Novel finally finished - hooray. Now to find a publisher [hopefully]!

Hi, it's been a while as I have been working frantically to complete my novel before Christmas time. It has been a 'work in progress' for the past four years and i'm pleased to say that the end is nigh. I am editing the last draft and will have it ready for submission to publishers in the New Year. As you can probably guess from the book cover mock-up (by yours truly) and the working title, it is a novel about a killer. Actually about a family of killers to be exact, told through the journals of a budding serial killer whose twin brother is also afflicted with the same unfortunate disposition.

I guess you could place this novel under the genre banner of 'Serial Killer Fiction,' or crime fiction. I realise that this field is littered with cliched monsters all trying to replicate the success of Harris's Hannibal Lecter trilogy +, hopefully I might have succeeded in providing a new twist to the genre - or at least to the smaller sub-genre of 'First-person Serial Killer Fiction.' Whew, anyway - worth a crack, so there it is.

If I don't have any success with publishers I will probably post it here in installments for at least some people to read and hopefully enjoy.

If anyone has any publishing contacts who might be interested in this kind of work please let me know via 3cagency@gmail.com. Also, what do you think of the cover?

Have a great Christmas everyone. Will/Grant.

Babylon fading

This seat is hard, my shins are cold, my socks are low & black with grime, my shoes are stiff, my knees ache with the weight of my worn corduroys — the night is warm & noisy, so dark it is, that abstract & absolute light which is darkness — it is so dark tonight . . . Wait! There is light, a shimmering speck, by Jehovah! & Then cans twang bottles clang & smash, paper blows its rustled way wrapping around my lower leg like a flaky piece of skin or the slap of a bird’s flapping wing & then it’s taken by another breeze in the black city night — that light small speck I saw is extinguished now by the black hulk of a looming tower block — frail barks flounder in darkness, speech silent for a still savage moment . . .

My neck is sore I crane it skyward searching the churning ether for that noisy light . . .

BOOM!!!

ZOHAR!!!

A shock of burning white light — the infinite brightness violently broke through into vision — the corneas ripped from their lethargic slumber — the howling light turns blue, bouncing off the geometric multiplicity of the chainlink fence I clutch at, frantically gasping at the light on the other side — arcing shadows dance beneath the light’s accusing glare . . . lingering — I am shaking I am fear I am death I am insane I am paralysed I can’t move I can’t see I am dead I am about to be killed. . .

Mother?

Father?

MotherFatherMother

HELP!!!

PLEASE!!!

PLEASE!!!

PLEASE!!! Please . . .?

I’m still on the bench seat in the trash-blown park, my legs nailed to my seat to the concrete thru right to burning hell . . . — STAY WHERE YOU ARE — DO NOT MOVE — IF YOU DO SO YOUR LIFE WILL BE TERMINATED — I REPEAT DO NOT MOVE —footsteps shuffling then a broken run, boots slapping asphalt louder, quite, yes there they are a stampede, ground rumbles thunderclaps hammer on steel, bombs drop resound — No, nononononono . . .

The light goes off. I am released. The sound breaks like a truck passing — a distant rumble then the noise of the dead man’s bones return to their creaking — halfalive halfalive halfalive — my breath is smoke, my eyes throb, my brain burns, my heart tries to saw its way out through my crumbling ribcage — I release a sigh, exhale, to end all sighs.

I close my eyes & feel & smell the dirty hot warm air of hell caressing my face, my hair, creeping up my trouser leg, crawling across my heaving gut & across my bruised bare chest — a massive hole now gaping blackly just above the left nipple, the icon of Mary grinning in the growing light — I lay back on the hard bench — the smog flavored morning bleeds light across the bay, a tugboat blares its horn through the fog, the trash barge shunts its bulk through the mist across the harbor to refuse island, car lights cut across the motorway invading the sleeping city, a silver-snake of train thunders past on the stilt-tracks, police sirens blare in the distance & a cold wind wipes my face.

A gull floating in on the light & breeze, eyes me suspiciously, dips its wings & turns circles above me looking down with malice & a perceptible hunger as it stretches its sharp red beak screaming at me — CAWCAWCAWCAWCAW . . . all black & white — Babylon fading . . .

‘CHILD ART’ - History in education

In the context of the nature/nurture argument in education, this essay will attempt to explain what ‘child art’ is and how it came to exist. A basic summary of the nature/nurture argument is as follows. The naturists believe that childhood is a natural stage of development that generates its own unique experience relative to the individual child. It is a privileged stage of life; the role of education in this respect is to encourage such development with as little interference as possible. The nurturists argue that education should impart knowledge and social skills in preparation for participation in society. Children are presumed capable of learning these skills and knowledge at all stages of development to varying degrees. The polarities between these two sides show the reactive state of educational beliefs and theory. It is within this context that concepts such as ‘child art’ have evolved.

To begin this discussion it is necessary to trace the origins of the educational ideas that produced such concepts as ‘child art’. One of the early arguments, of a distinctly educational viewpoint on natural development and child rearing, is that of Jean Jacques Rousseau. His educational romance Emile, presents an unconventional (at the time of writing) view of educational and social reformation, based on his beliefs about ‘nature’ and individual freedom. His views on childhood education were centred on the notion that natural development, encouraged in accordance with the individual’s own nature, could only be achieved through “well-regulated liberty”[1]. He viewed freedom as being something controlled by the rationale of the upper classes, and the ‘unnatural’ constraints and lies imposed on individual truth, by religion and the state.

Rousseau was looking for the universal nature of truth common to all “men;” it was in this search that he saw the promise of a new and ideal society. He saw childhood education as the means by which to change society through ‘natural’ development. The emphasis was on learning by individual experience, and the treatment of children in accordance with evolutionary stages of development, free from the influence of social constructs of adult morality and reason:

Natural growth calls for quite a different kind of training. The mind should be left undisturbed till its faculties have developed; for while it is blind it cannot see the torch you offer it, nor can it follow through the vast expanse of ideas a path so faintly traced by reason that the best eyes can scarcely follow it. (Emile, p. 200)

The implications and influence on pedagogical education, generated by Rousseau’s romantic notions of natural and evolutionary development, show in the ideas of educators that followed, like Freidrich Froebel, Franz Cizek, and Wilhelm Viola. Rousseau’s celebration of “natural liberty” and childhood education paved the way for notions of education, like ‘art education’ and ‘child art’, to emerge in response to the apparent need for a form of expression that was natural, and relevant, to the early stages of childhood development. As Stuart Macdonald has pointed out, ”the concept that art education for the child should differ from that for adolescents and adults stemmed from Rousseau’s scheme of education in Emile ” [2]. It must be noted that Rousseau did not place any importance or relevance on ‘art’ in relation to a child’s natural development. In fact, he saw it (‘art’) as a corrupting influence that was morally ‘bad’ and detrimental to nature at that stage of a human’s life.

Rousseau’s naturist ideas were largely idealistic and romantic, and because of this, they were not coherent enough at the time to justify as a form of education for children. Froebel, along with others, developed the ideas expressed by Rousseau as a basis for such an education. Froebel believed that drawing was the means by which children developed naturally. He developed the concept of ‘Kindergarten’ as a place for individual children to develop in accordance with the laws of nature. Froebel’s ideas were scientific in that he used esoteric precepts of psychology, in relation to understanding what a child’s drawing represented:

Beautiful drawing . . . demands the spontaneous, skilled use of the senses . . . the development required for drawing, conditions in the same way a harmoniously unfolded soul, a feeling, experiencing mind, as well as a thoughtfully comparing, intelligent, and perceptive intellect, forming judgement, correct conclusion, and so, finally, an idea of that which is to be formed . . .

As can be seen, his naturist idealism peppered with psychological jargon, shines through in his views about the importance of child drawings. His educational philosophy, which is based on the notion that the child is a self-determined vessel of creativity, inspired other educators and artists later on like Franz Cizek, Paul Klee, Alexander Bain, and the Bloomsbury group, to name a few.
Like Froebel and Rousseau, Herbert Spencer championed the naturist ideals about drawing and childhood education, except he “modified [it] . . . from the scientific viewpoint of a nineteenth century evolutionist”[3].

Spencer saw children’s drawing as an evolutionary process. In fact, he believed it was the main factor in human development. He was of the opinion that the science of psychology was the means by which education could develop, and a culture could come to understand itself, through the interpretation of children’s drawings. Thus, childhood art education became important as a tool to understanding and determining “self-culture” and progressing as a culture in general.

Spencer’s educational theories attacked the nurturist arguments of mass-education theorists like Henry Cole, who ran state controlled institutions that were geared up for social and industrial production. Spencer’s ideas were also nurturist, in the sense that they supported utilitarian ideas of training children to be productive members of society. However, his ideas were more naturist in origin (following on from Rousseau’s ‘nature of the child’), in that they argued that there is a natural development process (“phylogenesis”) in drawing, that should be integrated into childhood education.

Spencer’s ideas are also important to the concept of ‘child art’ because any development (according to him) in the individual, and therefore the whole society, could be influenced and reflected by the drawings of the child. While it must be said at this stage that the drawings of children were not yet considered as art works, there was great importance placed on their significance as indicators of cultural and biological development.

Although there was a large void of disagreement between the two factions of thought (nature & nurture), ‘art education’ became an increasingly important concept to the curriculum of schools and to the educational theories of both sides. Cole is important here in this instance for he implemented the establishment of art schools in England, art training for teachers, and compulsory art education as a subject on an equal footing with other subjects. This is important in relation to the origins of ‘child art’ as well, because it generated interest in children’s drawings and paintings, in such a way that they became viewed as ‘art works’.

In other words, this social change provided the impetus and the infrastructure, wherein the claims and ideas about ‘art’ education and making ‘art-works’, as being essential to a child’s ‘natural’ development, began to be seen as educationally beneficial and logically defensible. With this implementation, and despite the negative impact on the radically nurturist Kensington system, ‘Art education’ (rather than ‘drawing education’) became to be a valid and accepted part of the infrastructure of educational teaching and training (educators).

Alexander Bain helped this along by following on where Spencer left off. In maintaining that “Drawing was not a universal mind-trainer, but also that art appreciation, or the cultivation of ‘Art-Emotion’ as he put it, was the important factor in education, not Drawing” [4]. His idea was that art education provided the means by which children could have fun and express themselves creatively. Other educational thought developed along the same lines until the idea of art education was more acceptable in Victorian education circles.

So far, children’s drawings were still not considered viable art forms, like other established adult art works and movements. The rise in anthropological studies and scientific (in particular, psychological) research changed all that with their growing interest in child drawing as an important means of developmental research. The influential and growing relationship, between education and science, meant that this perceived importance transferred to the educators, curriculum, and to the type of experience drawing was considered as. The Kensington attitude toward children’s drawings, as only having commercial value in industry, was its main weak point as it was in contrast to developmental (and naturist) scientific beliefs, which had popular and governmental support.

‘Art’ began to evolve as a practice along with the changing times. The continuing (but waning) influence of Romanticism encouraged a new style of expression that was more ‘primitive’ and ‘natural’, with an emphasis on the individual, freedom (in thought and from authority), and the ‘symbolic’. Like science, ‘art movements’ represented new ideas and invention, which had profound influence on the intellectual culture in which they existed. Children’s drawings were beginning to be seen, like the cave drawings of ‘primitive man’, in the context of symbolic interpretation and meaning. Comparisons between ancient ‘primitive’ cultures and children’s drawings increased, as artists became interested in ‘primitivism’ and the symbolic nature of cultural artefacts. The connection became apparent and soon artists saw in children’s works, that which they tried so hard to replicate in their own ‘art works’.

Children were seen as ‘artists’, naturally endowed with ‘artistic talent’, who could perceive their social and natural environment with an innocently naïve sense of truth and insight, reminiscent of primitive adult cultures from the past (Palaeolithic Age) and the present (Aborigine). This increasing concern with ‘culture’ and of children as artists whose work represents “the primordial origins of art”[5], was typical of artists like Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and many others, who delighted and strove for the same kind of rawness and meaning in their own work. Like the nature/nurture arguments, these new theories on ‘art’ became embroiled with debate as to what the work in question signified. One thing that came from the debates of the modern movements, was that ‘primitive art’, and therefore ‘child art’, were viable art forms. Herbert Read suggested that “a growing appreciation of primitive art, tribal art and revolutionary developments in modern painting helped to bring children’s art within the general range of aesthetic appreciation” [6].

Franz Cizek, perhaps more so than others, defined what ‘child art’ was and what he thought it should be:

Child Art was disregarded, ridiculed, and scoffed at. Even now people visit me who, when I show them real infantile work, only laugh. I estimate very highly those things done by small children. They are the first and purest source of artistic creation . . .

and more definitively:

Child Art is an art which only the child can produce. There is something that the child can also perform, but that we do not call art. It is imitation, it is artificial. [7]

Cizek approached art education with a naturist view. His theory on child art, obviously influenced by naturist idealism, was a reaction against logic-bound, scientifically based, notions of education and child development. Whilst he still used scientific concepts to explain art, he based his ideas on naturist convictions, “all true art contains psychology, but so wonderfully dosed as only nature can dose” [8].

With the conviction of his own ideas and studies and the views of his other artisan comrades, Cizek concluded that children were naturally gifted as artists and producers of art works. He saw this quality in children in somewhat phenomenological terms, in that it was separate from the adult art world. Children were individuals who perceived the world on a more instinctual and natural plane than adults did. Paradoxically, it was this adult experienced (and therefore morally corrupt, re. Rousseau) world, that must not influence the children’s.

Cizek believed in the innate will of the child to be creative and to develop ‘naturally’ (re, Froebel) and in the power of nature to develop humans free from unnatural and socially constructed constraints (i.e., morals, sin, reason etc). Cizek’s theories on art education and child art, may display inconsistencies and contradiction, but to explain them, along with all the other flaws in the other theories mentioned, would take more word space than this essay will allow.

The major flaw in Cizek’s theory was that his own adult influence was a major factor in the production of paintings and drawings by his child students. Obvious training in technical aspects and adult ideas of artistic practice and formality/tradition were reflected in the children’s highly stylised and competent works. So what was essentially a naturist theory of art education, based on his own ideas and those of Rousseau and Froebel, was in practice a nurturist based exercise in art training that steered the children far from their natural stages of creative development (maybe?).

Cizeks’ theory provided a model for future art educators to base their justifications of their discipline on. This artistic ideology was the high-water mark of naturist education theory, just as Cole’s was the nurturist extreme. The gradual shift of focus in the ideology and allegiances of the education theorists, anthropologists, and from artists, culminated in debate to look for connections between ‘primitivism’ and the adolescent production of ‘art’. Artistic movements, more so perhaps than educators, contributed to the evolution of childhood art education and concepts about ‘child art’ through their assimilation and recognition of the drawing and painting of children as a viable art form.





NOTES:

[1] See Readings in the History of Educational Thought, ‘Rosseau’, edited by Alan Cohen & Norman Garner (London: University of London Press Ltd) p. 91.

[2] See The History and Philosophy of Art Education, Ch. 18, ‘The Recognition of Child Art’, by Stuart Macdonald (London: University of London Press ltd.) p. 318.

[3] Ibid, p. 321.

[4] Ibid, pp. 324 - 325.

[5] Quote from Paul Klee.

[6] See The History and Philosophy of Art Education, Ch. 18, ‘The Recognition of Child Art’, by Stuart Macdonald (London: University of London Press ltd.) p. 329.

[7] See Child Art, by Wilhelm Viola, Ch. IV, ‘From Talks With Cizek’ (London: University of London Press, 1948) pp. 32 – 34.

[8] Ibid, p. 32.

The Apocalyptic Revelation of John:

A Sublime Text According to Aesthetic Tradition?

§

John of Patmos was a writer and a seer; also rumoured to be the Apostle, the Divine, and later the Saint. Whoever he really was — it is apparent from most accounts that no one really knows with any surety — ‘he’ was and is the author of the Apocalypse known as Revelation. It is a distinctive piece of religious doctrine, different and distant in tone and brevity from the other works contained in the Old and New Testament, making it ironically one of the most quoted and read books of the Bible. Its apparent prophetic nature and strange twists of style and image figuratively transport the reader to a world of imaginative and spiritual possibilities. ‘Cleaved’ between realms of belief and amazement, most readers, religious or not, become mesmerised by the violent ‘vision’ of John. It is according to the text itself a divinely inspired apocalyptic version of human existence, which, ultimately, defies any definitive interpretation of meaning. It does however invite a non-theological literary or aesthetic estimation of its value, because of its highly evocative rhetorical style, according to principles and theories known to a student of literature and the arts. The contention of this essay is to discuss certain aspects of Revelation and the King James Bible, [1] with the aid of relevant literary perspectives, both modern and classical.

This essay does not attempt an interpretation of the meaning of the text, as this is rather pointless in terms of my own limited biblical knowledge and the vast screeds of criticism already available on the subject. Nor do I intend to give a biographical account of the authors’ lives to contextualise meaning, due largely to the doubtful nature of the authors’ identities of the two main texts I use. The fact that understanding the text in terms of meaning is difficult, leads me to look at the style and technicality of such an artefact, in order to understand its value as a literary work. Aesthetic criteria or a technical analysis applied to the text of Revelation reveals that its most noticeable feature is its ‘sublimity’ in accordance with various theories of rhetoric and the sublime from classical through to modern times. Despite its religious nature, obvious allegiances to rhetorical principles make it both an aesthetically appreciable work of literature, and a mystically devout theological transcript.

