Khoigab Dunes, outside Aus.
The desert’s scale forces one to let
go of the illusion of understanding.
The flies always find me.
The sheer weight of the sun.
The gravity of light. Sun bleaching
the fly strewn carcass of something.
*
Across definite spaces
I hear the Tractatus
But I cannot know
What I am hearing
Until its silence
penetrates me
I relinquish Logos
Beginning after the End
*
When words fail
And I go beyond
Those secular havens
Doubt and Panic;
There I find you
In my deepest register
Beneath the secret layers of your life
that you hid yourself under, Beneath
the fading curtains, the dusty
carpets, the tapestries.
Beneath the jumble
sale philosophies
you aspired to
for a week
or two
Beneath
the cortisone
and the chemo
that kept you alive
long after you were
supposed to die, Beneath
all that Was your Doornfontein
Black Hole Heart And your bottle
of All Gold Tomato Sauce
I was sent forth from the power,
and I have come to those who reflect upon me,
and I have been found among those who seek after me.
Look upon me, you who reflect upon me,
and you hearers, hear me.
You who are waiting for me, take me to yourselves.
And do not banish me from your sight.
And do not make your voice hate me, nor your hearing.
Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time. Be on your guard!
Do not be ignorant of me.
For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter.
I am the members of my mother.
I am the barren one
and many are her sons.
I am she whose wedding is great,
and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the bridegroom,
and it is my husband who begot me.
I am the mother of my father
and the sister of my husband
and he is my offspring.
I am the slave of him who prepared me.
I am the ruler of my offspring.
But he is the one who begot me before the time on a birthday.
And he is my offspring in (due) time,
and my power is from him.
I am the staff of his power in his youth,
and he is the rod of my old age.
And whatever he wills happens to me.
I am the silence that is incomprehensible
and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.
I am the voice whose sound is manifold
and the word whose appearance is multiple.
I am the utterance of my name.
Why, you who hate me, do you love me,
and hate those who love me?
You who deny me, confess me,
and you who confess me, deny me.
You who tell the truth about me, lie about me,
and you who have lied about me, tell the truth about me.
You who know me, be ignorant of me,
and those who have not known me, let them know me.
For I am knowledge and ignorance.
I am shame and boldness.
I am shameless; I am ashamed.
I am strength and I am fear.
I am war and peace.
Give heed to me.
I am the one who is disgraced and the great one.
Give heed to my poverty and my wealth.
Do not be arrogant to me when I am cast out upon the earth,
and you will find me in those that are to come.
And do not look upon me on the dung-heap
nor go and leave me cast out,
and you will find me in the kingdoms.
And do not look upon me when I am cast out among those who
are disgraced and in the least places,
nor laugh at me.
And do not cast me out among those who are slain in violence.
But I, I am compassionate and I am cruel.
Be on your guard!
Do not hate my obedience
and do not love my self-control.
In my weakness, do not forsake me,
and do not be afraid of my power.
For why do you despise my fear
and curse my pride?
But I am she who exists in all fears
and strength in trembling.
I am she who is weak,
and I am well in a pleasant place.
I am senseless and I am wise.
Why have you hated me in your counsels?
For I shall be silent among those who are silent,
and I shall appear and speak,
Why then have you hated me, you Greeks?
Because I am a barbarian among the barbarians?
For I am the wisdom of the Greeks
and the knowledge of the barbarians.
I am the judgement of the Greeks and of the barbarians.
I am the one whose image is great in Egypt
and the one who has no image among the barbarians.
I am the one who has been hated everywhere
and who has been loved everywhere.
I am the one whom they call Life,
and you have called Death.
I am the one whom they call Law,
and you have called Lawlessness.
I am the one whom you have pursued,
and I am the one whom you have seized.
I am the one whom you have scattered,
and you have gathered me together.
I am the one before whom you have been ashamed,
and you have been shameless to me.
I am she who does not keep festival,
and I am she whose festivals are many.
I, I am godless,
and I am the one whose God is great.
I am the one whom you have reflected upon,
and you have scorned me.
I am unlearned,
and they learn from me.
I am the one that you have despised,
and you reflect upon me.
I am the one whom you have hidden from,
and you appear to me.
But whenever you hide yourselves,
I myself will appear.
For whenever you appear,
I myself will hide from you.
Those who have [...] to it [...] senselessly [...].
Take me [... understanding] from grief.
and take me to yourselves from understanding and grief.
And take me to yourselves from places that are ugly and in ruin,
and rob from those which are good even though in ugliness.
Out of shame, take me to yourselves shamelessly;
and out of shamelessness and shame,
upbraid my members in yourselves.
And come forward to me, you who know me
and you who know my members,
and establish the great ones among the small first creatures.
Come forward to childhood,
and do not despise it because it is small and it is little.
And do not turn away greatnesses in some parts from the smallnesses,
for the smallnesses are known from the greatnesses.
Why do you curse me and honor me?
You have wounded and you have had mercy.
Do not separate me from the first ones whom you have known.
And do not cast anyone out nor turn anyone away
[...] turn you away and [... know] him not.
[...].
What is mine [...].
I know the first ones and those after them know me.
But I am the mind of [...] and the rest of [...].
I am the knowledge of my inquiry,
and the finding of those who seek after me,
and the command of those who ask of me,
and the power of the powers in my knowledge
of the angels, who have been sent at my word,
and of gods in their seasons by my counsel,
and of spirits of every man who exists with me,
and of women who dwell within me.
I am the one who is honored, and who is praised,
and who is despised scornfully.
I am peace,
and war has come because of me.
And I am an alien and a citizen.
I am the substance and the one who has no substance.
Those who are without association with me are ignorant of me,
and those who are in my substance are the ones who know me.
Those who are close to me have been ignorant of me,
and those who are far away from me are the ones who have known me.
