New Book: Letters Against the Firmament

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"Letters Against the Firmament is a user’s report on the end of the world, a treatise against Tory terror, a proposal for a new zodiac, a defence of poetry, a hex against the devourers of planet earth."

[morphine]

Five points on the map. Five days
You watch your city burn.
Five A.M. Five cops at the door.
Interpret that. No city is built again
Your map a declaration, a trap, a war.

 *

Divination. Inhuman fears of the people
This distance, an arrangement of songs
scattered on the capital, a set of laws
to kill the living. Rhymes, this distance.
Ruins are barricades. Songs are bones.

*

Our maps, almost, are conspirators
all night awake, questioning the sky
Comets, also, are bones. Are waiting
to crash our adventure. Days pile up
Like collapsing towers. Cops. Bone.


crossed out Bakunin. wrote down five cops.
5 a.m. - a charm to consume the capital.

Poems after Katerina Gogou

 
I would like to spin a eulogy / of filth, of poverty, of drugs and suicide . . . drugs, disgust, rage - Pasolini

 Benzodiazepine. Give me the prescription
and I will be you. I’ll pretend to be you
and if i cannot, well, I’ll tell you about your walls
the interpretation of the cracks, divination etc
you probably don’t wanna know. give me the paper
its fine I’ll never remember a thing.
you’ll say things tomorrow I’ll have said them last week.
just right. I know explosives. magic I know and dialectics.
just write the fucking prescription ok.
I have conversations with the dead
 
*
let’s drink with the unemployed
with all sun and silence
with all dust in the sun and silence
and sun and cognac and dust
and cigarettes and sun
no, lets not go on about our health today
pills and drink and snot
don’ worry
I feel very calm
there are nails there is hair there are years
dirty
the pills are great. the party, you know which one I mean
impossible to tell whose a cop these days
music
the cognacs shit
no, I haven’t heard anything for quite some time
you know I’n thinking I might want to, you know
there’s a room upstairs
I want to see you without your pants
kind of curious about your dick
music, for chrissake
you take a solo
“they took a stick and beat me”
cognac
music
silence
you pullout your switchblade start slashing
The Bonnot Gang were right.




There are four cardinal points.
The first is the sky, it is where they have buried us.
The second, the earth. There they question us. It is very silent.
The other two points were recently taken out of commission.
No explanations were offered

one day I’ll come out from the houses
I did it yesterday
no thought for anything
one small shred of my father
a tiny piece of the sea
no-one can take them from me
the city they fucked like a dead friend
so many dead friends
one day I’ll come out from the houses
straight into powder and flames
I did it yesterday
you fascist bastards
you pig bastards
red banners barricades black banners
a new city a new kind of sun
one day I’ll come out of the houses
and listen I need to tell you
don’t think I’m afraid when I tell you
they got me. don’t do it. they got me.
reinvent time. reinvent violence. then
listen, go at those bastards like the furies.
only then will you disappear
only then will you learn the magic
a tiny shred of childhood and ocean
one day I will come out from the houses
a strangers language of rags and dreams
and the loneliness, the disappearance
oh god the loneliness. I mean
what do you think I am
some kind of fucking cop


*
 
Loneliness does not meet for lunch in Selfridges
nor does it stroll abstract and satisfied thru the V&A, for example
it doesn’t understand Beethoven
or even the Beatles, for that matter
never gets nostalgic over memories of its mother
its ribbons its straw hats its oh-so-middle-class morphine
loneliness is not white
loneliness is up for sale. loneliness will clean your toilet with her fucking tongue.
oh god I’m swearing again.
loneliness turns up drowned on the front pages as refugee porn and is three years old
loneliness queues up politely for a boot in the face for black eggs and poisoned ham
loneliness crawls up from the desert her mouth filled with salt and grain
is marked out in inches like cattle and real estate
humiliation pain humiliation pain
is laughing and is very silent
loneliness crawls out from the ocean her mouth filled with sand and glass
loneliness knows your passwords
humiliation pain humiliation pain
destroys private property. knows all your music is prison.
knows all of your language is prison. all of your seconds are prison.
knows western weapons.
knows european oceans and blood-clots and fucking shit.
loneliness is screaming is smashing your windows with boots and chains
loneliness is dancing barefoot on tables in bars where they hate you hate you
is holding in her bruised and ruined hands a very sharp axe
is hanging over your head
is swirling over your head
is lonely is lonely and loneliness is power is sharpened and bloodstained is swirling is swirling

