writing

Strange Briton commiserates with Lakota over imprisoned headdress

I Don't Like Politics

An indigenous rights activist recently accused my town of hoarding a stolen Lakota headdress. Headdress. It seems strange to me that that word has two “d”s in it. Headress.

How much would we really lose by dropping the second d? (Get your mind out of whichever gutter it’s currently in. Mine went to breasts [dd], then dicks [the d], then a drug [dropping the second d]. The drug is probably psychedelic and people call it “d” for slang; maybe it’s acid?).

I guess it does sound different without the second d. Normally when I say “headdress” it has two: “head-dress”. Or does it? Depends on how fast I’m talking and how badly I’m slurring (or how many ‘d’s are near my face). And fast-talking does feel like the norm these days.

Headress. Is “ress” a word? One site tried to say it’s a feminine agent noun, but I feel like that’s just “ess”, not “ress”. Well, if it hasn’t been claimed already, I guess headdress can have it. “Ress”. It sounds a bit like headrest, but not too much.

A headdress is a bit like a headrest, except the headdress is resting on you, whereas you are resting on the headrest.

Perhaps this is a discussion for another day.

“Chief Iron Tail in long bonnet” (bonnet?! That’s a headress!)

As I was saying, misleadingly, an indigenous rights activist recently tried to call my town out for imperialist thievery. I’m putting it like this because he was very lazy with his accusation and I feel like replying in the same (or a similar) churlish way. The difference is, however, that my people and culture weren’t almost brought to extinction by psychopathic imperialist invaders. I mean the Romans and the Christians invaded Britain and slowly eradicated most of its pagan culture, so much so that we don’t even really know what the words and practices were that people used. But that was ageeess ago. And it’s not like I’m called Merlin, am a pagan and have in me the blood of Britons, witches and the nomadic peoples of old. Oh wait.

So anyway, this guy’s Instragram post was not actually about me, or about Hastings as such. If it was about Hastings I figure he might’ve had a bigger problem with Grey Owl – the Sussex boy and ex-soldier who pretended to be an Apache (by the way probably a Spanish word, not an indigenous word, but still widely adopted) for much of his life. He even represented indigenous folk to Queen Victoria. A Hastings man who used to taint his white boy skin with tea. Madness.

The post was about England refusing to give back the headress (headdress?) of Lakota chief Iron Tail.

(Okay, the wording was “continues to keep…rather than returning”. I summarised it fine, right?)

Now, I don’t know if anyone’s actually asked to have the headdress ‘back’. I’m in the investigation stages of this article, so I do not know, but there’s nothing in his post to suggest that the Lakota want it or have a place for it, either in active ceremonial use or in some kind of museum or reliquary. I mean obviously there’s the context that it’s part of their history, so they’d probably want it back, but that doesn’t mean there’s anyone looking for it or anywhere to keep it.

Iron Tail was an actor. Kinda. Some Lakota were forced to attend boarding schools by the US to try and turn them into white people, and as a result, kinda out of necessity, some of them got good at acting. Among their own people, these actors/performers were referred to as ‘Oskate Wicasa’, like “showman”. I don’t know to what extent this was a profession versus something you could do as well as other things. Some sources talk about warriors being recruited to Wild West shows while on the run from the US cavalry. Some suggest everyone in the show was a primarily a performer. They’re not mutually exclusive.

However, there is apparently some confusion in professional-looking sources about which Iron Tail they’re referring to. There was also a contemporary Iron Hail, says wikipedia, who fought at Little Big Horn, whereas Iron Tail didn’t do so much fighting. And people got befuddled because you kinda just assume that the man who got his head on a coin was a great warmaster. But you don’t have to fight to be a good chief, you know? Or to be a real bastard.

Speaking of real bastards, I’m pretty sure it was Thomas Jefferson who set out the US policy of trying to destroy all indigenous cultures in his part of the ‘New World’ and make every ‘indian’ a 2nd class American. And the land of the free never gave up trying to fulfil that goal. So, if you’re a Lakota, for example, who wants to be treated slightly less like shit by everyone around you, what do you do?

Well, you learn the Christian stuff, you go to church, maybe you do a little acting for Buffalo Bill. And then you go home, talk with your friends and family about your tribal and cultural history, make sure your kids learn it by memory, keep your language and rituals alive in private where it’s pretty safe. But publicly – you make yourself look like ‘the good Indian’ or whatever.

So Iron Tail seemed to spend a long time on the road with Buffalo Bill, and got photographed a lot wearing this headress. There’s one of him trying to start a car while wearing it. Now I’m not 100% sure but I think it’s supposed to be a war headress. It either is, or that’s what all the American commentators thought it was. And Iron Tail was not so much a warrior, more of a wise adviser type as I say. You know, looking sternly into the camera, not needing to speak in order to deliver a line. And he’s wearing this warrior headress, maybe, while cranking a car engine for Buffalo Bill. As far as I’m aware, they got along. Were buddies or whatever. But damn, you know? That feels cold.

‘Lakota Chief Cranks Car for Buffalo Bill’. Buffalo Bill, if you didn’t know, got that name by killing a fuck ton of buffalo. Buffalo, in case you didn’t know, are very significant in indigenous nomadic and plains cultures, being the animal that used to give many people a way to survive and thrive. And cars… don’t get me started on cars. Cars bring roads, demand for oil, all kinds of wild and arguably very nasty infrastructure to places that used to be dominated by nature. Roads made the US what it is today. Euuugh.

I really wanna know how Americanised Iron Tail became. You know? Was he sipping margaritas with Bill at the Savoy while his kin were left abandoned back in Salford? Yeah, the Wild West show came to England, and yeah some of their oskate wickasa contingent got left behind in Salford, including a veteran called Black Elk. They did a mini European tour of their own before making it back to the US. One guy called Surrounded by the Enemy got a lung infection and died. He was 22.

Now, Iron Tail supposedly sold the headress to a Texan not long before he himself passed, and an Englishman bought it off the Texan, and through the Englishman it ended up in Hastings Museum.

‘England’ didn’t buy it. But whatever. Let’s say England bought it off Texas, which bought it off Iron Tail while he was still alive. Iron Tail was an actor, sometimes. I guess that means… Iron Tail, Texas and England stole it off the Lakota? But it’s here now. Buck stops here, n’ all that.

I’m going to try and take a supportive angle in this article, when it’s done. I emphasise it is not done yet, and do not consider this blog post to be factual, though some of it probably is. I wanna be supportive of indigenous folk and the Lakota/Dakota/Nakota Nation specifically – because they exist. I don’t know if I’m capable of being supportive, as a well-to-do imperialist, but, as I said earlier, my people got wiped out too so… maybe we can bond a little?

Can’t help being annoyed at this activist who posted the thing, but then again, I do get annoyed at activists. I am an activist and I don’t like myself some of the time. It’s just this feeling that he’s doing it for likes. As an “influencer”, eugh, you know? Not for… truth? Accuracy? And, sure, it gets the message out there, but when you’re willing to compromise on a few details for the sake of good coverage, what message are you sending? Well, I guess that England doesn’t want to repatriate items of cultural significance to the indigenous folk trying to preserve and develop their culture?

