kagablog

‘In the land before sunrise, rumbles a cord. Youth vanished like a medieval dream that can haunt even heads that rise to touch foliage on dazzled branches.’

The body. The Self. Projection.
The thoughts raced to kiss his mind.
“The man. He seemed to have been listening in on my thoughts prior to his dramatic entrance.”
Awaking from sleep.
“I must take the body with.” He thought hard and even considered teleporting the whole molecular structure to the winter upside.
The pallid arena was still as he recalled, vast and coldly un-minding of its vain size.
There is glitch in the flow. Any human mind is believed to transmit and receive data, stimuli almost simultaneously; this he was taught once.
But his carrier seemed to only transmit an echo of what he fed without generating any internal response.
A cold silence of a corpse.
The bloated insides calling back with its walls and muscle.
His brain was being sucked out.
Psychic lobotomy.
”The savages and the lengths they would go to for victory.”

In thought-speed he’d returned to the body, jerking it up from the table and thrashing its anaesthetized bones to the cold floor. Eyes shot open and shadowy light increased the urgency in the carrier. Khah knew that interface cables would be stuck to the skull, and prepared for the severance pinch and scarring pain.
He held the carrier’s hand behind the occiput and pulled whatever imaginary cable injected into custom data ports every clone had implanted in the heydays of memory enhancement techniques.
The field of vision began to morph, and he felt faint but kept courage.
The pallid arena and its fluorescent mirage faded like smoke before his eyes.
He was standing clothed in black rubber combat suit, strapped to a ruggedly tattered chair which would pass for a couch in happier times.
Monitors glared at him, pallid men nervously punching digits into buttons.
He was himself again, he felt it. A warrior.
As rage seethed like bile through his throat, the colossal arms of a menial wrestler tore the straps from their hinges. His feet rummaged the console tightened around his ankle.
Khah rose frantically before security personnel could secure an attack with electrocution rods.
He was human built for brawls. Brown skinned with brawn and brain now intact.
Monstrous events followed what he perceived to be seconds, finding his acumen for molecular disintegration as prescribed by the combat attire.
He shot through equipments, monitors splattering on steel floors with wires sizzling in the after-heat of his light-speed motion.
Phantom warrior dismantled the place.
But as soon as he took a breath outside the cage bolted door to the experimentation laboratory, he became furiously confused.
It was pitch black. Ghastly winds summoned ash towards his gaping mouth, coal dust from scotched forests and grass-lands lain waste by sulphur of molten blazes - a Venusian clime of burning shadows.
He hammered about rowdily with the electrode rod he confiscated from the assailants, leather cloak symbiotically folding about the crevices of his terse figure - and found that there was nothing.
Poking behind him, he felt a hard surface that clanked to the impact of the rod.
Upon running his palm on the surface, he made it out be a wall.
A colossal wall; a wall of a fortress.
He was free.
“This was, or must be the Panopticon.”
Rushes of memory flickered inside, horrible recollections of imprisonment, countering the eminent realization of the danger of his imminent surroundings.
And it was soon that he realized a pair of flame red eyes approaching from a distance, shrouded in the blanket of blinding darkness.
Another pair loomed from behind the first, then a multitude waltzed rhythmically towards Khah.
They must have stood no more than his knee height.
They were Plutonian.
“Tok!” Khah screamed in the direction of the advancing mob of crimson eyes.
“It is us Master Khah,” said the Plutonians in chorale unison, sending a belch of relief through Khah’s taut belly.
“We have come to take you to The Highlands.” Tok spoke alone.
“The highlands? But, I thought they were still unsafe. How is Master Motk?”
“He’s well, sending regards to you. And beckoning you return god-speed.” Tok responded.
One of the members of the throng handed Khah a pair of infrared spectacles for better vision, which he clumsily accepted.
The spectacles had been designed by the Plutonians, excruciatingly modeled after their own eyes.
They had no difficulty navigating any kind of darkness.
Tok always boasted that there is not darkness like his days - telepathically that is.
“We have seen the copper sky, Master Khah.”
Khah was aghast.
That would mean the storm-clouds were letting through sun rays.
Illumination.
This meant yet another struggle for adaptation and survival. No-one knew what remaining resources still lay among the ruins of a collapsed civilization.
And it meant the first expedition would have to be his clan’s.
He was content with the knowledge of the danger time would usher forth, but he felt much relieved that the eternal night had ceased.
He had never gone silently into this night, and now was his opportunity to defeat its scepter.

keep reading here

It would be presumptuous of me and it would certainly be pointless to tell you what we owe to language. I am only a guest in the German language, which I learned at the age of eight, and the fact that you are welcoming me in it today means more to me than if I had been born in its realm. I cannot even regard it as a credit that I held on to German when I came to England over thirty years ago and decided to remain. For continuing to write in German was as much a matter of course as breathing and walking. I could not have done otherwise, another possibility was never even considered. Furthermore, I was the willing prisoner of several thousand books that I had been fortunate enough to bring along, and I do not doubt that they would have viewed me as an apostate from their midst had I made even the slightest change in my relationship to them.