Similarly, like Revelation, the question of authorship has been a point of conjecture by critics regarding another classical text: Peri Hypsous or On the Sublime. [2] Originally, thought to be written by Cassius Longinus, and then later regarded as the work of an unknown Greek author in the 1st Century BC. It is the first real treatment of the concept of ‘hypsous’, otherwise known as the sublime. Saint John the apostle and evangelist is regarded as being the writer of Revelation and, like Longinus, his authority has also been called into question by scholars and historians alike. [3] Aside from the confusion about the authors of the texts, they both appear to be written about the same period by ‘cultured Greeks’ as D.H. Lawrence calls them. [4] Rhetorical antecedents inform both texts: On the Sublime follows traditional lines of Greek literary criticism from Homer through Aristotle and Horace to Longinus. [5] Revelation is the apocalyptic pinnacle of prophetic verse. The use of metaphor, symbol, and analogy making it a rhetorically proficient and profound text.

§

To say that Revelation is sublime is to pose a hypothetical argument, as well as an aesthetic value judgement, which is exactly what this essay intends to do. The fact that rhetorically aesthetic criterion from antiquity like Longinus’ can be applied to a religious 17^th Century text like the King James Bible, reflects the timeless nature of certain fundamental principles of literary excellence, and also the literary appeal of the KJB to 18th Century aestheticians and writers like Edmund Burke. The tone and didactic confidence of the voice of John, combined with the depth and omnipresence of his subject, makes for strong verse, well within the range of most theories of the sublime:

Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand . . . Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty. (Rev 1:3-8)

The difference between a classical theory of poetic language like Longinus’ and an aesthetic theory like Burke’s is that the latter post-dates the former which as a consequence is relevant to the author’s (John’s) use of literary device. Because it may predate John’s work, Longinus’ theory quite possibly could have been an influence on his method, whether by direct contact or just a temporal culmination of traditional, cultural and contemporary literary practice and theory. Certain aspects of Longinus’ ideas, his regional location and era, and his own treatment of Genesis puts his work in the context of John’s literary and social knowledge. However, Burke’s treatise is applicable in discerning sublimity within the text, from an 18th Century perspective of psychological and aesthetic understanding. The other obvious difference is that one concentrates on linguistic function, whereas the other’s focus is on artistic and physiological effect.

Whether Longinus has any direct bearing on Revelation is purely hypothetical and debatable, yet as far as literary tradition goes, every work (divine or not) is logically influenced by a genealogy of ideas, linguistics and inspirational textual precursors. To ascertain the sublimity of Revelation in a literary context, I will apply select aspects of Longinus and Burke’s individual theories of the sublime, providing two different perspectives of the primary text. The interesting facet of my discussion is that both interpretations, using precepts divided by a millennium and a half of Western literary tradition, have essentially the same conclusion. That is, Revelation is interpretable as a text that uses a concept of the sublime, similar to Longinus’ and Burke’s, as a literary mode.

§

Longinus suggests in his treatise On the Sublime that art is the mediator of the innate ability to perceive, convey, and utilise the sublime. There are five sources of the sublime, the first two being innate, the last three the ’product of art’. They are: “the ability to form grand conceptions . . . stimulus of powerful and inspired passion . . . the proper formation of two types of figure, figures of thought and figures of speech, together with the creation of a noble diction, which in its turn may be resolved into the choice of words, the use of imagery, and the elaboration of the style. The fifth source of grandeur, which embraces all those I have already mentioned, is the total effect resulting from dignity and elevation.” [6] The first two of these precepts is characteristic of Revelation and to most of the other apocalyptic works of the Bible. These two aspects are almost stereotypical character traits of the religious prophet also; John reveals himself to have these ‘innate’ abilities in his writing. This divine aspect of Longinus’ theory connects the sublime via literature to religion, as David Norton points out in A History of the Bible as Literature:

Longinus pushes both these sources towards divinity. Sublimity is not just ‘the echo of a noble mind’ (Ch. 9, p. 109); it ‘carries one up to where one is close to the majestic mind of God’ (Ch. 36, p. 147) . . . Sublimity bespeaks divinity. So too does the Bible. It was [and still is] difficult, following Longinus, not to think of the Bible as sublime, especially as he himself, in a famous passage, had taken one of his examples of sublimity from the Bible. [7]

One passage from Longinus almost describes exactly John’s reaction and mimetic experience, as a noble vessel for Christ’s spirit and the ‘word of God’:

certain emanations are conveyed from the genius of the men of old into the souls of those who emulate them, and, breathing in these influences, even those who show very few signs of inspiration derive some degree of divine enthusiasm from the grandeur of their predecessors. (Ch. 13, p.119)

John’s own inspiration to write, stems from the direct influence of his religious idol Christ, and his sublime experience of the ultimate artistic creator — God:

I John, who also am your brother, and companion in tribulation, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ. I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, Saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book.

(Rev. 1:9-10)

The ability to conceptualise and vocalise the grand thoughts of Christ and God is echoed in this passage from Revelation. According to Longinus, this very act characterizes ‘nobility of the soul’.

John’s descriptions of ‘beasts’ with “seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion”(Rev. 15:1-2); are typical of the imagery he uses to induce a sense of the sublime, in order to convey the severity of God’s judgement and to emphasize the horror of hell and its minions. The ‘inspired passion’ of the narrator is obvious enough. The symbolic imagery, vigour of speech, intensity of vision and hyperbolic emotion, pervades the text. For example: “And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp twoedged sword: and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength. And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead” (Rev. 1:16-17).

For Longinus, rhetorical figures invoke the sublime when their utility is well hidden; the fact that John’s text is one complete metaphor makes it sublime in its simplicity and in its technical covetousness. The phrasing of the verse is neither too alliterative, unless to impress the sound of the sense, or too plain as to be mediocre. There is an economy of words that enforces the repetition of images and ideas of a profound nature on the mind of the reader. Sections throughout have a bard-like quality to their diction that seems to lull the reader into a trance-like state, with the hypnotic (over) tones of a satanic tempter:

And the angel said unto me, Wherefore didst thou marvel? I will tell thee the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carrieth her, which hath the seven heads and ten horns. The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.

(Rev. 17:7 -8)

As the last book of the KJB, Revelation needed to be special — to be able to impress upon the mind of the reader the severe consequences of faithlessness and the words and miracle of John’s ‘vision’. It serves to heighten the sense of Christian beliefs by describing, in vividly imaginative terms, the antithetical options available to the unrepentant.

Whether written in terms of a-priori aesthetic or doctrinal ideals, Revelation inspires an imaginative interpretation in the literary-minded reader, rather than a spiritual awakening or re-enforcement of belief from a theological perspective. However, even from an aesthetically focused viewpoint, the most ‘disinterested’ objectivity of an art critic sways with the imagination’s subjective metamorphosis of the mystical symbols of the Apocalypse. The power of evocative images, prophetic language of a delusional seer, combined with the wrathful plans of a despotic God, causes the reader to fall back on either their logical beliefs or imagination to make sense of it all. Caught somewhere between these systems of mind, is the nagging doubt that this strangely compelling narrative is too fantastic to be factual, or too profound to be fiction. In other words, it leads us to believe in something or to question the text’s validity as a work of literature.

In terms of Longinus’ ideas of rhetoric and sublimity, Revelation could well have been an example in his treatise if it had been written a few centuries earlier. In order to understand the sublime, if we ever can, we must have some notion of what exists beyond our physical world. Longinus explains that this “beyond” is metaphorical, the sublime—illusion, a human construct designed to extend the imagination and the limits of our world. The sublime is that which defies logical sense and the imagining of what the ethereal sublime actually is. What is God, what is hell? It is that whose infinite presence reduces all else to disillusion, a force that affects the individual’s own system of values and beliefs in relation to their existence. This consideration produces prophets, seers, and artists like John. This thing called the sublime, whether by Longinus or Burke’s definition, is only a name applied to a feeling one gets when encountering something beyond the grasp of our words. Whatever it is can really only be described in literary terms, as Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests:

That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world. [8]

These limits of expression, these experiences of the sublime feeling, are what Burke attempts to harness by literary definition; beginning where Longinus left off and where John had already gone in Revelation.

§

Given Burke’s criteria for the sublime in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, parts of the Revelation at the end of the New Testament are sublime. It is an example of a text that emphasises the sublimity and grandeur of a supernatural world and an omnipresent God. Burke’s account of the sublime, places importance on the perception of subjects in relation to physiological senses. This notion of Burke’s differs from the concept of the sublime established by Longinus. Burke notes physiological states and sensory experience as a-priori conditions for the sublime, whereas before, the experience lay in the interpretation of the word image.

The primary source of the sublime, for Burke, is ‘power,’ with its main effect being ‘terror’ or ‘astonishment.’ The sublime, according to Burke, is “an idea belonging to self-preservation”(Enquiry, p. 79) that produces terror, fear, pain, and is characterised by obscurity, danger, power, greatness of dimension, vastness of extent, infinity (eternity) and magnificence. Further features of the sublime are loudness (of sound), suddenness (of movement or sound), intermittent light (and sound), darkness, confusion, and dullness in colour. The most important passion caused by the sublime, is that which is described by Burke under the heading of “Terror”:

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. For fear being an apprehension of pain or death, it operates in a manner that resembles actual pain. Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too. [9]

The self-realisation of human mortality and frailty, in the face of the immortal and numinous ‘idea’ of a wrathful unseen God, is what instils fear in our hearts, with the result that we experience the sublime sensation of terror or horror. Therefore, anything that is sublime for Burke inspires fear or inflicts pain upon our senses. As pointed out earlier these are what he calls “the passions which concern self-preservation”, (36) and these passions are what Burke considers, “the most powerful of all the passions”. In Revelation, these passions of fear operate in tandem with what Burke terms ‘astonishment’, the state when “the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it” (Enquiry, p.53). This passion of fear is caused by the overwhelming vastness of dimension and sublimity in nature, in contrast to human powerlessness and inferiority in the face of its power and majesty. Revelation has twice the sublimity of a response to nature; it is an emotional response to God, nightmarish in its imagery and effect:

And they of the people and kindreds and tongues and nations shall see their dead bodies three days and an half, and shall not suffer their dead bodies to be put in graves . . . And after three days and an half the Spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon them which saw them. And they heard a great voice from heaven saying unto them, Come up hither. And they ascended up to heaven in a cloud; and their enemies beheld them. And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of men seven thousand: and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to the God of heaven. (Rev., 11:9—13)

As Burke points out (in the section on vastness), things of “magnitude” are sublime, and so too is the “last extreme of littleness”. He sums up by comparing it to the “still diminishing scale of existence” (Enquiry, II, VII, 66). The obscurity of God’s presence and the clarity of his wrath are enough to render him near entirely sublime, in accordance with Burke’s account, as is his power and ability to inspire in most creatures “the passion of self-preservation”. The figure of God (because of his great power) is the most sublime and all-powerful character of Revelation. Burke states in the Enquiry, “power is undoubtedly a capital source of the sublime” (II, V, 64). It is this section on ‘Power’, which is the most relevant to this discussion of Revelation as a sublime work:

And indeed, the ideas of pain, and above all of death, are so very affecting, that whilst we remain in the presence of whatever is supposed to have the power of inflicting either, it is impossible to be free from terror. (Enquiry, p.59)

The power of God, over Satan and his legion of sinners, is emphasised by John. The superiority of God’s power is what makes pain and redemption possible for all things inferior to his hierarchical force, i.e. us (humans), apart from the unredeemable Satan of course. As Burke points out, “wheresoever we find strength, and in what light soever we look upon power, we shall all along observe the sublime and the concomitant of terror “ (II, V, 61). The terror in Revelation is in the fear of God’s power. After all, the wielding of redemption by death has to be the most sublime way to enter the ‘temple’ of heaven, which is also a place so sublime it is beyond human imagining:

And the temple was filled with smoke from the glory of God, and from his power; and no man was able to enter into the temple, till the seven plagues of the seven angels were fulfilled. (Rev., 15:8)

Given Burke’s account of the criteria for the sublime, Revelation is an example of a sublime work. The representation of power is the most significant characteristic of the work’s sublimity. Similarly, the depiction of terror, fear, power, darkness, depth, vastness, privation, and obscurity, all come together in the text to fulfil the criteria of what Burke considers the sublime.

§

Either the reader who comes to the Book of Revelation is a scholar, a Christian, or just curious as to how it all ends (the Bible and the world, as we know it). The non-Christian reader might look at the Bible because it is a book. Flicking through the lucid and profound chapters of Genesis, maybe appreciating some of the Psalms or the Book of Job, noticing the ‘poetic’ qualities of the text as they proceed. By taking the Aristotelian shortcut of a traditional ‘speed-reading’: perusing the beginning, the middle, and finally the end, the reader is shocked out of a conventional reading by the violent confusion and sublimity of Revelation. It has the effect of making one reflect on what they have read prior, in order to understand its complex and quite surrealistic images and density. It also turns the reader around, driving them back to the other books of the Bible, to cross-reference the highly symbolic words and events.

Of course, such a reading presumes that the Bible is a complete narrative and not an anthology of religious texts from different eras and peoples. If Revelation itself were read separately, it would be no harder or less difficult to read, than say The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. On its own, Revelation is probably more appreciable as a literary work without the detritus balance of the hefty Bible. What is unavailable to the imagination is what makes it such a sublime text according to Longinus and Burke. The variations of interpretation extend its range beyond a factual account of “the word of God”, to the unlimited possibilities of human creativity and existence. Whether this effect is caused by the passionately obscure ‘apocalyptic’ style — the English translation of a Greek text — or the possibility the literary mode of the Longinian sublime was used to provoke aesthetic and/or spiritual reaction, is beyond definition. What is not beyond recognition is the fact that the reader brings to the text, much in the same way as the writer does, influences and contexts from the sphere of their own experience and expectations.

§

****************************************

NOTES/WORKS CITED

[1] The Holy Bible, The King James Version, (Cambridge: Cambridge) 1769. 12:7-11. From hereon all references to the Authorised King James Version of the Holy Bible will be referenced with the abbreviation KJB.

[2] See Aristotle/Horace/ Longinus, Classical Literary Criticism, translated by T. S. Dorsch (London: Penguin Books, 1965) pp. 97-158.

[3] All historical and factual data given henceforth, regarding biblical characters, authors, events, places and times, is from: William Smith; revised and edited by F.N. and M.A. Peloubet, Smith’s Bible dictionary [computer file], electronic ed., Logos Library System, (Nashville: Thomas Nelson) 1997.

[4] See Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, by D.H. Lawrence, ed. by Mara Kalnins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 66:18-19. An interesting, lively, subjective and comprehensive account of Lawrence’s beliefs and studies about Revelation. Provides an account of commentaries and conjecture regarding aspects covered briefly in this essay, i.e. authorship, literary attributes and attitudes.

[5] Hereon, for the sake of convenience, I shall use ‘Longinus’ as the author’s name of On the Sublime as no other name is forthcoming.

[6] See Aristotle/Hrace/ Longinus, Classical Literary Criticism, translated by T. S. Dorsch (London: Penguin Books, 1965) p. 108.

[7] See A History of the Bible as literature: Volume Two, From 1700 to the Present Day, by David Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp.6—7.

[8] See Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, by Ludwig Wittgenstein (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd, 1933), p.151.

[9] Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas on the Beautiful and the Sublime, ed. Adam Phillips, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) p. 53. From hereon, the abbreviated title Enquiry, will be used for this edition.

Jacques Lacan's Theory of 'The Mirror Stage'

Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan[1] (April 13, 1901 - September 9, 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, who made prominent contributions to the psychoanalytic movement. His yearly seminars, conducted in Paris from 1953 until his death in 1981, were a major influence in the French intellectual milieu of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly among post-structuralist thinkers.

Lacan's ideas centred on Freudian concepts: e.g. the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego. He also focussed on identifications and the centrality of language to subjectivity. His work was interdisciplinary, drawing on linguistics, philosophy, and mathematics, amongst others. Although a controversial and divisive figure, Lacan is widely read in critical theory, literary studies, and twentieth-century French philosophy, as well as in the living practice of clinical psychoanalysis. Lacan's first official contribution to psychoanalysis was The Mirror Stage.

Jacques Lacan’s essay The Mirror Stage[2] describes the psychological process of the formation of the illusory ‘self’ (or ego). He constructs his theory around the conception of the infant’s most crucial developmental stage: “the mirror stage”. He attempts this by illustrating how the infant forms an illusion of a unified conscious self, that later becomes identifiable through language by the word “I”. The development of language reinforces the infant’s “function as subject”, yet separates the child from its symbiotic ideal self, or ‘other’ (ego), as seen in the mirror.

This transformation of self, according to Lacan, is traumatic (in varying degrees as dictated by the infant’s route of transference). ‘Oedipal’ complexes, neurosis, psychosis, death, and “perception-consciousness systems”(p. 75) occur in the maladjusted subject. Everyone, apparently, because of losing the pre-linguistic security of the mirror stage identification has this sense of loss and disposition toward neurosis.

The strength of Lacan’s essay is in its style: complex and full of referential allusion, making it hard to criticise and interpret. Lacan’s style is ambivalent in that it synthesises psychoanalysis, philosophy, linguistic ideology, and phenomenology, together in its justifications as a science in search of essential truths and remedies about the human condition. The weakness of Lacan’s argument is that he affords the reader no definitive proof of his assertions. For a theory, that proposes to illuminate truth and experience (”the formation of the I as we experience it in psychoanalysis”, p.71), it offers no empirical or factual support to such claims.