On the day when I am close to you, you are far away from me,
and on the day when I am far away from you, I am close to you.
[I am ...] within.
[I am ...] of the natures.
I am [...] of the creation of the spirits.
[...] request of the souls.
I am control and the uncontrollable.
I am the union and the dissolution.
I am the abiding and I am the dissolution.
I am the one below,
and they come up to me.
I am the judgment and the acquittal.
I, I am sinless,
and the root of sin derives from me.
I am lust in (outward) appearance,
and interior self-control exists within me.
I am the hearing which is attainable to everyone
and the speech which cannot be grasped.
I am a mute who does not speak,
and great is my multitude of words.
Hear me in gentleness, and learn of me in roughness.
I am she who cries out,
and I am cast forth upon the face of the earth.
I prepare the bread and my mind within.
I am the knowledge of my name.
I am the one who cries out,
and I listen.
I appear and [...] walk in [...] seal of my [...].
I am [...] the defense [...].
I am the one who is called Truth
and iniquity [...].
You honor me [...] and you whisper against me.
You who are vanquished, judge them (who vanquish you)
before they give judgment against you,
because the judge and partiality exist in you.
If you are condemned by this one, who will acquit you?
Or, if you are acquitted by him, who will be able to detain you?
For what is inside of you is what is outside of you,
and the one who fashions you on the outside
is the one who shaped the inside of you.
And what you see outside of you, you see inside of you;
it is visible and it is your garment.
Hear me, you hearers
and learn of my words, you who know me.
I am the hearing that is attainable to everything;
I am the speech that cannot be grasped.
I am the name of the sound
and the sound of the name.
I am the sign of the letter
and the designation of the division.
And I [...].
(3 lines missing)
[...] light [...].
[...] hearers [...] to you
[...] the great power.
And [...] will not move the name.
[...] to the one who created me.
And I will speak his name.
Look then at his words
and all the writings which have been completed.
Give heed then, you hearers
and you also, the angels and those who have been sent,
and you spirits who have arisen from the dead.
For I am the one who alone exists,
and I have no one who will judge me.
For many are the pleasant forms which exist in numerous sins,
and incontinencies,
and disgraceful passions,
and fleeting pleasures,
which (men) embrace until they become sober
and go up to their resting place.
And they will find me there,
and they will live,
and they will not die again.
26
With the generalized separation of the worker and his products, every unitary view of accomplished activity and all direct personal communication among producers are lost. Accompanying the progress of accumulation of separate products and the concentration of the productive process, unity and communication become the exclusive attribute of the system’s management. The success of the economic system of separation is the proletarianization of the world.
Psalter and Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg
A life-size arme Christi, the side wound of Christ, or “the entrance to Christ’s heart”
It was ten years after the Lady Chatterley trial until ‘cunt’ hit the headlines again, when “the most offensive word you can use on British TV” (James Doorne, 2007) was uttered for the first time on live television in 1970. David Frost was interviewing the Yippies during ITV’s The Frost Programme, and introduced Jerry Rubin as “a reasonable man”. Felix Dennis shouted back, jokingly, “He’s not a reasonable man, he’s the most unreasonable cunt I’ve ever known in my life!”. There ensued an atmosphere of general pandemonium; Dennis admitted to behaving “bloody abominably” (Richard Cowles and Colin Campbell, 2002) and Rosie Boycott later accused him of “wreak[ing] havoc on live television [and] effectively [bringing] the show to a standstill” (Andy Baybutt, 2002).
The very nature of live broadcasting makes unexpected events a distinct possibility. If a programme is broadcast live, mistakes cannot be rectified in the editing room, and advantage can be taken of the situation because a live broadcast allows unfiltered access to the airwaves.
The first scripted use of ‘cunt’ on television – the first time its use was premeditated by a broadcaster, in contrast to the unforeseen use by the Yippies – was in the ITV drama No Mama No:
“What did he say?”
“He said your Dr Cawston is a cunt” (1979).
Verity Lambert persuaded the Independent Broadcasting Authority that the use of ‘cunt’ was dramatically valid: “I had a lot of correspondence with the IBA about that word. I think it was a real insult, and she needed to say that particular word. And, in the end, to be fair to them, they accepted that as an explanation” (Kerry Richardson, 1994). By contrast, American television was a ‘cunt’-free zone until as late as 1994, when chat-show host Phil Donahue used the word “in relating and condemning an employer’s insult to a female employee” (Jesse Scheidlower, 1995).
Such is the word’s scarcity on television that several programmes have been erroneously credited with being the first to broadcast it. Auberon Waugh cites No Mama No as “perhaps the first use on television of the most controversial word of all” (Kerry Richardson, 1994), though, as noted previously, ‘cunt’ was scripted into this 1979 drama nine years after it was uttered live on The Frost Programme.
Years later, John Walsh confidently declared that ‘cunt’ was used on live TV for the first time as late as 2002: “It is, or was, the last linguistic taboo, the final insult, the unsayable word. [...] But now history has been made. For probably the first time, someone has said the “c-word” live on British television”. Walsh was referring to This Morning, the live daytime ITV programme during which Caprice, discussing her role in The Vagina Monologues, mentioned the section “called Reclaiming Cunt” (Siubhan Richmond, 2002). This was certainly groundbreaking, as the word was spoken on morning television, though it was clearly not the first time the word had ever been broadcast live.
A similar mistake was made by Matthew Beard and Victoria Coren, both of whom mistakenly claimed that the 2003 drama Witchcraze marked the BBC’s first broadcast of the dreaded word. In C-Word Allowed To Make Debut On BBC Television, Beard wrote that “A drama-documentary on witches on BBC2 is to risk the wrath of viewers by featuring the “C-word” – previously considered so unutterable that it has never been passed by BBC television censors” (2003). Coren agreed that “[in Witchcraze] BBC airwaves played host for the very first time to what I believe the more delicate members of society refer to as ‘the c-word’” (2003). The Sun also gleefully announced that Witchcraze would “break one of TV’s last taboos” (C-Word Shock, 2003).
