after Rimbaud: The Kidnap and Murder of David Cameron

I think it was probably some kind of terrible mistake. He’d howl all through the night, bloodshot and ridiculous: “I am not to blame. Prison, slavery, luxury. Crowbars and magistrates. Metaphors and factories”. I didn’t know what he expected from me: his thought-processes were mysterious, his logic slightly disturbing, all I could do was laugh in his face. Each morning I would clamber out the window, and wander through a landscape of geometrical music, a galaxy of vaguely corrosive stereotypes. State bureaucrats, military prisons. I had compressed all centuries, the better to see into his bones, the insipid cultural signals that had bound us together so strangely.

Sleep was no better. I’d turn out the light and his voice would be all that remained, rumbling like an imageless space, like surgery, an immense collection of shattered and pilfered hours. His idiotic dreams cut through me at impossible angles, finance and real estate shredded and negated. We had been walking together for centuries, sucking on stones, on cavern gas, on corked wine and planetary diagrams. I had meant it as a kindness: to tear out his heart, throw it to the dogs and to the homeless. The songs of heaven, the secrets of history, the kidnap and murder of David Cameron. Steal away.

after Rimbaud's Vagabonds

Letter on Work and Harmony

I’ve been getting up early every morning, opening the curtains and going back to bed. There have been rumours of anti-unemployed hit squads going around, and I don’t want some fucker with a payslip lobbing things through my window. Especially not when I’m asleep. Though I don’t expect to be able to fool them for long - my recent research involves an intense study of certain individual notes played on Cecil Taylor’s 1966 album Unit Structures, and so obviously, once I’ve managed to isolate them, I have to listen to these notes over and over again, at very high volume. Someone from the Jobcentre is bound to hear them eventually and then, even though I’m not claiming benefits, my number will, as they say, be up. Taylor seems to claim, in the poem printed on the back of the album, that each note contains within it the compressed data of specific historical trajectories, and that the combinations of notes form a kind of chain gang, a kind of musical analysis of bourgeois history as a network of cultural and economic unfreedom. Obviously, I've had to filter this idea through my own position: a stereotypical amalgam of unwork, sarcasm, hunger and a spiteful radius of pure fear. I guess that radius could be taken as the negation of each of Taylor’s notes, but I’m not sure: it is, at least, representative of each of the perfectly circular hours I am expected to be able to sell so as to carry on being able to live. Labour power, yeh. All of that disgusting 19th Century horseshit. The type of shit that Taylor appears to be contesting with each note that he plays. As if each note could, magnetically, pull everything that any specific hour absolutely is not right into the centre of that hour, producing a kind of negative half-life where the time-zones selected by the Jobcentre as representative of the entirety of human life are damaged irrevocably. That’s nothing to be celebrated, though. There’s no reason to think that each work-hour will not expand infinitely, or equally, that it might close down permanently, with us inside it, carrying out some interminable task. What that task is could be anything, it doesn’t matter, because the basic mechanism is always the same, and it involves injecting some kind of innovative emulsion into each of those hours transforming each one into a bright, exciting and endlessly identical disk of bituminous resin. Obviously, what is truly foul is what that resin actually contains, and what it consists of. Its complicated. The content of each hour is fixed, yeh, but at the same time absolutely evacuatated. Where does it go? Well, it materialises elsewhere, usually in the form of a set of right-wing gangsters who would try and sell those work-hours back to you in the form of, well, CDs, DVDs, food, etc. Everything, really, including the notes that Cecil Taylor plays. Locked up in cut-price CDs, or over-priced concert tickets for the Royal Festival Hall, each note he plays becomes a gated community which we are locked outside of, and the aforementioned right-wing gangsters - no matter that they are incapable of understanding Taylor’s music, and in any case are indifferent to it - are happily and obliviously locked inside. Eating all of the food on the planet, which, obviously enough includes you and me. That is, every day we are eaten, bones and all, only to be re-formed in our sleep, and the next day the same process happens all over again. Prometheus, yeh? Hang on a minute, there’s something happening on the street outside, I’m just gonna have to check what it is. One of those stupid parades that happens every six months or so, I imagine. One of those insipid celebrations of our absolute invisibility. Christ, I feel like I’m being crushed, like in one of those medieval woodcuts, or one of those fantastic B Movies they used to show on the TV late at night years ago. Parades. The undead. Chain gangs. BANG. “Britain keeps plunging back in time as yet another plank of the welfare state is removed” BANG our bosses emerge from future time zones and occupy our bodies which have in any case long been mummified into stock indices and spot values BANG rogue fucking planets BANG I take the fact that Iain Duncan-Smith continues to be alive as a personal insult, ok BANG every morning he is still alive BANG BANG BANG. I think I might be getting off the point. In any case, somewhere or other I read an interview with Cecil Taylor, and he said he didn’t play notes, he played alphabets. That changes things. Fuck workfare.