Lacan relates the subject to the world, through the metaphor of the (psychological/literal) mirror. The paradoxical antithesis results in the negative assumption that the subject ‘I ‘ is a fragmented self-alienated being, which is forever marked by a lack, and forever trying to attain what it saw in the mirror as a complete other. He argues that the formation of self-identity begins at the mirror stage, between the age of six to eighteen months. Prior to this period of intelligent cognition, the child is “for a time, however short, outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence”(p. 71) [3].

According to Lacan, infants are born into this world prematurely. Consequently, they experience an insufficiency of environmental resources, to provide for their needs because of their premature senses, motor skills, and underdeveloped self-identification. Until the child experiences and interprets its reality outside the maternal womb (both literally and figuratively) as such, it will have no concept of the other or itself. The human being comes into the world without an ego - without an identity, without a sense of I that is separate from an ‘other’ (its mother). In a sense, the child has to conceptually rebirth itself, in order to distinguish itself from others as an individual being.

The infant (or “organism”), that has yet to make this separation, exists in the realm of “reality”, according to Lacan[4]. The real is a psychological place where there is unity; there is no sense of loss or lack, ‘reality’ is absolute. Because there is no loss, there is no language in the real; it is unnecessary. In other words, Lacan claims that in the infant’s pre-linguistic state of maternal dependency, there is no need for anything other than what it already has.

Biological nature apparently predetermines our sense of identity/the ‘other’, by forcing us away from the maternal protection of the mother. The onus for the ensuing state of loss thereby falls on the mother’s inability to sustain environmental resource, and on the child’s biological/’natural’ growth that prevents the mother from fulfilling such a tedious existence

Therefore, there is no language at the “infans” stage, because there is no loss; there is only absolution and satiability. Hence, the real is beyond language; it becomes irretrievable upon entry into the linguistic world. This notion of the origins of language and loss is based on theoretical assumption. In a sense it is illogical because of its reasoning and the questions, rather than answers, it generates. If the child is not born with a faculty of speech, what are its communications with its mother?

The mother largely provides resources for the infant’s needs such as food, security, safety, diapers changed, etc. The infant does not differentiate between itself and the object/s that meets its needs at this stage of maternal dependency. In order for the mirror stage to occur, the infant must sense an insufficiency in its ‘self’ and separate (wean) itself from the body of its mother. The separation, anticipation, and recognition of the ‘other’ generate the subjectivity and difference of the infant’s self to the other. The mirror stage is developmentally crucial in this sense, because it holds consequences for personality and mental development, affecting normative to abnormal states of being.

Lacan states:

The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation – and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body image to a form of its totality [‘orthopaedic’] . . . to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development. (pp. 73-74)

Faced with an identifiable image of itself in a mirror, the child recognises its ideal ‘self’ and the ego is born. The infant makes an anticipatory judgement, perceiving the image to be stronger, more maturely coherent, than his or her own unrealised function as subject. Subsequently, the pre-linguistic infant perceives this ‘other’ image as an attainable reality. Lacan claims that the infant recognises the image and makes this judgement before it can ‘objectify’ it with “the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject” (p. 72). Lacan speaks of this pivotal point of identification of the other, as being “primordial” and highly “symbolic”, whilst the infant is still dependent and maternally connected to the (m) other.

Lacan suggests the primary identification is illusory and idealistic (fictional), the reflection being mimetic, a copy of the real, or a misrecognition (“meconnaissance”). There is a void between the reflection and the self; this void creates apprehension and a sense of alienation, between the self and the image. At this pre-linguistic stage, this sense of ‘lack’ is non-apparent.

When the child eventually experiences and comprehends the concept of absence through language, it identifies lack with its environment (world) and its (m) other. The infant is no longer in a state of fulfilled contentment, protected by and unified with the mother. This first acknowledgement of this absence directs the child towards its own image, in order to transform itself as an entity of identity without lack. The child’s recognition of ‘lack’ is the pivotal moment around which the mirror stage is set. The child will attempt to fill this void throughout the rest of its life, looking for its imaginary and significant other. This element of Lacan’s theory is tragically paradoxical: to become a socialised ‘adult’, sacrifice of coherence/unity is necessary, resulting in a perpetual sense of loss and desire.

A weakness of Lacan’s argument is that it relies on conjectural summation as proof of his concept. He cites a few inconclusive examples of “comparative psychology” as factual evidence of his concept. Neglecting the need for empirical evidence of epistemological claims, he attempts to compare and contrast selectively, animal behaviour (chimpanzees, pigeons, and even locusts) to child development. His reasons for failing to provide necessary and sufficient evidence to back up his claims, is probably due to the fact that the unconscious mind at the “infans stage” is essentially unfathomable. In order to prove his claims of infant identification with the self and the other, as something other than biological necessity or response, this failure to provide factual proof negates his argument.

Without evidence for Lacan’s claims and concepts of a mirror stage, we cannot definitely say that the infant behaviour and development described is common to all children six to eighteen months old, as Lacan claims. Some leeway could be made in hindsight because of the historical context of Lacan’s theory (1949) and technological/interpretative advancements made in developmental research[5] since then (e.g. genetics, computers, medicine, equipment etc). Yet even so, this lack of physical evidence does not necessarily prove Lacan’s theory right or wrong, this is what makes it problematic. Like so many other theories of the unknown, how can we objectively prove as fact, that which is unknown or subjective?

I may have misread Lacan’s meaning at this stage, but I feel it necessary to point out that what a child may see as a significant ‘other’, may indeed be an object not necessarily found in the mirror. A gestalt does not necessarily have to be “constituted” with ‘constituents’ of human form (for a child, the ‘real’ or significant other could be a toy or goldfish!). In my opinion, he underestimates the power of the pre-linguistic imagination of the infant and, consequently, the relationship between the child and what he calls a “fictional direction” (which I presume indicates the imaginary).

He also over-estimates the importance of the “lure of spatial identification”(p. 74), as a fundamental type of anti-existential (“I think therefore I am”) lack of free will, which drives and consumes an infant’s ego toward “a form of its totality”. The pre-adolescent child does not seem to make judgements about their mirror image, other than those of fancy, amusement, curiosity, or utility (e.g. combing hair). This “lure” of the mirror does not seem to be as magnetised or compelling as Lacan suggests.

By the time most children recognise themselves in the mirror (or even that the mirror is a ‘mirror’) they have already begun to converse. An element of fear or mistrust of the unknown is present in most children, in regards to the mirror image. I suspect that this apprehension is directed toward the fact that they do not understand, how it works[6], rather than their sense of alienation in seeing an image of their self.

The fact that mistrust or apprehension is an emotive response in infants toward mirrors, disproves Lacan’s suggestion that the child experiences jubilance and gains an “instantaneous aspect of the image”(p.1). The evidence and common knowledge available today of infant behaviour suggests that the concept of the ‘mirror stage’ is inconclusive and representative of a naïve type of subjective truism.

Another weakness in his essay is the lack of differentiation between the developmental stages of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood; neither does he distinguish between genders apart from his brief reference to the ‘Oedipus complex’. Lacan does not clearly state, or address, physiological differences between the sexes or psychological differences that result from these differences, e.g. maternal, hormonal, perceptual, social etc. He seems to be looking for the fundamental link that unites/defines humanity. He apparently discovers this common factor in the ‘mirror stage’, it being that all human subjects lack a completeness that can be traced directly to the “fact of a real specific prematurity of birth in [hu]man[s]” (p. 73).

Essentially, for Lacan, the human being splits, between something that it is and has and something it will never be or have. His theory proposes that the foundation of human development is fundamentally a handicap of negative irrationality and lack. Lacan’s analysis is inconclusive, as the subject of experiment (the pre-adolescent infant) remains voiceless and therefore inadmissible as evidence of Lacan’s theory of psychological/conceptual development. The interior world of the infant’s mind is apparently laid open (“dehiscence”, p. 73) by Lacan. Yet, he does not actually offer any empirical evidence for what is largely an empirical theory of “the formation of the I as we experience it in psychology”(p. 71).

Lacan’s interpretation of Freud is strategic in its repetition and avoidance of Freudian concepts to promote his own. In reading Lacan, we also re-read Freud (both Anna and Sigmund) and the many other philosophers/theorists he makes recourse to (e.g. Descartes, Hegel, Levi-Strauss, Caillois, Buhler, etc). By appropriating these other theorists, Lacan uses their authority as his own. His psychological (and philosophical) theory of reality and the subject resembles the philosophy of Hegel[7] (whom, incidentally, he utilises in his anti-existential tirade on p.75) with its dialectic and metaphysical aspects.

He assumes a philosophical position regarding the limits of psychoanalysis and subjective truth:

The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul, just as the beam of the psychoanalytical scales, when we calculate the tilt of its threat to entire communities, provides us with an indication of the deadening of the passions in society . . . In the recourse of subject to subject that we preserve, psychoanalysis may accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of “Thou art that”, in which is revealed to him the cipher of his mortal destiny, but it is not in our mere power as practitioners to bring him to that point where the real journey begins. (p.76)

Lacan’s seemingly logical, albeit difficult, reasoning belies a search for truth (of the unconsciousness) that cannot be objectively justified, due to its largely conjectural and subjective status as evidence. How can interpretations and ‘knowledge’ of the unconscious mind be free from subjective irrationality and self-truth? How can we prove that such ‘evidence’ is universal in nature, culture, and the individual subject’s imagination/psyche, without definitive and evidential proof of the mind’s processes and memories from the mirror stage or the unconscious?

In my opinion, Lacan does not convincingly substantiate his concept with answers to these questions, and that is what makes his writing difficult, impassable, and illogical as an ontological definition of psychoanalytical epistemology[8]. His unscientific argument is more philosophy than psychoanalysis, the abstract and anecdotal reasoning seems far removed from clinical/theoretical psychoanalytical accounts (see Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams). Lacan uses idealistic philosophy and linguistic theory to psychoanalyse the non-existent patient, present nowhere (conclusively) in the text. His use of these devices fails in my opinion to convey an empirical working model of the mind. Instead, this has the effect of juxtaposing discourse, theory, and consequently, logical/illogical claims, so that it is hard to determine fact from fiction.

Lacan uses the metaphor of the mirror as a reflection on humanity and psychoanalytical theory and practice. In the process, he moves from a psychoanalytical perspective of the mind, to a philosophical stance on the nature of the human subject. The mirror stage functions somewhat theatrically, the psychoanalytical light of Lacan’s concept illuminates the action, while the ‘subject’ and the ‘other’ play out their tentative drama of human creation, identity, development, and fallibility.

This concept of human nature and the human psyche contradicts the basic psychoanalytical precept, that unconscious desire determines conscious decision and will. In denying this, Lacan seems to adapt and contort conventional psychoanalytical concepts of identity and development, social-adaptation, and constructionism, to support and build his theory on. There is an element of the subversive in Lacan’s attitude toward psychoanalysis and human concepts of will and identity. For the anti-existentialist Lacan, his project is impossible. The ego can never take the place of the unconscious, or empty it out, or control it, because, for Lacan, the ego or “I” self is only an illusion, a product of the unconscious itself.

In some respects, Lacan’s theoretical discourse, and the concept of the mirror stage, borders on the “threshold of the visible world”, as an ideological phenomenology that seeks to establish a foundation for all sciences of humanity. Apart from providing us with this social indicator and definition of neurosis and its origins, the reader is left bemused and somewhat dismayed at the feeling of malaise and incongruity that the essay concludes with.

***********************

[1] Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan [1st two paragraphs].

[2] See, Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage’, in A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, eds, Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan, pp. 71-76.

[3] While there is response from the infant to its mirror image, Lacan places no relevance (other than mere unconscious mimicry) on this fact, until the child appears to consciously, “hold it [the image] in his gaze”.

[4] “ . . . the organism and its reality – or, as they [?] say . . . the Innenwelt and the Umwelt” (p.2).

[5] See J. C. Dixon’s empirical observations “of developmental change in relation to the mirror” and his advancements and use of Lacan’s mirror stage in ‘Development of Self Recognition’, in The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 91, (Florida: Florida University Press, 1957) pp. 251-256. See also M. Lewis, J. Brooks-Gunn, and J. Jaskir’s ‘Individual differences in Visual Self-Recognition as a Function of the Mother-Infant attachment Relationship’, in The Journal of Developmental Psychobiology (New Jersey: 1985) pp. 1181-87. This is an interesting a/c in relation to Lacan’s because it provides extensive empirical evidence of its claims about attachment relationships compared to visual self-recognition development at infancy-early childhood. The results suggest that: “individual differences were related to later self-recognition. In particular, insecurely attached infants showed a trend toward earlier self-recognition than did securely attached infants” (p.1181).

[6] Primitive cultures, religious superstition (Voodoo), conventional societies, relate different responses to the mirror. Frightened responses toward mirrors, cameras, and foreign objects are common in diaries of travellers to different (non-western) cultures where the image/ identity is not to be found in the narcissistic/exterior reflection of the self, but in the stature of the physical being, etc.

[7] George Hegel saw reality as a dynamic process, rather than as a reflection of static ideals. The dialectical law governs the process of reality: every thesis implies its own contradiction, or antithesis, and their conflict ends in a synthesis, which again brings forth its antithesis.

[8] The ambivalent effect of his text on the reader, almost emulates the responses of the mirror stage subject toward the ‘other’, which in this case is Lacan’s text. There is an uneasy sense of ‘meconnaissance’ (mis-interpretation) and ‘lack’ of full understanding of his text, which requires the reader to reread in order to understand. This rhetorical technique appears to me deliberate and stylistic, whilst being clever and making ‘the sound echo the sense’, I wonder whether it serves to distract from that which is not present in the text, namely evidence, for Lacan’s claims?

Playing the Game

There were five other guys sitting in the foyer – all young, preppy & clean cut – then there’s me – long hair, old jeans, half a beard, & trying hard to shake off the dregs of a hangover. 8am appointment. One of those you think is just for you. You turn up & a hundred other bums have all been told the same story. The other four plebs & me checked the clock tick-tocking on the grey wall – 8:20am – ten minutes earlier there had been five of them, but one had left. He knew he wouldn’t get the job, or maybe it was the old crazy eyes I had given him before he went. He quickly gave a copy of his embossed resume to the dowdy receptionist, asked her to pass it on to the boss as he flew though the door, looking over his shoulder accusingly at me.

I saw him through the window giving me the bird & flapping his wordless preppy mouth at me as he started his mitsubitchy or whatever it was. I had his face programmed at that first retaliatory glance back over his shoulder. Christ, what a naïve dipshit – he didn’t know me from Buddha – I could’ve been a bad ass gang banger, a psycho crazy serial killer, the dude that lived across the way & watched him & his young lovely say sweet nothings to each other in silhouette sadness as they leave their house together . . . fuck him, he’d keep.

I leant back & stretched my legs out, put hands behind head, thinking about the runners in the big race at noon – $10 on ‘Slick’ in the 1st race, 12-1 odds, hot tip from old Charlie who worked the track religiously. After a day’s racing, Charlie’d come down to the Fitzroy & pretend he was broke, trying to bum drinks off the other patrons but I knew better ‘cos I used to see him at the track – usually at the counter stuffing wads of cash in his coat pockets as he collected his takings – so Charlie used to give me hot tips & free drinks to shut me up, but I wouldn’t’ve told. I ain’t no narc. I used to pay the old geezer with a few glasses of top shelf if his tips came in, which they usually did.

One of the students farted, a squelch noise like he was trying to hold it in, his face went red & everyone just looked the other way in disgust – they were all university students or graduates – I’d heard their banal conversations come fading in & out – ‘So you doing law? Oh yeah, me too – Hey, what’s your major?’ One of them was asking me a question. I gave him an incredulous look & was just about to pluck something from the air when I thought better of it. I folded my arms across my chest & rolled my eyes in the back of my thumping skull – he looked confused & turned back to his new pal – fuck, the world’s turned upside down, I thought. Overqualified & wet behind the ears – reduced to dipping their heads below the surface to pay for their ticket out, after exhausting all their other funds.

I yawned & considered leaving but it was warm & I had to wait around until midday for the 1st race. I looked out the office windows across the plant yard, semi-trailers weaving between the chemical reservoirs & production buildings. The yard must’ve been ten football fields in length . . .

‘Wallace? Henry Wallace?’ the plump receptionist called then ushered me into the boss’s office, her ample bosom heaving with the exertion of getting out of her too-small chair. ‘Hello Henry, my name’s Reg’ he said as he reached over & shook my hand without getting up. He had on a denim shirt with the company logo emblazoned across the chest pocket, a Pall-Mall burning in an ashtray on his veneer desk.
‘Have you ever done process work before?”
‘Sure’ I said
‘Can you work overtime & are you ok working with toxic chemicals?’
‘Yes & yes’ I said
‘When can you start?’ asked Reg.
‘When do you want me to start?’ I replied.

I left the office with a spring in my step. The sun was warm on my face, despite a crisp breeze – everything seemed very clear & sharp. The sky was blue behind the cold black clouds. I could taste all those wonderful beverages unaffordable for too long, fantasized about and drooled over, which is so undignified, really. Ooohhh those sweet warm whiskies, beautiful mad bourbon like an old lover come home, that devilish musky taste – no more betting on the nags for booze money now, things were looking up in the whole mad scheme of things here & now.

Gin, Bombay sapphire blue poetry in a bottle, must’ve been made of crystal Christ’s tears for me now . . . I hadn’t worked for three months & the money had dried up – a little bit of dope sold here & there bought my beer bloating kidney killing booze, & man was I sick of cheap wine & port. The dole paid the rent, but shit I was one bored & beat muthafucker. The shakes took away reading, time kept ticking off itself & doors kept getting knocked upon, a snatch of music here & there, the odd ceremony of intoxication via cheap wine & jagged dreams, mythologizing my existence with each measure of a cheap cup of wooden tea – a spliff to take the day away, cigarette the air into the ether, & now, liberation.