The Channel 4 drama Mosley was yet another programme incorrectly cited as the first to contain the word ‘cunt’. In its final episode, a prison guard shouted “You cunt!” (Robert Knights, 1998) at the eponymous character. This, predictably, caused revulsion from the Mail On Sunday, which reported that Channel 4 “will break the last taboo over bad language on television [...] with the deliberate use of the only word in the English language considered more offensive than the F-word” (Michael Burke, 1998). The newspaper did not print ‘cunt’ itself, though it solemnly proclaimed the word to be “an anatomical reference [which is] deeply offensive to women in particular”.
The Mail declared that ‘cunt’ “has not been scripted into a mainstream television drama before”, though this is incorrect on two counts. Firstly, Mosley is not a mainstream drama, as Channel 4 is not a mainstream channel; secondly, ‘cunt’ had appeared previously, in the mainstream ITV drama No Mama No. Regarding Mosley, Laurence Marks explained that the decision to include ‘cunt’ was not an easy one to make: “it is intensely powerful [...] we debated long and hard about using the word. There were many on the production team who thought we should not. The word is the most reviled single utterance in the English language [...] We know this word will jar but it was used for dramatic effect” (Michael Burke, 1998). (The word appeared in another prison drama, Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead, when it was forcibly tattooed onto a prisoner’s forehead.)
Tabloid journalists leaping to conclusions is one thing, though Irvine Welsh should really know better. Welsh confidently declared in 2003 that ‘cunt’ was first broadcast in a programme he had written eight years previously: “the word cunt was first aired on TV in my drama The Granton Star Cause in 1996″. This drama, broadcast by Channel 4, contains perhaps more c-words than any other programme, though it was, of course, far from the first instance of the word being broadcast.
The premiere appearance of ‘cunt’ in the press is a matter of equally contentious debate. When, in 1988, Mike Gatting publicly criticised a cricket umpire with the phrase “fucking, cheating cunt”, The Independent was the only newspaper to publish his comments unexpurgated. Bill Bryson has since claimed that this marked “the first time that cunt had appeared in a British newspaper” (1990), as has Ian Jack: “”Cunt” as well as “fucking” was included, perhaps the word’s first appearance in a British newspaper” (2002).
In fact, ‘cunt’ had appeared in The Times the year before, in an article by Bernard Levin. Levin criticised the common newspaper practice of asterisking swearwords, commenting sarcastically that “If the words are printed with only their initial letters, followed by asterisks [...] they are at once and entirely robbed of their dreadful power” (1987). He then went on to quote unasterisked lines from the poem V:
“Aspirations, cunt! Folk on t’fucking dole
‘ave got about as much scope to aspire
above the shit they’re dumped in, cunt, as coal
aspires to be chucked on t’fucking fire. [...]
Yer’ve given yerself toffee, cunt. Who needs
yer fucking poufy words. Ah write mi own” (Tony Harrison, 1985).
Levin’s article marks the one and only occasion that The Times has printed ‘cunt’ uncensored. David Glencross, writing in The Observer, was nonplussed by the article: “When an extract [from V was] printed in The Times, embedded in an article by Bernard Levin, the social fabric of the nation survive[d]” (1987), though Levin’s fellow Times columnist Ronald Butt castigated him for “[choosing] to reproduce a verse of unmitigated obscenity [...] in what was clearly a gratuitous taboo-breaking exercise” (1987).
V was also published unexpurgated in The Independent shortly after The Times’s extracts, with a warning regarding its “SEXUALLY EXPLICIT LANGUAGE” (Blake Morrison, 1987). These extracts in The Times and The Independent came months before Mike Gatting’s cricket outburst, though they were overshadowed by the controversy surrounding V’s recital on television.
However, the very first usage of ‘cunt’ in a newspaper occurred as long ago as the 1970s, more than a decade before The Times and The Independent were brave enough to print it. The word appears in a 1974 interview with Marianne Faithfull, published in The Guardian. The writer, Janet Watts, introduces Faithfull as a woman who is not afraid to speak her mind: “She used not to read what people wrote, because she got to believe it: now, she’s easy about it, relaxing into words I think she thinks I can’t print”. Watts then quotes Faithfull’s reactions to negative reviews: “If they think I’m a whoo-er [sic.], they’re entitled to say it: just as I’m entitled to think they’re a cunt for saying it”.
keep reading this article here
by gregory and maria pearse
“Here we are at the threshold.
This is the most important moment of your lives.
You have to know that here
your most cherished wish will come true.
The most sincere one.
The one reached through suffering.”
(from STALKER)
In the entire history of cinema there has never been a director, who has made such a dramatic stand for the human spirit as did Andrei Tarkovsky. Today, when cinema seems to have drowned in a sea of glamorized triviality, when human relationships on screen have been reduced to sexual intrigue or sloppy sentimentality, and baseness rules the day – this man appears as a lone warrior standing in the midst of this cinematic catastrophe, holding up the banner for human spirituality.
What puts this director in a class all his own and catapults his films onto a height inaccessible to other filmmakers? It is, first and foremost, his uncompromising stance that man is a SPIRITUAL being. This may appear to be self-evident to some, and yet it is just on this very point that 99% of cinema fails. Man’s spirituality is quickly and conveniently pushed aside in favor of other more “exciting” topics: man’s sexuality, man’s psychology, sociology and so on. In today’s cinema, if spirituality is dealt with at all, it is never treated as the foundation of our existence, but is there as an appendage, something the characters concern themselves with in their spare time. In other words, while in other films spirituality may be PART of the plot, in Tarkovsky’s films it IS the plot; it permeates the very fabric of his films. It can be said that his films vibrate with his own spirituality. As he himself states, in all of his films the main characters undergo a SPIRITUAL crisis.
