but what grows lives and is alive only through its
feeling of contact with other worlds....praise God in your loneliness... "
"....I really think loneliness is the worst of all human afflictions. I am alone here every
night after 9 pm, the family are early to bedders – and I sit alone with my books and
think of this long war and all the lonely women throughout the world and the men in
camps and holes in the ground tormented with hunger for women. This is not a very
cheerful letter I'm afraid. I am trying to save as much as I can..." L. S. Taylor, at the
CAC, Hamilton, NZ, to Joy Miller, Tauranga, during WWII, ca. 1940.
[‘It’s all in the MIXMASS…
You live in a sunken steamboat and only occasionally is your
hand espied, waving whitely above the whitecaps – so presumably the
roar of 5000 rugby maniacs is really justified, and their joy is yours, even
if you cant see the game: or do you dream only of the empty book,
complete with uncompleteness, ready to clasp you in its
leaves of what they said, so you limp to the dairy, only to
buy a useless piece of soap because you felt for it, and it
you, both of you stuck inbeing and the impossible quagmire
of clarification because x=y or it did last week
questionmarked the edges
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If a million million automatic typers typed If a million million automatic
typers }}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}
}}} automatic typers typed If a million million automatic typers
typ- }}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}} Will Opak get there? Painting numbers to the end…?
Mrs Walker walked. “The Great Dawkinsinian Delusion”…. ‘I have loved the Bible all my life…’
dfdfqiiisdfgfg$&^%!@$&^%!@$!@!@__!@_!_@_!@_!_@_!@)!(@*)!@(
*_!)@(_!)(*_!)@(*_)!@(*_)!@(*_)!@(*_)!@(*_!)(@*_)!
***)!_()!_(*!)(****_)!*_)!(_)!(_)!(*_)! Dostoievsky
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a rather unexpected route, to that subject for Art which so concerned the post-minimalist generation
– the phenomenological relation of subject and object I also read the Technical Books! …Silver-
coated with Humbol enamel, McCarthy’s humble plastic bottles and boxes assumed the allure of
‘designer packaging’ – those disposable wrappings of luxury goods that, despite their ample
disposability, make the completely frivolous, completely necessary – so that containers for toilet
cleaner or fabric conditioner started to look like video cam….If only I loved music, that song, at least
‘Imagine’…But, one wonders... (Killed the messenger…) … They were more famous than Jesu…I’m
in a place of talk... I’m in a place of silence. I’m spending casual time to test. I’m sorting casual time.
I’m furnished all around me. I’m more absent than most. I’m never understood. I don’t know what
he looks like. I’m looking at him…. Morning plastic bag thought no sounds ears fall to the side of
everything that answers. It’s been 20 years and the glass burns and I cant find my feet. When the
coffin falls on a snowy day it crumbles to green-yellow dust. Who are you? We opposite men, having
opened our eyes and conscience to the question where and how the plant “man” has so far grown so
vigorously to a height—we think this has happened…We think that hardness. Forcefulness, slavery,
danger in the alley and the heart, life in hiding, stoicism, the art of experiment and devilry of every
kind, that everything evil, terrible, tyrannical in man, everything in him that is kin to beasts of prey
and serpents, serves the enhancement of the species “man” as much as its opposite does…Is it any
wonder that we “free” spirits are not the most communicative…? As for the dangerous formula
“beyond good and evil” with which we at least guard against being mistaken for others: we are
something different…
clashing aversions
 

Where armies of machining ants clash and time is bent into a ring on the old father’s
finger and Form, producing a machine-like finish, suggests that there is an absolute,
ultimate form
 

“...there was a tremendous explosion. My first thought, and I wasn’t the only one, was that I
was trapped in something like that film Towering Inferno...”
they want to scratch out the eyes of their enemies with their virtue
He loves the ampersand. And in you, too, there is much that makes me love and hope
Piet Mondrian “Windmill in Sunlight” (1908) offered Mondrian the pretext to paint a
violent red apparition in which the optical pulsation from the calculated opposition of
primary colours across the reflecting surfaces of his brittle invention:
The tragedy of the angry sneer, its vengeance, trap-ratted cat, crying in the box, cuboid,
deep in the white hexagonal hold, the Drogons searching, phrasically, in the loop back
reactions of dead significations and burning laser beams: it all falling over into the mouth.
They begin to imagine symptoms.
