He took out a large flat knife, put a flame to the blade, and focused. He was cutting up some hash that I'd brought him. I put my hand on his wrist, and stroked the black hairs. I laid my other hand on the table, palm up. His eyes flickered. Knives speak louder than words.

Epilogue

You hope, yes,

your books will excuse you,

save you from hell:

nevertheless,

eithout looking sad,

without in any way

seeming to blame

(He doesn't need to,

knowing well

what a lover of art

like yourself pays heed to),

God may reduce you

on Judgment Day

to tears of shame,

reciting by heart

the poems you would

have written, had

your life been good.

WH AUDEN

Lovers

I am standing before you. You before me. You can see it now - if you choose. The stances have shifted, but the movements are the same.

So, how about this? This time, let us be honest at least.

Right now see, I'm not interested. But I promise to love you within a week. In two, I'll sleep with someone else, but I'll regret it in three. In four you'll have changed. In five you'll change your mind. And because I thought to let it go, and this time do it right, I won't let go.

And I promise I'll never forgive you for it.

A psychoanalyst speaks...

"All social transformation is necessarily doomed to failure and horror because humans are necessarily flawed and horrible. Often I’m inclined to agree. Between what I’ve heard from my patients– you do learn a thing or two about people in analysis –and what I’ve observed, we’re a pretty vile lot. Nonetheless, I am not convinced by claims that such social transformations are doomed to horror. I do, however, find myself wondering whether psychoanalytic political theory does not end up unwittingly repeating this narrative of human nature. Is not the psychoanalyst saying precisely the same thing when he claims that there’s an irreducible real, that there’s always the swerve of drive, that we’re always duped by the unconscious? As a result, is not psychoanalysis an inherently conservative ideology? The question isn’t rhetorical."

X-ian

Kierkegaard, feminists, post-modernism; none of them are systematic.

Congruities are uncommon.

But, typically, all of the parties are concerned and lie, and in three areas: methodology, communicative strategy, and the rejection of procrustean metaphysics.

Which is to say that none would spare the knife in the interest of getting you into bed with them. And all would deny it.

For Fear Failure and Insanity

There are two primordial stuffs,

He said.

fear of:

1.Failure.

Insanity.2

But I think he is wrong

Because there is only

Fear.

And Failure.

And Insanity.

And then there is something else –

The something else that is everything else.

I think it was the everything else he was trying to understand.

And that was way he made a mistake.

Lost (III)

You find
Things
Lose you.
Take place
Elsewhere.
Which has been
Misplaced somewhere,

And also
Somehow replaced:

With the bait,
With the source,
With the draw...

And all this
Is
Now
Yours.

ISM: Are you talking to me?

Lost (II)

You find
Things lose you,
Take place,
Elsewhere:
Is a depository

Prometheus Unbound

PROMETHEUS
MONARCH of Gods and Dæmons, and all Spirits
But One, who throng those bright and rolling worlds
Which Thou and I alone of living things
Behold with sleepless eyes! regard this Earth
Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou
Requitest for knee-worship, prayer, and praise,
And toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts,
With fear and self-contempt and barren hope;
Whilst me, who am thy foe, eyeless in hate,
Hast thou made reign and triumph, to thy scorn,
O'er mine own misery and thy vain revenge.
Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours,
And moments aye divided by keen pangs
Till they seemed years, torture and solitude,
Scorn and despair--these are mine empire:
More glorious far than that which thou surveyest
From thine unenvied throne, O Mighty God!
Almighty, had I deigned to share the shame
Of thine ill tyranny, and hung not here
Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain,
Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb,
Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life.
Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, forever!

- P. B. Shelley

The Mask of Evil

On my wall hangs a Japanese carving
The mask of an evil demon, decorated with gold lacquer.
Sympathetically I observe
The swollen veins of the forehead, indicating
What a strain it is to be evil.

- Bertolt Brecht

Lost (I)

You find things.
Things lose you.
You take place.
Place loses things.
Things deposit you
Elsewhere.
Where else?
Or else, where?

Word wars

The failed poet
(Sorrel)
Walked up to the failed apologue
(Steven Dedalus)

Sorrel took pity and fed him.
Dedalus took offence and killed him.

