Why do we deny the obvious:
That happiness
and property are opposites ?
casting
PIGLETS
before
ROBOTS
Hermetic Situationism
BEYOND
THE PALE
The
Pale was the variable extent of Engish influence in Ireland, centred
in Dublin,
from the late 13th to the early 17th centuries.
My Irish home in the barony of Lecale (80 miles north of Dublin) was
rarely part of it.
It ended with the 17th century 'plantations' of English and Scots in
various parts of Ireland.
The phrase beyond the Pale means 'beyond civilisation, beyond
respectability, uncouth, unacceptable'.
There was another English Pale - around Calais, where English jurisdiction
ran until the 16th century.
I believe
that there were also Pales in the North American colonies.
The word means 'stake' - hence an area defended by a palisade.
The
Pale of Settlement was along Russia's western border (including
a large chunk of Poland-Lithuania),
established by Catherine the Great to 'control' the Jews in their shtetls
and ghettoes.
To have been beyond that Pale would have had a contrary meaning: to
be a civilised Lutheran German,
such as Immanuel Kant in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad)...
"The
reasonable man attempts to adapt himself to the world
and the unreasonable man attempts to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore all change is created by the unreasonable man."
-
George Bernard Shaw
"We
cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is
interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home.
Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own
voice, to see our own light."
The traditional
publication of small-circulation, quality books of radical-philosophical
(tiny minority) interest is dead a long time.
The education-system
and the profit-motive killed it.
Big Business
and the Nation State have silenced all versions of The Word
that do not serve their corrupt, greedy, Protean cause - which
is, in the end, the destruction of the planet for money, status
and vainglory.
Nation-states
and Turbo-capitalism have killed the awareness that awareness
is suppressed.
Dissident Editions
is in the vanguard of free, anti-copyright web-publishing
- until the Web, too, is controlled and censored by corporate
and governmental malignance.
The advantage
of the Internet over print is that both text and presentation
can be re-edited and improved daily, if it seems necessary.
It also allows writers and poets to be their own publishers,
in control of their own material - for better or for worse
- and to extend their talent or genius to web-presentation.
When the poet
is also a painter and photographer, the Web is virtually the
only way for him to present his vision.
The Internet
allows truly democratic access to anyone with a computer and
an enquiring mind. This site has received input from such
varied visitors as an Albanian émigrée, a French craftsman,
an English schoolboy, a Russian artist, a Dutch poet, an Iraqi
Kurd, a Russian painter, and a Finnish doctor...
The Internet
is now the only possible - if unlikely - medium for Oracles.
This website
is dedicated to
the holiness of animals
and the irredeemability of Man.
Beyond-the-Pale
does not do similes nor metaphors
nor family
nor birthdays, nor Christmas
nor bars, nor restaurants,
and very little sex;
does not have television
nor washing-machine;
does not do hygiene
nor publishers
and has never been employed -
he’s someone
the banal avoid.
to download a copy of an illustrated zipped E-book of Selected Poems
from this website, entitled
"The moment I left school I decided
that I would be in control of my life: I would not take orders
from anyone unless I agreed with them; I would make my own
mistakes. My time would belong to me, not to unknown or half-known
others.
"So I made my own mistakes, in my own time, which were
insignificant compared with the mistakes that others made
on my behalf.
"Time is my richness. Money is
for the poor in time and in spirit.
I have chosen an autonomy.
"At the age of 21, after dreary years
of brain-washing and body-despising 'education', I decided
that I would no longer tolerate the oppression of contemptible
hierarchies and their inbuilt competitiveness, and that employment
after the confusing punishments of birth, childhood and adolescence
was an indignity too far.
"I was also so acutely aware of the misery
and injustice in the world that beauty made me weep. So, although
I had no recognised talent, I decided to devote my life to
poetry and to try, through contemplation and devotion to honesty,
to make my life into a continually self-revising poem.
"Such arrogance!
"Poetry that is merely an up-market part
of the Entertainment Industry is no more than up-market entertainment
- whether it be by Catullus, Gœthe or Seamus Heaney.
"I eventually came to believe that the
only poems worth writing - and reading - are those that celebrate
non-human things, integrity and humbleness;
or those that can persuade at least one person to unsubscribe
from everything.
For the most beautiful music is when music stops."
Would
you like to be e-mailed each time this website is
updated?
If so, send me your e-mail address using the feedback
form.
Note that your e-mail address will only be used to
send information about updates to this page (not more
than once a month) and will not be disclosed to anyone
else.
