walkingtalkingwriting

Where is the Empire these Days? DIALOGUE (mmj)

Beginning: a  ‘Pastoral’ by Giannina Braschi from…

El imperio de los sueños / Empire of Dreams (2011)

Yo hago la afirmación. Yo hago la exclamación. Yo soy la inquisición de los recuerdos. Y me aburren los puntos y las comas. Me aburre la duda. Y sobre todo la memoria. Me aburren los recuerdos y he llegado a la cima del mundo para quemarlos. En este libro están mis recuerdos. Escúchenme damas y caballeros. Éste es el funeral de los recuerdos. Éste es su cementerio. Y éstas son sus honras fúnebres. No los adoro ni les tengo ningún respeto. No le pertenecen a nadie. No le pertenecen a la tumba. Y ni siquiera le pertenecen al recuerdo. Ya todos han visto las quimeras rojas y las quimeras negras. Han visto las borracheras y los banquetes. Y después ha llegado la resaca del recuerdo y ha arrasado con la vida. La muerte se llama recuerdo. Y el tiempo también. Y también los malditos recogedores de basura. Me refiero a los pastores del recuerdo. Y los recuerdos son sombra. Y los recuerdos son muerte. Yo no soy un recuerdo. Yo no soy un arsenal de epítetos ni de metáforas. Yo soy la estrella y la estrella alumbra. Soy afirmación. Y no quiero conceptos. No quiero abstracciones. No, No, No, y No. No soy punto y coma. Quiero punto y aparte. Quiero acabarlo todo de una vez. Sin arrepentimientos. Sin recuerdos.

Escúchenme damas y caballeros. Escuchen el sermón de los recuerdos y de las lamentaciones. Escuchen el infierno. Por qué no hice lo que debí haber hecho. Estoy arrepentido. He pecado. Tengo recuerdos. Y tormentos. Me estoy quemando en el fuego de los recuerdos. Por qué no me habré quedado quieto. Por qué habré hecho aquello. Yo me arrepiento mil veces. Por qué te traicioné y por qué te recuerdo. Ay, y cuánto dolor y cuánta pena. Ay, y te dejé plantado en la calle. Escúchen a los recuerdos. Escúchenlos de nuevo. Por qué te tracioné. Por qué te fuiste y me olvidaste. Y me lamento y te recuerdo. Escuchen la telenovela de las seis y escuchen al recuerdo. Ay, y ahora qué me queda. Me quedan los apartes y los monólogos y los recuerdos. Me quedan las sombras. Me quedan las memorias. Yo no quiero monólogos ni lamentos ni apartes. Yo soy un pájaro que canta. Yo soy un niño. Yo soy el ruiseñor. Qué saben el invierno o el otoño o la primavera o el verano del recuerdo. No saben nada del recuerdo. Saben que pasan y que vuelven. Saben que son estaciones. Saben que son el tiempo. Y saben afirmarse. Y saben imponerse. Y saben sostenerse. Qué sabe el otoño del verano. Qué lamentaciones tienen las estaciones. Ninguna odia. Ninguna ama. Y pasan.

I make the affirmation. I make the exclamation. I am the inquisition of memories. And I am bored by semicolons. I am bored by doubt. And above all, by memory. I am bored by memories and have reached the top of the world to burn them. My memories are in this book. Listen to me, ladies and gentlemen. This is the funeral of memories. This is their cemetery. This is their service. I don’t worship them or respect them in any way. They belong to no one. They don’t belong to the grave. They don’t even belong to memory. You’ve all seen the red chimeras and the black chimeras. And you’ve seen the drunkenness and the banquets. And then the remains of memories came and cleared away life. Death is called memory. And so is time. And so are the damned garbage collectors. I mean the shepherds of memory. And memories are shadows. And memories are death. I am not a memory. I am not an arsenal of epithets or metaphors. I am the star, and the star shines. I am affirmation. And I do not want concepts. I do not want abstractions. No, no, no, and no. I am not a semicolon. I want a period and a paragraph. I want to end it all, once and for all. Without any regrets. Without memory.