Alone. Splendour. It’s cold. Passion. To cross wisdom. He’s a strategist from
way back. I don’t think she’s playing a game Pete. Praps she is. Oh Jesus, what a fuck up
that all was. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Go the play. Go to the play?. Go to the play?Alone??
Yes, you’re always alone. Every one’s alone.
To sail the equidistance. Dance on an egg.
 

If a daddy long legs got drunk and its head grew to the size of an immense baby’s,
and it caterpaultered across the First World War, and all the other deathings, and
the moon fell in shells of ice....it would be time for the first green, hopeful shoots,
curleying from the little garden, hidden from the others, in the oxygenated
blackness, and all twenty two fingers in the perfectly nothing lake.
nothing ever finally resolves, beginning again, makes a change whose origin,
from the process of which was not contained in of what it originated in, whose form, is
actually is something – it gets to another place
when it gets working it keeps on. Switch the light.
 

NASA SPACECRAFT POISED TO PROBE
RED PLANET
……………………………………………………………………..
Black trees, blue trees, bare trees — Whatever was my life has been returned to me / in a made-
of-trees coffin / killed in action like a veteran husband, its flag / a pitiful consolation
We now can turn to Dent’s poems to see how she manages …by turning alienation into autonomy.
What we might first notice is that alienation in Dent’s poems stems largely from the lyric form: the
poems are … closed off from the outside world and its narratives, and this allows Dent to create her
a language isolated from the politics of … so also lends credibility to her subversion of
those …Throughout the collection, Dent makes no overt address to her fellow AIDS sufferers or the
officials who have controlled the perception of HIV/AIDS … nor does she attempt to locate herself
within a community of fellow sufferers … she suggests that she does not feel any more connected
fellow persons with AIDS than she would to strangers
But who’se to blame!? What do you advise? What message can ever be construed from all this
darkness, or even more sad; this endless richness of human thought, these words, this or that dilemma:
Why Not Paint Coca Cola Bottles? That’s what I like. I want to be a Machine. That’s what it’s about.
I am a Machine. “REPETITION IS TRUTH”, but he had trouble speaking…His Mother wasn’t
allowed to die… The million and one pathways taken or not: the blood, the words of love, wisdom,
hope…” Lurched he them him into the twisted queer and gorgeous crushing coming of the solid light
that rises up up up into the the arched night…all fired with the multiface, the near rush of wings….
When I saw Him, I fell at His feet like a dead man. But He placed His right hand on me and
said, “Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last, the Living One. I was dead, and behold,
now I am alive forever and ever! And I hold the keys of Death and of Hades. And there shall
be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall
serve him:
       And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads. And there shall be no
night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them
light: and they shall reign for ever and ever. And he said unto me: These sayings are faithful
and true: and the Lord God of the holy prophets sent his angel to shew unto his servants the
things which must shortly be done. [I wanta open them doors….]
    Behold, I come quickly: blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book.
And I John saw these things, and heard them. But: nothing can be nothing can be noth-
ing can be nothing can be nothing can be …?!?!!?...? SDUR-
OUP9FHIUWNPCPQIONWPOEIPDFIOHPSDFIVPSDIVNPO
aDNSV endless richness 9WNEVIN[0FIGJPSODVBPS monstrous
and, indeed They begin to “crawl toward death”
JFG[OP-0G3902345I-3490-909G-VSRVN- -we(we__)wwch__wh_wf_fh
endless richness
they are tr ap pe d in THE GREAT FORESTS OF TANE
as0956846887=35903467E433423232752-348902351=-140312=-36I9G-
          {{{{((((((((________________________________))))))))}}}}
would welcome dullness as a bright relief. He is tediously amusing; he is brilliant to the point of
being obscure; his helpfulness or extravagance as to worry and confound. That is the secret of his
unpopular...
_____________________ }}}}}}{{{{{{______________________
gszPPPjgngn&&bq asdf..;a ;a;; ;;a a/ a dg ;;; a; ; ; ; ag]qwet ga;a .. ‘’ ‘’ a
sf..l; ::> …….. .. .. .. . . .a. ..s.. as igg if s a w hh a a t llg g;; p ‘’ ‘’
a.. …asd.f..g..g.g………..0 (((000()0000))))))))))) ;;;s ))))
////…//…….. . . .. .. . . .