It’s not true that all we downtrodden fellahs don’t want the work – shit, if we’re trying to go on the straight & straight you can’t live without it – if you want to live & keep going & goin’ headlong into inevitable death & stormy future, the destitute night begs you to have a job, you can’t go bush, there’s no escaping it – you wanna escape you have to work, no man can live without wheels in this crazy day time of oppression, oppression, oppression . . . besides, the plant was only six blocks away with a bar, a brothel, & a bottle-store between. Shit! I didn’t need no death-trap wagon wheels to statisticize my ass, I had everything I needed within stumbling distance. I had it made man. I went to the track & sure enough old Charlie came through for me again. Feeling good after scoring work, I had put twenty down to win. ‘Slick’ ended up paying ten to one. Two hundred up, I headed for the Fitzroy looking for Charlie. Top shelf tonight Charlie, top shelf for me you & I. Things were looking up. I was afraid – I know the laws of physics man.

The first day at the plant was a drag, like all the other first days. The foreman, who in this case was an ugly short bastard with a face like a cane toad, would inadvertently pair you up with a begrudging co-worker to be, who would usually just instruct you to go get a coffee & keep out of the way as you watch the heavenly interesting blue-collar action of the everyman. Well, I couldn’t be but blue collar, it was ingrained from birth into my beaten brain & every gene ached with the weight of downtrodden forefathers. Here I was stuck in the talon plant with a huge Polynesian/German guy called Karl who had biceps like big chocolate bowling balls. He didn’t say much, which didn’t bother me – in fact it suited me fine. He showed me what to do – the poor bastard had been doing it for thirteen years I found out later. It took me an hour to get it down pat.

The plastic buckets would be placed on the rollers, take one, place on the scales – the always grinding throb of the vat mixer making the poison, spittin it out lickety split real quick – tare off & hit the overhead chute button red & big enough not to miss with a cross-eyed Monday morning hangover – the rat poison pellets dropped into the bucket with a sick thudding clatter like dead sparrows falling on a tin roof – you hit the switch again at the cut-off weight, move full poisoned bucket to the left with a jerk & repeat the process again, waiting for a gap in time as the hopper mixed the poison & the talon & hammer hammer hammer the plastic lids home with a rubber mallet. The trick was to stay ahead of the machine – no fuck ups, no lost time – just get the rhythm.

& pretty soon I got the rhythm & could dream of my lovely mistress Ambrosia & her wonderful alluring forms & tastes. O sweet delight, I would savour you for lost time in three nights – payday. O yes, we are risen. Born again, & the always grinding throb of the vat mixer making the poison, spittin it out lickety split real quick, kept chugging away into the knock-off hour. Karl, the dude with the bowling ball biceps & lips like stacked tyres, kept my skinny beat white ass in line with his constant mixtures – stoking the hopper with fresh mix, horse abattoir by-product don’t you know? I packed the product. The smell always was deep like musky wax, like burning soap – the stereo blasted reggae over the churn & mechanical chug & hum & thud of the hopper. Oh yeah, here it comes. I’m rolling home now.

After a few days you get into the swing of things, your thinking gets freed up, as you become the machine. The thoughts are like freight trains – they just keep coming, blasting through with profundity. Hell man, the answers to the universe’s universal questions are propositioned, resolved, & resolutely dissolved again into the chemical ether of the factory floor & the weekend’s absolutions & intoxications. Smoko would roll around soon enough, the morning dissolved as we all filed languidly into the vast cafeteria, the machines still churning in our brains. The day’s end would drift around soon thereafter. I pulled my blue overalls off, work boots, gloves, & threw them with inevitable building disdain into my locker.

Standing outside the big barb wired gate, I lit a smoke & felt another eighty bucks day’s wage better off. Ten minutes later I had the knives on the stove, a nice fat sativa bud chopped into succulent spots on the chopping board, a Bourbon rocks sitting on the bench. Ann came home & wrapped her lovely brown arms around my neck. I gave her a long slow purple smoke spot. Knives hot twisting every snake coil breath of smoke out of it. We kissed in warm hard passion & made love for dinner & I slept so verily deeply, despite knowing I had to entertain the succubus of fitful employment in six hours.

Payday rolled around quickly – cashed up – hungry for action & relaxation in that order. Everybody shuffled into the cafeteria. The company subsidized the booze – flagons of draught beer or dry white wine. I slapped my 5 bucks on the counter & grabbed the wine – 5 bucks!! I couldn’t believe my luck – I only ended up drinking 6 glasses. Stood up to go to the bathroom. Fell back, into the chairs & tables behind. My legs were gone – I was good & drunk on 6 glasses!! Karl the Samoan Schwarzenegger laughed, raised his glass –
“Comes a bit cheaper here don’t it bro?”
“Waddya mean?” I slurred
“It’s da chems man – they build up in yo blood. Don’ worry, you get used to dem & its CHEAP PISS man!!!” he leant back on his chair & let rip a raucous laugh as I excused myself & stumbled to the pissoir, my head spinning, legs rubbery. I put one hand out against the cold top of the steel urinal & proceeded to drain my full bladder. I blinked my eyes & looked again. Shit! My piss-stream was a fluorescent green colour – it fucking glowed in the dark. Chriiissstt!!! I stumbled out the gate & pointed my body toward the apartment – the pub rolled up quickly, dodging cars full of curses across the busy afternoon road – inside, a jug of beer at the bar, sat down . . .

“Ya can’t sit there mate” said the old toothless geezer in the next booth.
“Yah, that’s Tom’s spot” chimed in his old buddy next to him.
“I don’t see anybody sitting here. Where the fuck is the old bastard then?”
Everyone in the bar stopped talking & stared daggers in my direction. The huckory hag of a barmaid turned the rugby down on the radio. The old fart with no teeth pointed a skeletal bony finger at the wall behind the bench seat I had attempted to claim. The plaque read:

‘TOM DOWNEY SAT HERE
1908 – 1986
TRAGICALLY TAKEN FROM US
WHILE HEROICALLY RESCUING
A YOUNG CHILD FROM DROWNING
IN CLAYTON’S CREEK.
R.I.P. TOM
‘WE’LL SAVE YOU A SEAT MATE!’

I gave up, sighed & shrank into my beer on a stool at the bar. Brilliant, my first drink at the local & they were ready to ban & string me up already.
The barmaid turned the rugby up on the radio again, giving me a disgusted look . . .

My hands & knees were bloody & raw, I could barely see, let alone walk, but I made it home somehow – exhausted & blind drunk – no-one home 8pm Friday – Ann & the others must’ve gone out. I stripped off all my clothes & fell into bed. The chemicals & booze swimming in my battered brain. I woke up crouched hunched over the toilet. Bare white hairy ass up in the air, vomit churning, body heaving just as Ann & her mates rocked through the front door, which happened to be directly opposite the bathroom door now open wide. Hey come on in – WELCOME TO THE SHOW.

The hangover lasted until Sunday night – time enough to eat a meal, apologize to Ann then make up. I rolled & lit a cigarette & passed it to her. She stuck it between her full succulent lips & took a drag. I lit up, inhaled & exhaled, sighing at the same time. I could feel her smooth long legs under the sheets.
“So how’s the job hunting goin’ babe?” I asked her
“There’s nothing out there at the moment” she replied.
She took another drag, blowing the blue smoke into the shadows past the lamplight. I watched the smoke curl lazily upon itself & then dissipate in the stale air hanging over the bed. She stubbed out her smoke in the glass ashtray beside the bed & turned her back to me as she fell asleep. I took another drag & watched the blue smoke twist into another swirl, like an eye – the eye of god maybe? I looked at her dyed blonde hair for a few minutes – she looked like a crumpled blanket.

I rubbed my eyes looking round the room. A few clothes. Alarm clock. Shoes. Half a bottle of scotch & a duffel bag. I took another drag on my cigarette, breathing in deep, trying to purge the stench of decay that permeated the room. I got out of bed slowly & put my clothes & shoes on. I unplugged the clock & put it & the half of scotch in the bag. I pulled the door to, thinking about the runners in the first race tomorrow – $100 on ‘Sure Thing’ in the 2nd, 16-1 odds, another hot tip from old Charlie who worked the track religiously.

Burnt

*


Lucille sat smoking on the step in the sun. She took a drag and continued to dream through the fresh blue smoke. The sun burning brightly in the summer sky. The blue back porch peeling in the heat – the timber creaking under her young dreams and aspirations. Flipping the cap on her steel lighter, tapping her feet on the top step to a silent beat. The sun good and warm on her young thin skin – white t-shirt loose flapping languidly in the warm afternoon breeze – bare feet breathing, feeling the worn grain of the wooden step – blue jeans beat and holy with worn wounds torn in knees and backside. The flame, as if from her fingers, dancing in the whispering air – white spots pop around the flame.

Lucille tired of her imagination, yawned and tugged her sneakers on. The sun now dying in the distance, floundering behind the dusky silhouette of the suburban horizon. Her black parka and red baseball cap – protection against the coming night. Dogs began to bark in hungry expectation – their master’s cars creeping home up the street. A bus half-lit against the twilight – faces forward, vacant eyes – floating along like leaves on a breeze until home, then caged again. Lucille’s old man wouldn’t be home again – lost somewhere in the desert between then & now. A gecko slithered across the porch and into the black shadows under the chair. Her mother might be home tonight, if she didn’t score – her mother that is. At least she didn’t bring them back anymore – she figured the old bitch had probably realised it was easier to let them do her in the alley behind the bar – less of a walk to get the next drink from a trick.

Lucille lit another smoke, the light from the flame orange white glowing in her stony gaze. She spat in prophesy into the dead flowers beside the porch – the screen door snapping at her young heels as she went inside, switching on the yellow hall light. The house stank of meat and grease – flies broke away from the walls and dirty dishes in the sink as she entered the small kitchenette. She opened the fridge – last beer left. A white spark then dark, the bulb blew – she fumbled in the empty rank fridge for the beer and left the house, slamming the chain-link gate behind her. She sucked on her beer and headed on into the musky night.

A greasy burger on Main Street, moths beating themselves to death on the popping fluorescent light under the street cover. The burger tasted good, her thin stomach moaning with gratitude, licking fingers. Another smoke. Walking again. Damn, she needed some cash. She’d just spent her last loose change. A plane rumbled overhead – ominous, its undercarriage low and visible, wings blinking red and green, then gone. She lit another smoke with the butt of the last – sixteen years old and full of dreams and the warm city night waiting to swallow her up.

She kept walking, images flashing faster in her brain – her mother, her crabbed face white and wrinkled blood-red lips charcoal dead eyes bleached blond dry hair – soulless posture. A photo of her father, remembered, black and white – long beard shaved head jailhouse tattoos straddled on a clapped out chrome horse. Fire, always fire licking the edges of everything – the houses the moon cars windows trees fences people . . .

People moved inside the white house. A family scene – steaming dinner on the table. All smiles and throwback head laughter. Man cuts the meat. Mother hairbuns blue apron, dishing out the sliced pink roast. Plump blond children squeal, banging table with fisted knives and forks . . .

Lucille stood hypnotized, rooted to the spot. Her face dissected in the reflection of the quarter windowpane. She didn’t know how long she stood there, watching, trembling – mind blank. Hairbuns blue apron appeared in the window, a laugh on her red lips, head turned over shoulder as she drew the curtains across her pert apron encased cashmere breasts. Lucille snapped out of her trance. It was like she woke up, but was outside of herself. Everything – like one of those old black and white James Cagney movies her Ma used to watch on the TV late at night. She watched herself walk around the corner of the west wall and stand before the half open bedroom window, the linen curtain slowly flapping in the breeze against the white window sill. She closed her eyes and dreamed a dream.

Lucille kicked open the gate and walked up the old wooden steps to the dark porch. She wasn’t home. She sat on the top step and looked out across the suburban landscape silhouettes lit with faint ghostly lights. Haunted figures across the way, shambling in and out of sight like voodoo zombies framed in the windows. A cat moaned for sex next door. A car slid its hissing way up the empty street. In the distance, a siren started to peel itself out of the black night. Lucille lit a smoke and took a drag, holding the cigarette up and watching the red ember glow as it took to the thin cigarette paper – her other hand absently brushing up against the growing urge in her torn jeans.

An orange glow had broken out in the distance, about a kilometre south, above the black silhouettes of the houses on the horizon. White smoke flowered from the horizontal half moon of the fire, tapering up, drifting slowly into the black still night. Lucille’s eyes glazed as she flicked the smouldering cigarette butt into the dead flowers next to the porch. Her breath quickening as her hand worked against herself – the siren now multiplied, screaming. Tumbling red lights dancing flippantly towards the fire, now blazing cinders spread like small red stars high into the warm night sky. The smoke now yellow, billowing into the blackness hanging heavy over the suburbs. The scene like a consummated painting framed between the porch banisters. All Lucille heard was her heart beating, blood pumping like a drum in her head. The worn wood grain of the porch, cool through her t-shirt against the bones of her young back. The night now closing in.

Anomalous Perigee

He turned on his black polished heel, raised his well dressed right arm – the light dancing off his polished cuff link – repositioned his curved left arm a little higher on the delicate back of his true love, then slowly waltzed from the centre of the light into the shadows.
Over her shoulder he watched the light, drunk with love & wine, he could not contain the rogue tears that tumbled from his tired eyes. The smell of her perfume engulfed his senses.
The silk touch of her soft skin on his cheek.
The feel & smell of her fine hair against the tip of his nose, as they spun slowly in between the light & the dark.
The empty chairs & tables in the hall resounded with applause; confetti fell like snow upon their twisting slow sonata . . .
The adagio waned – began to fade – the click of a door echoed through the music & the lingering mumble of departing guests – the light flickered, swelled, then was full & bright again as it should be.
The confetti was gone, the guests too – the table & chairs nowhere to be seen – the hall walls had shrunk, chandeliers disappeared, but still the music continued as he took one last semi-pirouette & stopped – his hand raised, fingers together as if holding the smallest of hands – the other hand spread just away from his mid-section as if to protect the daintiest of waists.
He stood under the dim light, the yellow glow casting shadows on his face, his dapper suit now looking quite threadbare – the cuff links long ago disappeared over the grimy counter of a downtown pawn shop – his polished shoes, the seams along the soles split – the buttoned collar around his neck, loose – the mirror rippled darkly around his form transfixed. His hands went to his head, his shoulders collapsed, as he turned his back on his own pitiful image.
He slowly unbuttoned his jacket & hung it carefully over the back of a chair, unbuttoning his collar & stepping from his old worn shoes. He folded back the covers & pulled the cord, which extinguished the light. As he lay in bed, the adagio still tumbling through his mind, his chest tightened, he looked through the gap in the blind.
The moon was low & full & seemed to smile back at him drunkenly. The cold blue light beamed across the room trying to penetrate the black shadows of his austere bedroom. The mellow luminosity of the light filled his mind with a soft blue hue.
He knew there were angels, alive, somewhere. The heaviness in his heart began to subside. He lay on his side, one hand holding the blind open so he could see the moon. He could almost step onto the moon he thought. It’s so low. So blue. So big. His tired eyes closed, the hand falling gently away from the blind onto the mattress & he was with her once again.

Substance Abuse

a piece of news
in platitudes
hybrid hyper media
seconded to
a lesser kind of life
a soft intelligence
far from cut up
rearranged
reconstituted
just opaque
shamelessly profane
this is
a lesser kind of
layer cake
more a multilevel glass box
fixed together with
the filaments of yesterday
& the lifeblood
of tomorrow’s dreams.

http://nzartist.blogspot.com/

Hey everyone, I just realised I was starting to post a lot more photographs and art than I meant to on this blog which is supposed to be dedicated to my writing. So, I have just put the finishing touches on a new blog devoted to showcasing my artistic works. You can find it here. I hope you enjoy my work and if you like it please subscribe and share the link. Cheers.

Annual Commemoration of the Divine Passion

You eclipse me & I have stained the Sun with black love . . .
death from a bottle cools my ardour
for a while, until I see you again.

The damp distance is bleached
then blackened with shadows
& flocks of shrill birds, screaming for blood

Bound hands grow swollen
body – silently numbed
a bed on fire I laid upon
now reddened with burning life

In these blistered hours of insomnia
objects are like lead
I believe they are other things & less than they are
as if fewer of them would create
a stillness like sleep
— if only to dream of her again

The cushions beckon in the mirror
white & summoning, judicious
the bed reflected in that fantasy land,
that round pool of hope

Why stir dust on a sacred tomb
as I lay down with a prayer for darkness
a snowflake melts on her virgin eyelids
somewhere & now, together again
we drink every breath of poisoned air
she asleep, I awake . . .

Not believing in resurrection —
I stroll through cemeteries
looking for her name, not wanting to see it
the damp brown earth reminds me
every hour we breathe is our last;
victims don’t want blind skies
their toil & consistency as mortals
are truer religions than faith itself,
so welcome me as one of them — into your house.

The last star’s neon spark
will be dissolved painlessly.
Morning will knock on the window, still —
like a grey wet wind
slow day will begin to stir.
Livestock shiver in the cold dawn,
some kind of slaughterhouse morn
the blood drained dreams
dissipate, replaced by
perpetual sameness . . .