Listen to me, ladies and gentlemen. Listen to the sermon of memories and sorrows. Listen to hell. Why didn’t I do what I should have done. I repent. I have sinned. I have memories. And torments. I am burning in the flames of memories. Why didn’t I keep quiet? Why did I do that? I repent a thousand times. Why did I betray you, and why do I remember you? Oh woe, woe’s me! Oh, and I left you standing in the street. Listen to memories. Listen to them again. Why did I betray you? Why did you leave and forget me? And I grieve and remember you. And the worst were my tears. And the worst was remembering you. Listen to the soap opera and listen to memory. Oh! Now what’s left for me! Just monologues, soliloquies, and memories. I’m left with shadows. I’m left with memories. I don’t want monologues or sorrows or soliloquies. I am a singing bird. I am a child. I am the nightingale. What does winter or autumn or spring or summer know of memory? They know nothing of memory. They know that seasons pass and return. They know that they are seasons. That they are time. And they know how to affirm themselves. And they know how to impose themselves. And they know how to maintain themselves. What does autumn know of summer? What sorrows do seasons have? None hate. None love. They just pass.

Evita and Massimo (ak)

Here are two star-crossed lovers awaiting the ”next” resurrection amidst the silence of the disappeared. Massimo, he looks rather like Max Wall on a bad night, shuffles on to the stage: where is she? he demands of the audience. Only to be met by a wall of silence. Not like the roar of the crowd in the packed velodrome as Queen Vic trounces her old rival, Anna of the bright yellow skinsuit. With supreme effort bodies can be made to disappear; we can lose them in the vastness of the Atacama desert, drop them into the ocean. With supreme effort bodies can be trained to seemingly impossible levels of performance.

    How amazing it is that my mind can (with a few wobbles) travel from Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia for the Light to scenes from the London Olympics. It is remarkable how the human frame can tolerate such extremities. The women who continue their search in the Atacama desert for their loved ones’ remains, fragments of bone, in the shadow, so to speak, of the telescopes ranged at the heavens, peering into the origins of the universe, attempting to tear the veils that hide reality. The women insisting on their right to remember what Pinochet’s regime attempted to obliterate. I can’t help remembering that Pinochet was a great hero for Madame Thatcher, who similarly wanted to dispatch socialism to the grave, to leave not a trace . . . but just look at the monster she gave birth to.

    But the miracle, one might say, out of all that corporate world of bottomless corruption, rises the Olympics, helped on its way by the amazing Danny Boyle's Opening Ceremony. Yes, one can feel a certain sympathy with Iain Sinclair’s unwavering antipathy to the Games, to what he described (on Channel 4 News) as their hallucinatory delusion imposed on us, but there are these amazing women and men who with single minded dedication are arousing heights and lows of emotional connection as we weep in our cornflakes.

    Meanwhile Massimo and his puppet Evita, a bag of bones, it’s true, but here they are singing a Neapolitan love song, to the rather poor accompanying scrapings of a violin and yet another old man playing the spoons. This is the sort of resurrection we can manage. At least Massimo looks happy enough, transformed as he is by the words he sings, the gaunt flesh of his face almost transfigured. Actually it’s not bad for an old man. Let’s give him a round of applause; perhaps even invite him to join us for supper. Hopefully not the last supper.

 

The Necessity for Us to Wait for Ourselves - DIALOGUE (mmj)

From - Being and Nothingness. Jean-Paul Sartre, tr P 558:

"...It is necessary to consider our life being made up not only of waitings, but of waitings which themselves wait for waitings"

From - Satantango. Laszlo Krasznahorkai, tr P 147:

"...conscious that they'd be arriving soon and then it would be "all" over. Waiting, waiting, nothing but waiting, he fretted, then leapt to his feet because he remembered that he had put the croissants back on the shelf without covering them in cellophane" 

Back of the pampas - ARCHIVE (mmj)

An honourable story: a little over 60 years ago on 26th July the incorruptible body of Eva Peron breathed its last.

