63. Little Ones Climbing Up and Out. What Do We See? We See the End of Their World.

for old friends

Oh well, here’s a very familiar to do. Is it time to start again, work together yet again? – no. It’s like something more general & at a deeper level. Whatever it is is with old friends now. Who? Some people in particular (like Taylors & Eckersleys, Pauline, Symondsons, Dunbars/Bristows, Youngmans and all the others). I hope you will yet enjoy (that simple!) this, this whatever it is, once you’ve recovered from that that’s gone before (which may also be where we were apparently heading). Try and think of this in terms of texture, taste & aroma – rich chocolate, sweet, soggy and granular, mildly psychotropic, verging on the migrainous.

What is going on then? I’m trying to see an answer to “Do I know about human action?” Can this be, like, pinned down, or etched into definition? Is it actually this, say, or something else, entirely? What I take as given: that we are variously coloured etc, delightful & dangerous in ourselves & in our interactions. And too that we are all trapped, here in this place & situation – no! no alternative universe! – but trying, always, to fly free.

What do we need, then, here? We can draw up lists of needful things: chocolate dinosaurs and their ghosts, ten geese a-laying golden eggs, sour ale with watercress, dried & fibrous cat sick, small books about notable failures, cheap talismans to make all well, ice-cream wafers flavoured with penicillin, pearls still vibrating in their teaspoons, old dusty opened bottles of rum, just dregs really, some of it left over from Christmas.

Where will it take us to? Shall it be rich, we wish, hot and strange, a plumped up utopian fantasy? Oh boy, I could imagine that. I’ve been there. Last night I was in a room full of poets (oh, no, maybe not last night, but some night, you know). We were all mouthing revolution, clapping and cheering as if we’d just written The Tennis Court Oath, or condemned the Queen to execution. We thought we were doing well just through this shared enthusiasm, that briefly made us feel better. Sharing is good, yes, but real riots need a better start than this. I fear careers were being built, not new orderings of the world set in motion.

Don’t you think we need actually to do something completely new, not just a batch of late 60s flashbacks? “Just follow the instructions” says the guy with the loudhailer. “That’s the way to make the revolution easy.” Do you remember believing that hillbilly kings shall lead the way, shambling and laughing? Their photos stared from a thousand album covers. We thought, hey, it’s not that difficult, & to remake the world would indeed be very useful. We’re ready! Then, inexorably, it was our turn to crash up on this stony beach, stranded and spluttering. We’d come up against the hard edge of hegemony, complete with the useless but inescapable limit of our own inadequate impetus. That we objected to all this – oh, just a joke and a trope, another dumb reflux in the service of power.

The result of course a long drift through all the alternative systems – Freud & Lacan & alchemy & ley-lines & heavy theory & handwoven stuff & fucking fringe medicine. OK, it is fun, like food, wine, drink & sex, like botany on holidays – look the sea pink or thrift, Armeria! And there’s mugwort, of course, over there. But they’re both basically metaphors, because that’s just how we operate.[1] All these networks of purpose and purposelessness – you don’t need them, but you can’t shake them free, ever. We ended up writing conference reports instead of taking the action needed here.

Let’s set on from here. This luscious mess we’re in – yes, it is a fine one too – nothing for it, but, as I keep saying, cook it up & cook it on. Start with the stuff. Deal with that & work with it. What it does, you are realising. Bits are usable directly; others need more consideration, careful stirring and stewing to wherever it will all end. Then, simply, use your head and steer & support whatever works to its desired completion. Oh, this is gratuitously naive, I hear you cry. You’re right, there probably isn’t any such resolution – but we need a process predicated upon the brute things of this world, for that great & grainy category is ours.

Always another bowl to fill already – then fill it – isn’t that just it? – to take up what is needed from those with excess. Those sorts of things, the things of economy & societal organisation, the things that power actually guards – free them and share them as we like, as if they were poetry, painting, weaving, cooking, the planting of gardens everywhere. Let’s have lots of things going on & kept in play. We need to act like you do with a crowd of children – involve, develop & enlarge them so they are growing freely up into what you have assured them. Call children people & people children. Yes, late ‘60s traps still – actual, but not theoretical. Fill another bowl now!

