square white world

your father and I have decided

we don’t believe there’s anything

after death

 

you don’t

go

anywhere

 

there are no beautiful fields

or singing angels

 

there’s nothing

 

you just stop

 

given over two years ago

with no room for argument

 

this was a pronouncement

typical of my parents

 

because the opposite

could be said

to be equally true

 

your father and I

believe absolutely

in life after death

 

we are looking forward

to meeting in a beautiful field

with singing angels

who will pluck their lyres

or harps

for us

 

there is an eternity

heaven exists

and you live forever

 

the lies are mere contingency

the truth is out of reach

 

the lies are mere contingency

because the truth is out of reach

 

like trying to open a letter

when half is in the mirror

 

you follow the trail with your eyes

while birds eat the remaining crumbs

 

the picture changes

the page turns

 

the two are not connected

 

you know what you said about the unexpected

expect it

 

oma was always unusual

 

my heart has streamers on it

so we may see it

drop

 

down a deep black hole

 

so that between the fiction

and fact

falls

 

delay

 

anton chekhov knew

exactly who

my mother was

 

a seagull

landed

on her head

in the front seat

of the punt

 

screaming

on the avon

 

what is left unsaid is this

 

better to stamp your golden curls

lie with sticks

the wrong end of the book

 

what did they see

the dykes at the fish and chip shop

what did they say

that made her think

 

they wanted to pick her up

 

more breast

while I’m leaning over

 

birds

she hated birds

soar

 

in a reflected sky

 

you can write about us

when we’re both dead

 

a story

half-buried in heavy sand

 

it has escaped the ravages

of truth

 

it has escaped exposure

to the light of secrets

that are told at parties

 

it has escaped

wrapped in dresses

small and simple

 

small and simple

like a twin

 

gives each

a double gravity

 

like a thing which

has been wrapped

in dresses in layers

for centuries

 

and unlike a thing

that has been handled regularly

it is not worn smooth

 

it is sharp

it catches

 

a claw

a talon

 

on the silk and lace

of every piece of fabric

 

they must have known

their lives would be loud

 

for the rocks

in its course

 

but for that

exceptional

 

monika

 

she said she got fat

on school dinners

in the fifties

 

she said

stop writing poetry

in your head

look at the road

 

she also said

wait till your father

gets home

 

how do you feel

 

I don’t feel well

 

why not

 

I don’t know

 

where is the pain

 

I don’t know

 

silence an ocean

secrecy a din

night suddenly falls

 

the choir roars sleeps

by turns

 

the ship of the world

spins and fires

 

the land offends

because it floats not

 

noise drowns

in music

 

look at that

the last drops of the mixture

 

you shake the bottle pink

unscrew the lid white

plastic

 

you take out the wand

you put your lips together

blow

 

a bubble pops

without a sound

 

it would be right

and wrong

to say

she passed away

 

she didn’t pass

she would not pass

 

and if anyone had been there

to remind her she was passing

she’d have said

 

no I’m not

 

each small perversion of the facts

doesn’t add up to one big lie

 

it speaks

a frail truth

 

how fragile

is the human heart

 

a model of negativity

a practical fiction

 

the road ends in darkness

as if darkness were only

a colour

 

I’m barking at shadows at the gate

bright sun

 

as if everywhere

a sign

 

angels

a waterspout

a flood

a black beetle

a breakdown

a slow blink

 

the night of the night

 

a week hard with happening

 

each day

a child

a light

 

each day

tauter

 

this morning a slanting blade

and movement at the gate

 

the shape of it under the skin

of these events

 

a stranger outside

or one of us who has left

 

who has just left

who hesitates at the gate

 

no room in a world with too much sense

to account for any life

 

so what was mum’s about

 

dad and us

 

but put her in a theatre or a school

and she was shockingly

capable

 

she only had to set foot on a playground

to organise some small child

 

who wouldn’t quake but connect

as if mum had access

to a special switchboard

 

and she only had to step

into a classroom

to calculate its average

intelligence

 

as well as range

and modes

 

who the bright kids

and where the slow ones were

and where the trouble-makers

 

to each she would give

her full attention

 

which is exactly what she did

at any party

 

even family gatherings

 

it was quite wearing

for friends to pass her IQ test

 

but she never had to disarm a guest

grab the knife

kick him in the balls

at home

 

as she had at work

shockingly capable

 

discriminating

in the application

of force

 

she hated housework

it was lonely

 

loved food and wine

and company

 

she pulled party food

platters of petits-fours

pâté and crackers

olives and cheeses

artichoke hearts

dolmades

 

and whole meals together

 

out of the best ingredients

 

the credo of the good

hostess

 

true until two weeks ago

 