Her body was embalmed, and it is said that over two million mourners filed past her open coffin in the Hall of Memory Hall of the city of Buenos Aires during the following weeks to pay their last respects to the wife of the Popular Front president Juan Peron. It was not so much a lying in state, as a rite of passage or elevation to a zone of "contagious fiction and contested fact". *

For instance, it is known that her body was then placed in one of the city cemetries in a specially constructed mausoleum intended for her final resting place and place of popular remembrance. However, three years later a popular rising lead by church and army forced Juan Peron out of office. He had recently legalised both divorce and prostitution in Argentina, and for many this was a disgrace too far. During the coup d’etat Evita’s tomb was broken into and her body disappeared. Not the end of the story, but a new beginning, instead of efficiently disposing of her body in the Rio Plata, the security men who had taken her had strict orders from their superiors to guard her carefully and see that she came to no harm. This required them taking her from secret location to secret location; sometimes the body was left in its coffin in a van at an anonymous street corner; sometimes she lodged in the offices of a senior member of the security forces; sometimes she lay in a damp cellar. The fact was that wherever she went word seemed travel with her, and soon after flowers and lighted candles would mysteriously appear on the nearby pavements, and so she had to move on.

Eventually, with the approval of the Vatican, she was secretly flown to Italy and buried in Milan under the name "Maria Maggi". A government decree under president Aramburu, an ex-general who had helped lead the 1955 coup, also prohibited all mention of either Juan Peron or Evita. But word continued to be carried on people’s lips, and so it was in the 1960’s that Evita was claimed the protectress of the revolutionary leftist Montoneros movement, who in 1970 succeeding in kidnapping president Aramburu himself. He was killed shortly thereafter, but his body was hidden as a provocation and act of revenge for the disappearance of Evita.

The Argentina military finally admitted their shameful deception concerning Evita’s body in 1971 enabling the later release of the body of Aramburu. Honour satisfied, she was exhumed and flown to Madrid where Juan Peron was living in exile. There Isobel, Peron’s third wife, agreed with her husband that Evita should be kept in their apartment dining room next to their dining room table. Peron himself returned to Argentina as president in 1973 but died two years later and was succeeded by Isobel. It was she who arranged the burial of Evita with her husband, but not before the Montoneros had also re-enacted their kidnapping of Aramburu by again stealing his body from his grave in 1974.

Honour again satisfied with the supporters and family of Aramburu, Evita now lies in a new tomb in Buenos Aires with her husband. Such is the massive underground concrete construction and the two sets of reinforced doors that it is said it would outlast a nuclear bomb drop on the city. It is from the room below ground that, when honour requires it, she awaits her next resurrection.

*"Contagious fiction and contested fact"
The phrase comes from the recent LRB review of A Book of A Journey to a Room by Geoff Dyer.

Questions? (ak)

On board the Dreamboat there were puzzles to be examined. Such as, who is Massimo?  Such as, why would anybody think that I might be his friend? And if I was what would it mean? And more importantly, would it be dangerous?

    Not that my potential interrogator hung around long enough for me to reply.

    Out beyond the harbour walls the Dreamboat encountered a lazy swell; the combination of that gentle lurching and the ever-present smell of fish stirred my intestines into high alert, a state of readiness to evacuate should conditions deteriorate.

    More questions flooded my mind, perhaps in an effort to distract attention away from the volatility of current peristaltic activity. Questions such as:

    Did Tony Blair wet himself when shown the instruments of torture? Or, even, did any of those convictions he was so proud to display, his façade of self-belief, wobble?

    Such as:

    What am I supposed to remember?

    Such as:

    Did the image of the assassin as woman turn you on?

    Such as:

    What sort of shoes was she wearing?

    Such as:

    What would it be like living in a de-growth economy?