sometimes the door opens I’m terrified
you are dressed in white your face is white
you force open my hand place coins there
I never move never every morning
you know exactly where to find me
a long time has passed my nails are filthy
they are long and sharp I terrify my friends
I have no imagination
coins in my hand they frighten me
every day I cook potatoes
every day they call my name it terrifies me
I know they want me to betray someone
I keep their voices close to my face
I know they change the words
I’m frightened of the voices because the voices lie
they told me they shot you in the legs
I know they never shoot in the legs
they shoot in the head
they extract the mind
just keep it together, love. keep moving.


Someone has taken our knives. We go down like the sun. Place of birth. Unknown. They have scratched away our slogans. Colour of eyes. Unknown. We go down like hail and rain. Year of birth. Fuck it. Next time they shoot us, we’ll refuse to die. Its raining again. Give me a cigarette.
 
we’ll cut ourselves down
they hung us yesterday
no escape from the massacre
this whispered ‘no’
liars. informers. murderers
squealing ‘yes’
always ‘yes’
no escape
always ‘yes’
        this whispered “no”
        this rotten world
        this world we loved

Please don’t cry. Time will come.
Bear that in mind. Remember.
Don’t look at me. Don’t cry.
We are gathering the pieces.
There will be no locked doors.
No officials, no murders, no slaves.
Sometimes we’ll speak in colours,
in musical notes. No passwords,
no secret codes. But remember,
serious, keep a pill in your mouth.
Keep it there, these words there:
solitude, profit, humiliation, suicide.
That’s the dictionary of history.
When they shoot it at us, fire back.
I can’t lie. Things will get harder,
but keep at it. Despite our violence
our addictions. All this burning earth.


*

Fearful we’ll abandon our history or steal it. Fearful we’ll set up borders around that history. Fearful we’ll drive up the rents on that history and talk and talk about the old days in meter and rhyme while the pigs close the borders. Fearful we’ll be those borders. Fearful we’ll confuse those borders with songs and sit inside those songs as if they were the scars on our veins. Fearful our scars will become a lullaby and that we will turn into dogs. Fearful we’ll confuse dogs with doves. Fearful of doves and swans, of corpuscles, of medical robes, of silence and smack. Fearful we’re doing what they want. What silence wants. We police their borders. They know how it is. Fearful bastards. Fearful of everything. All of us. Fuck it. Do it tomorrow. No escape from the massacre. 
 
We are being followed. They are hunting us, are mostly silent. Lines of them, they are hunting us. Their sentences, relatively simple. Our hunters, our educators. It is very simple. We don’t mention the silence. What we keep inside our whispers. In our signals, in our silence. As each of their faces change. As each of their cells divide. In great procession, the faces. Their lessons are endless. Silence, in circles, our hunters. As if we were dogs. As if we barked at strangers. And now they will murder. There is safety in murder. Somewhere are angels. Angels have claws. Dogs are everywhere.

*

music, I don’t talk about it
my eyes. seriously. where are my eyes
every day there’s something to reject
I will not scream when I die
Marx Lenin Trotsky Luxemberg
The Kronstadt Massacre and the dream of Sisyphus
there are flowers there are colours
revolvers and homemade bombs
I’m going crazy, why aren’t you
my dreams my friends dreams
all these dreams are the same dream
repeated breakdowns endless weeping
puking spirits loathing
every morning I have to apologise for something
coke, raki, smack
this is measure
you and me
up and down
and back and down
we understand everything, those stupid bastards
private property newlyweds money
newlyweds money prisons terror
they have spit at us
old comrades are dying every day
kids eyes just get bigger and bigger
riot cops, UKBA, new glass, the border
there is a false symmetry separates us
lets not laugh
if we don’t sign the paper
they won’t be able to act on their decision
night falls
the central committee, rape apologists, maoists
night falls
they want to know if I have a television
night falls
I’m still kind of keeping it together
I won’t sign
Long like the 204th International

and we collect little pieces. of resistance etc.
don’t talk to me about fragmentation. it is
rain. talk about rain. Durruti had it right
transubstantiation. rain. metallic burning rain.
red rain. crowbars. the richter scale is
a calendar. bones piled like rain beneath the earth.

