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.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Day Something...
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
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
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Today, Or Not to day...
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.
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.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Another Day...
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.
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.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Day Thirty-One...
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?
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?
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Day Thirty...
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...
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...
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Day Twenty-Nine...
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…
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)