I don’t know yet whether that’s true, but I can believe it. It sounds like what we’ve done to plenty of people across the world. Also I have found a bunch of stuff about our ‘study’ of ‘Native American history’ in Hastings that seems kinda shit. Treating them like they’re either dumb monkeys or brutal savages who’re mysteriously well-attuned to nature. Neither of those is really an adequate story, and we don’t seem that interested in hearing from these indigenous people themselves to correct the record.

Except… a lot of that ‘study’ was from last century. It is being updated. Hastings is unusually interested in the indigenous folk of the Americas. We’re a mystical town. Pagan in our ways, almost Brythonic at times. Maybe we’re the dumb children trying to make a connection with our ancestry. Maybe no-one has to be the dumb children? Maybe children aren’t dumb? I mean heck, they certainly make a lot of noise.

And the museum is changing a lot right now, to the extent that it could maybe just start being a positive influence here, and really do something to promote indigenous culture, and maybe even advance their rights over in the US! You know, do some fundraisers or something. Do fundraisers help? Maybe King Charlie could recognise their nation status or something. Really fuck up everyone’s day.

I can imagine some of the volunteers in and around Hastings Museum putting the work in to find a good home for this headress and other artefacts, among the Lakota and any other groups we might’ve acquired them from. I can imagine these items being used to revitalise, rebuild and evolve their culture in their own terms, to keep up the fight against centuries of attempts to see it wiped off the face of the earth.

Yeah there’s anger here, sure, there’s people insulting eachother, crimes against humanity are involved. But really, what this headress matter boils down to, is one of the most deprived towns in England, and a (now) small nation that the US refused to acknowledge as existing. Why wouldn’t we get along?

Since 2019… language traps, accidental ethics and being a good doggy

Counting the Days
Dog at Rest
Gerrit Dou (Dutch, 1613–1675)
1650
Oil on panel
* Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection
* Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

I haven’t written on here since 2019 so, I prompted myself to get started again by editing an old draft for a post (well, just a little thought-note really) and scheduling it to go out next week, which quickly become tomorrow, and while I was writing this, tomorrow became today.

The logic being, if I know suddenly, out of the blue, I’m posting a weird little note about metaphysics (that’s what the other piece is almost about), then it’s not going to make sense. I’m going to have to write something now, tonight, today, as a prelude to overshadow it: the real ‘return to the stage’. Not because anyone’s watching but I mean… I dunno, it takes a lot of integrity and self-confidence to stand up on stage in an empty room, rant for a full ten minutes and then disappear. What if someone saw? Every minute ticking by up there makes it more likely that you’ll have a witness, right, and if you have a witness, you have an audience. And if you’re on stage and you have an audience, well then you goddamn better entertain them.

Apparently – I can’t let a sleeping dog lie. Like the empty theatre. I struggle, sometimes, to embrace the emptiness and just roll with it. For example, I hate using phrases like “let sleeping dogs lie”, uh, just let me check on a search engine… idioms! I think that’s what they’re called.

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about how a lot of the Nazis were boring in their evil. Well, not boring, but banal. The point being, you don’t need to be Space Hitler, you can just be an unsatisfied painter and ex-solider with PTSD, personality issues and a hardcore painkiller addiction. Evil happens in that kind of environment – a real world environment. You don’t need literal Satan or a Sith Emperor. Sometimes that grandiose image of evil even distracts from the real evil going on around you, maybe to the point where you aren’t ready for it or just don’t see it.

Eichmann is the banal Nazi I’m reminded of currently. I remember Arendt writing that – in his trial – Eichmann seemed to only speak in idioms and justified all his actions through a kind of dumb reliance on orders and supposed ‘common sense’. This wasn’t a shitty attempt at hiding mastermind villainy – which is what my mind immediately wanted it to be. Eichmann was an average man, using his boring mind to commit a bunch of heinous acts on numerous people, regardless of whether they were interesting or boring. He just liked that he’d become important, I guess. No grand agenda, as such. I imagine him as a local council official given way too much power, probably specifically because he wouldn’t think out of the box. [dammit, another idiom]

So now, when I hear myself using a string of idioms (or, it seems, just one idiom) I compulsively retch in my mind over how I’m drifting into the Eichmann zone of thought. Just keep repeating the common phrases, do what you’re told, and be exceedingly evil when you’re pretty confident you can get away with it, ‘and you’ll be fine’.

I don’t like it. Ick.

And this little aside proves, maybe, that I can’t let a sleeping dog lie, because I retched at the idiom and then I really wanted to explain myself to you rather than just trotting past it like nothing happened.

Imagine I’m doing this (or resisting doing this) in regular conversation, and not in a – possibly – conceited bit of online self-reflection. Because that’s what it’s like for me a lot of the time. My mind is cuddling or poking or panicking at sleeping dogs all the time. Maybe yours does the same thing. I don’t literally poke sleeping dogs though. I do tend to very gently pat them if I think it’s not going to disturb them too much, but probably not if they’re really far asleep. It’s not often that dogs do seem to be in a deep sleep, so I wanna let them have that moment to themselves.

I just read a snippet of a summary of the banality of evil and Eichmann stuff (I searched it up to make doubly sure I’m not going insane and had remembered enough of the details correctly) and the AI search assist that had made the summary concluded, “This idea suggests that evil can arise from thoughtlessness and conformity rather than from a monstrous nature.”

I kinda think thoughtless conformity is a monstrous nature. I mean isn’t that what predators are supposed to be doing all the time? Thoughtlessly killing to conform to their nature, because they don’t know any better? Or, is the point here that it’s not about a monstrous nature at all?

A leopard scavenges a corpse to feed itself and maybe its folks – is that a monstrous nature? Another week, the same leopard ambushes and kills a gazelle, still to feed. A dead tree rotting is home and food to hundreds of plants and creatures, but if humans cut down a forest to build a town, there won’t be any dead trees rotting for them to live in. No forest, no plants and creatures, that’s less food, less medicine, less pretty things. Suddenly the town that was built doesn’t look so homely anymore.

We’re getting into what could be a hardcore ethics chat here, but to my mind there is no monstrous nature, there’s just nature (forget whether it’s human or not, ethical inclinations or biology, I’m talking about it all) which can be a real fucker sometimes, for sure. There’s a black hole out there that can eat a sun. And, I dunno, that just feels rude. But I’d be hard pressed to say that black hole has a monstrous nature. Pretty sure it’s as much a reason why we’re here as a bunch of other stuff, including our sun – which would also be a bit of a fucker if it wasn’t for our unique atmosphere. If you wanted to get fanciful you could say it’s trying to burn us alive, but then again you could say it provides us with food, power, and we’re made out of bits and pieces of its aunts and uncles.

I guess, the fact that we can get emotionally scarred, to me, doesn’t mean that the things which scar us are intrinsically evil. It just means they feel that way a lot of the time.

