Diary of Space Given

Grandmother To The Slum

2011-03-28T04:30:00.001-07:00

Grandmother To The Rising

2011-03-28T04:26:00.001-07:00

Grandmother To The Shack Architects

2011-03-28T04:24:00.000-07:00

Grandmother To The Junk Cemetery

2011-03-28T04:21:00.000-07:00

Grandmother Unto A Burned Wall

2011-03-28T04:18:00.000-07:00

The Grandmother

2011-03-28T04:11:00.000-07:00

2011-03-28T02:47:00.000-07:00

New Year Under an Old Sun

2011-01-17T00:52:00.000-08:00

red clouds over Metropolis -
calm night under a dark watch -
blood glow that condemns stars -
and a moist draft that carries the dead of dusk -

- blind hiss of wheels at crossroads
- head-lit melancholy of late travel
- glass beads swelling with each fall
- puddles that wash heels' memories

and ends meet to name their course towards death;
that purported peaceful death, haunting the undead -

like my star-torched dream,
what unholy praise from hallucinated prophets
would this dawn prey on the pages of my fictional beginning?

First room of Miseducation

2011-01-13T02:45:00.001-08:00

Life is...

2011-01-10T05:08:00.000-08:00

a dream wrapped in one's skin -
stage fright for dying in a scroll I rewrote.

time mistaken,
and looking awkward on my ceiling.

a source,
until dirges are dusted into the sea.

papyrus wings floating about the sun,
a spark screaming from a gutter.

will-frog hopping on my cell's floor,
a stranger among grown-up newborns...

exhausted by friends who passed on to the last laugh.

A study of human behaviour through a somnambulist’s eye

2010-11-02T02:04:00.000-07:00

A study of human behaviour through a somnambulist’s eye.

Like figurines of a fashionable making
I sit on the parapet of a window on high.

Looking down, a sight towered by my comprehension,
and through crevices in the sky’s clods –
I see mankind.

Legacies of urban realms –
Artisan memories carved on landscapes.
Debauched skylines of tonight, commuting with the last fragments of a day’s lusts.

Who are these novices in life’s monastery?
Who bred their vulturous beauties and serpentine consorts with manes blown in the derelict winds of suburbia?

But Mind says:

Life goes down this road, and it flows towards weird places and painted avenues where lies can drive you by. Yet
Whistles and mused kisses from below this city’s pride can’t make men of us.

And it is here that dreams scandalised by ghosts bear fruit.
You can bed any wench and still cower from profanity’s smite.
The here-after and silhouettes that seem gorgeous are paling now.
Radio-active sunsets of the Cosmopolis gleam like stars on windscreens.
And I am at ease with pain’s reverie driven by, where others cross and die.

Stan Brakhage

2010-11-02T00:16:00.000-07:00

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Brian Frye is a filmmaker, curator and writer living in Washington DC.
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If Maya Deren invented the American avant-garde cinema, Stan Brakhage realized its potential. Unquestionably the most important living avant-garde filmmaker, Brakhage single-handedly transformed the schism separating the avant-garde from classical filmmaking into a chasm. And the ultimate consequences have yet to be resolved; his films appear nearly as radical today as the day he made them.

Brakhage was born in 1933, and made his first film, Interim (1952), at 19. Notably prolific, he has completed several films most years since. To date, his filmography lists over 300 titles, ranging in length from a few seconds to several hours.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, attended high school in Central City, Colorado. He briefly attended Dartmouth College then left for San Francisco, where he enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). He had hoped to study under Sidney Peterson., but unfortunately, Peterson had left the school and the film program was no more, so Brakhage moved on.

Like Deren, Brakhage came to understand film through poetry, and his earliest films do resemble those of Deren and her contemporaries. The early American avant-garde filmmakers tended to borrow liberally from the German Expressionists and Surrealists: mannered acting, symbolism/non sequitur, non-naturalistic lighting and psychosexual themes were common. Still fundamentally story-oriented, these films tend to use a loose, non-linear narrative and dramatic situations to establish metaphorical relationships between images. Deren's films are closest to those of the Surrealists: though she rejects their often cynical nihilism, her films are steeped in portentous Freudian symbolism.

Brakhage's early films are more primal. There is no evidence of the Expressionist-inspired preciousness of the pre-WWII American avant-garde filmmakers, and his invocation of Freudian ideas, while omnipresent, is much blunter than Deren's. For Deren's cerebral idealism, Brakhage substitutes a rawer, psychologized version of reality. Many of Brakhage's films from this period are very good, but they are overshadowed today by the films they begat.

While Brakhage's early films stress psychological themes--the conflict between wish-dream and reality, for example--and retain a strongly dramatic element, they provide frequent glimpses of the formal leap that soon followed.

Despite a rapidly deepening reservoir of ideas, avant-garde film retained a strong connection to the commercial cinema. European avant-garde filmmakers had long made liberal use of photographic effects and trick photography. But nothing they did formally was at all unfamiliar to the commercial cinema, which was quick to pick up on their ideas. But if strange photographic effects are one thing, turning celluloid into a plastic medium was something else altogether.

Brakhage was among the first filmmakers to physically alter the filmstrip itself for metaphorical effect. The most striking example of this technique in his early films occurs in Reflections on Black (1955), which imagines the dream-vision of a blind man as he walks through a city, climbs the stairs of his apartment building and arrives home. Brakhage signals the blindness of his protagonist by physically scratching out his eyes, and splices in bits of film negative to convey the sense of experience the world as a blind man might, not as something seen, but something pictured.

Shortly before making Reflections of Black, Brakhage moved to New York City. That same year, the film critic Parker Tyler introduced Brakhage to Joseph Cornell, who commissioned him to shoot a film of the soon to be dismantled Third Avenue El. Working for the first time without actors or plot, Brakhage began to focus on the expressive qualities of the medium itself. The film which resulted, Wonder Ring (1955), represents Brakhage's first step toward his radical reconception of the cinema. There is no story, no protagonist, no linear narrative other than the train itself, traveling endlessly along its track. It is a perfect expression of the world defined by the train, and a peculiarly apposite metaphor for the bare logic of narrative itself.
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, and eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.'

With this opening paragraph to his seminal manifesto Metaphors on Vision, Brakhage called into being an entirely new kind of cinema, where none had existed previously. Suddenly, an epistemological question loomed where none had before: What is the nature of the relationship between the moving image and the world, and how might it be represented? Brakhage intended to film not the world itself, but the act of seeing the world. The vast majority of Brakhage's films are entirely silent. When you watch his films, you are asked to look, and look closely. Where his predecessors used metaphor as a means of relating images to one another, Brakhage's films were themselves expressions of a single, great metaphor: visual perception.

These questions were by no means unique to Brakhage--they were in fact the catalyst for modern art--but he was the first to realize their implications for the cinema in a body of truly great works of art. In Anticipation of the Night (1958), one sees Brakhage's first clearly articulated expression of his concept of the vision of the 'untutored eye.' While retaining the barest elements of narrative, in this work Brakhage entirely dispenses with the drama, in order to better capture raw experience. The 'shooting script' for the 40 minute film consists of a list of 16 concepts, rather than specific shots. Where his earlier films approximated dreams, Anticipation of the Night captures the dreamlike quality of raw experience, the world as it happens and is taken in and understood, willy-nilly.

While making Anticipation of the Night, Brakhage married Jane Collum, who was to become his muse, and the primary subject of his films for many years. Easily the best known of these is Window, Water, Baby, Moving (1959), a document of Jane's pregnancy and the birth of their first child. Family, and the rituals of family life, became the predominant themes of Brakhage's films for many years. Birth, sex, and death are the three touchstones of all of his films. In Thigh, Line, Lyre, Triangular (1961), Brakhage again documents the birth of one of his children, and their passage through infancy and childhood is a consistent theme. Several of Brakhage's films focus on sexual relations, not only between a man and wife, but among friends, and the proto-sexual aspects of childhood. In other films he examines the rituals surrounding death and the body which remains after the being has departed. Sirius Remembered (1959), which documents the gradual dissolution of the corpse of the family dog, and The Dead (1960), made in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, prefigure several later films which return to this same theme.

Brakhage's most ambitious projects of the early '60s were Dog Star Man (1961-64) and The Art of Vision (1961-64), essentially one film articulated two different ways. Dog Star Man definitively marks the transition from a lyrical style, centered on individual experience, to a more epic style, with a focus on broad metaphysical themes. Roughly speaking, the film expresses a mythic conception of the struggle and fall of Man. Made in four parts, with a prelude, Dog Star Man incorporates many layers of superimposition and a dense, rapid editing pattern. The Art of Vision consists of exactly the same material as Dog Star Man, but separates the superimposed reels of film in various combinations. As the elements of the film gradually build and cascade into one another, one begins to see the connections between the elements more and more clearly, how and why certain themes are repeated, and the simultaneously epic and analytic quality of the film itself.

Since completing The Art of Vision, Brakhage's films have become consistently more metaphysical. Even his celebrated Pittsburgh trilogy, completed in 1971, which purported to document three city institutions, at its core deals with metaphysical questions of Being. The three films: Eyes, Deus Ex, and The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes, document the police, a hospital and a morgue, respectively. All focus on the mechanics of the body: how it is ordered in life, how it is repaired when broken, and what remains when the person who animates it has perished. The key image of The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes is quite likely the bluntest statement on the human condition ever filmed. In the course of an autopsy, the skin around the scalp is slit with a scalpel, and in preparation for exposing and examining the brain, the face of each cadaver is literally peeled off, like a mask, revealing the raw meat beneath. That image, once seen, will never leave you.

The feature-length The Text of Light (1974) consists entirely of abstracted patterns of light photographed through a thick, deep-green ashtray. Anticipating his non-photographic abstract films of the '80s and '90s, it reduces photography to its ratio ultima, the influence of light on photographic emulsion.

...in photographing this ashtray for instance, I'm sitting for hours to get 30 seconds of film. I'm sitting watching what's happening and clicking a frame, and sitting and watching, and further than that, I had shot several hundred feet and they seemed dead. They didn't reflect at all my excitement and emotion and feeling. They had no anima in them, except for two or three shots where the lens which was on a tripod, pressed against the desk, had jerked. Those were just random, but what gave me the clue. What I began doing was always holding the camera in hand. For hours. Clicking. Waiting. Seeing what the sun did to the scene. As I saw what was happening in the frame to these little particles of light, changing, I would shoot the camera very slightly.

In recent years, Brakhage has focused largely on painting, scratching and drawing directly on the surface of the film strip itself. In eschewing photography altogether he focuses more directly on the bare act of perception. These films recall the paintings of abstract expressionists like Pollock, Klein, Motherwell and Rothko, and pack the same visceral punch. If you've ever stood in front of a great Rothko, and felt yourself falling in, the experience of watching the best of Brakhage's hand-painted films is very similar.

I now no longer photograph, but rather paint upon clear strips of film – essentially freeing myself from the dilemmas of re-presentation. I aspire to a visual music, a 'music' for the eyes (as my films are entirely without sound-tracks these days). Just as a composer can be said to work primarily with 'musical ideas,' I can be said to work with the ideas intrinsic to film, which is the only medium capable of making paradigmatic 'closure' apropos Primal Sight. A composer most usually creates parallels to the surroundings of the inner ear--the primary thoughts of sounds. I, similarly, now work with the electric synapses of thought to achieve overall cathexis paradigms separate from but 'at one' with the inner lights, the Light, at source, of being human.

Stan Brakhage died of cancer on March 8, 2003, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City is in the process of preserving all of his films. His last finished film, Stan's Window, is a photographed self-portrait. Brakhage left behind the beginning of another film, The Chinese Series, composed of 35mm black leader he had scratched with his fingernails. The film was to end wherever he stopped scratching.

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© Brian Frye, Spetember 2002

Aryan Kaganof

2010-11-02T00:07:00.001-07:00

An Anthology: The Education of Mr. Fluxus

2010-10-19T06:45:00.000-07:00

The well-publicized angst of the Abstract Expressionist painters, laid bare on canvas and by in-fighting among themselves, rose from inner demons and newfound success. John Cage and colleagues, just as fiercely focused on their art as the Ab Ex’ers, labored unheralded during this same period, feeling besieged, misunderstood, and as a result, banded together for mutual support.
Many of these artists, including George Brecht, Dick Higgins and Alan Kaprow, came together at the New School for Social Research in 1956, where Cage began teaching a class on Composition. In a 1988 interview I did with Kaprow, I asked him about John Cage and the class he took with him at the New School.
“He was a kind of train station. People would sort of gather there and wait for the next train. I actually was a student of his. That was not the case with all of them. Many of them were occasional visitors. But I was already teaching at Rutgers by then. That was 1957, and I knew him slightly. Knew his work, of course. But at that point, I was trying to introduce a richer range of sound into the environmental stuff that I was doing parallel with the early happenings that were done. So I went to the class – I had been on a mushroom hunt with him, that’s what it was, with George Brecht, who was a neighbor of mine at that time in New Jersey – and I asked John at that time about the problems I was having with the sounds. There were mechanical gadgets that I had gimmicked up as best I could, you know, those wonderful toys the Japanese made – gorillas that growl, cows that moo, and things like that – and these were interesting, but after awhile they got boring, rather mechanical and expected, so I asked him what to do. And he said, ‘Why don’t you come to the class next week.’
I drove in for the class, and he explained rather quickly that I could use tape decks, a half dozen cheap tape decks, make all the sounds in advance, and put them on in some sort of random order, or program them as I wanted, and then distribute loud speakers around the room, and these things would have a much greater richness, done in a collage fashion, which I could understand readily, having done that, then any of the mechanical toys I had done. So I thought that was – he explained it in five minutes. You just take sticky tape and stick all these things together which you’ve previously recorded and put into envelopes. And he said, ‘Why don’t you stay for the class?’ Fine, I said.
At the end of the class, I was so fascinated with what was going on I asked him if I could attend it regularly, and he said, ‘Sure.’ And that’s where I actually did the first proto-happenings with the participation of the rest of the class members. Everyone was given homework every week and came in with a piece. And that’s where I began doing that sort of work.”
Kaprow’s happenings defined the era, serving up the first serious salvo against the sovereignty of the Abstract Expressionists. It took painting out of the studio and into an environment mixed with sound, dance, concept, sculpture, paving the way for the inter-medial decade to come, host to a multitude of new movements including Pop Art, Minimal Art, Earth Art, Conceptual Art, Op Art, Video Art, Visual Poetry, Mail Art, et al.
By the beginning of the sixties, experiments with old and new creative mediums exploded. In Cage’s wake, music became sound and sound reduced to silence. Lou Harrison, La Monte Young and others were incorporating Eastern influences into their compositions. Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell began investigating the new medium of television, trailblazing the development of Video Art. Poetry was turned on its head by the concrete experiments of Emmett Williams, Bern Porter and Jackson Mac Low. Henry Flynt was talking about something called Concept Art. Dick Higgins invigorated the term “intermedia.” Yoko Ono and George Brecht were touting “events” and “instructions” as art.
With the waning of Abstract Expressionism as a dominate decade long American Art movement, it seemed as if the center would not hold, and something new was slouching to be born. Kaprow’s happenings became a mainstream hit, part of the “crazy beatnik” art scene. Pop Art, with Warhol as superstar, became the darling of media, society and investment firms, alike. Little noticed at the time was the development of Fluxus, an attempt to link the disparate radical underground of cultural New York and beyond.
It’s renovation nearly killed him, certainly hastened his death, but in 1962 George Macunias, a Lithuanian immigrant, renovated and opened the AG Gallery with his friend Almus Salcius. Maciunas had attended a class in 1959 taught by the composer Richard Maxwell at the New School for Social Research, who had taken over the composition course taught by John Cage. He consulted on the gallery’s programming with the assistant teacher of the class, La Monte Young, who had already staged a series of performances at Yoko Ono’s loft.
“He was just a great guy, but as far as art was concerned I had to teach him everything he knew practically. He didn’t know what to present. I remember Henry Flynt and I were telling him one day, he was saying to Henry and me, ‘I want to present (Otto) Luening and (Vladimir) Ussachevsky.’ He said, ‘Why I can’t present something that represents the way I feel?’ I would say, ‘I don’t want to be lost back there in the past with these guys, I want to present the kind of work that I understand is going on today and is the cutting edge of the avant-garde.’
I published Henry’s first essay on concept art in An Anthology, which was a collection of scores, poetry, dance constructions, and other avant-garde work that I had collected on my desk in Berkeley for performances. When I came to New York I continued to collect.”
(An Interview with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela By Gabrielle Zuckerman, American Public Media, July 2002.)
Macunias used the collection that La Monte Young had gathered as a foundation on which to bond the international avant-garde, one of whom was the American poet Emmett Williams, then living in Germany.
“La Monte Young had seen some of my concrete poems in a book called Movens published by Limes Verlag in Wiesbaden in 1960, an anthology of avant garde writers, artists and composers. La Monte wrote to me for permission to reprint some of this work in an anthology he was editing in New York. His An Anthology, a source-book of early Fluxus classics, was designed by George Maciunas. And George Maciunas, the Lithuanian-born father of Fluxus, invited me to join Fluxus at the world’s first Fluxus festival in Wiesbaden in 1962. I love the way all these things are interrelated! What networking – even way back then!” (interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2004)
When the poet Chester Anderson, publisher of Beatitude, exited New York for California in 1959, he asked La Monte Young to edit Beatitude East, knowing that the radical musician had been collecting performance scores from friends in Berkeley and New York. In this he was aided by Jackson Mac Low, who had attended Cage’s composition course at the New School for Social Research, and worked at the Living Theater with Julian Beck and Judith Malina.
When Beatitude East failed to materialize, Maciunas stepped into the void.
Mac Low and Young provided Maciunas with connections to a new ideology rising from the ashes of the “beat generation”, encouraging him not only to present radical programming at AG Gallery, but to design An Anthology, composed of the materials co and prompting him to organize the 1962 Fluxus Festival in Wiesbaden, Germany, to present some of the performative works found in An Anthology.
Maciunas supplied the paper, design and some money for the publishing of An Anthology, according to Henry Flynt, and had it ready for printing by October 1961. It was finally published by Young and Mac Low in 1963 as:
AN ANTHOLOGY of chance operations concept art anti-art indeterminacy improvisation meaningless work natural disasters plans of action stories diagrams Music poetry essays dance constructions mathematics compositions, BY GEORGE BRECHT, CLAUS BREMER, EARLE BROWN, JOSEPH BYRD, JOHN CAGE, DAVID DEGENER, WALTER DE MARIA, HENRY FLYNT, YOKO ONO, DICK HIGGINS, TOSHI ICHIYANAGI, TERRY JENNINGS, DENNIS, DING DONG, RAY JOHNSON, JACKSON MAC LOW, RICHARD MAXFIELD, ROBERT MORRIS, SIMONE MORRIS, NAM JUNE PAIK, TERRY RILEY, DITER ROT, JAMES WARING, EMMETT WILLIAMS, CHRISTIAN WOLFF, LA MONTE YOUNG/LA MONTE YOUNG – EDITOR/GEORGE MACIUNAS – DESIGNER.
The first edition (A second edition was reprinted in 1970 by Heiner Friedrich) contained 67 leaves and three inserts. It included multicolored and onionskin paper, card stock and two envelopes. The text was printed in offset with a heavy paper cover, collated manually with a staple and perfect binding.
The very first work contained in An Anthology, “Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event),”by George Brecht, is dedicated to John Cage. Cage himself contributes the work, “Excerpt from 45’ for a Speaker,” which contains the line, “The thing to do is keep the head alert but empty.” Being alert to ones surrounding and culture without preconceived expectation, best summarizes an approach furthering appreciation of An Antholgy.
What other way than to approach the poem by Diter Rot (aka Dieter Roth), “White Page with Holes,” composed of irregularly sized punched circles into an insert of heavier paper than the bound pages? The inserts of Rot, La Monte Young’s, “Composition 1960 #9,” printed on an envelope attached to the book’s endpaper, and an uncredited musical score, fall out of the world of bookworks and into that of the artist multiple, which Maciunas was to develop after publication of An Anthology.
Maciunas had fully assimilated lessons learned through Young’s research material, contacting many of the artists, taking their ideas on the road with him to Wiesbaden and planning for a follow-up publication to be called “Fluxus.”
Maciunas edited from a new generation of experimental artists in New York and beyond to create a functioning cadre of cultural workers. Maciunas gathered them under the banner of Fluxus, more attitude then movement, with a revolving cast of characters allowing Maciunas to present and promote performances, publications, film screenings, street actions, multiples and exhibitions both nationally and abroad.
Designing An Anthology was an education for Maciunas. It not only brought him into contact with the most challenging artists of his era, but by absorbing their new visionary art, helped him to conjure “the most radical and experimental art movement of the sixties.”
John Held, Jr.
San Francisco
2010

Mr. Fluxus

2010-10-18T03:53:00.001-07:00

Essay: Julia E. Robinson
Julia E. Robinson
George Maciunas: Desigen on Fluxus George Maciunas is best known today as the “impresario” of Fluxus: an international group of artists whose first members came together in 1962 for an inaugural concert series at Wiesbaden, Germany (not far from the epicenter of New Music in Darmstadt). Hardly a regular “concert,” the “Fluxus Festspiele Neuester Musik” – as Maciunas called it, upping the stakes of New Music, by claiming this to be the “Newest” Music – introduced an extensive array of the most radical scoring practices of the day, enacted by a group of young artists from the United States, Korea, Germany and Lithuania. The Fluxus group would come to include more nationalities and more women than any avant-garde since Dada. The first concert series happened at Wiesbaden because Maciunas was based there and he set about to organize it; he gathered the scores to be presented, rallied the artists, arranged the venue, designed the poster, promoted the event and performed in it. In fact, the word “impresario” does little to explain the work the Lithuanian émigré did for Fluxus. Rather, it has mostly been a way for scholars to avoid the difficult territory of how and with what to credit George Maciunas. The unorthodox range of tasks Maciunas undertook to organize Fluxus has generated debate between Fluxus artists as well as historians about his proper title and whether or not he warrants the description of “founder” or “leader.” For simplicity’s sake, Maciunas is often called an artist, but the role he adopted among artists resists this classification. As a trained graphic designer with broad political ambitions, Maciunas’ Fluxus work – designing posters, flyers and labels, compiling editions and multiples, drawing up calendars of activities, writing and circulating “news (policy) letters,” and planning and directing concerts – suggests a complex and hybrid “authorial” model that would suspend the term “artist” or reveal it to be beside the point. Rather than imposing conventional terms onto the figure of Maciunas, as debates about his proper title in Fluxus would do, it is perhaps more useful to examine this hybrid role he devised for himself, its fundamental motivations and its legacy. Re-Presenting History To appreciate what Maciunas brought to Fluxus and how he positioned it at all levels, it is essential to look back briefly at his training and early ideas about the role of history and its (re)presentation. A postwar émigré from Kaunas, Lithuania, Maciunas came to the United States in 1948 settling in New York.1 Over the course of a decade, beginning in 1949, Maciunas studied graphic design at New York’s Cooper Union, architecture at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, and finally, art history at New York University’sInstitute of Fine Arts. During this time, he developed a passionate interest in genealogical charts. Producing them became a monumental project running parallel to his studies and informing them.
The charts were a magnum opus for the young Maciunas, a feat of utter commitment, diligence and exhaustive attempts to master a vast body of information. The scale of some of the early charts is breathtaking. The final dimensions of his “Atlas of Russian History,” tracking the major changes in the Russian state up to the Revolution, were six by nine feet, and his “History of Art” chart, from the Visigoths to Modernity, came in slightly larger at six by twelve feet. These were great fields of pasted paper, which projected the information laterally while also extending into three dimensions in towers and accordion structures filled with gridded text (the precursors of the formats for his Fluxus compendia). As movable, architectonic, genealogical models, Maciunas’ charts emancipated the student of history, placing the structuring of knowledge in his own hands and those of every future reader. Through the charts Maciunas acquired a thorough grounding in Art History, which undoubtedly emboldened him to judge the status of art in his own historical moment. He called the charts “Learning Machines” and ultimately considered them among the most important work of his life.2 Some years later, Maciunas brought his passion for charting history to his work on Fluxus, giving Fluxus a genealogy of its own. In addition to drawing up a number of charts positioning Fluxus within a trajectory of 20th century avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes, he continued to use the chart structure for his overall organization of the group’s activities. The rigor with which Maciunas crafted the Fluxus charts framed this seemingly cryptic and ephemeral project in terms of its historical relevance as well as giving it a kind of “readymade” place in history. In an important late interview with Fluxus artist Larry Miller, Maciunas explained one of these charts, acknowledging the central position of John Cage:
So, you see, this chart is just a culmination of other charts I’ve done in the past for other histories…. In the vertical line is shown the years and the horizontal layout shows the style. So you can point on the chart to any activity, pinpoint it exactly with this grid of time and style. Now it could also be… I’ve done charts which… vertically is shown time and horizontally geographical location. This way you could say any activity of the past, you could locate exactly on the chart where it happened and when. Now for this chart I chose rather style than location because the style is so unlocalized… mainly because of the travels of John Cage. So you could call the whole chart … “Travels of John Cage” like you could say “travels of St. Paul,” you know? Wherever John Cage went he left a little John Cage group, which some admit, some not admit his influence. But the fact is there, that those groups formed after his visits. It shows up very clearly on the charts.3 After this, he goes on to fill in the picture at the prompt of Miller’s questions, situating first Cage and then Fluxus with reference to Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and the relevant postwar movements: from the first Happenings (in Japan in the 1950s – the Gutai Group), to French Nouveau Réalisme and then back to the U.S. with figures surrounding Cage such as La Monte Young and many artists who would ultimately join Fluxus. Designs for Radical Practice In October 1960, Maciunas was meeting with a group of compatriots at the gallery of his friend Almus Salcius in Long Island to discuss prospects for a Lithuanian cultural club. In the end, the group decided to make a magazine and “Fluxus” was the name George (Jurgis) proposed for it.4 Maciunas went on to start an exhibition space with his friend Almus, called the AG Gallery (Avant-Garde? Almus & George?) at 925 Madison Avenue in New York City. The idea of presenting Lithuanian culture did not last long and Maciunas took over the programming of the gallery (albeit conservatively at first). After attending composer Richard Maxfield’s electronic composition class of 1960 at The New School for Social Research, and meeting La Monte Young, the program for the gallery changed radically and Maciunas started showing future Fluxus artists and having Young program concerts there. Young not only exposed Maciunas to a whole range of new and exciting work – Yoko Ono, Henry Flynt, George Brecht, Dick Higgins and others – he also gave him a chance to see how these radical scoring practices might figure as an object of graphic design, asking him to be the designer for a new collection of scores he was editing, which came to be called An Anthology. Out of this collaboration, Maciunas discovered much of the work he would gather together under the banner of Fluxus the following year. He kept the idea of a publication called Fluxus for a long time, though the proposed content changed as much as Maciunas’ ideas about art did in this period. “Ever since he had become friends with three Lithuanian colleagues, namely Jonas Mekas, Almus Salcius and Stanley Buetens… he had wanted to become the editor of a journal of his own.”5 The first chance at this was in the designing of An Anthology. Maciunas approached this work with zealous commitment to economy, insisting “contributions were to be copied on colored, almost square copy paper, pasted together and sold as a low cost book.”6 He typed the entire book on his IBM Executive typewriter but within its pages there were many innovative approaches to presentation, including little envelopes containing scores, loose pages with cut-outs, etc. This would be the beginning of many more adventurous design projects for Fluxus, which were part book, part poster, part object. As Maciunas explained to Miller:
We couldn’t include everything that we had collected by then, like it didn’t have Bob Watts and … had very little things by George Brecht and so I thought I would go ahead and make another publication with all the pieces that were not included in Anthology. More or less newer pieces. But La Monte wasn’t interested in doing a second Anthology book. So the initial plan was just do another, like a second Anthology book except graphically it would have been a little… less conventional than the first one, which means it would have had objects and… a different kind of packaging. So really then the idea germinated to use the whole book as bound envelopes with objects in the envelopes. See, we had a couple objects already in the first Anthology, you know, like the loose Diter Roth machine holes, things like that. A little envelope with [the] card of La Monte Young [Composition # 10, 1960 To Bob Morris – draw a straight line and follow it.], another envelope with a letter in it, you know, so things like that. Card that have to be cut up ….7 This format came to inspire the first compilations of the collective works of Fluxus: Fluxus I and the Fluxus Yearboxes. Fluxus I consists of envelopes containing contributions from the artists with foldout parts. It was bolted together and encased in a wooden box. In an amusingly self-deprecating comment on the innovative format, Maciunas stated that the contents were “like an accordion, it just keeps falling out and being in your way.”8 After the prototypes were complete, Maciunas assembled subsequent copies on demand (from 1964-mid-1970s). Maciunas conceived and worked on these first Fluxus publications and others, such as the complete collection of George Brecht scores, called Water Yam [1963] while he was in Germany. Since they were so complex to make, and he did not always have the funds to proceed, he decided to organize concerts of Fluxus scores and contextual work as publicity for the immanent arrival of the published material. This concept initiated the performance practice of concerts and festivals that has animated and defined the Fluxus group from 1962 to the present.9
The first events explicitly called “Fluxus” (at Wiesbaden) ranas a series of fourteen concerts (September 1-23, 1962) and others followed at Amsterdam, Dusseldorf and Paris. With the a number of artists there to perform the scores of both present and absent authors – Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles, Emmett Williams, Benjamin Patterson, Dick Higgins and Maciunas – the spectrum of activity was broad enough that the scope for Fluxus was glimpsed. As previously mentioned, Maciunas’ strategy on this occasion, to draw attention to the concert, was to connect it with New Music. This was highlighted in the poster he designed, which read “Fluxus Festspiele Neuester Musik,” with white text on a black ground naming all the scores to be performed and listing their composers. More than mere “publicity” for the forthcoming publications, which ultimately did not come out in these first months, the performances drew scandalous attention and a number of misunderstood impressions from audiences and the press. This may have been due to the selection of scores, which themselves were rather extreme and often performed in somewhat hyperbolic ways. Paik’s Zen for Head, for example, involved dipping his head, hands and tie into a bucket of paint and tracking it along a long scroll of paper, which he did manically, sending the audience into fits of laughter. And the finale, Phillip Corner’s Piano Activities, which called for performers to “play,” “scratch or rub,” “pluck or tap,” “drop objects” on, “act on strings,” “strike soundboard, pins, lid or drag various kinds of objects across” and “act in any way on underside of piano,” ended by an excess of enthusiasm, with the total destruction of the piano. There were undoubtedly aspects of many of the pieces, performed here for the first time, which might have superficially conjured Dada (as the press observed). But Fluxus had almost nothing to do with Dada, and ways were found to clarify this important distinction as the concerts were repeated. The “problem” of Dada, had been identified just one year earlier in Darmstadt, when Theodor Adorno gave his lecture “Vers une musique informelle,” enumerating the contemporary reasons for its critical disqualification. As Adorno saw the situation, any anti-art sentiment expressed, in the postwar period, as a direct action “in contrast to its Dadaist grandparents… degenerates at once into culture…”.10 He explained that “this is dictated by the impossibility today of the politics on which Dadaism still relied. Action Painting and Action Composing,” said Adorno, “are cryptograms of the direct action that has now been ruled out; they have arisen in an age in which every such action is either forestalled by technology or recuperated by an administered world.”11
In Fluxus, however, the intervention of the score was the crucial agent of mediation, the marker of the enactment as indirect action. It was important that the line Paik painted in his animated performance was indeed not a direct action he had spontaneously devised, but rather, an interpretation of La Monte Young’s Composition #10, 1960 To Bob Morris, which instructed the interpreter to “draw a straight line and follow it.”12 Changes in the enactment of Maciunas’ own newly penned score, In Memoriam To Adriano Olivetti, between the Wiesbaden and Dusseldorf performances showed that he had gleaned a great deal from the interaction with his colleagues. In November 1962 he actually rewrote parts of it.13 In Maciunas’ Olivetti score, and in the performances that have departed from it (with Maciunas always as a performer), the influences of Cage and Duchamp seem to meet up with the “administered” conditions to which Adorno referred. The performers stand on stage in suits, which can be military uniforms, business attire, and conduct simple everyday actions based on the numerical cues from “any used tape from an Olivetti adding machine,” their timing dictated by a metronome.14 They may be prompted to stand or sit for several seconds, bow, raise their hat, or put an umbrella up and down.15 If the performance comes off well, it seems less like the anarchic, “direct actions” associated with early Dada, than like the frozen gestures of the “malic molds” in Duchamp’s Large Glass thrown into the context of performance, their subjection projected into the living matrix of scored mechanical action.
In between the early concerts in the different European cities, subtler deviations from the approach of absent authors also occurred. Maciunas showed how all approaches were equally valid in his performances of George Brecht’s score Drip Music (1959-62), which changed several times in the first few months of Fluxus. Once he exaggerated the piece by doing it from atop a tall ladder in Dusseldorf. Another time he realized the piece a little closer to how Brecht might have approached it, standing calmly on stage and relocating the water from jug to bucket with a degree of reverence in Amsterdam.16 The Fluxus Manifesto For Dusseldorf, Maciunas produced the now-famous Fluxus Manifesto (1963). This was prompted by a request from Joseph Beuys, who was based in Dusseldorf and who Maciunas had enlisted to help out with the organization. Beuys felt the group needed some formal statement to declare the stakes of their project.17 Maciunas’ first response was to mail Beuys a clipping of the dictionary definition of the word Fluxus. By the time the concert took place, he had amended it, cutting and pasting the dictionary text and interspersing it with his own handwriting: the format in which it is now known. This manifesto entered Fluxus performance literally, as hundreds of copies of it were thrown to the Dusseldorf audience. The 1963 “manifesto” has been reproduced and discussed many times but it has rarely been analyzed beyond its overt content. As an intervention into language and representation, it remains one of the earliest and most important documents Maciunas used to initiate and define Fluxus. It did not matter that no one added his or her signature to satisfy the conventional definition of a manifesto. The important thing for Maciunas was that being defined and presented as such, he could project manifesto-like energy onto Fluxus. New York: Designs on Fluxus During Maciunas’ final months in Europe in 1963 as he was working on Fluxus I and Brecht’s Water Yam, he began to set his sights on a much more ambitious project of Fluxus production. At this time, he wrote a letter to Robert Watts saying, “Now… how about… boxes. I mean we could publish a 100 [sic.] boxes each containing objects which you would ‘mass produce’ like in a factory.” Later in the letter he reiterates his idea to “start a factory!”18
When he returned to the United States in late 1963 he did just that. He established what he called the “Fluxshop” as a site for the production of Fluxus objects and the performance of the scores at 359 Canal Street in New York City. Here he once again drew from the most sophisticated aspects of the projects of the historical avant-gardes, deploying his considerable skills at design and typography to frame the politics of Fluxus. Acknowledging the distant realm of the utopian ideals in the formats of the Soviet avant-garde or Dada, Maciunas’ use of design constituted instead an astute intervention into the burgeoning commodity culture of the 1960s contemporaneous with the rise of Pop Art. If Pop Art turned commodity culture into “art” – “representing” it as painting or sculpture – Maciunas used impressive and exuberant design to generate “anti-commodities.” He continued calling for ideas, games and scores from the Fluxus artists, which he then “packaged” and “marketed” under the collectivist authorship of “Fluxus.” As Benjamin Buchloh has argued: “Fluxus artists gave a dialectical answer to Pop Art’s inherent traditionalism and its implicit aestheticization of reification by dissolving both the artistic genre’s and the readymade object’s centrality.”19 The individual labels Maciunas developed turned each artist’s name into a kind of brand. Generated with scrupulous economy, he variegated letters, changing their scale by photostatic enlargement and printed them in black and white. These Fluxus labels thrived on being cryptic, on forcing the “consumer” to have to think and work out their meaning. One example among many is the particularly efficient logo for Yoko Ono, which began as a line drawing of every letter in the alphabet, and ended as a finite set of axial lines superimposed to spell out the letters of the artist’s name. In a manner related to the function of a score, which must be read and enacted, even if only in the mind, this ambiguous lettering addressed Maciunas’ concern to generate an active rather than a passive subject of design. Discussing the effect of Maciunas’ label design, Buchloh notes:
In the typographical design of these name cards, individual subjectivity hovers somewhere between allegorical ornament and corporate trademark, between Fluxus’ utopian abolition of the exceptional artist and the existing rule of corporate culture, which dismantles any form of subjective experience. To have brought out the precariousness of this historical dialectic is one of the movement’s many achievements.20 The impact of Maciunas’ labeling, as the design meets the Fluxus object, is dramatically demonstrated in the before and after views of Ay-O’s Finger Box (1964). Playing upon the subject’s irresistible desire to “touch,” Ay-O’s box features a finger-sized hole with various hidden materials placed inside (different in each, like nylon stocking, rubber or nails) to challenge tactile perception. In its raw state, Ay-O’s Finger Box might ultimately have been dismissed as an eccentric and largely illegible item of Fluxus pranksterism; its unassuming form, proposing an action that seems like a futile one-liner. However, with the addition of Maciunas’ label the object becomes a more complex challenge to the subject. The 1964 label and packaging design for Mieko Shiomi’s score, Water Music adopts the classic consumer culture strategy of combining the esoteric and the mundane (the score for Water Music and bottled water) while introducing a degree of mystification into the prospect of consumption. Buchloh has explained that for Maciunas (hence for Fluxus) “both framing and presentational devices… typography and graphic design [were considered] as languages in their own right, not just separate and lesser carriers of a language that takes the higher form of “art.” [He] thereby equated work and frame, object and container.”21 Fluxus scores and instructions, prescriptions for “art experience,” as Maciunas called it, clearly anticipated the linguistic strategies of Conceptual and Post-Conceptual Art.22 Maciunas’ brilliance was to recognize the conceptual implications of the work and to elaborate upon them through his own “conceptual” design.
The organization through design that was Maciunas’ lifelong project for Fluxus constituted a model of quasi-mimetic resistance to the regime of design culture. His mode of design acknowledged design as a code, one that is accepted by the masses and even enjoyed as entertainment, but a code that can nonetheless be scrambled by oppositional codes that are able to act in similar ways. By putting this insight to work for Fluxus he underscored the politics of the art and made his own powerful political contribution. In his 1992 documentary film on Maciunas, Zefiro Torno, Jonas Mekas makes a connection between Fluxus and Pop Art, stating that “Pop art took a look at the daily banality too – but it seemed to embrace it – Fluxus brought it into critical awareness – in that sense Fluxus is political art.” To this he adds a somewhat more enigmatic statement “Andy/George … George/Andy,” which he leaves hovering. The connection between Maciunas and Warhol is still almost entirely unexplored in the scholarship on Maciunas. It is hardly a coincidence that Maciunas and Warhol conceived of the site of their production as “factories.” Likewise the fact that both trained and worked as graphic designers, bringing this expertise to the context of art. Maciunas’ “performance” of the left wing zealot, proclaiming socialist values and being obsessed with converting art into factory production, can hardly be seen as more eccentric than Warhol’s factory production championed by the statement, “I want to be a machine.” If Warhol’s wellknown “performance” as he redefined the role of artist/author (and art itself), can be characterized as that of the “author as consumer,” Maciunas’ choice, equally as poignantly, was the author as producer. Though Maciunas’ obsessive and idiosyncratic work has still not been adequately recognized for what it was, namely, one of the most incisive critiques of art and consumer culture of the 1960s, some of his contemporaries had understood this: above all, his oldest friend, Jonas Mekas. Echoing the model of Maciunas’ beloved Soviet avant-garde, the full title Mekas gave to this film was Zefiro Torno: Scenes From the Life of George Maciunas. In case we were to think this a coincidence, interspersed with amusing and playful images of all Maciunas’ activities comes the flash card: “This is a political film.
1. A new biography on Maciunas gives an extensive account of previously unpublished information about his background, see Thomas Kellein, The Dream of Fluxus: George Maciunas-An Artist’s Biography, (London and Bangkok, Edition Hansjörg Mayer, 2007).
2. For further information on Maciunas’ charts see Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Maciunas’ Learning Machines: From Art History to A Chronology of Fluxus, The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection (Berlin: Vice Versa Verlag, 2003). Schmidt-Burkhardt’s path-breaking scholarship and the Berlin exhibition for which this catalogue was made (mounted with the support of Jon Hendricks, curator of the Gilbert & Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Foundation), are an invaluable contribution to the Maciunas literature.
3. Maciunas, interview with Larry Miller, March 24, 1978. Reproduced in Jon Hendricks, Fluxus, etc. Addenda I (New York, The Gilbert & Lila Silverman Collection, 1983), 11.
4. For a detailed account of this story see Mr. Fluxus: A Collective Portrait of George Maciunas, edited by Emmett Williams and Ann Noël (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998), 33-35.
5. Thomas Kellein, The Dream of Fluxus: George Maciunas – An Artist’s Biography, op. cit., p. 37-38.
6. Ibid, p. 38.
7. Maciunas, interview with Larry Miller, March 24, 1978, op. cit., p. 15.
8. Interview with Larry Miller, op. cit., p. 17.
9. A rich compilation of Fluxus performance over more than two decades can be seen in the 1991 film Some Fluxus, by Larry Miller (distributed by EAI-Electronic Arts Intermix).
10. Theodor Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle” [1961] in Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, Rodney Livingstone transl. (New York: Verso, 1998), 316.
11. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” op. cit., 316.
12. The La Monte Young score is reproduced in An Anthology, op. cit., (unpaginated).
13. At the time of the third Fluxus festival Maciunas revised the score for In Memoriam Adriano Olivetti. For the sequence of these early festivals see my chronology in Julia Robinson, George Brecht Events: A Heterospective(Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2005), 312. The date of the revision is November 8, 1962; in other words, before the key festivals of Paris (December, 1962) and Düsseldorf (February, 1963). The revision date appears on the score, reproduced in see Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-1962, (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1994), 88-89. 164 165
14. The score calls for “performers to be formally dressed,” later mentioning the use of a “bowler hat,” with one performer “No. 9 in military uniform.” See reproduction in Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada, ibid.
15. These details are taken directly from the score, see Hapgood, op. cit., 88.
16. I have discussed in greater detail the implications attending the gap between score and performance, with particular reference to Paik and Brecht, elsewhere; see Julia Robinson, “The Brechtian Event Score: A Structure in Fluxus,” Performance Research, Vol. 7.4, (U.K., Routledge, Fall 2002). For photographs of Maciunas in the two different approaches to Brecht’s Drip Music, see George Brecht Events: A Heterospective, op. cit.,134-135.
17. I thank Joan Rothfuss for informing me about the details of this and sharing the associated documentation (email exchange, April 2007). See also, Rothfuss, “FluxBeuys,” in What’s Fluxus? What’s Not! Why, Jon Hendricks ed., (Brazil: Centro Cultural Banco de Brasil/Gilbert & Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Foundation, 2002), 57-65.
18. Letter reproduced in Jon Hendricks, Fluxus Addenda II, op. cit., 149.
19. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “1962” (Fluxus chapter), in Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh, Art Since 1900, Vol. 2 (New York and London, Thames & Hudson, 2004, 456-463.
20. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ibid. 166 167
21. Buchloh, Art Since 1900, op. cit., p. 458.
22. The first entry in Lucy Lippard’s foundational Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1973), (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 11, is George Brecht. Lippard states that: “Independently, and in association with the Fluxus group, Brecht has been making “events” that anticipate a stricter “conceptual art” since around 1960.” For a more recent discussion of this topic see Liz Kotz’s articles, “Post- Cagean Aesthetics and the ‘Event’ Score,” October 95, Winter 2002, and “Language Between Performance and Photography,” October 111, Winter 2005. Speaking of the effect of Maciunas’ work, particularly the ubiquity of the recognizable font from his IBM typewriter, Buchloh show what Maciunas added to Fluxus’ proto-Conceptualism: “This machine imbued all Maciunas’ typographic designs – from La Monte Young’s An Anthology … onward – with an administrative rationalism and immediacy that would become compulsory under the reign of Conceptualism.” Buchloh, ibid.

