EDITORIAL (July 2010)
Welcome to Issue Three - or should that be Twenty Four?
Three, of course, is one of the most important numbers of all. The Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, though I much prefer the Hindu Trimürti of Brahma, (The Creator) Shiva (The Destroyer) and Vishnu (The Preserver). Three is the number reconciling division, which is implicit in two. Three is also the final moment in the Hegelian dialectical triad, which, as the Synthesis, both transcends and preserves the previous two moments, the Thesis and Antithesis, but we won’t get bogged down in any of that.
So let's leave the number Three to its own devices and move on to the number Twenty-Four. As I know nothing about this number, I shall consult my ‘Bible’ - The Penguin Dictionary Of Symbols. There’s a great deal here about the Old Testament and Chronicles 24 and 25, but hey, what’s this? - the very last paragraph. “Twenty-Four is the number which often occurs in both Western and Eastern fairy-tales. ‘In this context it stands for the sum of human strength and the complete gathering of original matter. It divides into the five elements, five senses, five active organs and the five objects recognised by those active organs, to which are added, Mind, Intellect, Individuality and primordial Prakrti (precosmic primal matter).’” Well, what do you know? Ain’t that a co-incidence, given the subject of my essay below!
It’s been and come and gone already, and the end of the world isn’t nigh. Well, not yet at least. I’m talking now of the results of May’s election in Britain. I didn’t vote myself but, I must confess, I’m only glad that New Labour have gone. What a nasty, horrible, loathsome, odious, obnoxious, vile, slimy bunch of authoritarian control-freaks and chancers they were, with their 3500 new laws, not to mention Iraq. Not that I’m over the moon about the new government, but that’s a bridge we can cross when we come to it. My default position is a plague on all their houses, but right at the moment I’m savouring New Labour’s defeat.
Talking about the election, I wonder how Michael George Gibson’s The True English Poetry Party fared. This is a political party which has a definite ‘English’ nationalist agenda for poetry. English nationalism seems to me to be a rather curious phenomenon. The Scots and the Welsh have some idea of what being Scottish and Welsh is all about; their sense of identity has been forged against the background of English domination for centuries and has therefore had a long time to put down roots, grow up and establish itself. English identity, I would suggest, is something which has been recently cobbled together from the bits and pieces of “Englishness” which seem to be at hand at the moment. It has the rather quaint, Olde Worlde feel about it of St George fighting the Dragon, Morris Dancing, Beefeaters, thatched cottages, leafy country lanes and, of course, Winston Churchill’s “We shall fight them on the beaches…” speech. This apparently is what true “Englishness” consists of. But the truth is that the English have been pre-occupied with dominating others for so long that they have lost their own creative identity in the process. What do they have left apart from all these ersatz ideas about what it means to be English? You cannot forge a new cultural tradition from bits and pieces of the old. In the end you have to wait for it to emerge and the best way of doing that is to forget about it entirely and just get on with your life. Gibson believes that English poetry has to reroot itself in traditions going back 1400 years, blissfully ignorant of the fact that the most vital English language poetry of the past hundred years, beginning with Pound and Eliot, has been American, and moreover has involved attempts to break away from restrictive English methods of writing. I am not saying that we should imitate the Modernists and ‘take the baton forward’ from them. After all, poetry does not develop in such linear ways. When you set pen to paper, there are no certain precedents to guide you; you are very much out on your own. As for the idea of setting up a political party to promote certain aims in poetry, it was as if poets themselves were not to be trusted with the composition of their own poetry. In the end, it is poems which dictate to poets, not politicians, and the sooner we get that idea into our heads the better for all concerned.
Of course, it has to be said that poets also seek an audience for their work, hopefully beyond the usual self-elected cliques which infest the poetry-ghetto and also the vested interests of the mainstream publishers which prevent more vital voices emerging. Ol’ Chanty hopes to provide an alternative to all that; but, of course, it cannot do it alone; it needs people to send in their work. As an online magazine there is theoretically no limit to what it can publish beyond the practical one of respecting the attention-span of the reader. It must be admitted that paper magazines are much more comfortable to read, although I try to make up for this by using a fairly large typeface and attractive background. The online magazine also has a far larger readership than the previous paper magazine, so the potential for poets acquiring an audience and a ‘fan-base’ for their work is therefore much greater. I hope the next issue will come out on time, and of course, I will be looking for material for it as soon as this issue is published - poems, essays, short stories, novel-excerpts, quotes and whatever else it might take to make an interesting, non-ghettoised, non-academic and non-dumbed-down magazine which gets up the noses of the “panjandrums of poetry’s official line”. So send it in. The only criterion is that I have to like it. And whether or not that would ever be considered an adequate criterion for a ‘major poetry publisher’ doesn’t really concern me.
There is also a new blog with this issue. It will be on the “Blog” page. I have contributed a piece for it, but it is not meant to be just for me. Feel free to respond to the blogs or to send me work which you consider might go well on that page and I will be happy to consider it. Any 'rant' will do, just so long as it makes some intelligent points.
Finally, my apologies for not yet acquiring the nous to link the items on the contents-list with the items in the actual magazine. I am waiting for a good fairy to come and wave a wand over my computer and set these things straight for me - no pun intended! People have tried to explain to me how I should go about it, but I just don't seem to be able to connect their words with what I see in front of me on the computer-screen when I try. Once again, I offer my apologies.
CONTENTS
POEM - Alfred Gosschalk
QUOTE - Delmore Schwartz
FEATURE - Louise Landes Levi
POEM - Eliza Fisherman
POEM - Eddie Woods
QUOTE - Kain the Poet
POEMS - Peter Van Belle
QUOTE - Geoffrey Cottrell
POEMS - Lisa Mansell
QUOTE - Jorge Guillén (trans. Ben Belitt)
POEMS - Richard Livermore
QUOTE - Friedrich Nietzsche
ESSAY - Richard Livermore
POEM - Jacki Proctor
POEM-SHARDS - John Bennett
REVIEW
POEM - Alfred Gosschalk
Four Unsolicited Comments On The Nature Of Things
As usual summer lies behind, or before,
and the days predictably
unstable as the gods who
never leave us - divinities to whom
it would never occur,
assuming they were able,
to ease our discomfiture
which is seldom less than total.
Now the gulls grow frantic
the air is thick with pain— and see
how, reluctant with hectic red
and gold, the skies record the change.
One could say that dark,
deep, and very still, our dry roots lie,
awaiting any god,
indifferent, loving, or psychotic;
like amputated hands they lie.
As the error is essential to the root,
so the root is free from sin;
as the fault is in the fruit,
so the fruit is sound within;
but how fertile are satanic wishes
intent on stealing with all hands in the global till.
Four Unsolicited Comments On The Nature Of Things
As usual summer lies behind, or before,
and the days predictably
unstable as the gods who
never leave us - divinities to whom
it would never occur,
assuming they were able,
to ease our discomfiture
which is seldom less than total.