*

40 degrees in the shade. 40 below.
No-one was ever born here.
Fascists and charitable organisations
have made an agreement. They have bought up the city.
They have poured oil on us.
They talk about rats. And houses. The contractors
And the cops, of course
like voyeurs
Fucking them. They talk about the houses.
They are breaking up the houses
They have tied you to the bed with your legs and face.
Its how they put up the rent. How they get us out.
They change our names. Elect us. Pour oil on us.
The streets names. Our names. They burn our names.
40 in the shade. 40 below. Our mouths are swollen.
No-one was ever born here.
A stone. Beneath it, that liar the sun.

*

that there are houses
on grand roads, we know that
and we used to know
in the silence and dawn
of bottles, and pass codes
never would we live there
hating the roses, fearing them
we knew the address of each one
we had the blue-prints, everything
we talked
minute to minute
we talked
wire to wire
of what we would say
at the pre-ordained moment
class vengeance, we understood
futuristic and ancient, as
all of history, as
one click, as
some kind of message
left on the table
                like a packet of fags
in an overheated kitchen
not even the ones I used to smoke
squealing, yeh, thanks a lot
you destroyed the wrong world
pack up your roses, asshole, get out

On an undisclosed date she was spotted leaving the house setting fire to every cop car she saw. At a synchronised hour she was known to be transporting weapons to anarchist-communist groups in the Middle East, to be working with refugees in Calais, at every border in the world, to be distributing certain classified documents relating to the blood-stained and medieval predilections of David Cameron, Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt. Last spotted wearing one red and black military sweater, one pearl necklace, fists clenched inside the pockets of a somewhat dirty borrowed jacket. This is a note on how to become numbered among the ranks of the invisible.

I think of my friends as blackbirds
screeching from rooftops
murdered by rising rents . we survive
at random. pissed out of our heads
in songs in squatted bars
with pills and needles. to get some sleep
to stop dreaming
interpreters. commies. thieves.
we wake in the same bed. with bedbugs
with trackmarks I love my friends
we dream and never sleep
cocaine into Marx
plague into Bakunin
murdered by rising rents. we screech
from broken rooftops
I think of my friends as blackbirds
as wires stretched from city to city
nailed to the front of the houses
in borrowed dresses and migraines
in silence. lines of speed. of wires
of STDs and bedbugs and microscopes
we fall in love with killers
we survive at random
no ambulance
broken glass. telephone. silence
I think of my friends as blackbirds
Marx and Bakunin. always on the move
the city has been stolen
always on the move
murdered by rising rents
all of my friends. dressed in black
in silence. antibiotics and broken roofs
speaking in code. always in code
plain speech is only for lying
my friends are blackbirds. are wires
tight around your hands. your necks
you capitalist shits. your necks
my friends are wires. are blackbirds


Don’t let me sleep I’m dreaming. They walk toward me the dreams the phantoms it is lonely here. They walk toward me the dreams the melodies the harmony is wrong. It is lonely here. The years are pebbles and they’re blocking my mouth. The years are coins each one stamped with a separable sun. First sun Kobanî. Second sun Calais. The dreams are lines they are suns their angles are vicious their voices are thin they are phantoms their voices shatter glass. They are thin phantoms they speak inside our mouths. They speak inside our mouths in Haymarket in Kobanî. The dreams are years are pebbles a system of inaudible suns. Third sun Tottenham. Second sun Calais. The harmony is rage the dreams are hunting us down. First rage Ferguson. Second rage Gaza. They are thin phantoms they are bursting suns they are blasted glass. Now they take aim. Now they murder. Dreams are a means of speaking. Glass is a means of screaming your nightmares down. 

The Chorus is on Fire (improvisations on poems by Katerina Gogou / abandoned notes on Pasolini)

Pasolini’s utopia is the necropole, what Hölderlin called the nefas. It is a counter-sickness, a naked factory-owner screaming in the desert, a force from the past tearing up the present because it comes from the future. History is invisible, is exclusion and contagion.

A ring of slums encircles the city, as inexpressible distance, measurable only in light years. Memory etched in the boarded up windows, the promises that business will be resumed presently. ASAP becomes ACAB. Bitterness perfected.