But perhaps I can tell you something about what happens to language under such circumstances. How does it resist the unflagging pressure of the new environment? Does anything alter in its aggregate state, in its specific weight? Does it become more domineering, more aggressive? Or does it turn into itself and hide? Does it grow more intimate? After all, it might conceivably become a secret language, that one uses only for oneself.

Well, the first thing to happen was that one confronted it with a different sort of curiosity. One compared more, especially in the most everyday phrases, in which the differences were conspicuous and palpable. Literary confrontations turned into very concrete encounters in socializing. The earlier or chief language became odder and odder, namely in details. /Everything/ about it was conspicuous, whereas earlier only a few things were that.

At the same time, one could sense a lessening of self-complaisance. For one personally saw cases of writers who had given up and gone over to the new country’s language for practical reasons. They lived, so to speak, in the vanity of their new effort, which was meaningful only if it succeeded. How often did I hear both gifted and ungifted people say in almost silly pride” ‘I now write English!’ Yet the man who clung to the earlier written language, and without any prospect of achieving some external goal, must have regarded himself as abdicating in terms of the public. He competed with no one, he was alone, he was also a bit ridiculous. He was in a predicament, it seemed hopeless, the people sharing his fate might consider him a fool, and the people in the host country, among whom he did have to live, viewed him for a long time as a nobody.

Under such circumstances, it can be expected that many things become more private and more intimate. One says certain things to oneself that one would otherwise never have let pass. The conviction that nothing will ever come of it, that it has to remain private - no readership is conceivable, after all - gives one a bizarre sense of freedom. Among all these people who speak their daily things in English, one has a secret language for oneself, which serves no outer purposes anymore, which one utilizes nearly alone, to which one clingsmore and more obstinately, the way people may cling to a faith that is taboo in their greater environment.

Well, that is the more superficial aspect of the matter; there is a further aspect, that one realizes only gradually. A man with literary interests tends to assume it is the works of writers that represent a language to one. To some extent, that is certainly the case; and ultimately, one does live on them. But the discoveries one makes by living in the realm of a different language include a very special one: namely, that it is the words themselves that do not let one go, the individual words per se, beyond any larger intellectual contexts. The peculiar strength and energy of words can be felt most strongly when one is often forced to replace them with others. The dictionary of the hardworking student who has striven to learn a foreign tongue is suddenly reversed, everything wants to be named as it was named earlier and actually. The second language, which one hears all the time anyway, becomes banal, it is taken for granted; the first language, defending itself, appears in a special light.

I recall that in England, during the war, I filled page after page with German words. They had nothing to do with what I was working on. Nor did they join together into any sentences, and naturally they did not figure in the notes I jotted down in those years. They were isolated words, never yielding any sense. It would suddenly take me by storm, and I would cover a few pages with words, as fast as lightning. Very often they were nouns, but not exclusively; there were also verbs and adjectives among them. I was ashamed of these attacks and concealed the pages from my wife. I spoke German with her; she had come with me from Vienna. I know of very little else that I ever concealed from her.

I viewed these word attacks as pathological and did not wish to make her uneasy; like all other people, we had enough things to make us uneasy and that could not be concealed. Perhaps I should also mention that it really goes against my grain to smash words or warp them in any manner, their form is inviolable for me, I leave it intact. Thus, one can hardly imagine a more foolish occupation than stringing together unscathed words. When I sensed that such a word attack was imminent, I would lock myself in as though to work. I ask your forgiveness for bringing up such a private absurdity, but I must add that I felt extremely happy during such fits. Since then, there has been no doubt for me that words are charged with a special kind of passion. They are really like human beings, they refuse to be neglected or forgotten. However they may be preserved, they maintain their life; they suddenly spring forth and demand their rights.

Word attacks of that sort are certainly a sign that the pressure on language has gotten very great, that one not only knows - in this case - English well, but also that it very often forces itself upon one. A rearrangement has formed in the dynamics of words. The frequency of what one hears leads not only to one’s noting it, but also to new inducements and suggestions, motions and countermotions. Many an old, current word freezes in the struggle with its adversary. Others rise above any context and radiate in their irreplaceability.