This is particularly evident in his film Stalker, where ALL of the characters are involved in an intense spiritual struggle. And while the nature of this struggle is uniquely personal for each of them, the basic objective is the same: to keep the flame of the human spirit within them alive. The character of the Stalker, in particular, is the most fascinating example of the human being struggling to find the right path by using his intuition (that is, by listening to his “inner voice”). And since most people are used to following only their worldly desires in carving out their path in life (paying little or no attention to this “inner voice”), Stalker’s behavior produces a reaction of bewilderment – not only in his companions in the film, but also in the majority of the viewers. Instead of rushing through the “Zone” (representing life), grabbing and tasting and plundering everything in his path, he proceeds with caution, as though listening WITHIN himself, watching for signs to indicate the next move to him, careful not to disturb anything around him. What is it that he is listening to, waiting for, hoping to comprehend? It is the language of the “Zone”, which is the language of life itself – the language, in which the Creator speaks to us through life. This is, perhaps, the most unique quality of Tarkovsky’s cinema (which also accounts for his unique cinematic style of incredibly long takes and slowly-pulsating rhythm): he is observing the very language of life, as though hoping in this way to “hear” the language of God.
And there are other unique qualities, which make Tarkovsky stand out not only as a director, but as a human being: his insistence that conscience is “the most important thing” and his attempt to make other filmmakers aware of “the fact that the most convincing of the arts demands a special responsibilty on the part of those who work in it: the methods by which cinema affects audiences can be used far more easily and rapidly for their moral decomposition, for the destruction of their spiritual defenses, than the means of the old, more traditional art forms.” (from “Sculpting in Time”.) Unfortunately, his words fell upon deaf ears. But he continued to emphasize the need to take personal responsibility for our destiny and not blame others or society for it. He wrote:
“It is so much easier to slip down than it is to rise one iota above your own narrow, opportunist motives. A true spiritual birth is extraordinarily hard to achieve.”
“. . . nobody wants, or can bring himself, to look soberly into himself and accept that he is accountable for his own life and his own soul.”
“The connection between man’s behaviour and his destiny has been destroyed; and this tragic breach is the cause of his sense of instability in the modern world. . . . [man] has arrived at the false and deadly assumption that he has no part to play in shaping his own fate.”
“I am convinced that any attempt to restore harmony in the world can only rest on the renewal of personal responsibility.”
There seems to be little reason to attempt an analysis of Tarkovsky’s films, since no one can do it better than he himself has already done in his book “Sculpting in Time”. And, anyhow, since his films strive to reach out to the spirit within us and convey to us a spiritual experience, each one of us will take away from them something uniquely personal. But in each case, it will be something which will move us on a deep spiritual level – much deeper than emotion! This level of experiencing is akin to a state of NOSTALGHIA. Here the word “nostalghia”, which one of Tarkovsky’s films bears as its title, is to be understood not in the English sense of “nostalgia”, but in the sense it has in the Russian language: a state of unquenchable longing for one’s homeland. And since the homeland of the spirit lies far above this earth, “nostalghia” of the spirit for the Light is that inexplicable longing we feel when nothing on earth seems to satisfy us, nothing seems to come up to that ideal of harmony and beauty, which we carry deep inside us as a vague memory from our distant homeland. Far from being an imaginary place dreamt up by poets, it is a place as real as the earth – and it is precisely the reality of that memory, which the poets in all branches of the arts throughout all the ages have tried to convey to us. Tarkovsky himself stated that he was not satisfied with the screenplay for his film Nostalghia until he succeeded in expanding the more narrow concept of Russian “nostalghia” (the longing to return to Russia) into a more profound “global yearning for the wholeness of existence,” so that the film “came together at last into a kind of metaphysical whole.”
A great illustration of this state of nostalghia of the spirit for things not of this earth is the poem by Tarkovsky’s father (Arseniy Tarkovsky), which he put into his film Stalker:
Now summer has passed,
As if it had never been.
It is warm in the sun.
But this isn’t enough.
All that might have been,
Like a five-cornered leaf
Fell right into my hands,
But this isn’t enough.
Neither evil nor good
Had vanished in vain,
It all burnt with white light,
But this isn’t enough.
Life took me under its wing,
Preserved and protected,
Indeed I have been lucky.
But this isn’t enough.
Not a leaf had been scorched,
Not a branch broken off. . .
The day wiped clean as clear glass,
But this isn’t enough.
(translated by Maria Pearse)
It is a sad and irrefutable fact that the overwhelming majority of the population has decided to bury this precious gift of longing for the Light deep within them. Tarkovsky clearly perceived this – “. . . it’s only possible to communicate with the audience if one ignores that eighty percent of people who for some reason have got it into their heads that we are supposed to entertain them” – yet with every film he continued to try to reawaken this sense of longing within his audiences. He felt it was his duty and his calling to give expression to that which is “innermost” in the souls of his viewers, even if they themslves are not aware of it.
Those of us, whose spirits have been touched by his films will recall from them our own special moments:
*** it may be the apple cart with the two children in Ivan’s Childhood (aka My Name is Ivan), which reawakens within us the longing for the lost purity of childhood;
*** it may be that sequence in Mirror, when Tarkovsky depicts his parents as a young couple lying on the grass, already anticipating his birth, and the man asks the woman: “Who do you want more: a boy or a girl?” The woman says nothing, but her eyes move around searchingly until she suddenly turns away from the camera as if looking into the mystery of Creation. Tarkovsky then cuts to the trees as the wind rustles through their leaves with the opening strains of J.S. Bach’s “St. John’s Passion” coming closer and closer towards us until the jubilant outcry of the chorus: “Lord! Lord! Master! Unto Thee be praise and glory evermore!” Where else has the entrance of a human being into this world been depicted wih such awe and such sublime spirituality?!