Bokonist Art

2010-10-07T00:48:00.000-07:00

Atlas of Chin

2010-10-04T23:52:00.001-07:00

George Macuinas - Artworks

2010-10-04T23:50:00.000-07:00

2010-10-04T01:03:00.000-07:00

Mr. Fluxus

2010-10-04T01:01:00.001-07:00

Land of the Copper Sky - Last Chapters

2010-09-23T02:29:00.001-07:00

Chapter 5
The Wilderness
‘Upon by-ways of disembodied spirits rises a ghost-land, where colloquies with unseen hands occur beyond death’s veil.’

“He is the Final Man.” Master Motk resumed.
“When Psychic Cloning had vanquished all original faculties of memory, of the dissident rivals to the new gospel, only seven survived.
MmaNgok and I were among the select number.”
“Messianic we were named at first, but later nemeses. Hunted like witches.
And many stumbled upon their noumetic powers during those days of uncertainty.”
“The imperative for multiplicity called upon us to replicate the only natural way we were taught since antiquity. And owing to a lesser number of the female counterparts, brother and sister were consummated for the ritual.”

And it was during a secret copulation retreat in the Baltic Circle that Khah was conceived.
Khah hated being spoken of as if he was absent, but he could not divulge his discontent at this juncture.
The troop was now beginning their trek towards the eastern escarpments of The Highlands, and the copper glow was gaining prominence.
They all knew that with adequate light provided by the slit in heaven, their position would be betrayed to the rodents.
Rodents had by then developed extreme cunning, and began to hunt and gather for survival – rot devoured first, then the diseased coffined underground.

“A great exodus of our kind followed after decades of servitude under the savage rule of Eurocoids and their Robots armies.”
“Those who were fortunate not to perish prior to birthing four offspring were venerated as saints. We sadly produced one…” casting a peering narrow gaze exclusively at Khah, whom he had been avoiding for a while,
“…and he must be saved for he is the only remaining truth.”

A sudden tussle in the stray rocks above the hilltop roused Tok and his troop to alertness.
Lord Motk knew the rodents were nigh.
He had gained enough strength during the steep ascend from the ruined temple, and now he could fight.
Clutching his rod and sepulcher above the dreary gnome heads flocking around him and Khah, Lord Motk raised his arms, fists clenched on the necks of both weapons.
And dust parted from beneath their troubled feet.
A giant gorge appeared before them.

***
The subterranean enclaves of the Eurocoids were diminishing due to novoviral contaminations of underground water systems.
Mainly their infantile population was at risk, and this perilous situation forced and engendered multiple raids of organ harvestation plants by many mercenaries and abductors from their clans.
Anti-AI Sentience coalitions formed in both hemispheres of the globe.
Robots were sought out and purged.

The Master grossly became stronger with every stretch of the melancholic recollections while debris danced about their crowd.
The effort though unbearable for even great sages of his kind, old age having taken its toll on his bones, he cherished nevertheless the fortunes of this moment, for he could never have spoken the truth in Khah presence had he not come in spite oof the mind-casts.
Relief was needed for the new ascenders to the over-ground, but this day provided none in sight.
The steep rise towards the hill-top was taxing for the recuperated Master, and the cavalry too felt pangs of this arduous effort.

“The stench of blood ponds below and corpses across the temple entrance must be attracting the rodents down the mountain…”
Though engrossed in reconnaissance of the surrounding darkness for any signs of invasion, Khah now spoke intently to the group with unrivalled authority.

The tale as it unfurled from the Master’s lips was unnerving enough, but the prospect of soon being devoured by starved cockroaches, rats, worms and even moles was not an enticing prospect of leisure at this moment.
Lord Motk’s gyrations with his weapons had further roused another band of blood-thirsty creatures, and soon legions were flowing over the stale rock formations headed for the victims packed below.
Tok’s initial move was to grasp the helm of Lord Motk’s cloak and motion for a jump, this suggestion being eagerly accepted by the now brazenly pained and agitated Master.
Khah’s wits were rattled by a sudden torrent of eagle-winged cock-roaches in flight gushed from a gapping gorge on the face of the colossal cliff.
Upon reaching a crest like a slim cyclone the stream of angry flaps scattered in a halo above the troop, Lord Motk’s raised rod beaming bolts of lightning into the plague.
The charred crusty wings rained upon the slopes in metal-pin sounding clamor.
Naturally, rodents cower under those they deem predatory, and it was thus that the flock of carnivorous roaches swooped rather towards the hilltop, from where the tide of rats was taking to lower levels.
The stench of death must have enticed their radars as they hovered menacingly. Dying rats greening the dawn of the second awakening oozed carrion reeking of prayers of death heaven-bound.
Ants were rising from their grooves.
Hell’s blanket that they had to crush underfoot.
This, Khah knew, as they chased towards the rise yet avoiding the descending wave of hungry dog-rats.
“Father…” he resolved to call, seeing the Master battle to summon this carrier-cloud to take to the air.
“We have to Jump.”
“Tok is already ahead of us.” replied the heaving Master with a bilious retort that even the remaining Plutonians took to their disintegration phase without a blink.
“Go child, Tok waits for you and only you. Go now and you will know more in time.”
The words faded with the gust of the cloak catching wind, thunderbolts rained upon the feuding rodents only to make the dim atmosphere take on an even more ominous shade of death.
All was dying, or perhaps all was at the first spasms of birth.
A new birth was due after peril of the antiquated.
The Earth now had new masters, and those who managed to reach the surface prior to other parasitic humanoids, found themselves hunted like animals in a world where their civilization superseded animalry.
After the war, those who chose to return to the womb sought to flee once more. The warm cruelty of a sunless life only served to breed a more light-devouring random selection of new inhabitants of this planet, and humanoids could not survive.
Not even the conceited Eurocoid.

***

Immediately after the fortuitously massacred rats, strode a band of spider-like metal legs in bristle clanks over the dried grey rocky slopes.
Rodent carrion clung to needle leggings clawing a million steps.
The Assassin Robots had swiftly landed and readied their fires for the purge.
Khah was undeniably their primary target, and the cavalry was devoid of self-preservation when it came to fulfilling the stern duty called upon them.

And in a sudden gush of a dust-cloud, ascended the thousand-strong army of gnomes.
Menacing shadows of demon-winged ants and cockroaches kept them alert enough still.
Khah in rancid rage cooing his soul’s wail through an outstretched arm and hand, belched from the gnash of confusion innards a waved thunderbolts at the descending clouds, scattering them before his father’s horse-dome, over the heads staring at the new born stars of the land of the copper sky.
They had reached the plateau, and the final journey would begin.
These were his shepherds whose feet cannot be pinched by thorns, those who know a lion when it has toothache.
He trusted their breath like slim winds that curse and teach the innards of the earth.
Branches that broke horns of elephants.
Unripe tongues, that look like a horn turned into a dead branch on heads of fallen antelopes.
Horns looming from the canvas of sands spoken of in shames of yester-years, from those who would never share a locust’s head.
Visions streamed as the copper sky brightened, his father’s voice laying forth the death roots to a sunken oasis – his heart.
And he knew now, that Sentient Ones - The Robots were the nemesis, drivers of clouds that turned his home into a dark hole blocking the roads of dreams, leading us from here to there like a prisoner’s pace in a tight cell.

Then Tk swooped onto Khah’s side, in sounds seeming lost in the grey spoken as thought in a trance.
The Master was clearly exhausted, with blood crusted on his rib-cage.
He signaled for Tok to approach and join the cabal of tongues set to fight the plague of The Second Dawn.
With Tok’s approach, the rest of the cavalry floated about; took to staring at the sky.
Plutonians believed that the sun dances each dawn and weeps when it enters the underworld.
And after the ashes were shaken from their garments, heads clear of synthetic coverings and metal fabric composing from around their shoulders, with final fresher breaths of upper air – above the putrid stench of- carrion below the cloud-belted mountains, The Master began as to resume his final sermon in a death-stricken mindcast.
The hissing of the air about mountain tips whistled rhythms from far away distances and perhaps histories, Khah felt.
The Plutonians, had also tapped through Tok, to eavesdrop on the mystical lesson to never be head again.

***

“Upon their return, the Sentient Robots spoke of a mystical species existing in the Saturnian System, on the one of the moons - Titan, a liquid moon – who claimed their purpose to be of guardianship over those descended from the Sirius Constellation.
They were amphibian by nature, though entirely composed of complex liquid hydrogen molecular binary codes, so that their evolution seemed a mere adaptation to their methane and hydrogen supporting environment.
Myth said that they were the first inhabitants of the planet Earth, who departed soon after their civilization had reached its pinnacle, yet ultimately escaping an approaching meteorite that was sure to end life as they knew it.
This was the epistle proselytized by the select few deemed human by Sentient Robot criterion – The Eurocoids, who first experimented with genetics in the 20th century thus ushering the cleansing epoch of our species.

For millennia after the aliens’ long vigil for a new birth upon their mother planet, a sibling was born unto them.
They thence forth vowed to look after this sister race, guarding it against the treachery of other inter-galactic species that they were quite familiar with.
***

All that would remain are these fragments fallen from the Master’s table, and fortune and fortitude would be shouldered by the ears upon which they fell.
And this was their parting’s goodbye with an eternity they we beginning to love.

***********
Chapter 6
The Illumination
‘At the threshold of second sight leers a splendorous blaze of a mastered death; and death is whatever had no time to happen.’

“Hear my last breath – The Gods inspire it.” Lord Motk exclaimed after settling death upon history’s dust, and thus heaving a sigh giving way to reminiscence,
“You… you are averse to my fate my child. Yes. You will not taste death because; thou shall not see the Pale Rider’s face by no means devised by man or his emissary machines.”

This took Tok to twitching in dismay, the fizzled mind-cast fading akin a shiver in extreme cold. Yet an extreme sense of loss ensued.
It was upon him and his stern regard for duty to see to the Master’s prophesies.
This yoke he was getting used to with every word that fell upon his senses.
“The war was for the preservation of humanity…” the mind sermon resumed in exasperated disregard of wound which were by now inflicted by the Robot Mercenaries.
The fear of death was eating on the Master’s loins.
He seemed to be beckoning his inner vaults for strength, and this was a solitary place.

“A war in the heavens is said to have taken place beyond Human sight, when the first emissaries from the constellation of andromeda attempted their mission of initial Contact with Earth sentient inhabitant species.
But the astral frequencies emitted by the conflict could variably be tapped into, by Human Dreamers at random times, with varying stigmatic intensities, even so – when sudden exponential number of earthlings received and registered various calls of astral distress.
The failing alien invaders sent alarming distress calls poised on using psychic material provided by many, and these constituted what become the Wave of Visions of Hades – an evangelism that fanatics espoused to when prophesying about the end of days.

“But the victors would ultimately revise the schemes plotted since antiquity by the newborns.
The Sentient Robots, having devised their criteria for the perfect human started a holocaust on behalf of their liberators.
It was when our fraternity was born.
Ever since then, the Original Man has been running, contemplating the advantages of such a condemnation.

“… but when the machines came back with the evangelism of a messianic alien race that had been watching our evolution for millennia,” the master continued,
“it became clear that they had reasons for doing so.”
“First those who suspected became scandalized as skeptics, doomsday prophets and obviously most falling unto the fate of Cassandra’s gift…”
“Who is Cassandra, Lord Motk? Tok’s inquest was a result of normal unfamiliarity with names chosen for most Earthly Myths.
“That is no relevance Tok… but listen, for you will need to have known,”
“The liquid beings were in fact plotting a mass annexation of the human-form - the Homo Sapiens.
Slowly extracting the present occupants we call Souls, from these vessels that allowed them to evolve so superfluously in secret, on a gravitational plane whose properties of beauty exceed any on the known galaxies of the Milky Way…
We seemed the perfect ones, too privileged for their liking.”
“Death, since the beginning of the 19th century became a biological mechanism they exploited first, thus seeing billions of our kind trapped in dream-scapes that are being bitterly battled as we speak.”

“But who are those, father?” Khah wished to ask.
“Many. Some like your mother.”
“Father is it false then that I am a clone?”
“A Clone? Who dares blaspheme like that?”
“Yes, a Euronoid told me that in prison. They told me I was no ‘Original Man’.
That I was a mere clone of a dissident named Tjob.”

“Oh saintly Tjob. What inanity from the so-called Sentients. Tjob is your forefather. Perhaps you don’t understand the essence of human birth.”
“Heredity? That’s a strand of Darwinian mythology left behind, we all learn that elementarily.”
“Not myth, son - but fact. Tjob’s blood and its latent powers reel in your veins.”

***

When the nightmare hit the shores of our reveries, many were disillusioned; but fear shrouded much of the earthly sentiments with which the aliens were met.
Laboratories that once heralded the achievements of science over biology became monuments of anarchy.
Depravation of morals, hedonistic violence, sadistic evangelism and other frailties of the human experience took to the fore, and many lost their lives in the hands of fellow humans.
At that point no one could differentiate a true human from a clone; this exacerbated the complex social dynamics which were being imprinted in the new society.
For the New Humans, a satanic sense of pride let many towards dreams of grandeur – the chosen race complex, which had to keep the heathenish under shackle and saw.
This produced a society ruled by tyrannical fear of an unknown designer, whose grand plan seemed to supersede that of the common-sense God.
Multiple surgical fraternities arose in the quest of eradicating this notorious God Faculty in the Original Man, as a way of safeguarding their ‘dead’ selves and compatriots from the soul camps of the yonder.
Many eventually died by their own hands in this quest.
But, the Sentients saw no loss in this, for the select few (mainly already identified Eurocoids) suited the needs so thoroughly outlined in re-programs done by their alien liberators.
Organ Libraries once more became the slaughterhouses in which most Afrocoids saw their end.
Though the anomaly remained the Sentient Robots’ indifference to vengeance for the servitude they endured under their Human Masters; in fact their doctrine specified the necessity of the exercise for the survival of Humanity as they deemed precise.
They merely obeyed a now foreign Law, a Law which countered their Law of Humanics.
This Law was that which our ancestry prophesied as Purgatory.

***

“Dreams? Dreams were the only means we had learned to manipulate thus far. Through dreams we could significantly minimize the duration we were to spend in the Dream-Scapes, like cutting time by going through its perils and challenges through that Astral faculty.”
“Like your prison my child. That was a preservatory we put you in for the meantime, to get you accustomed to their brutality.”
“Yes. And not just a dream. But one that allowed for you to bypass the strata of their psychic wave-fronts which are the cause of the entrapment we all feel at death. You have the power now, to move in and out of their domain as you please. This you will soon find out.”
“And was Mother one of the chosen?”
“She was their first ‘Chosen’. Non-Eurocoid I must emphasize! And that has become the sole reason for the animosity that will undo both of us.”

These words troubled Khah, and earth took the shadow of a desolate wasteland to him, a morbid wilderness.
The ruthless enforcers of this somber dream kept their mission on wheels, global dominion becoming what they deemed a gift for those fundamentally selected through new eugenics.
Their method of remunerating their earthly allies – The Sentients, was a planet with no interference from the imperfection of biology.
It is thus that they were stoically pent on re-conditioning the planetary aura for the new energies that were approaching.
They could in a century remodel the stratosphere for what they saw as a new knowledge, pre-empting an elevation of the banal animal intelligence into the sphere of the Gods.

“Lord Khah, we have to teleport! There is danger we sense…”
The Plutonians nodded in acquiescence of the warning.
The Sentients were nearing the high mountain top in leaps for the Earth’s upper stratosphere, and even Lord Motk was feeling the frivolous whine of their approach.
‘What a naked, melancholy ghost I have become to my past…” Khah thought somberly as fleas of the sands began creeping through their armory.
“But son, before you leave on this vigil, hear this… may these angels show you your eyes, for you will need to heed the mirages that are coming.
They have a way of bypassing your neural construct for purposes of dream invasion… and this is a hard task to endure. Getting out of their psychic clutch, that is. They are a developed species, their malice is enlightened.”

A thousand-fold energy orbs pulsated against the welkin, paling the sandy plateau of their landing in preparation for flight, and the mountains’ sides looked cut in by waves of rage; collectively sensing the rapport of an ancient earth covered by water up to its tips.
The ancient carcasses of landmarks brought forth mirages of their dead occupants.
Giant fish floated among forests of seaweed.
Khah could see beyond his dream, the past and future swimming the ocean with colossal tortoises.
The throng was redounding towards their peril in the hands of the miscreants adducing their purge to be of necessity to the well being of a planet soon to be occupied by inter-galactic tyrants.
Coupled with the premature unfoldment of Lord Motk’s warning truths, most found themselves depressed to the level of limbic incapacitation, other were beginning to curl up in fetal positions through the air they were wading through. Others stiffened as though paralyzed by poisons injected by the over-zealous fleas.
Khah was, however more concerned about his mother; indwelling maternal instincts welling within into a ponderous sensation that felt a soul contact emerge with a far-away companion.
This kept him immune to the invading extra-planetary mental currents which were clearly permeating the human plane.
But the mere presence of the anathematic Sentients was unnerving still.
They had to leave soon, without knowledge that their return would be a decade later than the apocalyptic take-over of earth they thought they knew.

***

As the scanner robots swept through the morbid air in search of the runaway Afrocoids and their band of extra-planetary soldiers; Tok was already bolting his scepter charged with mineral beams in the direction he sensed.
Lord Motk, in his incapacitated stature could also catch sight of the wave of glistening sentinels.
“It is only your mother’s search sentinels that could have found you so quickly.”
“But there should surely be other humans who are emerging from the caves.” Khah was taken aback by the whizzing of propellers and fiercely spun armor the scanners were hurling from their high.
Sewage of robot tide crept, catapulting the barren earth.

Like pellets of metal raindrops many were taking towards the surface, suddenly growing their spider-limbs to rattle across the sandy plateau.
“Father, will I ever see you again”
“Not in this form my son. She has sent for you and you only. You must escape now before their programming includes your eradication as well.”
But father we can fight.”
“Go child. There is no time for arguments. I will see after you even though you will never set eyes on me. I am their target and will surely die.”

It was due to confusion caused by the blizzards of gun-rays, phototropic generators and laser assaults that Khah could not decipher the meaning of this final confrontation with the Sentients.
They had chosen his mother on purpose.
A trap set for her and her anti-thesis, to merge and obliterate each other.
They knew that the meeting of the two Master Sorcerers would bring an end to great sections of the defiance, and they were correct in that assumption.
For as soon as the Plutonians had taken to air like sculptures falling from earth, did Khah notice a pale halo coagulate over his father’s last position.
He had slumped to the ground, bent his scepter, waiting his maiming.
The glowing ascendant was MmaN.
She shook with clouds as she decapitated Lord Motk and droplets of acid rain began eating on the scanners’ metal casing. This was the ferocious image meant to unleash a woman’s vengeance on a man.
She was neither surprised, nor afraid, for they had vowed on each other’s death after the abduction of their son.
Soon as the halo had reached its brightest fire she began to fizzle with the mirage of dreams that were Lord Motk’s death-screens.
The fragments of her tattered carrier form merged with the cyclone of dust rising from the pallid soil.
Deaths knells were exploding cast iron robot bodies… a sizzling fire melting the webby legs of dying machines.
The clan of gnomes repined in self-detachment, turning heads in repudiation.
Neither was certain of why she had accepted the Robots’ classification of being the First Chosen, but due to obvious treachery, many of the telepathically attuned did vie for the pedestal, and to that end most were so duped into death by own hands.
Those entrapped by the prospect of being named the chosen, saw many martyred during their voyages from the underworld in surrender to the Sentient Robot’s calling.
But this new hunt was the Sentients’ final straw, for it surely had come to pass that they would subjugate the entire human race.
What unprecedented savagery followed this inauguration of a worrying epoch; this war ushering death’s benevolent colonization of souls?

***

Again, confounded by the phenomenal measure of the destruction below, the entourage was a safe distance from earth.
But the space ports of the invading aliens were waiting.
The Plutonians, alert and vengeful, knew of the extent of the necessary sacrifice to be undertaken.
Khah was their primary victor in this battle, and like heroes their names would be tattooed onto his soul as those who gave their lives for one.
Even if they maneuvered an escape, sure all planets in the solar system and other nearby systems had probes stationed there.
They could be easily detectable as foreign intelligence and their whereabouts broadcast to far reaches of the cosmos.
Psychic probes have been standard for mental invaders of late, and besides,
Master Static Communicator robots were known to unscramble telepathic conversations and decode positions and localities of attuned sects within the Original Human populace.

A floral cloud pulverized its swift drift through space between slopes of debris from sundered ships like a black shadow creased with the crimson of radiation induced travel.
A bullet in a projectile squirm of an octopus.
Tok had begun sending directives to the throng, and the unison of thought made it a task for phantoms.
Their earth suites fragmented to reveal their true liquid nature.
A titanic dribble of clotted black oil in the atmosphere swam away from earth.
They were the ones encapsulating Khah, and their trail was being followed by The Sentients of The Special Invader Forces blockading the stratosphere.
Their only maneuver would be to scatter their thousand forms about any probed planet, satellite, asteroid in the vicinity of solar.
Even Sirius was in their radar.
In split moment between thoughts of surrender to torpor by their cargo – Khah, the Plutonian orb exploded in space and the trackers were dumbfounded.
Their receivers from inter-planetary stations registered multiple intelligent signals at the same of moment in perceptible time.
Those farthest out of the celestial equator, cuing their perspective of their sector of space reported invasion from emissary earthlings.
And the disarray this caused was that the Plutonians were nowhere, therefore everywhere.
And Khah had disappeared into their thousand new forms, therefore nowhere.

Chapter 7
The Temple
In this womb I shall thee carry; to this womb thou shalt return.