Awakened from a long dark dream,
I thought I saw her somewhere in there
the awesome force of sleep’s return
shut me down like wild song
like black amphibious wine
a hollow ghost —
peering senselessly through the cold
window of every lost night

This morning once again
on motionless ground,
& along with it
drinking cold mountain air outside;
refined air, once, our air . . .

Across the crisp cool valley — white snow
blue mountains of decrepit glass & dream
dissolve, in this fresh green brocade

Hope sparkles in the diamond dew
that mirrors the sun
for a minute
while across the way, beyond this place
despair draws its dark curtain of cloud
over the broken road;
another day annexed,
closer to you again, I come.



This poem was written as a bit of a homage to Osip Mandelstam. If you haven't read any of his poetry then I recommend you do - far superior to most of the dross being produced these days!!!

Around Town: Wellington Zoo for real

Went to the Wellington Zoo the other day (true story this time) with bubz and another newage dad and his two offspring. A beautiful day kicked off with a Velluto coffee from the café of the same name. The Zoo was busy as usual with ominous groups of school children lurking at the side entrance, set to invade. Pushing on (we had prams) we picked up the pace for a quick walk to the top - the kids seemed to like the Ostrich, any kind of monkey, the sun bears and the Giraffe. I was surprised by the proximity of the new Giraffe enclosure as you can basically touch the creatures when they poke their inquisitive heads up to the manuka fence for a nosy. Hopefully this does not prove an issue re. human/animal contact issues later on. Anyway, managed to snap some pics as you can see - unfortunately none of the lion but some reasonable shots of the lioness. Maybe next week will bring some fresh pics and some more good weather.

Around Town: Wellington Zoo

Recreation of Actual Events on a smaller scale somewhere else!


Wellington Zoo. For the last few years there have been continuing issues with people climbing over the Zoo fence after hours. The local council and Zoo officials have remedied the problem by installing a 7000-volt electrical fence around the perimeter. Despite the new measures, resounding screams have been heard late at night as frugal zoo patrons still try to access the Zoo’s attractions nocturnally. Local residents have reported the screams that usually occur between the hours of midnight and 2am Friday thru Sunday. The human screams usually precede a raucous cacophony of baboon, chimpanzee and various angry animal noises.

Accident and Emergency Staff at the nearby Hospital have treated ten patients so far this year for electrical burns. Charge Nurse, Gina Jaja said that many of the injurious were superficial although they have had a few that were quite serious. One in particular, where a drunken teenage male managed to straddle the top of the fence before suffering bad electrical burns to his testicles. Apparently he had only been wearing a pair of nylon swimming trunks and had brushed his private parts on the top of the fence as he was attempting to launch himself into the man-made lake around the gibbon enclosure.

Zoo officials have made no apologies for the fence and since news reports publicized the injuries were quite confident that the intruder rate had dropped to nil. Police officials and nearby residents however have noticed a disturbing trend of drunk teenagers attempting to “climb the wall.” Like lemmings, the drunks take turns seeing who can outdo each other withstanding electrical shocks. “I have seen more than one of these idiots actually knock themselves out by licking the livewire whilst standing on their equally idiotic friend’s shoulders. It would be quite comical if it wasn’t so pathetic,” said Harold Dimwingle from the nearby Newtown Apartments. “We can nearly set our clocks by these retards. Me and a few mates from the RSA come down here at midnight on a Saturday and have a few brandies while waiting for these clowns and their ridiculous antics!”

Around Town: local in-depth news straight to you

One of the 'Little Bastards'

The Newtown Council Apartments Building, Block B



Wellington, Newtown. Possums that climb drainpipes at the council flats in Newtown have long been a problem for the residents and more importantly the landlords. Now a possible solution has been found by one of the tenants who live on the thirteenth floor of Apartment block B. Noticing that the drainpipe was made from a conductive material, Arnold B Wingthrop, a retired electrical contractor, unscrewed a lamp from its electrical cord and attached the flex with duct-tape to the drainpipe fixture outside his window. Within days a pile of scorched possums lay stacked at the base of the drainpipe. Local stray dogs have been disposing of the barbequed rodents but there have been a few incidents where some animals have touched the downpipe and fried as a result. Mr Wingthrop stated, “the little bastards got what they deserved. They’ve been shimmying up that bloody drainpipe and pinching things out of my apartment for months now!” Neighbouring residents have complained that the apartment block now ‘looks like a friggin’ radio tower at night’ because the electrified drainpipe glows in the dark. The day after we interviewed Mr Wingthrop, the first of the Autumn rains fell, which upon contact with the electrified down-pipe, resulted in a massive electrical fault that blew out half of the suburb’s power supply, including the local hospital’s. Police are interrogating Mr Wingthrop about the incident.

breakdown of the suburban mind

Watched David Lynch's 'Inland Empire' last night. Blew my mind with its brilliance. Very subjective viewing but amazingly surreal - like a broken dream, a barbituate stumbling night out not knowing where you're going or where you've been. Least of all - thought provoking. Highly recommended. Check out this site for more details.

David Lynch: Genius Par Excellence?

For those of you who like David Lynch films, and especially those of you who don't, have a look at his art and this very cool website [takes a tiny moment to load as high-res images etc].

Aspects of Infinity

I


I remember how it all began, as clearly as if it were yesterday. It was a fine morning, crisp & cold, but full of sun. I woke up to the sound of angels playing music in my ears. I can’t be sure of their instruments, although they made the most beautiful sounds I had ever heard. I couldn’t see, my bedroom was filled with a blinding white light, the only sense I had was one of sound. I lay motionless in my bed, the waves of crystal light & symphony pervading my every pore. I was a blank canvas as the sounds began to shape the very fabric of my being. Through the lucid choir of nothingness came a word & with it followed another:
‘Rise’, it whispered, as if a breeze.
‘Rise up & face the day for your life has ceased. Your new life is just beginning . . .’
I awoke again, yet unsure of if I had ever been asleep.


It is cold tonight. The streets are quiet for once, that ‘feeling’ is not there, for the moment. Everything is so still & pristine. My breath fogs in front of me, a backdrop of black night. Cold O cold, yes warmth – that is what I need. Three coats over rough layers of cloth. I feel like a freakish character in a Brueghel painting.
Another memory stabs my eyes – a feeling comes running at me, then disappears with my steaming breath into the night. Ice has covered everything; shards & sheets of crystal light illuminate the dark.
The cracks are more visible tonight; under stark streetlight, gaping splits filled with phosphorescent light that weep & spew forth into the black shadows.
There is nowhere to hide.
If there is nowhere to go where it is warm, then there is always the cemetery. Earth always offers sanctuary, so softer & more welcoming than the hard bed of concrete. A manhole cover beckons from behind a tomb; we scurry like diseased rats in burrowed warrens beneath the poisoned city, deep within its gut, beneath the rivers & the broken factories. The steaming creeks & rivers above, lap the earth from their banks. Pulling the blistered blanket of glass up, as its wake rocks & stirs our consciousness from mournful sleep & ritualistic instinct. We realise that if we were to be dead --- we would be, yet, we are all drowned . . .
White begins to stain the night as we sleep.


II


We stopped for a while; the others went to forage for maps & food. I rested on a huge marble step that stretched its cold form out for a mile. The building, hovering over me above, would’ve welcomed Alexander’s drunken torch. Persia never looked so grand & diseased at the same time as this mortuary – huge space cobbled with grey stone. The other surrounding buildings scrawled like feverish charcoal monoliths, deep shadows frame the cold snow of their architecture.
I sit alone on these steps.
I watch the cold clouds reiterate above the grey skyline.
There is no blank canvas. Tabula Rasa.
Everything is a colour.
Everything is a word.
I cannot help but interpret & participate in this infinite moment. This morning froze me; snapped me from a dream of thirteen faces — none of which were mine. What is neutral in this God-forsaken world?
I have a new found faith in sleep that serves me well for everything. Shuts my eyes as light as a thief’s, yet still lets me live when I wake. This I find quite amusing. & here we now stand, on the edge of the hill above the dirty little town where I was born. Looking across the black abyss to the thrashing, heaving, mass-molecules of space & time, bursting & splashing the city lights.
O where do we go from here?
What will the skies bring us tonight?

We thirteen seekers of the truth, who were once slaves of sin, now stand with countenance & fortitude amongst the teeming hordes of brutish defilers. We think of nothing but the goal that never lets us know its name & in that coveted mystery, we find assurance & spiritual strength. Like Lazarus, we have risen from pools of blood & death to walk amongst the living dead, to have some purpose totally foreign from that of this world. We sight our ships to sea just to have them crushed by quick waves. Others abort the vessel falling fallen while we fall, we set our sights to land & catapult an anchor plated with the fear of missing the mark. We know however, that where it scalps a patch of earth, we may as well dig a place & in it lay our skeletal frames – watching the moon spin off, far away, to an inconceivable distance as steaming black sod frames then blocks the final vision.

In a damp cavern beneath the border, we seek & find temporary sanctuary. Food is shared & words are said; you step from the shadows into the fold of the family. Warm light dances off the sloping dust caked walls. An orange aura fills the chamber & shadows play out their grotesque pantomimes of murder on the walls, but your silhouette is beautiful yet transparent. The reflection of the flame burns brightly in your eyes tonight & I see a hunger there so deep. I feel your skin so warm your touch like silk lips so you who hypnotise like a home welcome me into your arms once again & again & for a brief instant, I am human again. I pledge my undying love to you & everyone as we twirl like dervish dancers begging for alms of love in worlds of pure white neutrality untainted by freedom as we melt sun with the sky to burn bloom buy our place with what & all we’ve got, which is not much.
My hands do not feel your memory.
My eyes see you in everything . . .
In various sorrows, blizzards begin above the ground. Grinding sand & shingle down the dark corridor toward our empty shelter. To blow the bells & ring the chimes of you, burning pyre-like in my flaming chest, I must climb the highest mountain.
I must record the journey & events of the hours & days to come.
I must record your beauty & your twisted ugliness as detailed & as infinitely as I can, with the last drop of blood as my ink. My heart houses the flint you struck; to live is to die tonight & every lost night from now.
I must record your dying history – your progress, your decay, your thwarted attempts to claim new worlds . . .
everything.


Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major - Andante


III


A new day & we brush the ash & dust from our eyes & hair. Our black overcoats increasingly stiffen from the shed skin follicles of her Malthusian moulting, which stick like mortician’s wax with every warm breeze of her dying breath. The sun is purple & fills the tangerine hued sky. Its burning eminence pockets the loose change of oxygen, its twisting smile creases, dazzling. We lower our welding masks & shuffle dust clouds off through the churning ghost dance of the early morning day. From half awake to suddenly wide awake, almost – a lucid kind-of light licks our flesh. It is hard not to forget the ancient promise of real rain --- crystal clear water that is sweet & liquid wet.
O to taste the diamond drops of moisture!
What a bastard of a shadow of a dream!
This is the time when a mind eraser could be put to good use.
We all wish that we could die.

Last night I had a nightmare, my memory recorded my thoughts. It started with a noise & then language became apparent. Words crawl like pulsing worms from my mouth. Naked.
All naked we are nude & nice now in the slow fetid time of a clock no longer tick tock tick tock . . . Rain falling, like dead sparrows on the roof. So loud & thudding, the water-drops as big as bombs. If you had a weak thin neck, it would snap with their pummelling weight. Old trees cracking twigs arthritic limbs frozen air freezing flays flesh off bare cheeks. Wind whipping strop’s slap acid sand grates. Breathless. Diseases abound to burrow faster, yet still we stand & breathe the foul air.
All around – beautiful vampires.
Red lips platinum hair ghost skin yellow tongues lick black teeth.
Everything surrounds & squeezes back – large machines enlarging . . .
Everything is a word, but I can’t shake the fact that words are so meaningless, in the face of such events.
I want to wake up.

We have ploughed our fields with streets, planted them with ugly tombs of concrete instead of fruit trees. The separation is evident; the direction misunderstood. We the unwilling are urged to remain seated ‘til the show is over. Is there any one with just cause why this marriage should be over, speak up now or forever hold your peace in check? Throw twenty different objects together & try to stack them up; a triangular structure is the only form withstanding. Who is at the top? How soon before the objects beneath collapse or eject from the equation? Who ploughs the field does the sowing, yet who is it that reaps & rapes the rewards of our toil?
The separation is evident.

On my way through the smashed suburbs, I saw a clothesline swaying in the cold warm wind, a single tall stick, a rake that strongly held the weight of the world above its rigid head. The pole pushes piles of christened ragged clothes into the wind. It flaps the wet wrinkles of the clothes dry, impregnates their nature to rub against skin. The pole sways privately. Ticking off the time, a pendulous metronome, & supporting it all a blue line & the breeze. The rigid rake has kept its place actively alive by its still & unwavering disposition. By its silence.

It feels like autumn now, but the seasons are all mad & messed up.
Burning bark smells like cinnamon sometimes, right now it smells like burning bark. The tree’s on fire – the last of them, on this dying street clogged with floating embers & curling balloons of smoke. All the ghosts stand in the mist smoke in silent chastity & broken innocence, shivering at the sight of the steel scythe blade of the reaper. Some peel in fright like snakes, others shed leaves like scales & skin – matt-finished minnows fall – sardines litter the ochre smoky floor; quite hot, then cold blue haze blankets everything & we drift off toward our destination.
Towards redemption, or just another aspect of infinity?


IV


A three storied building offers sanctuary from the searing elements for a while, affording us a vantage point from which to spy all other travellers & assassins. Cold hard concrete swells & sweats its broken crumbling walls under the midday sun. We take turns on watch. I meditate in a quiet corner in the dark – waiting for a sign, a map, a pineapple, a hole in the clouds . . . sleep. The others try to sleep; stirring occasionally, humming, reciting lost songs & poetry, drawing crude figures & signs on the scarred walls. After seven hours, I rise refreshed & wary of the indigo night that is now upon us. I climb the outside window fire-escape ladder, hanging out over the litter-strewn footpath below. The simmering night fluctuates in temperature. All is silent save for a warm breeze brushing between my ear & the wall of the building. The yellow moon is huge & seems to be gaining ground with every revolution, its eerie light casting a sickly glow of gold over the jagged geometry of lower downtown Knotterdam.

From out behind a dead store scurries one of the first mutants we see on our odyssey. He scuttles along on his gammy leg. He looks like he is trying to leg-over a short fence, dragging his idle leg then kind of flipping it to limp along on.
From out behind shadows & shapes, emerge the blackened faces of children.
Screaming with insane mirth & laughter like small dancing skeletons, the children surround their prey like rodents around a corpse. He occupies their ebbing worlds as a target for stones & short relief from their surroundings. His hunched body burns with words, rocks, & perverted piercing stares. Looking up bent over, his face twisted in shadow, he shudders & flops faster to outrun gregarious gazes & the pelting assault of creatures more mindless than he. It gets too much sometimes, in fact all the time, the throwing about of his cumbersome cage. The frustration of a life not knowing why, but most of all it gets too much, because of them. They hate him, they always have, & they follow him wherever he goes. Crying now & limping as fast as he cannot go, he falls down, curls up, in the black dismissal of the world.
I can hear his pathetic moans from the rooftop.
He is sobbing & calling “Esmeralda? Esmeralda? I hang my head with the weight of shame just as the weight of your natural & cumbersome form hung you. Come back to me my love. Come back, to me . . .”

A piece of brick flies from the dark, knocking a splash of blood from his swollen forehead. He lies back & stares at the moon glistening in his weeping eyes, his arm raised, fingers moving in silent appeal. In the pain of difference & of hurt, & of being very much alone, he succumbs to the world around him. The ground flattens & swallows his twisted form, the black asphalt pulsing like a heartbeat – each swell inhaling, gulping.
A bony arm remains, elbow high above the ground. In the sick light, it looks like a withered fire hydrant. The fingers still writhe & click, their lumpy knuckles turn & crack, the torn shirtsleeve slides down the twitching forearm.
From the dark realms of a narrow alley, the squeak of pedals, chain, spokes & bell resounds. In slow moving motion, a child on a bike floats across the stage of the street. The child’s head is a balloon – a balloon with huge wide staring black pupils for eyes, button nose upturned, all framed in an ivory countenance as polished as a marble basin. His small arm swinging in timeless motion, it seems to swell & elongate like sharpened bone. I watch his small arm swinging as he pedals, the other hand steering his mechanical vessel. In his toy hand, his hand, he holds a thin shiny curved blade – a scythe glistening like a diamond in the shadows, a razor sharp scythe tinkling off the road, small red sparks dancing behind the black tyres of his bike.
The hand & muscle of the exposed arm is lined up by the boy’s front bike tyre. The arm suddenly stands still & tall like a heron on alert, as if aware of its approaching foe, trapped in a quagmire trying to free its tethered form. The boy peddles pedals pedals faster faster, breath puffing in small red clouds of dust from his sneering wee mouth. The white bony arm wriggling above the asphalt, fingers clenching unclenching as if trying to scream. The boy’s strange arm upraised now, blade in hand sharp, arm – a swinging arc down & . . . SCHLOCKKK . . .
The moon silhouettes the spinning arm clutching at arm & then disappearing past the window of the light of the moon. The boy tilts his huge head back, laughs, swallows & then blows perfect dust-red smoke rings at the night’s weird sky. I look down at the scene, all actors disappear now, as the swirling paper & dust in the gutters of the street stop their discontented stirring. The breeze dissipates, comets stop their blazing trails across the sky, & everything is so quite. I lean back on the wall of the balcony of the roof & slowly let my knees give out under my weight – goodnight sick moon.
Good night.


Cello Concerto No. 1 in E Flat Major, Op. 107 – Moderato.