Also, Das Buch Endet
_____________________________________________________________________

 

NOTES FOR BOOK:
Most of the poems are relatively straightforward but I will give a link to my EYELIGHT BLOG
and I will argue any questions. I am also on FB. If you are interested, I will comment there.
A few present some difficulty.
Obviously, the last poem ‘The Secret of Being Unpopular’ could well present some difficulties.
The poem began when I read about a poem that had been written by Bill Direen (The Rue Beliard).
Brett Cross had put the long poem in an issue of Brief (a magazine that as I write is trying to be
resurrected by Bill himself). There was a reference to the humour of George Meredith (I know that
Bill had read Finnegans Wake shortly before he wrote his poem). I did know something of Meredith
and knew that he is mentioned in Joyce’s Ulysses. In looking for something re Meredith, I found a
strange review from which the title of the poem comes. The strangeness of this review, and the writing
in it, triggered me into writing the poem. I had no preconception of what I was about to write. I just
wrote it very rapidly for several pages straight onto the computer. But as I wrote I turned and looked
at one of the books I had beside me which I had for sale. It happened to be a book about Nazi Germany.
I used (titles of) the photographs in the book for the quotes in the poem. Now I was writing a complex
or at least “meaningful” political-social poem. A poem that questions with various philosophic tropes,
such as ‘the argument from design’ and so on. The Holocaust now became (and it strangely has to be)
an enormous pivot point for some intense and deep questionings. The typers typing is an old idea,
say, in The Philosophy of Art (a paper I did once) ... the monkeys type for a long time, completely
randomly, and eventually recreate the entire works of Shakespeare word for word. A kind of
Borgesian idea. I had read Primo Levi’s account of his time in Auschwitz. In ‘The Secret’ I mention
both he and Celan. Both committed suicide. I myself, re God and all that, simply don’t know. For me
there is or are no absolute knowledge (s). We cannot know whether God exists or does not exist.
(Nota bene, I use both some “theory” but mostly my own version of the Truth Belief Justification
system in epistemology, although here I insist on absolute truth for certain “highly essential questions”
otherwise I revert to a ‘lower level of test parameters’, and that knowledge is a shared social thing
that is provisional. (Calculus works, provisionally, whether or not we can reach an “actual infinity”,
and so on.) We are in the world faced with horror and beauty but we are in it. So, things contradict….
Bouvard and Pecuchet try to find about everything. Flaubert is a great novelist and Bouvard and
Pecuchet is both very funny and fascinating. There are many other references or pastiches in the poem.
From the Romantics to the Bible, to Dostoevsky, Yeats, Nietzsche, Tori Dent (and many other writers),
to writing about pop art, Mao tse Tung, to my own ‘from The Infinite Poem’ [a part of my The Infinite
Project] which I also quote, and to some extent Richard Dawkins comes under fire (although I have
enjoyed a few of his books I don’t like the absolute atheist position he takes) *. I feel we need religion
as much as we need anything else. Kathy Acker is in there, and by implication the cut-up methods of
Burroughs… And in also is Maoritanga...much else. Just ride with the poem. I love The Book of Job
and much philosophic writing. Do I know what any of these things are about as such? No. Perhaps I
can answer the question of God’s existence by saying: ‘God simultaneously does and does not exist.’.
Of course this as such is meaningless. More important are the "questionings" of Wittgenstein and to
some extent Nietzsche's. W.'s significance I feel is accentuated by knowing his life and even his
private thoughts, his desire to simplify in the foundations of mathematics, his avoidance of Theories
leading to justifications (Or absurd ‘glorifications’) of Science. Descartes is also a beautiful writer
who, I feel, went wrong in not simply treating the All as One Substance...In a sense Schopenhauer
and Spinoza do this. I mean they are thus Monists but not Materialists. [God save us from Materialists.]
W. avoids certainties and steers to Life, or toward Mystery and craft and the need for practical
examples—for purpose, the need to face death etc to live. The clear failure (s?) of Science. But I have
no agenda, I believe in nothing. These are all pretty much random thoughts. Progress is a very human
illusion. For progress substitute ‘process’ or 'change'. Protagoras “nothing changes...Man is the
Measure of all things; and Heraclitus “all is change, war (or struggle) strengthens, all is ‘a-flowing’
(Pound again). For thus is life...However, it has to be said that in fact I am not putting forward
anything I believe or do not believe...Or if there are traces of my "ideas" they are really beyond me.