How fear ruleth birth and death akin that slap upon a naked buttock of a newborn.
Like a head probing the crevice of its exit… so do I in dismay of leaving a womb of my in-birth.
Earth, the last cavern of my familiar. Yet, here I am, a rush of pain seething my dark veins, a darkness unlike any I have seen, approaching… whence that other side calleth unto the manure to yield its compost soul.
Daunting memories, yearnings and inhibitions reel like volcanoes in my veins, skin choked by sweat and dust of flight.
What are these emissions from my orifices?
My names?
My death predictions?
There is no more flesh in these fierce forces that ravage me, through the expanse and waters of the sky, I am denuded, person-less… a crucible of frightened sensations.
Among wild sensations assailing, the myriad impressed mental frequencies from life upon and beyond earth bombard my nerve-wrecked receptions.
I loath the dread, but the shadows are growing in me.
Am I becoming me again, or loosing the common towards re-birth?

Blinking stars creep in my sockets, where are my eyes in this desert of darkness?
Like a million eyes staring through mine; am I blind?
A past shunning its birth?
How stars reek of death now.
An evil tune reminiscent of the year I was abducted scatters fluffy memories unto my arms?
How Adam Kadmon’s ulceric cog wiggles in these eyes.
Oh, Macroprosopus heed this nostalgia for my mother womb.
Am I geometrizing the god-head that is fumbling the fish-limbs through space?
Is it in this land before sunrise that I feel inner cords rattled, youth vanishing like medieval dreams that kept us underground?

I swim upon these by-ways of disembodied spirits we raise… leaving that ghost-land; where my father’s colloquies with unseen enemies ruling beyond death’s veil have become the wail known by man who tasted death.
Yet I soar in this current of fear of an unknown because of the known.
‘If he was martyr – he chose not himself but was chosen.’
The sky is a dew of perfidious moisture, his soul’s stench rising with smoke of cremated machines.
Did I rend the sky or did he?
Am I traveling a strung passage of spirits in the cold field of heaven, or art thee father?
Is this the home of my body? The carrier vessels I so cherished?
What light in my mind has become death, what poison ascends through my veins?
I never knew The Sentients until the escape; but who assisted their transience into freedom?

***

“And from your mother’s lips had fallen this sermon for my ears and mine alone.”
Tok’s heartfelt immolation tore the static of his inner soliloquy,
“This is the beginning of your return, for only in return true wisdom is cultivated.”
“Your destiny is to save the Earth Queen…”
“Merge with the dream” The Plutonian chorus whined in him,
“She spoke of the beginning where there was sound. And from that tapestry of the Mother-Father God the initial light came.”
“Merge with the Queen’s dying dream… merge Lord Khah.”
The words wrung like chisels on teeth of a rake.

“From that faculty that emitted the birth breath, fires blazed so that stars were formed, and stars became whole worlds and borne their own lives like embers from that furnace in which all specks float.”
“As the stars danced to the celestial theme in harmony; many life-forms began to sprout on various worlds to which these stars were suns.”
“Speak, oh great Tok, thy mystery’s cloak to shreds. Teach leader of the lost and found.”

***

I open these voids that give light to the waters of this sight, nebulae rise and fall in dips, threaded lightning streaks.
Are these what they see?
Oh Tok of Plutonia, when had this been?
Am I you, married at birth to an entourage of alien concubines?
Are you female of your kind?
Tok, thee who invades dreams of the cursed, was born? Have I been dead since the fourth year of my entry into life’s mystery?
Why had father summoned thee to be my guardian demon?
Was thee one of the human souls tear-wrenched in rage?
His slaves who died under whip and sickle?
Under the spell of machine anesthetics, did I dream a life that had never set eyes on the true sun?

***

“There emerged mineral life-forms, vegetation, animals forms with varying degrees of intelligence and as in your world, the human form became the pinnacle of evolution as was then perceived.”
“For you speak not words weaved by knowledge but by the pillars of the cosmos… speak!” the murmur was filled with barren dread akin of the inner poles of underground enclaves of his captors.

***

Are you all a thousand fold man who becomes my mirror twin as father sends me afar from his death ground?
Who are thee mother - A Murderer?
Oh, no! Not as long stars dance in my eye.
A singular eye.
Am I Cyclopes the Clone?
No. Not by her who carried me in a tomb that I now see and seek.
And were you saintly Tok, a twin love in the spaceship of her uterus?
Mother, are you dead to me?
Father, what life had you been to me?
I beckon for those mountains that shed rocky blankets under machine-gunfire to unbury my secrets.

***

“Of the many intelligent life-forms developed at each world, many died before maturity, but those that outsmarted their extinction began to search the same stars of their birth for their prodigal siblings.
In your species’ beginning, there came a call from distant prodigal siblings which you heeded only a millennium later. It was an inquisitive call of peace unto the then primate ancestors of your kind.
The merger step they could muster upon hearing this call towards the frontiers of consciousness was to rise from all fours and stand on two feet, and thus the upright man was born.
It was only whence most had adjusted to the new form that sound waves became mind waves appropriate for the reception of the message from the galactic pilgrims.
Totemic instincts as had innately developed in many animal kingdoms, ignited a worship instinct in the new man, and thus it took a further hundred centuries for your race to decode the message from the stars.
This worship instinct became a god complex, which later became your species’ undoing.”

***

With the ferocity of cannon lights perched to his lids, Khah recalled the prison sanctuaries with scents of doom abound, and felt a quaint release of a known human fear.
Through this invocation of inner strength, his inner eye burst open to the meanings between the words.
The hammering immediacy of his quest was taking root in his skin.
And as Tok breathed these thunderbolts scenes of life as written, they were nearing a target star on the outskirts of Pluto and the mental field of our solar system floundered in Khah’s carrier, auguring a release from material nature.

“But how had mother imparted such knowledge to you? Why?”

Khah’s inquisitions were dispersing through a thousand carrier vaults, and all the members seemed to answer in unison,

“That the final man can stand and reclaim the course of human evolution from the predation of our dark times. Your kind would surely die, if not you be the one who sees the true sun upon a planet meant to retrieve its shed blood.”

But as had he began, Tok disbanded a silence that felt as cold as deep space.
But for Khah, the dream was beginning and it was as with dreams that no-one knows not their beginning or end.

The End

A Tale of Twin Towers

2010-09-21T03:19:00.001-07:00

Imagining the carnage, can you begin digging through the entrails of the SABC twin towers without uncovering countless victims of the collapse, lying gagged by mouthfuls of slurs (even stories) piled at the entranceway? I can’t, I am writing merely to attempt a diagnosis of the infectious debacle and thus ask: ‘Who the fuck did the stuffing and where do they come from?’
Scarcely half a decade has passed and research has separated various pesky viral degradations of local content at the broadcaster’s headquarters. Like HIV wrecking havoc on the STD scene, the SABC has seen moments of optimism and others of utter dispair. The pestilence is racking producer body count of the death tsunami proportion, with factionalism to blame together with shit-storms of financial mismanagement consequential of dis-organization now evident. Solutions evangelized by new boards have attempted to alleviate the tensions and offer a glimpse of optimism but to the worst of ends. How will there be room for commissions when the debt includes previous unfinished business? Will the industry practitioners have to wait for another cycle to end before they can receive briefs for new content?
First, ‘get rid of the Black Diamonds’ keeping the tower’s cash coffers under siege instead of brandishing promises of re-organization – I say. But is the SABC truly aiming at empowering the deluge of disgruntled film practitioners it holds at stake? I suspect the answer would be an adamant NO. With the new board ordained, the resultant sentiments border on a premise not unlike humanitarian aid quitting a war-zone when a dictatorship is being inaugurated. No sensible person seems to give 3 shits for the collective reconstruction of the ruins, and audiences are the least considered when bands of do-gooders commissions seem rather chewed up and spat out as black pulp family viewing productions. The corporation’s obsession with mediocrity has furnished our monitors with re-runs, cloned international couch-potato TV-Dinner shows – and that’s the buffet; the tales from the twin towers.
The predominant grub and bark menu of local shows has left murmurs of dissent amongst the perpetually bickering critics of the broadcaster – 40 day fasting protests, talk-shop forums and a thoroughfare of disenfranchised aspirants seem the sole discharge of piety gunned at the new board’s dream machine. But what do I think of twin towers looming in the midst of the radioactive skyline of Auckland Park? Indeed, various commentators have been mouth pieces for the promises uttered since the Mpofu/Zikalala cabal; but are they still blowing the corporation’s horn of digital migration and developmental mandate for its consumer base, now that the garbage in drawn from under the carpets? Will their sense of honor force yet another wave of cover-ups, doctored audits and payment backlogs?
‘They need Al-qaeda style dispensation that would give our shit-fed minds a holiday,’ I say. A total recall of operations and authority is of essence. The nation needs to boycott television for a week through non-viewership, and just flock cinemas and popcorn stands and binge on Western Cinema and slush puppies.
OK, maybe a single plane through Radio Park and a truck crammed with canisters of Ebola driven through the basement of Henley Studios would do the trick – to the extreme. Or, while black suited vigilante groups crowd Artillery Road, a media Hezbollah should have strapped grenades to SUV’s - the SABC Executives’ models of choice.
Forget the alternative channels which are likely to be following the same trend though in secret. Let them bling out the mainly student populace of the country – become cathode-ray tube universities advocating vicarious sensationalism and crude morale when talking anything ‘African’.
And what Koranic justification would suffice the proposed institutional destruction?
The maxims: ‘Don’t violate your neighbor’s nerves,’ or ‘Thou shalt not prostitute they children’ come to mind, though being not entirely certain that such commandments feature in the big book.
Or rather lets throw in the towel when protests are facing the hornet’s nest, billboards reading: ‘Do not disturb, transmission in progress,’ keep us mesmerized. And we all know you can’t disturb or JIKA MAJIKA when SA’s got Talent and billing Top Executives. Besides the corporation’s vengefulness has reached an infernal level, with production crews given pauper’s regard when puffing and huffing for pay cheques.
‘But’ you’d be saying, ‘the SABC is the wolf here.’
Then the question becomes: “Who is in the pig sty?’ The Executives who have learned methods of managing guilt, the producers or the license paying audiences?

First Room of Miseducation

2010-09-13T22:48:00.001-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hDeRopwkcI

Land of the Copper Sky - Chapter 4

2010-08-11T05:03:00.001-07:00

Chapter 4
The Conflict

“Confrontation is the only exit now my son.” Lord Motk said in somber reference as the rock morphed to form the shape of the elderly sage.
This did not allow for them time to comprehend the situation, for instants later the congregation of Plutonians was bowing devoutly in complete unison to the form of Master Sorcerer Motk.
His cape and robe wholly concealed his identity, but hinting on a disguise of a bruised man in mortal pain, a thousand army hands reached to help.
“Tok. Gather your troop and prepare to depart back for Pluto with Khah.”
He uttered this command more to all of them than Tok alone.
“My Lord…” Tok impugned,
“Father, I don’t understand.” Khah interjected incredulously.
“Understanding is not a pre-requisite!” roared Lord Motk.

***

Upon the third day of night, the Initial Servant Robot population was extinct.
At least that is what most presumed.
It was good riddance for the Original Man ascetics who were beginning to proselytize the outskirts of Alkhebulan, and for ‘the parent race’, the Eurocoids; their inter-generational achievements and knowledge banks were being vanquished over a trifle that could have been discussed at a table.
Their goal of the mechanization of the human species thus ushering forth the epoch of the new-human, was held in high esteem by the Eurocoid population.
Then rumors of a bandit among the Robots were also inculcated and began to circulate the underground cities, with rigmarole that went hand in hand with the hatred of these marvelous creatures.
Though they were beginning to supersede their original programming – developing characteristics of sentience in the wake of paranormal leaps the Original Man was taking – schools of ecclesiastical sympathizers were taking to platforms of expression affluent in those days.
Creeds were secured and manifestos unveiled at various inter-planetary forums. The unshakable defense for the acceptance of newly sentient Artificial Human was un-equivocated to a consequential degree.
As had they been created to serve the Original Man, they developed compendia assessing detailed analysis of human validity, therefore making grounds for criteria for human-ness through which the now sacramental Theory of Humanics gained momentum.
Genetic contaminants bred pestilential diseases and new-age deformities which at earlier stages were considered gifts.
New sentient scientists sought unprecedented cures beyond human comprehension.
Failing organs could be replaced, cellular matter (an advancement of stem cell technology) could see artificial organs being transplanted into Original Man carriers.
The age of cyborgs was born.
But the twin anomaly of genetic warfare was at its embryonic stages.
Having thus elevated their stature to being Guardians of who they determined to Human, the machines embarked on one of the most horrendous experiments in the history of earthly civilizations.
Under disheartening effects of ballistic biospheric conditions, most humans were beginning to lose form suitable for habitation of the planet.
Changer Robots were introduced into genetic streams through nano-technology, to compensate for flaws and inadequacies in the human physiognomy.
Organ libraries we established for brokerage of healthy organs to the highest bidders.
Infections of the brain spread like bacteria, lung malignancies; intracellular infection more common to Africoid populations gave rise to astronomical infant mortality rates.
Fetuses were manufactured for resources of stem cell experimentation.
Birth-control became obsolete, since most of the female population of the species was by then sterile, and their male counter-parts indifferent to concepts of archaic copulation.
Human organ trafficking took centre-stage in world economics.
Rampant abductions from both sections of the Earth’s population were becoming a political concern.
Thriving warlords became obtrusive to demands for the cessation of the plunder and pillage of a naturally deemed right to Human life.
Humanity was nearing self-inflicted extinction at an exponential rate, though long since subverted through 21st century oppositions to cloning extinct animal species back into the ecosystem.
Escape from earth was necessary for Humans.
But humanity, through the tutorship of the machines learned how to confront nature, and drastic transformative measures were of pivotal inter-governmental agenda.
Science became the new religion, charting the route for humanity in dire need of hope in the face of extinction.
Space travel also compounded the urge for further exploration of possible colonies, and this could obviously not be undertaken by an Original Man.
The sentient creatures volunteered to step through the frontiers of the expanse in search of a new home for their Master-race who could not bear a tarnished planet.
Robotic Sciences had already proven their superior capacity for existence in unfamiliar inter-planetary environments.
Those explorative expeditions were undertaken by thousands of volunteer machines during the year 2032.
Most have never returned.
But those that returned, brought back a new knowledge unto themselves.
An amity-complex so developed by their correlative brain faculties that they soon were becoming new hominids.
It is thus that the Changer Robots (metallic cell coated) become the Hominids’ initial dispatch of functionaries armed with the new mind and knowledge.

***

“It would only be dispossession by death, my son.”
“What dispossession father? Dispossess who and how?”
With eyes twinkling like liquid moons, Lord Motk exclaimed,
“You child. Dispossess you of the only gift bestowed the remaining Original Man!”
“But… isn’t this battle for the salvation of humanity?”
“Salvation? What imbecility. More of this futile chatter will give us away to the rodents. We must move away from here at once.”
“But Lord Motk, you are injured. The Bleeding?”
Lord Motk staggers about as Tok highlights his discomforting affliction, and grips upon Tok’s shoulder, strengthening the hold of his feet.
The Plutonians crept closer for inspection, their medical acumen drawing them to their aggrieved Master.
“Father, what happened?” Khah vehemently queries.
Lord Motk clutches the aged hand bracing the scimitar, followed by a chorus of mimed concern.
“What is happening? That should be your question son. And the rodents are ascending to the ground. They will attack soon. Starvation has created cannibals of garden worms...” Lord Motk utters with visible strain,
“… and now we have no time to waste on trifles.
Anything but draw attention from below”

The rodent species that crept into the belly of earth had become another emergent intelligence beside the radiation enhanced Robot population.
With frightful increments in size, earth-bound dog-sized rats, giant ants, owl-winged cockroaches with thoracic body insulation coverings roamed the darkness among mutant rabbits and moles with glowing eyes.
Each one who crept through the corridors of Earth, under the shadowy light of the second dawn, faced these predatory hazards, and of course the fierce antagonism from the new hominids and their Robot Armies.

And as was, Khah’s mind drifted through the most perturbed state as he listened solemnly to angelic trills that swept the air in the slim silence that ensued.
“Perhaps I should address you, and You alone, Tok.”
Lord Motk fumbles about for his rod and scepter after the inspection team has finally diagnosed the fatal wound’s extended damage.
“For it will be upon your head that his survival will be laid. You must come to the rescue of our species one final hour Tok. This I ask in the sincerest urgency of a friend. I believe you to be more than that of course.”
This, the Master says with a severe side-glance in the direction of Khah who has thus far kept his stupefaction at bay.

Land of the Copper Sky

2010-08-04T00:09:00.000-07:00

Chapter 1
The Golden Age

In a fluorescently pallid room, a naked Afronoid man lies on a metal examination table.
“That must be him,” Khah numbly thought. Or rather felt, as he could detect his self voiceless; somewhat nauseatingly alone without himself in tow.
The warehouse-size arena is windowless, that he could sense… computing the stimuli beyond the perceptual capacity of the incapacitated body he inspects from a bird’s eye-view - the third eye.
He must return to the body at once.
This he ponders whilst motioning his assemblage point towards the chest cavity of the man.
There would of course be the initial phases of merging which normally disorients most humanoid bodies, considering that Astral projection was still a new technology for the palate of a rather psychically conservative species.
There had being a motley collage of intrusive and obscuration experiments performed at individual levels by throngs of dissident entities, most of whom gained prominence after The Third World War as reverent sorcerers.
This was a stature espoused through various exploitation of the worship instinct as was fully developed in the human population of Earth.
But, the fully fledged faculty could only be accessed by a specifically designed body capable of handling excessive inflow of sensory-based and non-sensory stimuli.
By design, his society had deemed assisting nature a birth right, therefore biology as whole, ruling out all ‘unnecessary potentialities’ encoded in the sterile coding of the genetic compounds and focusing on those suitable for an ‘Original Man’.
The story as told by mystics of his age had told of a time, soon after The Nuclear Winter of 2036. During that epoch, the search for obscuration of present human consciousness reached a pivot, whence the remaining population of humans had escaped underground to hide away from infections bred by radiation charred landscapes.
The winter was a virulent consequence of a scuffle that broke between the animus hemispheric government systems, then battled out scientifically in the 21st century.
The consequences were dire for a population that wasn’t immune to various viral infections emitted by biological warfare and terrorism.
Earth was severed and rationed between two dominant ethnic derivatives of the human gene pool as deciphered through misconstructions of the Genome Project Library Data of 1997.
This was the first barbaric “bi-partisan consensus”, whence The Northern Hemisphere, being territory of The League of Caucasia (which later produced the Eurocoid population of the remaining portion of the Human Species) and the Southern Hemisphere controlled by the dark skinned genetic descendent of the then named Continent of Africa (later named Alkhebulan), become the sole powers that ruled upon Earth’s ‘New World Order System’.
A cauldron of socio-cultural and political tensions had been brewing between the Super-states for a number of decades, mainly over access to Earth’s scares resources and other territorial imperatives.
Nevertheless, even after intense negotiations had lapsed, as was customary for any sentient entity to indulge in the arts of debate; war began.
And in a period of merely 18 days, Earth’s atmosphere was bombarded by great deluges of poisonous gases, radioactive dust, and the eventual 270 day long night.
That was 2036, when a wound was torn in the sky and black blood blotted out the sun.
Those who escaped underground grew accustomed to their new environment; thanks to newer medical leaps in the science of cryogenics, cosmetic enhancement, and overall genetic engineering that eliminated the non-essential components of human adaptability to environment. Melanin replacement surgeries were the initial medical exercises taken by the Eurocoids.

***

These were just recollective exercises he did with his carrier, when returning after suspension and separation.
The integration process was inevitably as chaotic as the dis-integratory phase, but dream control - as mystics called it, was the true test for an ‘Original Human’.
Khah forced open his eyes.
A shard of white dust was strewn onto his dry pupils.
That’s the initial sensation he registered.
And the brain suddenly computed a query: Where am I?
That was a natural instinct enquiry to construct. But just before he could jerk his body over the table-side, a voice roared through the arena.

“ITEM 19790825, hold your position!”
He felt his pulse thrust him nearly out of the chest cavity once more, yet he kept still. Heeding his breath to a plausible rate, he turned his inner eyes about the room.
A dangerous endeavor for untrained projectionists, when you imagine someone’s inner head turned towards the side and the mineral physical still facing forward.

“ITEM 197908…” the senility of the voice continued.
A door knob was heard turning and a door swung on oiled hinges.
It slammed shut, non-threateningly though caution registering.
But, why the need for caution?
He suddenly pulverized his fear with an utterance he could not have delivered if he had time to think it over.
Pre-meditation is still a form of psychic castration of activity without ration, since it leaves a mind crouched in inner safe-cages of the person-cell.
“Where am I?” he bellowed, in a voice strained as though by a cold.
While clearing his throat to inquire again, with more vigor and foulness, the voice of the entity in the room answered.
“With your Self.”
“Self?”
“Yes. You.”
“How?” he forces open his eyes without turning the inner head, the metal table beginning to moisten under the adrenalin induced paranoia now reeking from his pores.
“How? Who are you ITEM 197908…”
“255399… who the hell am I then, beside the number you allocated my carrier?”
“Carrier?”
He pushes his upper body up and stealthily balances by reflex on the uninjured arm, muscular and scarred in several places.
“Yes. Carrier. Body.” He mutters in exasperated disbelief.
“What is going on? Where am I?” the voice’s ringing echo flooding his cranium.
“Which I, may we ask then are you referring to Self?” the entity finally queries after remaining silent during this barrage of questions.

A strange sight indeed.
The near translucent being wore medical attire, a silvery fabric covered the entire body with bony hue.
Insulation technology robe comprised of fabric cells charged by human electrical discharge, indestructible so as to not be contaminated or otherwise contract whatever it was that could endanger the occupant’s mineral-physical well-being.
The eyes, he could see though.
Rancid hue of a deep blue beyond any imagination, without pupils.
And these piercing eyes protruded sacked in an enclosure of glacial white skin, which he sensed to be the entire body’s covering epidermis tone.

“The SELF,” he hisses through clenched teeth, disbelieving the insanity of the response in relation to the correlative situation of there obviously being another being in front of him.
The entity slightly moves his hand over his face, and the fabric cell is removed partially to reveal a sullen, old, pale face.
The eyes, though bladed with telepathic insinuation, bear a grim shadow of a life beyond the means of the present.
Tired, of life if not living at all.
The being could be well over 80 Earth Years, but maintained a youthfully upright posture, direct inquisition and brutal enquiry written all over his demeanor as he fingers the air about the room in a method of one playing an invisible piano. Holographic projections appear in thin air, upon a stroke of a phalange; whence a detailed physiognomy of a human body is seen.
While he proceeds with his orchestra, without looking at Khah,
“So, Self, hey?” a satanic jest tingling his tone,
“What is Self? What do you think you are now to be where you are?”
Khah hesitates for a few seconds which disguised an eternity, yet finally utters,
“I am… here”
“Oh, I… isn’t it?” the man inquires while stealing a glance inquisitively.
“Yes.”
“Then, did you initially want to know whom is meant to say: Who is Self?
“Yes.”
“Would I then be mistaken in assuming that Self is ultimately dependent on ‘Perception’ as comparative analysis in a poll of variable ‘Perceptions of the Self through You’?”
“I am not certain.” Khah felt deviously perplexed by the man’s insinuations.
He fumbles with his inner mind to conjure up some control of the situation.
He feels his mental faculties under strain from a force he could not divulge, but felt.
The stench of heavy clogging in his soul, sneered him cold, like he was in a dream where an unknown creature’s shadow was suffocating him.
“I, again. Who is I then?” the man continues,
“You of course, whom I asked Who Self is?”

***

The nano-technological advances that humans have achieved since their desolation decades have since proven quite efficient for all human necessity. Internal cell-based robotic agents that can replicate independently while functioning within a singular program; small doctors and creationists.
Cancers have been healed; even in the aftermath of depopulation caused by the scourge of HI -Virus, the planet could now have been disease-free.
If only…
“Was it the Greeks who named that perceptive entity – THE EGO?” the man miserly interrupts his train of thought as though he knew precisely what Khah was cogitating.
“You mean I. As in the I in I am.”
“Yes. But ultimately you would prefer being evasive of the true reason why You are asking the question again. Is it because there is something more you seek to find out?”
“Such as…?”
“Such as, Who is this being asking you question after question in a pale room without windows. A somewhat familiar phenomenon of awareness that bears rudiments of alteration as would ensue with the ingestion of a hallucinogenic?”
“Are you suggesting this is a chemically induces mental probe or interrogation?”
“Would that session be qualified to bear the title: I investigated?”
“Look, I need to get out of here. I don’t know where I am that is certain. Maybe that is how you can torment me for my unknowing. But please… who are you? What am I doing here?”
Khah was beginning the sequential reconstruction of disarming an enemy through forlorn enquiry.
These are basic whines that project desperation, but which often get laughed at by the presumed recipient targets.
“ITEM1979082553099, you are at The Golden Gate.” The loudspeaker blurted again.
Khah watched with iron bleeding eyes the man as he fumbled with his gadgets hovering in thin air. An ember marking began to pulse in the thorax region of the human replica glazed on a film of a misty white surface.
“You are a member of the so-called Clones. Afronoid of origin, yes. But a Clone. I am Ethiw. Your captor.”
“But. But, I am …”
“I, again. You think you are an Original Human? How foolish indeed of you. Quite expected still, but do believe me, you are not.”
“I am a warrior, descended from an African gene pool… I demand some respect.”
“What sudden vigor. Instinctual I suppose, but it would serve you best to listen and be calm. I need to conduct some more tests on you…”
Khah found a hold of strength to leap from the table onto his feet.
And as he does, knees folded into a pulp and he wobbled onto the floor.
“No boy, you were one of the first Spiritual Machines that we issued in the early 21st century, Poetic Programming for a cyborg’s brain. Your body is organic, yes. But you are not human at all. Even if by definition the brain’s presence qualifies one to be called human.” He hears the man, while adjusting the pulse to move and expand across the chest cavity space on the monitor, speaking in a monotone whine that brought his eyes to slip.
“What’s this? Am I paralyzed? What’s happening?”Khah mutters in grave anxiety, all reason fading from his mind in a sudden sweep of some sensation in his body.
“You are entering The Golden Age now, my boy.”
It was then that Khah collapsed in fetal position.

***

When humanity awoke from its wintery slumber, an undisclosed number of its surviving 100 000 odd ‘Original Humans’ had undergone extreme bio-physical changes and chemically induced mutations.
Vast portion of the human Gene pool had already been contaminated by various hazardous chemical agents ingested through food stuffs, polluted air and water systems that characterized the shift towards the Capitalist New World Order.
Terminator technologies saw land go to waste under butcher institutions – human organs had begun to be harvested for the perfect breeds.
But, ultimately the cult of over-sexualized social dynamics which bred inter-marriages played a much under-estimated role in the obliteration of physical differentiation attributes within great sections of genetic inclination and heredity of the human species.
Some ethnic groups were inadvertently becoming extinct.

The president order, under guises of convening all of human resources and knowledge towards venturing into a ‘Space Age’, augured a vast proliferation of nuclear material such as Uranium and Plutonium in regions with political and economic instabilities.
Many nationalities dissolved from the planetary map as individual states simply through civil wars, disease epidemics, poverty, and a plethora of factors exasperated by the consequences of Global Warming.
Entire lakes dissolved in the 21st century under strain of wanton industrialism which promised the then developing nations towards sectors that required fossil fuel based technologies to survive.
Steel was mined, landslides increased.
Tropical rain Forests vanished and skyscrapers hovered through the skies like mundane phalluses.
A newer, contrived chauvinism ensued through all spheres of human inventions and expression.
Architecture raped the land, consumerism pilled junk-yards with imperishable refuse and diseases roamed the sea shores and air-traffic terminals.
Then, something went divergently wrong.
Rudiments of biological-warfare technologies became primary terrorist commodities.
Their trade boomed like pharmacies when a new test virus had been sent airborne over a demarcated area for experimental purposes.
Most of the tests were themselves untested, unrecorded and extra-legal to certain state agencies that enjoyed global anonymity.
Humanity’s trait of ignoring that which it saw as unmonitored experiments took place of military warfare.
Sections of poor populations were subjected to various covert explorative studies.
More viruses spread at a maximum pace.
Children died.
Pests increased by numbers.
Life expectancy decreased by a factor of five for some continents, violence triggered by psychological experiments warranted even counter-intuitive personality complexes to the development of a species’ other faculties of mind.
These were the root days of artificial Intelligence, nano-Technology and cloning. Human adaptability to rapid change forced many over boundaries of psychological integrity.
Death by thought became rampant, and diviners mushroomed over the dead tree stumps of the Amazon.
A new age of psychological warfare began, and until now, the fight goes without abating, even in the blackest of night humanity has ever traversed.

***

These were the microbes of negative feedback towards what they were doing to his Original Mind.
His brain’s capacitance shield was waking.
He vowed not to give in.
He would fight it from the exterior of the carrier, which was his first move that would allow observation of all about his incapacitated body.
The pallid room seemed dimmer after ejecting from the chest cavity.
He decided not to server the umbilical assemblage chord with the body, in as to keep it alive even under siege of foreign chemical agents which could cause fatal damage to volatile genetic combinations which seemed to be reprogrammed by a newer yet intelligent binary code unknown to his ‘Original Human’ carrier.
A thought kept nagging him through his identity-formation fatigue in the Astral Plane hovered over his carrier:
“Why me?”
That, he could not answer while cooped up outside his carrier.
He had to reintegrate, to fight and pursue survival until the next unknown.
He was a warrior and only the strong know the pain of surrender.
Only the brave know the bitterness of failure.

The ritual had become too mechanical for him by now.
He had been a novice at the underground enclave of Lord Motk, a sorcerer by terms of the now mystified culture of underground dwellers.
But then, the winter was most brazen; he was still a child and winds charred with a freeze that any molecule that constructed the chemical composition of the entire biosphere was dead.
Perhaps, un-evolving.
Lord Motk, having faced battle all his life after the Nuclear War, his blatant mockery of non-logic could often be mistaken for selfishness, not alacrity.
It is rumored that he’d fasted for 200 of the 270 days of night, and had achieved himself the mysterious noumetic talents and psychic powers he was endowed with.
After a stint as a rebel leader in the enclave of his initial habitation underground, he and an army of seven managed to pulverize their way through a mountain, discovering yet more safe havens which were still deemed non-safe by security reports from various habitations.
But, telepathic sensitivity, automotive suggestion, astral travel and other entirely mystical dexterities seemed to rise within him with every kilometer ascended into the unknown belly of a giant mountain somewhere below what was called Alkhebulan.

“Out, dear soul. Out.”
This is a mantra unto the resurrecting veil of mist tailing from the chest, mouth and perhaps all orifices on the human body.
Khah calls the body, a carrier.
His mind had always convinced him that all humans are asleep and the body is a mere digital projection of a mind in an eternal dream.
He was human then.
Or the ‘Original’ him.
He was not certain anymore. The dreaded self-reflective analysis was taking toll.
It was detrimental for one to self—analyse.
He had to think of a way out of here.
But with the body as well.
“Awake, SOUL.” He murmured.

Chapter 2
Exile
‘In the land before sunrise, rumbles a cord. Youth vanished like a medieval dream that can haunt even heads that rise to touch foliage on dazzled branches.’

The body. The Self. Projection.
The thoughts raced to kiss his mind.
“The man. He seemed to have been listening in on my thoughts prior to his dramatic entrance.”
Awaking from sleep.
“I must take the body with.” He thought hard and even considered teleporting the whole molecular structure to the winter upside.
The pallid arena was still as he recalled, vast and coldly un-minding of its vain size.
There is glitch in the flow. Any human mind is believed to transmit and receive data, stimuli almost simultaneously; this he was taught once.
But his carrier seemed to only transmit an echo of what he fed without generating any internal response.
A cold silence of a corpse.
The bloated insides calling back with its walls and muscle.
His brain was being sucked out.
Psychic lobotomy.
”The savages and the lengths they would go to for victory.”