Now the gulls grow frantic
the air is thick with pain— and see
how, reluctant with hectic red
and gold, the skies record the change.
One could say that dark,
deep, and very still, our dry roots lie,
awaiting any god,
indifferent, loving, or psychotic;
like amputated hands they lie.
As the error is essential to the root,
so the root is free from sin;
as the fault is in the fruit,
so the fruit is sound within;
but how fertile are satanic wishes
intent on stealing with all hands in the global till.
QUOTE - Delmore Schwartz
“Let he who is without sin go out and get stoned.”
“Let he who is without sin go out and get stoned.”
FEATURE & POEM - Louise Landes Levi
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Those who recall Issue Twenty-One of the printed Chanticleer Magazine, will I hope remember the Chanticleer News And Views item I put at the end of the issue about an American poet who was arrested and prevented from entering Britain in order to read her poetry and play her serengi on the radio - for neither of which activities was she due to be paid. The poet in question was Louise Landes Levi and what follows this editorial introduction is her account of what happened.
It was originally intended for a friend (X), who had asked how she was. However, the writer is uncertain as to whether it was sent to X. She did not send it to anyone else at the time or even talk about it. 4 or 5 months later, some English people she had met suggested that she send the piece to The Independent, with the covering letter included here. But it was not eventually sent.
The issue here, however, is not the author, but her being shown the actual clause of the act preventing her from entering the country which basically stated that anyone from outside the EU could be arrested for saying anything if they did not have a visa ‘to exhibit’. In other words, they were not just preventing artists from exhibiting, they had actually legislated against the free speech of any non-EU visitor to this country. “Free-thinkers” were specifically included in this clause. Reading poetry in public - without a visa - was now being outlawed as such readings were considered to be free assembly without any determinate monetary gain. (If you aren't making money in Britain today, you're obviously up to no good!)
On hearing about the way this writer was treated by British Immigration, I myself tried to raise the matter in the online editions of both The Independent and The Guardian without receiving any response. In fact, The Guardian only began to take an interest in the existence of these new laws when certain writers and poets who were due to appear at the Hay Festival - sponsored by The Guardian, I believe - were barred from entering the country some 9 months later. One wonders what the commitment of these ‘liberal’ newspapers to freedom of speech really is when they are so willing to ignore the existence of laws specifically designed to prevent the free flow of ideas once they are alerted to them. But I’ll say no more about that, and go straight to the poet’s own take on what happened, beginning with her preliminary letter to The Independent.
LOUISE LANDES LEVI
March 15-18th, 2010
Pedro Gonzales, Isla Margarita, VE
Dear Independent
This is a letter I wrote to the friend who was to pick me up at Stanstead airport / scheduled to read in Café Rustique & to play on Resonance FM, both gigs, unpaid. I was detained & placed in a ‘pen’ for detainees. My crime, attempting to enter the UK w/o a visa for the performances? - a recent law about which I was totally uninformed. I was perfectly willing to forego the performances to see the friends, the letter is addressed to one of them, who was waiting for me.
Sincerely
Louise Landes Levi
ca. Sept 25 - Oct. 1st 2009
Bagnore, Gr, It
Dear X
You asked how I am - understand that their ‘interrogation’ tactics work & subsequently disorient the person submitting to them. It is a process of depersonalization difficult to describe ‘on your own day you are not believed’ - at the same time you are subject to interpersonal dialogue reserved for hard criminals, not for ‘you’, so it is difficult to reply, especially since yr. reply will be considered a falsification of whatever is ‘true’ for you.
You are carefully watching, this is yr. chance to be ‘inside’ what you know is a criminal & corrupt ‘system, of (concealed) hierarchy, deceit & subterfuge. You don’t know enough abt. legal systems to ask for a lawyer, by the time you meet w. the ‘authority' it’s after working hours anyway. You’ve never been in this situation (except as a student, w. 800 others, studying Hebrew in yr. cell – FSM, Free Speech Movement, Berkeley , Ca, 1963).
Yr. Jewish parents – wordlessly communicate to you the necessity to AVOID CONFRONTATION W. THE LAW – NOT because the law is just but because those behind it are evil (“men who flatter King Demos" B.Russell). This is an unwritten code of yr. childhood & you follow it. Years later, you’re teaching (poetry) in a maximum security jail, Upstate NY – this is one of the greatest opportunities of yr. life, as poet & performer. The only difference between those men (ca. 30 out of 3000 inmates come for yr. class, which you ask them to consider as a ‘café’) - the prison ‘poets’ (some, not all of whom are innocent) & you is the childhood code; you have been taught to avoid the mother fuckers, to stay out of the ‘hands’ of the law.
Later, you are a ‘Buddhist’ - you study a (rare, until it is taught by yr. teacher) form of ‘wisdom mind’ (W S Burroughs). Again, you are taught to obey the law of the land – for the same reason - to avoid, interruption of activity whatever it is, hopefully you are saving beings, in one way or another. But the authority does not trust you, once in their confine – they are going to fuck w. you, to the maximum, they want to disempower you. They or someone has studied, O glorious subject, the methods involved. For the next 18 hrs. You are subject to these methods. On yr. own day you are not believed.
They ‘frame’ you w. a legal code. You need a lawyer but are too traumatized to bring it up or even to understand its necessity - you have no intention of breaking the law, are being prosecuted for laws you don’t even know about & have not yet broken & you have every means at yr. disposal to avoid doing so. You are too tired to even want to break their heads - people are calling saying yr. some kind of international figure, this may or may not be true, but they have checked yr. profile on the internet. They can go through the pages of yr. work ‘on line’ & will find nothing that has to do w. violating or violence or breaking anyone’s head or their arm or their will. You are a utopian anarchist (if anything, really you are just an ignorant person who wants to be left alone - but you are against war & you know that what is going on in their interrogation cell is linked to other, vaster situations). A system of criminal (un)justice has been set in motion & you are part of it & many many innocent people are part of it. A request for an L.3 admittance fee to a poetry reading (to pay not you but the café) - to an essentially FREE ASSEMBLY is a threat but not the billions of Dollars, Pounds & Euros crossing borders & creating what we have seen is the subterfuge & covert intention of the major players - those that walk though these borders invisibly. Judith calls ‘it’ The Great Utopian Pacifist Revolution. The last time you saw Julian alive, was in London, on Haverstock Hill, in a Donut shop.
Going to the UK is a big chance for you. You live a very isolated existence. You may have lived on the road, yes, but not as a criminal, as a ‘nun’ of sorts & as a poet, translator & musician - you are a secret translator of secret texts. Some people are surprised you can use a dictionary. Maybe yr. low profile is a little too extreme, anyway you’re shy, there are not many people you can ‘talk to’, certainly NOT yr. interrogators.