    Such as:

    Was the captain of the Dreamboat called Pring? And was he indeed a poet?

    Such as:

    What are the rules of this vessel?

 

Get Real (ak)

At the worst of times I’m an anti-poet atheist; at the best of times I don’t give a monkey’s; it is so irrelevant that my mind remains unblemished by such filth. And more importantly I’ve got to get out of this place – the lyrics of a song swirled briefly – if it’s the last thing I ever do. Did the words refer to the factory the singer, or at least the song’s writer, worked in, still living, squashed, in his parents terraced house; dreaming of a future with his girl friend? Poetry, of course, is simply smashed up prose. What some people do instead of getting to grips with the real world.

    To be honest I have no idea how many ‘floors’ I have already descended. Didn’t she say two floors down?

    I was supposed to be finding the Trumpet Trawler courtesy of Pring the Poet. The thought of bashing my head against the wall suddenly appeared to be the height of sanity. It might help. But look, is this a hopeful sign? The landing I was descending towards was a blaze with lights and not only that but I could now see vast double doors; ancient polished oak with lustrous brass fittings. Surely this was worth a blast of trumpets! It was only later that I, with delayed panic, wondered what I would have done if the doors had been locked, but instead I yanked eagerly at the left hand door and it swung open with delicious ease and I was confronted with a dazzlingly bright morning. Half blinded I staggered down the few steps, ears assailed by the scream of gulls. Smells of the ocean, of fish, of diesel, of people bewildered me. All my senses were working overtime. I had to eat what saw. I had to taste it, touch it. Milling crowds pushed me this way and that, but always closer to the hive of activity on the wharves. But this wasn’t the non-world of luxury yachts this was work, real work. The life dragged from the oceans glittered in variegated mounds. The knives of those gutting and cleaning flashed in the sun with impossible speed.

    I felt the hand slipping into the inside pocket of my jacket but by this time my hands were trapped at my sides by the press of the crowd. It was too late to fight. And then I was falling on to the deck of the Dreamboat. I was grateful that nobody bothered me as I lay in semi-conscious dreaming only in some tiny part of my mind aware that the Dreamboat was edging its way through the throng of boats towards the open sea.

    But why was it necessary to have all evidence of my past and only life removed?

    Move up there, a male voice, harsh, brittle. I tried to move but it didn’t seem at all easy.

    Then he leaned in close, are you a friend of Massimo’s?

 

On Slime (mmj) - A DIALOGUE

On being slimy; a dialogue between the Daily Mail, an OUTLAW, and Jean Paul Sartre.

''We will not solve the economy's  problems by hanging bankers at the end of the street" Tony Blair said last night (as reported in yesterday's Daily Mail 24/07/2012). Note his use of "We": how strange that Mr Blair still claims some connection with us, as if he is one of us, and does not consider he might be among those who "WE" might be keen on stringing up on a lamp post: one of us, despite, according to the Daily Mail his annual income being thought to be in the region of £20 million a year, including being an advisor to the investment bank JP Morgan, and also having "a role" with Insurer Zurich.

What about hanging bankers at the end of the street? A la lanterne! The turn of phrase is strangely out of date, more appropriate to the gas-lit arcades of Paris in the 1890's, than the CCTV blanketed pre-olympics London city of today.

Let us have more moral imagination. Let there be a secret court in the land, presided over if you like by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and let the court have the power to appoint an OUTLAW, and have him or her issued with:

xl sniper's rifle with telescopic sites

x2 rounds of high velocity 'exploding' bullets

The instructions given to the outlaw are that he or she may shoot anybody whom or she considers has behaved, as we sometimes still say in south London, 'OUT OF ORDER': a single head shot, comme Voltaire, "pour encourager les autres"(the second round is held in reserve… just in case).