This is not a case - as must be stressed - of mastering a foreign tongue at home, in a room, with a teacher, backed up by all the people who speak as one is accustomed to hearing in one’s own town, at all hours of the day. Actually, one is at the mercy of the foreign tongue in /its/ precinct, where all people are on its side, and together and with a semblance of legality, they smash in on one with their words, heedlessly, steadfastly, and incessantly. Furthermore, one knows one remains, one does not go back - not after a few weeks, not after months, not after years. Hence, it is crucial to understand everything one hears; that, as everyone knows, is the hardest thing at first. Then one keeps imitating until it too is understood. In addition, something happens in reference to the earlier language: one has to make sure it does not intrude at the wrong time. So it is gradually repressed, one encloses it, one propitiates it, one puts it on a leash; and as much as one secretly fondles and caresses it, in public it feels neglected and rejected. No wonder that it sometimes takes revenge and ambushes one with swarms of words, which remain isolated, do not join into any meaning, and whose onslaught would be so ludicrous for others that it merely forces one to be even more secretive.

It may seem highly inappropriate to make such an ado about these private linguistic situations. In a time when everything is getting more and more enigmatic, when the existence of not just individual groups but literally all mankind is at stake, when no decision turns out to be a solution, for there are too many mutually contradictory possibilities, and no one is capable of even sensing most of them, because too much is happening, and we find it out too soon, and before we have even grasped it, we are already finding out the next thing - in a time that is swift, menacing and rich, and developing more and more richly because of that menace, in such a time, if a man takes the liberty of thinking, one would expect something different from him than the tale of the agony of words, occurring independently of their meaning.

If, however, I /have/ said a little about that, then I owe you an explanation. It strikes me that today’s man, charged with more and more in his fascination with the universal, is seeking a private sphere, which is not unworthy of him, which is clearly distinct from the generality, yet is perfectly and more accurately reflected in it. What I mean is a kind of translation from one into the other, not a translation that one selects as a free game of the mind, but one that is both incessant and necessary, forced by the constellations of external life, and yet is more than a compulsion. For many years now, I have been involved in this translation; however, the private sphere in which I have settled now, albeit not comfortably, and in which things should be conscientious and responsible, is the German language. Whether I shall succeed in satisfying it in this fashion - I cannot say. But the honour which you have paid me today, and for which I thank you, is something that I shall take as a propitious omen that I might still succeed.

1969

The very first one: standing by the front door, looking at the paisley pattern in the frosted glass, and thinking: ‘I will always remember this’. I still can, over 40 years later. Most of my memories are traumatic. Pissing in my pants just before I acted as Noddy on TV. They had to be changed in seconds. Cutting my thumb as I ran my hand along the fence while riding my bicycle, but proudly not crying when I present the bloody hand to my mother for fixing. Jumping off the garage roof with my friends and my sister and her friends – that rush as you leap off - and pick up speed so quickly. The tree we climbed to get there had triangular-shaped branch ends. Falling into a pit filled with burning rubbish. Stumbling around screaming as the skin on the soles of my feet disappeared. The gardener rescued me. Being driven around in a pram for weeks, until my feet healed, which was intensely embarrassing. Deciding that I didn’t want my friends to play with my new gun at my birthday, and having it taken away by my parents, who then gave it to my friends. Cutting out a face from a block of wood, painting it, and giving it to my father for his birthday. He beat me for damaging his prized wood as I sawed off the block. Being hit by a car as I crossed the road to my house. Landing breathless in the driveway. The x-rays reveal no damage. Being broken into, my aunt wouldn’t let her handbag go as it went through the window. The cop dogs couldn’t follow the scent, we had tobacco on the lawn. The family pet vomiting blood on the carpet, Fluffy had to be put down. Drinking the milk left on the doorway when I got home from school before my mother got home from work. Sitting on the backseat of the volksie while blood spread from a cut on my backside. I had fallen into a pit and cut my ass on the way down. My mother didn’t believe I was hurt until my sister told her the car seat was filled with blood. Screaming as the doctor sewed up my butt before the anaesthetic took full effect. Running in terror from a bullterrier at a friend’s party, falling as I turned around to face the dog and hitting my head on a wall. My father called the lump an egg. Seeing my father cut his beard into the basin, chuckling, leaving the hairs there for my mother to clean up. Proudly showing my father my erection on the porch, and being heavily scolded. ‘Running away’ from home after our parents discovered our provisions under our bed – torch, food, clothes, carefully packed into bags. Reading crap comics filled Dennis the Menace and Billy Bunter. Being beaten with a hairbrush by my mother; my father only ever hit me when I was bust for shoplifting as a teen. Hoarding a piece of biltong given to me by my grandmother, so that it lasted longer than my sister’s, in the back of a station-wagon. Oupa was a stinking whisky alcoholic who would throw his piss out as we drove and it splattered along the side of the car. We would steal his ground-up powdered biltong, he had false teeth. Being caught playing doctor in the cupboard, we were inserting ballpoint pens into each other’s bums. Breaking a frog’s legs, I can still remember the tiny snapping sound it made. Dropping an aunt’s poodle off the porch. It broke its leg. I denied any responsibility, my first big lie. Putting a hamster in my pocket, catching its skin as I zipped up the pocket. The hamster was cut from the jacket and taken to the vet, anaesthetized in a plastic tube with gas, cut from the zip, stitched. Shooting countless hundreds of small birds in sheer boredom. Shooting my parent’s friend’s neck with my pellet gun as they had drinks in the garden. My gun was confiscated for weeks. The horror as the lights blacking-out during my parents’ reading of Lord of the Rings, just as the line ‘and the lights went dim’ was read. Clutching a tennis ball in my hand as we crossed the Limpopo, thinking how I would teach my new schoolmates how to play stingers in South Africa. They already knew how to.