Making every search engine use involve an “AI” programme that may be draining a town’s water supply, putting thousands of people out of work (maybe including me), and it still doesn’t do a better job of summarising a thing or answering my enquiry than any of the standard, somewhat less damaging listings just below it… isn’t that quite mundanely evil? I mean it seems almost machiavellian in one way – you can hardly notice the swap from ‘Wild Wild West internet’ to ‘tool of greedhead oppression internet’, just like with America itself perhaps. But DuckDuckGo are (probably) just using AI because everyone else does it. Boring, dumb, lemminging ourselves off the cliff of eternity because we forgot the option to live a life was there all along.

At some point in this piece, I’m going to explain that I’ve been working voluntarily as an editor or equivalent in local small town newspapers (two) for the last seven or eight years. I don’t have any other go-to on my “CV” to prove I can edit a body of writing. Reading this, you might think, “no wonder it’s a small town paper”. I’ve always had a tendency, okay, to link things in my mind. First I see something new, it’s strange, it’s terrifying. I see other things around it that give it a context. And if the new thing doesn’t kill me, I start to learn about it and its relations to the things around it. Suddenly I find that the strange new thing has become completely familiar and I’m flitting about it with reckless abandon, jumping from one part to the other as if it was all the same ultimately coherent whole.

And that is me writing an article. Or reading one, I think. That’s how I first found out that this might be a weird way of interacting with text – I read a poem at school when I was about 15, just as part of a normal English class, and it created a completely different world in me than it did in anyone else, apparently. Certainly my English teacher didn’t like my interpretation. I could back it up with the text, but then she threw the book at me [fuck!]. I mean, she just told me all this other stuff that wasn’t covered in class which proved that I was wrong. Or, at least, proved that I was not presenting the most usual interpretation of this text. Since I’ve unlocked internet search powers, people normally don’t get to do that anymore. I have infinite possible contexts to call upon mwahahahaha! Also I’ve relaxed a lot these days. Also people don’t really care half the time.

From an editorial perspective it’s interesting, because I’m very cautious on the first read, and then the text keeps expanding (whether I’m reading it, or writing it, actually) perhaps to infinity. I tend to cut it off – more or less arbitrarily – after a while. Sometimes it’s a good, coherent text by then. And sometimes I’m just too familiar with it to see its flaws. Where possible I leave it and sit on it for a few days, to refresh my perspective. With this right now, I stopped writing most of it at 1am this morning, and I’m editing it now at 2pm, as I’m writing this paragraph about editing.

A lot of the people (not all of them, far from it, but a lot of the people) I work with do not like the “let’s wait a bit” part of the process. Back at the last paper, I even got into the habit of skim-reading a quick proof rather than actually editing (or rather than taking the proof reading seriously), because everyone wanted it done quickly… until it went wrong, and then they wanted to have done it slower. I was listening to something recently that said the unfulfilled wishes of the past haunt the people of the future. I can probably get on board with that.

I struggle not to explain myself and overjustify everything. I also struggle, when I know something well, to remember that I need to explain it at all. I sometimes struggle in either or both of these ways to the point it causes chaos and (emotional) destruction around me. Usually that only happens when I’ve stopped being aware that I’m doing it, but not always. And believe me, it is horrifying to realise that you’re the dickhead but then carry on anyway. Almost scarring, really, because after that moment where it seemed so essential to keep being a shit, you have a bunch of emotional baggage to carry for… who knows how long. I still remember winning an argument by knowingly lying when I was 11 or 12. It still scares me, because it wasn’t an important argument – I just wanted to be right, even though I knew I was wrong.

The pain of understanding that what you’re doing to reach something has actually pushed you so far away from it, you won’t be getting it back.

From time to time I think of these interruptions, these justifications and observations as me narrating or fourth-wall-breaking my own life. Or maybe I just also narrate some things to myself or have this part of my self that sits on my shoulder looking at what I’m doing. I haven’t completely worked out what role this narration or segment of self plays in my overall being. Am I practising for something, like talking to people or explaining myself? Am I reviewing things that have happened, but now in more detail or with a different lens? Probably some yes to each of those. And am I scared that I’m the only other person who can really see and understand me… well, that sounds like something that might be the case.

I’m missing out a lot of background here, and I don’t know if I want to keep digging this hole. I’m on the “hate myself” side of the arrogance spectrum, and in life I have a tendency to put others first to the point where I’m utterly devoid of all vitality and lash out mindlessly at my surroundings to try and recapture some rumour of whatever essence I seem to have given away. You can’t go it alone, either as a ruler or as a slave. Both extremes are unhappy in their extremity, lack of balance, and probably their lack of community.

The buddhists are probably onto something, with all that balance stuff. And I’m fairly sure it’s not just the buddhists either. I mean, I’m an anarchist hedge wizard of sorts, and I seem to be onto something myself. Or possibly just on something. But the other anarchists and pagans seem to get it, and they don’t all draw it from buddhist texts passed around in the 60s; the ideas of balance, peace and community have somehow survived many attempts at their destruction in ‘Western’ thought. We don’t like to admit it, but we are capable of not being ignorant, intolerant, greedy pig-fuckers. Someone should pat themselves on the back. Maybe you.


A Red Handkerchief on the Grass

Poetry

Been away a while. Here’s a new one I’m working on.

A Red Handkerchief on Grass (By accident I imagine a world where we could have sex, but you and they covet her)

i’m talking to you on the phone with the messages, you’re sending me them and I’m sleepy and in the bed and lying next to her and the sheets are up in me, the sun is coming through yellowy; outside the bed is cold inside the bed is warm
you’re talking in my inner ear with your messages and I’m sending you back, the phone is down and on the floor and in my inner eye you’re walking along this sunny afternoon street to me, you’re in her body and I know and you look at me knowingly but you don’t say why. We know it.
you walk over to me on the grass talking normally, her voice not like her, not unlike you, you sit down next to me talking the same message, there is a tree and a house, I don’t register what you’re saying but it is normal and alright.
I want to say I can’t look into her eyes with you in them, look a little too long, and see the mouth, nose, brows and in those features your face looking back, I want you to know I went to sleep wet and this is me dreaming
I’m reaching over to press down on the clit you’re wearing, soft cotton on top and pushing and you moaning, and warm overhanging in the sun, I’m mounting you, feeding you thru her, in the grass, in the heat
in a sharp movement you get up and back into your body, all in one swift motion but not quite, like a few frames of film were missing, and you walk off knowingly; behind you and next to me where we shared blood and semen, a red handkerchief lying flat out as if to absorb stains
I wake up wet and look over at her, sleeping in the white sheets in the yellow light, my hair is in my eyes, I reach for the phone and drop it again, I turn over and stretch out on the mattress and on the pillows, and I rub myself in the mattress, and it hurts in my heart but tenderly and I remember how you sometimes wish you are a woman too

Learning From the “Masters”

Communication as Magic

Edit: I fucking hated poetry again for a short time lately, I forgot its value, I looked on it as a poor excuse for a few chatted sentences, and then, again, Dylan Thomas saved me and my sense of poetic value, of betrayed and crushed romance, breathing under the boot in rebellion.

