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Our Death by Sean Bonney

A reckless voyage into the apocalypse against which we hurl ourselves night after night, entirely political and thus relentlessly personal, self-lacerating, perhaps a bit disordered, no doubt perilously lucid. Moving through the shards of the decade’s social movements and the torments of persisting within the wreckage, the book forms a complex web of lament and refusal. Its guides are Pasolini, Baudelaire, and especially Katerina Gogou, the great Greek poet, anarchist, and suicide. Our guide is Bonney himself, and there is none like him.

Heroes

1.

Mustapha Khayati, I got a question. When you were writing your dictionary, did you have any sense which words might be snitches and which might be scabs. While the Eiffel Tower continues to mean what it does, sending out signals no-one could ever translate, these questions continue to matter. Mustapha Khayati, say something. Fascism does what it does without a need for language.


2.

Jean Genet, if alive today, would be somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, entwined with all the other human bones. No-one would say his name. His fingerprints would be stored in an obscure data-mine. But his hatred for your world would be the same. His fist, his knife, his negligee. As the final oceans evaporated, his bones would begin to move. The kindness in his eyes long gone.


3.

If it turned out that Dante’s cosmology was true all along, then I would like Artaud to be the guide to Hell. He’d know how to deal with the tourists. He wouldn’t say a word or look you in the eye, and the screaming in your ears would be your own. If you were lucky, he would grasp you by the wrists. Somewhere, far from where we were standing, the earth’s final clock would explode. Basic flowers.


4.

If all of the letters in all of the alphabets of the world were pronounced simultaneously, they would not spell out the name Arthur Rimbaud. That name was taken out of commission some time ago. But still, try it backwards, in the hour before dawn. Watch the statues erected in his honour as they do not implode. Listen to his poetry, as it wanders the ruined cities, invisible to our sight.

5.

Baudelaire you knew it all along. Your skeleton compelled without question to scrape the earth forever, to ward off the bitter need that comes on it like a living clock. Smack makes death eternal, you know that well. As does its respectable twin, wage labour.