Cell 1 / Suite 3 / as in Crisis

 with his knees and his fists in bituminous black - Garcia Lorca

ok think this / or as in scabies, social ones
in any fiscal exit, in any skaldic bullet glass
is spinning: like the scorn of andromeda
would compress our picket cells, as infinite
scratch that /  with all your social nails, like
literally, inside our cutting waters, nails, like
inside our stuttered fall / & capital is mind
o frozen predicate: as in any social microbe
is mundane and berserk, as any slave ship, as
any social drunken boat, as in any scabrous
general strike, o scarab: would scratch this
numbered surface bone / like our finite scorn
of prison nails / this thing has fourteen lines
as in picket lines / like venus in a closing sky

October 2012: Blanqui is still in jail, and as the cosmological city plan becomes ever more compressed, each human body comes to resemble a conspiratorial cell. This is individualism: all of us fixed into a collective table of anti-matter that no-one believes in, despite how much its wild flashing may sometimes portend trouble. Official speech takes on the rhythms of chicken bones, glue and feathers cast across a receding social sphere, and the antiphonic interplay of megaphones disperses like the dust of imploding stars. Within this reactionary net, the poem is negation, which simply means that it is false. A hopeless omen that longs to rupture the tyrannical banality of the ‘true’.

HUNGER: A Sorrow Song

- sometimes I feel like -
- sleep now -
inside the mayor of London
- that thing -
yes / the trouble I’ve seen
his gasps of blazing snow
his misty mathematic glaze
- sleep now little hangman -
inside his word for coins
- yes / sometimes I feel like -
in each of his numbers a starling
in each of its beaks a startled knife
- sorry, we are that knife -
sleep well / we are cold and bleak

- sometimes I feel like -
a million shuttered doors
of meat and blazing stars
- it is 9.45 exactly -
- o golden city -
its livid sentence punctured
its corpuscles and laughter
- wait -
the city’s outer circuit
inside the mayor of London
- his automatic claws -
- his staggered scrape of convicts -
- stop now -
his million punctured doors

- yes / sometimes I feel like -
a bird within its shell
- stop now -
o desolate drinkers
metronomic and scared
inside his word for London
inside our disk of wages
- of dragonflies and moths -
- sometimes I feel like -
- stop -
- o graceful city -
- o graceful colour of ash -
a poisoned lark is shrieking
his golden voice is leaking

- sometimes I feel like -
- a rim of cutting wheels -
- inside the mayor of London -
his stocks and with his chains
his misty mathematic blaze
- steal away -
fuck it / the trouble I've seen
- sleep well -
o diplomats and bandits
- inside their mouth a printed rag -
- inside that rag a midnight hag -
- o public debt -
- sorry, we are not that debt -
- & music for our sorrow -

I haven’t slept since Thatcher
yes / have never been awakened
- stop it -
- sometimes I feel like -
- your silver and gold -
- stop -
we are your midnight lasers
your ritual and your razors
- stop -
- o spectral city boiling -
- its bitter coins are burning -
- sometimes I feel like -
- a motherless child -
- a long way from my home -