Being OUTLAW ('Homo Sacer':for the

purpose of dealing with the counterfeit, or, so to speak, the slimy - for more read Giorgio Agamben)

Simultaneously, I find out over lunch that an obliging young student of Philosophy, female as I presume, has left a copy of Jean Paul Sarte's  Being and Nothingness on the 'free distribution' book shelves of Bostons Café in Exeter, and I thrill to find it, what appears to be an entirely unopened copy - my copy; yes, it is mine now - with minimalist black front cover and grey back cover, 656 pages, the spine uncreased, the contents hitherto entirely unread, only the covers slightly scuffed from having travelled, as I think, from her student study bedroom to bedroom study each year, and a coffee stain at its top where an overfull mug overfull was once placed on a tightly packed row of books, all equally unread, and whose only function was to stand in relationship with each other.

She, who has not read the section III, entitled FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY

..." of interest primarily to the moralist",

nor any other of the 656 pages, will be appointed our first OUTLAW. Having her sniper's rifle she will not shake, she will not flinch, and she will strike with unerring accuracy, her finger squeezing the trigger without the slightest tremor. She who has not read or indeed ever opened Being and Nothingness will bring the cross hairs of her telescopic site over some distinguished head, and deliver a head-shot with a high velocity bullet to the person who most offends her morality and without impunity against her (although her life is forfeit).

"There are no accidents (italics) in life," Sarte writes on Page 574, such as finding the book in the café and opening it again , as I considered it then randomly, or of her having taken up her sniper's position on the ninth floor of a building, and finding myself reading from Page 625 (On Doing and Having) an investigation of the slimy: "A handshake, a smile, a thought, a feeling can be slimy", continuing to the end of the chapter on page 636 - but especially on page 631:

"The being of the slimy is a soft clinging, there is a sly solidarity and complicity of all its leachlike parts, a vague, soft effort made by each to individualise  itself, followed by a falling back and flattening out that is emptied of the individual, subdued in on all sides by the individual."

As when Mr Blair is reported talking of" WE". But do not fear Mr Blair, yours is not the head upon which our OUTLAW angel has located the cross-hairs of her telescopic sites... at least not so far as I know. However, the Daily Mail has been informed.

A sandwich and a cup of coffee (ak)

I hesitated, she hesitated or at least she failed to withdraw. Was it politeness that drove me out, looking for stairs, a lift, looking for a way down. Two floors down. I had left without breakfast and was beginning to feel that tremble and light-headedness of low blood sugar. And there was an accompanying shock of a thought: what if this was the wrong building? What if I in the haste of being a few minutes late had inadvertently entered the wrong building? Why hadn’t I realised before? What had made me so sure that this was the place? But even worse was the nature of this building I was inside. I had fallen into a challenge that I had no way of understanding. All agency was being removed from me. Kafka’s tales were metaphors. Ways of telling a story. How real were they? What is the nature of our emotional life? What bit had Kafka made up? What bit am I making up? Here I was trapped inside a radically changed set of rules.

    In the relentless gloom I found some stairs going down but saw no sign of the stairs that I had descended ten minutes before.

    The fish wharf (or was it Fish Wharf?) she had said. Though we are a hundred miles from the sea. With unusual briskness, which I suppose was a version of impatience to get this whole thing over and done with; done and dusted and returned to something that promised familiarity, I skipped down the stairs. Yes, I would solve this like I had solved all the other problems that had ever confronted me. Reaching a landing I noticed a figure, an elderly woman, wearing a sun hat and a blue silk scarf, a pale cream linen jacket.

    You’d like some coffee, I expect, and a sandwich if you’re hungry and I’m sure that you are hungry, aren’t you.

    She stood next to a small circular table on which was a silver coffee pot, a cup and saucer, a silver jug that must contain the hot milk, I could see the thin curl of steam rising from it; and a large plate of sandwiches. Smoked salmon, she informed me.

    You need to keep your strength up.

    I slowed and crossed the landing towards her. I compared her to the memory of my grandmother; my mother’s mother, and the implied line of women leading back into the past. A line of kindness. And I wondered as to how and where the past exists. Does the past descend as into a grave and do we rise into the future?