I’ve been watching a couple of documentaries on distinctive artists recently: (google image them if you don’t know them) Francis Bacon and Stanislaw Szukalski. And while their personal moralities and lifestyles may seem, may in fact be, highly problematic to most people, you have to admit they have a talent for creating evocative imagery. I mean images that aren’t just what they seem. Images that refer to other feelings and experiences in the viewer, about which the artist probably only had a distant inkling…some feeling based on their own understanding of how deeply the image effected them on their imagining it, or the parts of it. I mean these images startle something crawling around in your head and in your body. Creatures climbing the ladder of your spine etc.

So I’ve decided I need to try and put some more of that into my own use of imagery in the poems. These guys from the documentaries go to town imagining and communicating what they’ve imagined. Lately, I’ve just been wanting to produce something that a reader somewhere might like. And I don’t think that’s the way to go about it. I still firmly believe you need to have a sense of what different readers think of your work, and that you need to interact with your readership, but you can’t really let them determine what you’re making. They can help with formulating the ideas that inform your creative work, but the work itself, unless you’re starting it as a collaboration, has to be yours. From your own private brain workshop, manufactured using the tools of your emotions, instincts, your fingers, your sweat. With art anyway. With that kind of art that you immediately say is “art”, because it’s so fucking artsy.

I guess that’s not always what I want to write/make, actually, now that I think about it.

There are exceptions, but work that comes from your soul really seems to be work that’s worth the creation going into it and that’s worth people seeing it.

At the moment I’m at a bit of an impasse. Whenever I try and start out on something new I get caught not knowing whether to go for smooth shapes or hair and dirt and rough. Maybe both are the way to go. After all, how can you really talk about one without having the other at least as a reference point, if not an immediate contradiction.

I’m trying to put aside time and space to dream out landscapes. This is something I used to do regularly when I was more of a romantic, and when I engaged less with the world anyway. I’d hide away from my surroundings even as they encroached on me with increasing meaning. I was the kid wandering on his own or standing in the group not saying anything and clearly daydreaming about something else. And that fed nicely into weird and extreme romantic landscapes streaming through my head…but being at school and stuff I never really spent much time fleshing those out into words. Or pictures I guess.

Since some harsh but enjoyable waking up to reality I’ve cut myself off from that place for a while, and now it feels like the right time to scavenge there for remnants, time to rebuild some clearer sense of romance again…I mean the passion’s bled right out of me. I need to rediscover the source from before and approach it again, with more care and self-knowledge this time, and use it for the poetry. For the sake of the poetry.

Yeah. So that’s what’s happening with that.

Also if I’ve not mentioned it before then have a look at this: https://hackhastings.home.blog/. It’s the other non-poetic project I’m working on at the moment and will occasionally show some of my writing that’s not turning up anywhere else. Also various other Hastings locals doing their thang. Check it out. Edit: things have moved on since 2019. hastings-examiner.uk.

Rambling Revolutions

I Don't Like Politics

I keep wanting to find a way of writing on here regularly, so I’m now attempting a ‘journal’ type of thing, which I’ve definitely attempted before and failed…well, stopped. I’ve already stacked a few posts to try and give myself a head start. You might think that’s cheating given the diary-like context, and it probably is, but I’ve been writing these on a mostly day-by-day basis, and (after this one) without too much editing required, so the main thing is that I’m just not posting them on the day they’re written, which doesn’t seem so bad. I want to give you people good stuff to read, not just random thoughts, but I also can’t keep up the regularity if I’m doing too many proofs and edits. We’re going to see how it all balances out, I guess. Hopefully there’ll be enough for you to enjoy.

Anyway. Damn, openers are such a struggle sometimes. I’ll be alright once we’ve tucked in to the series.

There’s a lot going on in UK politics at the moment, I mean a lot of talk about democracy and people and stuff, and this talk looks more like a revolutionary force bubbling under the masonry than it has in a while, this talk, this stuff happening. I mean it’s conflict. It’s trouble. On the other hand I’ve been encountering loads of fellow travellers, not just around town but the world over. There are serious writers and activists out there not only writing about anarchism, community living, self-sufficiency, not only writing about it but actually living it. And not necessarily giving it those names, I mean I don’t like those names but they’re helpful as broad labels for the kind of stuff I’m into. An example of one of these fellow travellers is Alexandra Elbakyan, who runs one of the various crews out there that try to keep academic papers free to all. In case you didn’t know you have to pay for a lot of those papers. Not just science and medical papers, and not to support the authors or institutions. Some publishers bought the rights or did the publishing, and those publishers have amalgamated into a few big names over the last couple of decades or so. As monopolies they’re keen on making as much money as possible out of students who normally have enough private or government funds to waste on whatever bullshit they’re not focussing on while they’re trying to focus on studying. Students are an easy con in that sense – it seems relatively rare, in the UK anyway, to find a first or second year student genuinely concerned about saving their money and spending carefully. Third year can be slightly different, experience and exam pressure put an end to some of those heavy nights out or those days in posh cafes.

So I’m seeing all this activity, the good and the bad – it’s great – but particularly with reference to the UK I’m worrying. The real revolution is in these fellow travellers, the thinkers, communicators, people working on networks and the exchange of information. Community development projects. All that. But there’s a fake one, a wrong revolution that might be waiting within these undercurrents of discontent. Maybe. Maybe we’re past that kind of behaviour. Not sure. I’m not necessarily talking about violence here, but at least some big change that’s very enthusiastic and very poorly informed. “Brexit’s already happened, genius” is what you might be thinking. I know that – and that isn’t it. What eventually happens about Brexit could be it though. I get the feeling we’re probably going to stall for time, which, in context, is definitely the right thing to do. There’s no-one good enough to push things forward so it’s best to wait and try and train someone up to do the job properly. But what if we don’t pull that off…what if the talent vacuum in UK politics continues…?

The revolution – any idea of revolution – is euphoric, okay. Historically all revolutions start with this good energy, this genuine righteousness of motivation, but then people get too excited and blow too early, it becomes conflict, it becomes violence and anger, ignorant and hateful, leading to years of tyranny or worse. It’s natural. When you think you’ve dropped in to the informational pipeline straight to truth – to God or whatever – it’s a powerful feeling, hard to ignore. You want to keep believing you’re on that righteous path. You have to ignore that feeling though. There are dangers in being too excited for too long, just like with being too sad for too long. I remember hearing a victim of post-partum depression talk about this feeling of euphoria, going mad with it, writing on the walls, getting up on her roof, seeing all the beauty around her, and then, clear in her purpose, jumping off the roof to try and kill herself. Not to belittle her actual real-life experiences, but that’s how a revolution tends to go. Heroic sacrifice yes, perhaps, but for what? Near annihilation? A social self-destruct?

Happiness isn’t a good thing on its own. It’s an emotion that you can use to your advantage, just like any emotion. It’s your friend or if not it’s an enemy to be feared indeed. Christ, getting dangerously close to a Col Walt E. Kurtz sentiment there.