*** or it may be those brief moments of zero gravity in Solaris, when the main character and his beloved levitate (Tarkovsky felt that levitation was the most accurate cinematic depiction of the state of love).
*** or, perhaps, it is the moment of Stalker’s breakdown on the very threshold of the Room “where all wishes are granted.”
*** or that moment in Andrei Rublev, when we learn that an impoverished young man who put up a front that he knew a special secret of bellmaking, didn’t know anything after all – and yet, through his intuition and a desperate prayer, still made the greatest bell ever.
*** or the final sequence of Nostalghia with its three attempts by the main character to carry a lit candle from one side of an old, empty pool to the other in his conviction that he is carrying the flame of the human spirit across. And when he finally makes it to the other side, the opening of Verdi’s Requiem comes in. Is it not the requiem for all those masses, who have so cruelly neglected their own spirits that they are now about to fall into the eternal sleep of spiritual death?
All of these sequences are cinematic depictions of a spiritual nostalghia for the Light. It can even be said of Tarkovsky that he lived his whole life in a state of such nostalghia, regardless of whether he was in Russia or abroad. All his life he kept trying to uncover deeper and deeper levels of meaning to our existence. Upon arriving in the West, he took immediate advantage of his new freedom by reading through the voluminous works of Gurdjieff – only to be ultimately disappointed, but the important thing is that he explored every new opportunity.
He also took some wrong turns. Reflecting on what he had to go through in his life to bring his films into being, he wrote: “And so it’s always the audience who win, who gain something, while the artist loses, and has to pay out.” It’s become almost a tradition that a great artist should also be a martyr. The martyrdom complex seems to have a strange appeal to many artists and even the best of them, like Tarkovsky, Bresson and Paradjanov, find themselves unable to resist its magnetic pull. In reality, it is just the opposite of what Tarkovsky had stated: it is always the artist, who gains most of all, because it is his spirit that advances through this artistic exertion (when it is applied in an upward direction, of course, like in Tarkovsky’s case), while the audience can gain from it only as much as they are capable of recognizing and thus re-experiencing in their own way. But the artist possesses all of that experience; it is totally his own spiritual gain. The Perfect Justice of God does not allow the one, who exerted himself the most (namely, the artist) to “lose and have to pay out,” while the ones, who exerted themselves the least (namely, the audience) “to win”. The same Justice does not permit the sacrifice of an innocent life of ANY being in exchange for the sins of others. One cannot drive a bargain with God as Alexander attempts to do in The Sacrifice. The demands that are now being made upon humanity by the Light are much more exacting than that. One spastic act will not suffice; a whole NEW and SUSTAINED way of living is required. A complete transformation of man into a totally spiritualized being at last! To make this transformation possible for those, who wish to follow this Call from out of the Light, the New Knowledge is given in the book “In the Light of Truth: the Grail Message” by Abd-ru-shin.
One of the last things Tarkovsky said on his deathbed (as reported by his wife) was: “It is time for a new direction.” This is reminiscent of Lev Tolstoy’s last words: “To seek, always to seek . . .” With this kind of attitude one advances rapidly both here and in the beyond. What drives the seeking spirit onward in its quest for Truth is an unquenchable longing described so well in the following quote by Pavel Florensky (1882-1943), a Russian philosopher, who died in a Stalinist labor camp:
“I do not know whether there is Truth or not. But I instinctively feel that I cannot be without It. And I know that if It is, then It is everything for me: reason, and good, and strength, and life, and happiness. Perhaps It is not; but I love It – love is more than everything that exists. I already count It as existing, and I love It – though perhaps non-existent – with all my soul and all my thinking and dreaming. I renounce everything for It – even my questions and my doubts.”
When all is said and done, we are left with – perhaps, not even an image – but a sound from Stalker of a train whistle far off in the distance, calling us to leave our old, familiar life behind and to seek out a new way to bring the spirit within us to true life.
“MAN is not really meant to live according to the conceptions which have hitherto prevailed, but should be more of an intuitively perceptive human being. In that way he would form an essential connecting-link for the further development of the whole Creation.
Because he unites in himself the ethereal of the beyond and the gross material of this world, it is possible for him to survey both and to experience both simultaneously. In addition he also has at his disposal an instrument that puts him at the head of the entire Gross Material Creation: the intellect. With this instrument he is able to guide, thus to lead.
Intellect is the highest of what is earthly, and is meant to be the steering element through life on earth, whereas the driving power is the intuitive perception, which originates in the Spiritual World. The basis of the intellect therefore is the physical body, but the basis of the intuitive perception is the spirit.
As a product of the brain, which belongs to the gross material body, the intellect, like all that is earthly, is bound to the earthly conception of time and space. The intellect will never be able to work outside time and space, although it is actually more ethereal than the body, but nevertheless still too dense and heavy to rise above earthly conceptions of time and space. Hence it is completely earthbound.
But the intuitive perception (not the feeling) is timeless and spaceless, and therefore comes from the Spiritual.
Thus equipped, man could be closely connected with the finest ethereal, indeed even be in touch with the spiritual itself, and yet live and work in the midst of all that is earthly, gross material. Only man is endowed in this way.
He alone, as the only bridge between the Luminous Heights and the gross material earthly, should and could provide the healthy, fresh connection! Only through him in his special nature could the pure Life from the Source of Light pulsate downwards into the deepest gross material, and from there upwards again in the most glorious, harmonious reciprocal action! He stands as a link between the two worlds, so that through him these are welded into one world.
However, he did not fulfil this task. He separated these two worlds instead of keeping them firmly united. And that was the Fall of Man! -
Through the special nature just explained man was really destined to become a kind of lord of the Gross Material World, because the Gross Material World depends on his mediation, inasmuch as, according to his nature, it was forced to suffer with him or could be uplifted through him, depending on whether the currents from the Source of Light and Life could flow in purity through mankind or not.