    I asked her about the Kazoo Dreamboat.

    Poetry, she responded, must be honest. Poetry is a chance for us to redeem outselves.

 

Does it always have to be so difficult? (ak)

I zipped up, waited a few seconds, grabbed at some oxygen, sighed and shrugged, then turned to face my interrogator. Expecting something altogether more solid, more muscular I was surprised to see a girl, well, a young woman, who could have been no more than seventeen, overwhelmed inside an oversized uniform, dark, black or possible navy, her waif like face locked in uncertainty was a striking contradiction to the questioning, challenging voice I had been subdued by.

    Are you, by any chance, looking for the Kazoo Dreamboat, her voice had mysteriously become dream like, soft.

    Perhaps she had a colleague with her, somewhere in the shadows, a senior colleague who was supervising her on her first day in the job.

    Kazoo Dreamboat? I wondered about the strange name but decided to press on with my mission to reach the conference on the ninth floor.

    I’m trying to reach the ninth floor.

    A sheaf of papers had appeared in her left hand. She carefully examined them.

    Apparently you must go down to the fish wharf, three floors down.

    Erm, I rather was hoping to . . . I need to  . . . erm pee. I never did like the word pee, so prissy, so pathetic, but my vocal apparatus had got strangled in the effort to say piss.

    Sorry, was all she said and waited for me to leave.

 

I drew myself up to my full height (ak)

As a committee member I had been invited to a specially conformed conference to discuss matters of the utmost international importance. Held as it was within the solid imperial splendour of Victorian limestone, the entrances watched over by uniformed staff, ex-military, ex-police or even ex-G4S, my expectations rose to dizzying heights as to not only the outcome of the conference but my own status which I had always thought to be of a rather doubtful nature, skirting as it did both  the gutter and the lower ranks of the aristocracy. Now this, I thought optimistically, now this is where I belong, and squared my shoulders as the commissionaire held out his hand so that he might examine any documentation I might have. My first attempt was a failure because he merely shook his head and moved as though he intended to send me marching back out the door that I had so recently entered through. From my voluminous pockets I was able to produce some other papers. I could see he was sorry that he didn’t have any latex gloves to handle such a doubtful offering but he was willing to take a chance and drew them towards his highly trained nostrils. After many dramatic contortions involving all his extensive facial musculature he cleared his throat. I had assumed he would then return my papers but his hands were now empty and he withdrew into an official indifference as to my existence and if I did indeed exist what actions I might take.

    There was no reception desk and no receptionist but fortunately I had been informed my text message that the conference would be held on the ninth floor so I cast about for the lifts. As you well know the public transport systems in that distant city do not include much in the way conveniences so it was imperative that I discover the whereabouts of the gentleman’s conveniences fairly hastily. But I now seemed to be alone so seeing some stairs descending off in the shadows to my left I decided on that course of action. Two flights down I had the notion that a Virgil was needed to guide my steps. Did I have to go down in order to eventually end up on the ninth floor? Had I once again made the wrong decision? But, no, there is a door, heavy dark wood, perhaps mahogany, and though there was no sign on the door my spirits were lifted at the prospect of relief of urinary pressure. And what a delight it was to see a long row of gleaming urinals arrayed along the length of one wall, with gleaming copper pipework and glass splash guards to protect my admittedly unpolished shoes. Unzipping, as one must, in such circumstances, I was surprised by a low cough behind me. And then a woman’s voice:

 

    ‘Are you Pring, the poet?’ Almost a purr, even a hint of growl.

 

    ‘N-n-no,’ I stammered.

 

    ‘Are you Peliot the poet?’

 

    ‘No,’ no longer a stammer, but in fact a hint of anger that I was being delayed in self-producing the wished for relief.

 

    ‘Are you a poet at all?’

 

    ‘No, no, no I’m not a poet but I have to get to the ninth floor.’

 

    That might just have been the wrong thing to say.

 

                    (To be continued)