Letter on Harmony and Crisis

Thanks for your list of objections. I accept most of them: my vocabulary, my references (my identification papers) are for the most part things I’ve pulled from the past. Old films, old music: abstractions, commodities. Its exactly the same when I go to the supermarket. The instore radio, the magazines, the DVDs: all of them register some kind of obsessive relationship with the culture’s recent past.  Don’t think I’m moaning about it. I quite like it in the supermarket, I go there every day, in fact I rarely go anywhere else. Its a kind of map of the future of London, adjusted to admit a slightly censored collective history, where friendly and contradictory forces confront each other with rapidly diminishing strength. Astrology, basically. Or at least some form of stargazing. A weird constellation of information, fact and metaphor that invokes a comforting aura of a very gentle death disguised as a glistening array of foodstuffs, endlessly re-arranged on the gridplan of the shop to give an impression of constant social movement. Its a substitute for the calendar, basically, a system of harmony set up to keep an extremely fragile stability in place. Its why they only ever play certain songs in there. Simply Red, for example. Though that’s not quite the case. I was walking around in there the other day, wondering what it would be like if they were playing Leadbelly’s “Gallis Pole” over their radio system. You know the song. Did you bring me the silver, did you bring me the gold, and all of that. The guitar picking sounds kind of like a spiderweb. It would actually make the whole thing worse: the vibrations would empty the content of the supermarket back into the frequencies of folk ballads and superstition. Rings of flowers and gallows trees. It would be useful insofar as the contradictions and antagonisms of bourgeois production would be strikingly revealed. It would be a disaster inasmuch as all sound in the supermarket, including the old Leadbelly song, would be reduced to a frequency spectrum of predominantly zero power level, except perhaps for a few almost inaudible bands and spikes. We wouldn’t be able to get out, is what I mean. All known popular songs would be seen flickering and burning like distant petrol towers in some imaginary desert. Well, not really. Actually, thats why I hate all those old bands like Led Zeppelin. They took all those old songs like “Gallis Pole”, straightened them out, and made them an integral part of the phase velocity of  the entire culture, arranged as a static sequence of rings, pianos, precious stones and prisons. Its not entirely hopeless, though: the circulation of these songs does contain within itself the possibility of interruptions. I’ve been following the progress of the strikes at Wallmart with great interest, for example. They’re establishing a system of counter-homogeneity, basically: the structure of the supermarket is kept in place, but all of a sudden the base astrological geometry of that supermarket is revealed as simplistic, fanatic and rectilinear, and the capitalist city as a tight lattice of metallic alloys, ionic melts, aqueous solutions, molecular liquids and wounded human bodies that would prefer not to die. The city is all perimeter. And song is not, ultimately, a rivet into that place, but absolute divergence from it. The event horizon as a rim of music, all vocabularies as an entire symphony of separations all expressed at the moment immediately prior to their solidification into the commodity form. At that moment there is everything to play for. All else is madness and suffering at the hands of the pigs.

*
The last sentence is adapted from "Affidavit No. 2: Shoot-out in Oakland" by Eldridge Cleaver. There are also a couple of near-quotations from Marx's "Theories of Surplus Value", and a few words pinched from Trotsky's "Notebook on Hegel".

Memo: On Violence - 5, 6, 7

The social butterflies have become pterodactyls" is from LeRoi Jones' (Amiri Baraka's) poem "Friday", in Black Magic Poetry, and "You may bury my body . . . . " is from Robert Johnson's song "Me and the Devil"

Notes on Militant Poetics 3/3

As for the political thought of the Black Panthers, I am convinced it originates in the poetic thought of Black Americans . . . . We are realising more and more that a poetic emotion lies at the origin of revolutionary thought - Genet

This antagonist is still maintaining his incognito, and he resides like a needy pretender in the cellars of official society, in those catacombs where, amidst death and decomposition, the new life germinates and blossoms. - Heine