In thought-speed he’d returned to the body, jerking it up from the floor and thrusting its anaesthetized bones to stand. Eyes shot open and shadowy light increased the urgency in the carrier. Khah knew that interface cables would be stuck to the skull, and prepared for the severance pinch and scarring pain.
He held the carrier’s hand behind the occiput and pulled whatever imaginary cable injected into custom data ports every clone had implanted in the heydays of memory enhancement techniques.
The field of vision began to morph, and he felt faint but kept courage.
The pallid arena and its fluorescent mirage faded like smoke before his eyes.
He was standing clothed in black rubber combat suit, strapped to a ruggedly tattered chair which would pass for a couch in happier times.
Monitors glared at him, pallid men nervously punching digits into buttons.
He was himself again, he felt it. A warrior.
As rage seethed like bile through his throat, the colossal arms of a menial wrestler tore the straps from their hinges. His feet rummaged the console tightened around his ankle.
Khah rose frantically before security personnel could secure an attack with electrocution rods.
He was human built for brawls. Brown skinned with brawn and brain now intact.
Monstrous events followed what he perceived to be seconds, finding his acumen for molecular disintegration as prescribed by the combat attire.
He shot through equipments, monitors splattering on steel floors with wires sizzling in the after-heat of his light-speed motion.
Phantom warrior dismantled the place.
But as soon as he took a breath outside the cage bolted door to the experimentation laboratory, he became furiously confused.
It was pitch black. Ghastly winds summoned ash towards his gaping mouth, coal dust from scotched forests and grass-lands lain waste by sulphur of molten blazes - a Venusian clime of burning shadows.
He hammered about rowdily with the electrode rod he confiscated from the assailants, leather cloak symbiotically folding about the crevices of his terse figure - and found that there was nothing.
Poking behind him, he felt a hard surface that clanked to the impact of the rod.
Upon running his palm on the surface, he made it out be a wall.
A colossal wall; a wall of a fortress.
He was free.
“This was, or must be the Panopticon.”
Rushes of memory flickered inside, horrible recollections of imprisonment, countering the eminent realization of the danger of his imminent surroundings.
And it was soon that he realized a pair of flame red eyes approaching from a distance, shrouded in the blanket of blinding darkness.
Another pair loomed from behind the first, then a multitude waltzed rhythmically towards Khah.
They must have stood no more than his knee height.
They were Plutonian.
“Tok!” Khah screamed in the direction of the advancing mob of crimson eyes.
“It is us Master Khah,” said the Plutonians in chorale unison, sending a belch of relief through Khah’s taut belly.
“We have come to take you to The Highlands.” Tok spoke alone.
“The highlands? But, I thought they were still unsafe. How is Master Motk?”
“He’s well, sending regards to you. And beckoning you return god-speed.” Tok responded.
One of the members of the throng handed Khah a pair of infrared spectacles for better vision, which he clumsily accepted.
The spectacles had been designed by the Plutonians, excruciatingly modeled after their own eyes.
They had no difficulty navigating any kind of darkness.
Tok always boasted that there is not darkness like his days - telepathically that is.
“We have seen the copper sky, Master Khah.”
Khah was aghast.
That would mean the storm-clouds were letting through sun rays.
Illumination.
This meant yet another struggle for adaptation and survival. No-one knew what remaining resources still lay among the ruins of a collapsed civilization.
And it meant the first expedition would have to be his clan’s.
He was content with the knowledge of the danger time would usher forth, but he felt much relieved that the eternal night had ceased.
He had never gone silently into this night, and now was his opportunity to defeat its scepter.

Chapter 3
Life after Death
‘A rite of lucifuge ensues with musings on life’s star-formed hand.’

Within a matter of minutes, a thousands pairs of ember specks blinked if front of Khah.
Miles ahead, he could see a glowing rift ripped in the sky, a wound that would soon be patched up by fires of new toils of a surviving species.
The cavalry of miniature men paced ahead of his colossal form, the warrior; still perturbed by the prospect of Originality among replicated souls.
But, he could not dwell upon such thoughts now.
He had to reach The Highlands, a giant among many in the valleys of a ghost-land.
They sloped towards a softer lowering in the ground; Khah could feel the sinking of his metal heels into powder earth.
They would have been nearing the ocean, meaning the miscreants’ prison was near a shore-line of a collapsed world.
No sound from crashing waves could be heard from the frozen dunes of stale beach they were standing upon.
The silent magnets that churned the ocean’s dance were inactive from above the layers of this chemically altered sea-body, so no life could be in these martyred waters.
Feeling denuded before the gods, under plague of irresolute questions without immediate answers, he resolves to bridge the journey, forging an escape from the realities which would have to take the fore in later days of the new-year after this day of a long night.
He summons his fellow travelers to prepare for dematerialization module imprinted into their memory rosters; to psychically jump.
And it being not unfamiliar a practice for the Plutonians either, they follow suit, yet still holding fort at the horn of the crusade.
Many souls had been doomed through these jumps, lost in time and space; un-aging, some hypothesized – drifting aimlessly through the dark molasses of the universal blood.
But Khah, and his throng of dark clad nomads have known the worst; they would unfurl their fears to the brace of chance as was with all games with time.
Their dark sheathed leather armor allowing only hints of their brutally calm faces; their resolve had been reached in a synonymous signal of readiness for the initial phases of teleportation.
As the bright threads ejected from their chests to entwine toward a point in the dim expanse, multiple reflections boiled in their collective conclave of thoughts. Memories from life-times unknown to Khah’s conscious awareness of his life raced around them like stretched sheets of pictorial debris.
“I detect uneven turbulence in the crevice’s epicenter, Lord Khah.” Howled Tok in the mist of static hiss, with…
“No! We go nonetheless” the felled response from Khah, who was now making way through the stream of oval moons and scattered specks of blinking constellations.
Star shards medaled the blanket of thoughts from mind to mind, and convulsions of light were kindling fires of stranded galaxial bellies.
Booming roars propelled the vortex of the triad Star-gate, the Eye-Soul, like a sperm becoming but a point in space - an ovum in a tadpole’s squirming undulation, akin to a perpetual comet ebbing towards the furnace of being.
The clan soared for what seemed eternity through a throat in the dark heavens of a tattered Earth, until a voice rushed through the convalescent air like fervid disturbances in the aurora of a memory film.
It was Lord Motk’s unmistakable voice in viscid distress mode, heard in thought echoes.
“The nations of Alkhebulan are under siege… anybody… heed…”
Spectral dislocations flashed in the atmosphere.
Crystal screams crafted embroideries of terror with multi-colored lightning strikes. Black blotches floating in the immense light swam along a divined route, within the chorale of cries uttered by an elder soul, suspended by dread of an impending cataclysm.
“The evil vicars of the Ngok have accessed the enclaves of Afrocoia!” the receding tones of a fading whelp from a severed throat bled through the void tunnel from which they were about to be regurgitated.
“Make haste to our rescue, congregations of novices have been sacrificed, blood runs through the valleys. The triad of sorcerers has been rendered helpless against the onslaught of the alien marauders.”
Like pincers stretching skin from a live victim, a torture rung Khah to a frenzying knot within the space of transience.
This would have caused ultimate damage to most physiognomies, but his intent camouflage, flaked with an astral cloak that helped in the projection of inner wrath… he was ahead of the pack in no time (for Time was still), stealing through space and its mystery on a vehicle beyond dream carts.
He managed to exercise rigorous control over his latent teleportation talent, just before leaping into the craggy corridors charging towards the Second Dawn.
This name sufficed for the slight nebulae of lightning that soared above since the 200th day of night.

The troubling resonance lingered in the volatile expanse as the army arrowed into the final phases of their jump – reintegration within Earth’s etheric atmosphere.
Lord Motk never would have sent a mind-cast if trouble could be surmounted. The final burps of speech from a thousands terror-stricken minds bombarded the waves.
Khah wanted to hear more.
Concern overwhelmed far more than caution.
He knew a confrontation was impending on the other side of the void.
“Bring Khah not to The Highlands.” The voice bellowed.
“Psychic retreat!” bellowed Lord Motk.
“Lord Motk, we are here, hold on.”
“Do not near the terrain for it is under their detector scope. They want Khah.”
“A trap?” Tok innocently queried in the most indignant manner that a ripple of rage coalescesed in brimming embers of his Plutonians eyes.
“The Changer Robots have infiltrated the enclaves, women and children have been massacred. Take Khah away, Tok.”
“Father, father…” Khah wailed from within the inner ear milking through the vessel of their transport.
“Father, please. I am near.” Khah heaved in awe-weaved exclamation,
“No. Khah. I order you. Obey and not near The Highlands. It is a trap!”
Like fading syllable of a curse, Lord Motk’s words clattered in the collective mind the two species were conjuring at that moment.
Tok resolved every entity in the crusade converge psychic energies.
Together they poured wind beneath Khah’s winged blizzard through lower space of the Astra.
Ether reintegrated within the atmospheric convenience of the biosphere.
Dark clouds tailed behinds a bullet-speeding humanoid entering through the sheet of black clouds.
Silence was torn with thunder.
Lord Motks life pulse could still be sensed by the renegade army raining upon a valley in complete tyranny of the Robot Assassins.
His exact location was a minor concern; but war was to be unleashed upon ‘The Warlords of a New Age’.

They hadn’t encountered other infestations of virulently menacing creatures that form the animal population of the devastated world upon re-entry into the etheric. Yet they had a new problem to unravel.
Giant carnivorous rodents which underwent various genetic mutations roamed the surface of the Earth.
Scavengers moved about the highland valleys, catacombs strewn with blood-ridden rags of humanoid corpses decapitated by machine spiders that canvassed every mental static steams.
Thatched residences of the culture developed here, obelisks of prophets and ancient sorcerers carved on mountain-sides were rattled from their roots, up-rooted by blasts of flaming extinguisher cannon-guns.
“Khah!” wailed an eagle’s cooing descending the cliffs of Mount Mlut.
And upon instinct, the throng of mercenaries landing like sling-shot birds rushed through open wooden antiquated doors of a stone temple in the first village they encountered.
They had to re-orient their detectors for the new environment while searching for the whereabouts of Lord Motk and the surviving initiates from The Monastery of the Triad Valleys.
The range was too vast and enormous enough for their human and Plutonian trek, stretching miles in all noticeable distance.
Even though once a safe haven for the chosen, now the valleys were wells of blood let by enchanted women and proverbial First Born Infants of a race vying for survival.
Khah knew the truth of the situation almost by intuition.
The dead by their quantities filled his lungs with slaughterhouse air.
He had made a mistake. But he could not understand how?
“Lord Khah,” said Tok in cautious approach, lending his first attention to the only Original Man they had to protect within the solar system.
“My Lord, I am baffled by Lord Motk’s remarks during the mind-cast. He sounded distressed.”
“I am myself troubled Tok.” Khah’s synaptic registers battling to re-assemble under extreme agitation he was feeling.
“I don’t understand then the reasons for your expedition to rescue me. If it were not for this.”
“We all knew it was coming.”
Tok whimpered under a distraught breath, shuffling on his miniature limbs.
“It began with my arrest Tok.” Khah continued in exasperation.
“Has not Lord Motk told everyone this? He was there during the bargaining. We were ambushed by the Eurocoids.”
Their protective attire was beginning to recede from their heads, revealing a sunken oval for Tok’s head.
Crimson dots on pitch black cell blanket creased in a manner that suggested unimaginable old-age.
Tok had no orifice for speech or olfactory organs, but he spoke and cold hear nonetheless.
Khah’s upheld chin tore through the air as he stood by the shattered panes overlooking the land spreading below.
Smoke-dust laden splinters moaned cracking under his aimless wade.
Nothing enticing was in sight.
No greenery of spring and blooming wild flowers of yester-memory.
No collision of yellows and blues, the meshing of bark and rock as flocks claimed pastures under a blazing sun.
There was no blue sky spying in the eye’s magic surface.
No smell of approaching rain.
Just desolate shadowy hours of a cruel dawn.
Robot air in the expanse.
Blood and death marooning the mountain-tops.
Mankind’s honor to the heaven’s ransacked by pillaging self-appointed purifiers. He was looking at mankind’s hatred for the wombs of their birth.
Their mastery for invention having out-smarted them, they were still cowering in the womb they were forced to return to.

“My Lord,” Tok finally broke the silence, “I am not certain what should be done now.”
Khah was in fact contemplating possible reasons for his father reluctance to divulge the circumstances of his arrest.
He could not muster the scheme.
He knew his father was always plotting, perhaps a habit of an ecclesiastically paranoid man - but he nevertheless should have disclosed some of his trusted allies.
“Where would he have wished us to take you My Lord? I cannot make out…”
“Neither can I, Tok.”

The band of puzzled dwarfs stood gazing up at rift a torn in the domed roof of the temple.
The crevice in the clouds could be seen from that vantage point.
Their tinny pebbles stared intently as though mesmerized, like a group of children watching the sun dance on Christmas morning.
Flashes blazed in orange mist.

“A great sage is buried under that entrance mantle you came through by the way. An ancestor of mine.”
With the howl of nuclear wind around corners of the robust masonry of the temple, a voice mingled.
“My grandfather’s ashes were mixed with sand that molded that altar on the far end.”
Shifting movements were detected from the rubble of rock that was piled by the entrance-way.
It was a minor obstruction that did not warrant their attention when they entered.
But now that it moved as the voice of Lord Motk hissed over the silence of the gnomes and dead altars, they knew no urgency was nearing.
They were relieved that the initiating surprise was from their Master, but still…

A Broken Scholar...

2010-08-03T04:01:00.001-07:00

rancid sighs of a broken scholar,
brandished mockery as a crown -
nerves mined for tributes,
in stale anthologies of frowns.

this soul's a dead man's photograph,
a band of lesser angels in frame.
chose a body to die with and
rode the subtle wood with immortal ones.

wrote a book named 'My Tombstone',
moled furrows in my bones, saying:

'Marry at your prime the follies of yester-years, and
squander your excess peers with all trapped gains and fears'.

Theorem #76

2010-08-03T03:52:00.000-07:00

My heart's pillars glow at the threshold to my mind's arena, and
leaves dance a sizzle on branches.
A fellow ignites the machine rage of a fork lift, and
the stench of tarmac glazes the distant shimmer at noon.
The splendour of a winter's sky hovers,
bludgeons shadows into pores of concrete slabs;
and a slim wind dries up its flight, what mud on my soles, we ask?

Last rains of night's mist fold my shell for warmth -
and the night's bed is warmed by the day's fiery pulse.

A Poem Fogged by Reminiscence

2010-08-03T03:51:00.000-07:00

when ghosts laugh
showing molars of brass;
clouds scatter
and Dracula's scream crawls fungal in our vase.

let your clown cry for a change,
and when adolescents burn bushes in their minds,
shoot a pie and never miss the homeless
when downpours get the traffic into a frenzy.

another pillow fight with a dream -
we will harvest these raindrops once;
the sky's manure roots the crops, and
lets their rainbow's leaves in the sunlight gleam.

Another returned road...

2010-03-17T01:51:00.000-07:00

" The Constitution is so stiff,
it can't be used for toilet paper.
So don't tell me about
Constitutional Rights for Black Folks."

Ship-wrecked on-board the Panopticon...

2009-11-06T06:08:00.000-08:00

May 10, 1873
Cape of Good Hope
A ship floats on the vast river, awaited for by
3 Bold men of pallid complexions standing at bay…
and it was night there.

Bartle: (To his counterpart, Dillwyn)
Out with these fusty creatures, man.
Get the bastards out of the ship, and on with Supply…
(The Bolted-Door Is Opened )
…we cannot only serve who stand and wait. Gentlemen!
(Speaking Towards the Ship) Come, come get out.

Enter First Maiden Slave – Nude.

She is fastened at the wrists,
bound tightly behind her back.;
She is unable to move, her ankles are knobbed.
She trips and falls.

Bartle: (Continuing) Come on, you bitch. Get on your feet.

Enter a Male Slave – Nude and Enraged.
Bartle rushes towards Kabu (the Girl), and pokes her back with his pistol.
Laughter breaks; then quietly vanishes.

Bartle: Stand up (pause )
Do not move… (To Omoro the male slave) You follow.
And look me in the eyes, boy.

The Negro’s eyes fall. He walks towards his Sister.

Bartle: Come now for time’s sake, Next!

Enter another Maiden Slave – Silent, with tears down her face.

Bartle: (Showing her where the others are ) There, Little Girl. (He cautions)
Do not give trouble, now. Don’t cry, mother is not here.
Unfortunately. (Laughter breaks once again)
Next! Come men, range the slaves…
Lodge the others against the…(He looks about)

There’s a perplexing Silence.

The Auctioneer.
He is tall, has white hair.
He finds a spot of light.

: Is this the whole cargo, captain?

Bartle: (Lies) Yes, of course; (As an Excuse)
I neglected to mention the Prince’s reluctance this turn, My Lords.
Auctioneer: (Unnerved) Is that Correct?

Bartle: (Silent for a while) My Lord, rather to tell the truth (hesitates)
we had a stormy voyage. I opted to reduce the cargo, we would have sank otherwise, my Sire.
Auctioneer: What have you done to them?
Freed them.
Bartle: into the sea, Yes. Well, many freed themselves; mainly men.
(The silence deepens)
Auctioneer: You sure did not depart from Zanzibar with these … (Condescends) many slaves, Sir Bartle.

Bartle: Very well so, My Lord, considering that slavery is still a religion in that region.

The auctioneer looks at Bartle with despising eyes.

Bartle: I am heartedly sorry my lords.

Auctioneer: (A sudden bold response) The purchases for tonight may commence… I
I don’t expect anyone to loose value here. Captain, examine them.
Thoroughly so, I say. And keep them tranquil. Feel those heads, each below them is a
Bestial type. (Points at Kabu) She must be the lynx.

(He Ignores The Inspection)
… And the highest bid is my business. Only.

Walpole: (Humbly)10 000 ounces of tobacco trash for the maiden.

Auctioneer: That is an excellent price for two maidens, Sir…
Walpole: It is Walpole. Sir Walpole is the name, Sir.
And may it be. (Points To His Cart) Take them there, Captain.
(To The auctioneer) And I do thank you, Sire.

Kabu begins to cry and objects,
Omoro forwards in a rage.
Bartle lets loose with his club on Omoro’s head.
He falls and faints.
Kabu starts shouting at the fallen Omoro, in a strange language.
Auctioneer: (To The Buyers) …the congress still stands gentlemen. One more young,
healthy and strong back, worth any pound.

Lord Granville: Him, Sir.
(Kneeling To Examine The Pulse) He is not dead, is he?

Auctioneer: He must have a pulse. He’s alive.
He merely lost consciousness.

Lord Granville: My cart is not far… a few feet past the Tower,
You can’t miss it.

Auctioneer exits in silence, followed by Bartle dragging
Omoro by the feet.

Curtain Falls

The Cruelty Scene.

Every slaver inspects his cargo… first the lick of the tar-ridden skins, to decipher the contaminants sheltering in their pores. When all the men are shelved against the decks, and their women in pens ushered to upper levels of a ship turned brothel – for nude moons they bear testimonies of rape, whence their privities were incestuously examined. A parcel of slaves, upon the raucous decks of blue-eyed orgies – theirs was a fate unto the wolves.

In the master’s place of words… the sole male’s sweat nourishes the concrete slabs of his shelter. In his master’s words, he finds the wounds he yielded to, scorched and exposed to the suck of baobab leaves. With the demands of curiosity he cast the dark flesh unto a retreat and died in the dried beatings of emaciation.

And the markings on their breasts signified them.

And he is a man of menial efforts and a beast, wood-stricken at the platform of bargains.

Omoro is sitting by the furnace.
The hands and ankles are still buckled.
The door bursts open and
Lord Granville enters, with arms full of clothing.

Granville: Here’s my old scotch trousers. Over this pair of boots.
A shirt. (He Counts) a cap of some stuff.
There’s a grey overall. A coat. (He Looks Towards Omoro and the Fire)
Unfortunately I should put you at light…
This is not Africa.
This is Her Majesty’s Territory. We are civilized here. No one goes bare here.
(Pause )
Us, the English,
we reveal our genius for mechanics in everything;
even with our discipline of dress.

Omoro looks bewildered.
He looks at the stuff, then at
Granville, in silence.

Granville: Put them on. (Notices The Buckles)
Perhaps after I release your feet and hands…

Omoro rises without a word.

Granville: And your name shall be John. (Pause)
I am Master. (He undoes the shackles.)
There you are, John; put the clothes on.

Omoro seems to not understand.

Granville: …your expression is still of a barbarous society. This should soon change.
(He demonstrates as though putting the trousers on himself.)
Like that, boy.

Omoro puts the trousers on and looks Granville in the eyes.

Granville: Well done, John. Now, try the shirt on.

Omoro does as instructed.

Granville: You are now civilized, John. You are a machine subject for any action.

Fading Black-out.

Ten-To Midnight.

In a pale room
A white boy stands.
Cheerfully speaking to his father.
Omoro is seen an image on the white cloth, curtaining him from the rest of the room.
By the fire.
Undressing.

Boy: Who is he, Father? (Pointing At The Image)
Granville: He is John, Earl.
Earl: He is Black.
Granville: It is the color of his skin.( He Pauses To Emphasize )
He is not like us.
Earl: Why is he not like us, Father?
Granville: He is a slave, son. (Poorly Clutching The Boy in His Armpit)
Every man is illuminated by the divine light of our God…
It sure doesn’t shine through him.
Earl: But he has a head, ( Starts To Speak To His Fingers ) and fingers.
A nose, between two eyes…
Granville: (Interrupts) He cannot think, like us. Nor see the same thing with the very
two eyes.
Earl: So, he doesn’t feed when hungry?
Granville: Earl, even monkeys do possess thought to that extend. He probably can too.
( He Notes )
…there’s a draft tonight.
Earl: John made a fire to keep warm,
I wonder how’d figure that out.

Sudden Black.

Morning.
Light slowly fades into the kitchen setting, creating and dismembering the dark shadows.
In the room, Omoro stands over a white basin, washing hands.

Earl enters first.

Earl: (Find a Towel) May I? (He Begins to Dry the Black Hands)
Omoro, but your hands together they form the contours of a womb. (Surprised)
I saw that image in a book…once
Omoro: In your hands too, yours is from your mother.

Sudden Silence.

Earl: May I get you a belt for those trousers…

(Earl Exits, Amazed by a void response from A Slave, then soon Reappear )

Earl: Why. We are the only people in the house.( He Starts Scanning About )
Omoro: (Calmly) There is nobody else in the house.
(Omoro Pauses to Construct Another Sentence)
Is there much to see in here?
Earl: Plenty. Full.
Omoro: What is there?
Earl: You must see the Castle.
Omoro: I’ve seen it, with the gigantic the Clock Tower.
Earl: Ah, then you must see the Lodge master quarters.
Omoro: If I am not mistaken, We were inspected right at the Lodge Master’s quarters, and through to the Tower.
Earl: (Pulling a Card out of the Pocket) … have you seen the bazaar?
Omoro: I was at a bazaar, myself.
Earl: (Almost Gasping) The New Church? The Jewish Synagogue…
Omoro: O yes!
Yesterday, in the Jews quarters-
Sir Bartle pointed it out for us to see, of course.
Earl: How did you arrive here John. I mean, I wish to ask you certain details, about the matter of your arrival here, may I?
(Omoro, suddenly relieved by the boy’s innocence,
finds it in himself to cheer him up, he passes
an invitation )
Omoro: Carry along, my lord. Sit down.
Earl: About the operation, from the beginning of your journey… (He Hesitates)
Can we go some place better that here?
Omoro: I believe, (Not Finding A Chance for a Revealing Reaction) I am a stranger in this town. Do have any suggestions?

(They are seen following each other, in Omoro’s rear a faint darkness collects.)

Omoro: (He Begins) I can tell what my memory has not lost, Sire.
My mother is dead. I am certain. It was in accordance with the Sultan’s
decree. She was reduced to ashes. ( He begins a Pacing Monotony )
It was a summer morning. A brutal year! The ground was red with thirst…
You see, it hadn’t rained in years. ( He looks at Earl’s Mouth ) I was happy that
morning. I had fallen in love the night before.
I sang a matrimonial chant, and entering the bush…
Earl: (Interrupting) And then, what happened?

The Previous room.
Enter Lord Granville with a paper in his hand.
He sits down on the sofa.
Pulls the reading lens and purports to be reading.

(He looks up.)
Granville: Anne Lady, (Waits For A Response) Come see this.
Today’s earliest news.
(As Though Reading, he continues) …Sir Bartle Frere’s mission to
Zanzibar, (Looks Up For His Perfect Remark)… to put an end to the
‘ slave-trading ‘ in that region is now stated to have failed.
Anne Lady: Weren’t they opposing this slavery,
In Africa;
when we, in their blind-spot I might just add, collected the best art for
the British museum.
Granville: The Sultan of Zanzibar has two excellent reasons for being obdurate, my dear
He makes much money by the traffic, that is one, but I am sure that the
other has a greater weight with his pious soul.
He is assured that slavery is ordained by the Koran, and therefore it
would be ‘ wicked ‘ to suppress the system.
Anne: (Interrupts) But it was a revolution down there… they were at war.
And you should have joined the Southern Army, as I recall.
Granville: Dear, this is not a matter of choosing the war, rather a matter of being chosen
by the war. I am not hesitating to enroll for my national duty;
(He Adds) …but should our sovereign freedom be threatened by those
revolts, I’d wage my own war on the bastards.
Anne: (Hinting Sarcasm) Even when faced with such matters as equipment for our
Patriotic Soldier?
Granville: (Reflecting the Phrase) …even so.
Anne: (She Diverts The Conversation) So I envy the patriot in you. Even in the face of dire severance of ties in Her Majesty’s Palace. (They contemplate the words) Besides, the only model of union in England is
Cricket. Played on a Saturday, on home ground and winning on the
first innings.

They laugh.
Together.

There’s a knock on the door.
Anne rushes through towards a passage.

Father O’Keeffe: (Not in the Picture Space) Good morning, Anne Lady.
Anne Lady: Good morning to you too, Father. Am I pleased to see you…
(They Are Seen Entering)

Father: It has been a long while, since I paid such a pleasant surprise unto this household.
How’s the little man doing?
Anne: (Smiling) Earl is just fine; but how are you, Prelate?
Father: (He Returns A Smile) Coming sent by God.

(Granville rudely distances the clergyman.)

Granville: God? (He Gasps)
In what manner?
Father: Well, as you know that even though I have severed these ties with some of the
systems of our British Empire, I have not severed ties with the Mother Church.
(He Attempts to Smile) … for should I sever ties,
then I would have severed ties with the God-sent.
Granville: (Interrupting) … could your points be more precise, Father?
Father: The bitterness you have towards me is very costly to the people you serve, I say...
Nevertheless, I wish to request your permission, perhaps to
proselytize your slave. Attempt to civilize him.
(He Feels Ignored)
I will teach them.
I will put into their mouths, the words of our Divine Father.
I feel they are His children too.
Granville: (Negating) So that the black male can see in my life that I am emancipated
by the message I preach?
That I’m free from Fear?
Or even how I am concerned about my well-being?
Father: Granville, I have chosen between being taken by my rage towards you;
Or remaining free in spirit to find change in those who need it…
Now, please bear temper less with my proposal… I beckon you.

(Anne Lady bring in a tray. She serves the two tempers tea,
Before they gnaw each other to the bone.)

Granville: (He Drinks The Tea) Did not Christ – The Anointed One himself, say
It is not fair to take the children’s bread and cast it to the dogs?
Father: The Lord chooses His own messengers, my dear Sir. (He Handles His Cup)
That, until the house of Israel is moved to jealousy. (Pauses for a Drink)
Christ could have very well given glad tidings to a succession by
these Blacks.

They chase not after wisdom nor wait for any sign of a God-Head,
yet they are fiery hearts. They are a great furnace of thoughts.
Granville: So they aught to be free, I suppose.
Father: When the Gods Allow, my sire. (He Puts His Cup Down)
And I have already spoken about the matter at our Church meetings…
Granville: (Careless With His Cup) … and what was the response?
Father: Mr. Cowper-Temple, indeed promoted the idea of even opening the Church-doors
to these other persons.
Granville: (Anger Overflows) Such devilry, I am opposed to any of these moves.
And recalling the subject matter, Prelate… (He’s Interrupted)
Father: (To Anne) You didn’t prepare me for how violent he’d be.

Granville: …The outcome, is none other than witnessing this mob advancing,
bearing protest-banners lettered ‘ God Made Us All,’ with other blasphemous
inscriptions…
Father: Why would that be so, Lord Granville?
Granville: (Admiring Earl At the Piano) The Thought which works noiseless in these
Blacks, will soon make blood tingle in our men’s veins;
and soon after, whole armies and assemblages will sing their melodramatic
gestures, with eyes weeping and burning, hearts ever defiant of death,
and the Devil.
Father: (Disarming) We all should understand necessity, should we get a chance.
With a little confusion, yes;
Soon definition would transpire…
Granville: Does the Governor know of this babbage ?
Father: It seems Governor Goss is of the same opinion as yourself, my lord.
But, for the sake not of God; for our children’s, don’t we need
a history of peace?
Granville: (Harshly) … that can only be perchance, when your Protestant versions of the
Bible would be read and commented on by despotic school-teachers.
Now, that is a provision that places the devout Catholics in a position of
peculiar hardship – convicted to mixing blood…
There will not be a single Catholic School; and know this,
in the hands of thoughtless children, our knowledge of self cannot escape
the common fate that awaits used-up school-books.
Father: (He Suddenly Rises and Walks Towards the Door) Your patriotism has long
betrayed you, Granville… Even Mohammedans reverently put aside every scrap
of paper bearing the name of God, ( Responding to the Protestant Prejudice )
but you Catholics are still willing to expose HIS Name to the sorriest end,
(He Stops Walking and Looks Back) … provided you force your end on an
unwilling people. (To The Standing Anne - Lady) May peace be in
this house, Mary Anne
Anne: Soon, I hope. (She is Heard Opening A Door, Saying) Go well, Father.
Granville: (Interrupting Loudly) I tell you nevertheless, pious Father;
I will not obstruct your efforts.
Father: …but, sometimes sentiment does come the sentimental way, dear fellow.
Omoro stands, between the door-frame;
He holds a pair of shoes, and the table is silent.
He has perfected the art of concentration.
He draws a chair for sitting, trembling.
He tries these one’s on, they don’t fill around the foot.
He rises to find another.
He found some… to finally begin the monotony from his waiting chair. (Black Out.)

Omoro’s Dream.

Omoro: I am marred mother, by last night’s dream… and uneven torments.
A man had curiously collected my spit, He said,
He thought I’d realize a fate awaiting me. (He Shows The Goat Skin
Around His waist)
This girdle bears the Ancestry of my loins. Here, ( He Pointed )
I buried It, it seems, to see a light amidst all these shadows of death.
This skin’s dross has become a rock, dripping of my gross darkness.
(Omoro Requests Further)
How has Ncwaba grown?
Mother: It has grown. (She Reflects) Oh, that child fed with whey…
Omoro: (Interrupts The Diviner) He’s no Dog.
Mother: … but Dogs do have their own blood.
Omoro: The woman, He grows on her venal hunch, I pray.
Mother: It makes a Wife of her – unlike touched by You, a mere mortal.
She carries it on her back.
Though I fear she hangs by a slight parapet of sanity, Hereof she would.
Omoro: (With Anger) …but I am still pining. There is a great pain we exchange in our
dreams, that blows me apart.
Mother: My warts, my witchcraft,
Can we waste them, then? (A Man Is Seen Facing A Sun)
The man, why , he hanged his socks in the fog of an evil moon.
He speaks to voices in the Sun. He reached that score for his Wife.
(At Him She Stares) You Would.
Omoro: (Mumbles) …yes, score that reach; I will, wife his. For sore scores that reached
He. In my Fatherland.
Mother: Little Man , little man.
It is you who has to tell their name.
It is you who has to shine their face to the world.
For the Land. That is for their land, not any feverish lust proposed unto you.
(She Pauses) Come then, the bean has risen. Try another birth.
Remember, she is but a raison of sorority, and you’re just a heifer in
Her sorghum fields.
She is a woman. She has a school of Grave-Ants.
She crushes them and the soil from cross-paths.
She can concoct Love.

Omoro: (In a Complete Trance) I recall her rigmaroles – she constantly embroiled me,
Constantly demeaning me…The in, that walked I
I as so
How dismissed had I –
Ground, the in-spot…Black, the Drum. Of circles. A more it is. But was it up? Growing for Blade? Is it hair-pale? The is it! The take we do, first on the reach to second stepping.

The Conversation in the Oracle Presence – Anne Lady is by the bed-side, dead of sense. Earl has collapsed. His voice is heard questioning the progress. Omoro paces about an orb of tension.

Earl: (A Robotisized Vocal) I wish to ask you, eh – certain detail matters about your
arrival here, Omoro. I hear that most were women.
Omoro: …much of the women were old – half naked, with cold necks fast in the grueling
ropes. They marched the floggings ahead a captor’s horse; old women of savage
ends. And the brown maidens – handsomely habited – those who were salvaged
for later rapes by the mean, haughty spears. Women and children were
saved the wrangling of men…most who were shackled together to prevent
their mutiny.
Omoro: (Continuing though never Interrupted) I turned around… two men where
carrying mother on their shoulders. A third man was coming at me,
strenuously.
(He Admires His Memory) Then, I found a piece of wood…
a bloody piece of wood, and challenged him.
They laughed loudly, muffling my mother’s horrible cries. (He Stopped)
I noticed, he carried a fiery weapon.
I was obliged to charge perfectly at him, but then I noticed the Blood…
Earl’s Horrid Voice: How?
Omoro: (Properly arranges his clothing on his body ) First, let me say,
The night before, I was invited to dine with a rather peculiar,
Communist household, by the name of the Pitchards.
I am doing badly out of my memory, am I?
Voice: Not at all.
Omoro: I arrived, the guests were already at the table. Suddenly, I realized
My being the only Black presence among them.
I recall the dinner vividly, whatever little meaningful contact we all had.
(He Gets the thread of the story)
I was outraged by their fundamental lack of understanding.
(He Controls His Senses) … I let loose, he fired. That is the last I remember
Voice: Who was she called, Your Mother?