Chapter 1
The Golden Age

In a fluorescently pallid room, a naked Afronoid man lies on a metal examination table.
“That must be him,” Khah numbly thought. Or rather felt, as he could detect his self voiceless; somewhat nauseatingly alone without himself in tow.
The warehouse-size arena is windowless, that he could sense… computing the stimuli beyond the perceptual capacity of the incapacitated body he inspects from a bird’s eye-view - the third eye.
He must return to the body at once.
This he ponders whilst motioning his assemblage point towards the chest cavity of the man.
There would of course be the initial phases of merging which normally disorients most humanoid bodies, considering that Astral projection was still a new technology for the palate of a rather psychically conservative species.
There had being a motley collage of intrusive and obscuration experiments performed at individual levels by throngs of dissident entities, most of whom gained prominence after The Third World War as reverent sorcerers.
This was a stature espoused through various exploitation of the worship instinct as was fully developed in the human population of Earth.
But, the fully fledged faculty could only be accessed by a specifically designed body capable of handling excessive inflow of sensory-based and non-sensory stimuli.
By design, his society had deemed assisting nature a birth right, therefore biology as whole, ruling out all ‘unnecessary potentialities’ encoded in the sterile coding of the genetic compounds and focusing on those suitable for an ‘Original Man’.
The story as told by mystics of his age had alluded to a time, soon after The Nuclear Winter of 2055, during that epoch the search for obscuration of present human consciousness reached a pivot, whence the remaining population of humans had escaped underground to hide away from infections bred by radiation-charred landscapes.
The winter was a virulent consequence of a scuffle that broke between the animus hemispheric government systems, then battled out scientifically in the 21st century.
The consequences were dire for a population that wasn’t immune to various viral infections emitted by biological warfare and terrorism.
Earth was severed and rationed between two dominant ethnic derivatives of the human gene pool as deciphered through misconstructions of the Genome Project Library Data of 1997.
This was the first barbaric “bi-partisan consensus”, whence The Northern Hemisphere, being territory of The League of Caucasia (which later produced the Eurocoid population of the remaining portion of the Human Species) and the Southern Hemisphere controlled by the dark skinned genetic descendant of the then named Continent of Africa (later named Alkhebulan), become the sole powers that ruled upon Earth’s ‘New World Order System’.
A cauldron of socio-cultural and political tensions had been brewing between the Super-states for a number of decades, mainly over access to Earth’s scares resources and other territorial imperatives.
Nevertheless, even after intense negotiations had lapsed, as was customary for any sentient entity to indulge in the arts of debate; war began.
And in a period of merely 18 days, Earth’s atmosphere was bombarded by great deluges of poisonous gases, radioactive dust, and the eventual 270 day long night.
That was 2036, when a wound was torn in the sky and black blood blotted out the sun.
Those who escaped underground grew accustomed to their new environment; thanks to newer medical leaps in the science of cryogenics, cosmetic enhancement, and overall genetic engineering that eliminated the non-essential components of human adaptability to environment. Melanin replacement surgeries were the initial medical exercises taken by the Eurocoids.

***

These were just recollective exercises he did with his carrier, when returning after suspension and separation.
The integration process was inevitably as chaotic as the dis-integratory phase, but dream control - as mystics called it, was the true test for an ‘Original Human’.
Khah forced open his eyes.
A shard of white dust was strewn onto his dry pupils.
That’s the initial sensation he registered.
And the brain suddenly computed a query: Where am I?
That was a natural instinct inquiry to construct, but just before he could jerk his body over the table-side a voice roared through the arena.

“ITEM 19790825, hold your position!”
He felt his pulse thrust him nearly out of the chest cavity once more, yet he kept still. Heeding his breath to a plausible rate, he turned his inner eyes about the room.
A dangerous endeavor for untrained projectionists, when you imagine someone’s inner head turned towards the side and the mineral physical still facing forward.