The songs I heard there seemed to have been composed in hell and the refrains rang with furious anger. The demonic tones making up those songs can hardly be heard in our delicate spheres, until heard with one’s own ears in the huge metal workshops where half-naked figures illumined by angry sparks from the forge sing them with a sulky, defiant air, beating the time with their iron hammers: the boom of the anvil makes for a most effective accompaniment to the scene of passion and flames - Heine

Accordingly, the dialectic image should not be transferred into consciousness as a dream, but in its dialectical construction the dream should be externalised and the immanence of consciousness itself be understood as a constellation of reality - the astronomical phase, as it were, in which Hell wanders through mankind. It seems to me that only a map of such a journey through the stars could offer a clear view of history as prehistory - Adorno

The revolutionary kernel of the poetry fetish becomes clear if George Jackson’s letters are read simultaneously with Lautréamont. In a 1943 essay on Lautréamont , Aimé Césaire wrote that “by means of the image we reach the infinite”. This “infinite” is no bourgeois escape route through which the poetry fan can reach a gated community of cosmic harmony: when Lautréamont  sneers that his pen has made a boring Paris street like Rue Vivienne “mysterious” he means the poetic image has been transformed into a splinter of glass fixed into the centre of your eye, a glass through which we see the capitalist class as the lice and bedbugs they really are, and in like fashion, the proletariat become a swarm of red carnivorous ants. In a figurative storming of the Bastille - or Newgate, or San Quentin, or Soledad - the counterpanoptic of the poetic image gives an x-ray view into the infraviolence of capitalist reality. Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, published in 1955, insists that Lautréamont’s work is an “implacable denunciation of a very particular society”. The “infinite” is precisely that “denunciation” where, in Adorno’s terms, hell wanders through humankind. The world turned upside down, or inside out. Blake, who right now I’m tempted to call the English Lautréamont, tracked a similar activation of perception:

Now will I pour my fury on them, & I will reverse
The precious benediction; for their colours of loveliness
I will give blackness; for jewels, hoary frost; for ornament, deformity;
For crowns, wreathed serpents; for sweet odors, stinking corruptibility;
For voices of delight, hoarse croakings inarticulate thro’ frost;
For labour’d fatherly care & sweet instruction, I will give
Chains of dark ignorance & cords of twisted self-conceit

The “precious benediction”, “crowns” and “sweet odours” which are all of our birthright have been blasted apart by capitalist alchemy, and our “voices of delight” have been occupied by advertising, which can only be countered by the “hoarse croakings” of the poetic hex. But the realities of the prison cell and the police bullet have made poetic beauty banal. Capitalist poetics transform everyday life into the advertiser’s sublime. Every abandoned billboard is a bulletin about the nature of your invisibility .The collapse of capital has neutralised poetry’s counterpanoptic: Blake becomes an emblem of English nationalism, Lautréamont  becomes a refuge for goths. And yet a nonconformist reading might force an electrostatic discharge, a brief flash where whatever remains unstable within the poem - everything that cannot be reduced to simple fetishism - is all that is available. What interested Benjamin about the early 20th Century avant-gardes was their intermingling of “slogans, magic formulas and concepts”. The sharp clarity of the slogan pierces the esotericism of the magic formula, forming new constellations of meaning and a new rationalism absolutely alien to bourgeois forms of logic. If its true that only poetry can do this, its also true that hardly any poetry (be it the so-called mainstream or the so-called avant-garde) actually does do it. When, in the poem “Black People”, Amiri Baraka said “The magic words are: Up against the wall mother / fucker this is a stick up” he had found the almost invisible point where George Jackson and Lautréamont  become the same person, where the revolutionary tract and the esoteric poem become the same thing. The “wall” is the limit of the poem, and also the contested site where the poem blends into absolute reality, where the “invisible point”, in its moment of crisis, becomes visible, and yet . . . . .

Ce n'est rien; j'y suis; j'y suis toujours

We need new forms. New modes of speech