Oh fuck! – where are we headed? More writing! More writing! How long will it take to transform? Well, all of our lives I guess. There isn’t a solution to being where we are. We will riot, sing it, therefore. Of course, what’s after is the problem. Whether we put something aside to shelter it from the storm, or hope that things will come, I can’t imagine right, but at least better. Being riotous burns books, replaces the complicated networks power maintains us by by home grown simple violence & conformity. What goes on is not clean, cool & justified – the sound of really hollow laughter comes in. This future soundtrack modulates into our diurnal rhythm – but keep that fungible, corrosive, & yet, oh yes fucking please, creative.[2]

Communism? Community politics? Communion of the Saints? Just communal. Common or mundane events. Also then, take just one. As it arrives like a rising wave. Swim it or surf it. Call it, umm, revolution, riots, payback to power, change, change at last. A lot of things will get broken. Not even not particularly, but quite heavily, poetry. Current or correct theory will not power or channel or even describe this – it is mainly (& in total[3]) just an empty legend – Charlie Marx, Big Ted Adorno, Artognou the King, Paul of Bloody Tarsus[4] - oh who can divide up their books correctly? Who wants to? Or feels it is important? In a new landscape, there will be new lives & new languages. May we live to see and say these together, healed.

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[1] Beat in each bit of ingredient carefully into the poem, so it isn’t, like, personal or individual, and it somehow objectifies the process. Clots it more likely.

[2] Uh-oh! Yes, I know it’s a word often used for dreadful things. Big Ted would hate it – but what didn’t he? Words I’ll declare as innocent as puddings. And beyond that: if you don’t welcome the birth of new things into this world, why are you reading this?

[3] OK, maybe not in some detail, at some times.

[4] Oh thy heads, thy guilty heads!

54. Now in This Place Together

Getting out of this dream of poets’ situations is both difficult & easy. Easy because their places are unreal – we’ll just wake up in cupboards, end of not very major fantasy. And difficult because the antique dominations we embrace are deep inside us, like the after effects of another Pembroke brunch. Power anywhere? I should say so – to no effect. Power is anywhere and everywhere. You imbibe its customs & pleasures with every dinner, I mean dimmer. They are meat, our meat – its excesses our flatulent dreams.

Being drunk with friends is another thing – a casual acceptance of an ad hoc community. “Our futures are not together” you feel like saying, “but here we are, now, and in this place together.” It is almost very scary how much bonds appear to dissolve with intoxication – if only we were all drunk as well all together all the time. But – well, gotcha there! – how could that work? We’d rename reality, but though language changes, power doesn’t. It blurs and confuses, kind of like this, so the world becomes all much the same, holding itself back from sharp & sober actuality. What are we talking about here? Not privilege, that ugliest thing, but how we want to enjoy the most decrepit fantasies – not much else left to us here. Look at them with that sharp gaze & luminous[1] appraisal you’ve just invoked. Enjoy!

Sometimes we do it right, OK? Not enough for it to feel right is the problem. How can this all be worked at, without falsifying the world & the language? Really, I don’t know, I’m not ready, – I try to push this out, just to see how it could be done. But how do I know what I have done is what I ought to have done – especially when engaged fully in doing this? And somehow doing it right?? Done, done, done. That’s all. Like anything else here.

Just passing, and enjoying the sun, we come to the algae on the edge of the lake, like partly washed out bloodstains. The dear old sun breeds passions, it cooks them up, and we feed it what it needs for this recipe. Turn up the gas! Things are bad today. This will last all day.

Then, please, just forget all about writing. Listen to the poets laugh. They don’t do it very often, mind – OK, it’s a stupid ploy, it’s not at all good. Mainly, really – oh shit! Some days shit, it is all really shit. Really mainly that here.

Look, yes, at lakes, at poets, at everything. Stare at the sun if you have to. Back in those days that aren’t now, we fantasise we were all in one classless class all together.[2] This is called a utopian fantasy. It’s probably a good thing. You could call this how things could be. That it is a fantasy is what makes it difficult to say this is how things must be. The lake will remain poisoned, the poets silent & stupid, everything knotted up, and the sun blinds you. There will still be a fantasy. That’s all.

You will get something out of this, I hope. It’s so much easier if I claim there really are systems that are existing out there to help us. So many books, so many followers, so many leaders for us, all of them knowing what is best to do. But here, just the mulch of people’s ordinary business, the silence from our shattered past & futures. Nothing but what is here, nothing but its inchoate but accusatory facticity.

We could talk, yeah, arrange together some sort of joining up. Riots I’m told make good occasion for this. Collective action against the patterns that control us, that’s the thing. I’ll sit down & talk on some business with Karla & Darrel, Joe & Charlie, (oh, this all memory here), Nik & Jeanette, Anna & Nick & Patrick, even with our friends the poets. Saturdays then, second of the month – right out of Liverpool St Station, past the huge rusty steel sculpture, first right past Broadgate itself, up Wilson St past the Chapel of the Opened Book, then in at The Fox, starting before 4 to meet and talk, then upstairs. At the Chapel of the Opened Book? No. Inside there is that head, thy golden head, embalmed in cedar oil, & gilt. No. Poor old Charlie Marx[3], turned here into Baphomet. And now, let’s talk, move on and act. Heal it, now.