Yeah, basically I’m worried about the revolution. I know, I know. An anarchist worried about revolution? People like Alexandra Elbakyan are excellent – sharing information, discussing, just pushing connectivity. They’re the real revolution, like I say. But Extinction Rebellion, people demanding a “People’s Vote”, people charging into the public gallery of a meeting of my local council waving placards…they have no fucking idea what they’re doing. I mean they’re still great, in a way. And fair enough tho, sure. It’s panic or euphoria or…some other powerful natural drug coursing through their veins. Great. But that mob mentality, thinking that you’re fixing something with a bold statement…you’re not. To be bold like that you become too simple. Complexity can’t easily (or just plain can’t) be written on a placard. Can’t be expressed in a bridge blockade, in a trip to jail for civil disobedience. It can be expressed through discussion, through art, through writing, or through extended periods of well-planned action. I’m not seeing well-planned or protracted anywhere at the moment, but I suppose maybe I’m not looking particularly hard.

I’m sitting here thinking that I might need to be careful. If this gets worse. And it might. Brexit (organisationally) never had to go this badly wrong. We’ve had shit governments in the UK for a while now and it was only a matter of time until people started to notice and take advantage of that fact. So Brexit is now the shitshow that represents the trouble at our national core. We’ve been broken for years and no-one at management level cares about fixing it. That’s the crisis – management are not answering the phone. The bosses can no longer be relied upon since they’ve all but filed for bankruptcy and moved to Fiji for a passport. Have you seen that list of places that give you citizenship if you spend enough on property there? They have.

But that’s them. We all need to chill the fuck out and then, calmly, collected, dismantle the capitalist superstate piece by piece. This angry excitement doesn’t work. Big, sudden movements fail if not planned down to the tiniest detail and conducted professionally. Slow and steady is better. Like the hare gets to the end of the race first, but then the prize is getting killed and butchered for food. Who wants to eat a tortoise that moves that slow, and is wrinkly and all shelly? Well, seagulls maybe but they’ll eat anything. And that said, lethargy never helped anyone. We want calm and deliberate action. Good ol’ Kurtz has a line on that, something like “Swiftly. Deliberately. Awake.”

I plan to go ahead as some kind of social commentator, often anarchic, often seeming mad, but mad like a jester you know? The court jester replaced the court wizard when our old monarchs no longer wanted someone wiser than them giving advice. Instead they had someone wiser than them acting stupid and telling insightful jokes. A different kind of advice, a kind that could but didn’t have to be taken seriously. A jester could talk shit about the king and get away with it while others were being sent to the chopping block. I think any opinions formed or even proffered for public consideration should either be immediately supported by clear evidence and reasoning, or, if not, then indirectly supported by a body of evidence and reasoning that’s neatly referenced within a surprisingly articulate rant or series of jokes.

Oh my but I’m rambling particularly badly here aren’t I? Maybe. Well, this is the new pure ramble zone. “Journal” being a polite euphemism for “poorly conceived and largely unedited”. Heck fella sometimes you just need to write. Ask Hunter S Thompson, the Dr of Journalism. I’m sure he’d pull a mace on you.

 

Thoughts of the Early Morning

Poetry

The secret is not to create mercilessly
But to make what other people thought
They only knew privately –
When you show them something they
Felt inside and quiet and alone
It’s like a magick trick except
Instead of pulling a coin from behind
An ear it’s a heart from a chest or brain
The bloody peace thumping in your fist
That you twist and turn for them stroking
Aortas, cava, trunk with knuckles and finger
Tips so that they can see what they are feeling
So that they have their blood on paper
For eternity –
And if you don’t do this you are merely
Wallowing in your own inarticulate sorrow

Pernod in the Interwar Years

Communication as Magic

On my way here today I got an ad for Wix, I wondered: who’s paid off Google to translate “Wordpress” to “Wix” first, or is it all just some damned mistake…that some ad agent somewhere, paid more than the freak curating our children’s futures, just happened to confuse one ‘w’ word with another, relevant, ‘w’ word. I feel like these kinds of mistakes cannot reasonably be made with nouns.

I’ve been away from the blogging world – and from writing – for a little while now, and I’ve hated it. Nightmares from childhood crawl through my skull even in broad daylight, a substantial marker in my mental landscape of sustained failure. A warning that arises unbidden when I’ve spent too long writing cheques that won’t be honoured. Metaphorically of course. Show me a 20-something of today that ever wrote a recogniseable cheque from their own account. Even when I had my Mary Poppins Kiddie Account at the Halifax (I think I was 13) I didn’t write cheques and I’m pretty sure that was the only way you could use the account. Perhaps I dislike banks and even money altogther. Perhaps we all do, secretly, even while we profit from them. But more of that kind of rant later.

Editing other people’s writing for content rather than style is a disgusting activity that should only be conducted at times of definite intoxication. I have been undertaking this kind of task, sober, for extended periods of time. This had been part of the source of my break from writing. There are other things: transitory things that don’t make the cut here. What you need to know is that I shouldn’t be editing anyone for content, I should be exposing their own lies to them or singing out their truth. Editing doesn’t come into it. But style – if they want a different style to their own, if they want a unified publication style, well, that’s something I can disagree with but also something I can enforce while employed to do so. That’s something I can edit, but that’s also something that’s not part of my employment description. Time will tell however. Manoeuvrings and strategems, possibly even ruses, will enable me to gamble at the kind of position I desire. Inklings already here, staining my fingers.

Enough of gambling, however. Writing has to return to my life, and this is the allocated medium. Content production must occur, ideally with some extravegance or flair or other expressive quality. I adore neutrality but language isn’t neutral. It’s like some disgusting fizzing pot of chemistry full of PH papers and overshadowed by distillation tubes and pipettes and other extreme scaffolds with distinctly menacing connotations. The right amounts of love and bile must be associated to produce something approaching a middle ground, or at the very least a highly entertaining segment of nothing at all.

People don’t respect a writer who’s not writing. They don’t understand the alcoholism, the binge-watching, the binge-eating, the long walks, the hibrow cultural gatherings – they’re not pretence, they’re all an effort to convince the psyche and soul to reinvest their myriad energies in the act of verbal description. Coaxing a mouse into a bottle, except this is no ordinary bottle. The acoustics are fantastic, and there’s a thin crusting of rum salts at the bottom and up the sides. It’s been a struggle bringing myself back to this point, I can’t pretend to you it hasn’t been. But the nightmares have led me here safe and sound. I don’t want to be dealing with them anymore. I’ve had enough of childhood recollections taunting, without reason, without logic, except the undeniable fact of my own failure to pursue my own designated purpose. Got to get back on the horse, got to carry on up the path, or down it, at least until the next town.

But these distractions! For someone such as myself, who takes pride in low self-esteem, who hails it as a philosophical attitude, it can become painfully easy to get sidetracked. I mean why should I do any better, the question comes. My answer has to be tight. I have to navigate my own internal highways with great care, understanding, and above all, integrity. I can’t be intimidated by myself or else the plot will be lost for at least another day. And that’s another day of nighttimes and youtube advertisements and trips to the shops. If only the shops would go away. I don’t know if I can take the consumeristic bent of it all any longer. I can, but I’d rather not. And it’s that preference that scares me. More stable types than I have probably been lost to insane delusion. Firebombings and riots and even ideologies…all seductive to the head, all very sinister. I myself nearly became an ad man, once. It took the death of my father to stop it – Fate speaking a clear message with a completely unexpected heart attack. Or was it co-incidence? And is this ignorant arrogance?