“ITEM 197908…” the senility of the voice continued.
A door knob was heard turning and door swung on oiled hinges.
It slammed shut, non-threateningly though caution registering.
But, why the need for caution?
He suddenly pulverized his fear with an utterance he could not have delivered if he had time to think it over.
Pre-meditation is still a form of psychic castration of activity without ration, since it leaves a mind crouched in inner safe-cages of the person-cell.
“Where am I?” he bellowed, in a voice strained as though by a cold.
While clearing his throat to inquire again, with more vigor and foulness, the voice of the entity in the room answers.
“With your Self.”
“Self?”
“Yes. You.”
“How?” he forces open his eyes without turning the inner head, the metal table beginning to moisten under the adrenalin induced paranoia now reeking from his pores.
“How? Who are you ITEM 197908…”
“255399… who the hell am I then, beside the number you allocated my carrier?”
“Carrier?”
He pushes his upper body up and stealthily balances by reflex on the uninjured arm, muscular and scarred in several places.
“Yes. Carrier. Body.” He mutters in exasperated disbelief.
“What is going on? Where am I?” the voice’s ringing echo flooding his cranium.
“Which I, may we ask then are you referring to Self?” the entity finally queries after remaining silent during this barrage of questions.

A strange sight indeed.
The near translucent being wearing medical attire, a silvery fabric covered the entire body with bony hue.
Insulation technology robe comprised of fabric cells charged by human electrical discharge, indestructible so as to not be contaminated or otherwise contract whatever it was that could endanger the occupant’s mineral-physical well-being.
The eyes, he could see though.
Rancid hue of a deep blue beyond any imagination, with no pupil.
And these piercing eyes protruded sacked in an enclosure of glacial white skin, which he sensed to be the entire body’s covering epidermis tone.

“The SELF,” he hisses through clenched teeth, disbelieving the insanity of the response in relation to the correlative situation of there obviously being another being in front of him.
The entity slightly moves his hand over his face, and the fabric cell is removed partially to reveal a sullen, old, pale face.
The eyes, though bladed with telepathic insinuation, bear a grim shadow of a life beyond the means of the present.
Tired, of life if not living at all.
The being could be well over 80 Earth Years, but maintained a youthfully upright posture, direct inquisition and brutal inquiry written all over his demeanor as he fingers the air about the room in a method of one playing an invisible piano. Holographic projections appear in thin air, upon a stroke of a phalange; whence a detailed physiognomy of a human body is seen.
While he proceeds with his orchestra, without looking at Khah,
“So, Self, hey?” a satanic jest tingling his tone,
“What is Self? What do you think you are now to be where you are?”
Khah hesitates for a few seconds which disguised an eternity, yet finally utters,
“I am… here”
“Oh, I… isn’t it?” the man inquires while stealing a glance inquisitively.
“Yes.”
“Then, did you initially want to know whom is meant to say: Who is Self?
“Yes.”
“Would I then be mistaken in assuming that Self is ultimately dependent on ‘Perception’ as comparative analysis in a poll of variable ‘Perceptions of the Self through You’?”
“I am not certain.” Khah felt deviously perplexed by the man’s insinuations.
He fumbles with his inner mind to conjure up some control of the situation.
He feels his mental faculties under strain from a force he could not divulge, but felt.
The stench of heavy clogging in his soul, sneered him cold, like he was in dream where an unknown creature’s shadow was suffocating him.
“I, again. Who is I then?” the man continues,
“You of course, whom I asked Who Self is?”

***

The nano-technological advances that humans have achieved since their desolation decades have since proven quite efficient for all human necessity. Internal cell-based robotic agents that can replicate independently while functioning within a singular program; small doctors and creationists.
Cancers have been healed; even in the aftermath of depopulation caused by the scourge of HI -Virus, the planet could now have been disease-free.
If only…
“Was it the Greeks who named that perceptive entity – THE EGO?” the man miserly interrupts his train of thought as though he knew precisely what Khah was cogitating.
“You mean I. As in the I in I am.”
“Yes. But ultimately you would prefer being evasive of the true reason why You are asking the question again. Is it because there is something more you seek to find out?”
“Such as…?”
“Such as, Who is this being asking you question after question in a pale room without windows. A somewhat familiar phenomenon of awareness that bears rudiments of alteration as would ensue with the ingestion of a hallucinogenic?”
“Are you suggesting this is a chemically induces mental probe or interrogation?”
“Would that session be qualified to bear the title: I investigated?”
“Look, I need to get out of here. I don’t know where I am that is certain. Maybe that is how you can torment me for my unknowing. But please… who are you? What am I doing here?”
Khah was beginning the sequential reconstruction of disarming an enemy through forlorn inquiry.
These are basic whines that project desperation, but which often get laughed at by the presumed recipient targets.
“ITEM1979082553099, you are at The Golden Gate.” The loudspeaker blurted again.
Khah watched with iron bleeding eyes the man as he fumbled with his gadgets hovering in thin air. An ember marking began to pulse in the thorax region of the human replica glazed on a film of a misty white surface.
“You are a member of the so-called Clones. Afronoid of origin, yes. But a Clone. I am Ethiw. Your captor.”
“But. But, I am …”
“I, again. You think you are an Original Human? How foolish indeed of you. Quite expected still, but do believe me, you are not.”
“I am a warrior, descended from an African gene pool… I demand some respect.”
“What sudden vigor. Instinctual I suppose, but it would serve you best to listen and be calm. I need to conduct some more tests on you…”
Khah found a hold of strength to leap from the table onto his feet.
And as he does, knees folded into a pulp and he wobbled onto the floor.
“No boy, you were one of the first Spiritual Machines that we issued in the early 21st century, Poetic Programming for a cyborg’s brain. Your body is organic, yes. But you are not human at all. If by definition the brain’s presence qualifies one to be called human.” He hears the man, while adjusting the pulse to move and expand across the chest cavity space on the monitor, speaking in a monotone whine that brought his eyes to slip.
“What’s this? Am I paralyzed? What’s happening?”Khah mutters in grave anxiety, all reason fading from his mind in a sudden sweep of some sensation in his body.
“You are entering The Golden Age now, my boy.”
It was then that Khah collapsed in fetal position.