__________________________________________________________

Is loneliness is. Not family photos. Not memorials not. Distance is. Loneliness is. Queuing for food and. Crackling of bone and. Hanging of meat and. Calais is. The border is. Loneliness is. Yellow fire is. Glassing the present is. Not you not. Blood clots not. Bruises not. Prisons not. Hatred is. Hatred is. Without a passport is. Not melancholic is. Bought and sold and. Yes wakes up early and. Yes cleans your office is. Not your self-pity is. Nine to a room is. Not your cocaine is. Drowns in transit is. Counting of wounds is. Dances on tables is. Is loneliness is. Planets of glass is. Whirling is whirling is. Knives of glass is. Over your head is. Swirling is swirling is swirling

But the possible which steps into reality, as reality dissolves, this has a real effect, and it effects both the sensation of the dissolution and the memory of that which is dissolved. - Hölderlin

Open the door and give me money.
I haven’t moved. You can still find me
But years have passed and my nails are jagged and filthy
And I frighten my friends and my mind has
Vanished. I left it here. I can’t find it.
And when I hear my name I become afraid
They want me to betray you. They want me to lie.
And I’m frightened of the voices because the voices lie
                                       They say they shot you in the legs
                                       I know they never aim at legs
                                       They shoot you in the mind.
                                       Keep it together. Keep moving.

If, for Pasolini, fascism is the dream of death that, in emergency, becomes capital’s raw force and keeps it alive, then communism is that which scrapes and wheezes at its edges, is the death encoded in traces of historical memory. But this is a commonplace. Metaphor as fixed lie. Metaphor as catastrophe. Pasolini’s era is further from us than Hölderlin’s ever was. The shift in epochs is the nefas. We pass over without noticing. This is the meaning of the illness of St. Paul. The struggle is not, as both Walter Benjamin and Frank Wilderson have claimed, between the living and the dead, but between the dead and the dead. Dead history and dead future: a showdown between the desert and surveillance camera. In Mathew, the devotional is suffocating, is crazed with starvation, fear and atrocity. The disciples have flies crawling on their faces in every scene. Malediction is realism.

God has chosen precisely what does not exist in order to reduce to nothing what does exist - St Paul

Someone has taken our knives. We go down like the sun. Place of birth. Unknown. They have scratched away our slogans. Colour of eyes. Unknown. We go down like hail and rain. Year of birth. Fuck it. Next time they shoot us, we’ll refuse to die. Its raining again. Give me a cigarette.

Some academic once wrote of Pasolini that we should “turn down the volume on his political sermons and listen to what he whispered in his work”, which is obviously pretty stupid, as the politics are precisely within those whispers. In the St Paul screenplay he quotes Corinthians, on “hearing inexpressible things, things we are not able to tell”. And in his final essay he makes it clear what those “inexpressible things” are; they are names. The names of those responsible for massacres, the names of the owners of power as it exists behind known power. Names that it is impossible to recite and still live. This has very little to do with what is still called ‘magic’.


In this arena we’re pushed along like some strange and dark army in which some carry cannons and others carry crowbars - Pasolini

___________________________________________________________________

We are being followed. They are hunting us, are mostly silent. Lines of them, they are hunting us. Their sentences, relatively simple. Our hunters, our educators. It is very simple. We don’t mention the silence. What we keep inside our whispers. In our signals, in our silence. As each of their faces change. As each of their cells divide. In great procession, the faces. Their lessons are endless. Silence, in circles, our hunters. As if we were dogs. As if we barked at strangers. And now they will murder. There is safety in murder. Somewhere are angels. Angels have claws. Dogs are everywhere.

Here come the evictors
They’ve got us by the hair and throat
And bound us with it, bound us
To the floor and the bed, all of us
This is the way they put up the rent
The rent changes, the names change
Our names change, the street’s names
                            40 degrees in the shade
                            Next time they shoot us, fire back

Meanwhile, the Chorus, weirdly absent in Pasolini’s interpretations of Greek myth, but who for Hölderlin could speak “almost in the manner of the furies”, are, put simply, the un-named. Those who eat dogs on the surface of the planet of slums, and scream out their names from the centre of the desert. And “chorus”, when spoken from within certain archaic accents, is almost the same word as “curse”.

Corpus Hermeticum: On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres

 News blackouts etc. This really happened.