At the heart of all we do, not authenticity, please, or theory, or genealogy, but what is actually, pragmatically, useful here and now.

There are no other people to blame – for we are other people, aren’t we? No, it doesn’t matter either whether it’s writing or rioting, whatever is done by us. But we must do it, right, now.

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[1] or do I mean luscious? Ah, the blessings of bad handwriting

[2] The search for origins at our origin – see various pieces in The English Intelligencer. Oh Man!

[3] or Ted Adorno, or G-Man Debord, or . . . , whoever it was under that jewelled iron mask.

44. Or?

Q: Why am I eating a biscuit as I write this?

A: I am not eating a biscuit, but instead travelling on a train, so this question is meaningless. Not a good start.

Q: Is that unpretentious enough for us all?

A: That I cannot answer as I cannot speak for us all – indeed our total voice is in truth silence.

Q: How far back does the memory of this poem go?

A: The memory of this poem, like all memory, lives only in the present.

Q: Can there be anything in it that will really heal?

A: There can be something in it that will really heal – if we are lucky, we shall discover it.

Q: Why do some poets write crisp, neat & decorous?

A: Some poets do not write on trains; other poets believe in writing anywhere, anyhow.

Q: Is there any truth, then, in that legend?

A: All legends are true and not true – to mislead is, after all, merely to lead to an unexpected place.

Q: How can these tangled lines help us to arrive?

A: We can only discover this by following the lines through & closely observing what is happening.

Q: Can it be that easy to write down how to cook?

A: Writing is always easier than cooking.

Q: Why are some words familiar and others shaken lines?

A: That all words are shaken lines is in fact the case – familiarity merely disguises this.

Q: Is this forming anything we can call a poem?

A: We can call anything a poem; what a poem is formed of is up to that poem.

Q: How will it all be ready when the wave is?

A: Oh, believe me, it cannot be ready either after or before the wave.

Q: Can anyone care two figs for all these words?

A: If these words give as much pleasure as two figs – then, maybe, there will be care, and someone to care etc.

Q: Why do we link the arrowed lines & the scrawled together?

A: Somewhere, all lines join up and link, though it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to find this point.

Q: Is there any escape from this gemination of left & right?

A: Interesting results can be obtained either through using a sufficiently large number of mirrors, or by turning things over onto their sides.

Q: How is any process that is worthwhile helped forward here?

A: Think of these words as staining any process, worthwhile or not; the direction of the coloured light shining through them can be called forward, if you like.

Q: Can one poem be further than any other, or ?

A: “So is the poetry that excessive language use which actually numbs you in some ways, and whose over-indulgence makes you incapable of acting more deliberately in the world? Or is it that which blows apart the excesses of a consumer society?”[1]

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[1] Andrea Brady, quoted in Scott Thurston, Talking Poetics — Dialogues in Innovative Poetry: Scott Thurston talks to Karen Mac Cormack, Jennifer Moxley, Caroline Bergvall and Andrea Bradley (Shearsman, 2011), p 122

37. The Making of the Christmas Pudding Considered as Alchemical & Political Process

1. Prima Materia: The Opening of the Work. I dedicate this, a recipe for the Christmas Pudding, to my children, their partners, and all their children – Anna, Jamie, Ianthe, Nick, Jeanette & the anyone else who is yet to come & will. The work, in other words, must be collective & shared, starting where we are but open to all chance. Upon such is based this art of poetry & of cooking, for it originates in nature, our nature, which is Culture, thence follows a natural end in a just form, through just and natural means. What these words mean, well, we shall see, yes? Take them as a proud & riddling blazon to live up to – just and natural in form, end and means.