***

When humanity awoke from its wintry slumber, an undisclosed number of its surviving 100 000 odd ‘Original Humans’ had undergone extreme bio-physical changes and chemically induced mutations.
Vast portion of the human Gene pool had already being contaminated by various hazardous chemical agents ingested through food stuffs, polluted air and water systems that characterized the shift towards the Capitalist New World Order.
Terminator technologies saw land go to waste under butcher institutions – human organs had begun to be harvested for the perfect breeds.
But, ultimately the cult of over-sexualized social dynamics which bred inter-marriages played a much under-estimated role in the obliteration of physical differentiation attributes within great sections of genetic inclination and heredity of the human species.
Some ethnic groups were inadvertently becoming extinct.

The president order, under guises of convening all of human resources and knowledge towards venturing into a ‘Space Age’, augured a vast proliferation of nuclear material such as Uranium and Plutonium in regions with political and economic instabilities.
Many nationalities dissolved from the planetary map as individual states simply through civil wars, disease epidemics, poverty, and a plethora of factors exasperated by the consequences of Global Warming.
Entire lakes dissolved in the 20th century under strain of wanton industrialism which promised the then developing nations towards sectors that required fossil fuel based technologies to survive.
Steel was mined, landslides increased.
Tropical rain Forests vanished and skyscrapers hovered through the skies like mundane phalluses.
A newer, contrived chauvinism ensued through all spheres of human inventions and expression.
Architecture raped the land, consumerism piled junk-yards with imperishable refuse and diseases roamed the sea shores and air-traffic terminals.
Then, something went divergently wrong.
Rudiments of biological-warfare technologies became primary terrorist commodities.
Their trade boomed like pharmacies when a new test virus had been sent airborne over a demarcated area for experimental purposes.
Most of the tests were themselves untested, unrecorded and extra-legal to certain state agencies that enjoyed global anonymity.
Humanity’s trait of ignoring that which it saw as unmonitored experiments took place of military warfare.
Sections of poor populations were subjected to various covert exploratory studies.
More viruses spread at a maximum pace.
Children died.
Pests increased by numbers.
Life expectancy decreased by a factor of five for some continents, violence triggered by psychological experiments warranted even counter-intuitive personality complexes to the development of a species’ other faculties of mind.
These were the root days of artificial Intelligence, nano-Technology and cloning. Human adaptability to rapid change forced many over boundaries of psychological integrity.
Death by thought became rampant, and diviners mushroomed over the dead tree stumps of the Amazon.
A new age of psychological warfare began, and until now, the fight goes without abating, even in the blackest of night humanity has ever traversed.

***

These were the microbes of negative feedback towards what they were doing to his Original Mind.
His brain’s capacitance shield was leaking.
He vowed not to give in.
He would fight it from the exterior of the carrier, which was his first move that would allow observation of all about his incapacitated body.
The pallid room seemed dimmer after ejecting from the chest cavity.
He decided not to server the umbilical assemblage chord with the body, in as to keep it alive even under siege of foreign chemical agents which could cause fatal damage to volatile genetic combination which seemed to being reprogrammed by a newer yet intelligent binary code unknown to his ‘Original Human’ carrier.
A thought kept nagging him through his identity-formation fatigue in the Astral Plane hovered over his carrier:
“Why me?”
That, he could not answer while cooped up outside his carrier.
He had to reintegrate, to fight and pursue survival until the next unknown.
He was a warrior and only the strong know the pain of surrender.
Only the brave know the bitterness of failure.