I like a full cupboard

 

her mother put her off poetry

because granny

was the last victorian

 

insisted on recitation

by heart and banned comics

 

and grandpa never spared

the rod

 

first year college

he asked me if I was

a fag

 

I misunderstood

 

mum rebelled and all her life

put herself against

if not above

convention

 

probably why kids made

the connection

 

one look at dad

a dirty mick in a duffelcoat

wearing a goatee

was enough for her parents

 

then one look at dad

under the clock

at charing cross station

was enough

for mum

 

they didn’t live to enjoy a

happy old age together

 

but when they both had something to do

they were brilliant

 

they were brilliant at living

 

that’s not long

 

she told the specialist

when given only months

 

but you have surprised us

he said

so far

 

so

who can say

 

and once said

who can be sure

 

months passed

and on wednesday night

within the standard length

of a play

two to

two and a half hours

 

she not so much left us

as went without leaving

 

but she did do one last

extraordinary thing

 

as if to acknowledge us

but also and equally possibly

to graciously acknowledge

a grateful audience

 

to say

this is

all I am

 

she lowered her eyelids

raised them

 

a small drop

of moisture

ran from her eye

 

I didn’t see it

but it was there

 

a tear brought out

by the quietest time and also

the greatest noise in the world

 

applause

 

mum wasn’t supposed to die

right now or

at

all

 

and she was expected to fight

to the end

 

she slipped away

 

as if she’d secretly rehearsed

lying at night

in the hospital bed in her room

she called her

coffin

 

the terrible years are gone

and the years

we laughed more

than we could have believed

possible

 

I only have to look at you

to know where they are gone

 

they flit like shadows

on your face

 

they move like breath

they lift like mist

drop like rain

they pool in your eyes

 

they hide in pockets

 

look away

you will

miss them

when they’re

there

 

lying in long grass

 

the simple sky above

 

a still lake

 

every feature of the landscape

perfectly reflected

 

feeling the earth turn

and the way

time folds one

thing against the other

 

like the sky and the lake

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[for my mother

Ianthe Victoria Taylor

29/1/1939 – 15/2/2012

the service

held at Kaukapakapa Church

21/2/2012]

poetry is a muscle

what Leibniz would call an organ

it is not an Eternal Thing or Idea

although a single poem can last an eternity

poetry is part of the body

whether it is used or not

‘Style,’ said Evelyn Waugh, ‘is not just avoiding the cliché. It’s avoiding the place where you can feel the cliché is being avoided.’

– in David Hare, Obedience, Struggle & Revolt, Faber and Faber, London, 2005, p. 140

By engagement, I mean not so much an exposition, or a critique, or both, but a path that cuts across these texts, a thought that attempts to find its way through them. Needless to say, this approach might be seen as involving a certain degree of violence. Yet this may well amount to nothing other than the irreducible degree of violence involved in the work of interpretation, which remains the sole form of fidelity toward what is most thought provoking.

– Miguel de Beistegui, Truth and genesis : philosophy as differential ontology, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2004, p. 16

I once with, with Howard Brenton, wrote a play called Pravda, about a mad South African newspaper owner played by Anthony Hopkins as a kind of maquette for his subsequent Hannibal Lecter. Anxious lest our fictional proprietor be confused with a conspicuous real-life Australian, the Board of the nervous National Theatre insisted that we consult a QC. ‘Well,’ said this highly intelligent man, ‘as far as I can see, your play portrays a megalomaniac psychopath who drags his newspapers downmarket, who has no concern for editorial standards, who has no sexual pleasure except in public humiliation and violent dismissal of his staff, and whose only real interest is in the accumulation of a massive, unscrupulous and anti-social fortune for himself. If Rupert Murdoch really wants to step forward and identify himself as the hero of the play, then my advice would be: let him.’

In fact, Murdoch’s response to the play was characteristic. In Pravda, our Lambert le Roux adopts British citizenship specifically in order to be able to own British newspapers. Please not, six months after our opening night Murdoch decided to become an American, protesting that, like Lambert, he went through ‘the normal channels, albeit at unusual speed.’ Murdoch effectively treated our play not as a work of art, but as an inspirational business plan. Is Murdoch the only man on earth who could actually asset-strip a satire?