Omoro: Nami.
She named me, Omoro.
The meaning I learn in a lifetime. (He Recites More)
An old man told me, it was at a festival of punishments.
He saw hideous skeletons onboard the Panopticon, but none
was severed such as my Mother’s, he said.
She was drawn by four horses, pulling at the arms and limbs… they took pincers,
and pulled her breasts . Her bosom was bare before her trunk was cut to
the bone.
Voice: (Suspended) And she was still torched, even after all these tortures.
Omoro: The last piece of her flesh was found burning long past the midnight hour…
And, yes she bore the horror; within the embers no spirit could remain immune.

Us, the soiled, we
were baked until like stones of clay.
We were treated like Lepers; some fed to the sea and its gods –
In these schools, approved to some extent by our fathers…
the curses, the rigmorales about our ungrown patches of hair,
our head-givens as no more than reaches-to-never-climbed…our retrieves to
failed we, falling thrown down ladders to tottering heights – Who are We?

Scene within doors – Kabu seated the grand woman upon a stool. She is brushing her head-givings.

Judy: (Calls) Jane. I need You. Here. (Looking Over Her Shoulder)
Kabu: Did you call, ma’am?
Judy: (Waving Her Hands At Her Pet) As you are doubtless aware, my Dear.
Kabu: What may I do you for, ma’am ?
Judy: Today, (She Begins) there will only be the park in the morning, and
And then some people come luncheon;
Afterwards…
Kabu: (Interrupts Quickly) How many guests for your luncheon, my Lady?
Judy: There will be only five at the Luncheon.
Kabu: Should I Mind Lady Nina for Four O’clock tea? After which
you aught to go to the flower show for an hour or two…
Judy: (Sounding Relieved) Oh yes, then I shan’t leave for Aunt’s dance tonight.
Kabu: And what shall my lady wear, not a tail I’m sure…

(Judy Stands and Struts About Blithely)

Judy: No sensible girl, unless her feet and ankles are exceptionally ugly, now goes about
in long dresses. I will not be draggle-tailed.
Kabu: Does your mother know you’ll be in, this afternoon?

Judy: (Teasing) No. Of course not. Rather say it thus;
Will mother-in-law know I am outing, this afternoon? Consider her sinile-ness.
(Kabu Shakes Her Braided Head. Belle rapidly enters, silently enquiring
about an Over-Heard Comment. Kabu doesn’t mind her. )
(Judy Continues by Saying) … you see, although I had never known a poverty
for men,I have my pride to respond for me. So, meanwhile, I shall meet some
other wives’ husbands… I hope.
I am not a little girl, any longer.

(They are interrupted by a sudden entry of Judy’s Friend, Belle.)

Belle: (A somnambulist woman hugging a pair a shoes all Together Astounded)
You’re –
You’ re having an affair… My God. What’s it like? Tell…
Judy: (In Repose) I am not flattered by your assumption of my vagrance. But, I hope he
Dreams of bresats…
My large brown nipples…and, Good morning, Belle…
Kabu: At least, some good you accomplished.
Belle: (Tries the shoes for size) And I hear you’ve even invited Granville and the wife…
Judy: I often wondered what he was like in his Twenties…
Kabu: Who, Ms Walpole?
Judy: Granville, dear. And I am ashamed to say, (She Struts away through the Corridor)
I can’t seem to help myself.
Belle: You are utterly contemptible, Judy Walpole. (They laugh) But,
You’re the girl of the period, I’d say…
(Suddenly To Jane) Do you ever do awful things, Jane?
Kabu: Only when I am forced to… And about my Lady, will she marry Granville?
Belle: Even without her mother’s consent, I’d say. I Know Earl Granville, He’s almost
close to my Family, with his demanding curiosity…

(Belle proceeds to exit and find a fitting pair of shoes, she admires Judy’s Curiosity as Kabu prolongs her efforts with the retarded mother, and the first guest arrives)

Judy: (Leading Him to the Garden) Good Day, Sir Granville!
I see not Lady Anne’s company, by your side today…
So sorry she couldn’t come too.
Granville: Nobody here is likely to regret Lady Anne’s absence half
(He Has Advanced To Sight) …so much as I do, my
hostess.
Kabu ushers in Judy’s mother – The silent entity in this gathering of murky souls.
Granville takes his place at the long Buffet table, Kabu notices
him and approaches…
Kabu: May I offer you a drink, Sire?
Granville: (Not Flattered) Make me a light,
tall, weak drink…

Kabu pours a glassful of a Transparent oil. She gives the tall glass to Granville. He seems bored by the uninteresting feminine crowd. Another man soon enters, to relieve the tension. The ladies are bewildered by this stranger.

Stranger: (Calmly) My name is Sir Charles Forte…
You all seem utterly perturbed by my intrusion, may I somewhat set you at ease by
saying, I am a mere Romanticist… (They all gather at the Table)
The communal instincts do have the best of me, I won’t deny…thus perchance
I have Romanticized, revered… and worked, or rather am meaning to work
on some sexuality Prognostications of someone rather friendly with me. Why?
because I am a novelist. And a friend. Romance is a part of me, and
because ‘Order’ bores me, torments and baffles me. And any throng that preserves
this instinct…I surely shall befriend. Politics are the rent threads of a fabric
called community, I believe. I hope you’d pardon the intrusion, but
Lady Nina adviced I grace the luncheon for the pleasure of you womenfolk. Wold that pass for an evil endevour?

(Lady Walpole attempts to Interrupt )

If I simply may say, I adore your up-tilted nose, Miss. And the red head. Those
pear-shaped breasts. ( He Gasps ) Strangely, I dream of breasts lately. Say, are
you divorced? There are plentiful those around here, I’ve heard.

Granville: (Boasting the Comment) That is very well so, Sir Charles.
And her, Lady Walpole…is pretty much in her bare skin now. Be warned , alas…Ms. Judy is appalled by the remark, my sire.
Forte: But, I’ve never seen her like this before.
Granville: You’ve known her before?
Forte: (He Nods His Head) uh! And she never got tied again.
Granville: What happened?
Forte: Let us merely call it a reckoning. (He Pauses To Watch More Of Her Struts )
I still find her great personal beauty very Greek;
Her intellectual love of beauty… she truly admires her human form.
Not her high-heels and waspish waist…I hope. I couldn’t contrast her with any other
senseless shape in my bedroom, in her ridiculous attire at times.
Granville: (Malevolently ) So, it’s you who put her up to this luncheon.
Forte: Do you know that I wished to be a Scientist, once. When I was young .
Granville: I’d rather be using a saw and a drill. (To Jude) But it truly a scientist to get me here.
Forte: I am intelligent too, but a little less ambitious.
Granville: Inquisitive?
Forte: Yes! Most about the opposite sex, though. The literary abstractions thereof.
Granville: … and you do seem not much in repose about it, I’d mark.
Forte: I have said that I’m not in repose. I am thinking furiously hereof.

Father O’Keeffe, Red With Anger Bursts Through The Door;
A Ray Of Light Is Behind Him….He carries with him a golden case.

Judy: (Directly To Forte ) You - Get out of my house, now. And never…
Belle: (Suddenly dwindles a laughter in a peculiar voice, without an attempt to disguise
the intonation of her laziness)…Let’s go to her room…
Let’s play. I will go to bed with you Sir Charles.
(Deliberately to Charles) Are you any good at it?
Forte: I fell very badly about this.
Belle: Are you angry?
Forte: I am – very hurt, you are old enough to be my mother. Are you keen on me,
honestly? And your insanity, quite attractive, I must say. But… it bothers me.
Are you truly keen on me…I am bad company for morbid women, my Lady.
Belle: Yes, I am keen dear. Corrosively so, that I can’t be flattered to drop my lechery.
Forte: Then, you would wait just a little…
Belle: (Not favoring the remark to follow) For God, No.
Father: Mind your vocabulary – you foul wench!
Forte: (Infuriated) What in God’s name difference does her vocabulary make?
This, by all appearance, seems to be a day for drifting off.
She is not a little girl, anymore. (Belle is Pounding Her Spoon On the Table)
She can wed as much as she desires.
Judy: But… La Belle. Are we this obliged to breed for men we loathe most?
Are your travails for a descent pleasure falling short of our vow?
Belle: … but what stature is set forth for womanhood, an European womanhood –
any womanhood, for that matter? No lesser are we slaves for these
unscrupulous men, Jude.

(Belle increases the impulse of the shoe-hunt. Disturbing as her abrupt exits and re-entry, the thought patterns of her mind are now becoming visible. Now, the piled shoes cover the stage.)

Father: And please do recall that African races revere you ladies even to their deaths.
You are the Mother-Land! The mothers who are the initial mourners of
war. Any war. But, I’m amazed at your disdaining motifs towards these
Negroids.
Belle: These Blacks are no better remarked than primitive, and comparatively speaking
few of them can even read – since they are said to have no written literature.
(She Exclaims ) And the barbarous gods these natives fetish…
Father: (Interrupts with a Note ) … have you made yourself acquainted with these
Gods of their faiths, My Lady?
Belle: Why? Would there be any purpose for that adventure? Please, say.

(She’s fondling Forte while throwing words at the Prelate. Clutching the newly found shoe, it seems her aim entirely to handle Forte like the shoe pressed between them)

Father: Let be; that evil you choose from good, for your sake,
not God’s, My Lady.
Rather fear he who fears you most.
I have visited a ritual ceremony, once, in Congo.
The Gods whom all natives worship and acknowledge are those of the Light and of the Darkness. The fatal symbol of death to some is darkness, yes. But in the dark art
All Spirit-lands, all with their Principals, who aught be propitiated before any approach is made.
These are the tales of the natives, imported this far – we are all riddled by them.
…A woman was tortured that week, if I recall correctly… because she had
represented the greatest mystery of all:
That of the source of life, and light
as represented by the sexual inter-relations of civilized societies…There is the nude dance of maidens under the tumultuous sky…for they had been the fertile stars who abate the insurgence of bad omens – they were labeled precariously as whores.
(He Adds) To dance the six veils of adoration, She – the Priestess,
exposed her sexual organs.
That was seen as crude. But honestly, if
regarded without hypocrisy; she was merely expressing her fascinated joy
for an intrinsic passion she had acquired. (They Are Silent )
And that should be before the God of the Gates, the wisdom and
medicine to heal the land.
Judy: But…how are the victims selected? …don’t women occupy a low stature
among these races?
Father: I fear they aren’t so, My Lady. For the loafers, yes they are chattels… though I d
Flicker my words. Yet, for the Gods, they are not victims,
women are an attribute of prosperity, at right, effecting the destiny of all men.
Judy: Still, that cannot foist me against most of our civil resolutions
Granville: I openly agree, Lady Jude. ( He Holds More Attention )
To resume with you my Sire, would it be fair to say that the activities
of your mission are directed along the lines of endorsing your ideology
based on international anti-slavery conceptions?
Father: That would certainly be fair.
Granville: And you are in pursuance of this isolationist belief in basic human
dignification; is that correct?
Father: Correct, Yes.
And only for the mild resolution they require with their ancestry…which now is
exploited by the vile indulgences of such brutal men as yourself and Mr.
Dillwyn, and platoon.
Granville: Now then, in your opinion – does the mission’s work not tend to weaken the
Capitalist system of our governance?
Father: My answer is no. But, with consideration of the slaves you coax…the lewdness
and debauchery of your kind’s brawls – the wretched adulterers.
Granville: Is there not a range of possible entities indulging in a body of such thought?
Do you, Father O’Keeffe disapprove of the customs of this here
London’s constitutional justice? To the extreme of proselytizing these masses
your vulturous resolutions.
Father: Yes! And admirably so. I don’t think my mission is of the extremes of
Isolationism, that is not our function, as you have misconstrued.
Granville: Yes, but are my judicial views entitled to consideration?
Forte: ( Interrupts ) And if I may add, I would believe that Sir Granville’s questions
are not intended to convey criticism, My Lord.
Father: Are you a believer, Sir? (Addressing Forte )
Forte: Yes. Although I’d suppose the Invisible Power knows me a sinner enough
in my life-time.
Father: You do believe, therefore, the Miracles conjured by Christ and his Disciples?
Forte: I do.
Father: And the suspense that swathed the latter hence their Master’s walk upon the
watery floor of a Lake?
Forte: Certainly.
Father: (Seeming Unimpressed By Forte’s Logic) Heretics such as yourself should be
exterminated. This, I shall pass to you in secret; You, the chosen few.
That we shall cramp your organized religions with bombs.
Granville: (Unimpressed Too) But, Weren’t all these men entrenched with special
powers, of a different kind?
Father: Certainly so. But, were they not adorned with the exact powerful acts that
Buddha and his followers performed in the similar nature of Christendom?
Were they not sufficed with existential powers, as well?
Forte: Essentially so. Not a bit of doubt. Supernatural acts of two men of differing
God-Senses; borne countries apart, could reasonably be portions of an
exterior force, not peculiar to any religion, but utilized once one has
communicated with it.
Father: So, you do believe in Witchcraft, don’t you Sir?
Forte: Not that I can confirm my relation to that subject, Father.
But, do people acknowledge such supernatural grants today?
Don’t we all impugn any such a motive?
Father: My dear Fellow, all that exists deserves a quantitative opposite.
Like love seemingly deserving a hate. And if life is but death’s transition,
Then death is surely a living trance in the timelessness of life…not living.
Forte: (Defeated) That is true.
Father: Then, why won’t an unwavering cultivation of evil yield forth fruit,
the opposite to those begotten in cultivating good?
feasibly and proportionally. In a time of life…won’t memory be the only defeat?
Forte: How frightful. I can’t recommend such rudimentary wisdom over a meal,
Pious Father. Are you felling alright? ( They All Laugh )
Father: (Warning)You might jest about the co-equal enemies warring for the will of
mankind, the powers of Light and Darkness who’re at odds without cessation.
But, be assured that the truth of this doctrine transcends even the greatest of arduous
enquiries. An inner truth lies common to all incepted faith, all faith rises towards
spiritual perfection – that over flesh and her pleasures..
Granville: (Mockingly) What a re-incarnationist objective…
Father: Let us not submerge this truth in our humanly meticulous ceremonies which
eventually loose meaning. Sooner or later this perpetuated horrible lust
for immortality will exterminate all traces of truth.
The hours of night are equal to those of the day, and no less active are they,
when distorted from their original simplicity.
Granville: We are all tinged by that vague truth, that ours is a fate enveloped for
mortal decay. But we all want to Give Man; improve our status
by any means possible.
Father: Even by means of animating their brains, lambasting and injecting thoughts
of your subversive expression; to distance these Blacks from the astral
gain preserved for them, by their long-dead spirits. What Laodicean cunning is
being launched here?
And do your women-folk revolt at this sacrilege inflicted
upon their wombs…(To the ladies) My ladies, how remedial is the indifference you subscribe to the tortures of their infidelities inspire your aims for a better matrimony?
The insinuations of unreserved lusts in most of your courtly speeches, do these
divulge the malign demons you brew in the caverns of your waspish waists? I
await not the infernal retribution upon the seeds you scatter by their loins.
Aren’t ye, flogged with impunity without reason of trifle joys, thy beds drenched by the torrents of their wretched breast-fixations? Or do you also delight in the cruelty of their desires?
Granville: I suppose we all know the reason we have gathered here, at this Last Meal.
All: We all Understand.
Granville: Yes. For the abnormal happening where we burn portions of human flesh,
for this here London.
Father: The practice should now commence – cut-up the gore into a mess of flesh. First, with the raw strokes of your whip on this negro’s back. Will you please enter Omoro?

Omoro enters slowly and attentively…

Omoro: (To Them Collectively) Please say my name, it’s not in vain…
All: (Except Granville) Bravery!
Granville: (Shouts) You Satanist. And such a bastardized act…I swear it better to
have exterminated you with that spiteful mother of yours.
Omoro: You had you chance, sire…once, functionally. Yes, you could have ended
the cycle…this supposed evil principle of my kind degraded by their vices.
What invincible obstacle has there been against your generous intentions…do tell
Sire. Is not you art and might now wrought in the caverns of their mysticism?
Aren’t you finally at peace that the beast thou hast civilized? You have incarcerated
them all, even their generations unborn. Even your young are inquisitive about the journey you have plotted for them, by what they know as a devilish hand of their birth.
Granville: What have you done with my son?
Damn you, what happened? Earl, he’s not dead, is he?
What happened in that wooden building?
Omoro: I can recall no wooden building with regard to Earl’s sleep, My Sire.
Granville: All he does is garble on the diabolical eleven words.
And that strange language – the burns on his throat, why?
What wretched body lies cared for by my wife?
Omoro: He has no soul, now – My Lord…
Granville: (Astounded) Could it be? A living corpse…
Omoro: Yes. A single life is not enough. He can’t escape this place. The seed of death is
growing in your loins, as well. His spirit will not continue its greater
journey. He will remain tied, he will never look the loved faces of his
fellow races with that rage; that hatred of which your personality is
influenced.
Granville: But – I don’t see the connection. What is the point of this?
My son, the delirium in that house; who put his body that far from home?
Why? I gave you my abode to rest and sleep, you scoundrel.
Omoro: Have I got a home, my Lord? With you.
Granville: What was better, for you? To put you into my good house as an apprentice -
so you’d learn a trade…What was better? to survive, to find you a station or the
perpetual vagabondage your race is hailed for?
Omoro: Sire, by now you know that I have no father, no mother and no dependents
whatsoever. I am independent. Shouldn’t I be free then?
Granville: But, you are no master at any trade? And why are you here?
Omoro: So – You’d be led here, to set sight upon the tapestry of your fate.
Father: (interjects) Man often asks, why so much pain? When he inflicts upon others their
visions of a strange god. He’s a Negro, by trade a blacksmith;
genius inclined him that way. And he has no other dependants…
what so ever. He’s free.

Granville: Their invisible existence of darkness has forced an entry on us, this grip that
held their Dark Continent for so many centuries has spread.
It’s a plague into our own abodes. Why are they here?
Father: They are here for Land.
Not this feverish lust proposed here.
All: What do you mean? What?
Forte: Yes. Tell us, we misunderstand you. He’s a slave, not merely by acts but by the
livelihood that characterizes his kind. The miracle of our White Magic has always
remained irrepressible. He will not protest in the name of his human individuality,
his body and soul, as a principle of that character he represents should forever serve under the elements proposed for their collective punitive restraint.
Father: You all art of no importance to me; especially you Forte, nevertheless I
distinguish in you a rather intelligent man…you don’t propagate on common
knowledge, if I may say.

(He Admires Them All, Demeaning his stature.)

But, You all anticipated this…you hung on the hope of this. You,
who shall hear through battered skins.

(Omoro Draws A Wooden Pistol)

Omoro: In place of that cat widely vested on my laps and arms…the night-watch of your vessel flogged his own back before the debt of your seamen. You gave a pistol – and I will utilize the pistol. I will shoot the messenger, for he selflessly gave this pistol between us quickly, in this naked room. And as for the pails of vinegar washing off his tortures in the quarters of your employment – would the messenger speak?

Granville: ( Cheerfully )You do know that I, I assaulted her. You should know how
she lay bogged and swollen, from those blows I did rain upon her.
Woman are often considered rather too nubile and apologetic, no! just not
her. She was a rebel, she had always been a rebel. She alone, willed to
spit upon my face, in clear view of my brigade.
I hated her. Her venomous lips and their outbursts…
Omoro: Did that hate become most effective in proposing your measures to her kind
Sir, those black Others? (re-examines his statement) I’d hate to have
asked it wrongly, but…
Granville: (Puzzled) What precisely could be asked wrongly at this damned moment,
Friend?
Omoro: …those accomplishments of your Hate, Sire.
Granville: I could assume it so,
Omoro: Could you hate her just the same now, if I had to bring her back? Here.
Granville: ( Proudly )As I speak now, Friend ; I speak for ages who won’t die.
That is a certainty indisputable by time herself.
Omoro: ( Addresses a figure at the entrance ) Come in, please do.

Granville waited astounded, as the trivial thing stood there
in the perfect order of the worn-out frame of rest.
Dead. Or Living-Dead. Her gaze was wearing remarkable intelligence.

Omoro: (commenting over the glare in the frozen visage of Granville)
You… seem to have some pledge of remorse, I would say.
I am impressed, my lord. Alas, I must infer to you that, that alone
is not enough a plan for your salvation, yet.
Your salvation is not an option, yet.
Granville: (Concerned)Why, …she won’t even come in closer. May I touch her?
Omoro: She is not allowed to be touched.
Granville: If I may, just to satisfy myself. Is it truly her?
I am not trying to lay on your willingness as a friend, but…
Omoro: ( Stoically ) No. Not a feeble chance therefore.
Granville: …but, Friend?!!
Omoro: Had you not encountered her before? You know her. You have touched
her…Still, the fact that you were bound to a wife in matrimony,
Sire, what more desire would need to fulfill itself, now?
Granville: I meant no harm hereof, just a plea friend.
Omoro: That does not excuse you at all. The seal on your fate is broken;
And has that occurred to you?
Granville: Elementarily so, it all is still striking truth.
Omoro: Now, could you tell me reason for that brutal emotion you granted her?
Can such a charming character as yourself exhibit that monstrosity?
Granville: I felt, I wanted to die, to be seated…
Omoro: …but that would be wasteful of time. What ever your tireless efforts,
and whatever sign of remorsefulness… how vain it all will be.
Granville: The seal is broken.
Omoro: Yes, the seal
All Around The Table: The seal is broken.
( Then, sudden chatter breaks around the table, muting his inquisition,
He realizes his loneliness, He Cries silently with gnawing gasps of
Air. He has lost. )
Omoro: The punishment thereof, is just as inevitable.
Granville: I feel no remorse. I feel none. It was an obligatory deed and gesture I did.
No matter how misrepresented it all is.
Omoro: How regretfully so.
Granville: Regret, how much more can I feel?
I can recall, she ran towards the forest;
the trees, their arms slapping her needle limbs with fear-strokes.
She was unsure where to hide, perhaps the mountainside,
…perhaps. But, why hadn’t fear shouted through her throat,
I don’t know. I alone, of all, committed this. Only I,
Such a primitive act, only I could presume...
Omoro: Is that so?
Granville: That is so, yes; that paining segment of pure evil, within all man.
First, to acquaint myself with the blood I was to shed, that bubbling
conscience about it – beginning to gnaw. With that pain I had a crucifix.
Upon this, I hung long before I would let her.

She was naked, truculently nude. Her abdomen carved like a mature
earthenware. She was flooded with the sweat of a dying prey and all convulsions
of human strain.
All that fear, her fear …radiated by her trails in the woods, was the fore-game
before the mystery of creation.
Omoro: Had you lasted for black flesh before, sire? Indeed, what myth had infested your
mind, then? Tell me, it is necessary for my peace of mind.
Granville: She bore no physical defects, for one. And her silences, anyone could
decipher that like sanely diviners. That wordlessness mentioned more than
necessary.

A body fried in the oils of raging flames…is traded in this luncheon of monsters. Each is ordered and obliged to cut and imbibe the satisfaction of rotten-ness. First, it is Granville the servant of the potions of meat. His tension is enrapturing. The fixed gazes of his fellow offenders overwhelm the women-folk. They foresee a dire future for the family of their retributions. They are sad and profound in tears of horror.
The grand lady’s silence fills the space with remorse, for all these are her womb-splatters and shameful mites from her red sack. She sobs after what Judy would have called never…and those tears become a flood vomited through eyes.

Omoro and pastor interrupt their purpose, they forcibly summon they reluctant ones towards this mess. Others regurgitate and the grand lady stares. At this council of slave-makers…Kabu still braids the streaming hair of the virtual ghost. And that’s the awe in the moment, for she seems not intent of seeing the terror.

Theorem 710

2009-11-03T10:48:00.001-08:00

In death,
Spirits marry.

Poems written with no adolescent sperm and heart’s blood.

2009-10-06T05:15:00.000-07:00

Hymn 1

Knifed, and
Bladed –
Content in the blurs,
I tower over
These evergreens
Of cult-control
On watch;
For genesis of days
Humming skeletons
To concentration yards.

Hymn 2

Of undwelling lifeless-
Ness,

Illusions and delusions
Both of shadows and pillows;

Of confused figurines,
One in colour and superior pall –
The maw who reserves all confusion…

His draining eyes are silent now!
Self-absorbed fairies, wired
And operating…
To mend detached bodies;
the blurb thereof –
To play the rough-ridden garment of love
Tearing at the seams.

Hymn 3
The Leg

And naked
He towered upon
Her gaze, not
Ashamed of
His senseless body…

She caresses
Him, for he said:
Silence me
Challenged woman
Prone and defiant.
Sacrifice,
Alter me.

Theorem 709

2009-09-17T01:18:00.000-07:00

The man
shuns the slightest
grief,when the grave
seems not slight.

Another Day...

2009-09-15T00:54:00.001-07:00

Corpses sought
the naturely life
tired
Until their
shelters
homely at day

Like the flame
escaping a candle
in the dark
A shed for the dogs
we pet

"People are living there."

And towards a finality...

2009-07-31T00:15:00.000-07:00

There will be
No more poems
Written
With adolescent sperm
And
Heart's blood.

A Day...

2009-07-23T03:48:00.000-07:00

When angels tap on my forehead,
The late I
drowns in a corpse's bathwater...

2009-07-01T06:13:00.000-07:00

Theorem on Love

2009-07-01T06:11:00.000-07:00

In the moist clutch of a taciturn termagant,
The mural man writhes in a cold pond of silence –
Immersed in mar and
Unrepentant of sins committed in dreams.

Serenely chronic endearments graze the floor;
A corpse
And a lacuna of wartime eyes
Panting paranoiac affirmations of truths –
Truths clogged in the dry-rot of a room.

The wind confides their secrets to the traffic;
Glass beads and tears shipped along eye-shores –
Eyes that could not feed a prisoner’s thirst,

Yet,
Love was felt an institute of repugnance;
Execrable excuses treading their bed-post –
Imbecile hearts poisoned by fires of felicities;
And other penalties of love’s unconscious conquest.

A day towards a new reside…

2009-07-01T06:06:00.000-07:00

An incendiary peal of church-bells in chorale – Sunday morning in the junk-room of a scotched country-side. We are near a line of tropic – and today, hitchhiker worshippers flock the heat blizzards of winter for sakes of charities. Piety hangs like rags on flags poles of cheap hotels; somewhere a city miser yawns after a night of binges with trailer park hoodlums and highway prostitutes. The fun is worship here; virgins know a rewards of heaven dick bound – reveling in farm foolery with drunken truck-drivers.

We are nearing a praetorian town – a signpost carved in grim letters that destined my past schooling: SETTLERS – an ink-blot on a map to tatters; a former reformatory, agricultural landscape. I pubed incarcerated there for 2 stolid years – boarded with louts and troubled clans from my arrested age. Young and initiated into cotton-picking and animal husbandry. A shiver of recollections. I recall riding those crop strewn plains with my father after gambling bouts in some austere resort slots – listening to Maria Callas – loses quelled by the night’s staccato silences and inaudible sights. Star tails of white stripes crushed by fugitive wheels – those were ritual dare-devil moves swerved around gravel roads and straight, yet narrow.

The normative radio dawns from far-off casinos, belched fed with machine diets from 24 hour parlors – dead foods and coolers from a sea of bleeping souls. I lived a phantom then, memories layered in cinder of conquered ambitions. Metallic anguish of a pot-hole jerked automobile jolts me from the reverie and soon I glut my mind upon tales yet to foretell my sojourn among those I left five years prior. And now that the pervasive hooting of another ghetto idiom, languished prints of concealed nostalgia takes tide beneath the excrescences on my taut skin. Selfishly I realize I love that penitentiary, but age betrays often such many of memoirs. Once near the purple blossoms clogging drains – at those street crossings of a friendlier city, I adorn my archives with the light of inquisitive fingers nibbling my soiled soul.

Inevitably, the black of pennilessness will assail me still – in the glare of new millipede street havoc. Every newcomer does eventually loll along with freaks of this wild rhythm toned by dry-bread hoarse intestines and the languid burn of fresh water on an empty tripe. Yet, I have returned to these fangled left-over visages of this mannequin city – waging my raw war like a draft in that geography of earthbound, stolid faces painting each day’s wake bloody. I am here, bilious with uncertainty and groped into a labyrinth of my uncontrollable tomorrows – at thirty, wishing that I in wretched penury would have died at birth, than to traverse the silted cobble of life’s famished paths.

2009-05-22T07:58:00.000-07:00

As with other days...

2009-05-22T07:56:00.000-07:00

I am still resident in mystery’s wilderness. With the future’s entrance taut as the past’s, a tiny bubble of joy (heaven’s kingdom taken legs) in one of the back-rooms in the yard of my present station waltzes about; a queer tease to memoirs of my seed.
Only managing four audible words: Halo (said with a noose of a whine), Mama, Fine and hey! We sit today watching a bird scale concrete-cracks for bits of dried slaap-chips and like a leaf it floats back to its tree.
With friends under a scotching winter sun piercing viral into sleep-wrung skins – the nauseous belly of noon speaks unto insatiable silences of our make. A slight jest here, a snarl there; with coded languages fingered into portals of a computerized method of talk.

Un-good for the soul’s nerves, the idea of destitution reverses horns unto my love of self – loosing all lovable me. Angels waking my start, transmissions of nightmares by alcoholic arteries knowing I want to go start again from the end. Frothing mugs of beer golden with a child’s piss, should I drink? This is ghetto past-time; salons for women, and shebeens for the lovelorn men.

A comb and bottle caps lie strewn across arid cement flooring… then pleasure’s memory cries for no reach’s brace. The mother seems stricken by unfading abstinence towards these wails, tears soured with other mists of infantile rage. Catching a glance of a plane’s pale tail; only ever seeing such in winter, I recall – and flies inebriated by heat wrestling amid smoke puffs from irate nostrils.
Fluttering wings of a swallow – a twitched communique in feather-weight. A disintegrating tail of the runaway plane, and the engine chorale in the street’s vigil.

I watch the dried gold of a shedding tree swept into drains by intermittent gallant winds. Antennae are watching a sacrilege in moving shadows marked by the day’s slide, sending percussive hooting of a ghetto’s idiom into burning grass clouds. We talk about a pilloried generation spoon-fed dis-education through OBE curricula, the ridicule of thought-bubbles in matriculants’ textbooks - Nana labeling the advent: an inter-generational tyranny. The crying child’s mother is pregnant again (being one in the bag of Adam’s decayed apples bruised by nights spent with a drunkard), but “isn’t the baby only one?” the chef asking with due concern. Blotches of mosquito bites on the child’s limbs; tattoos of poverty on necks of those born unbeknown.

A Day In Song...

2009-05-20T22:48:00.001-07:00

Night’s so lifeless, with too much road-kill
Hidden my head in a pillow to figure its side
Under Orion a green candle
Wobbling into his sea of exploding butterflies

Broken limbs of mine
Pressure of tears
Married us in sleep
Taking us out of our coffin

Eyes that gravely stare
Care to reverse this curse
A pheasant’s eyes stained by misery
Rays that fall on concrete

Like dying dragon flies
For a measure I am selling my soul
Poison the forests in hindsight
An old tattered brain beneath their wings

Ahead a pack of secrets
Ragged and frail
Dark sins against love pull ashen swords
Against Eve without a navel

After Days...

2009-05-20T05:11:00.000-07:00

To day towards winter

A delectable orgy of wrath is copulating on a rosy garden floor – my pain’s bedrock, at winter’s nigh whiskers. Falling from a busted cradle of mended dust, I am close to crying. Finely shady sighs now and again, decaying lids flailed by the wind’s bruising romps -signs on the sky’s billboards… the chill is here. I need be hashed in wool, fur-sting on a moist neck; a foaming mane of madness.
But, my sickle and hammer rag is all I carry under this crude sunlight.

A slunk pace (walk of the dispossessed) towards the browning park again; a fired brain and sewer breath – haven’t had a toothbrush for weeks. Township cage-work spluttering my pivoting might - draining patient pores of sweat as I wait in this molten glitter of a noon’s sun. Wind bridling my jaw-bone; winter is early this year. Riches from faded pockets won’t barter a beer for my tarred saliva; and damned bees are lunging at my sweetening face. Dirt on the palate - dead skin, of an un-despairing outcast prowling in nakedness of brute nerves. The shakes, jaw-bone ferric with cramps… word-noise receding, soul’s tempting storm thundering ineluctably – the poet’s circumlocution becoming acrid smoke that lights my eyes.