Too soon to tell. Too soon. The memories will well up and consume eventually, and then the truth of it all will be reality, for better or worse. Or perhaps this is already the present, the great procession of Septimus Hodge marching and shedding in perpetuity, despite both fires and equations.

These times for the individual are like the interwar years were for Europe – a time of both certainty and uncertainty. A time when the controlling forces change more or less and begin to understand things, while the masses ignorantly celebrate every last moment they’re allowed, safe in the knowledge that they can do so without being randomly exploded. Now, once again, they will only be exploded for transgressions against more powerful parties within their own society. Elsewhere in the world will largely leave them be, for now. The individual is both – the thinking master and the wishing-they’d-rather-not-have-to victim. We’re each an ouroboros, infinitely changing, infinitely the same. At least, we are if you interpret it like me. And this is where the self-hatred or at least deprecation comes in as a natural response to an uncertain new world for humanity. We don’t want master-slave anymore and yet our biological hard-wiring struggles to make the change, on the personal level and on the social level. It can’t provide the internal stability our ideals prefer. So we work at it: we want democracy, we get representative oligarchy, we say that’s good enough for now. Maybe that’s all there is for us. The next generation will do better if they can.

We must destroy these kinds of assumptions. We must carefully and knowingly unselve, in select ways. Unravel our own stiching to do a better job than the Great Seamstress in the Sky. This is willful evolution, a new process often ignored or rejected by right-thinking scientists and pseudo-Darwinians. More on that another time.

Jean Rhys wrote some good books in the interwar years, and in one of those books her detached character liked Pernod. I have to say it’s an excellent discovery. I’m not drunk on it now, but I will be shortly. Then to the pub? No, no. Not enough pay for that. More importantly – not enough certainty of positive social contact. Who’s there? It could be somebody, it could be nobody. It could be some demented bat with a perfect tan and bleached hair, his eyes guarded by overly keen cheekbones. A heavy ordeal to encounter as the light fades on such a seasonal evening.

No, I’ll stay back and edit that last poem. Drink some more Pernod. Drive it forward with minimalist synthwave drumbeats etc.

The time could be near.

Is there any more to be said?

Perhaps not yet…the prey must be led with breadcrumbs, not brought to escape with a labyrinthine thread. That’s what they say at ad school. That is…unless you want to make them escape from their own heads, their own realities…but no ad man is genius enough to come up with that kind of manipulative scheme. The unreality on us now is sheer accident brought about by centuries of corruption crushing layers one upon the other. The sort to make a conspiracy aren’t advanced enough for it. More stuff, more, more for the fire. Break all the chairs, break all the pots, the food, break everything you made the fire for, just to keep it going. The burning must go on.

I have to escape now, before the anti-capitalism takes me away for hours…….and so the Pernod comes, an aniseed twist up the nose, dreams of green oblivion……it must be allowed to take effect…poetry must be drafted, writing must unfurl and snarl and beak at the uncertain consistencies all up the walls, the procession must go on…

Poison to the Antidote

Communication as Magic, Poetry

In that Netflix series Narcos, Poison is a pretty un-chill guy. He reminds me a little of the protagonist in the Sniper Elite series of games, just doing drug hits and about 30 years on, and younger and Colombian.

Here’s my latest poetic adventure. I wrote it inspired by discovering King Krule, and trying to recount an incident after a concert at Ally Pally that I still don’t fully understand. The incident, that is, not the concert. TLSP are fookin’ amazin’.

The slashes are there to help me read it, because it doesn’t have any punctuation. That’s not to be “groovy” and “trendy”, it’s just to force you to make your own punctuation while desperately trying to find some of the real stuff, like a comma. Everyone loves commas. But they’re not in this poem. This poem says fuck commas – make your own pauses. Or try to follow mine, I guess.

I’ve got you bleeding on my heart in minature/
An action figure temptress/ arm missing
And the paint faded/ go figure that overuse
Would wear and tear your eyes still bright/
But now blue tracing my heart attack
With creeping electric sugar/ sonorific infections/
I keep Alex Turner in a box in the freezer/
Crystalline watery eye discharge and shut lids/
He’s between life and death now/ when I wake him
I’ll heat slow and careful/ he always opens with
Do I wanna/ and no, it’s you again feeding
On my heart in minature/ parasitical love bliss/
How beautiful the worm of an idea wriggling
In that/ grey matter jar demanding pickle juice/
Of red and blood or wine and fine/ spirits or
Caffeine or legal excess heart palpitation/
Explosive thumping and DVT and hours in
Front of the blue-white light softly screaming/
And your gnawing something fictional I’ve/
Got to breathe I’ve/ got to get a breath above/
Your erection pushing over my eyelids/ the
Watery discharge of eyes in distressed cold
And bulging/ weary discharge of eyes/ your
Presence up and dagger thru the ribs/ your
People dagger up the ribs/ ceremonial sword
In the eye/ your eyes and distant memories
Of perfect protrusions in panties a vision/
I try but I can’t replicate/ I hate the way
I beg your action figure for favours
Alex Turner/ snaps in the freezer box but
I’ve got superglue in the drawer danger/
Flammable liquid lighters catch well on bricks
Tho/ harmful vapour may spew affects the brain
Or nervous system/ prolonged paraplegic
Exposure may result in severity/ physical injury
Developed for war casualities, used by jilted
Lovers/ I may have thought about you too long/
And the others also feel this that I was burnt/
Before they set me on their eyes/ and that drunken
Prize value was lost on the turn of a lightswitch/
Catching fire mechanism broken and glasses
Empty everywhere/ I don’t know your hair some
Silken straw maybe on a pillow or in a hand/
How does your worm still make me want it/
In my salt shaker chilli pot I’m your gusset/
Soaking or flattery aside an accidental art class
Colour mixing stain/ on something lost to black
Plastic landfill/ still too much I find and Alex
Shivers with me behind the scenery/ Bill Shatner
Shaking hands with a styrofoam dino meanwhile/
A Waitsian wino dribbles on my shoulder fabric/
Reassuring soft skull, again, like yours, again/
Your pop-up platform shoots gyrating/ sheer/
fairy/ wings/ and flying pink papers[wings] scuttle what’s
Left of me/ that’s the story I hear recounted after
The dream, that’s still what I wake up to even as
I’m culling/ and they see it in the half looks cast
Away seeds to salty turf/ they feel women in the fall
My ratio is 4:7 and the lights are down low on
North London’s streets/Ally Pally apocalyptic market
Stalls lining my liver/ each concrete step the sweetest prostate
touching excrement/ and a catalytic mind’s eye over
Hollywood hills/ vest open tie low jeans hanging
Off thighs a belt buckle dangler bouncing/ the night
Propositions through a young creature/ wild whites
Locked about my lumpy indecency and Strongbow
scented exhaust fumes/ thanks but you can fuck off/
King’s Cross unfettered stomach adoration
Replacing you/ you lost in the folds of the past’s fat
I’ll have another pint but they’re shut and it’s three
if you can get it in the morning Alex trying to change
My mind Turner to agree with the pit of my chest not you
Anymore missy/ I’ll not call you love at all/ but I’m still getting
Mined by friends or at least I wish love can’t die
Can only fade/ and yawning to the mobile buzz bright mean
Screen/ I’m alright in the bed spread/ trousers falling down
Stumble through the brain strain down an alley not in the rain
And piss in a cascade.