V


We walk past a flickering transmitter, still crackling with stored power. Static burns the brain cells, buzzing constantly like electric fur brushed up the wrong way. The strange sensation of a foreign body invading every pore & cell. Its life force scratches neon graffiti on never-ending night while all around satellites spin above . . .
A message – another mountain to conquer.
How many days left?
Looking all the time for something that has always seen us, which we will never see, through this burgeoning haze of red dead solidity. O but now I’m letting my emotion override my sensibilities in my search for truth! But what is truth?
Of the heart?
The mind?
The soul?
& what are these names for these things, if such things even exist anyway . . .?
My heart is low, my mind weary, my spirit has wandered on ahead to scout safe passage for our advance, but it is not searching for mystery or treasure. Yet, I pray that it might find some, just something small. A glimmer of shining illusion that we may believe in, to get us through another day & night . . .

A common theme along our journey, that I find quite disturbing, is the pervading impressions of silence that pepper the day & night. It is a dripping tap – even the most subtle of words repeated enough, eventually drives to the point of distraction & attentions the prey. As a tiny twig, broken from a tree, that falls upon water makes ripples that echo its form. However, when such water is not calm, still a bigger branch with more substance is needed to create visible & audible impression. In these moments of absolute peace & lucidity, the shadow of death breathes its name in an epiphany of silence.

This morning, everything moves in slow motion. I awoke to see women beating slow tracks in beauty with leaves swirling at their heels touching sweet white feet. A moist caress glides in their perfumed surrealism. The summer sings optical promises; maybe everything will be all right?
Another vision of Mary – standing on the edge of the Black Forest on the fringe of the camp. An army of ghostly figures behind her, writhing in the mist & the damp leaves, waving slowly, translucently.
Her last good-byes seem forever cast in cold calculus, a flickering hologram.


Fantasien, Op. 116 – No. 7 Capriccio. Allegro agitato




VI


We found an old run-down cabin, just before dusk gave in to night, deep in the foothills of the mountain ranges. Windows doors grey walls torn. A fox skitters ‘round the room, sniffing trash, oblivious to our presence. Eye to eye rats in rafters, on mantle, windowsills, within walls – scratching, scratching, scratching through holes; standing still for slash of time, then off again. Seen sniffed snorted disappeared forgotten, room now empty save for moonlight.
The fireplace flickers, then explodes.
The whole broken brown-grey interior illumined, in all its decayed woody brilliance. The flame licked the cobwebs in the grate, blossoms crushing cellophane, sounds that burn sun-burst bright, engulfing envelopes stuffed with wads of cash & unforgettable memories, crackles to ash.
Then back-to-back black.
The visions are becoming stronger while our quest becomes more inconsequential. Nature is casting its archaic spell over our experience of things. We have all experienced a heightening of the senses; the smells of the deep woods & tumbling streams, the clarity of sight & hearing - a leaf so finely cut, a dry twig cracking under the hoof of one of the green deer sniffing the air ten miles downwind in the heart of the forest.
I remember a story that once captured my imagination – a poet at the end of his tether, frustrated with society & (ultimately) himself, walks into the foothills of a vast mountain range in the Americas with a loaded firearm.
No one ever sees him again, no body is ever found.
All he leaves behind are memories & a huge body of verse for the world to do with what it will. The forest has swallowed him; nature has enveloped his very being, distributed his atoms throughout the flora & fauna like so much mulch, & that’s all we are . . .



VII


The new day vivisects the dawn, another telegram from hell. Pressures of belief make for sacrifice of sleep --- relief, so hard to shake the madness of life from one’s head, without losing dreams . . . grown nurtured there, like lice they hunger, live upon ghosts, teasing & teeming rife with maddening proposals. Wet dam breaks, floods the soul, quenching fires of the fragile heart; blood ferries vessels of shrouded prayer, laps sides of narrow passage, ridges perched precarious --- shelter in the shadows, breeds clinging moss of time --- the dawn buries the dreams in thought, in matter, under the new day.
O thank god for the new day, today!
These small mercies are no mean feat, yet there is still a huge nagging doubt in my nature as to the effectiveness of petitioning the lord with prayer.

Another painful message came today; the great communicator speaks with no words so familiar. I placed the impulse with words so much softer than your cutting spiel of want. I would not hesitate to use you as such, mere words of my own writing, but you would let all of my blood become dust, leaving me dry with tears of loss like water.
A small stream seems to follow us just to remind me – where there was just flat baked dust & soil, a fissure appears & splits, widening as it fills with crystal water, tripping past my shambling leaded feet. It is quite all right to drink; in fact we are on agreement that it is perhaps the best water that we have ever tasted.

The sky parts its grey beard for a minute, yawning in bright disinterest & makes the dull colours glow, as they should, for the same amount of time. Flitting birds play & sing all that’s natural, the stream babbles wetly, tumbling quietly past us, leading us on into the unknown while the sun shines warmly --- paints everything still, so still & quiet for a minute.

I turn back in the grey, toward the valley below, to check the burning fires glowing as far as the horizon. Suddenly, a waddling duck jets its slick form out from the front of the burrowing stream; I grab its wet neck & wring the painful life from it.
We all have to remind ourselves every now & then that we are only human.
That we are still alive.

The river frogs choke the highway, croaking to the night.
& the rain it hammers down across the barren blue hue, in its shimmering sweeping black dress. Smoke-like clouds draped above the great flood of blood. Dawn cloud ingrained in this almighty time with blindness. It rained forever in the sweet south & sweet north & sweet east & bittersweet west. Sweat pearls run down my face. An almighty fine wine of the weeping sky falls down on old slumbering earth, snoring with the promise of the BIG sleep in Messianic night. Till that almighty river’s shining dawn & passage down stream turned big muddy, where the desert had been --- & Noah might’ve rowed on out from the banks of old earth . . .
If it hadn’t been another dream.

Near the camp, ripples on the surface of a nearby dam signalled the coming tide upstream as Salmon swam down-stream, furtively kissing the small insects from the mirrored surface of the sky.
We have to close our minds – we have learnt the laws of the forest – and we have to disintegrate our bodies in order to become part of the force of the storm. Resistance is futile & dangerous. The sun glows pale red through the silhouettes of the trees, as we trace its fall, cold sinks its blade a little deeper in the bone, shadows merge.
We build a small fire on the embers of yesterday’s.
The pine-needles pop & smoke, the twigs ignite & consume themselves, as the flame’s glow casts masks & dancing shadows across our pensive faces. We sip Rosemary tea from warm receptacles; steam curling from our breath, the forest is deathly quiet again save for a stirring breeze swaying the treetops. The chill air defies the approaching storm, the silver clouds above now iridescent in the blue moonlight; they accelerate across the grey plains of the night sky. As their speed becomes lost in the filling of the sky, the trees creak & drop branches & pine-cones from their thrashing limbs. Our fire is scattered, tumbling sparks flicker through the tumultuous bracken & undergrowth, as the wind’s momentous fury systematically attacks our camp.


Allegro con moto


VIII


I know now the third trouble has earnestly begun its unstoppable stoppage. From the wrong mountain that I had wasted three days & nights upon, answering question after question of my silent companions. To be skin-blackened in the blazing light until refuge in a crag brought my skull bloody pecks from all manner of winged creatures. I decided to descend, as I was told that this was not the very tall terrain that I should be on.

Coming down the mountain, I met a virgin who had children; her entourage were all weeping for their lives. I met a blind man who had vision, but no other sense at all. I met a poor man who had given all his wealth away & had nothing else to give anyone – no words, no hate, no nothing at all. The travel down was so much harder than the voyage up the mountain, despite the heavy load upon my weary shoulders. My twelve companions, light as they were; all grasping, clinging, like a thick ball of twitching twine coiled up across my creaking spine.

Coming down the mountain, I met a muse that could not play, sing, or impart gifts of inspiration. I met a clown that never laughed, but who had always been laughed at. I met a married man who had lost his ring deliberately amongst the stony slopes. Now on another mountain, we had ascended, amongst the ranges of the world. Up high on mountain peak, three days & three nights did curse me with its silence, yet the voices they were loud. A cold cave in crags of granite precipice did afford we with sublime providence & writing space in the dark. All about me ravens black & buzzards grey, haunted me with beady hungry stares, while forcing me into friendship with threats of violence & despair. I do not know, nor will I ever, the nature of those creatures that caricaturise the deformity of men.

Coming down the mountain, I was blinded by the brilliance; everything was crystal clear & held a lucid gold resilience. To my dismay, my vision could not offer me sanctuary of allegiance. Thrown from one apparition to spirit deed entrusted --- the golden glow endowed within, soon poisoned all, & ruptured shaking ground. Serenity of peace & mind madness breached the shrunk horizon.
I made retreat in haste & fear of all that I had witnessed.
A martyr's life, of seer & shaman, harnessed by the reins of Sodom.
To lead like the blind scout in disarray. To plot the paths through minefields olden laid, without map or guide to show the way for who has gone before, has gone without, to bleed for wounded souls their pain. To dance scarred by the acid rain's great rocks. To house the children evil shamed. To see the blind-man’s tortured fate, in beggar’s rags dressed with itching pestilence. To walk the paths with famine as my food, with death as my guide . . . I wove my bleeding heaving wretchedness, once again up the incline.

Were we ever going to find the answers for the great one – we were beginning to seriously doubt the validity of his requests?




IX


In my sleep, I had another dream.
Beneath the old sash window, someone had placed a mirror; it reached from the floor to the frame. Standing naked, head-less – it did not look like me, but then I’d only ever seen myself in reflection, so I presumed that it was. Outside, dry ochre fields – flat as sea – stretch away through & beyond defiant nets of fences. A black bull – horns, big polished lump of charcoal stares at me, snorting breath paints the window. He thinks that I have fresh blades of grass for his consumption, he is wrong. Its huge head adheres to my form, the cadence clear:

I rise to fall – the morning sun stains bronze, the birds song sounds of pipe & tambourine, minus my hands that now burn with the sun in this labyrinth of dawn. Seven figures shimmering with energy, atoms spinning in a spinning mass of form, one stood apart – more material & menacing than the others who had a certain kind of innocence in their immateriality.

Given eyes to see a world, we did & so we died. Hunger in the new night’s yawn we ate ferociously, like wolf cubs at mother’s milk, gorged pregnant with concrete fear.
It was all we could do to stay awake.
Now we are the infected.
Slippery tongues of crass old lands injected in our virgin veins, we have not even begun to begin to see the mud we stand in, to smell it as it is, to disregard its funerary qualities. Buried we have not begun to contemplate this place we are in, this rock we stand on. We see the ocean as a moat, as an eternity, between the setting sun & us. We do not feel the touch of waves all we see is all we are. The transcendence of time, irrelevant in its ticking hue, buoyant on its mocking grin -- grasped by none, aspired by some. It chatters – a bone wind-chime, cracking & tolling each short but endless passing of day. Impeccable revenge: in evanescence two pits dwell -- infinite charcoal voyeurs, watching, always waiting for you. For me . . .

Rain falls – ashen snow of sorts, trying hard to clean it only dissolves & steams. Evaporation leaves a hollow where there once was life. Time keeps ticking off itself, so do we too bring intonation to ourselves.
As we have done, so shall be done to no one, but unto ourselves . . .

What is this place on which I stand?
What is this place in which I dwell?
Is this thought naught but a smell, of what has always been that is not seen? Consummation has stamped its seal on everything, long dead & buried – who wields the stamp with such intent?
Who creased the seal on our bent backs?
Who gave us these dead eyes?


Adagio – Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 10



X


Inside the enclosure, they gave us a street to play with. Everything was ok until we began to think we could not see them.
They were there though.
We worked hard while some fell down; they were not picked up.
We became one, so they said.
Our liberty monopolised, streamlined, they said.
Then came the virus. No fence could keep it out. They contained it well, the chosen few were made to survive, you see, they needed someone to repair the machines that built the machines that mined the metals that made the machines that control our existence. Herein lay the redemption inside the enclosure. Suicide – the only sin-filled option.

The wicked city sleeps for a second as the sun comes up sleuths with blind obedience & subtle reward the day blinks & is gone – swallowed by itself we float like zombies bittersweet voodoo magnet – implants its claws in our broken backs toward the neon grin great endless inanity of night pulls to begin in earnest the spade breaks the earth’s skin our quest for delight knows no bounds for fools streetlight sings & slaps the cruising cars like bleeding sunshine shards through weeping tree-lined avenues the cumbersome concrete breaks another face upon goose-steps – goose-steps, across & over while the black mirrored glass of her evening bodice entices the swirling mutants who stumble & ripple with vanity & the tease of undress winding – winding in & out through cavities like a cancer as the darkness covets the flight of our souls & soon, as ghosts, we echo & return with another tattoo from the city’s sin emporium.

Journey we go, into a place where lost buildings of time stack against each other in a delicate city of memories. Walking these barren streets, searching for hidden clues, we get lost in the quest of looking for answers to the future, in the gloomy & poisonous back streets of the past. Black galloping pillows of cloud; hasten like advancing sentries of night against the grey sky, proclaiming: the ferocious almighty thunderheads, glory, blossom, & stab the tender side of the West. The East’s long sabre draws out & twists, spilling gushing blankets of deep, deep maroon over mortal Earth.
Casting great floods to the West.
Decaying plagues shall ravage the North; moreover, famine bleeds dry the South’s cold haven as the East, connotes slow suicide in its prophetic insane seclusion. Green stems from the grey & all the glass age redeems itself back to the crimson beaches, whence it came.
Always hunting, without knowing, for the three properties of motion: the beginning, the middle, & the end.
Life, death, fire, water, earth & ocean.
Bringing in the space of the old: the new.
The idea, the propulsion, the result is seen in all things.
Cause, effect, & result of the action, is a troublesome discourse, when the end is ultimately commotion, destruction . . .



XI


What is acquired at birth falls back to more pure & honest beginnings.
This burgeoning & ever-present death is not really our creation, but more like God’s . . . or something else. Nature does not concern itself with our presence, or the way we practice genocide, murder, rape, cannibalism, & sacrilege. For a while, we lived inside an enclosure in which they gave us a street to play with.
We saw everything, as did the third eye.

There was an uneasy calm about the place. No one spoke. Outside the walls, disease marched across the west desert scratching its long black fingernails along the high tin fence. The fossils that controlled the place stood around nervously; clad in leather jump-suits, their white faces glowing like light-bulbs in blackened sockets, obese ink-pot bodies swelling & twitching at the sounds of the scratching screams, the bloody baseball bats twirling anxiously in their podgy dough claws. Everything was ok until we began to think we could not see them.
They were always there – our imprisoners.

We worked hard as did the other broken bodies. Some fell down, they were not picked up, we saw it all & still the statues rise to meet the falling sky. We became one at that stage so they said; that point between death & beyond or something like that? Our liberty monopolised, ‘streamlined,’ so they said. Then came the virus, no fence could keep it out but the ones that stood tall around the cities contained it well.
Soon the chosen few were made to survive.

They needed someone to repair the machines that built the machines that mined the metals that made the machines that control our existence. . . & that was then, this is now. It all collapsed beneath the onslaught of the natural night. We tried to forget that place, but for some inexplicable reason it was photographically tattooed on our internal vision.
We could not shake it.
Herein lay the redemption inside the enclosure – acceptance, honesty, awareness, and encompassment.
Aspects of infinity.



Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor – Rondo-Finale. Allegro

Message for any readers out there (if any!)

Hi

I realise that 'Blogging' is as much self-serving as it is for public entertainment. In light of this truth I have to ask the question: "Is anybody reading this blog?" So that is my question, is there anyone reading this blog and if so would you like me to continue posting items of interest?

Obviously, this stuff takes time to produce, edit, post etc. The growing realisation that blogging (in my own opinion) is a probable waste of time has led me to ask this question to find out if it's worth carrying on. Anyway, there you have it - should I stay or should I go? Also, feedback on the blog etc would be appreciated.

Best wishes


Will

God is not an American - (Read & find out why!)

david bowie said:

“god is an american”

nietzsche said”

“god is dead”

madame blavatsky said

“there is no religion,

higher than truth”

i say:

“truth & religion

are non-compatible”

by the way,

this is not a political poem

or a religious poem

my views (contd.):

a poem is an expression of interest

potentially, entertaining

possibly, thought provoking

usually, annoying

seldom, enjoyable

always, didactic

drivel – essentially

but this poem

is not meant to tell you

what a poem is or isn’t

or what you should think

this is just

some words on a page

possibly, not even a poem

vers libre or not libre

that is not the question

finally,

just to set a few things straight:

god is not an american

god is not even alive so how can he/she/it be dead

truth & religion

should never be mentioned

in the same sentence

ever

& poetry . . .

don’t even breathe that word.

Perfume

i love
the smell of the city
the hustle-bustle brilliance
of life effective in every moment

sweet ambrosia of death
sits lurking
in the shadows of rancid alleyways
signposted with ciphers
symbols of strange forests
hieroglyphics of night’s construction

breathe in
the humanity
breathe out
the horror

the horror of concrete & steel
a flailing colossus
the smell of victory
over death
not too unlike
“the smell of napalm
in the morning”

lingering
like perfume in the back of your throat

Chasing the Dragon

I feel the strangest compulsion to jump off the balcony. It isn't a depressive desire, more of an unnerving compulsive urge. Inspired, no doubt, by a gravitational influence. The heat was oppressive, although not overbearing - just constant – sweat inducing. The fifteenth floor afforded a panoramic view of all the other apartment blocks. The black night behind low cloud, cast an eerie hue, glowing with the reflection of the city lights. A cigarette. A drink.