2. OK, then, why can’t I

escape to the utopia of the pre-modern city[1]

instead of this rigid dialectic of inner & outer

                                                 fantasy?

because, first a date fast approaches

inexorable as duty, and bearing danger & ridicule

unusual for a poem or recipe

                             but

                                 we’re heading for that one day the five and twentieth (or next before Advent) Sunday after Trinity when we know we’re about to start (seriously, actively) the Great Work of Christmas. Now, we know he, the babe Jesus, wasn’t born then, but we’ll instead join our good old friends & relations in all our commonplace joy at this Natal Day of Sol Invictus[2]. We must follow, on the lines of, why not, this day’s Collect: “Stir up, we beseech thee O Lord (substituting here & elsewhere that unknown god)[3] the wills of thy faithful people that they plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works may of these be plenteously rewarded (oh surely, a good wish) through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” – celebrating yet birth in the midst of winter (like you, Anna, Jamie & Jeanette) and the real promise we must continually make to ourselves of our new life, in all its weeping & laughter, moistening dry bodies that they may Green and Grow. Amen, again. Let us go and see, then, together, the nature of the four elements, for art can produce extraordinary things out of the aforesaid natural beginnings such as nature herself would never be able to create.

3. There is a mass of stuff for this you need, of course, for the Way of the Universe is through the Inclusion of Particulars. Some of this ordinary, like the moon & the sun, but often crunching (apples? carrots? it is a diverse world full of diverse tastes!), smelling of the sun (coagulated), despite our drabness. Let’s list these – I must in fact, for this iteration requires all due process:

             110 g plain white flour

             175 g suet (vegetable etc)

             120 g slightly stale white bread

             110 g sugar (demerara or muscovado etc)

             100 g plump raisins

             50 g sultanas

             115 g various uncut candied peels

             50 g undyed etc glacé cherries

             50 g dried figs

             50 g blanched almonds

             ¼ tsp mixed spice

             ¼ tsp fresh ground nutmeg

             up to ¼ tsp mixed ground ginger & ground cloves

             ½ tsp salt

                   – and here to balance

                   there must be mercury

                   a few drops should suffice

             2 medium eggs

               in token of timely resurrection

             75 ml milk

                   – of heroines

             & good dark rum at hand

             a swart sweet solvent to unite in coition

             + a little butter just to grease the pot, set the process within clear & defined limits so that we can engage with all these material particularities clearly in motion. It will be a struggle, but we must know when we have gained what we need and seek.

4. We must talk of familiar things first, for the earth flowers and bears manifold coloured blooms and fruits, and in her interior has grown a large tree with a silver stem, stretching out to the earth’s surface. Its fruit you must grate it fiercely into crumbs. Slice up finely the peel of the fruit of the TERRA FOLIATA – bearing in mind there is no healing or salvation in the ready cut tubs of this. Halve the fruit of Health & rinse to return them to the state of grace. Then prepare, too, finally the Herb LUNATICA or BERISCA.[4] Everyone can take part to make this conjunction a common enterprise, to which all are committed & have played their part. Let everyone be excited at this stage. There can be no regret – so much can be done when all is ebullient with such potential.

5. The First Conjunction. We rise in joy, back and forth, back and forth, the red and the white, the black and the white. It is like mixing dough in one big bowl, with suet and crumb, plus sifted flour, sugar, then dried fruit and spice and salt. At last backwards & forwards, backwards & forwards. And here then the body becomes spiritual. Imagine that in another bowl you beat the eggs well and add the milk and half a glass of rum, making a black, dirty and foul smelling slime or clay. Backwards & forwards again & again! Stir the wet into the dry, adding more rum – or milk for the faint hearted – there needs always to be thought of these. If it seems not moist and dark enough, not emanating from her the most splendid perfume, surpassing all aromas, then say silently all your Christmas wishes for all this poor old world. Shall I tell you a great mystery? These wishes are this: “It is a living thing, which no more dies, but when used gives an eternal increase.” We blossom, like peacocks, like white peafowl, like deer, like flowers, which perceived rightly, perceiving and acting, uniting our opposites in one conjunctive and gentle decoction.

6. All this control & calm

– where’s it getting us to?

It isn’t fresh is the surprise. Oh god, let it all rest quietly under a bloody tea towel, in a cool place until tomorrow. Put it off, you’ll feel better – two days of pleasure? And then? Oh, stuck in the edge of a ruined forest, with the philosopher’s egg & the winged rebis itself. I think you need rage. Red and white! Red and white!

7. Nigredo. Thy head! The head, thy golden head! Familiar situation here then next – luting (as well as looting). You will need to butter a large pudding basin, giving room at the top for it all to rise again, then spoon in the dark mixture, carefully covering, note, in an adult fashion (not like worldly wantons). Lute the vessel thus: one layer greased dull white baking paper and two of luminous foil. Put in a pleat like a fine lawn shirt’s back across there, to allow for the innumerable fruit of its increase. Tie it around the basin’s rim firmly with string, and loop it across to the other side for a handle to raise up at last. Hide the head within. The body shall receive a superabundant life. This is the time, of course, of dark, quiet, murderous secrecy. There will be danger, even death, amidst these preparations.