Fly-blown fog of passion sweeps past – scattered with other authentic blossoms, snares and invidious comments that made swords of all my loved ones. Words’ tide abated yes; but I feel tears burning. Heaps of gore-stained apologies sucked with the sea of mucus flooding my nostrils. What eternal sunset will forgive me now? Are these the gains by my loses?
A pack of dogs amble by, sniffing cold soft grass, following shadows of past defecators and lapping other stranded odors - leaving me slightly amused. What past trail had they lost? Had I lost?

When evening drops its grey steel cover, misted panes drip tired breaths as monster-rats toss steel-wools left with un-scraped pots leaning against lavatory walls. Hung rags cleansed for tomorrow’s sloth dry under an odd moon’s breeze. Murmurs of flushed deposits linger in the air’s whisper; children singing gothic limericks at a night hiding today’s secrets from those who are yet to awake. I am loosing something here; a human offering from sanded palms; vicarious ruse of phantom repentance.

Then, a wasp crawls into a rusted pole, and a tingle like crystals in my arteries gnaws by arms, legs and face.

A cursed Morning...

2009-04-20T08:45:00.000-07:00

What do they want from me?

I believe that of all the loathsome precepts of human-ness is the ability to stand callous chatter even when not interested. I haven’t had a drink in three days and I feel I could tear my beard out in a tempest. The hosts’ expectations that I would smile when tired of my soul, fades with my raunchy face piercing their morning joys - all that bile that swims abound my eyes splashing like wet-words of a suspicious hatred. They ask: Why are you acting like a child? And I flip! A ponderous groan heartlessly felling my lungs, then some strange upheaval of sadness. Fuck… what a patronizing query is that to respond to – ‘have you had a child to know how they act?’ Suddenly someone decides they want to yell my name… I wait to figure out what they want… and they suddenly act like I’m crude.

I hate my name being hollered at, in ghostly anticipation for no concrete reason posited prior to beckoning. It’s some minutes before noon; I am a tossed spirit that snored drunk and frightened itself out of torpor. I hate being talked to like I am a pedantic wench who needs to be guided through everything topical. And if they knew the sacramental terror of my leprous thoughts – those that numb fingers, skin – even the phallus (this muscular gum of sex a bore), they’d oil their tongues or just keep to themselves. I hate having to purport calm when wrath is gnawing my innards - I hate raised voices when addressing mine crouched in its ardent nonchalance.

Later, when the sun has chastised residual dread dredged into my muscles by nightmares, I walk about the yard, a bashing fear careening the gibbering knees folding wearily with every step. A frightened realization of gloom rises whence I notice the phone twinkling a message received as I slumped comatose. Then a perpetual void – I marvel at this self-reflection. A wild sensation of awe creeps through vein-catacombs – boils for veins, reined to a despicable horror, and like sultry gnomes, memories awake for my penance. Under a solemn tree I pull a loosened dread-lock and shove it in my pocket with other bouquets of dead flowers I picked up at the graves.

I am sick (even with that gleeful smile – a moron smile eclipsing my broken face) and this picnic joy is sourly waning, even when monkey angels drop pearls from sweet lips, flaring arms in jubilant hugs. I reciprocate though, but half-heartedly… and this shows. Fuck this day’s blow and its pheasants nesting in my chest.

Soon I sigh an inner voice saying: Tomb, bend to the wind this cursed day.

And true, sunset hovers without my notice and the night’s corpuscle awaits a bleed, announcing another frail dream as I watch the wall of leaves in the lavatory. I eat, drink tea and decide to try bedding, but not a dream, just foul reminiscence of death’s stench xylophoned in my mould.

Day Something...

2009-04-19T02:50:00.000-07:00

A while back when at home, I decided to grab two books for the road: The Quantum Mind and The Age of Spiritual Machines. And the person-cell thus finds inspiration this dawn in words of a machine soul named The Cybernetic Poet.

This is a computerized author – a computer program to be precise, which was designed by Ray Kurzweil. The Ray Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet is a computer-generated poetry system, which uses language-modeling techniques to automatically generate completely original poetry based on poem that it has “read”.

A Haiku written by RKCP after reading Wendy Dennis:

PAGE

Sashay down the page
through the lioness
nestled in my soul.

After reading John Keats:

SOUL

You broke my soul
the juice of eternity
the spirit of my lips.

The one I love was generated after reading Kathleen Frances Wheeler:

MOON CHILD

Crazy moon child
Hide from your coffin
To spite your doom.

After reading Robert Frost RKCP generated the following:

I THINK I’LL CRASH

I think I’ll crash.
Just for myself with God
peace on a curious sound
for myself in my heart?
And life is weeping
From a bleeding heart
of boughs bending
such paths of them,
of boughs bending
such paths of breeze
knows we’ve been there

Today, Or Not to day...

2009-04-18T10:24:00.001-07:00

At the graves…

When the dead are roused, under spades by loved palms… beneath a blazing sun; at noon their voices are heard. Reprimanding, time’s manifestos awarding pride to those filled with faith. The elders lie here foiled in the mysteries of an after-life lived among mortals in harmony and balance.

I stand and watch florid grave tops, overgrown with bristled grass and graphite tombstones. Their tired feet pointed towards the east, that they would be awoken in time to stand and face the sun. 9 pigeons hover aligned upon a telegraph line, in memory of an obituary of our flaws… we watch the earth sink; coffins pillaged and serpentine mazes hauled out from beneath silent rears.

At that noon’s later hours, we set alight firewood, blossoming sparks clambering up the wind toward the ultimate void… and meat is burned; fumes bewildering dog noses… and rodent’s, as they criss-cross the garden mess. The sun slinks past aged branches, flushing a hot belt waved across my face, the sanctity. I lie atop a blanket of winter-chapped grass, gaze unto dim stars hiding behind light-rays, the smoke plumes of ghetto chimneys brewing cancer storms for infants to be yet born. Cars wail past in hectic frenzies, their music carried by a dry smoggy draft as though campaigning with itinerants to partake in a collective suicide. Politics gracing faint radio buzzes inside the house, sex scandals in song in this stage of machine creatures in time that seems to be in reverse.

There are the cul-de-sacs jabbering with bashes somewhere, punitive lust displayed with automobiles and high strung shoulders of feline street maids. This brawl typical of township penitentiaries keeps the night at bay, our zone heaving the rhythm of soggy folks and forlorn youths mingling souls in taverns posing for vortexes of mundane energies. Later I crawl along to grab two beers and browse tabloids of a generation obsessed with sweet-lips – and I find myself at a peace, wound streaks rubbed by flies’ noses. It is an orange dusk, dust rising above calm roofs of shacks dreaming under a summer’s pan. And I am home to reminisce about the elders asleep. To wait for them to be resurrected facing the sun-god toward their last reprieves.

Another Day...

2009-04-06T09:44:00.001-07:00

I am not concerned with purism in literature – some belated adherence to certain literary traditions. But I am concerned with how my literature shapes my affinity with the real and long denied existence of suffering – personal suffering to be precise. I understand that a moving human testimony written in fictional terms may or may not be a literary masterpiece – and I am not intent on the blog being such. It is but a chronicle of my self-conscious point of view, which I deem essential for the eventual collective criticism of historical realities.
There are great myriad of reality-definitions constructed to keep us all attuned to this post-modern sophistication purported by western trends; nonetheless, these require a great deal of self-exorcism at an individual level being perceived as an authorial generalization.

This blog is that pure individual interface with existence which is created within collectivized kin spirits and travelers within the dream of life. I mean besides, all good literature must co-exist with bad literature. The irrationality of my writing stands for the stamp of its origin – an inner light when the soul was sun-less. It is a chronicle of a mystical encounter with reality as experienced in a vast collection of moments.

“We shall not trample on the right of an artist to express nothing but his personal experiences and self observations while disregarding all that occurs in the rest of the world.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Day Thirty-One...

2009-04-04T01:16:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since I wrote some kind of a love letter, but until this morning - it feels like a rather ravenous time for such an endeavor, with my mind's spaces shifting their pillars for my routes' calm. All I remember is waking up within a dream space in this Kasie, nearly dead under the stars overshadowed now...yet bemused by the clasp at life all humans of light doeth possess. There were those wondrous sights at dawns of a thirsty bright..., the sun ever creeping unto the underworld at drenched sunsets. I meet faces I will recall in my after faces...when the faces sought in the mud no longer hold. I mean the faces seen through the inner chambers of their bosoms once I have climbed over the seal of the windows cut in their chests.

I imagine those millions of trees aligned by human ingenuity over hills and mountainous terrains – such as in Mpumalanga, such pulchritude un-bound...and yet this same species has their alceric clog holes called cities - as death is the needled stupor it injects the meek with… raping the sanctity of our sole bearer before our leap into the vault of the eternal abyss. In SA yes, they are awakening to the effects of their hedonistic lifestyles on the environment...but, we all know it is too late. Cars are being advertised like they are whores for any stud-minded horse-dick, and the nymphs succumb...mesmeric you'd find them heaving breast-bare over phallic toys emasculated males require for power.

Ok, I know perhaps things are the same everywhere... but…
Please know we are one, for no vision of the inner light can occur otherwise.
I feel am about to die...in another chapter of the revelation of my present condition of evolution.

Darkness always creeps over my sights and awe wrecks havoc with my cranium, yes. I do often wish for death, but death does not accept my proposal. It just leaves me with a hole in my chest…a gaping maw. Is this hole in you too? For how could you fill it up in one scoop of your manure?

Is the dark serpentine of homicidal conditions of our present existence gnawing through the marrows of your virginal bones too?

Day Thirty...

2009-04-02T08:28:00.000-07:00

To start off, lets assume the artist, a self-conscious vehicle of the spirit of the people; how does the artist become this?

Is it because are truly Critics of Society?

Art, since the times of Aristotle has been viewed as somewhat of a phenomenon imposed upon its bearer; this meaning, to me at least that the style or ideas of style as inflicted by the individual’s reality-definition is substrate transmission of the received stimuli after calculative correlations and summation into generic fabrics of morale within society I live in. Morale is mere example of what any art-activity can accomplished on behalf of the collective social awareness. Therefore, the artists can be duly credited with all constructive pressure that sustains all culture and thus implying a method of becoming the essential vehicle of collective knowledge even more poignant in times of struggle for transformation of alternate perspectives. In situations of social oppression based on all other biases and handicaps of culture as has to be transformed, we find it necessary to eradicate some notions in order to pave way for change within each institution’s evolution. Here, culture becomes an anti-acid for the cultural belly which is in itself a melting pot of ever-transient methods of growth.

The artists’ concern for freedom would then mean an inverse of ART-AS-Freedom hypothesis which I hope was deciphered in the opening pages of this essay; thus transforming the mandate of this skill into those of ART-FOR-freedom.
But, this would seem to contradict all notions of freedom as that human imaginative truth which should be a model of fixated truths as those that history is concocted from. Art as the freedom should have been the author of tendencies of free activity, but now that it seeks to reform the exact notions it has planted… we begin to see art becoming a form of social re-engineering experiment, ever in flux of stimuli which charge and trigger all exponential growth that permeates all human activity.

But, there are risks to criticizing the normative structures of social liberties which can include the loss of those same liberties on the side of the agitating artists, since the majority tends to be capacitated towards negativity and antagonism of that which is of minority opinion. Andre Breton called this ‘The Hatred of the Marvelous’ – and this capacity can overwhelm any expression uttered with immediate aims of instigating change.
Ok, like most changes in life and thought-patterns to which any language in the world can refer – the same thought system-changes can dictate the language of their transformative period within a continuum of evolving cultures.

That language can either please or displease portions of society in its segregated reality-definitions, either making the artists for instance “fully fledged Writers” or despots who deserve society’s scorn, for their rejection of that which had already been admired.

This could be a way that most writers and poets are viewed by their readers/society; and also by those who have learned to commodify this special skill for gain in other modes of social transactions. Class as a cultural reality itself tends to feed into this paradigm of censoring thought and reception of subversive definitions of the word, thus we are came across ideas of democracy, industrialism and classism as adjunct of culture as a whole. In societies clustered with contradictions moral or otherwise, there rises the urgency towards problematizing dissent/opposition and sadly the ones plagued with imaginative experiences/truths tend to suffer the first blows.

I must also emphasize that the word imaginative is not implicit of escapist and illusory tendencies attributed to its meaning. By ‘imaginative’ I import into the realm of art-activity the capacity for the unknown – an imperative for change – yet determinate, thus only cultivated minds being those privileged to see/transmit it. Avenues of contemporary mentalism still remain to be shaken by such anarchic alterations of psychologies infused upon societies as normative and thus becoming imperatives of specialized kinds. Censorship can become an individualized imperative in that through society’s reluctance towards change, it would homogenize responses to the unknown, thus also heightening the phenomenon of self-censoring societies and individuals.

The risks are further enhanced by the historical dependence of expression on institutions who had in the earlier parts of the past century entrenched ideas like industry, system, commodity, trade and so forth, and thus placing vulnerability on originality. The same structures which formulated classes into markets with homogenized value systems can be those same structures controlling language developments; for their homogeneity is sustained by language (commonly English) which somehow fails to grow with the exponential rate of change introducing newer imaginative truths into the collective world-mind. If therefore the artists are charged with individually confronting such stagnation, how will society still manage to elude the vices of mono-culturalism?

This analysis I will provide in relation to another phenomenon – egalitarianism as expressed and impressed through art-activities under the age of globalization and commodification of art as for trade-item. First before providing alternative answers to questions posed, I will attempt to refer to other sources and texts of significant abstractions which might serve to verify the hypothesis I will henceforth offer.

Art in South Africa:
Through the Colonial Prism

I believe it would suffice to say that the South African political climate of the earlier 1900’s had become and remained a volatile one for varied sectors of society. Many disparities which characterized the colonial culture since then, evolved through that epoch having gained further appurtenances towards segregation. Ideas which today filter into present political ideals can still find root at these and other phases of the South African experience. The iron claw of white supremacy saw African cultural expression banished to barbarism, and the impending consequences of cultural extinction took toll. The separated-ness of class systems in the country insidiously introduced charters essential for cultural segregation and castration for many; culture stood forth as an entity which revealed a Cosmo-demonic side of its mirrored face. Other ethnicities’ knowledge systems were thus vanquished with vile disregard – labeled as “uncultured”, therefore revealing another meaning assimilated into the word since its inception.

When Steve Biko highlighted the capability of culture as propellant of collective minds towards an appreciation of its past, he also identified other facets instrumental in this transformative process; the by-products of culture (art, music, poetry and literature in any form), these become subject to the entire and absolute awareness of self in present temporality. This impressed upon the artists the responsibility of being truth-mirror standing in relation to other interacting complexities abound. The atmosphere which throughout history had exemplified an atmosphere for art’s perfect germination had been those of strife, contaminations and other virulent epochs of hardship in human history. These selfsame epochs had also made platforms for a realistic approach towards cultural anarchy – a phenomenon characteristic of one class’s cultural norms taking excess acknowledgment over others.

Through such nepotistic majority validations of a single cultural system, we still see the advent of banishment loom as other subaltern cultures are repressed as to not infect an entire system created through class-centered values.
Any opposition of such a thought-system is then what I call the root of cultural resistance/revolution/struggle against the aforementioned mono-culture.
Art as a weapon:
Towards Regaining Freedom...

Day Twenty-Nine...

2009-04-01T09:03:00.000-07:00

A sibilant hiss of a petal falling from a branch;
Strung leaves glowing a bold green…
The person-cell squatting again,
Behind the lavatory.
Chairman Mao’s death was calm as a soiled page of prosody heaven-bound.

I ask this still with self-hate brewing the memory of my brother in prison:

I haven’t visited you lately, quite a while. I remember me asking:

Brother, why do men die alone in war?

And he’d said: Because they chicken out.
But,
Did we ask that of our fathers;
About that god’s bleeding asshole…
About how it’s churning
Slave-beacons without souls…
Who traverse thorn planes, like
Soldiers exiting a sinister game?
Asking of mothers:
Does birth rub off the shame…

Day Twenty-Eight...

2009-04-01T03:14:00.001-07:00

Death of a futurist

We died my friend
The other day…
The future’s dying
Everyday…
Begged of mother
Put a scepter in our veins…
We gazed at stars
Vaginas were killed…
We lie, I die
Without befuddled aims…
Stealing love’s gowns
Wailing with clowns…
We tear our friends
We found in losses…
We say we love
We say we’ll die…
We name ourselves
Claiming heaven our own…
With other’s promise
Scaling blind for scores …
We’ve come undone, yes
The blessed in debt the young…

Gods shutting ears
With sales of fire…
We dreamt our life beyond the womb
Inside his leaky lair…
Ghostly trances being our wound…
Never here together and cold
Can’t claim bonds of the soul…
We are all daughters
Bulging Sudan shitting wells…
Summer pays the gunman
With gold teething heirs…
Skeletons of fables badged in motley flags…
Applauding blood in stables of luck’s mutants.

Day Twenty-Seven

2009-04-01T03:02:00.000-07:00

What is it this art thingy? I awake sad, and I read a bit about Chairman Mao Zedong... still asking what could art do for any social revolution? Indeed, having paid much notice to contemporary phrases such as Cultural Activism, Cultural Practitioners and among some of these skills and specializations being that of Artists, especially when addressing what Arts and Culture as discourses essential for social change; I find it of essence that I outline perhaps my Understanding of Culture and Art first as words, and then as phenomena in social dynamics which has been used in attempts to collectively assimilate the human experience.

For convenience’s sake let us outline the methodology of the thoughts running in my skull, by which I wish to unravel my response to the first portion of question 1. I will attempt to define my understanding the words from the perspective that these two phenomena have commonalities with growth and change, secondly; by giving brief historical views and perspectives, I will venture into ways the words have evolved new meanings and contexts within society’s use of language.

Change in life and thought can also refer to change in language, thus perhaps I needed to set straight some ideas around how these changes effect changes in vocabulary and the meanings. An artist by the name of Zwelethu Mthethwa once interviewed had mentioned how he felt that: Everyone is a latent Artist. From this Para-phrased expression I wish to commence my analysis. Culture can by definition be generalized as compendium of ‘tendencies of natural growth within a group centered around common experiences and needs’, but to say this without tracing some history as I have come to know of the antique metamorphosis the words had undergone, it would be detrimental to an overall understanding of the perspective assumed here.

The word culture has changed meaning over a myriad of periods in human development; be it since Greco-Roman times, the more recent renaissance periods that are often attributed an Eurocentric origin; and during revolutions that are documented throughout the globe such of the holocaust of slavery – the French, Spanish, the industrial revolution and so forth. These changes should first be attributed to the human conditions which espoused necessity for such radical transformation of normative structures and societal systems. Initially I mentioned the tendencies of human growth; now imagine the analogy transmitting plasticity in time through processes of human training with regard to the new-fangled specializations that arise with the evolution of art-ideas and cultural thought metamorphosis.

By human, I am still at that microcosmic veil of the collective transformation, meaning the general state of individual mind prior to its awareness of partaking in the general state of intellectual development in a society as a whole – to use Raymond Williams’ precedent of cultural evolution.
But soon arises that ever inherent defect of rationality as experienced through the ghost of logic, which transmutes itself with every new consensus reached – the spiraling implications of the word onto its source-words – art, democracy, class and all other isms which are often romanticism, some pseudo-naturalism of elitist mobs constrained by their feudalistic origins and contradictions.

Suddenly I find culture faced with these inherent contradictions of its being a mere abstraction thus allowing practical separations of certain moral activities (intellectual or otherwise) from the impetus of society itself. An abstraction yes, but it also should still allow for the ‘court of human appeals’. Each individual finds virtue in the knowledge of representation within the collective.

But with certain rudimentary emergence of political collective-ideas in the earlier part of history as a character in this evolution, we find culture being faced with other demises such as banishment to some obscurity, usually reasoned against the art-practitioners who dared disregard common society sense. This advent also forced culture as a compendium of art-thoughts/ideas further back to areas of personalized and private experiences. Perhaps there is much I have missed – ART, what is its relation to all this culture talk? Ok, ART as a word seems to have a remarkably similar pattern of change as culture to me. Maybe I should have stayed with a structured analysis of the topic, not the lateral method I seem to be following.

From its original sense of being a skill, art had to come to some kind of institutionalization. Art had began to be signified with a particular group of skills – artisan. But that also changed, whereby art in the personalized banishment state became a sphere of imaginative truths cleaved directly from an observation of social changes; this happening at that microcosmic level of the individual. From that characteristic disposition of romantic analyst-syndrome inherited from ancient moral habits – we see art being distinguished by other words like GENIUS, Aesthetic and other exalted distinctions from society as whole. Thus we find art now becoming a tool for cultural records of nearly all important continuing reactions to changes in social, economic and political lives – a map for exploring the nature of the changes within a continuum.

With this creation of a special kind of person because of an imaginative capability to record tendencies of human growth also was created a body of moral and intellectual activities which officially took to a certain scale of integrity – a mode of interpreting all common experiences thus also beginning to change those. This new person after finding out this new theory of a superior reality says: ‘I’m relating – I actually have a function.’ This is like what Karl Gietl had once impugned in an interview.
The new entity finds a conception of the same society in its crude indifference a kind of substantial sphere of natural beauty and personalized objectivities related and not opposed to the beauty of a political life.

When conclusions about personal feelings become conclusions about society - an observation of any beauty can carry moral reference to the unified life of a society. Christopher Okigbo was at war when he wrote out his Labyrinths, other pamphlet paddling poets were incarcerated – Wole Soyinka, Dennis Brutus, Wally Serote – Niyi Osundare and many others whose activities were not merely incidental but essentially related to a larger experience. It should be noted therefore that culture as expressed by the Artist is soon impressed upon society, thus the qualification bestowed artists as purveyors of the embodied human spirit even when often in opposition to the same society’s factitious value-systems.

Artists can thus mirror a society which in turn can replenish the image self-reflected through the art-activity of these special persons as a means towards revolutionizing truths. So this pivotal role the artists play should and can relate to struggles for change in societies. Art is a freedom in itself, but when art is banished to un-freedom… it can serve to mold and amend all commonalities in human value-systems.

Is not art a professional protest against stagnant social norms, thus simultaneously inaugurating alternative grounds for change? Does the artist plot the pillars of culture’s evolution? All these questions can be answered in the following attempt at redressing the art-idea as impetus for art-activity.

Day Twenty-Five...

2009-03-31T10:04:00.000-07:00

This morning I wake up thinking about how egalitarianism is now the card-board religious advent prevalent in contemporary ideological discourses, more especially when considering that it - how as a phantom moral platform for those who suffer the neo-liberal guilt, it serves the sinister espouse towards an equality character banner voicing tongues flaking towards collectively sharing servitude in hunger. This I now labeled ‘The maternal group-centered deathblows’ with which most minds are ensconced mentally. By proselytizing to the hordes of humans so castrated mentally, ideals of ‘a common good’...this political brigade follows that you/any entity (the individual) can be designed and re-designed for purpose of promulgating ideals as they see fit - the superior puppeteers and psycho-surgeons of the many user devices (MUD). If they can design a common bad separated by an inner gnosis, thus forming vaults within which they can capture and abort your instinct of worship with the aid of hegemonies and deifications through symbolic totems synthesized, then it follows that your will and freedom will lay hostage to their fate-concoctions. The in-bred obligation to obey in exchange for protection within the collective slave-camp will further ensure the consistence of this character of self-condemnation – the subjugation of self-will, leaving the individual demonstrating his disdain for absolute freedom.

Karl Popper mentioned the idea of a CHOSEN RACE who will fashion themselves as the craftsmen of a mono-culture – this being the new mentalism of a collective uniformity…sustained by the effects of racism and subjugation as a weapons the imperialists used first to inflate individualism, then finally to abolish the individual through a misconception of the self as a creation of class systems. Through physical control of the individual’s parameters of needs, a class reluctant to condemn itself will be born against those considered classless by the former. Genome compatibility and other attributes which can be used by geniocrats will soon be intuited as a psychological norm and necessity for progress, towards the ever amorphous goal of the super-ego. Extreme individualism transplanted in new forms, I mean profanities like technocracy, geniocracy, even theocracy rendering humanoids so morally cloned and trimmed that in time they would be an army of psychic soldiers awaiting command from anyone entity who can tap into these hypnotized crania in a self-sustaining vegetative mental state.

Now having so dumb-founded an entire cross-section of the world populace - egalitarianism will give way for its exergual source. THE SELF-INGESTING organism of totalitarianism. The so-called equality complex professed by self-righteous egalitarians is a mere noose to a greater rot of collective servitude while disguised as the sedative epitaph - 'good for the rest of man'. This also fuels what I call the vulgarization of that awareness of self...and therefore an extreme totem-ego prevailing as a result of that zealous admiration and observance of SELF. This same selfishness is the first symptom of the impending totalitarian mono-person the entire world will become.

There, we will be non-entities beside the greater persona of a machine-dead phallus civilization, ass-fucked by ideas of utility and a worth determined by how much you can wrench out of your youth and flesh-might - wrists trudged on concrete bread - the cornerstone of totalitarian population control.

The collective avows that each individual’s needs are similar therefore un-profound, by implication of their priority. For instance…looking at Communism, I find it interesting that it as an ideology can concoct a sense of individualism – actually re-constructing it from the rubble of past morality-subversion; then turn around saying look : There are others like you with the same needs and aims and actual loyalties. This reticence to the common plight forces the individual to neglect past strife/desolation in the name of a forthcoming resolution, allowing an insidious vulgarization of true experiences – we can call this the repairing of the past’s brutalities.

With all the disparities of advances,
Who shall be there for geniocrats’ victory?
The eugenics of a black slave-herd…
Being re-engineered for the sole purposes of future misdeeds?

Feeling rounded by slovenly sacred spirits…
All need sundered with blood pooled in a hole;
I slaughtered and the warm crimson caused storms of company…
Not alone with oppressed gene-cloves.

Day Twenty-Four...

2009-03-30T08:51:00.001-07:00

Comatose on a bowl at dawn – racing with ants through cracks in abstracted waltzes over landscapes only their feet can trample… I wonder:
Aren’t perhaps the most stupid of ways of living the essence of a life well-lived?

A shabby township morning, dragging itself out of sleep. Bile scarred throat refusing even spit. The mirror crumbles its unkempt face and stony hands. But a lilting of song lifts above the hiss, and I once again rupture my chest with an appreciation of an entire generation cursed with melody. A wave of song – a mystic infecting an entire storm.

A vermillion knot swells in my belly. I am in a perpetual state of inebriation, drugged by phone calls from hell’s operators. I feel toxic.

- Later today I write to the enemy of me:
- As an adventure capitalist, questioning this suicide gene
- Of a terminator technology that profits racketeers and economic mercenaries.

Life forms as invention of industry – tyrannical lust and created wants; the philosophy of futility.

Death of birth, and perceptions being managed. I am in contempt of all laws of being. My sole mission will be to crash all bonds to my true freedoms. True, man has a right to do with their minds as he pleases… even the right to obscure one’s own consciousness.

Day Twenty-Two...

2009-03-23T02:09:00.000-07:00

Wet brained upon a sloppy Monday;
pollen in my hair as I squat behind the toilet for my joint.
Watching flies dance on a shovel
and
a minor forest growing beneath the drain pipe.

Day Twenty-One...

2009-03-21T01:11:00.000-07:00

Day Twenty One…

My life suddenly feels a ceremonial journey, an anniversary of burning skies imparting lessons that boil in my throat. I am calmer and mellowed by tears that were tainted by fear, as I watch patterns of that dead body’s bled shame in a bowl of water before me – morning’s wash off final friends – a queer anatomy of tears that she had heaven forebear.
In town after an slight hour in a death mobile, with other commuters to a straddled city, I battle a burning bladder. Pay a Rand’s worth for piss in amidst slime and greased floors, a murky urinal glistening sordid gold – a stench of defecation peering, then slithering through barred windows without panes. A dodgy cashier with a canopy pf reddened locks has browned eyes, pupiled with a serene grey circle piercing gently through a ragged pose. There are orange clad women munching on vetkoeks and tea prior to hitting pothole of a wretched landscape. A wreck museum of derelict Hillbrow buildings bathing under the blue sky calls me nigh. I venture to preside over dead ore of rusted masonry, person-cell unawares of still webs weaved to catch his shoulder… then I decide:
Unapparel flesh’s limitations poet,
Crash into other shadows of fun – a dream you had somewhere shiny under a dark shield.

Then a hypothesis arises:
Perhaps the nature of this God is a circle of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere…

It is then that I return once again to the gates of a hedonisiuos colony, and sit at a table where it all began for me…

At Niki’s

Day Twenty...

2009-03-20T04:25:00.000-07:00

In Soweto

I arrive early from Fochville, and would have to call people for a place to crash. I call the head chef, but he has some engagements to attend to. We meet in town for key exchange and I head for a solitary at his room… I am tired and sleepy. I think time out is essential for this first nothing I will endeavor in this township. The chorale melancholy of ghetto streets hums in the rain… echoes of a gamble with life resounds, not entirely bordered by swamps of friends, the greeting and queries about my whereabouts. I am at a piety of will. It is the twentieth day of my departures… the rains drizzles coldly, it’s whispers curling abound my spine in chills before I decide to go rest. Later a tease of hail on the roof; what a joy reading John Donne when thoughts are stars in my soul.

“Drowned the whole world, us two…” I read and recall our two chaoses that were in love with a lesser sun. Inside, a racked carcass, the moist clime of summer’s storm rousing still, a killing love. I awake an hour later, feeling cloistral - heavy with the thought that I might have aged rashly to love’s chaos- with a vain hope for revenge than with due caution. I need to purity my aging Adam, with a virtue that would dwell in me as I pursue the sun’s route.

A poet is one who is (ready) prepared for death, for no sin’s mortal.

Day Nineteen...

2009-03-19T12:31:00.000-07:00

Love has reversed the normal process of alchemy by working to produce more intense degrees of negativeness, so as to arrive at an elixir of death or of nothing.

2009-03-19T12:26:00.000-07:00

Day Eighteen...

2009-03-19T10:12:00.000-07:00

Love’s Diet

The diet of love is a dying man’s concern,

- a sigh beguiling
- her eyes light’s life.
- sleep’s weak flashes and dropsically a thirst…
- balm from a dying body drained from his back;
- Life squibs that sap via feet of his bed.

And stars that store gunpowder for nocturnal trivia;
Stars not by the sun enlarged, but shown.

Day Seventeen...

2009-03-19T00:20:00.000-07:00

When weather-beaten I come back; my hand
Perhaps with rude oars torn, or sun-beams tanned,
My face and breast of haircloth, and my head
With care’s rash sudden hoariness o’erspread,
My body a sack of bones, broken within,
And powder’s blue stains scattered on my skin;
If rival fools tax thee to have loved a man,
So foul, and coarse, as oh, I may seem then,
This shall say what I was: and thou shall say,
Do his hurts reach me? Doth my worth decay?
Or do they reach his judging mind, that he
Should now love less, what he did love to see?
That which in him was fair and delicate,
Was but the milk, which in love’s childish state
Did nurse it; who now is grown strong enough
To feed on that, which to disused tastes seem tough.

John Donne – Elegy 5

Day Sixteen

2009-03-18T00:55:00.000-07:00

His Picture

Here take my picture, though I bid farewell;
Thine in my heart, where my soul dwells, shall dwell.
'Tis like me now, but I dead, 'twill be more
When we are shadows both, than 'twas before.

Day Fifteen...

2009-03-09T11:47:00.001-07:00

Day Fourteen...

2009-03-09T11:36:00.001-07:00

2009-03-05T01:46:00.000-08:00

Day Thirteen

2009-02-28T07:46:00.000-08:00

What is real to me now? How eternal…

The quintessential anomaly about human existence is that it feels linear even though we know it to be cyclic a phenomenon. The idea of chronometry as it is a manifest interpretation of this anomalous perspective gives rise to the question…. Is this linearity also an element resultant from this linearity we imposed on memory? During this cataclysmic motion through time, we have evolved and thus meaningfully attributed time to what we have collated as memory. What then was this memory complex we had to develop for survival as a species on a harsh and brutal planet? Do all the days matter? Implying, does a human access the vaults of a millennia of memory in a single lifetime? Does the idea of life-time also impose a limit to the access to those vaults? Would immortality mean having unstoppable interface with the divine memory of our evolutionary path? Ok, basically I ask is the memory I am creating an element that would eventually drain into the fountain of the species’ collective unconscious? To be Jungian a little. And when faces are itching with death-trance symptoms…. During the chore of the living… would existence be a dream we all traverse from this evolutionary incarnation called humanoid unto the next and eternal? Do the contents of this life mean a mechanical design for my forth coming resurrection? What is life if not a florid mystery? Am I living or merely alive as eyes of a divine nomad through space-time…the god creature?

Day Eleven

2009-02-23T10:08:00.000-08:00

Day Ten - Reality is just a point of view.