Every Thursday mayhem in weather systems.
Imaginary battles in science and strike actions. The bastards had won
as in Vision overload, fascist analysis of human beings
and a slightly less comfortable suburb. Arts and that.
Or science. Black mirrors. Seven dials. Black mirrors. Seven dials. Prisons.

We’re blocking central London. Riot as, in relation to this past
I don’t need a wound. We wanted going fucking mad. Too many racists still breathing
and strange convulsions, I felt it, me and the devil
at first repression and counter-acts, overload Malediction, tried to chart strikes
as Noise, they were still dead. Their galaxies, spinning faster.

Mercury unsuitable for making coins.

———————————————————————————————————

February 17th 1600, burned, “his tongue imprisoned because of his wicked words”


for water say plague i.e. the language of judges, the infinite vowel
for water say fire i.e pulsars and mace. For water say yellow fire
i.e. the fascist microbe in every drop of rain. For water say dust
i.e. negative flames, soluble dust, chemical burns, scars and skies


Forget psychogeography. All its ever been is a ring of protection, a police-thing’s joy, at its centre that bitter knot of strings that Brecht called ‘prophecy’, spy-rings. String One: we were smashing up the Ritz, March 2011. String Two: shit was talked about immigrants, about dole scroungers. String Three: not an ATM a bright metallic wind or real-time alignment of the patterns of non-affordable housing scattered throughout the city and the stereo-optic beating of police hearts. Beat one. Cancelation of Europe and Mercury. Stone circles are police kettles, you can’t tell me different.


for yellow fire say fuck the police
kill fear say fire say fuck the police

For example, take Newgate. Built 1188, directly into the walls, London’s eastern gate. Beat Two. We don’t recognise ourselves there. Beat Three. The debtor’s jail, the throat the muzzle of the city.  July 10th, 1790, burned. Robert Peel built cops from the ashes. Beat Four. Debt is bone. Versions of bone. Version One. Spare change. Version Two. Lock the bosses out. Superglue them. Out. Version Three. Debt One. Those nobility who entered the city from the east would pass through a wall packed with the tortured, the scraped and wheezing dead. London a cursèd city, is beautiful in the smouldering spring.

We’re not underground we’re invisible. - Bernardine Dohrn.     remember Theresa May, that guillotine

Unemployed families were slaughtered
remember Theresa May driving thru London in crackling human Tar
about legal channels, hot pink and petrol flare
Awake at night, in strike actions

or the protests did what in relation to Fucking realism
stuck it out inside all noise, inside David Willets and Abeizer Coppe
bounded by law, David Willets, gored by magpies and glass
Victory to dole scroungers. This really happened

inside Normal matter such as atoms and electrons, orphanhood.


——————————————————————————————————————-



Check the extent of police lines. 1829, Robert Peel invented 1000 pigs to circle the city as walls or gates as cordons. This happened. Those 1000 pigs as calendar, the working day a pyramid as razor the police recuperation of the sun. It was dark and the barricades were burning.


Tiresias the birds. Tiresias who sees what only a child could see, who blunders up from hell and hell is not underground. Says riots are a work of vast and incomprehensible mourning, a border a burning weird as even the fear felt by Charles and Camilla, that crow-bait, 2010, off with their heads - this really happened we have no fucking demands and Tiresias summoned voices of the vast dead charts of incomprehensible bird flight, everywhere we are those birds and it don’t mean shit the cops don’t know this.


We’re not all white and we’re not all men - George Jackson Brigade Communiqué, 1976

Robert Peel still peers down from Broadgate wall and is a blockade, Newgate torched. Police moved in smashed heads in counter-time, a silent musical fixture separates a human being from a cop. It is vital to recognise, to insist on that difference, that fixture - to locate with precision where that separation first appears in the ‘continuum’ where the entire pack of errors, superstitions and blood-stained bullets ram the solar throat of every cop in this town with vile psychic music and we live there, have organised noise. Studied strikes. Cop lives don’t matter.