The UK was a break fr. all this. You were a little nervous about it but looking forward to seeing your friends, people of real ethics & accomplishment, rare, rare anywhere for anyone. A little nervous (& w. a chronic inability to digest food at least food w. lactose or gluten) yes, your head hurt, you were vomiting on the plane. Why didn’t they offer you a wheel chair, they saw you writhing, but you made it to the immigration bureau w/o one, head in hand. You forgot the danger zone, you were too sick to meet their requirements. Later they fed you – your own special food, to avoid going too far, starving someone who is sick constitutes a higher risk than disempowering them.
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Those who recall Issue Twenty-One of the printed Chanticleer Magazine, will I hope remember the Chanticleer News And Views item I put at the end of the issue about an American poet who was arrested and prevented from entering Britain in order to read her poetry and play her serengi on the radio - for neither of which activities was she due to be paid. The poet in question was Louise Landes Levi and what follows this editorial introduction is her account of what happened.
It was originally intended for a friend (X), who had asked how she was. However, the writer is uncertain as to whether it was sent to X. She did not send it to anyone else at the time or even talk about it. 4 or 5 months later, some English people she had met suggested that she send the piece to The Independent, with the covering letter included here. But it was not eventually sent.
The issue here, however, is not the author, but her being shown the actual clause of the act preventing her from entering the country which basically stated that anyone from outside the EU could be arrested for saying anything if they did not have a visa ‘to exhibit’. In other words, they were not just preventing artists from exhibiting, they had actually legislated against the free speech of any non-EU visitor to this country. “Free-thinkers” were specifically included in this clause. Reading poetry in public - without a visa - was now being outlawed as such readings were considered to be free assembly without any determinate monetary gain. (If you aren't making money in Britain today, you're obviously up to no good!)
On hearing about the way this writer was treated by British Immigration, I myself tried to raise the matter in the online editions of both The Independent and The Guardian without receiving any response. In fact, The Guardian only began to take an interest in the existence of these new laws when certain writers and poets who were due to appear at the Hay Festival - sponsored by The Guardian, I believe - were barred from entering the country some 9 months later. One wonders what the commitment of these ‘liberal’ newspapers to freedom of speech really is when they are so willing to ignore the existence of laws specifically designed to prevent the free flow of ideas once they are alerted to them. But I’ll say no more about that, and go straight to the poet’s own take on what happened, beginning with her preliminary letter to The Independent.
LOUISE LANDES LEVI
March 15-18th, 2010
Pedro Gonzales, Isla Margarita, VE
Dear Independent
This is a letter I wrote to the friend who was to pick me up at Stanstead airport / scheduled to read in Café Rustique & to play on Resonance FM, both gigs, unpaid. I was detained & placed in a ‘pen’ for detainees. My crime, attempting to enter the UK w/o a visa for the performances? - a recent law about which I was totally uninformed. I was perfectly willing to forego the performances to see the friends, the letter is addressed to one of them, who was waiting for me.
Sincerely
Louise Landes Levi
ca. Sept 25 - Oct. 1st 2009
Bagnore, Gr, It
Dear X
You asked how I am - understand that their ‘interrogation’ tactics work & subsequently disorient the person submitting to them. It is a process of depersonalization difficult to describe ‘on your own day you are not believed’ - at the same time you are subject to interpersonal dialogue reserved for hard criminals, not for ‘you’, so it is difficult to reply, especially since yr. reply will be considered a falsification of whatever is ‘true’ for you.
You are carefully watching, this is yr. chance to be ‘inside’ what you know is a criminal & corrupt ‘system, of (concealed) hierarchy, deceit & subterfuge. You don’t know enough abt. legal systems to ask for a lawyer, by the time you meet w. the ‘authority' it’s after working hours anyway. You’ve never been in this situation (except as a student, w. 800 others, studying Hebrew in yr. cell – FSM, Free Speech Movement, Berkeley , Ca, 1963).
Yr. Jewish parents – wordlessly communicate to you the necessity to AVOID CONFRONTATION W. THE LAW – NOT because the law is just but because those behind it are evil (“men who flatter King Demos" B.Russell). This is an unwritten code of yr. childhood & you follow it. Years later, you’re teaching (poetry) in a maximum security jail, Upstate NY – this is one of the greatest opportunities of yr. life, as poet & performer. The only difference between those men (ca. 30 out of 3000 inmates come for yr. class, which you ask them to consider as a ‘café’) - the prison ‘poets’ (some, not all of whom are innocent) & you is the childhood code; you have been taught to avoid the mother fuckers, to stay out of the ‘hands’ of the law.
Later, you are a ‘Buddhist’ - you study a (rare, until it is taught by yr. teacher) form of ‘wisdom mind’ (W S Burroughs). Again, you are taught to obey the law of the land – for the same reason - to avoid, interruption of activity whatever it is, hopefully you are saving beings, in one way or another. But the authority does not trust you, once in their confine – they are going to fuck w. you, to the maximum, they want to disempower you. They or someone has studied, O glorious subject, the methods involved. For the next 18 hrs. You are subject to these methods. On yr. own day you are not believed.
They ‘frame’ you w. a legal code. You need a lawyer but are too traumatized to bring it up or even to understand its necessity - you have no intention of breaking the law, are being prosecuted for laws you don’t even know about & have not yet broken & you have every means at yr. disposal to avoid doing so. You are too tired to even want to break their heads - people are calling saying yr. some kind of international figure, this may or may not be true, but they have checked yr. profile on the internet. They can go through the pages of yr. work ‘on line’ & will find nothing that has to do w. violating or violence or breaking anyone’s head or their arm or their will. You are a utopian anarchist (if anything, really you are just an ignorant person who wants to be left alone - but you are against war & you know that what is going on in their interrogation cell is linked to other, vaster situations). A system of criminal (un)justice has been set in motion & you are part of it & many many innocent people are part of it. A request for an L.3 admittance fee to a poetry reading (to pay not you but the café) - to an essentially FREE ASSEMBLY is a threat but not the billions of Dollars, Pounds & Euros crossing borders & creating what we have seen is the subterfuge & covert intention of the major players - those that walk though these borders invisibly. Judith calls ‘it’ The Great Utopian Pacifist Revolution. The last time you saw Julian alive, was in London, on Haverstock Hill, in a Donut shop.
Going to the UK is a big chance for you. You live a very isolated existence. You may have lived on the road, yes, but not as a criminal, as a ‘nun’ of sorts & as a poet, translator & musician - you are a secret translator of secret texts. Some people are surprised you can use a dictionary. Maybe yr. low profile is a little too extreme, anyway you’re shy, there are not many people you can ‘talk to’, certainly NOT yr. interrogators.
The UK was a break fr. all this. You were a little nervous about it but looking forward to seeing your friends, people of real ethics & accomplishment, rare, rare anywhere for anyone. A little nervous (& w. a chronic inability to digest food at least food w. lactose or gluten) yes, your head hurt, you were vomiting on the plane. Why didn’t they offer you a wheel chair, they saw you writhing, but you made it to the immigration bureau w/o one, head in hand. You forgot the danger zone, you were too sick to meet their requirements. Later they fed you – your own special food, to avoid going too far, starving someone who is sick constitutes a higher risk than disempowering them.