There is a degree of satire. Nothing is or was planned. But my modality includes texts that "talk". I
am interested also in process and in the concept that anything in any order could be as valid as
anything else. Also my own feeling of the impossibility of certain knowledge. This is a
phenomenological and or existentialist concept or feeling....
* But for me, evolution if treated as kind of Black Box, is, in that: very acceptable. Unlike Professor Noble, et al, I feel that Dawkins is right re the ‘how’ of evolution. No quarrel there. And his writings are beautiful and informative. But as to God? Who knows. It is a problem of knowledge...insoluble in my view. In a deep sense no one knows anything, and yet they ‘know’ a lot. Media and mediation. There are always doubts. And I like it that way. Doubt is important for me. But not any facile absolute skepticism. So. Doubt. And keep doubting and wondering. Humans ++++know too much, have been to too many places. Shrink, learn to fail. Keep doubting, keep the mystery, let the land spring into a savage green Throw away celln phones, read real books, descend. Exterminate the brutes! Destroy! Destroy! Destroy much technology. Doubt, fall in love with doubt and madness. See The Sportswriter by Richard Ford.
‘Glass Swan’ is a more ‘artful’ poem than most and has references to many philosophic ideas and to art. The ‘k’s are the constants in science. In theory they could change, or to put it another way as Hume did, the sun may or may not come up in the morning (we can know nothing of the future so all deductive and other such logic fails in the absolute sense). But there is a ref. to Browning’s dramatic poem Caliban on Setebos, in which Caliban rails against Setebos, and Prospero (does anyone like Prospero?), and God and the Greater God….it was Browning wrestling with his faith. I also “quote” part of or the atmosphere of Nabokov’s poem-novel Pale Fire, then I take an idea from Siri Hustvedt’s great book on art Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (2005), and her discussion of Goya and how she discovered Goya, bearing witness (literally he painted himself into his poems or left a shadow – almost – of himself there.) in his poems. The Cave is that of Plato, the philosopher we love to hate etc. Glass is a general metaphor. (The phrase: “I saw a glass swan passing by.” I heard on the radio or read somewhere.) The fingers on a hand is a curious question Plato or Socrates asks in The Republic, it is like a question by Wittgenstein. How, perhaps without resorting to science, do we distinguish a hand that is moving, or appears in different aspects, such as looking sideways?
    ‘Humpty Empty Back Make’ was engendered reading a book The Physicist and the Philosopher by Jimena Canales, a long book but around the question of time (& physics and philosophy). In it the film of an egg breaking showing almost by demonstration the impossibility of time ‘reversal’ convinced many. Also, the only book by Martin Amis I have read is the, very good book The Arrow of Time.
Any other questions can be sent by a message to my Blog where my The Infinite Project includes
EYELIGHT. http://richardinfinitex.blogspot.com/ - I will answer asap.
NOTA BENE: My “quarrel” with Richard Dawkins is not that I am against the evolutionary theory,or his books (or him), I have and have read a number of them, they are good, explicative, and I loved biology as boy and wanted to study that subject...in fact earned the top prize in biology at High School. (My friend Peter Hunter, an award-winning Bio-Engineer, has met Dawkins and his wife (both studied under Tinbergen, one of my old Scientific Book Club books (I still have) is a book by Tinbergen on animal signaling.)). The problem is epistemological, and the danger of absolutist thinking. Else, I like his writing. The terrifying thing, that it is all driven by a “selfish gene,” of course doesn’t stop Dawkins from being “right” (or “wrong”). The problem is complex. ‘The last word shall want a word.’ There are certain questions of “reality” that science and indeed philosophy will never solve. Jim Holt goes forth asking ‘Why Something rather than Nothing?” However, (and of course invoking or provoking a tautology and risking circularity): re God and all that, using even elementary epistemology it can be shown that we will never know the ultimate meaning of life or whether there is a God, as defining and analyzing such abstractions is impossible as is any “unified field theory” or ultimate “solution”
of or by science, or any other method, possibly excluding ‘revelation’; and nor can we or will we ever know how life became life. The last word shall lack a word.