But man cut off the flow of this alternating current necessary for the Ethereal World and for the Gross Material World. Now just as a good blood circulation keeps the body fresh and healthy, so is it with the alternating current in Creation. Cutting it off must bring confusion and illness, finally ending in catastrophes.
This serious failure on the part of man could come about because he did not use the intellect, which originates only in gross matter, solely as an instrument, but completely subjected himself to it, making it ruler over all. He thus made himself the slave of his instrument and became merely intellectual man, who is in the habit of proudly calling himself a materialist!
By subjecting himself entirely to the intellect, man chained himself to all that is gross material. Just as the intellect cannot grasp anything beyond the earthly conception of time and space, obviously the man who has completely subjected himself to it cannot do so either. His horizon, that is his ability to comprehend, became narrow together with the limited ability of the intellect.
The connection with the Ethereal was thus severed, a wall was erected which became dense and ever denser. Since the Source of Life, the Primordial Light, God, is far above time and space and still stands far above the Ethereal, naturally every contact must be cut off through the binding of the intellect. For this reason it is quite impossible for the materialist to recognise God.
The eating from the tree of knowledge was nothing more than the cultivation of the intellect. The resulting separation from the Ethereal was also the closing of Paradise as a natural consequence. Mankind locked themselves out by inclining wholly towards the gross material through the intellect, thus degrading themselves, and voluntarily or of their own choice placing themselves in bondage.
But where did this lead? The purely materialistic, thus earthbound and inferior thoughts of the intellect, with all their accompanying manifestations of acquisitiveness, greed, falsehood, robbery, oppression, sensuality and so on, were bound to bring about the inexorable reciprocal action of what is homogeneous, which formed everything accordingly, drove men onwards, and will finally burst over everything with … annihilation!
A World judgment, which in accordance with the existing Laws of Creation cannot be avoided. As with a gathering thunderstorm, which must finally burst and bring destruction. But at the same time also purification!…
But then men will fulfil that which they should fulfil in Creation. They will be the connecting-link, will through their quality draw from the Spiritual, that is, will let themselves be guided by the purified intuitive perception, and translate this into the Gross Material, thus into the earthly, to this end using their intellect and accumulated experiences only as an instrument, in order to carry through these pure intuitive perceptions in gross material life, taking into account everything earthly, whereby the entire Gross Material Creation will be continually furthered, purified and uplifted.” (Abd-ru-shin, “IN THE LIGHT OF TRUTH: THE GRAIL MESSAGE”, chapter “Man in Creation”)
this article originally appeared here
*
Everything was necessary.
Otherwise it wouldn’t have happened.
*
I kissed an eclipse
when you gasped my name
coming
*
Pork
is three-legged
a real man-cat
Peach
knows exactly
how to swish
her question-mark
Their libido
is a ghost
they still chase
in empty
blind ritual
Had I the means
I would buy back
their viscera
watch them claw the dragon
for real
if the memory of you
could be custom-filed
in the cabinets of my lonely heart
and a bachelor basement flat
i would put you in a plastic bag
deprive your vessel of dignity and air
and hide you under a brick
at the bottom of the toilet bowl
DIVAN
Attending one of the performances was Divan. Ampleby had noticed her on the Wednesday nights, dancing alone in a corner, wearing a short pale blue dress. The combination of pale blue dress and blond hair was fairy-like, something out of a children’s story. She was dancing as if she was exploring, trying to find an African rhythm within the music. Quite unlike anybody else. Divan was studying drama at the University and had become increasingly uninspired by the lack of creative foresight from the lecturers. In fact, they allowed very little input from the students. She had been attending ballet lessons from the age of seven. Her blond-white hair when wound up into a tight ballet-bun, seemed to be thin and wispy. Yet when shaken loose, it became full bodied. Her white skin looked as if it had never seen the sun, and she wore thick book-worm rimless glasses. In fact she was an avid reader. She had the most remarkable intelligence. She persistently questioned thoughts, actions, outcomes. To the nth degree. A mind like this in a female he had never come across before. Yet, given make-up, contact lenses, hair teased and tousled, she transformed into a porcelain doll. A porcelain doll in a leotard. Curvaceous. Flawless and beautifully proportioned. Audiences were to become fascinated by her.
Meanwhile, the resident dj at Rumours walked out under pressure from the Friday and Saturday clubbers, now dissatisfied with his style of djing. Ampleby whose dress sense had become quite outrageous – no shoes, kokoi worn nappy-style, beads crisscross across chest, was immediately offered his job. He searched through shops in Indiatown (Grey street, Durban) and Diagonal Street in JHB for that special African print to make bold colourful shirts. He particularly liked the bold print of a red Africa on black cotton. Or leopards in black, leaping across azure blue. But ‘in club sense’ it was the time of the New Romantics: Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, Visage, and fashion sense generally centred around loosely fitted white shirts and black trousers. This dress sense was the link through from SKA, as the New Romantics would become the link into Goth. As a performer he constantly searched for new forms of dance expression. His times on the dance floor thus served a dual purpose – periods of experimentation, of searching, and periods of expression and release, dancing out the wildness of the political ineptitudes. It was thus that his dance floor discoveries permeated into the clubbers, creating a dance floor style unique to Durban. In fact there were those that came to the club specifically to watch him dance: they would sit quietly, unobtrusively.