You have studied system of deconstruction of personality & torture. You know that you are going through a light version of same. You know that if you, an innocent traveler are being subjected to such humiliation, someone else, in a detention camp not a pen (PEN) is being subjected, on a legalized level to something far worse, equally innocent just like you, of intent. You are being persecuted for something that was in yr. mind, an intention (to read or play) not for anything you have done, their case is a fiction.
You know that if what is seen (or observed) is criminalized in this way, the scene behind the scenes if far worse, at the covert & deeply concealed center of this shadow: the legalization of biological warfare, detention camps & Haarp. Were Tesler, Schonberg & Reich, appropriated for the good of mankind, for which they wished to be absolutely ? You know that if tactics used on ordinary citizens are now a front edge of a militarized persecution, that at the inner layers of this system, because EVERYTHING is systematized, categorized & subject to the hierarchy, something really heavy - even indescribable is going on.
So if you ask me how I am, I am recovering. But I am also at last following Gregory’s instruction, ‘yr. doing fine but lack discipline. You shld. be at yr. desk fr. 10am – 3pm everyday'. I had the dream 10 years ago but only now am listening, it feels good to work again. If I am going to be persecuted for something, I really should BE that something, so I am trying. & then I read Jo Anne
“Little Neural Annie was fined $65.in the Oakland Traffic court this season
for ‘driving while in a state of samadhi
You know that if what is seen (or observed) is criminalized in this way, the scene behind the scenes if far worse, at the covert & deeply concealed center of this shadow: the legalization of biological warfare, detention camps & Haarp. Were Tesler, Schonberg & Reich, appropriated for the good of mankind, for which they wished to be absolutely ? You know that if tactics used on ordinary citizens are now a front edge of a militarized persecution, that at the inner layers of this system, because EVERYTHING is systematized, categorized & subject to the hierarchy, something really heavy - even indescribable is going on.
So if you ask me how I am, I am recovering. But I am also at last following Gregory’s instruction, ‘yr. doing fine but lack discipline. You shld. be at yr. desk fr. 10am – 3pm everyday'. I had the dream 10 years ago but only now am listening, it feels good to work again. If I am going to be persecuted for something, I really should BE that something, so I am trying. & then I read Jo Anne
“Little Neural Annie was fined $65.in the Oakland Traffic court this season
for ‘driving while in a state of samadhi
Suppose I am a little out of it. I’m not harming anyone, searching for the supernal, in the time that’s left to me; everything else ‘failed’ me so to speak. Some systems allow you to create & to absolve - to purify & to exalt - all at the same time, in my itinerancy, or supposed intinerency, I am trying to do just that. But you don’t talk to your interrogator abt. the Bharatya Natya Shastra or aesthetic & erotic canons of the 12th century (in both N.W. India & S.W. Europe.) They are interested in fingerprints.
Even w/o a lawyer, you can see, that the clause they ‘nail you on is questionable. You can’t remember the exact definition of Habeas Corpus but you know it’s being abused, you studied Latin. You know when a legal clause is legislating Artists & ‘Free thinkers’ something is wrong. You know that words are not ‘objects’ to be’ exhibited’, if they were, everyone wld. have to have an exhibition’ visa because, in a certain sense, ordinary speech, at least as far as I understand it (& this is clear in my work - in their system ‘work’ is what you are paid for - if they cared to read the internet they have supposedly consulted) is part of the greater poetic. Their clause is designed to limit Freedom of Speech & to denigrate even the concept of Free Assembly. You mention this to them, politely, but it does not seem to help your cause.
Yr. time is up. You are leaving at 6.30 in the morning. Certain criminals are escorted, by the same system to their appointments, but not you. You’re being deported. A police car is waiting for the plane in Italy. You see it fr. the ramp. To your surprise, the ‘officials’ who meet you bypass it & lead you elsewhere. Eventually yr. passport is returned, NO QUESTIONS ASKED. (‘they are crazy over there. This happens every day’ – you are told). You are back to yr. mountain – but this is not a ‘memory’, something existing as a mental image – you have been violated, in a certain sense. The ‘bright lights’ have affected you - you are working to remove the effects of their interrogations, you are wondering why they finger printed you, where has your mug-shot gone?
You have not been permitted to read yr. poems, to ‘assemble’ in The Cafe Rustique in this way. You have not been permitted to play on RESONONACE FM, w. Johny Brown, your DJ friend. You cld. not see yr. friends. ‘MOST WANTED’, by whom? & for what?
Dear X, I am really sorry we did not meet. Thank you for trying to get through to me.
LLL
Even w/o a lawyer, you can see, that the clause they ‘nail you on is questionable. You can’t remember the exact definition of Habeas Corpus but you know it’s being abused, you studied Latin. You know when a legal clause is legislating Artists & ‘Free thinkers’ something is wrong. You know that words are not ‘objects’ to be’ exhibited’, if they were, everyone wld. have to have an exhibition’ visa because, in a certain sense, ordinary speech, at least as far as I understand it (& this is clear in my work - in their system ‘work’ is what you are paid for - if they cared to read the internet they have supposedly consulted) is part of the greater poetic. Their clause is designed to limit Freedom of Speech & to denigrate even the concept of Free Assembly. You mention this to them, politely, but it does not seem to help your cause.
Yr. time is up. You are leaving at 6.30 in the morning. Certain criminals are escorted, by the same system to their appointments, but not you. You’re being deported. A police car is waiting for the plane in Italy. You see it fr. the ramp. To your surprise, the ‘officials’ who meet you bypass it & lead you elsewhere. Eventually yr. passport is returned, NO QUESTIONS ASKED. (‘they are crazy over there. This happens every day’ – you are told). You are back to yr. mountain – but this is not a ‘memory’, something existing as a mental image – you have been violated, in a certain sense. The ‘bright lights’ have affected you - you are working to remove the effects of their interrogations, you are wondering why they finger printed you, where has your mug-shot gone?
You have not been permitted to read yr. poems, to ‘assemble’ in The Cafe Rustique in this way. You have not been permitted to play on RESONONACE FM, w. Johny Brown, your DJ friend. You cld. not see yr. friends. ‘MOST WANTED’, by whom? & for what?
Dear X, I am really sorry we did not meet. Thank you for trying to get through to me.
LLL
ADVICE TO TRAVELERS TO UK
1. YOU ARE A TOURIST.
2. YOU HAVE A SURE DATE OF DEPARTURE, ( IF YOU ARE AMERICAN - THAT DOESN’T EXCEED 3 MONTHS OF STAY IN THE EUROPEAN UNION ( shin li?) (Yr. date of departure fr. UK will not be respected, even if you have paid for it already - if you are suspected of wanting to hang around & go to British doctors who are probably Indian or to live covertly in the British Museum for several months, in one of the monuments, for example.