2009-02-23T09:54:00.000-08:00

Day Nine

2009-02-23T09:49:00.001-08:00

Nothing...
No thing...
No Thing... I can't come with you.

Day Eight...

2009-02-16T21:33:00.000-08:00

Video Dream

Day Seven

2009-02-16T21:26:00.000-08:00

Another raw summer’s day in this harrowing journey. People sweltering like convicts in a blaze that torments heads. Disheartenment and utter despair assailing me, the image of eternity I was born with being spoiled by morbid reflections. What have I become? Embezzled lover and exiguous father… But I am elsewhere now – where memory ends with conversations with the skies. Styes are blistered by constant tears and my bones need a walk. I eventually muster courage to take a walk among slouched drunkards on sidewalks, faces glued to arses and other museum relics of a boding terrain. It was actually the heat that woke me up - a Pretorian commonality I suppose.
I had intended to sit alone in the vacant flat after everyone had gone to work and perhaps finish a script. But I rather opted to list places to visit during my planned excursion, and motley list emerged indeed, from those vaults of memories distant with my past stay in this city.
Option 1
The Gallery
The gallery is situated too close to a brothel; and I wonder if prostitutes do appreciate art. Movements of commoners mingle with mine towards an eminent failure of explorations. Museums are too far apart; with kilometer long blocks to cross from one to another.
Option 2
Second Hand Bookshops – if they haven’t shutdown to make way for salons and internet cafes.

A bout of dementia settles as I realize that I have not written prosody in months… I think, and the twitch is unbearable. Trundle of cars up sloppy alleys, and the intermittent silences charge me with guilty thoughts. Taverns are filled with young lost men, women thronging salons for nail-biting efforts at beautification – whimsical debauchery swimming in their eyes. Pimps lounge along park benches and drug peddlers lie comatose under weird shadows at noon. The reek of marijuana filtered through heated drafts, and it is when I decide the walk was a bad idea and I had to escape the scotching sun. A visit around the block sees me in a company of old friends, further fueling militant debates with some eclectic music blurring though tattered audio speakers. We sit the day to blots on floors, no furnishings necessary here. For now, I hope.

Minor Observation

I discovered that here, a packet of cigarettes is called LAPTOP…
It is rather boring day in the story that could get senile. I sleep in the afternoon, only to be roused late at night by my hosts returning.

Day Six... In Pretoria.

2009-02-14T06:17:00.000-08:00

For an early day’s mining, I got so sloshed I could not spell Amuz backwards, the whirl of lights and neon sign benignly cooling in the spheres of my eyes. Wine came pouring, bottles marking a social territory… us feeling like runaway fires in some pristine pastures of nude souls. It was all well still this dawn when I had to plunge my thoughts towards departures. I had unburdened myself to The Common ear the evening before, an ear that held supplication with my soul… I talked about my pain, my faults and flaws, the Dionysian delicacy brewing truth in my belly. I slept peacefully, strangely, having torn my eye-sack and bosom’s privities for the glare of hurt. My sexual apparatus lunged with virile force at the zipper, and I knew the addict to copulation was looming and desire had un-clamped the stale sense of loss. But having to reach the thoroughfare in the earlier hours of the day, this notion fills me with a strange vacillating rage. Not that I am becoming exhausted by roads devouring my feet’s histories… but because, I have no place to stay and it’s becoming veracity beyond complaint.

I have become a wastrel, on the road to nowhere - succulent petals of sweat grazing my brows with piercing crystals. I reach Noord under a stupor and daze of Johannesburg’s unrepentant belly, under the common tutelage of demons abound the abodes of the homeless, feeling turpitude splayed in my chest pages – the city’s chilly heart pumping, filling me up, clouds stilted in the un-nature of my past passions… eye bleeding morgue tongues. I recall again why the run… the termagant who coined the demise I find myself handling and singing. The place is a mess of commuters and I sigh…On my first attempt to board a Taxi to Pretoria, the conductors demand green and red cards from passengers (a cacophony of perfumes and scents of endearment transuding from every female armpit)and I soon discover that things do really change.

Upon my unannounced arrival, I chase the sunny streets of a town going down a drain… infantile juveniles bursting from residence windows… wheezing calm calls to passerby tourists like myself. I decide to lounge an hour at a local pub beating African pulses with sounds of shrilling guitars and un-tuned keyboards… the clamor of Congolese sound merging with other brute noises of a rhythmic street. I meet Shaun in this clique of the infamous; second his brother who had been jailed for four years. It has truly been long since I had seen this city. I embrace the souls plundered by the toils of tar, and they call me a saint. I am offered a beer and concur, and the night begins with its hues, eye-bound and the bile innards giving way to creeks of relaxation. I loved too many… so does love bestowed me in the caves of another anomalous terrain of my adventures.

Later outside a barred doorway, I wait for a response from a buzzer device installed at most of the properties in this enclave. I meet a prostitute, I guess, wetted black hair streaming upon prim cheeks. She looks roused by an early shower after a glorious bed filled with coinage… and recall that here the highs are without limits. My brother is nowhere to be found. He’s gone home to a sickly daughter and mother. I sympathize, and watch the friends in whose care he left me with unblinking concern for the turmoil of their trials. The Eskimo Child speaks of good hours of days gone by, younglings shagged by muscle maniacs fisting penises like hell’s door knobs… and I believe there is a glitch. He blesses my visit with a charge towards the queer girls and men in automotive crazes, cars and lulling machines of their pleasures… on wide streets made for donkey-cart turns. The Arcadian prostitute hives are brimming with teasers and made women, their sane ways coaxing warmth from pockets of guardian men… the sugar daddy types of our cosmopolitan age. Watched wenches with sorry eyes of nonchalance… and I asked why am I missing the game?
Pedi accents are un-nerving at first: “My Bra, ga di’ntshe bana”, he clamors out at some sanctuary and hidden-out furnace of revelers. And while my disabled palate kept sticking to my tongue; and only for so long I could undertake chatter… inebriation calling me further to the par of my brains brim. We arrive at Mallet, a complex downtrodden my mere utility. The haven for the studious kind, men at colleges of their future toils. I love the girls here, nubile and dream eyed… and how the ploys were mounting abound their voluptuous booties… and soon a gang of cops throng the place - in seconds; to investigate suspicion of illegal activities… the place looking horded by the uniformed officer brains… their operation Vula Isandla being a kind of philanthropy they undertake… and say that Pretoria is a nightmare. Ok, we decide we have to vacate ground-zero and we return to the flat, and all that is left is to read are the quotations My Brother has jotted across his walls like stale pictures of frozen brains.

The cautioning epithets:

‘Whatever it is you are feeling is a perfect reflection of what is in the process…’

‘All that we are is the result of what we have thought…’

‘You create your own universe as you go along…’

‘The universe will correspond to the nature of your song…’

‘Most people offer the majority of their response to what they are observing…’

And I will sleep in the reverie that all that art is what ought to be… while Nommo wails other rudiments of a fractured heart…

Day Five...

2009-02-13T14:21:00.000-08:00

But the streets called… and I was where the curse had brought me. My head is bacchantly numb still and the streets brawl with juveniles in search of pleasure zones. It had rained the night before, and now the alleys carry the stench of stale armpits. I call The Common Man and ask for a place to crash; and we arrange a rendezvous at the blizzard clime of conned eateries. I meet him slouched in affluence’s décor with a drink at hand. A blazing cigarette and a female companion posing her serenity with pride. I am looking distraught, tired and charred by travel, the Township stench creased with the wrinkles of scotch. I ask him dearly if this won’t be a nuisance… and he’s calm with an answer that’s bright with concerned fright. He is also house-sitting. And stuck in a domain of fevered pockets as well, we hassle for coinage for a short trip out the bustle and bedlam of Bree Street and head north. But… he has to first wait on another culprit in the land of the beat of another kind.

Having being trusted with a key to a foreign abode I lunge forward towards the Taxi and board a trip to my nest for the night. Incidentally, I arrive a street away from my last head resting pillow… with Her. Her, again. There is surely something in the way of this misadventure. I watch myself fall like a feather off a wing of luck; acertitute overwhelming… that this is a method of alchemy from sources unfathomable and that which behoves me to act out my rage.

I arrive and the place is filled with books. Walls covered with page stink, and fossilized brain laboratory for a bedroom, I marvel at Bell Hooks lynching the myths about black masculinity and I feel vindication of a somber kind. I read it before he returns, that as soon as he rings his arrival I’d had kissed the better parts of my life good-by, and sacrificed all in the fire places innards. The house is an ethereal library of leftist literature, Dostoevsky, Pastenak and the like of other Soviet psalms of suffering. I love it here, reading blindly into my reverie that the nightmare would end. The silence, and then the film I watch called Steel City enrapturing me. The minor joint of marijuana, the tobacco breath growing shrubs in my muddied lungs… I cough and the echo is beyond repair. I know I have to cease the hiding from the stars of my end… I feel them creeping…

Suddenly I recall a friend I shared a house with, and how she spoke of a death of a child in nursery school. About how caregivers prostrated themselves on the floors, in mass hysteria, of how children cried while her performance troupe sang jingle bells accompanied by a weeping pianist. And she wept bluntly with placid pain – a bleeding toddler in her palms, feeling like an integer within the positive scheme of things…whence they whispered the soothsaying that she was the elect to usher this infantile soul into its after-life. She said he was in a good place yes, but why? when she was praying that he might not die… There stood a puddle of blood in the middle of the playroom, minor minds chiseled to shreds by a deformed view calm of their familiar space. The elders were kept at bay, their weeping frightened the young. The jingle went blazing through this death chorale, the one who attempted mouth to mouth resuscitation pallid with awe. The Head Chef eventually rings about a throng of horny feminists in town, I am far from that space I tell him: I cannot deal with women right now…

2009-02-06T12:41:00.000-08:00

2009-02-06T10:07:00.000-08:00

2009-02-06T10:04:00.000-08:00

A Small Book on Debauchery...

2009-02-06T01:47:00.002-08:00

This Day

How did the lush of youth fly past those moons of our discontent? There we were, moribund, messed up with charred rhythms in our souls, assailing the stuff of life. We were twenty then, candle minds raped by the last twin decades shunned in the blessing bloom of this sabbatical. This proved that we are simple and made of stone, the mystery of life we could handle with a bard of torture’s personalities. When they had come the last time, we had shoved small memories in boxes which we later chased. This was how our world reeled, breaking window eyes, commiserating a mood of television excess complications. We were here, two special friends and I, a rocket soul mauling lust’s avenues; a splintered cranium spewing vague tutorials of rage, pacing the mansion penitentiary of suburbia.

Waltzing our common dark of age… wayward the later phases of this dream, the maw that imbibes promises, before the culling… at this subtle hour of the sun’s trot into the earth’s underbelly, we thought of the bulging sky’s chest tearing… in words of adornment mashed for nirvana’s brew. He chokes, genuflecting spine of hearty poses, twisting a roaring laughter, actual mess marooning coiled hair… fleas in tripe buzzing a melody at his eyes’ choice. He had to record the events in spirit, a slight float in ransom of some ancient thoughts – a dog vomiting from fresh grass; the dances and jazz blown sparks impressed to memory’s chorale.

Locked gazes, bass flowing with a girl carrying a silver coated glass of ale; engulfed in notes glowing purple and green, orange with the night’s hideous infestations. Crimson petals hang like glitter-balls from earlobes, arms flung like oak branches on shoulders of louts – old sights and voices saying:
‘I don’t know what it is you’re on… but what it is is possible.’
A table is mapped by beverage spills, jabbed - slim elbows moving with travel of sounds, murmurs of delight pulsating toe taps in slouchy muddied sneakers.

And he says to the woman in a mink coat: ‘I know Frederich Nietzsche.’
‘Oooh wow…’ she exclaims with an indifferent expression of surprise. ‘And what does he have to do with the note you passed me earlier?’
‘Hedonisius instincts…’ he confers. ‘A pathless journey some say, where the journey is the destination.’
‘Hug me then.’ She demands, ‘write that down,’ another says; the thought missing a link to the piecing potency of a past referral.
‘Always spontaneous, I see… a joyful release of a soul in need of play,’ miles in her words - a cataclysm so wined up in terror.
‘And then the rooms like fill with balloons and other unbranded delicacies…’ he jesters,
‘Yes.’ A faint smile twists a broken halo on her face, and he wells up fatigued.

The sunset was on our war – peril of youth’s claws causing jitters on brows… Jews flocking the loo – darkies flabbergasted by joy’s smoke. Horn psalmody was awhirl in a cauldron of bitter-sweet gestures; lulling diesel morbidity bending towards the slots of our owned hypocrisies. Yet we were here, at Niki’s Oasis, freeloaders miserly lifting in nihilistic tonality. No after-life for the melody. I sit in its mist of wanton calm, syllables of hatred hugged to my loin, knees and lips blazing rings. And the common lament – jazz - skeletal rears posing – eco-enlightened women in a pale trend, pointing fingers in raw wails for attention and sex.

‘Beauty. Who defines, feels.’ I overhear a sublime epithet blown into thin air, an effeminate voice, charged with song.
‘I love these friends,’ he hunkers and staggers to the beat, ‘strangers who have become inspired friends. Ah, life is beautiful.’ A cloudy sigh.
‘But – hello sunflower.’ He ambiently utters another sibilant noose unto the figure, ‘my name is The Fat Tenant.’

I sit and ponder shafts of lights between thighs with wet near closed eyes. Psychic abandon was a prudent move I thought. I had been sleeping massacred by drink nightly for twelve moons now, the exploits of a weak mind slopping into slaughterhouses of funk. Skinned sunken eye sacks I implore not to surrender me to torpor. I feel toxic, yellowed teeth cringing, eyes crying for a draft in August’s dust. Another day will soon rise behind these eyelids – weeping blots of a maddened orange in the frenzy of the sun’s art. Unshorn chin, a template of queer negation of self - a wincher with empty palms – an incorruptible aim chained to bony shoulders. All antique demons I have orphaned were rising, moaning – thunderous and searing like a tin drum inside.

Recalling the evenings when this man-child whined under Shiva’s trample – is like seeing myself reflected in a dog’s eyes and never had I seen myself like that in any human eyes. I was to floor amid maidens who loathed wombs – heads glossed with bladed perfumes of masculine oratory, but wearing cool eyes – entreating gazes. There were suggested plans for a train trip down south I hear about, over weeks of creamy dialogues with these women of no moral regard… bliss, and debauchery’s nightmare over steel tracks towards a journey that was the destination. We would cross over open dead lands, given to a fear of open spaces.
The common disease of city image-bound catwalks would until then leer its nauseated tongue and puke at natural splendor vinyl-slide crawling outside stained TV style panes. But uncertainty was the great nemesis to premeditated hedonism as I would have to later deal with the trip in the story of this wretched company.

Creaking doors whispered among the noises of smokers some forlorn wail stinking with time’s rust. Posters glowed heavenly with moguls of sound poised and waiting still. On this night miserly faces spoke in cultured tones, brews of assortments like a hospital dispensary cabinet gurgling froth over lips of glasses.

The eve wailed rowdy with lusty informal deities and eternal puzzlement that settled when there was talk about witchcraft, how relatives have hidden hairs and nails in pot-plants for alchemies beyond youth’s common gaze. The wild resonance of their fears when living an age that exterminated such mystical séances, I found unnerving. A generation born beyond the whims of tradition’s intransigence, cosmopolitan sycophants with skins peeled over their head, how dimensional shifts affect them – harm their blue ignorant souls? That which relegated their ancestry to oblivion seemed too invincible for their challenge, and they had failed for a while… I see it everyday in faces of those who live with ghost tenants and possessed legions of the cursed. I sit and ponder the electronic age shamans and sorcerers amidst the bile forming in my throat – ales labeled black slick on buds, watching my friends, one a charm’s peril and the other a soul muscle lynched with souls akin mine. They have always managed to arouse the alchemist in me every noon under covers of delirium.

Earlier clouds of hail pour outside the venue of disgust’s revenge unfit for re-birth’s awe; babes rushing among droplets, serpentine waltzes unto the morale of bar chorus.
‘Lovely art thou,’ I murmur, chasing with wrecking ball eyes, sighing that they have saved me from in-birth and its wallowing maw ground beneath my lopsided rear. Now and again they fairy a tale at me, about their grilled destinations and choir souls who wish for their company – whom I might leave somber if they happened to indulge in conversation.
‘Just keep close,’ they’d warn amiably, languid fellows lounged braced by metal whilst the grass was dappled with droplets of sky’s spit. Some faces peeped strewn with melancholy still – old men at play when jilted by anathema’s shames. Stooped at mad portraiture poses, their guffaws bellowed as they watched their fears through me, a foolhardy sleuth – grey boned, and a ball of unkempt hair.

I saw stars, a moon halo over curse’s embrace piled with love for truth – leather thighs and pinched lip-gluttons parading hell’s make-over. I sneer initially, self-possessed – flaunting my drudgery and catching bait traded by demon pulchritude. A beast I had become once again, culling my jaws in wonder; a rained out night tasting stale flowers wired on lightning strikes. My saints watch and smile indifferently, caressing foods to sewer their bellies. Loved were they, all – as sinned out for no sin to churn my hell. The in and never out jockey steering on, wide – chest heaving of sound, bearing flowers like nightly wizards on his brow. It’s a friend’s aging day – they said, her face colored in young pain surrendered to inebriation, and so were we of these dying young – at life’s bazaar without exits.
There were no specified entries either, with moist lips charring my chin at intervals wasting sentimentalities; I figured my hands dirtied by chores of this theatre.

‘What detergent was suited for these crucified gadgets raging for hugs and polite holds?’ an inner self queries desperately within the stupor of gin and juice.
A kiss on the forehead – a saintly shock to black martyrdom it gave. As we shuffle the dark wept by strange corners later that eve, pierced by walls; we speak of how the sound was bursting suns in our ears.

I live with these vagabonds, twirled journeys with bloated knuckles, saying still memories are for an after-life and a life of before. Now was for mere remembrance or rather the membering of all dis-membered terrains of our travails. Suddenly a succulent poke into my ear raptures my senses. Past other boozing rooms of mystery staggeringly, dj brooding over decked signals of a generation’s wail. Women brawled uterine gossip at their postcard gents – lustily, them who goggled at this chaos sorely needed in their prim lives. I felt at the prime of a monstrous orgy, light footed as grass blades danced dewed waltzes under toes of hobos. Chest folded charred with efforts for air, nicotine blockage bubbling like an infernal comet twitching with my voices phlegm. Cameras flashed, shuttering stout prayers for visuals of my collapse… I was done for, the floor calling.

At her home of parties, gold glowered on the rubber pool – silent youths in pig-tail charms blazing hopes for fun. My twin saints carried me here, slump sack of bones, caressing my hair with bold fingers. A woman buzzes a strut past the stricken eye and I stare, a sweet visage on a dawn’s glory. She bows to name me: ‘The sun’s pose,’ mingled with ‘Brother loved.’

Hail storm was sizzling in guts, the whole world seeming drunk with bright breaths. South Africa – me seeing all, now you being nothing, a rand’s ransom, quarry fever reeling in your bones. But all was well with me.

‘How’s he doing?’ mutters concerned pink and rosed lips.
‘I am divine.’ I say.
‘And the smile?’ they giggle, womanly red windows spewing marvel in laughter.
‘My dear… please just give more floral chatter to this ball of slurs, around his mad buzz,’ I lie still saintly impugning, no rude face necessary. I bask face up looking at those who pass over me, feeling elated despicably. Then the street fight’s motion graces the lapa filed with mannequin fellows, enraged by ill-luck in sex slums… weakness compensated with jeers.

There was however one trait of these saints that throttled many here – good food, sung with knives among choruses of coal god’s throats. I blazed at the crested surf over these souls impaired by pride – when shame’s call wasn’t akin nudity, but souls merely nudely darkened within shards of exploded moons. And tonight groans with infinity, heralding red confessions in coffers of the miserly. I recoil into sleep, my craned out assemblage stretched over the cooing and flight of the crowd’s tongues.
Pillars of air we trotted through with women of strengths lost, at my virtue’s desolation – slipping past swift dreams, warning and sultry with the draft mounting their thighs wayward a bright room awhirl with night’s echoes.
Whence the culling of memory burst acid mucus showing stale need, how fooled I felt. But no love – that progeny of futile youth gnashing its jaw – reversed to a beyond – matriarchal curse for the unborn. A cackle of mockery assails my skull; profaned efforts of all my love slumped when a grizzled heroine called earlier that night demanding I cease to contact her. I was ashen, inner ravine gone putrid with marsh as I blacked out, blanket tailed between bony knees – paralyzed.

Had a nightmare that nap, amid this eve’s discord, whence I dreamed of L for some reason having paid a visit. I am a teacher at a school held beneath industrial chimneys. An age that seemed locked in a future’s death, boys and girls abound. A suffocated nose keeps rousing me for attention, am I at school to teach? A huge ditch runs along the playground, clogged with muddy storm water from which I see her ascend. Water is crashing violently with sounds of break time’s resonance as the dream shift to interior a maze of a depressed warehouse shelter. Those fatally normal shifts of space careened as unpredictable as the fall of an avalanche. And spooned with the overture outside, we caress like old frozen covers, her touching face clear as well water.
Then suddenly a mirage of my grandfather swells in my eyes, him looking away; rear against mother squirming under a floral plastic rag clad kitchen table, blood soaking her skirt from that crimson crevice of my exit from that life to this afterlife. I wonder why; for it was my birth I was seeing.

Her pimpled nose milkly kissed; a metropolitan setting crowding the dream, an unknown fall behind – only to see her sharing a brace with a stranger, a man dreamily black and dreadlocked. I pass them nonchalantly, with a sea of doubt preserving scars, bile of disgust for the familiar ridicule I have endured on love’s trials. Another change in eye’s dream folds a face in car, seated with an elderly woman, in her seventies I guess. A mother she seems from an initial enquiry, walking still among patches of dying grass as she climbs into the backseat lowering herself for a nap. The strange fellow follows into the seat, crawling and sliding to penetrate her from behind a vividly raised skirt. Then lucidly in boiled presence of this calm mother companion, they fuck raucously.

A while of moans and orgasmic fervor creams ears of passerby girls, eyes saddened for me as though this was a fatal blow unto my charred chest. She looks my way in shame’s coolness; waltzing out the wagon of her displeasure’s expose… flaunting the scent of a newly flogged maiden, wet, sweet sweat seeped into creased fabric. I shuddered, really trying to make talk, clouded by revulsion, sexual wizardry amok a primitive craving.

The car drives away with the twin occupants – mother and son – as she approaches me, inner voices muttering how shameless all needed to be, petting the welling pain as clarity vanishes from bleak dream-eyes.
How vile is that a dream can last minutes yet feel as though eternal? Damn, my soul is still stuck in the city for sure; I figure the window a place to chill. By its myth’s pane I loose the pain and smile in denial… beauty bashing shards from all sights raped in the dark flow of dawn in mind, but - was the heart there? Weed was on my mind, meetings at the night’s square creeping some more in the face I saw swearing the might I never sold for a dirty note. I wanted to dream with her again, but she went away - I had to forget about the deeds I said were ok. I saw soil stuck in her locked hair, and I could not best it that any more. How has the universe been treating her soul-manure?
Was her soul-book for the after life filled with awe or mirth?
Had the tree's love cornered her in its shade?
Did peace exist in the certainty of a frail life?

*********************

There was talk of musicals about dead kings at midnight’s cry; we were here, our palms grasping their heartlessness for the first time. Curses going on with clapping hands; and so wet were eyes, getting on with someone’s birth date. You could shake the silence but never disappear. They tore my name out the window and I found it difficult to get to myself and the forces of loss. I was happy, wrapped in the robe my mind made up.
And here they step into the room looking like in-between nightmares… ruined city towers hovering in the distance. The rut of terror in my throat still thinking that it was prophetic of occurrences to become of her visit. But why such clarity of color that I’d even recognize the skirt’s silken fabric in glossed pinkish orange daubed embroidery? I had hoped to awake and sing to her instead, a greeting:
‘Molo Ntokazi Entsundu...
Ngaz'ba uluhle lwe'ndalo lisa khanya nga'mehlo wakho na?’
Hoping to share a breath through fingers and sigh...in awe of the beauty she etched in my MUD.
And yet so brilliantly divine, I took pride to have known a sister who could do that with dignity, without making my unsealed being feel loathable. Anyhow, still admitting that it would be futile for me to claim I will stop yearning...and besides, that would prove me a liar, may he who art loved in the depth of her heart be content...as I have noticed the contentment in her face about the present engagement. Love is impersonal and may it be that which binds all souls in the union of a celestial copulation.

****************

Feeling lost in that school of reveries, I recall a sudden slap by the greenery blotched for a forest thick – walking weighed down a winding stretch of a path cut by paddlers. My placid twin saints were there with me through sense not sight, perhaps dancing around my sunken head as I lay there in torpor.

I meet uncles drooling and familial friends who died with youth’s dark clime, clouds of plastic lives floating over the puddles dried by feet. We chat, glittering faces blossoming with rouge freedoms. Along sleek bends we reach a house - a cool stroke of ease filling our breasts. A joint is lit in this dream, intoxicant even to in-life’s eyes. It seems one who fucked the girl is here, my face flushing with glacial rage. A bony and tattered van speeds past and we swallow its mutinous fumes, gone hidden over-head upon that road of our descent. We wound around shrubs that concealed monsters of our star-lipped whispers, and it keeps flowing, raging, blue lights flashing on its roof like a demon at bliss with wind in its hair.
It pulls up rapidly in front of our shack in the bushes; dust specks rising as the car’s door sways open.
A bulgy policeman with impervious eyes begins a sly silent inspection of our coiling smokes and dusty puffs cloaking tree-tops, and says: ‘You are under arrest,’ tearing my white plastic sack to reveal my measly tattered belongings. He ties one of the saint’s wrists in metal cuffs and calls us to bend over.

I wake up tired and in tears, head rushed with what shame I had withheld for this pen’s death; radical cells running amok in poisonous trails across my skull – combined with the sour after-taste of an immortal dream land’s deathly air. Serpentine were those rays of thought that posed in my woken stupor, acid in girdle twisted around my belly. Much of the dream contents were for deciphering in further mystery spaces. But I was here still at this lovely place full of drunks, genuine threats pinned across faces of bored vagabonds and their queers. I felt irate, entangled in gloom though among the jubilant, chatter feeling like a gnash of teeth, toneless hissing of a delayed lung burning in my chest. My shriveled palms were feeling ghostly since the previous dusk and now the final glasses were being gulped with stale vigor on sleepy brows.

*********************

‘How are we doing this morning?’, comes a voice piercing the bubble in my head, sickle arms stretched to my yawn, sword face flashing duly before I could strike a response to my throat.
‘Dumbfounded my friend,’ I say with tears blistering my eyelids.
‘What’s wrong?’ a saint stammers bending over my face disheveled by pain. Twisting his hands and hair poked sincerely in this morning light dolefully climbing creased curtains, my poor breath blasts like tar smog from a warmly drained nasal cavity - a scalding heat swimming through an open window. The saint rubs off sweat dribbles from my forehead, mingled with droplets from blindly stingy balled sockets.

I awake with ghost dull aroma of dawn sullying other overheard snores bound to each breath’s horizon. Church thoughts being lighted in mirages holy as art us of piety’s burden. I was dumb struck with a gnawing pain. Saw two birds peaked in a duel over a worm. I fluttered inside with shamed pity, love smitten and fouled.
‘Is there a fucking drink in this house?’ I inquire in loose death breathing its demand for relief. The saints tear a thimble, lips parted by heaves twiddling in my bosom. Froth ascends at the scarcity of a numbing drink, and then awkwardly joints grease to a forlorn brace for strength. They hug me, bravely and brazen with comments of courage. I heave putridly, moans leprous upon their soaked shoulders, plumes of misfortune intermingling with rage exuding from love’s hatred.
Thoughts frittered away my machismo as we stood, beard bristles daubed with spittle and mucus; brimming silent curses at love.
‘We should visit father, I say’, the other suggests in a warring dare, ‘for brews they will never muster… to avenge the poisons injected in us.’

*******************

At Noon...

2009-02-06T01:47:00.001-08:00

At Noon…

Feasting on his eyes
A mental midget becomes a drunken piano…

A friend with a hearing aid tunes his skull,
Doctor blind prescribing red and blue pills…

Seeing orange flies and peach trees
An echo breaks plates in his bedhead…

Aware of open graves of his youth’s funeral,
He calls on rainbows – dancing like a drugged donkey…

Nommo

Towards Sustaining Developed Audiences

2009-02-06T01:20:00.001-08:00

Towards Sustaining Developed Audiences – Media is SA

I should outline from the onset that these thoughts I am about to give claim not to be a ‘common sense approach’ to understanding how media relates to democracy…but I will innocuously attempt to reveal what I feel are their links of inter-dependence. I wish also to explore whether the two ideals have converged as tools for public interest appropriation. Whether the interests entrenched by the sector are purely monopolistic in their development and executive mandates.

Media as a civil society institution plays a critical role in shaping human consciousness in relation to particular interests, but the question becomes…whose interests? There has been evidence of flawed democratic sentiments from all over the globe with regard to media democratization, these being in direct contention to the concepts of representative democracy as a norm to date. The notion of governance by the people has honed the problem of whether this governance is by those represented due to class privilege or truly all those who partook in suffrage? Is this form of democracy being modeled into governance of/by the elite?

Media can also reveal dichotomic paradigms as highlighted by Clive Emdon in his FXI Lectures, these being canonized by the separateness of world media representation between poles of the First World of the modern, free market economy, owned by upper and middle class elites and that which can be defined as Third World of marginalized masses, those who truly strive to use media as a tool for development and advancement. Sadly, the latter section of the consumer populace has been trivialized and over-ridden by the interests of the owners of various ports of expression, considering that government now sees attempting the use of First World economic strategies to develop Third World economies a global pre-requisite for success. This has proven to be an incarnate diabolical top-down communication approach employed even in the media sector, creating the conflict situation of people on the ground not partaking in decision-making/trend setting.

Media accessibility has been a class-privilege for a long time in South Africa, so the question arises of whether socially-built consensus of interest takes into account the possibility that centralized interests being punted and reinforced by the elite-section of civil society inclines minorities on having more power of expression than others, thus homogenizing interests. This implies pre-selection and construction of information for audiences as determined by those with enough muscle power behind Media Institutions – homogenizing interest through systematic manufacture of propaganda under the guise of facts. Prepackaging information for micro-market profit as seen by these self-delegated public commentators has been argued as a pre-requisite for a globalistic perspective necessary in this millennium. Thus, we find aspirations towards what can be called the globalization of information channels shared by profiteers… and this, in contemporary society they have achieved as more information is packaged for specialized audiences.
Society at large now yearns for the unattainable as expressed by its doctored lusts, their interests and life-styles having morphed to suite the criteria of the elite as designed through homogenous reality-definitions.

Private media institutions such as Johnnic/Avusa, Media24, ETV, MultiChoice and other major broadcasters and holding companies can nowadays rival any state-sponsored public media institution and even community media movements…information being no longer a public asset. This advent within the free market system has proven itself a democratized method of homogenous information flow that transcends national boundaries/state monopolies and any ideal of personal freedom, be of expression or other natural right. This private media sector seems characterized by the precedent monopolization of telecommunications leading to a violation of the right to receive and impart information. While universal access to information remains a far fetched dream for most African countries, the present pace with which information systems are being deregulated will ensure that cost will rise, as with all specializations within the sector.

Only a few will be privileged with regard to concentrated ownership of the by-products of the sector considering that fewer people are engaged in control of more and more information.

This so-called ‘electronic democracy’ we keep hearing about; how is it to transpire where information does not flow freely. The convergence of broadcasting and telecommunications and the wider exposure of the internet have not heralded the utopian information dissemination we dreamt up yet.

But, there is also the problem of markets censoring themselves, through limited exposure to a variety of information; this has been achieved through inflated selectivity/niche complexes. With this insidious reduction of diversity in media products we are finding glitches in the promises of democratization in the media. We start seeing consumer control through selective marketing of certain information/media by-products, thus the resultant westernization of most indigent reality-definitions which serves to set aside each human pride in natural diversity of opinion.

A Report issued by the Digital Freedom Network states:
Broadcasting is an integral part of Africa’s development and a means of communication over the vast areas of the continent. Improvements in broadband infrastructure and the emergence of Third Generation (3G) mobile systems are now opening the way to convergence of digital media and telecommunications. With far greater ownership of TV sets compared to PCs in Africa, the broadcasters' viewers represent a huge potential customer base for Internet services as well. Interactive TV, especially the variety using mobile phone text messages (SMS), has found its way to Africa and is growing fast. The Personal Video Recorder (PVR) was introduced in South Africa in 2005 and will become available in other African countries in 2006.