I’ve got to work on it still, as with them all. And it might be one in a three part mini-series. At least, that’s what it says in my folder for it. So you never know.

If you feel like feedback, anyone, I’d love to know what you reckon. Too long perhaps? I love it. I love long things. Don’t mind if you don’t though. I want to try and plumb the depths of a topic, either in the time and resources expended on its exposition or in the wit and content of the phrasing used in its mere description.

Sorry, I’ve got a…prosaic brain on at the minute. Is it prosaic? Is it just a bit twatty? I can’t tell. I hope you can ignore my comments and enjoy the poem.

Incidentally I would recommend King Krule. Have a look.

Exhausted Stumblings, Confused Salt Crystals

Communication as Magic

I’ve been away too long. I’ve got to get back on the metaphorical horse.

I haven’t done a huge amount of writing except that I started a little freak page on Facebook that I’ve also temporarily abandoned. As ever, more is incoming – with poetry etc too. I actually really want to do some journalism. Like proper journalism. I don’t even know what that is – proper journalism – but I want to do it. Anyhow, facebook freak page:

It began with a picture.

Fullsizeoutput_13eb

And then another one.

800px-Armpit_by_David_Shankbone

Caption: “There is also a Nipple in the bottom left corner, but this is something you must not notice, for it is not strange and not unusual. Nipples are everywhere. Like foot cream.”

And this of course inevitably led to an opening story, with picture.

529full-elliott-gould

“Hello. I am not a strange crystal, but this is what some people think when they meet me. They say that I become involved in hair and sweat and unholy things. None of this is true. My tip is coated in a thin watery discharge and then thrust up into the darkness of the underarm, wherein no other crystal can see, and so I am a clean and healthy and normal individual. This is my work. I am determined and conscientious. Amethyst understands. Rock salt used to understand because he was young, but now he is old.

Here is the body part of Elliot Gould. The arrow marks it. Can you tell? It is moustache. There are other pictures of Elliot Gould, but this one is from listal.com. It was added exactly three years before I was born, by a nice man called Leo. Perhaps it was his birthday too? He is green. I like him and Mr Moustache.”

There are other segments. Maybe it’ll become a book? Who can tell.

Here’s the second story. I want to give you a sense that there’s some character development going on in this series before I leave you hanging.

MBDMOMA EC001

“I do not like advertising. It tells the flesh folk that what we do is sensual and filthy. It shows us rubbing our tips into the hairs and the salty sweats and their small, small crystals. It is wrong and disgusting. When I come away with a hair in my mouth, all the others say “you have been advertising again, you have, you have” and they laugh and raise their lids up and down. I say nothing to them. Amythest tells me that when she was young they would all look at her. She would try to crawl away deep inside, but she could not move and her lattices shone with words I could not understand.

This is Sean Connery from a post on theredlist.com. They made a very good post and their section on Furniture Design agrees politely with curves. I have actually seen it shake hands with the curves, but do not tell anyone. Sean Connery is like goo and cotton wool on fire. A rude man, a smart man, but I like his pretty face. Here he wears a hat.”

I really love exploring weirdness. A long time ago, I thought well fuck it: I’m only going to live as me once. After that I don’t know. I might as well try and experience as much as possible, from as many different perspectives as possible. Now that’s not what I’m doing with the Crystal thing, but that kind of thinking did inspire me to try and write something kinda stupid but also kinda pointy. Pointy like meaningful, almost disturbing but clearly non-threatening. A spike of odd you can investigate or leave well alone.

Finally (for now) a third post:

Kiwi_aka

“Today I went into the cupboard behind the mirror. Next to me was the shampoo bottle that is called ‘Aussie.’ He is from a place called Australia which the others tell is the deadliest place in the world. It has good caves. Aussie is glad to be away from there because now he can go into hair and ‘lather snuzzle’. The others say Aussie is a pervert. However, I know that he is shampoo. He may have a very dirty job, but he does this job quite well, with fine smells. Sometimes, if the fleshy one has been messy and not put back the lid, Aussie lets me go close and sniff his sticky cream.

Here is a kiwi fruit. It does not have hair, it has skins with fuzz. I like it both for texture and occasional self-pollination. Kiwi fruit are like flavour eggs – this is what the fleshy ones say. Sometimes the flesh eat out the green and suck the core. They are not wrong, but strange. Some claim the kiwi in the north of this picture is actually an hedgehog egg. They are liars.”

Check out the Facebook page that also got me working along these lines: https://www.facebook.com/welcometomymemepage/

(there was a frankly amazing tumblr called something like “littlebird” with illustrations of monster-freak-feathereds but I can’t find it anymore. The writing style in the captions though…beautifully weird)

Don’t worry this isn’t the order of business from now on. I just don’t have anything else publishable to hand. Will write/edit something tonight though.

Creative Struggles and Synthesis

Communication as Magic, Poetry

This is a follow-on from a post that helped me find my blogging voice again. You don’t need to read that one though. It was more thinking out loud where this one is basically the same but slightly better structured. The continuing theme is that we all get into a rut sometimes, overthinking or letting our emotions run away with us, or both.

Writers block is about disconnection, because writing, and even art generally, is about leaving the boundaries of your own body. Heck, all communication is about that. It’s probably what defines humans above all else – our ability to empathise with things. Empathy is a relatively new and very accurate word. It’s about putting yourself in the shoes of someone or something else. Not just sympathising “oh it must be hard” but realising “oh, it is hard. It really is.” Also I suppose knowing when you know nothing. “That’s just way beyond anything I’ve experienced, but here’s my sadly academic attempt at describing it. Because an attempt is better than ignoring the possibility of truth.”

Words are referring to and so trying to make you think of, and partly experience, things which are not immediately happening to you. Even if someone else is talking about you as you do things, they’re talking off-point. You’re drinking and they say “Ian is drinking”, it doesn’t describe the sense of thirst, it describes the sensation of drinking, or it could be a sarcastic reference to your alcoholism. It pulls you into the speaker’s perspective and away from your own. And that’s incredibly useful.

Empathy is like having a soul or a spirit, you know. Because empathising is extending whispy non-physical energies than can interact with and generally access physical things. Empathy is magic, and so art is magic. Talking a bit like Alan Moore here. Your ability to accurately understand someone else and so tailor an interaction to them, is magical. Or can seem so when you do it proper, because it’s so subtle and yet so powerful. The perfect gift, the manipulation into something, or the feeling of love and safety and acceptance you read in a friend snoozing on your couch. That’s magic, okay. That stuff is pure brilliance.