3. Say nothing abt. Performance of any sort, do not say you have been working, even essentially UNPAID work in the countries you have visited prior to entering the UK). If yr. not paid it’s not work, so if it's work it's paid, is their perspective.
4. It is less grueling to enter the UK via bus (& I presume train). It is less dog like.
1. YOU ARE A TOURIST.
2. YOU HAVE A SURE DATE OF DEPARTURE, ( IF YOU ARE AMERICAN - THAT DOESN’T EXCEED 3 MONTHS OF STAY IN THE EUROPEAN UNION ( shin li?) (Yr. date of departure fr. UK will not be respected, even if you have paid for it already - if you are suspected of wanting to hang around & go to British doctors who are probably Indian or to live covertly in the British Museum for several months, in one of the monuments, for example.
3. Say nothing abt. Performance of any sort, do not say you have been working, even essentially UNPAID work in the countries you have visited prior to entering the UK). If yr. not paid it’s not work, so if it's work it's paid, is their perspective.
4. It is less grueling to enter the UK via bus (& I presume train). It is less dog like.
even
migratory birds,
seek shelter, but where, one
night, in the arms of the night, I found
myself in a new terrain, birds were singing
but I cld. not hear them, the heavens
were veiling me, the heavens
who were to receive me,
instead descended
upon me ---
I
knew the sheltered
land was near, I called in a faint
voice, did you hear me? that night of
beginnings, that night of climax, that
night of reversal - universal,
the call, high in the
mountain,
a
single sleeping
angel, a lake of dew, somewhere
in the distance, your
name,
your
name
*
MOKUM
2010
migratory birds,
seek shelter, but where, one
night, in the arms of the night, I found
myself in a new terrain, birds were singing
but I cld. not hear them, the heavens
were veiling me, the heavens
who were to receive me,
instead descended
upon me ---
I
knew the sheltered
land was near, I called in a faint
voice, did you hear me? that night of
beginnings, that night of climax, that
night of reversal - universal,
the call, high in the
mountain,
a
single sleeping
angel, a lake of dew, somewhere
in the distance, your
name,
your
name
*
POEM - Eliza Fisherman
21 Words
I always thought poems, like lives
Need to be long.
They don’t.
Say what you need to say
And get out.
21 Words
I always thought poems, like lives
Need to be long.
They don’t.
Say what you need to say
And get out.
POEM - Eddie Woods
Insinuations
later perhaps,
when i am concentrated
in a camp wired for cold nights,
charged under raw-edged laws
by which barbed technocrats
enforce democracy,
rightly accused
of inciting private minds
to riot
and demanding
royal emancipation
of unpopular social views
(christ the anarchist
grows his own dope,
keeps pornographic magazines
on a shelf with the bible),
and you receive grave warnings
against failing to pay
party dues,
will your once-vivid love
recall
(in the valley of lost dreams,
free for awhile
of suburban brainwashing machines)
how casually you rejected
the least grain of truth
in my soon-forgotten
lyrical gestures;
then, of course,
given the intense disorder
of collective mental progress
(computerized churches
having dispensed with choirs),
it is too late
even for saying prayers:
the time for spiritual debate
was now.
QUOTE - Kain the Poet
“The Atheists have got it wrong.
It’s not that there is no God.
It’s worse than that.
We are God.
And we are the Devil.”
POEMS - Peter Van Belle
Some Songs
Some sorrow,
she’s never like the shell on my desk,
a witness to life in brittle cream,
a glass Gioconda, a tiny sphinx,
open, but dreaming within.
Some obscenity
drops from her mouth like a clump of mud
then blooms in oxblood roses
of the blouse that sheaths the silver
dagger of her evening flesh.
Some quiet nights
the love whimpers like a hurt puppy
of flower petals, elves and sharp tinsel,
humming me to sleep it slips
inside my head to make its nest.
Some hollow melody,
when early morning tolls a bell,
a secrey angelus (hers as well)
I pray deep within her rock,
the melting embers glow.
Someone
spoke too many kind words,
now her voice is like the leaves,
crumbling, brown and fleeing,
whirling round my feet.
Cathedral Spires
Accusatory fingers poking the sky
If you must, worship the masons
For these pylons of Christ
Don’d worship the god,
He brought no current.
New Prometheus
Lazy hero, chained to a desk
The fire shines deep blue
Gnaws his belly, wearing down hair
Curses the boss, swearing upstairs
Sick of city sights and delights,
Where no Herakles brings release.
Too poor to live out in the country
Bankers hold the leash
Dad rebelled, smoked dope
On the coach from The Hague
He might rebel, once mortages paid
And cancer’s unwilling to take
On evil days, he’s forced tp slay the
Urge to run from tail backed car
Stumble in a copse of oaks or birchs
And fall begging at their roots.
QUOTE - Geoffrey Cottrell
“In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.”
POEMS - Lisa Mansell
Mannequin
a scuffed dance of limbless bend
naked and mime
pornographic as napkin
faux-nylon on a the medal of stones
and rock-kinky in her slink-nip frame
a scuffed dance of limbless bend
cadence-fuck and silk-slip
spins degraded cusps of pucker
of stink-lick fame in her wrap of taffeta
a void-flesh cup of human drag
Twelfth Negative Space
the rubric drum of Beelzebub
bleats embezzled on the tympanum
irked and sap a glass-blow of stanza
curve and bevel dazzle
this is not a room
in the myrrh of electric motets
that monet and kick in the cram of idiom
a sanguine algae
grey-swirl and gruel-ancient
a gliding sallow of wail velic and wood
a sorrow of popes yellow swallow
this is not a grave
Third Negative Space
this is not a girl
a matron
lurid as age-sun crone
turkic and shriek
blaze and erasmus
a wax of squaw
plumps her gambit
a torque-plumb poppy-fed numb
womb-warm
this is not a river
red-mourn and water-tread
a rumble of raw-laden swell
that million elegiac
QUOTE - Jorge Guillén (trans. Ben Belitt)
“All that surpasses me,
Lying beyond me, sustains me.”
POEM-SEQUENCE - Richard Livermore
I Refute Them Thus
1
What if the earth went round the sun
as some people say, I mean, really went round,
doing its tour of duty each day.
Where would you find it
when you went out of your house in the morning?
There at your feet? Or up in the sky?
2
Galileo, I’m told, had no time for poetry;
neither did Darwin. They were too wrapped up
in their own little worlds, where the earth
revolved round the sun and we evolved
from the apes. Don’t get me wrong;
we probably did evolve from the apes,
but that’s not the point. Of course,
if Bishop Berkeley was right
- and who’s to say that he wasn’t -
the sun not only goes round the earth,
it doesn’t even exist.
3
It pleases me to think the sun
flies East to West and when it’s done
does battel with the Dragon-Blak.
Cut poetry a bit of slack...
because, you know;
it’s much more
what we are
than we are;
it’s what we are
before we are
when we are
and after.
