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' or 'post' - 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.
I wrote the above twenty years before I was sent this splendid
poem by
the Japanese resister, Kaneko Mitsuharo (1895-1975) (my own translation)
OPPOSITION
When
I was young
I resisted school,
and now
I resist employment.
What
I most hate
are property and hygiene.
There's nothing so inhuman
as law-abiding cleanliness.
Naturally,
I contradict The Spirit of our Nation.
Duty and Social Function make me vomit.
I'm against all governments everywhere
and wave my smelly cock
at the cosy cartels of
Accepted Writers.
When
I'm asked what my Purpose In Life is,
I answer: To oppose.
When I'm Easterly
I go Westward.
I do
up my coat and shoes the wrong way round.
I wear my trousers back to front,
and likewise ride a horse.
What
everyone else hates I like.
My greatest hate of all is
consensus, unanimity, received opinion.
So I
believe that to oppose
is the only splendid thing in life.
To oppose is REALLY to live.
To oppose is to connect deeply
with the spirit within.
to download a copy of an illustrated zipped E-book of Selected Poems
from this website, entitled
"For
my own part, I don't lack the courage to think a thought
through:
no thought has frightened me so far.
If one ever does, I hope I'll at least have the honesty
to say:
This idea scares me stiff. It stirs up something in me that
I don't want to confront."
- Søren
Kierkegaard
MORE BLATHER
"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 wealth. Money is for
the poor in time and in spirit, the Faustians.
I have chosen a Diogenean
autonomy.
"My only aspiration was to be wise.
My only desire was to avoid stress.
Head-banging relieved stress, even after I - alert and alone
- had picked my stressless and marvellously jobless, harmless
path in the invisible forest of feeling on the all-too-visible
Planet of Pain.
"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
(2003) 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 fairly nasty, nearby private
school (Campbell College, Belfast) 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. In my
whole private school and university career I was blessed with
just four good teachers! The
15 or so others were poor to dreadful. At this school, bullying
was the perquisite of the teaching staff, and there was very
little by my peers - though at one stage I was victimised to
the extent of having a future famous Ireland Rugby-player sit
on me (with his cronies around him) while he pissed on my face.
This was not so terrible, and actually I would now find it quite
tender - if performed lovingly by a sweet and hairy man.
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 and abort 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 sort of trichophilous
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 achieving some kind of orgasm,
but a celebratory journey starting from deep, inexpressible
connection.
I
am amost seventy 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 Arabic and Indian Classical,
from Dufay to Reich, Tavener and Schnittke, from Albanian polyphonic
singing to the piano quartets of Brahms and the Trio Joubran,
and from Georges Brassens to the ambient electronic compositions
of Brian Eno, B.J. Cole and Klaus Schulze.
I am one of the last people in Ireland to boil water in a kettle
over a fire. I do it to a lesser extent on the banks of the
French river Aveyron where I can live almost entirely from local
produce at any time of year, in wonderful and varied landscape.
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), I have just a couple each of male and female
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 of sixty, began the twenty-year happiest,
most autonomous period of her life.
But
if I die in France, I will be buried in a normal-sized grave
which I have attractively-planted, in a leafy corner of an unusually
well-sited municipal graveyard with a fine view over the village
of Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val
- where I have also planted a little and varied orchard.
I
have 'abnormal' tendencies - on the one hand: Aspergerish, and
on the other: bi-polar.
I am a thief, but not a liar. I write corrections in library
books."
[revised 2011]
Anthony Weir
"My
religion: non-practising Cannibal."
All
the evidence suggests that we are in the world to do very little apart
from enjoying ourselves,
and so we do everything to prevent our simple enjoyment of life.
Since
I was not offered a Cup of Hemlock to drink when I had realised this,
aged 25,
I became A BURDEN ON THE STATE
until such time as THEY would send me a
romantic cyanide capsule.
This
has still not happened.
But I am happy to be a Burden
on the State which I loathe, and whose hideous
military-industrial-pharmaceutical-educational complex
is my bête-noire.
"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, the last
part of 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
from
THE INVITATION
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.