"The more that we believe that we are
individuals
the more we are just products.
In societies of consumer-voyeurs who are themselves product,
life becomes the accumulation of spectacles in both senses:
both lens and entertainment. And the planet screams.
"All gain is both ephemeral and immoral
-
not least the gaining of knowledge - for knowledge is yet
another loss of integrity.
If knowledge brings power, and power is immoral, none in history
has used it as nobly as Caligula's horse."
TRIOLET
by Wendy
Cope
I used to think
all poets were Byronic - Mad, bad and dangerous to know.
And then I met a few.
Yes it's ironic -
I used to think all poets were Byronic.
They're mostly wicked as a ginless tonic
And wild as pension plans.
Not long ago I used to think all poets were Byronic -
Mad, bad and dangerous to know.
«He has a long beard & short fingers,
thin body and spathulate thumbs.
He longed to be one of the singers
and failed to be one of the dumbs.»
Notes
in reply to a correspondent who read the above
and asked for some biographical details:
"My
mother
scrimped and saved to send me to a local private school where
I learned only that the only education is continuous self-education.
I have taught myself everything worth learning except reading
and counting and the basics of biology, grammar, Greek and French.
School
failed miserably to expunge and extinguish my free curiosity
(which is what the education system and the whole nation-state
seems to be set up to do). I was physically abused at school,
of course, but not sexually (if only I had, I might not have
been so in-the-dark for years thereafter!)
Schools
are set up to abuse the brains and minds and hearts of pupils,
which is much worse and more corrosive than mere sexual abuse.
I would have preferred this latter to ten years of compulsory
'sport' which I loathed as I still loathe all competitiveness.
I ran away from school, once and unsuccessfully.
It
wasn't until the age of 25 that I realised that I would have
to dismantle (or at least question) everything that had hitherto
been pushed into me. And so I never was employed or married
or anything mindless like that. But I did not realise that it
would take all the rest of my life - at least 40 years - to
do the job. It is still not finished.
After
some false starts I read philosophy at University - but that
was more of the same, so I spent all nine papers and 27 hours
of my finals attacking the whole system of system-worshipping.
This was before I heard about the Russian Nihilists.
Naturally
I did not get a degree - which made me pretty well (and usefully
for me) unemployable: no 'Qualification', too well-educated,
and continually self-educating.
When
(after leaving home in Belfast)
I had nowhere to live I just went and asked rich people for
a hovel, and got three different, good places. I now live in
a 200 year old farmhouse with original sagging roof and some
damp, for $5 a week - for life. No other house is within view,
and I look out across a rookery and fields and over the Irish
Sea to the Isle of Man; and to the Mountains of Mourne in another
direction. I can't be put out because the landlord tried to
evict me on grounds of immorality (kissing bearded men
in the garden in a country where there is suspicion and dislike
of anything pliant, tender, autonomous, or unconventional),
and lost his case rather badly. There are no mass graves that
I know of.
This
was some years after the pivotal point in my life: my four-month
spell in a traditional panopticon prison (with slop-buckets
and defective heating) - for repeated shoplifting
of kitchenware and food. Through prison I gained a self-esteem
that those who rely on others being mirrors to their conformities
cannot conceive of. I was terrified when I went in; I was proud
when I left. And I wear with pride my crude darns and patches
on the clothes my mother, at various times, knit and made for
me.
I
didn't realise that I was a crinophilous
samesexlover until I was 40 - no hairy, bearded,
interested teachers at school to instruct me (in this or in
much else), I guess. And even if there were, they would not
have told (much less shown) me that 'sex' is at its ('Tantric')
best when it is non-penetrative and non-ejaculatory - that is
to say: when it is not a means of making connection, but a celebratory
journey starting from deep, inexpressible connection.
I
am over sixty and living rather well on a small Social Security
allowance in a house which I never lock, beside a rookery, with
a fine shrub-garden which is especially good in winter and has
plants from all over the planet: Chile, New Zealand, Mexico,
China, Japan, South Africa, the Mediterranean, Morocco and Siberia.
I
have lived off the warmongering and mind-crushing state all
my life: I vowed never to pay tax to finance its malignance,
so being on Welfare Benefit is a neat solution. I have a very
good quality of life. Peace and quiet in a house full of beautiful
stones and paintings, food that I prepare myself, a heartwarming
collection of useful ceramics, good, inexpensive wines - and
music ranging from early Jazz to Indian Classical, from Dufay
to Reich, Tavener and Schnittke, from Albanian polyphonic singing
to the piano quartets of Brahms, and from Georges Brassens to
the ambient electronic compositions of Brian Eno, B.J. Cole
and Klaus Schulze.