The ritual had become too mechanical for him by now.
He had been a novice at the underground enclave of Lord Motk, a sorcerer by terms of the now mystified culture of underground dwellers.
But then, the winter was at its brazen; he was still a child and wind charred with a freeze that any molecule that constructed the chemical composition of the entire biosphere was dead.
Perhaps, un-evolving.
Lord Motk, having faced battle all his life after the Nuclear War, his blatant mockery of non-logic could often be mistaken for selfishness, not alacrity.
It is rumored that he’d fasted for 200 of the 270 days of night, and had achieved himself the mysterious noumetic talents and psychic powers he was endowed with.
After a stint as a rebel leader in the enclave of his initial habitation underground, he and an army of seven managed to pulverize their way through a mountain, discovering yet more safe havens which were still deemed non-safe by security reports from various habitations.
But, telepathic sensitivity, automotive suggestion, astral travel and other entirely mystical dexterities seemed to rise within him with every kilometer ascended into the unknown belly of a giant mountain somewhere below what was called Alkhebulan.

“Out, dear soul. Out.”
This is a mantra unto the resurrecting veil of mist tailing from the chest, mouth and perhaps all orifices on the human body.
Khah calls the body, a carrier.
His mind had always convinced him that all humans are asleep and the body is a mere digital projection of a mind in an eternal dream.
He was human then.
Or the ‘Original’ him.
He was not certain anymore. The dreaded self-reflective analysis was taking toll.
It was detrimental for one to self—analyze.
He had to think of a way out of here.
But with the body as well.
“Awake, SOUL.” He murmured.

keep reading here

Reading “Terrorism Considered As One Of The Fine Arts”, the first part of the “Nohzone Trilogy”, by Peter Whitehead, is like slipping on a cosy pair of slippers, or climbing into a hot bath. Its hero, Michael Schlieman, an academic drafted into MI5 whilst at Cambridge, loves the Lakeland poets, malt whisky, pretty young girls and a bit of noir. He has a helpless everyman quality which is endearing, but only to the point where familiar references hold sway. But this is Peter Whitehead, and familiar references are the first things up against the wall.

Schlieman has gone AWOL in the Lakes, and his story is pieced together by a narrator who searches for him at first in the Lake District itself, then in carefully annotated second hand books, then in laboriously decoded web addresses and finally in the reaches of his own psyche. A tale of intrigue involving eco terrorism and the sale of nuclear material ensues. We learn about him through his associations with a pair of Femmes Fatale (who may or may not be aspects of his own anima), through his painstaking self-immolation in myriad concealed hypertexts and from rumours divulged by his estranged MI5 handlers. The cosy hot chocolate-ness rapidly takes on a wormwood bitterness.

Widescreen atmospheric inserts give us heady glimpses of Egyptian brothels, homely snapshots of the slightly depressing provincial lecture circuit, and nouvelle vague memories from Paris in the late sixties, all cranked up with a dose of laboratory strength laudanum.

Whitehead makes use of copious literary quotations, from De Quincey to Kawabata to Kotzwinkle to Coleridge. These serve ostensibly as a frame of reference, but become inevitably a springboard into the void, a void into which all his characters, and indeed ourselves, seem to be headed.

A central theme is that of the palimpsest, a text written over other erased texts, and here Whitehead has not only written over the erased remains of all his other novels, but also succeeds in interweaving the events in his characters’ lives to such an extent that the reader experiences a vertiginous feeling of déjà vu, a warp in consensus reality.
The novel’s most significant achievement, however, is to present a cogent narrative that emerges from the chaos of its shattered compositional style.

Each thread is a link in a vast interconnected labyrinth of allusions, a Qabbalistic raft of elision, a glittering panoply of synaptic flashes multiplying and self fertilizing, rather like neural pathways in the human brain, out of which emerges a new mindset. One cannot divorce oneself from complicity in this process, and in fact the fourth novel in the trilogy, “ And Death Shall Have No Domain Name” may or may not manifest solely in the mind of the reader.

Michael Schlieman straddles this web like Adam Kadmon, the archetypal man, the great within the small, He represents an opium- drenched messiah who not only drags Eros and Thanatos in his slipstream, but heralds the new google consciousness beloved of information technology evangelists.

In Nature’s Child, part two of Peter Whitehead’s Nohzone trilogy, we find ourselves becalmed in a pastoral lacuna. From the opening quote by Coleridge and references to the climactic anomalies of El Nino, to the conclusion with its clear parallels in shamanic transformation, we have Nature as transcendent force, mystical and physical in equal measure.
Whitehead gives us Nature besieged, in the overt story of eco-terrorism, which serves as the exoskeleton of the tale. Beautiful and idealistic young people bent on the assassination of corrupt and double-dealing French businessmen coupled with revenge on murdered activists (think Rainbow Warrior). The possibility of eco-disaster as an anarchistic lesson in political chicanery.