4
I had no intention
of hanging around,
once Harlequin’s body
was safe in the ground;
but almost before
the parson was done,
the ground took off
and flew round the sun.
5
If as a poet I didn’t believe
that the sun revolved round the earth every day,
though I know it’s the other way round,
how could I write? It’s not what we know
but what we perceive goes into a poem;
that’s what determines what revolves around what.
6
The earth revolves round the sun, does it not?
That’s what they say; that’s what they’ve tried
to sell us for hundreds of years
- while turning the world into cogs
driving cogs, downgrading us all
to links in their great chain of doing.
7
To confirm that the earth revolved round the sun,
instead of the other way round,
I’d have to travel outside of myself
- where people come and go as they please
and sometimes even make me their home -
to icy regions remote from myself,
and if I did that, I would die.
8
The first high gods
- by which I mean
the first to get
above themselves
and relegate
our Mother-God,
to the status
of an orbiter -
were gods of war
enslaving us
and the sun was
their chariot.
9
So, now that the earth goes round the sun
- which it did not do in the past -
what can we do to restart the sun
and make it go back round the earth?
Well, counter the earth’s revolutions for one
and ban its wayward jaunt round the sun.
QUOTE - Friedrich Nietzsche
"Madness is rare in individuals - but in large groups, parties, and nations, it is the rule."
ESSAY
SOME RANDOM THOUGHTS ON PURUSA AND PRAKRTI
Richard Livermore
“I am silver and exact. I have no pre-conceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful,
The eye of a little god."
Mirror - Sylvia Plath.
The idea of Purusa and Prakrti formulated by the Samkhya school of Hindu thought has come to fascinate me of late, especially for the light it might throw on how poems and other works of art are created. Of course, as I explain in this piece, the sources of creative activity are mysterious, because what we are dealing with are not exactly conscious processes of the mind. But what needs to be explained is why the sources of creative activity are so mysterious and why they will never be anything but. A look at these Hindu concepts might help us understand why.
As I see it, Purusa is pure consciousness, consciousness as witness, and also contentless consciousness, the vacant ground of mental activity. Prakrti is Primal Matter. The Upanishads speak of two birds sitting in a tree, “the one eats the fruits thereof and the other looks on in silence.” I would hazard that the one who eats the fruits thereof is Prakrti, while the silent one is Purusa. I listened to a poem recently about a ship-wreak in which the poet spoke of a quite common occurrence in this situation - namely that of suddenly coming to see oneself as someone else going through motions of trying to save oneself from drowning and feeling completely indifferent to it. A variation of this experience, which I often had while teaching English in Spain, is standing back and watching yourself teach as if you were an actor performing a role. The silent bird in the tree, in other words, watching the one eating the fruits thereof and passively keeping its counsel.
But to confuse us, of course, Prakrti is very much more than matter as we in the West understand it; it also consists of thoughts and ideas, plus the images and dreams which are said to be mental, but are really part of the fluctuating Mind-Body complex. (There is no suggestion here of a subject confronting an object, as you find in so much Western philosophy, for both subject and object belong to the realm of Prakrti.) In the Samkhya school of Indian thought they talk in terms of the three gunas, or intertwining strands of this Mind-Body complex, consisting of a) the subtle matter of pure thought (sattva), b) the kinetic matter of energy and movement (rajas) and c) the reified matter of inertia (tamas). However, so as not to complicate my argument with these distinctions, all that will concern me in this essay will be the relationship between Purusa who is passive and male and Prakrti who is active and female. (After all, Prakrti seduces Purusa.)
That Purusa is passive and Prakrti is active may be a difficult to notion for a Westerner to grasp, because we in the West have tended to regard things which are ‘spiritual’ as active - and therefore male - and things which are ‘material’ as passive - and therefore female. However, from a purely phenomenological point of view, it might begin to make sense if we think of Purusa and Prakrti as the passive and the active components of perception, the first involving the unintentional noticing of things which come within your field of awareness and the second the intentional organising of what you have noticed. This intentional organising of what you have noticed, of course, involves the phenomenon of will which is absent from Purusa. These two components of perception would constitute two different ‘moments’ of the same act of perception, like seeing and looking. (Husserl, I believe, saw intentionality in all acts of perception. He thus placed the Ego at the centre of his Phenomenology when, in truth, the Ego is a function of Prakrti of which Purusa is entirely free.) One’s Purusa self, in effect, does the seeing for one’s Prakrti self, while one’s Prakrti self does the looking - and also interpreting -for one’s Purusa self. Of course, it goes without saying that, for Purusa, seeing is more than something you do with your eyes. After all, one might as easily contrast hearing and listening, feeling and touching, involuntary recollection and voluntary recall, ideas which just occur to us and those which are a product of ratiocination, and so on and so forth.
If we have two selves, one passive, one active, it is perhaps because we have a Primary Self and a Secondary Self. The Secondary Self would be that self attuned to the 4-dimensional universe in which we reside and in which we make decisions which affect our residence in it. This Secondary Self, we could call our empirical self, a self turned outwards towards the world. The source of the Secondary Self is the Primary Self, but it is necessarily ‘cut off’ from the Primary Self, for if it were not, it would be at a great disadvantage in the day to day struggle for survival. It has to take an absorbing interest in the world around it if it is to function as it should. Yet this, though normally an advantage to it, is sometimes a disadvantage, especially when what is required is a new mode of thinking or way of responding to things. Then it needs the more disinterested perspective of the Primary Self, because too much immersion in familiar things and concerns, in what I call an unreconstructed Prakrti, can leave it unable to deal with any new eventualities which must inevitably arise in an unpredictable world. This is why an art which challenges our familiar perspectives, an art which is informed by Purusa rather than Prakrti is, though all too often unwelcome, necessary to our future survival.
There is no other way of describing the Primary (or Purusa) Self than as the self outside time. (“Outside time” should not be confused with “eternal”, in the sense of “time without end”.) Its disinterestedness comes from the fact that it is in its essence unaffected by any decisions taken by the Secondary (or Prakrti) Self. It stands above the Secondary Self and what happens to it. It can throw light on the Secondary Self’s choices in the world, but it does not interfere with its decision-making processes. Decision-making is entirely the business of the Secondary Self. We often need such a higher vantage point from which to view reality. We often need to be able to stand back from ourselves. As we get older, we are said to get wiser. Getting wiser to me means assimilating more and more of Purusa into our judgements, standing back from ourselves, being driven less by our immediate impulses and desires. It seems to me that one normally has less of a Purusa self when one is younger and more of a Prakrti self for the simple reason that the world seems to lie at your feet and you want to conquer it. Your Prakrti self seduces your Purusa self into going along with it and keeping its mouth shut - which is its nature anyway. The wise don’t intervene to stop fools making fools of themselves. They just let things unravel. Likewise, one’s Purusa self in relation to one’s Prakrti self doesn’t intervene either.