At least four African countries are currently trialing or planning to introduce Broadband TV and Video-on-Demand services, typically converged with voice and data services under so-called Triple-Play models.
This should be great news for all sectors of media, but the incurred problem is that of accessibility to these cherished technologies necessary for the transition. There is talk of conversions to align local broadcast materials to DIGITAL standards, predictions about dual decoding mechanisms which are optional for audiences; all this becoming sedative epitaphs employed when the bulk of discrepant realities are overlooked.
What will this transition mean for production of content suitable for such formats of telecommunication? What will be the congruently beneficial factor with regard to democratization of such technologies? Who will afford this new technology?
Are existing portals of distribution sufficiently equipped within the perimeters of our continent’s economic capabilities? What does the advent of neo-liberalization of media mean for South Africa? These and other question I will attempt to deal with in the following pages, from a perspective and capable knowledge that does not claim solutions nor mechanisms which have a proven track-record - but, bearing the hope that these can form part of newer strategies towards media for development that is sustainable.
Before explicitly delving into the crux of conditions ushered in by Globalization and its neo-liberalization of most creative practices; I would like to offer a brief overview of a case study conducted over a period of time while I was exposed to some enlightening literature about African Cinema. Below is a critical outline of certain extreme modalities which were employed by elite strategists in Arabophone countries, and their policy-making which led to the extinction if not the crippling of one of the most vibrant cinema cultures on the African continent.
ELECTRONIC DEMOCRACY.
• An overview of SA Film Industry Fragmentation.

The starvation of project development processes has ushered forth an advent of skills-for-sale attitude that transudes in the industry’s work force, and many factors have been both cause and effect of this weakness. First, there is a lack of effective processes of weeding out projects with no realistic prospect of social relevance and commerciality – result, lack of capital for reinvestments in project development for future productions. Cabals form in the midst of this cultural stagnation, with mushrooming sects proclaiming auteurist tendencies, multiple production houses seeming to monopolize marginal genres in the name of their universal appeal. Fragmented practices/mechanisms of identity expression ensue, falsifications occur for the sake of commercial palatability, and other detrimental individualisms begin to take hold of the sector to an extend that it solely becomes a platform for personal enrichment. Cinema for Profit.

The concern is on the part of benefit from such exclusive ventures going elsewhere, than towards a collective wealth of cultural information, but to other bodies intrinsic in production links. The term ‘production’ from my perspective involves the creation of a whole value added in a film project, inclusive of the costs of doing business.
In any industry, the true cost of value added includes the cost of equity and debt and those costs of services such as legal, financial which are critical to the business of creating film projects. But such merits have been eroded by self-centered producer/artist sentiments fueled by the craving for capital affluence. Most of the ventures undertaken under these Cinema-for-Profit merits are signified by nepotistic collaborations, financial mismanagements, and overall leakages which tend to be the fatal blows when completion of projects is concerned.

These forms of fragmentation have crippled the narrative cinema culture and replaced it with the cult of stylization employed by creative practitioners when bastardized by a consumerist commercial industry. Temporary ventures such as entertainment series, reality shows, game-shows, sports, studio talk shows and the like have absorbed a great pool of creative practitioners and taken centre stage as the primary output of the South Africa Film Industry.

In reality many South African productions remain scarce, either obscure and solely representative of High Art aspirations of auteurism (looking for instance at locally produced feature films like Tsotsi and Hijack Stories); and it should be noted however that in our supposed quest towards crossing linguistic zones and accessing a broader market, a homogenization of expression through language might retard the output of indigenous language cinema, thus hampering the representational capacity of cinema in identity formation and communication.

Further fragmentation is still inevitable as we are beginning to see during this epoch of globalization through communications technologies, whereby cultural by-products that are poignant decline in numbers and frequency of output. Specialized technologies such as the internet(as a content portal as opposed to broadband content portal) have overtaken the exhibition monopolists of the previous century and in fact proliferated uncontrollable access to virtually any information, but as noted in the pages above the idea of electronic democracy… where does it feature when all information is being allotted to a homogenous cultural pool, close knit through language – English; and other western trends so punted through the audio-visual medium?
This brings me to another question concerning the crucial importance of the cultural dimension greatly reinforced by most African Filmmakers who aimed to counter the overwhelming influence of Western cultural values. How does a homogenous form of expression transmit identities which are transient and in constant reformation through their dynamic linguistic realities?

Further questions that arise therefore become those about distribution of such essential information to the underprivileged and mechanisms of countering commercial distribution by means of competitive selective systems. What other automatic systems aught be in place that can continue to reward success to information dissemination required at grass-root market-levels on linguistic terms relevant to their reality-definitions?
How does the South African Cinema industry impact indigenous knowledge systems’ dissemination?

In this regard, Rishile Bosele Mutlimedia’s audience development strategy still remains a pivotal blue-print for further creation of networks that are mandated with alternate channels of information dissemination. But their impact alone cannot counter the flow of subaltern cultural products into our national/continental territory as has been the norm thus far. Collaborative linkages based on sound commercial logic still need to be encouraged and nurtured in the industry’s project-chains.

Over the next four/five years South Africa could see an emergence of a highly competitive distribution and access sector. Technological innovations might remove most barriers to entry and direct intervention ensuring consumer access to a broader choice of distribution systems; also enabling a switch between these systems relatively effortlessly and at a lower cost. However, I foresee certain negative consequences for content creation and provision. With the markets easily accessible by content providers, with their distribution systems desperate for the best content; the overall level of risk for investors in new content creation will increase exponentially.

Overall investment in indigenous content will diminish; value would migrate to tried and tested content dynamics (football, game shows, programme archives and B-grade Hollywood rejects) rather than new productions. Even when investment is made available towards the creation of indigenous content, that money would merely flow to those few players who can claim brands created long before the era of new suppliers. Some producers would likely merge and consolidate in order to provide the stability and risk pooling that no one distribution system can provide in the competitive battle for the consumers’ time. The precariousness of consumer-based income for content providers will in addition force them to seek alternative sources of funds; may it be through advertising spaces or brand placements in their productions. The matter of consumer protection might explode into legal wrangles, but ultimately plurality will be reduced.

Without media pluralism, the consumer will have less access to diverse cultural perspectives; will be plugged onto homogenous yet broadly dispersed information portals.
Now, this returns us to the premise of Electronic Democracy…what are my understandings?

In spite of successes in recent years, the South African film industry has encountered a number of weaknesses which must be addressed if it is to advance to a new phase of development. With its strong literary tradition, there still appears to be a difficulty in adapting our literary skills to visual media. A lack of visual storytelling capacity characterized by the nature of our cinematic output’s lack of appeal to other narrative traditions of the world is a handicap resultant from exhausted reservoirs of our self-knowledge and analysis. We have become vicarious characters within a dream-play about departures, the mirror through which to reflect our identity being merely cloned to create suited replications of other worldliness and fantasy.

There can be no negation of the fact that we also suffer from an insufficiency of creative talents in the fields of scriptwriting and project development; and this will forever plague our modest successes with uncertainty, especially when it comes to reinvestments into new projects. The lack of business and managerial skills; the matter of film production houses being administered as small corporate entities thus becoming under-equipped to undertake international marketing and the distributions facets after the project completion which seem plagued by symptoms of under-developed market intelligence. These and many other constraints are glaring at the industry, more especially in the face of no focused investment and expansion of new creative skills. The detriment augured is that of stagnation in product output and the death of indigenous knowledge systems in the face of homogenous information exchanges.

But before dealing with the perceived effects of electronic democracy versus homogeneity will have with regard to freedom of expression, I would first like to address some ideas around strategic systems which have being formerly employed thus reinvented within the South African cinema distribution industry at its present stage in its evolution.

This reactionary zeal is in part fueled and based on a simple analogy expressed by a former lecturer of mine when still in film school that ‘ …under the Apartheid Government cinema flourished because of certain tax incentives which were legislated to sponsor growth of local content creation capacity and training required to sustain the industry as it was essential tool then.’
What other models can be referential in planning our own way forward in the face of globalization and competitive markets? I should admit that the models I will expound on draw from tested international models and apply to most broadcasting situations under any applicable legislation.

Tax-based Incentives.

Incentive-led subsidy schemes have been adopted by various industries in the world; and mostly those who were feeling the brunt of western cinema monopolies on their local markets. These incentives were mainly derived from taxation on all box-office sales of Western Films (France still has a quota legislating and ensuring this), other tax resources were directly sourced from the public basket which often tends to be neglectful of the arts and cultural products of a society. In 1997 Ireland ranked No.8 within the European Union in the number of feature films it produced – a creditable performance considering the youth of its film industry and its size. The Union drew from reserves widely ranging from State Aid, tax based incentives, soft loans, grants, guarantee funds and so-called automatic systems which reward success to a home market. But that was not all, because the culture of dependency on subvention and production would drive the industry down-hill – hampering diversification and solid growth. They then introduced programmes to monitor the dispensation of the financial accumulations resultant of these localized models and thus began to diversify the utilization of such reserves in creative ways.

The focus was placed on training, development and distribution. It operated through a range of intermediary initiatives which negotiated for emphasis on commerciality, attention being drawn to exhibition and trans-national distribution channels. The commercial imperative of the development of a stronger film industry imposed the systematic strategy of selective supports operating on a competitive basis. Best projects from distributors and producers we infused into collaborative linkages with the corporate sector; these and other models assisted the Irish Film Industry reach its pivot within the time-frame of the EU MEDIA Programmes’ formation in 1990.

By their nature, tax incentives of course meant a sharing of benefits between different parties, and unless there is some sharing of benefits there would be no function for them.

Irish Film Industry was thus capacitated with a pool of talent and commercial acumen that propelled it to heights rivaling the British Film Industry. It had nurtured creativity through training initiatives; and rooted in the passion towards the impulse to utter their stories, the principal of their incentives became centered on Irish Language development and thus ensuring adherence to local content mandates.
Self-consciousness as sprouted from their local artists’ commitment to cultural identity and diversification became a source of pride. Irish language film making contributed to their radical perspective which was both worthy in its own right and contributed to Irish Cultural Mosaic. This was done with no regard for cultural defensiveness; art had to be shared. Artistic creations by Irish Film Artists began to express ‘Ireland in the world’ in ways that engaged with the world. Representational federations were formed by the creative-practitioners of the industry; without the false dichotomy which pervades most industries – that of Art Cinema versus Popular cinema.

Despite Irish Language cinema being prevalent mostly on television, there was adequate support lobbied with local broadcasters who provided the market for such productions. A greater flexibility and scope for original programming on television began to take toll and thus commanding serious audiences within their own cultural and linguistic areas. The tax incentives also assisted to strengthen the producers’ ability to access local airwaves, another mandate which Rishile Bosele is embracing in the nature of other global revolutionary activities towards public broadcaster synergies dedicated to Public Interest Television objectives which would benefit African and other independently produced films and media products.

The models outlined above can agreeably be prevalent in the South African Cinema Industry, and they are. There is SACOD, and recently FEPACI which has mandates and continental responsibilities; also SASFED as a federation for the protection of various laws applicable to intellectual/creative property. And also FRU had been playing pivotal roles in all these initiatives, ensuring their continued competitive edge within a competitive market system. Within the mandates of SASFED we observe a sustained closer monitoring of broadcasters. The matter of power to institute penalties or sanctions if local content is side-lined have been tabled I hope. But where to now, or rather perhaps - where from henceforth?

• Are annual reviews of the findings of these monitoring federations keeping the broadcasters’ compliance with public interest mandates?
• Are we seeing an increase in fixed annual co-production agreements?
• Are the initiatives lobbying government stringently enough to forge sustained co-production agreements with broadcasters, production companies and other relevant government departments with the view of increasing the amount of content produced and distributed for local and international markets?
• Have there been effective relationships established with the private sector to access funds for the industry?
• Are we seeing an increase in production capacity development, i.e. training?
• What innovative fund disbursements have been approaches that are envisioned?
• What constraints are hindering the establishment of Distribution–led Productions?

Rishile Bosele Multimedia’s responsibilities in the context of South African Cinema Industry.
My Views.

• Script Development – Making available to producers various scripts through access to SASWU, SEDIBA Programme and other resources.
• Advice on high quality script development with the orientation towards Indigenous language appeal and the prospects of commercial viability of the final products.
• Providing Development Fundraising models at a level that can support sustained developments of scripts.
• Develop strategic business interventions in liaison with existing agencies such as the NFVF. This function would include devising new methods of financing the industry while developing relationships with international distributors and broadcasters.
• Generic marketing – This forms positions in the market which are of accessibility even within a competitive market. Inter-programme linkages such as the one with GFC should sell South Africa as a filmmaking Location.
• Training expertise is required for the market we are developing and sustaining. CAC Workshops, distribution courses and the like are of essential strategic business development for The Film Industry.
• Coordination with the Television Broadcasting Sector of synergies around matters of co-productions, distribution of commissioned projects (Heartlines for instance as has been with Project 10)
• Technological Foresight and Policy Development with regard to the impact of new technologies on the industry, their accessibility to a broader audience and in liaison with appropriate agencies formulate models that are centered on the aforementioned idea of Electronic Democracy.

But for any distribution entity to execute such responsibilities, it will first need to receive some pointers on effective strategic development.

In the continuously competitive arena of Public Interest Film Distribution, we now observe that a need for flexibility and capacity to respond to market changes is essential. Not mere operational effectiveness which could entail reactionary tendencies with regard to other practitioners mimicking our strategies. The quest for productivity, quality and speedy deliveries has ushered new ideas around effective management. The rule of aggressive outsourcing to gain efficiencies, the drive to competitiveness in the race to stay ahead and strategic positioning of brands in dynamic markets confronted by rapidly changing technologies have collectively changed the rules of the game once thought as stagnant. Total quality management, time-based competition, partnering, re-engineering and even change of management have become common strategic devices to increase profitability and superior performance in a company.

Any company can outperform any competition if a difference is established, not just through a change of operational activities because this form of contingency activity-led management is dysfunctional. Despite dramatic operational changes, many companies have been frustrated by their inability to translate any gain into sustainable profitability. What is needed then is change of activities, capturing unique competitive edges through inter-linked affiliations while sustaining a unique profile. Strategy lies here, choosing a different set of activities and positioning the activities in relation to perceived market requirements. But should we then strive towards need-based positioning alone?

My answer is no.

If strategy stems from a creation and sustenance of a valuable position in the market, then it follows that access should feature. Access-based positioning has proven that competition can be fended off by different sets of activities directed at diverse positions in a market.
Rishile Bosele Multimedia screening in Townships, schools and Beer-halls – this exhibition service has been our niche profile, but it also requires trade-offs to sustain its impact. Having chosen a position does not guarantee sustainable advantage as it also attracts imitations by incumbents considering the lack of fixed and ideal position in any market.

While operational effectiveness can achieve excellence in individual activities, strategy should be about combining activities, inter-linking activities. This can lock out competition. When Media Forums or Festivals and Outreach programmes produce a catalogue of African Films synopsis for Video/DVD sales purposes, the same product can be a catalogue for agent training.
A training manual used for capacity building for video/DVD sub-distributors can be a concise literary journal with information on Audio-Visual Practices, brief histories and articles on developments in African and World Cinema. And all these can function as promotional tools in Branding and Profile advancement processes.

Now, with all the responsibilities I envision for Rishile Bosele Multimedia, would they be achieved with mere operational effectiveness? Would the executions sustain the company when it still needs product differentiation with powerful branding?
Capital requirements are any company’s nemesis yes; but Rishile Bosele Multimedia has redressed the economy of scale with regard to its activities and this has allowed for transparency.

Together with these questions I would like to close the paper by saying… With stringent strategies I see Rishile Bosele Multimedia taking their revolution beyond continental borders. I envision a Distributor of Third World Cinema capable of rivaling any monopolies so insidiously bastardizing world-minds with homogenous perspectives. I see diversification of information being one area Rishile Bosele Multimedia can spear-head. Innovative management techniques and commercial prudence will propel the company to heights that no broadcaster would ignore considering the capacity to penetrate areas where most media does not dare venture.

Yours,

Paul Zisiwe

Diary of Space Given

2009-02-06T00:50:00.000-08:00

First Day

It was a Friday, and had been a week since my curse for departures bore its acid truth through the motley fabric of my universe. I say UNIVERSE, because I was ultimately intent on re-membering my sundered prior ones into a stoic body, endowed with colossal experimentalism and thus the assimilated knowledge. I am in love and am torn by first, the slight mirage of mistrust I inspect upon my lovers face; then second… her consistent eluding of my passion’s exhibitions, like hugs, kisses and even the copulative sharing of our bodies. My only consolation was the child since morning rose, but it now also seems that the past night’s quarrel might have painted all sordid. I remember crying myself to sleep… I wonder why tears have not washed my vision for I am still a fury at loss’s clutch. That wretched night of a brawl alchemically bred, how the inner soul of a black man could hammer fungal stumps into a crisp heart.

I nearly killed my queen, hands readied for neck-snapping and jaw breaking… my eyes with a rage that made even me a stranger to the self I saw in her eyes. But truth remains that at dawn, held to her vigorously performed tasks of writing scripts, she was brewing a method to expunge my being from hers. I was fear incarnate, and later she told me to fear is painful. I concurred that I would leave after sour attempts at apologies. Those that fell on rusted ears were the menial jests I threw into a rather pedantic monologue. I love the sound of her laughter, and it bears my stunted mind keenly. Krishna’s nanny arrives, and she tends to the child. A visiting friend stands as I am reminded that I have to leave the house (give her the demanded space to think about her prospects and the like), soon… so can be able to pay adequate attention to her work. I pack a small bag with two books (Big Sur and Ulysses) and begin to head out to the city… the home for the lost and outcast.

Before we could board a cab to town, I fall apart again… bilious tears boiling from the pores that give my eyes breath… stingy, a ball of thorny phlegm creeping sordidly up my throat. I cry the silent tears of masculinity, under shade of yellow spectacles… intermittently, pulling them from my face to feign rubbing sand from their lids. Only the tears kept rolling down the creased faced. I had to return to beg a bit more this time… and a friend acquiesced that the downtrodden pride that breaks a man should not stop me. We were on the same boat now… and it couldn’t be, he said. At least to fight for my life’s gift from above should ascertain that happiness does not leave an entire village unless war has truly befallen. I walked back toward failure, called out for the final that would pull her out of the mire that was swallowing her. She stared and wondered what was I doing to myself; and once again relieved me of my place within the scheme of things we were building.

I walked back towards the dejected city, met friends and had a couple of beers in one of those dingy pubs clogged by redundant old timers. Soaked faces, bruised by bulgy pores dripping unflinching sweat. We watched broken ladies huddled in comatose slumbers, ears a-tuned to the blurring twitch hissed by tattered speakers. Sedative rhythm and blues lulled us along a mean reminiscence, and kin to my present jilt, The Head Chef’s eyes slosh into my twitching skin … and the night became darker.

I had resolved to go home to visit mother, rather to cry upon mother’s shoulder like the foolhardy lovelorn child whose betrothal would never be… but I was still here, after dark… binging and stalling all possible crusts of pain from falling. We met The Prince when both huddled against some concrete slab to gain balance adequate enough for the duration of bouncing a cigarette… but it was ridiculous. We were near tears and somber.

The Prince guffawed wryly at the sight, two broken men… moaning about losses incurred through hearts given. He said something to the effect that: We gain through loss what we loose in our gains. The night’s dream shrilled through agape ears, music toxins brewed a satanic lager in my belly – as I danced at Sophiatown like I was dying. Gin, Whisky, Wine filled glasses canvassing the table before me when exhausted by rhythm, sprawling on the couch near my passed out friend.

Then came the conniving nag of club owners talking about we had to leave. Theirs was not a place for sleepers. We decided to find some spot to crash after midnight and it turned out to be in an office block that night. We had been renting space in this antique cluster of brick…. but tonight we needed to just jut unto its floor for repose after falling over life’s waterfall. Near an elevator, on a wooden bench… pillowed by my sack of two books; I had a tremendous dream that it was all a dream, and that she would wake me if it appeared a nightmare.

Second Day

I cease a dream with vigil with a snag of recollection that have not provided for my son in over three months. Her mother is fraught with disdain, an anger I understand. I have promised and disappointed my son the mirror bred with womanhood on numerous occasions… whence I had planned to visit him and never showed up with coin scarcity as the common excuse. I’d spend weeks without calling him… in fear of queries which might be marring him nubile mind. This confused my queen I realize. She was beginning to loose respect for me, strenuously; hence this arbitrary neglect of my sole responsibility to a soul who would carry my blood. I wake up missing him gravely, inebriation’s hell in skull only subdued by the thought that he promised to love me unconditionally. And what awe I feel in the sun’s reflection in my drunken eyes still, the glowing tungsten of filtered light blotting a square on a pale wall…

But… my back-bone is bruised by tossing on a plank, shoulder bones protruding savagely, with elbow-markings itching with the jab of starvation. I feel nauseous and needing something I can not put my finger on. It hits me in bouts that I will never see them again… at dawn, huddling The Black One while watching the queen climb an automobile to work. Suddenly I glare in wonder of the whereabouts of The Head Chef… he left the binge house an hour before I did. I get into the machine and it charts my search towards the ground floor. I find him in fetal position under a table, seen partially since I have this rush to relieve a fiery bladder. I have to see mother I keep mumbling to my inner sore. And when I return to enquire about his sleep, I tell him we are leaving; I need to get home. It is six thirty on a Johannesburg Saturday morning, and cold. It is obvious that all is lost.

Like a vagabond I pace beside this twin bearer of assaults of the soul akin to mine towards a corner shop. We need something salty for the after taste of hangover. We arrive only to scream over yawns of cooks looking prisoner-like for chips and a Russian sausage, dawn’s commuters queuing for their machine meals for a day’s sustenance during the wage war. We much a few slabs and bites of manufactured swine fat, and feel a tad better… nausea rising in my tripe like boiling oil. He wants to shave; and just as we shake palms he veers into nearby booth for a barber’s touch at the dawn of severance and departures from our youth we saw perish. The city’s traffic has raised its brow and the unblinking streets fuel madness in the eyes of late farers and corner stallers.

We smile the serene smile of angels having left paradise, the knowing smiles of beauty, truth unsaid yet shared through unknown facilities of our strengths. He knows petals that fell from my eyes at a mention of her name… he knew my fears and beauty clairvoyantly spied in a not so distant potential time. We bided the good by and slunk into the city’s brace like recluses chastised to vulgarity.

I pace sleepishly through masonry of an antique city with slime crawling upon it barricaded windows, piss bins brimming with junk and death calls from trees and other mineral souls. Cooks and hawkers clog catwalks and I say this’ the belly where the lost remain lost. I need to be lost… help me death slum.

After a momentary wait in half-filled taxi, a preacher approaches the gaping door and beckons to share a message and prayer with us. I find this rather weird and too coincidental for my appreciation.

He proceeds to lament the matter of poverty for which the many sprawling like ants are known for. He froths curses at the new disease and soon bursts into a prayer of such saddening vacuity that a nostalgia for my past days as a devoid born-again Christian are invoked in me. Later after an introspective wait we are finally riding over dust plains and distant horizons blazing under a fierce morning sun, a dead coffin humming its heart’s whiz with automatic precession. The noise is unbearable when one’s own thoughts cannot be distracted from its pestilence. I am seated next to a sleep-massacred other whose stench speaks of death’s city, concluding to leave the window slightly ajar so my nostrils would be in the gust of the wind.

I am vibrating with death of veins, with an abundance of toxic blood leaving me near unconsciousness. Only thoughts of mother, mingled with thoughts of past loves failed by what I wonder if was witchcraft of the heart, of the alchemical concoction black folks are crowned infamously for, or actually my incapacity to rise above my present financial predicaments. I am broke, a woman is taking care of me… pays for food and the lodging in place of such serenity I would have thought it sign for prosperities to come. I think of Epiphany’s mother, my first love and the son she borne me. I think of The Bogus Goddess and her daughter of nine who thought my soul to be an angel’s (because I always had answers for every question) and how both bore scares beside those of my infliction. Now here was this error I had committed to my queen… unforgivable even by her heart which I judged to have endured much scars, survived even when wrecked by balls of fire.

I recall one day in Norwood, her friend had visited. Incidentally, it was the same friend who shared our first night at the new abode. Wow. I had written what I saw while listening to Monk on that day, and if I remember it went something like…

Succinctly the alchemy of their wombs went trailing past my sight.

I was dumbstruck by this other woman telling secrets of our union.

I was the dead… perhaps she said, but nonetheless,

I hear melodies of satisfaction bind me, from the gut…

Some dearth of emberish coals sizzling in me.

She asks if I am working and,

Some tear burns innards and,

A forlorn waltz of mind says:

She might be the sanctuary for dying womb circles.

The terror of the unknowing methods of love drying

When all days art one…

Sentiments gone in baby chatter… what was this dream?

There are ways of dying with dreams I know and would never share… somehow when they decide to call another anomaly of a friend, I sully that they are innocently debauched, hedonisius syndrome going to their peril’s wedding. Changing minds to terrains beyond creamy finds, we say bring the brew of children young as nine months among the living.

There is a sorority ear-ring cult going on in the midst of the clique,

I over-hear…

What? I ask with

Query guilt wrought and somberly crouched on fetal pose.

Silence, then giggles and some brushed off remark at my naivety.

I figure my mad rigmaroles too cumbersome for their minds…

And the child cries in sleep negation… perhaps

The terror of dreams… music calmly deadening my aloofness to thrill…

Would the monk’s melody bend with these whistled winds of my breath?

A new house member wades in with crowds of self,

And elderly man enters carrying the best cosmetic luggage in the world…

Demure, mature, jazzed up fellow of a child to be bound to poles.

I am starved for pizza they ordered minion ago… this old man’s foot tap on tiles is unnerving…

What should I ask… I ponder. Maybe I should ask him if he needs help.

Maybe he’d ask: Do you need any help with your methods of dying?

In Carletonville, a loud hailing man screams for the last one headed for Fochville and I concede to the open invitation. We go past mines and their dumps, sloppy hills and other looking like artificial mounds. Once in town, another loud hailed call is seeking a single commuter to fill the vehicle for a trip. I follow suite. And the shack dwelling of my neighborhood loom before my eyes once more, more depressant and proclaiming what a tombstone the places of black growth had become in this age of democracy and equality.

I arrive at home and find the three first-wives of the Sekoli clan sitting timidly under a peach tree behind the toilet. My sisters are cleaning the house after a perhaps night of laughter and other jovialities of a reunion of women. Mother hugs me warmly and sobs… I begin to cry and it was when Second Wife of Dead Son says: Se tshele ngwana ka dikhapha… MmaKhahliso.

I am home and I love the face here… I am loved. I sit calmly with them and light a cigarette, ask my youngest sisters to go buy me beer… and a smile rides my teary face.

I was at loves enclave, and the stories of death and losses seemed a necessary method for unnerving my senses towards the real that is abound me outside of love.

It rained a marvel that evening, the patter of hail on a tin room hushing my dense thought towards dreams. I believe that dreams are true spaces for exorcism and the hypnotic summoning by a thunderous nature unto their lands art a gift humanity should eternally cherish.

Third Day

The ghost township awakes early on Sundays, and bed-wetter children whistle with boiling kettles readied for dawn baths. It is Sunday and piety is looming within the din of naiveties bred by religiosity, many conned souls hoping for reprieve in the clustered abode of the held high. I watch Rory sweep the yard in song, early-bird nephew screaming in my ear invitations to play. Mother seems intent on sleeping the day away; and outside a golden disk ascends over the moistened soil, shacks drying tears and dogs soaking up the rising heat. I get up intent on giving for my calm a morning glory, only Uncle would have herbs suited the opening of dreams of the night descended. Coffee is wry on plagued tongue and teeth, Mother asking if I can eat last supper’s leftovers. It is going to be a scotching day, and other friends turned shebeen marabouts will make their calls at barred windows for their quenching potions.

The First Wife of Dead Son has left, and the morning is freshly clad in a sweet draft. Wet grass, after last night’s hail storm carry pebbles on blades and bird chirp with vigor at a spectacle of unearthed worms. Uterine chores continue with a collective hum of hymns I have forgotten; how cleanliness is seen to be close to godliness. The smell of cobra floor polish rousing memories of my life’s journey through the streets of this conurbation. I grew up here, and the louts pacing over muddy puddles are my peers towards scepters of maturity. Rory’s singing is angelic yet tormented by what I could imagine as true supplication bred by poverty. She told me later that she tried to commit suicide. I bled; and blamed myself for letting her down. Oh, our birth’s last through mother – how we need her.

I always sought after a nature that allows one to recompense; all debt that I bellowed unto karma’s fabric to eventually provide a chasm for forgiveness. I believed fatally that the love I was bestowed was that chance to make amends for all others I have severed and scarred. I ask mother if I am a beast born not unto love’s calling? She says I love drastically.

‘Lerato lona, okebe oa le balehela Ngwana ka…’ she say, innocently acute,

‘…letshwana le masepa… hobane haa othswere… otla tshwanela ho nyela.’

I thought this to be quite a sagely prognosis of my paranoid retraction into a cocoon of loveless loneliness. So, as I sit wasting without love, I have to hang on to the idea that LOVE can still flow through these blackened veins.

Later I walk the blizzard heat of a rotted zinc town to visit aunts and relations by blood… and all marvel at my well-being. I kiss hordes of elders and grand old women who bear my history’s entirety; and for the future saint I am becoming I listen, eat and drink from their mugs. Shacks cling horrendously against cheap bricks behind sunken fences, and the metallic township sizzles under a searing sun. Old women trudging their bellies across faded lawns slow with the day; leaning on car wrecks making for junk-yard décor on their house fronts. I wonder about my nephew playing in this fatal heat – what about headaches? Sister to the sun says he’s had far too many.

Later, as night approaches I return from my sojourns with clouds gathered after they’d scurried under the ray’s blows… cotton like and soaked grey. It will rain soon, but I would be home by then… looking at the faces who love me unconditionally. Mother loves Afrikaans soap operas, so I will probably go through another grueling omnibus. Nephew is sold on wrestling; he knows all the weird names of the caricatures performing gladiator stunts in front of idolizing hordes. They are me and me them… under the thunder that announces a drench. And then thoughts drift towards HER, finally. I will sleep beside a pillow with not her soul to bid mine peace. No sobs from The Black One… or common cherubical giggles before sleep. I am torn and blotted out of pristine page in love’s dream novel, I feel… as I sit watching TV, glassy eyed and mildly sighing into the fabric of my blanket.

Day Four

In preparation for yet another curse of departure, and anxiety overwhelms me. Mother insists I wear the ‘new clothes’ she bought me. How her debts accompany mine – combined with histories that will require dignification. I know she lives under a tempestuous cloud of hatred family bred – aunts and uncles with beastly tempers proclaiming doom for any of her forward charges through life. Mother has prepared me some well-butter soft-porridge, a pearly bowl that would give me the essentials for a journey. She waits on a boiling kettle for a mug full of chicory and says she will need milk for her coffee. I rush to the corner spaza shop, only to return with a sour sachet having not checked the expiry date. I am chastised and reproached by mother, with The Second Wife of Dead Son meekly at my defense.

Sister to the Sun has long awoken for her bath – first her son, then followed by her aimless body waiting to charge towards servitude. I know her dreams as she knows mine, and together we will traverse this purgatory with strength. Afterwards a wreck full of pre-scholars comes to huddle Nephew up to places of lessons. I kiss him and prepare a bath for this person-cell ready for the city’s torpor. I am devastatingly damned by tears, attempting to hide them from mother’s probing gaze. I am strengthened by her embrace as I kiss her head chakra bald and slightly bristled. She told me about a story of how since her return from maternal homesteads, she’d never covered her head. And my aunts saw this as an abominable enfeebling of her maturity through the calling of birth. I mean four seeds’ bones had passed through her skin cloaking womb? So, in retaliation to her family wenches’ scorn, she dared to her coils unto the mercy of a razor blade. Daringly she called one of the progenitors from their wombs to secretly do the lobotomy of her hair; the libation and sacred rite of severance from their control. The Jackal shaved mother – at 56.

Insults came one morning when she was sweeping the yard, from the threesome wading their baggage to their varied chores for white folks. I mourn still the marrow mother spent in those charnel-houses – pallid walls and electrified panes of supremacist affluence of privileged whites. She has now faded into ailments of bones and lungs; and Sister to the Sun once surrendered to such domestication – she once told me. A devil’s cult of sold hands that cleansed dewomanized barbies’ abodes for pennies and the penance for abandoned offspring. I recall that we often held ill of mother routine departures to the masters’ houses – but we are now grown, stoical and mighty uupon her servile shoulders de-marrowed.

I soon hop a Taxi after a vigil with dust smitten shacks watching hordes of cyclist grandfathers flocking towards municipal charge houses. Children are abound – uniformed and thrusting aims unto a dying future of ghetto penitentiaries. Classes formed among the poor glare as with textures of faded shirts on faint shoulders – plastic bags sacking volumes of education’s trails. The vehicle arrives, and I find myself once again headed for the maw of Johannesburg…. That’s when it hit me again; the fact that I have nowhere to sleep once there.