Getting Out of Hell - after Sappho & Diane Di Prima & Arlen Riley Wilson & C.S. Lewis

Good luck with that, because everything in this hell
is twilight & everything you do is inside it, twilight
spreads too far for the eye, for to walk for 10,000
years and find the most devious filth you can imagine,
Napoleon, pacing up and down grimly in his mansion,
you, in your imaginary house saying "no, it isn't work", you know
that your leisure is work, when you are letting go you're working
when you're feeling as free
as can be
you're a boss
that's what we all know, our common
knowledge undertakes to stay
in twilight, wondering, waiting
for the bus, it is here, you can't get on.

It is work, this home
my sister's wedding
is work, going there
to you...


...this
all home
ransom heart
in this hell the trees
looking up
all, at them,,
is work

when you look up, are at her wedding, you are working
when you resist inside you are working harder, inside it,
every act of deviation so what
should I do, Concorde? Vespers,,  what we all know, the truth
we are bound by
                             when I
hold
when I can hold you
you can scream
out in the grasp of this hell of this death
rattle I no there nothing is hell mouth deviation is work
your songs have there in them clicking
just more &&           more shattered
into twilight & labour intensive
       satisfaction the truth is the stasis
       of your solitude
       & we fear this for forever
remotely

"have nothing".

Dream Diary 23.11.2016

A mess of anxieties.

Fiona and I go into the garden at work to help the decorators paint the entire back facing surface of the house white. We are on the second layer. It looks horrible. We realise it is an undercoat and that the objective is to probably sell the house. We see a ghost-like hand holding a folder through one of the windows, and realise that the folder probably contains a missing CQC report. The house continues to be painted white but I become slowly aware that I need to be a long way from it in order to reconcile some things. I don't now know what they are, but I go out along the south coast on a train, and the train takes me to made up ends of the line where trains only travel to small villages and there is no way to get back. The train is at Barnham, which isn't the real Barnham because it is in a corner surrounded by the sea and there's a volcano there waiting to erupt very soon but all the trains take me to dead ends and place I can't go.  Eventually somehow     I'm at     my secondary school where there's a fringe festival and the show we see involves sitting on a chair on a metal rope that spins up to the top of a building then back down. The volcano is still going to go off and may be nearer than it is in reality but Megan wants us to explore the fringe, there's nothing there except for my mum and dad who have a new dog which is like a small Alsatian and has an automated feeding system. I have to get back to Brighton and do, and at that point a man is asking me to recommend a plumber, whom I call Franks. I've no idea who he is but we're in a new flat I don't leave in I am there alone with the plumber looking for Dolly out of the window which is a cliff top view of the sea and we do impressions of characters from little Britain. I notice right on the edge of the cliff there is a person holding the same envelope from the beginning of the dream and I feel sick seeing it, a sudden horrific dread spreading through my body. A workmate, Sam, arrives to babysit me for the evening on the instruction of the plumber, which I explain is unnecessary but Sam explains that the flight I took has left me vulnerable. But then I have to explain over the phone to my dad that two police officers had been attacked by teenagers in London and he says he thinks the police officers should ought to have been shot. I begin to realise for a moment I was dreaming, but was sent on an act of anti gentrification sabotage in Peckham. Harvey had a little house, about the size of a human but on a table, and he was trying to install miniature generators in it. For some reason I had to disrupt him, and that was the protest. I started pulling wires out and he was obviously suspicious of me until I showed him my similar tiny house which I was renting near to his. He explained he would hate to live like that, and that in a sewer in a made up South American country he had found a huge sum of money which allowed him to buy the tiny house. I began uncontrollably crying. Then we went to my old school where there was a fringe festival, a chair on a metal rope which is more like a pole and we all get on the chair as it swerves in terrifying spirals up to the roof and back to the ground, all the while feeling it will all end, that I will return to work tomorrow to find that it has gone, that the operation has been shut down and the house which is perhaps the same height that I am but stood on a stand or table has been sold for over a million pounds, the cruel view over the edge of the cliffs, the envelope to the left but somehow at its centre waving in the wind framed by the edge of the road, the cliffs and the sea.

09.11.2016

*

mandrel asleep, to mouthwash
no one asleep is there now
rain, destructive determined
force of not will. fanfair
words must now become us, more
uglier. harm that stupid
river the settlement its
calm silt unbound the dam is
let no more disclosure. send
men, armed on a roof little
is has worst happened trilling
nicely. i dumb. net curtains
strobing like tutus in a
nest of young spiders they sap.

*

have you wrongly come aboard
destination who fucking
there are people of entrap-
ment going to meet at the
corner come to your door ru-
in, they've realised beyond
violence their potential
dismissing law going far-
ther suddenly corruption
is my friend and crook. who could-
've guessed an infirmary
pardoned the world keeps shilling
uncoupling to die. windmills
torn out of the soil i am
going to the wrong outlet.

*

pigs on the trench parapet
deep in rain a dead bird laid
its head on the track  this is
all anxious clods in the pigs
mutiny, no surprise. why
so stunned the weakest  moment
your life passes out why do
you think you matter you think
time i'm with you all the time
bricks and lies. two guns at each
head still this racist militia is grown
out of the soil the socket left
from the windmill's rip, the scar
just a gaping heap, no tissue.

*

back to dot to square one to
wilson to impressions. lye
through your throat i dare you to
we could look down the whole truth
that'd send home the message
while the line manager goes
on her lunch break remember
you don't get that you get to
put up. burn this burn roofs, knife
hole gaping in the soil that's
the rondo the new truths plastic
spent by a lathe operated
with laser cutting impede
a fish a thing for its tongue.