Looking at the question of Purusa and Prakrti, or the Primary and Secondary Self from a completely different angle, recent experiments appear to show that there is a lapse of half a second between brain-activity and the emergence of a conscious intention to do something - such as wiggle a finger. It would be churlish I think to dispute the results of these experiments or ask how such results can be verified, since I assume that the experimenters have ways and means of doing that for themselves. However, it would not be churlish to ask the philosophical rather than scientific question concerning what the results of such experiments actually prove. Do they prove, for example, that the conscious intention to wiggle a finger originated in the brain itself - in its mindless depths, as it were - and took half a second to emerge as a conscious intention? Such a notion surely begs far more questions than it can possibly answer. For example, how can a conscious intention be the result of purely material processes going on in the brain? How does one morph into the other, considering that there seems to be such a huge ontological gap for it to jump? (Of course, we leave out of this equation the possibility that “mind” and “brain” are ultimately two sides of the same coin, like the wave-particle duality in Quantum Mechanics.) Or do they prove no more than that it took the brain half a second to process information which originated outside of it - if “outside” in this context has any meaning? In other words, is it not possible that brains are no more than highly elaborate computers which enable us to process information and present it in a language we can understand and act on? (I’m using the word “computer” here in a metaphorical sense, of course.) If this is the case, then what is it that sets off the brain-activity which processes the subsequent conscious activity?
It is here that the distinction between the Primary Self (Purusa) and the Secondary Self (Prakrti) might come in handy. The Primary Self, as I have suggested, is a self outside time, while the Secondary Self is a self which has to function within the framework of time and the space-time co-ordinates of the world it inhabits. May we not say, therefore, that it is the Primary Self which produces the impulse to think and act and it is that impulse which stimulates the brain to spring into action, process it and present it in a language or idiom which will enable the Secondary Self to make sense of it and act on it half a second later? Of course, this raises the question of how something outside of time may enter time as an impulse which stimulates the brain to produce conscious activity. Perhaps we might have recourse to quantum-mechanics to help us out here. After all, it is on the quantum-mechanical level that space-time breaks down and the usual ‘laws’ of cause and effect, which require contiguity in space and succession in time to operate in, are no longer valid. It may well be that here is the interface between the timeless realm of the Primary Self and the temporal realm of the Secondary Self and here also that the original impulse to think and act emerges which stimulates the brain to process it and translate it into terms which our Secondary Selves can interpret and act on.
This, of course, has implications for creativity and the writing of poetry, which I believe involves both the Purusa and Prakrti poles of perception. The impulse to write, based on the emergence of connections which have inadvertently occurred to one suggests the presence of Purusa in the process. However, writing uses words, which have a definite historical provenance and that, of course, suggests the involvement of Prakrti. It also involves Prakrti where the question of technique is concerned. Certain quantifiable aspects of poetry signify the extent to which a poem runs like a machine, according to certain mechanical principles and this, of course, is where Prakrti comes into the picture. However, although we can determine the ‘rules’ in particular instances, such rules cannot be generalised and imposed on poetry as a whole. A poem written by Gregory Corso, for example, is not the same beast as a poem written by W. H. Auden, and different rules must apply to both because a poem in its inspiration belongs to the realm of Purusa rather than Prakrti. What happens in the half a second between the inspiration - or pre-conscious impulse - and the conscious act of writing the poem is not for me to say. Our conscious intentions are always half a second behind our aboriginal impulses - whether these impulses emanate from the brain as a result of electrical-chemical activity or whether they emerge from our Primary Selves - and are then processed by the brain to materialise as conscious thoughts or other forms of behaviour - as I have suggested happens.
The poem, therefore, is a result of the interaction between our Primary Selves and our Secondary Selves, between Purusa and Prakrti. We cannot say any more about it than that. We could, perhaps, say something about Prakrti’s role in the process, but not Purusa’s, because what is happening at that stage is pre-verbal and therefore evades a verbal account of its workings. For this reason, creativity will always remain a mystery. No poet has ever given a satisfactory account of how a poem emerges, and so it should not be surprising if I cannot either.
Finally, back to Purusa and Prakrti. In the Sankya tradition, the duality which Purusa and Prakrti express is a metaphysical one - a form of dualism. I cannot see it that way. Purusa to me is simply aboriginal consciousness, consciousness without content, consciousness as witness, always there as the background of every perception, but never intruding itself. Prakrti, on the other hand, exists in the realm where that which is perceived by Purusa is organised and given form. As we have seen, Purusa is passive and Prakrti is active. Prakrti is the force doing the organising, the demiurgic power, as it were, which, when it works entirely by its own lights, works blindly, but when it works hand in hand with Purusa does not. When it works blindly, it can only work to an established pattern which has been laid down in the past, but when it works hand in hand with Purusa it can start to make new connections which only Purusa perceives. In other words, Purusa is its ‘eyes’. Only Prakrti has executive powers, however; only Prakrti decides. The difference between them could be likened to that between the Gnostic God and the Demiurge. The Gnostic God sees all, but can do nothing; the Demiurge does all, but can see nothing. They therefore need one another to make a world work as it should. However, more often than not, the Demiurge deludes itself that it can see without the Gnostic God, and thus blindly propels itself along the same old familiar grooves and patterns of activity. I say “could be likened to” because we are not talking literally about the Gnostic God and the Demiurge, but Purusa and Prakrti and, through them, what it takes for poets themselves to create.
POEM - Jacki Proctor
Books
Other people collected books, chose
only atlases or architecture, nosed
through the catalogues: finding
the missing volume and the rarest binding.
Our books accumulated like
matted hairs and dust beneath the bed; like
dried out leaves gathering along the side
of gardens; the jetsam thrown down by a tide.
Still, our bookcases were ace and no-one else
had faced mahogany lining to three walls
sucking in the mass editions, metre after metre,
turning the Self-Educator into a storage heater.
We sold the shelves and now I sift
through the hairs for plastic combs; lift
up the leaves to find the wintering snails;
refind our treasures washed up by those gales.
Wearing blue rubber gloves, against the dust-mite shite,
peering at publishers and titles, with my failing sight
straining for dates, I sort and pack our dross
and try to put a value on it, which might represent our loss.
Sorting out by size, by subject, by their state:
the Forties novels, the course books, year books out of date.
Separating wood from trees, I uncover our collections:
the Irish books, photography, the poetry selection,
mathematics, Left Book Club . . . It's not that we didn't collect,
just, we collected everything and could never recollect
where it was that our interests lay when we were buying books,
was it the subject, the author, the paper, bindings, looks?
It was books: books, books, books, books . . .
POEM-SHARDS - John Bennett
Instruction ToThose
Unfortunate Enuf
To Make It Into
Their Twilight Years.
one
Stay
out of
nursing homes.
two
Don't be
afraid to
go off in
the woods to
die alone.
three
Don't trust
your children.
four
Don't repent
your sins.
five
Embrace the
unknown it's
all you
have left.