Smoke. Drink. Sigh. Recur.

Silhouettes flicked from one apartment to the next, lights being switched on and off – dark figures going about their business like characters in some shadow box pantomime. Hanging clothes up to dry in windows and ranch sliders. Small shapes of children darting from one lit room to the next. An array of geometric cubes encasing lives and stories.

I still hadn't figured out if the city slept yet.

Horns chimed, echoing up from the busy streets below.

10pm and silence begged release.

The black night glowed with neon and the sound of drunks. The smell of fermenting cabbage hung heavy in the thick air. I inhaled the last of a cheap cigarette and flicked its remains deftly out the window – watching its red ember pirouette and diminish as it fell then scattered in small sparks on the concrete below. I stood for a moment contemplating its descent and destruction, and then the slabs of life painted on the skyline across the way in the other apartments, beckoned my attention once again.

A cough broke my voyeuristic reverie. A soft Asian banter grew louder from the unit two doors down as if approaching the door to the dark empty corridor. Nobody exited.

I breathed again.

All the tall buildings in this city were apartment buildings. I looked out again and could find no gaps between the overlapping silhouettes of the concrete monoliths. In the daytime – no horizon, no ocean or trees in the distance, just miles and miles of concrete, steel and teeming life.

And here I am alone.

A stranger in a strange land.

A fugitive from reality.

A dream within a dream.

Smoke. Drink. Sigh. Recur.

I have slipped back behind the bars of the cage. I am inside the Zoo again. I guess when there’s no one else to romance, the next best thing is to do a number on your self. Right?

The walkway to the apartment entrances was long, lined with sliding glass windows – about fifty metres in length I guessed. I left the windows open in the walkway outside the apartment so that air, no matter how dense and smog-laden, could creep inside my room’s window. Affording some small form of oxygen to my weary drunk brain once asleep inside.

Instead of impossible sleep, I pour myself another whisky and coke from the freezer. Napoleon, cheap and nasty, my eighth battle tonight with the French general. I take a book from my pile of recent purchases and park my arse on a borrowed couch in someone else's living room.

Ranch door open on the other side of night now.

The noise and heat still the same – low, deep, constant, but kind of nice and familiar. Safe almost. Yeah, safe and good warmth, like a brandy glow or body stone. Sort of like that bodily numbness after regular sex.

Shit, I don't know . . .

Slowly but surely, I slip back to the west through the words on the page and a growing numbness in my brain accelerated by the sweet cheap whisky.

The ching of the elevator snaps me out of a dull thought.

A half drunk dream.

I put book down and investigate on indented alcohol legs.

The night is still heavy and dim. At each and of the corridor – two red lights on the wall glow ominously, like the eyes of a devil. A ghostly central green exit light casts its sick colour over the lift foyer.

Another cigarette. Another drink.

Smoke. Drink. Sigh. Recur.

Things have quietened down to a whisper. A quick perv across the courtyard, trying to make out breasts and tight stomachs, bare asses at a hundred metres in windows lit with little light.

God, I must be desperate.

My western weakness so apparent. So disgustingly obtuse and transparent. So basic, yet so unsatisfying. The cigarette feels good in me – that savoury taste of death mixing with the low-rent alcohol makes me want to burn this city up.

Just roll it all up and smoke it like a big fat joint.

Chase the dragon baby. Another drink? Jump?

Smoke. Drink. Sigh. Recur.

As promised

Need more traffic?

Try this: FreeWebSubmission.com

A Certain Kind of Countenance

Her face, like a flower
In a closed fist
Wrinkled against time, adversity
A patronising counterpart
Settled in for a long lag

& the drugs don’t work, all the time
cigarettes, booze, pills, smoke . . .
you name it, it’s viable
as long as it’s a substitute
for reality, three dimensions

a quiet cup of tea
& dogs are barking
cars growling down the thin streets
sirens screaming,
intermittently
a broken tap drips
drips
drips
across the room, nestled amongst
dirty plates piled high
flies buzzing amongst the scraps
on the kitchen bench

a few ragged photos litter the walls
& the money’s all gone
two cigarettes ‘til hell
no substitutes immediately avail themselves
as each thing becomes a part of her
like broken crockery strewn across the floor

Message for the master

hail life

weird, beautiful master

hail your rule

may these burnt offerings

placate your need for more

but there will be more

in the stars

out there beyond

in space it snows

& the sun retreats

thankyou for the years

of confusion

the blind apathy

that leads me forward

the assumed knowledge

that steers my vessel

toward the sun

hail life

you have given me love

music, laughter, joy

but you have shown me

fear, hate, anger, pain

hail your sublime dichotomies

the split aspect of being

the sun’s light

plays warmly on my bare skin

despite gathering clouds

a cold snap is on the way

snow, possibly

i disrobe buck naked

& wait for your return

magnificent leader.

The “it’s not a joke” writing method

Self-explanatory really.

Know a good joke? Preferably one of those long ones with a nice solid punchline at the end?

Choose one long joke – any one and write the joke down.

Now develop the characters in the joke. Give them a name. Describe their physical attributes. How do they relate to each other. Make their speech different.

Set the characters within an environment. Where are they? In a bar, a field, a house etc. Describe the setting vividly. Why are the characters there?

What action is taking place in the joke? Ie, what is happening? Explain in detail.

Tweak the narration that leads to the punchline. Increase conversation between characters to enhance final dialogue.

Slap the reader with the 'punchline.' If you want to make it real interesting? Add another joke to the narrative - either in front of or behind, dependent on which order works best.

The Beach House Creeper

Patrick pulled the black Lexus into the narrow driveway, the coarse hedge scrabbling down the side of the company car as it came to a halt next to the old cottage. He switched the ignition off, yawned, lit another cigarette and gathered up his things before stepping out into the fresh morning air. A two-hour trip up from the capital with a southerly tailwind had blown Patrick into Paekakariki just before dawn.

The morning was cold but the sun was on the rise, the crisp air thick with the salty smell of surf and dew-sodden shrubbery. Patrick didn’t bother to look over his shoulder at the Ocean lapping the shoreline, a mere stone’s-throw away. Instead, he contemplated the bleak clouds billowing from behind the eastern hills, threatening to covet the sun’s slow ascent. He took another drag on his cigarette and depressed the alarm tab on his key ring, the car simultaneously omitting an electronic fart as it blinked its park lights.

Patrick looked at the overgrown shrubs and the tall unruly hedge that fenced the beach house and provided shelter from the ocean’s buffeting winds. ‘A job for the weekend,’ he procrastinated as he ground the cigarette butt into the grass and made his way down the narrow path to the rear of the small section.

He turned the northeast corner of the cottage and stopped short. Two dead sparrows lay in the centre of the gravel path that led to the back door. Patrick carefully stepped over them, noting the puncture wounds in the small bodies as he continued toward the rear of the house. He made another mental note to himself to get rid of the small corpses at a more amicable hour.

The key turned with force and he was greeted with the musty smell of enclosed months. He made his way down the dark hall to the bedroom, the silence pervasive save for the soft murmur of the sea outside. He flung his business jacket and overnight bag onto a chair in the corner and pulled the curtains, wincing as hard light flooded the room. Loosening his tie he changed into an old pair of jeans and a t-shirt and set about airing out the bungalow. He began to feel more relaxed, the coastal ambience and fresh air already seeming to have somewhat reduced his peaked stress levels.

Patrick opened the lounge window, a Tui swooped from nowhere and arced within an inch of the pane, blasting him with song and disappearing as quickly as it had appeared. He gathered himself together, breathing hard. “Bloody bird,” he cursed out loud as he held his hand to his chest, his heart beating quickly. ‘Creepers,’ his old man used to call them and Patrick felt compelled to agree. They gave him the creeps all right.

He had noticed that the longer he spent in the city the more phobic he had become about ‘natural’ things, birds in particular. He didn’t like the way their eyes seemed to follow his every movement, the abrupt shift of their wings, or the way they tilted their heads to one side as they peered mercilessly into what felt like his very soul. He shivered, lit a smoke and turned the stove on to boil a pot of tea.

Patrick opened the latch on the French doors that faced out towards the coast and sat on the top step in the sun, admiring the clarity of the morning vista as he finished his cigarette. Inevitably, he thought about work. He was a broker for a large multinational and had enjoyed the challenge of the first five years, but the long hours had driven a wedge between himself and his wife Daphne. They had been separated for three months and the phone call he had been dreading had come last night, cementing the inevitable divorce.

Finishing off a bottle of Chivas he’d seconded from the staff drinks cabinet in the boardroom, he had packed a bag and steered the Lexus toward the coast at four o’clock that morning. The old family bach had always afforded some sort of security for him – from his parent’s death, now to his impending divorce. He had fled to a reliable peace of sorts, albeit temporary, at least until he could think about what to do next.

The creeper chortled violently from the hedge next to the house, waking Patrick from his thoughts. He remembered the pot on the stove and hurried inside. It was cold to touch. The element was switched on. He remembered the power board and flicked the main switch on – dull yellow light duly illuminated the hallway as the dusty stereogram tucked in next to the sofa-bed in the lounge, crackled into life – Dave Dobbyn singing about being ‘loyal.’

Patrick touched the element just to make sure the power was really on and burnt the tips of his fingers. Cursing his stupidity, he turned the cold tap on, having to step back as it spluttered and shook, spraying rust-coloured water out of the faucet ‘til it ran clear. Cooling his fingers he looked out the small kitchen window into the yard. The old clothesline pole leaned limply against the frayed line, a few stray wooden pegs, scattered flax against the hedge, the grass a good foot-high . . . another dead bird lay on the pipi-shelled path under the clothesline. It looked like a fantail with a sizeable chunk removed from its small body. Patrick leapt back from the sink as the Tui alighted on the sill in a flurry of obsidian wings and mocking stares. It rapped its glistening black bill aggressively on the glass as if it was trying to break the windowpane.

Tap tap tap.

Tap tap tap.

Patrick quickly filled a glass of water and slowly opened the side window ready to douse the malicious protagonist. The creeper seized the opportunity at his first movement, to retreat to the clothesline where it perched on the swaying line, chortling and tilting its head madly as it puffed its plumed breast. Its white collar displayed like a proud priest uttering the last rites, over the body of the crumpled bird below. Patrick drew the blinds angrily, disbelieving the bird’s audacity.

He knew he’d been hitting the bottle a bit hard since Daphne had left him and he knew it was part of the reason she left him in the first place. He knew it was the reason he was strung out now, letting some pugnacious bird freak him out, of all things. Patrick knew he had to stop his self-destructive habit, which was one of the main reasons why he’d retreated to the beach house. So many reasons. So little motivation.

Cold turkey.

He’d done it before and knew he could do it again, for good this time. He pushed his anxiety aside and decided to get some much-needed rest despite the fact that the sun was rising steadily outside. Sleep came quickly as he lay on the wire-frame single bed. It had always been the most comfortable bed he’d ever slept on, despite all the expensive hotels and design-store brands that had been a part of his adult life for so long now.

‘There’s a lot to be said for simplicity and maybe, just maybe, for being alone,’ he cogitated while slipping into a dream.

It was dark with night when Patrick woke to the sound of the Kowhai tree scratching the side of the house. It sounded like a set of long fingernails being dragged across a blackboard. He lay awake on his back with the moonlight streaming through the window and the sound of the approaching storm gathering momentum outside. The old bach creaked as the wind pushed its weight against the corrugated iron roof. Patrick heard the powerlines moan outside his bedroom window as the wind whipped through the small community, just as it had done when he was a small boy curled up in bed against the cold.

There were roughly twenty or so baches in the small cove, surrounded by ancient Pohutukawa trees, a carnivorous ocean and a jetty in dire need of repair. One road in, one road out and a small store that sold fishing supplies and over-priced canned food and cigarettes.

At least half the residents still lived in the dwellings, the rest were like Patrick – out-of-towners who lived in the city and headed north in their SUVs and European cars for the occasional weekend away. Daphne had whinged at him to buy a more elaborate ‘bach’ elsewhere. Somewhere with restaurants, golf courses, and a marina – so he had. Most of the time they would travel across to the other coast and spend a few days hob-knobbing with the people one would usually be trying to escape by going to the beach in the first place.

The new ‘bach’ on the east coast had set Patrick back a cool half million and an extra year of overtime at the office, but it had kept her happy and that was the main thing. He had drawn the line when she tried to suggest he should get rid of the ‘old bach.’ It was handed down through the family and he was damned if he was going to get rid of it on a whim from her. His thoughts slipped away again as the house started to shake with the force of the wind and the rain that now lashed the outside with a vengeance.

Patrick shivered and pulled the blankets up under his chin, he fumbled in his bag beside the bed and produced a hip flask of whisky. After a few sips, he felt the chill evaporate from his body and a sense that everything would work out all right. Not just with the storm raging outside but within himself. There were plenty more women out there, he was rich and successful and good-looking. He would fall flat on his feet again shortly.

“Patrick Tripp always bounces back,” he reassured himself out loud as he took another long swig. He checked his cell phone and discovering there was no coverage, threw it in disgust on the floor. A tremendous crash sounded from the kitchen, the sound of glass breaking, followed by loud thumping noises.

Patrick threw himself out of bed, unsteady on his feet with the whisky as he fumbled for the light switch, stubbing his toe on the corner of the dresser as he did so. There was no power. Not knowing what to expect, he grabbed an old oak walking stick off the coat rack in the hall and made his way tentatively toward the horrible banging noise emanating from the kitchen. The cane extended in front of him like a swash-bucker’s rapier. The house was unbearably cold and his breath came in short gasps of fog as he advanced nervously. He rubbed roughly at his eyes as he tried to distinguish shape from darkness.

Moonlight illuminated a chaotic scene in the kitchen. The door was wide ajar, the wild wind blowing sheets of rain into the room, leaves and debris swirled amongst the puddles of water on the linoleum. Patrick dropped the cane and rushed forward to barricade the entrance against the storm, letting out a piercing scream as broken glass from the smashed pane in the door, cut into his bare feet. He fell to the ground and tried to cup his lacerated soles in his cold hands, blood running as freely as the rain blowing on to the kitchen floor. Taking his t-shirt off, Patrick tore it in half and applied a tourniquet to both feet, effectively stopping the blood flow.

After gathering his strength and securing the kitchen door with the back of a chair, Patrick scrambled on hands and knees through the cupboards looking for the earthquake kit Daphne had given him for Christmas last year. He entertained the idea that it was almost as if she had known he would befall a disaster such as this at some point or other.

Disregarding the mice that scampered across the back of his freezing hands he breathed a sigh of relief as he found the plastic case which, amongst other things, housed two candles and some safety matches. After much fumbling and striking, Patrick managed to ignite a match and subsequently the candles. He found a couple of empty whisky bottles under the sink and after hauling himself up on his sore knees, placed the candles strategically on the mantle piece above the coal range.

After managing to heave himself up onto a chair, he rummaged through the earthquake kit at the kitchen table and found a small first-aid kit with a pair of tweezers inside. Unwrapping his tender feet he was pleased to see the lacerations weren’t as bad as he first thought and had already begun to coagulate nicely. One cut on his instep was particularly nasty and looked as if it would require a few stitches. Patrick removed a sliver of glass the length of his finger from the cut, fresh blood escaping from the wound. He reapplied his makeshift bandage and proceeded to remove the rest of the glass from his other foot under the light of the flickering candle. All the while, the storm howled and shook the small bach with a fury he hadn’t witnessed for a long time.

Patrick blew out one of the candles and hobbled back to his bedroom, candle in one hand and in the other what he now recognised to be his deceased Grandfather’s walking stick. He heard ghostly drips in the spare room on the bare floorboards, mimicking the tap of the cane. He felt cold drips on his head and shoulders, from where the rain crept in under the iron and leaked through the roof. The small cottage was in need of repair and as he slumped back into bed he resolved to spend some money on the place and get it back to new. After all, the bach was in a family trust and Daphne wouldn’t be able to get her greedy hands on it when the divorce settlement came through, so he may as well make it as comfortable as he could.

His feet were starting to throb with pain. He would have to go into town to the doctor tomorrow and get some help. In the mean time Patrick self-medicated with the rest of the whisky. He lit a cigarette off the candle now perched on the small table next to the bed and inhaled deeply. He couldn’t believe his bad luck. “They say things happen in threes,” he mused to himself. “Wonder what the third piece of good luck will bring with it?”

He lay as still as he could, watching the smoke from his cigarette drift up towards the ceiling then get swirled away by unseen drafts of cold air. The curtains fluttered in the breeze that crept through the cracks in the old window frame. Moonlight flashed across the small room as the clouds parted for brief seconds and then rendezvoused, bringing more torrential rain and wind to beat against the small west coast settlement.

After a handful of cigarettes and the last drops of whisky from the hipflask, the wind began to subside as the weather settled and the rain became heavier on the old tin roof. Patrick began to slip into unconsciousness, the drink taking its course. He drunkenly imagined he could hear that infernal Tui warbling its haunting refrain, hidden in the wet shrubbery, somewhere camouflaged in the darkness. The flame of the candle flickered as the curtains moved gently in the breeze. Patrick slipped into another dream, the noise of the rain on the roof lulling him to sleep.

§

Patrick sat in the drizzling rain on what was left of the veranda step and smoked a cigarette as he looked out at the expansive view. The ocean was a slate grey colour and flat as glass. His clothes were as sodden as his heart was weary. He couldn’t believe the calm of the day after the night before. He had stuffed things up once again. The fire engines had left half an hour before with the officer in charge recommending that Patrick follow them to the small hospital in the next town, to get his feet attended to.