CHLORELL
It was late one Saturday evening. around 1am, that Ampleby met Chlorell. She was barely 18 and a bleach blond of note. She had obviously been looking for somewhere to go after her work in Pinetown as an exotic dancer came to an end. She took an immediate interest in Ampleby. Warning bells rang the minute he saw her. He told her he was homosexual at his first opportunity – when she came to make a request. She said she was glad to hear it. She had a very distinctive and individual way of dressing, and apart from her glaring beauty, stood out in a crowd. You noticed her the minute she walked into the room. She danced zombie-like, in a trance, arms bent at shoulder level pounding into the air, hardly moving from the same spot, trade mark knee high boots. Men surrounded her like bee to pollen. Her presence and magnetism were undeniable. She wore extremely provocative clothing. Her short shorts were so short that her pubic hairs protruded out the side of the hem. Men literally panted around her, she, seemingly oblivious. As a way of diverting them, she told them that she was ‘into the dj’. Not to be deterred, they hung around until closing time, usually around 5am. Ampleby and Chlorell hardly ever spoke, and they parted company when the club closed its doors. It was usual custom for him to be paid before leaving in the early hours of Sunday morning. The owner always dragged this procedure out, causing Ampleby to have to hang around, at a loose end, the party long since over. One morning, the owner became infuriated when a group of males refused to leave after Chlorell had complained to him. Suddenly, and without warning, he took out a baton and began beating the hell out of them. The viciousness was alarming. There was blood everywhere. A young man who happened to have left the club earlier and had returned not knowing that the club had closed, felt the full force of this violent outbreak! Blood was streaming down his face. The violence made Ampleby ill. Something in him broke. He was unable to apply the same intent and energy into his dj work.
RUMOURS CLOSURE
Shortly after this, RUMOURS closed down. The owner found himself having to fend off death threats. You can’t just slam up a group of people and expect to get a way with it. However, Ampleby experienced his first slap in the face. He only knew that the club had been closed when he arrived to dj. The doors were locked. There was nobody around. That was it.
By the fireside the four all sang criminal songs and drank a lot of vodka and told stories under the influence of the moon.
Skiraphorion leaned over to him at one point, his face silhouetted in the flickering glow of the flames. He said with a heavy Russian accent: “Listen. Amerika, OK. Two hundred years. Two hundred years old. Yes. But also two hundred years of perversion! They destroy all the Indians. Look at the people that went there. Fifty percent criminals, thirty percent troublemakers and twenty percent religious fanatics.”
He knew that Skiraphorion was right. Something had happened in Amerika which had changed the face of the world. For example, when he had travelled to Portugal the previous summer he could see a deep relation between the people there and their land. He could see that those people had come out of that landscape.
But Amerika was something quite else. In Amerika one had the distinct and unsettling sensation that here was a country where the indigenous population had been exterminated and that a bunch of foreigners, without any understanding of the land, came in and started building cities everywhere without any sensitivity.
But here, as he sat by the fire, all he needed was a house built of old gray wood, some bread, sausages and vodka. No need for the complications, and therefore no need for the possibilities of the West. He knew that Europa was entering a similar phase as had occurred in Amerika, in that it was breaking with its history in order to gain some vague notion of freedom. And like the system which developed in Amerika, which had been composed of so many nationalities but made blind by an unified destruction of culture, so Europa had made a similar choice- to collectively unify their production. This was not a cultural revolution, it was a business revolution. Europa was falling apart as it was coming together.
As he looked at the moon, with the flames of the fire roaring beneath it, he thought of Ezra Pound. Pound thought he had the chance to escape Amerika, and took an opportunity to run away to Italy. He went to Italy because of the culture and its Mediterranean mythology. But when he arrived he found, already in the 1920s, a desecration of the ethnic Italian tradition and a move towards an Amerikanisation of lifestyle and production. As a result Pound joined up with the fascists, which he felt was the only real force powerful enough to stop the dreadful eclipse. Interestingly enough, 30 years later the anti-fascist filmmaker Pasolini came to precisely the same conclusion, despite the fact that he was coming from the opposite political position. His last film Salo, which was a very coded film and therefore often misunderstood, was about the degeneration of Italian youth and the breakdown of Italian heritage through consumerism, the fascism of desire.
Amerikans, who treat Europa as a kind of monumental Disneyland, can never understand the amount of destruction that had taken place in such a short amount of time. And not only that, but even the new generations of Europeans, enchan-ted by the hallucinations of the mass media and technology, could no longer comprehend this wicked turn of events.
6
At the Office.
The computer is contended in its hibernation, and balls of frustration leave him glowering. This Elysium was entrenched by humanity with a diseased heart. He tosses and turns in this solitary chair. The minerals of his soul are to be spent here…in the orb of strife – life’s celestial dimension marked with bullet-laced walls and other uniform monuments of phallic programming. From through the window to the outside…a prison is in sight. Slim windows visited by pigeons fallen from a winter’s crystal welkin, the men in there are slaves to their first attempts at freedom. To manifest the will restrained by norm was once the sole aim of their criminal genius. And the brave…who dared fate to cramp them, they are finding deeds of their past too premature now.
He too was here, since his retaliation to the pangs of an empty tripe got him nervous. Now, he was ordained to loose his mind to a blind-folded skull, before the days of his resurrection, whence his spirit’s incense would ooze from the screens of eyes.
Not until yesterday did all gags he used to conceal the tongues of his misery fall apart. A fathomless enemy within discredited his knowledge of his nature, divested his self of all inquiry into the ultimate end of his flight. He couldn’t reduce his mnemonic frame to a platitude – a paint-pool of abstractions, since the mystic reach of depression balled shut its tentacles upon his void.
Left to unravel the impulsion towards the causes of his fallacy, he never brought quit the overstraining objections which were relayed unto him with the less he conceived.
Not until today did he realize that need was sorely for not wanting to pillage his story upon others. All was conceivable that the vigil the stars kept was never enough to render unto him any angelic secret. He reeled along the shores of his anger with the gods whose knowledge he had nurtured, yet nothing awoke them for his respite so hastily needed. Now that the same stars tethered wet in a sky – he felt cuffed to electric clouds and other minions of fumes ejaculated by factory pipes, in their eternal orgasm with men and women nude with cancerous shame. He knew by the scars on many that they’d learned respect for others.