REVIEW
White Fungus, Issue 11 (Biannual) 128 pp
Subscription costs - US$40 for four issues. This includes postage.
White Fungus, Room 3, Floor 16, No. 566 – 13, Sec. 2, Wunsin Road,
Situn District, Taichung City407, Taiwan
email - editor@whitefungus.com
website www.whitefungus.com
Most poetry magazines in Britain today have the feel of the ghetto about them. They are about poetry and not much besides. Even their critical practice is all about poetry. You wouldn’t think, reading many of them, that we live in a wider more volatile world which of necessity impacts on poets and poetry. It was not always the case. There were plenty of against the grain magazines in the 60s and 70s. One of the joys of browsing the New York bookshops in the late 70s and early 80s was the plethora of such magazines to be found there. In the mid-80s, Margin appeared in Britain edited by Robin Magowan and Walter Perrie, and did a pretty good job of making up for the shortfall at the time, but it died a death, I think, before the 90s were on us. And there hasn’t really been anything like it since. So I think we should welcome White Fungus as an arts, music and poetry magazine with a decidedly political drift.
Of course, one other great difference between now and the 60s, 70s and 80s is that, thanks to the internet, we live in a much more globalised world. We can no longer stick to our own tribal patch, but must start to take in what’s emerging in different parts of the world if we are not to find ourselves stuck in some cultural backwater. White Fungus is based in Taiwan, though it seems to have a strong New Zealand connection as well. So let’s just say that it covers what’s happening on ‘the other side of the world’ - in politics, the arts, music, poetry et cetera, and lifts the lid on things we rarely hear about here.
While reading through White Fungus, I tried to get a feel for the basic philosophy behind it. I don’t know if I succeeded, but I think I did discover a coherent position - ‘post-modernist’ to a certain extent-- the word “hyperreality” crops up here and there-- but with a lot more direction than one usually expects from ‘post-modernist’ discourse. The key perhaps lies in the piece by Walter Benjamin, On The Concept Of History, in which Benjamin discusses the difference between Historicism and Historical Materialism, concepts which might seem somewhat blurred, especially to readers of Popper. So here is how Benjamin sees it. Historicism is linear and is a philosophy adopted by vulgar Marxists who view ‘History’ in terms of linear progression from the past into the present and future. Historical Materialism, on the other hand, is concerned primarily with the present, and with the past and the future only in as far as they directly feed into the present. There is no linear progression here. History is what we make it in the here and now, although, to paraphrase Marx, in circumstances not of our choosing. The main thing seems to be the importance of what’s happening today in both politics and the arts and the magazine certainly tries to live up to this ideal.
It opens with an editorial about “Brand Obama” and the reluctance of ‘liberals’ in America to criticise his continuation of Corporate America’s agenda - especially in terms of foreign policy. The Editorial gives us a very good idea of the magazines political stance, as does the very first essay about the Neo-Liberal economic policy pursued by New Zealand’s Labour Party since 1984, The Kind Of Socialism Millionaires Approve Of. While reading it, I thought to myself, “So this is where Blair got his ideas from.” We have so much to thank the New Zealand Finance Minister and former accountant, Roger Douglas for; he was clearly a ‘genius’. I just hope that he hasn’t bored the New Zealand public with talk of his ‘legacy’ - like his British disciple.
Most of the magazine however is devoted to the arts and music and features articles on, or interviews with, artists and musicians from China, Taiwan, Japan and New Zealand. The piece on the rock and avant-garde music scene in China is especially interesting. It is enthusiastic about developments taking place in China, but not uncritical, since it does recognise that the Cultural Revolution had a devastating impact on cultural life in China. The destruction, for example, of living traditions meant that artists and musicians had to start all over again, often at the expense of the quality of their own work. However, these things are beginning to sort themselves out and China now looks like a very exciting place for artists and musicians to work in.
The final two items by Juan Santos, For The Earth To Live, Capitalism Must Die and Celebrating Collapse are also worth the encounter, though I tend to be more critical about them. They appear to be excerpts from a longer work (or longer works) and are apocalyptic in nature. They make for very scary reading about the state of the planet and capitalist generated “ecocide”. For instance: “If he (James Lovelock) ’s right, most of us are going to die, about 95% of humanity, by 2100. The heartbreak that’s coming in unimaginable.” However, Santos draws rather different - less knee-jerk authoritarian - conclusions than Lovelock, who appears to advocate some kind of global dictatorship as a way of overcoming these problems. Santos, since he appears to recognise that the state is part of the problem, probably would not agree with Lovelock’s solution. His philosophy seems to be “bring it on”, we’re all going to die anyway. The collapse of city-based civilisation will be a good thing for nature and human community. What will emerge out of it will be a new culture and more authentic way of living. Well, I’m not so sure. Such a collapse might benefit the privileged more than anyone else and lead to a dog eat dog scramble for survival in which those more strategically placed will have the advantage, especially if we haven’t by then overcome our reflexive respect for power and ‘authority’. On the other hand, as Santos suggests in the case of hurricanes, the collapse of state-functions have in the past led to people coming together and creating alternative methods of administration and collective self-help. Volin in his book on the anarchists of the Russian Revolution, The Unknown Revolution, deals with just such forms of self-organisation arising out of the collapse of the Tsarist state. So I am not willing to dismiss Santos completely here. I also think he scapegoats the city rather too much by saying that the roots of the problem lie in the city and ‘civilisation’. There have been urban cultures and civilisations which have apparently done without states. The cities of the Indus Valley, for example, those of the Harappan culture, which came into being a few thousand years ago, were trading centres and little more. Their form of political organisation appears to have been a complex system of cheiftainship, not a militarised state. Moreover, they did not dominate the surrounding countryside, in the way Santos suggests cities must. They seemed to have emerged spontaneously to answer the needs of the countryside and dissolved themselves back into the surrounding countryside equally spontaneously once there was no further need for them. It therefore seems to be quite possible to make the case that cities can exist without such forms of domination and exploitation. For that reason I find Santos’s arguments just a little too pat and schematic. Nonetheless, he raises some very important questions and therefore can’t be too lightly dismissed.
In addition to the articles and interviews, there is some very good art tucked away in its pages, a comic titled The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Dr Tom Bollinger, an intriguing poem by the 7 year old Peggy Chang from Taiwan called Here is my circus, an experimental prose-poem in two parts called Global Blues by McArthur Gunter, plus a fascinating supplementary disk consisting of a compilation of avant-garde and experimental music off New York record label Pogus Productions. All this makes White Fungus an extremely interesting and worthwhile magazine - and very good value for money to boot. Now all we need is a magazine like it in this neck of the woods.
NB. White Fungus is distributed by Disticor in the US and Canada, MOTTO in Switzerland and Germany, and Mediabus in Korea. White Fungus is also in the collections of libraries around the world including: The Museum of Modern Art (New York), Wisconsin University Library, The Southbank Centre (London), Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Spain), National Library of Australia and Te Papa (National Museum of New Zealand).