*

there is one man at the cen-
tre I yearn for he is ab-
user an entire worldview. can
you remember the notes in
bach's cello suite, the sara-
band was it? hot clusters. you
said they were calming, always
i thought there was a monstrous
terror waiting inside, in
those cruel and beautiful notes
that flew out of me across
the repaired climate. cut off
the supplies, die at thirty
five. expiry, compliments.

*

the rules to engage it must
end quickly... a short burst from
japan. now the destination is fixed
our your site's baby rapist

there's a screaming.coming. from.
just. out. side. no mercy have no
have you watched the video
a lot child shows another

the real depiction of the
cage on fire surely after
the debris is dumped that body
can scramble out.

The Sound of Silence 08.11.2016

(As per, I'll apologise for any shite spelling. I am writing this on a train on my mobile)

In the summer I met and was privileged to work with a dancer and performing artists called Pauline Mayer. I met her as part of a theatre project where, I believe, we made a really powerful performance. More than that I think we briefly instigated a practice the can be used in life at large. I've been watching what everyone has been up to since. I always like to read what Pauline posts on facebook. She's the kind of person I feel instantly safe around. Though perhaps that safety lies in the fact that Pauline is a danger to the establishment that seeks to alienate us. I'm going off point a bit. Just a little context. This is a post about music.

The other day Pauline said that on hearing Disturbed's version of The Sound of Silence (originally by Simon and Garfunkel) against the political backdrop of the US election she suddenly understood the prophetic lyrics. Not long before I saw her post I had been deriding this cover as the ultimate example of "burger rock",  a genre that covers a lot of white American rock music - marked out by white men with big feelings; ranging from Creed and Metallica to Nickelback with its more loose tendrils taking us into the realms of Zappa and Tool.

I was really tired. Unbelievably so. I was also filled with a social sadness and terror which I felt futile to withstand. I thought to myself that I usually find Pauline to be a person who can intercept my perceptions and turn them around, so I listened to the song and thought a out what is about to happen and burst into tears. Because this cover feels like an absolute defining point in white American pop music and social conscience. It begins in a deep register, a tense and controlled one. It builds it's crescendo within the exact framework of the song we all know. It is at once nostalgic and re-composed. Whereas the original as a seductive shimmer cut through with a deep emotional root note the cover is deeply centred around the voice - the "I", and I'm all of a sudden completely captured with that central register, it's speaking to me and showing me that silence is incredibly violent and totally audible. In fact the song itself is violent. It reflects the will to reconstruct a moment despite the knowledge that the moment has in fact been. You can write all over a historical object or even just tweak it and present it as an entirely new possibility.

I believe that very shortly Donald Trump will become the president of the USA. I believe this because over the last year I have been groomed by the continual fear of the worst case becoming reality. Obviously this is the choice between two murderers, but I feel it is the choice between Dr. Shipman and Dr. Mengele. You know what to do. But then when we were voting over Brexit a load of people, liberals and tories alike, willfully blinded themselves. And still now they won't be accountable to be complicit in any of it. I don't trust a thing. You open your mouth to argue and silence comes out of it.

I've sort of lost the thread of what I was trying to say. The singer gets the lyrics muddle in the last verse. He seems to sing "the words on the prophet are written on the subway walls". That's something worth listening to over and over because you imagine what words are "on" a prophet, imposed from the outside or in retrospect, and also what might have come from them. How you can superimpose your will onto a prophetic moment. Silence is promised. There will be moments where everyone goes very quiet as their sick will is enacted. For example many people who will vote for systematic racial hatred and conservatism will not admit they are going to do so. Silence does not mean "no".

Dream Diary - 28.10.2016, 31.11.2016, 02.11.2016

There's a cut of sadness running through these dreams. All of them carry the unusual sense of being dead. All of them are filled with the knowledge that I have died, and that what is left of my soul is falling or fading from the earth.

1) I am on Queen's Road in Brighton. A lot of my friends are there. They are chatting, there is an unusual tension amongst them - in their body language and the sounds coming from their mouths. I can barely understand what any of them are saying unless I make the effort to go very close to them and pay an almost painful level of attention to them. As I do that their language pulls itself into focus. I begin to realise that though what the people around me are saying is (through struggle) at least comprehensible, what I am saying is not. It isn't only incomprehensible. It isn't there. I begin screaming. My voice in the dream is closer to the voice I yearn to have in reality. This usually happens. Myra seems to be able to hear something of my screaming, but just in a tiny way. She is effected by it. I follow her down the road trying desperately to communicate to her. She begins to speak, more to herself than to me. She is speaking in order to vocalise that I am dead. I have to get back. I can't.

2) Very blurry and distant now. I am swinging onto an iceberg for a concert. Everyone packs up too quickly and I can't keep up. We have played a concert in a built into the iceberg. Everyone has got back onto the ship. I have to get back but I can't so I am forced to stay there which makes me afraid.

3) I am once again in Brighton and Dolly is encouraging me to go to an important interview with Ruth at her house. When I get to her house she says that the interview will take place in the bath and we put on swimming costumes and armbands to preserve our modesty. It is a big bath filled with bubbles and the interview is about poetry. The interview isn't being recorded. I don't understand why not but I feel very relaxed about everything even though I know that something really unsettling is happening by the nearby roundabout (see video below) and I am powerless to ignore it. I realise while I am in the bath that I am dead and find a phone and tell it that I have to get back to Dolly to see her before I fade out and I try to call my family only to be put through to their dog who has a low but kind voice. He won't allow me to speak to anyone else. The bath is warm and I know I should get out of it. Ruth waits patiently. The roundabout occasionally hoots.