8. Albedo. This is a perfect decoction, transferring energy to transform the arcane substance or people. At the end we shall arise. In the meantime, there is a pan[5], an old battered one in fact, and the pudding is in it, but it is a very mediated situation (with watchers on the walls around). It needs a very large pan (to stand for the world), and inside, at its bottom the trivet of faith.[6] Then fill this quite high with water and boil. When that becomes a turbulent and dangerous landscape, lower in the basin, letting the covers not be defiled with ordinary water, and get it to a steady simmer with a lid over the pan to maintain the pressure and the heat.[7] This situation needs checking and supporting, with boiling kettles, bellows, videos of the conflagration uploaded continually on YouTube etc – constant, purposive agitation is all. Keep up the watch – this is alchemy or revolution or cooking, not a game of literature. The time is real and precise: five long hours there is the pan & the pudding in it. What a situation, to throw smoke in Saturn’s face & transform this.

9. There is a minor problem. The covers will prove inadequate, will end up boiled raw. Prepare another set. Readiness is all. At five hours pull out the pudding, raised on high with fully conscious care, the decoction burst into the peacock’s tail. This is the moment of power, when the revolution transforms into triumphant carnival. Remove the old & replace with the new, like re-dressing a wound. Hence it is this combat raises upwards, or else you shall not gain by it.

10. Citrinitas. The black sun of midwinter irradiates the ruined forest. It is a slow, frigid putrefaction: a necessary process like clearing up after the carnival, organising the street committees and preparing for the completion of change. It rests there until Christmas Day. It isn’t hanging in a balance, it just requires time for the transformation to be completed, like some dormant grub or larva in a cool dry place of its choosing. We put ours outside in a woodshed next to the house, perhaps as place for food inconceivable & grotesque, unless you think again that this is also a religious or civic ritual, but not sad and ludicrous as they often are in these latter days, instead suffused with and suffusing familiar pleasures if just done correctly. The dark sun begins to gild the air as it decays at this quiet final turn.

11. Rubedo. Finally, then, your family, your feast, your fantasy – it’s here! It just needs implementing. For just two hours simmer as before, while you and the children play with your new toys. Lift out the basin, and uncover at once! No more playing! Slide a knife or palette knife around, put a large shallow dish on top and invert – for this is the feast of the time of inversion, yes?[8] Then serve the people assembled however they and you want, even as ceremonial as a true Christmas pie. They are all laughing together, jocund, familiar and rubicund.

12. “I was actually doing it. I felt alive, there’s no word to explain it. It was like that first day it happened will always be the best day of my life for ever – I swear to God.” This is so. This is how people experience a revolutionary moment or any other real action. It may not change things – but it will change us. It is more likely to be effective than alchemy, isn’t it? The only realisation attainable there is the non-attainability of that transformation – with the realisation, at this point, that the person is what is transformed. It’s a long way round, though, and its detritus of antimony & mercury, salt & sulphur, pretty destructive: the new-born sun begins to illumine the utopian city we approach – but the forest is still ashen, ruined[9]. Poetry at least doesn’t pollute – but’s probably even less likely to attain such clear and full moments. Like alchemy, it gives us a way of voicing this, and a way of voicing that it cannot be voiced. So, I’m not bothered at this point with the rules of my game, any game. There is nothing to bind me, not today. Not, sometimes, at Christmas – yes? Another little peak, just sometimes, of smaller, familiar & domestic fullnesses of body and of being. Improve and make as you wish. In all things aim at common pleasure, free exchange and full awareness. The sun that shines in the wintry sky is the red sun of transformative power. It is unconquerable, and its birth date is coming soon is what I need to tell you again now. Improve & make as you wish.[10]

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[1] We hold the Key to the City of Xian, remember?

[2] So should we not forget Jamie’s friend Trevor Wakefield and all his gang

[3] As we accept no lordship

[4] It has a red stem, spotted with black, grows easily and decays easily, and gains Citrine flowers after three days – let it be destalked & cut into 3 pieces, in honour of the dialectic

[5] Or poem

[6] Failing this, the upturned saucer of dogma – but that may break due the high energies released in the process

[7] Mary of Egypt first did this – honour her!

[8] Wherefore is this Art compared to the play of children, who when they play, turn underneath that which before was uppermost

[9] Welcome to the Anthropocene: Age of Ash and Rubble

[10] The reason why all natural things are put together in body is, that there may be a united composition.