________________________________________________________________________________
BIOGRAPHY FOR BOOK:
Richard Taylor is in his 70s and has produced 3 books of poetry which include: Singing in the Slaughter
House, RED, and Conversation with a Stone. He worked at many, often labouring jobs, as well as a Roading
Tech, later trained as a Lineman for the then NZ Post Office who paid him to study for a Certificate in Telecoms
and Electronic Engineering. He had published a short story, the first thing ever he sent, in the literary magazine Mate 18, May 1970, the first thing he had sent anywhere (he sent a prose-poem not knowing what that was in 1969 and it was accepted as long as it was made into a story). But despite this, he got into 'protest politics' deciding that Communism would save the world. More recently the late poet and classicist, a good friend, Ted Jenner. was surprised that he had read R A K Mason's poetry over and over as a teenager. Poetry, language, words seemed like physically (or spiritually) indescribably beautiful things. Later in his 40s he began to write and study again, and got a BA in English Literature and Philosophy. Epistemology and also the Philosophy of Art or aesthetics are two interests. He has been published in various magazines, including Poetry NZ (more than once), PICA a short lived but great little mag. in Chicago, and various other places including online in 2011 in Jacket2 (with other very interesting poets). He has also written many reviews and commentaries on writing. He has decided to publish with his son's work, a number of his poems and the long 'philosophical' poem 'The Importance of Being Unpopular.' For a father and son to publish poetry or anything else at the same time is very unusual and means there is surely hope for, not only human life (despite the many trials we are all subject to), but culture and creativity. For while at times a philosophic pessimist, he cannot help being a living and day by day optimist, except perhaps on a cold dreary morning before breakfast!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Various of the poems have been published in the magazine Brief, and ‘both for’ is from a review I did of a poetry mag in Pander, an interesting but short-lived arts, entertainment and lit magazine, After ‘Leda….’ (Inspired by an analysis of Yeat’s Poem ‘Leda and the Swan’) and other poems on here were in Poetry NZ, and ‘Bikini’ was in Poetry NZ Reviews (Yearbook One 2014), and ‘Flowers’ and ‘I have Cut Off My Own Head’ in Yearbook Two, 2015, of the same anthology. Other things are spattered in various small magazines. I want to acknowledge all those I can’t recall all the places and the people who have helped me over the years: Mark McIvor who did a book for me called Singing in the Slaughter House and encouraged me, Ron Riddell who published my book RED in 1996, Brett Cross and The Writer’s Group who published me in various issues of Brief, Brett Cross of Titus Books and Atuanui
Press and his wife Ellen Portch (a great NZ artist). Dr. Jack Ross who has helped publish me and put up with me for many years! Also, inter alia, Michael Arnold and Hamish Dewe – both linguists and poets and now in the fields of AT etc. Olivier Macassey and others associated with Brief magazine. Also, all those who participated in Alan Loney’s A Brief History of the Whole World. Alan Loney himself. Dr. Scott Hamilton who has been invaluable, the late Ted Jenner and Leicester Kyle, great friends and great writers – my son Victor Taylor who took up poetry late in life despite many years of struggle and suffering and who badgered me to publish my poems. Many others such as Bill Direen who published some of my poems in his mag. Percutio (the last issue).
I have met many good people (by this I mean perhaps also ‘ordinary people’ who I value as friends, not only in the poetic world but in many other spheres). Peter Le Baige, poet and scholar and the great poet and editor Alistair Patterson published me in various of his Poetry NZ. And Michael O’Leary. (Michael became ill and had to stop working on the two books but meanwhile helped us both by his interest.)
In my connection to Poetry Live which as of writing still meets on Tuesday nights at The Thirsty Dog in K’Road.   [Check 'Poetry Live' on FB etc as it has moved, as has the day.] I started reading at in 1989, so I want to acknowledge and value all those I knew there and helped me. Rene and Yves Harrison, John Herbert, Richard von Sturmer, Bryony Jagger, (the sadly late) Nic Owens, Michael Morrissey, Tim Birch, Raewyn Alexander, Shane Hollands and many others. E.g.: a man I owe greatly, & was a huge influence on my life, (the late) Frank Lane.
   Also, Richard Lopez and many who have seen or supported my Blog EYELIGHT (a part of my Infinite Project).
   Also, all my lecturers and tutors of Philosophy and English and other subjects who taught me at the University of Auckland where I studied for a B.A. in the 90s. If anyone is egregiously omitted, then perhaps there will be another edition. Everyone should be noted.

This is the first part. The images are there to add, what I am not sure. I will continue. As of now I am rusty using this Blog....at least EYELIGHT.  Hopefully more to come....