– David Hare, Obedience, Struggle & Revolt, Faber and Faber, London, 2005, pp. 127-8

if metaphysics, as a metaphysics of the ground, and of subjectivity – of subjectivity as constituting the very ground for the objectivity of objectal nature – is no longer possible, if philosophy can no longer turn to subjectivity as the transcendental site revealing the conditions of possibility of experience, and of beings as such and as a whole as a realm of objects, can it not undergo a transformation and reinvent itself, precisely out of this “crisis” of foundation? Can we not think the future of metaphysics, and the possibility of ontology, out of this very event, the event of un-grounding? And so, before proceeding with the rites of burial of philosophy, before declaring its death irreversible, and its new life as science – and, once again, that which, in the current institutional, professional, and cultural landscape, seems to testify to the good health of philosophy, in my mind only confirms the diagnosis I have just formulated – let us at least consider the possibility of a philosophy which, neither metaphysics in the sense of grounding, nor philosophy of science, nonetheless remains in relation to science, at once absolutely different from it and coextensive with it. What sort of relation would that be?

It is a relation born of this “crisis” of foundation. Yet because it is a relation, it does not coincide simply with a collapsing, whether understood as total collapse, or as a collapsing of the one (philosophy) into the other (science). Neither grounding (fondement) nor collapsing (effondrement), it is a relation of what, following Deleuze, we shall call an un-grounding (effondement). This concept is indicative of a twofold gesture, of a double possibility: the possibility of situating philosophy in relation to science anew, first of all; and, in close connection with this first possibility, the possibility of reasserting philosophy as ontology on the basis of a distinction in being between the actual, or the empirical (and the science it enables), and the virtual or transcendental horizon (which philosophy brings out) from which the former unfolds.

…

the transcendental no longer refers back to a transcendental subjectivity, but to the real as such. In effect, the transcendental no longer designates the conditions of possibility of (subjective) experience, nor the conditions of possibility of phenomena themselves. It now designates their real conditions of existence and is concerned with their actual generation and production.

…

The transcendental is therefore a dimension of the real itself.

– Miguel de Beistegui, Truth and genesis : philosophy as differential ontology, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2004, pp. 21-2

“There are, you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you’re even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on and on. Or there’s the other way: you see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is “Does it work, and how does it work?” How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through, you try another book. This second way of reading’s intensive: something comes through or it doesn’t. There’s nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. It’s like plugging in to an electric circuit…This second way of reading’s quite different from the first, because it relates a book directly to what’s Outside. A book is a little cog in much more complicated external machinery… This intensive way of reading, in contact with what’s outside the book, as a flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with books, as tearing the book into pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything. . . is reading with love.”

– Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, quoted here

“First you have to know how to admire; you have to rediscover the problems he poses, his particular machinery. It is through admiration that you will come to genuine critique… You have to work your way back to those problems which an author of genius has posed, all the way back to that which he does not say in what he says, in order to extract something that still belongs to him, though you also turn it against him. You have to be inspired, visited by the geniuses you denounce… In every modernity and every novelty, you find conformity and creativity; an insipid conformity, but also “a little new music”; something in conformity with the time, but also something untimely —separating the one from the other is the task of those who know how to love, the real destroyers and creators of our day. Good destruction requires love… You have to be able to love the insignificant, to love what goes beyond persons and individuals; you have to open yourself to encounters and find a language in the singularities that exceed individuals, a language in the individuations that exceed persons” (DI, 139-140).

– Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands, quoted here

“We are uncovering a world of pre-individual, impersonal singularities. They are not reducible to individuals or persons, nor to a sea without difference. These singularities are mobile, they break in, thieving and stealing away, alternating back and forth, like anarchy crowned, inhabiting a nomad space. There is a big difference between partitioning a fixed space among sedentary individuals according to boundaries or enclosures, and distributing singularities in an open space without enclosures or properties. The poet Ferlinghetti talks about the fourth person singular: it is that to which we try to give voice… Philosophers often have a difficult time with the history of philosophy; it’s horrible, it’s not easy to put behind you. Perhaps a good way of dealing with the problem is to substitute a kind of staging for it. Staging means that the written text is going to be illuminated by other values, non-textual values (at least in the ordinary sense): it is indeed possible to substitute for the history of philosophy a theatre of philosophy… Precisely, by virtue of those criteria of staging or collage, it seems admissible to extract from a philosophy considered conservative as a whole those singularities which are not really conservative: that is what I did for Bergsonism and its image of life, its image of liberty or mental illness.” (DI, 142-144).

– Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands, quoted here

INSAN-

ITY

 

STATE-

MENT

OF IN-

TENT

 

American scientists from Princeton University have found out how much money do I need a man for happiness.

It turned out to achieve full satisfaction from life, you need to earn 75,000 dollars a year, which amounts to 6,250 dollars a month, or about 190 thousand rubles. In this case, the excess of the threshold income is no longer adds happiness, and more positive experiences of wealthy people relate purely to their personal characteristics.

– from here

“The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture”
by Andrew Keen, Doubleday / Currency, 2007