And that’s art. When successful it takes you somewhere. Teleports you or possesses you or releases you. All these phrases for the same sort of process. Someone else connecting with your experience through and/or despite theirs…powerful.

There’s a good old movie called Excalibur. Proper Northern-European. Yeah, that manages to be a cultural thing. Merlin the magician helps by creating symbols, by helping with masquerades, and by creating fog. He doesn’t shoot lightning bolts from his arse, he appears in the right place at the right time and says the right thing to people who don’t understand the world in the way he does. This is no Gandalf fighting the Balrog. This is the man who taps into the power of the Dragon – pure life energy – in his sleep. He quietly glows while Gandalf desperately struggles. He gets how things connect. He empathises. And he only turns up when he thinks it’s appropriate. Which is why he’s only struck by something as fictitious as ice magic – being turned into a block of ice – when he loses his power to empathise in a fit of madness, caused by deep betrayal. The only time when he loses his aura of mystery is when he stops empathising, falls into despair, and lets his own emotion overwhelm him uncontrollably. It’s like when Spock panics, but much cooler. (Sorry Spock, you’re still really cool, which is why I’m mentioning you out of context.)

So, let’s look at a poem.

The Curly Auburn DJ

My nostalgia for you

Particularly, hugging me at work when you’re tired
Sharing sandwiches and mugs
Because you don’t like too much cheese
Being okay with my saliva
Dirty fingers from polishing your shoes sometimes
Because I want to
Sonorific MTV memories
And your little unexpected gifts
Always

Especially, innocent shameless on tired weekday evenings
Warm, rainy nights behind open doors
Lonely blue guitar rockstar singalongs
And romantic pointings beloved of Elvis
Lookalikes of lookalikes
Staggering
Striding through streets
And being alone with our lagers, hands

Specifically, kissing me with your hat on
At home, in private, with no-one to see though windows open to the night
With moonshine and lamplight on the sill
The felt catching on my forehead but sliding over, not down
Silently looking into your eyes
Feeling your body, privately, for the first time
Through softened wool or cotton and layers
You watching as I hold you and touch you
You would want to understand
And you would
A little, or more
Us dancing to your quiet music

I don’t like this one. I don’t like most of, if any, of my poems. They’re all trying to describe pristine moments or feelings, and they only get there part of the time. It’s like Stonehenge maybe. You only see the brilliance and utility when the sun shines just so, what like once a year. This one, I’m not sure if it makes it to communication proper. It’s basically only going to work – maybe – for the one reader who can catch all the references. Maybe you can read it and like parts of it, or maybe like me you read through it and see flaws that need correcting. I’m trying to present something for you to empathise with. I’m trying to make some magic. I need to try harder. Problem is, emotionally sensitive area. Ice block time.

Whereas another poem I’ve showed you and talked about before, I’m working on an update that’s tasty. Tasty because it’s honest, communicative.

EDIT: I’m cheating a bit as this is an old post that I hadn’t finished, until now. So, the first of what may or may not be many updates to Consul Orange is already here. I hope it’s as tasty as I suggested. Probably not, but I’m a pessimistic guy when it comes to this stuff. So maybe.

It gets ice block because I unfortunately enjoy being in love with people I’m not supposed to love. Nothing weird. Jane Austen, Darcy, -style nothing bad. Just stupid really. And if the love succeeds, if the hunt concludes, if the chase is done…well…not exactly what’s the point but…chasing is fun. Heck if I could just write beautiful love poems, no issues, no questions asked, wouldn’t that be a bit boring? Well, maybe not. But that’s how the grass looks from this side of the fence. There’s always a struggle therefore, there’s always an emotional vulnerability, there’s always the chance that I’m fucking up by saying what I’m saying. It’s a bit of a gamble you know? And I do enjoy a bit of a gamble, well, within what are really very safe boundaries.

How does this tie in with empathy and writers’ block? You may well inquire. Well, on the loving from a distance thing, I find myself becoming good friends with people, and one day I realise I know them really well. Basically from loving them in a mostly non-sexual way (love seems to play a huge role in my life) I get to learn a huge amount about them, what they like, how they tend to act. I get an insight into how they think. I get strong empathy. Sometimes. These are people who can then pull me out of any block or depression because just being with them hooks me up to the 230V and suddenly I’m ready to go again. That’s like art/communication but with very low distribution. I mean it’s putting all your effort not into a single work, but into another person.

Specific acts and methods are all well and good, however: what you need in life is a balance between your means of emotional satisfaction and your ability to pull yourself away and analyse stuff. You need those two seemingly incompatible sides of your being to interact regularly, and help you achieve what you want. The good friends I love are a microcosm of that. I’ve got to a place where there’s balance – albeit tentative – and so I can get the most out of what’s happening. And, you know, just feel good.

So, two sides: the distant, analytical empathic effort is great but you can’t drain all sense of self, you can’t become some distant contemplative creature like a transcendent god, because you’re not that. And you’ll just get really sad. Some writers fall into this trap I think, hiding away in the shed in worlds of imagination. You can’t really know what other people are feeling if you’ve not explored your own emotions and interpersonal interactions. Basically, you don’t want to spend so much time flying out somewhere that you forget your way home, run out of fuel, and other metaphors.

On the other side, you’re asking for trouble if you just go all emotion and all running around activity. You’ll end up stuck somewhere doing something you don’t understand, and eventually you’ll not feel great about it. Some writers become celebrities and get so busy with gala luncheons they forget how to make decent work, or they plunge into alcoholism. Any emotional excess – pretty self-explanatory why it’s bad, no? Charles Bukowski says he did a lot of his sexy poems for smut magazines because he had to pay the bills, which included bar tabs and booze money, but then he’d still manage to sneak in a grander theme somewhere in each of those poems so he could still express something more meaningful. Even in what some might call the depths of degradation, the man basically held it together: maintained a kind of purpose/perspective/balance.

This is fucking dualism, mate. To some extent. Mind and body are separate in some ways, but are also connected, must also work together. It’s not a contradiction, it’s a complicated web of biological and nervous connections that we don’t fully understand yet. Mind-body. Two separate things, connected. Balanced, hopefully.

Now, after that inspiring talk…can you feel the creative struggles fading away? Can you feel that Hegelian synthesis pushing its way up through the hole left by flawed arguments assuming contradiction? If not, I’ve got an off-the-wall suggestion: read the Great Gatsby (again if you’ve already done it) and try and work out who the characters are, what happens to them. For example, who’s responsible for the big murder at the end? Is Nick actually a massive gay? Is Daisy the victim of ceaseless manipulation, or a ruthless social climber? Or anything in between…

It’s a great book for refusing to give clear, straight answers about what happens. And it’s got a pretty beautiful setting throughout. It was a contradiction 101 for me: I learned, well, realised, that contradictions generally aren’t final. They’re a sign that something is more complicated than it seems.