Once
every six months (or so) I am visited by my big, hairy, unreliable,
cannabis-head cuddle-buddy Paul
(whose beard is magnificent, leonine) for champagne-enhanced
transcendental affection. Unpenetratively we kiss and entwine:
two streams of being together in one tumesced Tantric flow.
And I bathe in his sweat and his kisses. And then he disappears.
Twice
a week (or so) I visit my nearly-as-hairy possibly-rest-of-my-life-partner
for superb, celibate but sensual dinners in his sylvan wooden
gate-lodge, with wines that I choose and buy, and excellent
non-American films which he records on video for us to watch.
His Divine Grace, Oscar,
stays with each of us in turn for four days or so at a time.
We both make our own yogurt, vinegar, bread and jam. I am one
of the last people in Ireland to boil water in a kettle over
a fire. We cut each other's hair, of course, and grow what food
we can in a very unfavourable climate. We buy whatever we can
secondhand - from shoes to accursed car. Malcolm bakes sugarless
cakes, makes cordials, bakes sugarless biscuits and does most
of our shopping since I loathe supermarkets. One of the reasons
I hope to move to the banks of the French river Aveyron is that
there we can live almost entirely from local produce and craft
almost all the year round close to scrub-forests that have hardly
changed since Neolithic times. And I can escape from dependency
on a car.
Because
I make friends easily I used to have many. But since I find
people all very much the same, limited, normalised kind of dull
(or paranoid), these two men are almost my only friends.
Whereas
Jenny Joseph in her famous poem 'Warning' described the
unconventionality she would enjoy when she would become an old
woman (and wear purple), I enjoyed greater freedom long before
I was sixty, when, without family, TV, microwave, clean windows,
employment or insurance, I stuck out my tongue at unpleasant
people, and called them shit-heads to their face, and pissed
in washbasins and ate good half-price food well past its sell-by
date, and got caught shoplifting, and rarely took a bath and
changed my clothes infrequently. Of course I smell much better
than the fastidious, deodorised and over-washed who get up my
nose.
Unlike
Diogenes,
I don't masturbate in public nor hurl dead poultry in schoolrooms
- but I have kissed stray dogs in the street and would outdo
Lazarus by licking their sores
while the Christians drive by in their cars. I don't yet harangue
people in the street like the religious maniacs who are so many.
I scramble over and under barbed wire. I shall be buried in
my brambly badger-thicket where I have planted beech and oak
and hazel, spindle-tree and guelder-rose, medlar and quince
and bird-cherry and crab-apple, and apple-scented rose, fire-bush
and partridge-berry.
I
have not
disturbed it further, letting the nettles and fireweed grow
and chopping the brambles only so much as to stop them pulling
the young trees down. The birds and the badgers will breed and
the foxes move in, so that on this ravaged, ransacked, pitiable
island one acre at least would remain dense, impenetrable, protected,
free and unmanaged.
Often
I walk over my grave - where already are buried some ashes of
my aunt and some hair of my mother
- who, at the age I am now, began the twenty-year happiest,
most autonomous period of her life.
I,
however, suffer from idiopathic chronic fatigue or an obscure
and mild form of (viral ?) encephalitis.
And I write poems.
How terribly ironic it would be if they were ever to become
part of a Syllabus!
Unlikely
- but in this lunatic world even that is not impossible."
[2003]
Anthony Weir
"My
religion: non-practising Cannibal."
"The three
greatest frauds in history were Moses, Jesus and Mohamed."
- Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, the Stupor Mundi of the 13th
century.
This website was started in 2000 - on a little, old, damaged and dysfunctional
second-hand Laptop operating on Windows 95.
This
dubious certificate was sent in March 2008.
Finally, a poem
which almost exactly echoes my own thoughts,
even though it is written by a 'successful', much-quoted,
media-savvy, and presumably now-very-wealthy white American breeding-woman,
who is probably not vegetarian or anti-capitalist.
Her public name is:
Oriah
Mountain Dreamer
THE INVITATION
It doesn’t interest
me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest
me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest
me what planets are squaring your moon...
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can
sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.
I want to know if you can
be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn’t interest
me if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can
see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.
I want to know if you can
live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
Yes!
It doesn’t interest
me
to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children..
It doesn’t interest
me who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest
me where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can
be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.
