after Rimbaud

Listen, we got every escape hatch blocked. The centre of our orbit is some kind of cynical massacre, some kind of prolapse, thats all of your logic, your entire poetics, no-one can even think revolt -

Compression of east and west, AM and PM, whatever, its all the same. We are here to make the hard choices, your choices. We’ve got the food, all the food, all of your love, every point of circulation, all abstraction, all phosphor. And you can go shit -

Come o silken wraiths, come and devour us -

after Rimbaud

what we liked were transmissions, taglines, phonemes -

technique R2I. procedure 129. repeat. purge.
it began with the laughter of idiots and there it will end
our circumference: a gated english voice / delete -

they have their bombed cities, their ridiculous ancient songs
their ruined boulevards / our controlled, uptight ecstasies

night is nothing and the day is on fire -

report. all harmonic discourse to be compressed & restored
hurray for the fucked up dawn, our shredding swarms
our invoice decide what knowledge is / is like assassins -

science, patience, torture: the vows of the sun and the sea -

----------------------------------------------------------

newsflash. May 2010. what we liked were / vowel one -

was international nights of torrential study, was harmonic
our hydraulic calculations, your medicines, children’s books

Nephograms! Votemeal! O magnetic puke
& bank stuff. These spheres piss us off, yeh,
like surface nukes. But still, our so clean hands
of lepers v. the lash / 360 degrees / servitude

or paraquat / the rust on your kill silver
just rose up in judgement? Shame. Insert
lamotrogine, my asphyxiant / howl, love,
with scatological equity, goldened charity

ie send flowers, fire, gems

vowel two, three, four etc / sorry, but was a discrete attack
& shyly encircled the disks of the law. or we can’t find em

we hold ourselves safe on the roof of the world’s love -
our phantasmagoric business plans, our study of the stars -

the islands of the dead -

Peter Weiss: The Aesthetics of Resistance

All they knew was that they had to shriek against that elemental violence and yet they did not emit a sound

Crude beginnings could be erected from the shattered monuments, some wastelands were initially penetrated only by letters of the alphabet, with which people arduously learned how to read.

The more unreservedly we received the testimonies from the most diverse directions of entanglement and seething, of destruction and authoritarian uprisings, the more nuanced became our image of the world and our appreciation of the richness of language.

While reading, while examining images, I no longer entered a secluded special area accessible only to initiates, instead everything that was shown was integrated into my personal experiences.

Our consciousness guided us to books and pictures, it triggered conversations for which we had become ready only at this moment.

Later, after we achieved political understanding, our hatred grew more intense, we began purposefully fighting those who tried to hold us down, annihilate us. We were guided by a cold, homicidal repulsion. Very seldom did we find this sensation articulated in art, in literature

It was as if there were no language as yet for this grubbing and rooting, for the hours of lying with bated breath, the slow groping forward, the searching for nameless middlemen, for encoded addresses, for the sudden confrontation with the murderer.

I saw that this was quite wrong, that the definite and the concrete were surrounded by a thronging, by a lurking and choking, and, immediately underneath it, all that was to be found of names and terms was a babbling.

How could what we were experiencing, I asked myself, be delineated in such a way that we could recognise ourselves in it. The form would be monstrous, would cause dizziness.

------------

All of the above taken from the first volume of Weiss' novel The Aesthetics of Resistance. Very highly recommended.