Dark Photographs

Ed van der Elsken’s book of photographs, Love on the Left Bank, gives us a fascinating insight into the life actually lived in Paris by the future Situationists, then still rebel Lettrists or Imaginists. The central character, a Mexican—whose point of view the photographer seems to take—has arrived in Paris as a hitchhiker, sleeping out on benches. Soon he makes some new friends and wanders from café to café with an Australian girl, in search of the scene. The book consists mainly of photographs taken in Left Bank cafés, portraits of their denizens napping, embracing, drinking, putting money in the juke-box, playing chess, whispering, selling hashish, reading psychology textbooks, acting as nightclub guides for tourists, begging, playing the guitar, handing out publicity leaflets in the street, painting, grinning, eating cheese sandwiches, sleeping in a news cinema or the metro, arguing, singing, smoking hashish, flirting, getting drunk, picking a fight, dancing, making up, listening to music, just waiting, being sent to jail, dreaming, falling in love. Finally, he returns to Mexico. In fact, it is a very confined life, limited by lack of money and, I suppose, lack of focus, if that’s the word. It seems to be dark all the time. Who knows what happens in the daylight?

- Peter Wollen
'Situationists and Architecture' (NLR April/March 2001)

You mentioned your name as if I should recognize it, but beyond the
obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a freemason, and
an asthmatic, I know nothing whatever about you.
-- Sherlock Holmes, "The Norwood Builder"

Ground

Not parallel, but staggered,
The Lines are clenched:

Fit for a fight!
Ready to war!

Gates open.
Frames close.

A new tessalation formed.
An orbit was reentered.

Body unearthed.

"If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves."

"Maybe this world is another planet's hell."

- Aldous Huxley

Nerve

Between two visions of death -
One of incontinent fear,
Another spluttering for help -
I lay in bed:
One eye dry, one closed.

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."

George Orwell

Snakes and Monsters

The dreams that fall to interpretation
We leave untouched.
The breakdown was a political gesture.

So I left myself behind,
In the snakeskin that they removed
On the operating table.
Under a blue light

I saw this other thing emerge,
A monster of excess.
But an excess made penitent by structure.

Untitled

If it should
One day
Be proven;

That boredom is the avoidance of horror,
That hatred runs through life –
Like a cat scampering through wet trees at dawn,
Like a knife over the surface of an ice cube –
That all things are unknowable
That daring is a falling with purpose:

Then
And only then
Will the need for vindication arise.

Re-conditioned

Crawling in the desert

There is dust

Growing my mouth

I have scrambled in-between parallel lines

Cracked my head on a hidden hypoteneuse

Which hurts.

My palate turns dust-gray.

To set my limbs:

That is the meaning of this dust,

So finely pressed to skin

As to appear one with it;

But it is an outside violence.

Reason has passed

Through the Gut .

And trapped by intestinal wisdom,

Dust is outstripped.

I fear nothing else.

Sub/Ob/jectivity

"True, the more artists have journeyed into the interior, the more they have learned to forgo the infantile fun of imitating external reality. But at the same time, by dint of reflecting on the psyche, they have found out more and more how to control themselves. The progress in technique that brought them ever greater freedom and independence of anything heterogeneous, has resulted in a kind of reification, technification of the inward as such. The more masterfully the artist expresses himself, the less he has to 'be' what he expresses, and the more what he expresses, indeed the content of subjectivity itself, becomes a mere function of the production process…"

Theodor Adorno - Minima Moralia

The Thing

I don't know what it is;

But many seem to think that they have it.

Some of them are even convincing.

Some even think, I think,

(Quite honestly)

That they do.

Because there's nothing to it.

Not a thing at all.

It is done

In the moments stolen from expectation

1. Unkept appointments

2. Long and terrible silences

3. The sickness of speaking

Until the machine is before you,

Like a mother taking her child in her arms

(Not like your mother ever did)

(Or mine for that matter)

(Or even many people's).

For you know; that

Whatever is said

However true

And however many lies it contains;

That

Like other people's dreams

Like a gush from a levee

Like a bullet from a gun

It goes on.

Practising cruelty

"Emotion that is not tied to the opening of a horizon but to some nearby object, emotion within the limits of reason only offers us a compressed life. Burdened by our lost truth, the cry of emotion rises out of disorder, such as it might be imagined by the child contrasting the window of his bedroom to the depths of the night."

Georges Bataille - The Cruel Practice of Art