for “I love you” say fuck the police, for
“the fires of heaven” say fuck the police, don’t say
“recruitment” don’t say “trotsky” say fuck the police
for “alarm clock” say fuck the police
                                                       for “my morning commute” for
“electoral system” for “endless solar wind” say fuck the police
don’t say “I have lost understanding of my visions” don’t say
“that much maligned human faculty” don’t say
“suicided by society” say fuck the police, for “the movement
of the heavenly spheres” say fuck the police, for
“the moon’s bright globe” for “the fairy mab” say
fuck the police, don’t say “direct debit” don’t say “join the party”
say “you are sleeping for the boss” and then say fuck the police
don’t say “evening rush-hour” say fuck the police, don’t say
“here are the steps I’ve taken to find work” say fuck the police
don’t say “tall skinny latté” say fuck the police, for
“the earth’s gravitational pull” say fuck the police, for
“make it new” say fuck the police
                                                       don’t say “spare change”
say fuck the police, don’t say “happy new year” say fuck the police
perhaps say “rewrite the calendar” but after that, immediately
after that say fuck the police, for “philosopher’s stone” for
“royal wedding” for “the work of transmutation” for “love
of beauty” say fuck the police
                say no justice no peace and then say fuck the police

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

as published in the latest issue of Tripwire
recording here

Mythology (Corpus Hermeticum)

 I had forgotten human speech, it stuck in my throat . . . My voice came from Saturn - Diane di Prima

The victorians didn’t need alchemical diagrams they had factories. Diagram one: abandoned factory architercture. Diagram two: accumulation of years since the early 80s when Thatcher closed said factories. Factories compressed to the size of a small ball or asteroid approaching planet earth with all the historical force of a decommissioned god. God one: there is a cop inside my head there is a cop outside my head and the fact of their mutual destruction is the shape of abandoned factory architecture. Fact five: Rupert Murdoch. Fact eight: Theresa May. Fact three: the cop inside my head may be neutralised by a secret combination of forgotten names and when those names are pronounced and all forgetfulness is voiced London will burn Cameron will die.



Tiresias clambers up from hell which is. Only the noise that cities make as. She used to get information from the workings of birds but. Since we bound this city with threads of light and. They circle and ring like a rain of ragged logic and. Are fat with grease and grief and will not speak like. Inside the laws of hunger there is no grammar and. Loot the supermarket and. Those bones in that ancient ark are not your own and. Hell is the colour of human skin is not your own and. Tiresias her blind eyes scratch at bones are. All those new luxury flats are. This is the mystery of the eating of bread and bone says. Jump motherfucker jump.

Diagram five: fertility rites as emblem of the occupation of mayday. Class struggle misinterpreted as a ring of daisies. Ring one: impact of asteroid as metaphor. Ring two: names of cops as metaphor. Metaphor five: this is really happening. Ring six: Theresa May as symbol. Ring seven: infantile revenge fantasy. Symbol eight: Theresa May as ring of abandoned factory architecture translated into passport control. Symbol nine: abandoned factory architecture as magic and superstition translated into the belief that any of us ever existed. Fact one: sometimes it seems we live only as proof of the existence of cops. Proof one: Orgreave. Proof two: Newgate. Proof three: the class nature of comets the circulation of capital as a decommisioned sun. When those circles are charted and their diagrams pronounced London will burn Cameron will die.

Song / Stutter (Corpus Hermeticum)

takes the blind to see it ///// the voiceless to call its name  - after Lightnin Hopkins

Shriek-birds will circle our songs. First song. The sound of no blood. Second song. A bright and crackling gap inside our mouths. Prison one. An exchange of invisibilities inside the mouths of the dead who speak of death & live there. Prison two. Third song. Bright birds. Disks of sun. The murdered residue of song. Song eight. Song minus one. Feathers of social use are circling the body. Cop one. Cop two, cop three. Haymarket. Shriek. Tottenham. Shriek. And the moon.



an aside: Nigel Farage, in the hell of worms

tear open his mouth
          with all the silence in the world
                     which is golden, and screeches
                                    watch the bastard drown   


God has chosen precisely what does not exist in order to reduce to nothing what does exist - St Paul

The listener is of no real consequence, other than by the shared intensity of its collective irrelevance. This is a lesson in the revolutionary meaning of superstition and paranoia. This is what is meant by a “menaced lie”, its adversarial truth. Sun Ra called himself Lucifer.

The oppressor, formally known as the news, now becomes séance, magic, ultimately madness i.e. the expropriation of a people’s deepest aspirations soon becomes inaudible, a hideous inaudible hiss. The consequence is actually immense, and their lives become only a shattered state of dread, of warfare, unhoped for and fragmented. Breaks upon our mirror, our butchers glass.