Behind him, blue smoke still twisted sluggishly from the soaked remains of the charred bach. He hadn’t realised how small the section was until now. The clothesline lay like a dead thing on the grass. The hedge still stood strong and boxed in the yard, although gaps in its fortitude were evident from the thrashing it had received the night before. The wind-strapped Kowhai tree, which had scratched away at the side of the house, still splayed its sinewy limbs defiantly, though slightly scorched.

Patrick felt sick, yet somehow relieved. He guessed it was just something less he had to worry about now and he was feeling rather lucky as he thought how he had managed to escape the inferno he had himself inadvertently created. He forced himself to look back over his shoulder and tried hard to suppress the tears that welled up inside, as both good and bad memories came flooding back to him. He picked himself up, his sore feet somehow managing to hobble him toward what was left of the company car, a blackened key clutched in his dirty fist.

He stopped in mid-step and raised his sore foot to look beneath.

Patrick already knew what he had stepped on – the dead fantail lay flat on the path, looking peaceful despite being obviously dead. Patrick looked around the property again and there amongst the blackened limbs of the Kowhai sat the Tui, its head tilted to one side, its beady black eye focussed intently on Harris’s passage.

He took his last cigarette from the packet and lit it, crumpling the packet and throwing it at the bird. It fell well short of the mark and the Tui just watched. Patrick turned and walked gingerly past the smoking wreckage of the car, dropping the keys in the wet grass as he went. He regretted parking the Lexus so close to the cottage – he hadn’t used public transport in years and wasn’t looking forward to catching a bus back into town.

Despite his charred, slightly hung over state of dishevelment, he couldn’t get over how calm he felt. Last night’s rain should have prevented the fire from being worse than it was but somehow not a timber was left free from its burning rage. The bach was gone. A lifetime of memories tangibly incinerated and yet somehow Patrick felt free for the first time in his adult life. He knew he was covered by insurance and he also knew that the company might not be so forgiving for this culmination of recent indiscretions. He prised his melted Gucci wallet open, the expensive nappa leather peeling back to reveal a relatively unblemished sleeve full of cash. Last night’s rain had quietened to a soft drizzle, his clothes could get no damper.

Patrick hobbled the short distance to the village centre and stopped at the store to purchase a fresh pack of cigarettes, a new ten-dollar flannel shirt and a cheap tracksuit. They had limited clothing supplies at the store but the old codger gave him a pair of his son’s well-worn gumboots in exchange for a slightly charred twenty-dollar note. Patrick looked at the assortment of hipflasks on the shelf behind the balding proprietor, opting instead for the more sensible purchase, of an over-priced set of bright yellow wet-weather gear.

Oblivious to the chimes of the doorbell and the accusatory but somehow sympathetic stares of the local shoppers, Patrick bundled himself into his ill-fitting garb, selected a hot pie from the warmer, left the appropriate cash on the counter and made his way back out onto the quiet street.

The gumboots sucked at his bare feet, tugging the raw wounds on his feet as he hobbled to the bus stop. He ate his pie in silence and stared at the slick grey road in front of him. There wasn’t even a motel he could camp out in for a few days. He would have to head back to the city. Back to his expensive suits, his serviced penthouse apartment, and all the other trappings he had geared himself towards over the last twenty years.

He lit a cigarette and checked the timetable. Another half hour and he would be on the bus heading south towards the capital. Patrick looked across the road at the rows of hedges and the small roofs of the cottages. He could see both ends of the street, one of which opened out towards the coast and the flat grey ocean. He could still see faint drifts of blue smoke rising from the remnants of the beach house in the distance. He turned and looked the other way. Watching for the bus as he smoked his cigarette, trying hard to ignore the prying gaze of the Tui insolently perched on the gable of the cottage directly opposite the bus stop. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen such a bird in the city and somehow he felt the better for it.

The Burning Bed - New Story

I met Chris ten minutes after I was knocked off my bike by some crazy bitch in a VW. It wasn’t her fault but that’s what Dad called her after I told Mum about the graze on my shin and the lump on my head.
“We should sue that crazy bitch!” he spat at Mum. “Yes dear.” She said.
I came flying around the corner on my bike and hit the front bumper hard, propelling myself onto the bonnet, my face squashed up against the windscreen. My heart beat like a pump in my chest. A gnawing sick feeling sat in my groin. My shin screamed. My head pulsed. Crazy bitch leapt from the beetle.
“Are you ok? Are you ok?” she asked, obviously concerned.
My cheeks blazed with embarrassment and the thought of my father’s oppressive frown bearing down on my mistake.
I couldn’t talk. My chest heaved, sucking wind. I pulled my bike from underneath the vehicle’s grill. The front tyre and the bell on the handlebar – irreparably damaged. I hoped she wouldn’t notice the deep row of scratches across the bonnet and the crack in the passenger-side headlight. Then her anger came when she realized I was not damaged or retarded.
“What do you think you were doing?”
“You could have really hurt yourself or someone else?”
I recognised her from the library. I liked the soft warm touch of her hand as she presented me with my issued copies of True Illustrated War Stories, Tintin and Asterix.
Anyway, the librarian was obviously angry. When she seemed to exhaust her fury, I took my queue to exit the alley with a hobble and an affected wince. Truth was I was dead numb and slightly in shock.
My younger sister who witnessed the whole event was standing nervously at the end of the alley. I noticed she had been crying and motioned for her to follow me. We sat on the concrete steps of the library and watched the VW chug away down Commercial Street. I let out a big breath and shook all over.
“Are you ok?” she whispered. Her big brown eyes, still wet with tears and worry.
“I’m fine . . .” I said bravely,
“ . . . just don’t tell Dad, ok?”
She nodded and offered me sweets from a small white paper bag she had been coveting all morning. I took an Aniseed drop and sucked the sweet bitterness out of it until my teeth ached. The afternoon sun was still strong and cast shadows across the street. We sat in the warm sun and watched the occasional car drive somewhere. We ate lollies and I tried to straighten the front wheel of my bike between my bleeding knees.
“You’ve ripped your shorts Will!” my sister exclaimed, pointing to a tear down one leg.
“Crap!” I spat as a kid I recognised from school pulled up next to us on his bike. I learnt the word ‘crap’ from Dad and it made me think of what might happen when I returned home. I didn’t know this kid with the mile-wide grin. He was small and about the same age as myself I figured, except he was brown.
“Hey. What are you guys up to?” he asked.
“None of your business coconut,” I said in a rough voice as I pulled my little sister by one hand and dragged my bike with the other. Another word I’d learnt from Dad.
“Why did you call me that?” he asked, looking as though he was about to cry.
I leaned close to him so he could see I was a lot bigger than he was and told him to ‘get the hell out of it.’ He looked hurt and swung his skinny brown leg over his raggedy bike seat and pedalled off quickly down the street.
“Why did you scare him?” my sister asked quietly.
I said nothing and sat back down on the library steps again and felt bad.
“Let’s go home Will. I’m hungry.” She adjusted the black-rimmed spectacles on her little nose and pulled a wedge of underpants out of her backside as she tried to steady herself on her small bike. The trainer wheels teetered as she managed to sit upright with both feet on the pedals.
“You go ahead sis. I’m gonna stay here for a while.”
She slowly steered her bike towards home and disappeared from view. I sat and wondered what to do about my bloody bugger bike with the twisted wheel and crap broken bell. The brown boy sped up to me out of nowhere and came to a skidding halt next to the library steps. I was impressed – he had left a long black tyre mark on the gum-pocked pavement. I pretended not to notice him and looked down the street in the opposite direction. He climbed off his bike and let it drop to the ground with a clatter. I watched some sparrows dance around a rubbish bin across the road in front of the café.
“Hey. Do you want some?” he asked as he sat down on the steps next to me.
I got ready to give him a ‘thumping’ but as I swivelled around I saw he had his slim brown arm extended towards me with the biggest bag of sweets I had ever seen in my life. I eyed him suspiciously and wondered if I could catch germs off him like Dad said you could from ‘them.’
“Here you go,” he said as he handed the whole bag to me.
“I haven’t touched any of them,” he continued, with that big smile on his face and his friendly eyes flashing at me.
All of a sudden I forgot what Dad had said and I found myself liking him despite everything.
“What happened to your bike fella?” he asked.
“What do you mean ‘feller’?” I asked bemused.
“’Fella.’ That’s what my Gran tells me to call honkies,” he laughed innocently.
I couldn’t help myself and joined him in his laughter. It was infectious.
“What’s a ‘honky”?” I asked.
“Dunno. But it sure does sound funny don’ it?” he laughed again.
“It sure does,” I replied.
“You wansum money?” he asked me with a serious look on his face.
“Sure. Who don’t?”
He fished in his pocket and came up with a small handful of silver. He held it out in front of me as if he had sand in his fist and was about to pour it. I held out my cupped hands and he gently let it cascade into my pink palms.
“What . . .” I started to ask.
“It’s for you. Cos you’re my friend now.”
I liked the sound of that because apart from my little sister I didn’t have any friends in this town. We had moved here three months ago and school was the only place to meet other kids. They didn’t like ‘townies’ out here, Dad said.
“My name is Chris,” he said with another smile.
“I’m Will,” I said.
We started walking back to my house, side-by-side pushing our crapped-out bicycles between us. The sun was starting to go down and I saw Dad up the street standing at the front gate watching me walk towards him.
“I gotta go,” I said to Chris.
He looked at me and looked up the road at my father, smiled and threw his bony leg over his bike.
“See ya later Honky,” he said with a laugh as he threw his skinny body up and down on the pedals and biked back down towards the other end of the street.

“Who was that darkie you were talking to?” Father demanded as I arrived at the front gate.
“Dunno,” I shrugged.
“Don’t know,” he emphasised as he pulled me through the gate by my shoulders. I could feel his big strong fingers on my collarbone. His eyebrows were joined together in a frown and I could feel his bad mood waiting to get out.
“What the hell have you done to your bike?” he shouted.
“I had an accident,” I said meekly. I lied and said that the librarian had driven into me. I didn’t tell him I had been speeding and had gone down the alley behind the shops. Both sins punishable by belt.
“Put your bloody bike in the shed,” he spat.
“You’re barred from playing outside for a month.”
I started to cry and he told me to go to my room and stop ‘being a girl.’ My sister was sitting on her bed in her dressing gown playing with a doll. Her little face looked up at me frightened.
“Are you ok? Are mummy and daddy fighting?”
“I dunno,” I said as I lay on my bed and looked out the window across the back yard towards the Masonic hall. I used to lie in bed on a Friday night and hear them wailing and singing up a storm in there. It was a Sunday night tonight and there was no singing and dancing going on anywhere near our house.

As the weeks progressed I was allowed to venture out again. My sister and I sold plums out the front of the house from the old tree in our back yard. We would spend a morning picking plums with a tin can on a long pole and then wash them and put them in brown paper shopping bags collected from the supermarket. We made up a sign and put a nice tablecloth over an old table and sat outside in the school holidays. At fifty cents for a bag of ten juicy blood-plums we pretty soon had a jar full of coins.
Towards the end of the last day of plum season, Chris showed up on his bike. He smiled at me with that great big grin and gave my little sister a dollar for a bag of plums.
“Have two for a dollar,” she said.
“Nah. One’s fine thanks sis,” he laughed as he munched down on a plum, juice squirting in all directions.
“Guess what Honky?” he said to me, a curious look on his face.
“What?” I replied curiously.
“It’s my birthday and I got a gun,” he exclaimed, beaming with pride.
“Look!” he said as he pulled a silver cowboy pistol from the back of his torn jeans. Before I could comment he let fire in quick succession at a nearby streetlight.
“Ha ha ha ha. I shot the bloody light out bro,” he said and we both held our sides from laughing too much. Chris let me shoot the cap gun and it was the most excitement I had ever felt at that point. The smell of the gunpowder burnt my nostrils and the thrill of the noise that the caps made as they fired made me jump with fright. God, how I wanted that cap gun but I knew I would never get one as long as I was a kid. Mum would not let me have any kind of weapon – ‘toy or no toy!’
“I’m having a party with a big cake at Gran’s place tonight. Why don’t you come? You can even bring your sis if you like.” Chris asked.
“I won’t be able to come,” I said. My disappointment evident.
“Mum and Dad don’t know you and I’m not allowed to go to strangers’ houses.”
“If you come I’ll give you a hundred bags of lollies Honky,” Chris said earnestly. I thought about it for a minute and ran inside to ask Mum. Much to my surprise she said yes but only on the condition that her and Sis come along as well.
I ran back outside and told Chris who let out a whoop and a holler. Before I could stop him he had ran down the side of the house and was knocking on the kitchen door. Sis and I watched around the corner as we saw Mum open the door.
“Thanks Miss Will for letting them come to my party,” Chris said, motioning with his thumb over his shoulder in our direction.
“That’s ok,” I heard her say and then Chris was inside our house. I looked around for Dad but he was nowhere to be seen. In fact I hadn’t seen him for three days now and assumed he was ‘away for work.’
After a few minutes, Chris appeared at the doorway with a big grin on his face and asked me to help him with his bike.
“Your mum said she’ll give me a lift to Gran’s and you guys are coming too.”
I felt real happy then. I looked at Chris and knew I had a real friend. Mum stood wiping her hands on a tea towel in the doorway, a beautiful smile on her face as she watched us struggle with Chris’s bike into the back of the van.
“Be careful not to scratch the paintwork,” she hollered, but in a good way.

I found out that Father was away for a while and we had a great time at Chris’s Gran’s place. I had the best food I’d ever tasted and got so fat on soda and cake I thought I was going to be sick. We had a roast that came out of a steaming hole in the ground. There were lots of brown people there and singing and music. Sis ran in and out of the adults with all the other little kids and Chris and I just laughed and took turns firing off his birthday gun.
I looked at Mum sitting on a chair in a circle of other woman and she was smiling and laughing. This was the best birthday ever.
I gave Chris the dollar Mum had given me for his present and he let out another load of laughs.
“You’re not bad for a honky fella. How ‘bout we be best mates from now on?” he said and spat in his hand and held it out to me. Without a moment’s hesitation I spat in my hand and shook his vigorously.
“You bet, you’re not bad for a coconut either,” I said.
Chris looked at me real serious for a minute and then his face burst into an explosion of laughter. We laughed until our sides hurt and then laughed some more.
We travelled home from the party in contented silence. Sis slept, her head on my lap and little body stretched out across the front bench seat of the van. Mum drove steadily as I looked at the stars in the sky go past and the tall grass on the side of the road swaying in the vehicle headlights.

When Dad got home we didn’t say anything about the party. Sis went to say something and I managed to give her a pinch before she could speak. I was ‘grounded’ for two days but it was worth it. She realised later and forgave me for pinching her. Things returned to normal and school began again. I looked for Chris everywhere, thinking I could hear his laugh in the hallways at school or across the field at recess.
After school I came home and found Mum sitting on the couch with a newspaper open on the floor in front of her. I could see the wet stains of her tears on the newsprint and knew something terrible had happened. She looked up at me as tears rolled down her cheeks. She sobbed quietly and patted the couch next to her.
“Come here boy,’ she said softly.
I sat down. I felt numb and cold and sick.
“Chris is dead,” she said as she held my hand. I could feel her warm wet tears on her skin.
I didn’t grasp the meaning of her words for a minute, rather by choice than a lack of understanding. I fidgeted and looked through the net curtains at the blue sky outside.
“He’s gone. He won’t be coming back,” she continued.
“How did he die,” I asked.
“He died in his sleep. There was a fire at his Grandmother’s home and he was in bed when it happened.”
Mum watched me closely, looking for signs of sorrow or grief maybe. I stood up and walked outside to the plum tree in the back yard. I thought about my eleventh birthday coming up in a few weeks and how Chris wasn’t going to be there. I felt even worse because I knew if he had been alive that Father wouldn’t have let him come anyway.
I hated my father with a rage at that moment. I wanted to be able to drive so I could get in our van and run him over when he came home from work. The feeling passed and I felt empty and very tired.
I looked up at the plum tree and noticed how empty it seemed. Mum stood at the corner of the house watching me, she moved as if to come towards me and paused. Her shoulders were slumped and she looked very tired. She called out that dinner would be ready shortly, turned and went back into the house. I started to cry and felt the bark of the plum tree’s trunk tearing at my back through my thin t-shirt. I didn’t care if it hurt and I sobbed until my back was bleeding and there were no more tears that could fall from my eyes.
I looked at the scar on my bare knee and remembered the woman in the VW. I felt an urge to go to the library and read every book there was to read, yet I couldn’t bear to go past those steps where I had first met Chris. I had to find something to do. Anything. Anything to do, except thinking or feeling or crying stupid tears for some dumb dead friend. My best friend.

New Poem - 'The Axe Effect'

to do this
requires time, motivation
ignorance, stubbornness

passion is exhumed
momentarily
for the pursuit
of blind dreams

so here it is for you
a fart in the dark
a burp in the wind
a breath under the water
blood, under the skin
pumped from the source

so come on in
the light-switch is in the dark
the wind is aggressive but dry
the water’s warm
my breath as sweet
as you want it to be
but my blood runs black
beneath the red

what i have to show you
is a mirror
cracked
smeared with blood
wiped clean by me
you will see what you want to
its appearance kept up to scratch
just for visitors
to please those
easily pleased

see the green leaves
the brown coarse bark
the slender taper of its trunk
this man-sized tree
seemingly innocuous
natural, despite propagation
& here i come with a dull axe
& when i’ve finished
i will lay my neck on the stump
& you can raise the axe.