[WORK]
He types unto himself. A command. An further confesses unto his sloven alter-ego that:
To write is to contaminate thought. An encumbrance to any raked prophet, whence the
pangs of self-will wrought with the unction of spiritual trifling…those growls ludicrous and melancholy, fuel the laments of the dismantled cranium. A hypocritical indictment on language hence the mind’s disdain for replies to life’s inquisitions…
To write these sparse sorrows is fruitless but true and at its time’s function – this dribbled speech without breath, rasping the throat similarly with recycled creeds from hearts feigning age. Take words already jotted unto blades and carve a reconstruction to utter new impressions, since no thought is original. The purpose is the mark of difference…
Enthused by assimilation – the craze of pain so common to many…the words becoming the fleeting admiration for habits and bibles of fixations churned at any finger’s lost repute. They mask the regrettable distance of a flawed memory; that effusive visage ever constrained by the litany of eternal births. Souls of a wretch fragmented into coded attempts of erasure, cancellations of salty human experiences. Now, that is the nature of words – postponing misery and incarcerating terror>
Patronizing its death, the first word art written in MIND, that all others would conjure a pretense toward its completeness, unspoken, yet tattooed. It exists independent of a medium to unravel it, such as thought requires no brain to think it out. Thus I realize that I have not a technique of interface with this necessary scourge, I textualize too mechanically…a cheap satanic verse churned from an eventual Blind and Deaf puppet > Transforming merely excited nerves to work with an artistic principle of a super objectivism. I need embrace a monologue of battle on impulses to repeat with precision my scores of inter-relating in-tensions. Remembering also that these impulses that constantly draw us into life’s tragic sanctum of visions art cynical mockeries not to be dismissed as empty. To focus on the benefits is to trivialize tragedy. Recognize not only that language as flesh’s yield can penetrate any rejection, but that it art rendered impossible to diagnose in terms of black and white, even inextricable from its deadness>.
Be unpredictable, a poet rendered inarticulate and plagued by inner contradictions and vestigial critiques on truth > that animus within, united with the great silent aegis of psychic automatism by which one possesses to express…THE WORD…the functioning of thought > Not a mere measure of participation ‘in the scheme of things’ thought. Start first from an abstract enquiry into the possibilities developed and fostered by sensations, expressing a poetic trance. Corrupt all with imitations of accidental aspects of the immemorial intuition in a formed set of particulars > those extracts of a dead mirror – what is not, yet becoming. Aim at a profound thought-dictatorship that should be enough to resemble without being.
At the level of such ideas, nothing should be a reborn error on past tenses (tensions), nor a boded chortle in social defense of narcotic morale. We are patriots of our own worlds not any other linked to the reciprocal objectivist fatigue now paralyzing all recesses of language. All BEING revealed unto us, guarantees the BEING of actions apart from actuating themselves. And thus, word REALIZES (make real) itself as the author of unrealized lives.
First chose to cut-out words from articles of text and frozen ideas. These randomly place on an empty blade…and commence their automatic rearrangement in an order of their coincidental alignment. For the poet who curses the spoken, the aim is to vulgarize any linguistic rationality, suffocate language and sanctify the disintegrated nomads at Memory’s Death Consummation.
Whence he is spurred into the abyss self-ingesting and spewing; love-lost affront a death-platter filled with human scorn…his displeasure conjures up like a foggy multiplicity at those gallows inside time’s freeze, an idiot-housing; the human drudge, a cauldron new-born in complete abandon of that rippling pond of his eternal guilt. This modicum would then augur a pious supplementation unto the fates, that which would unwind their kingdom of precipitous obsessions mortally in him…those instinctual plagues by nostalgia for expatiated flesh.
‘Fuck, Can’t be caught sleeping at work.’
WHAT was he supposed to do at work?
[WORK] He types further.
[DO] Don’t just do…DO SOMETHING
[WORK]
AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE…….swarm…. churning savage beats…EXCESSES-
AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE- INWARD ECHOEING THE DICTUM THAT HE WAS A SLAVE TO WAKING FOR SALE. A castration not self-inflicted…the chords of guilt dangle affront his wound. Paces towards places provided for those allergic to hunger. Hoards who require starvation to WORK-AWAKE-TO CURB THEIR SATANIC HEDONISMS.
AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE…….PUNDIT…till the screen renders paralytic…the shield abound the psychic prison. Psychic soldiers dormant and awaiting command-COMMAND FOR WAR with the… AWAKE-WORKING-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE…KEYHOLES AND LOW-ENERGIES…defiled inheritances of mused mothers…AWAKENING WORKING AND WORKING AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE.-LUNCH-hour to masturbate over orgiastic meal machines. [WORK] to curb their hunger from translating into sexual convulsions which yielded plagues of human dung…. AWAKE-WORKING-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE-WORK-AWAKE…Work it as IT does you… awake for the sale of your gonads. [IN]
[POPULATION CONTROL…WORKERS DON’T HAVE TIME TO FUCK…and continue the spill of human murk. The swarm…working WORK-AWAKE.
He prepares a leave at its hour – another way to knead an insult towards his cage-keepers. Sweet bile in the belly – bright theatre looming – his leave outbidding his eyes from the coin-shackle. There is a metal cage in an abyss of death’s war-zone, elevating the grounded. A pernicious dream-fellow with other contraptions for the work-sick is sledging crossing the floors, cascading over stagnant blood. A screw drive slit across the hallowed spinal curves, thrust and impaled just inches from the cord. The obtuse manner of his walk…trudging alone not as gore, in the special hour of sundown.
The city out the windows laced misted with human tears – his head set on the way of this crushing joke. But soon, time vampire-sucks at his floored aim as night-town swells with travel.