Central to the novel, and indeed to the entire trilogy, is Maria, and Nature’s child is specifically Maria’s story. Like Nature, however, nothing here is straightforward, and while Maria would seem to be a chimera, in that she is a shattered glass reflecting myriad different elements, she is also, like Nature, a quantum polymorph whose life encapsulates millions of alternate potentials which happen to be crystallised into one particular narrative by Michael Schlieman.

Those of us who are easily distracted should take comfort, however, in the gripping style of Schlieman and Maria’s encounter. We are quickly enmeshed in a quagmire of spy thriller thrust and counter thrust, whereby everything we think we know is rapidly eroded, and gradually the artifice of surety is deconstructed until nothing is true (and probably everything is permitted).
Reassuringly we are soon in familiar Whitehead territory, as the protagonists engage loins and the real action begins. An intense psychodrama ensues, in which the struggle for dominion over mind is engrossing and deeply erotic.

In Girl On A Train, Peter Whitehead resolves some of the thematic strands which have entwined, in ophidian fashion, around the central pillar of the caduceus that is Nohzone.
Taking as a template Kawabata’s “Snow Country” and the notion of plagiarism; of novels, of lives, of the curlicues of existence; he revisits his old stomping grounds- academia, spies, sex, the esoteric. Milton Schlieman travels to Japan for a Kawabata conference, encounters a mixed race courtesan on a train, then becomes involved with a pretty translator, who turns out to be more than just a cunning linguist.

The novel pivots on a sex-magickal ritual in which the ghost of Kawabata is evoked. As with all of Whitehead’s novels the occult perpetually hovers at the periphery of the narrative, waiting to warp events whenever the parameters of reality are weakened. Whether it be ghostly occurrences, discreet espionage or unspoken emotional agendas, the hidden constantly strives to be revealed. Here, revelation is held up to us like a trophy head, then snatched back, leaving perhaps a greater awareness of just how precarious the truth is.

At the culmination of Girl On A Train we discover the Girl’s (Yoko’s), letter to Schlieman, where a story of two sisters’ lives unfolds. In it we have a tale of sibling devotion and a hitherto unexpectedly frank expurgation of events. This narrative, coming as the denouement of so many twists, turns, false alleys and blurred memories, is shocking in its candour, as well as profoundly moving. One cannot help striving for explanations, tying up loose ends, correlating the miasma of half lives, chimeras, ghosts.

The final nail in this sarcophagus is both disorienting and hugely audacious, as our presumptions are turned on their heads yet again. The facts themselves are too pivotal to expose here, suffice to say we question novelistic logic and simultaneously our own precarious foothold on reality. To simply recount the events of a Peter Whitehead novel is always to reduce it’s epic nature to the level of the prosaic. His writing is literature as total immersion, and his world is one where writing and magic are co-conspirators.

Peter Whitehead has always stood at the brink of cultural change, documenting and shaping significant resonances long before their delineations have been absorbed into the mainstream. With the Nohzone Trilogy, he anticipates a truly interactive new breed of novel.

Prepare to have your mind messed with.

this review first appeared here

Review by Rachel Kendall

237 pages
the ExaggeratedPress
2008
ISBN: 978-0-9558522-0-6

Available from www.lulu.com (£8.99) or as a download (£2.50)
The book can also be purchased direct from the author at terrygatesgrimwood@msn.com (£6.50).

Writers exaggerate. It’s what they do. It’s called artistic license. The writer takes excerpts from the world as he experiences it, and enlarges them through writing. He exaggerates to make his message more real than reality.

Grimwood’s reality is apocalyptic. It is dark, very very dark, putrid, and surprisingly true to contemporary society’s silly form. These stories exaggerate, and in a way, celebrate, humankind on its road to Hell. It’s about political correctness gone mad; aesthetic self-improvement bent all out of shape. Cold people, people of the future with no warmth, no odour, no excretions. Worlds where people daren’t walk, they use the TubeNode and then the LiftScoop, they travel in compartments used specifically by those who don’t breathe, thanks to surgical advances and media lunacy.

“Are you ready Mister Denna, to take one giant leap away from the primitive?” (Breathe)

Grimwood is an excellent teller of gruesome tales and the nineteen in this collection wend their way through horror to sci fi to magic realism to kitchen-sink drama to futurism to fairytale. Never have I come across such a wealth of stories, all so different, but all held together by the bloody umbilicus that links beauty to horror and horror to reality.

His stories tell of debt-collectors and dead-collectors. Of offal and bile, sin and fear, disease and a malfunctioning society. A war-rotten core, told with such precision, such poetic imagery that you can’t help but feel moved.

“The dancers turn slowly on their creaking, straining ropes. A slow gyration, one-wise until the rope reaches full tension, then other-wise to reverse the eternal pirouette. Turning and turning, they stare sightlessly down at us from their lofty stations; lamppost, war-exposed rafters, the branches of surviving trees. Old and young, men and women, hands behind their backs like inspecting Royalty, tongues protruding in mockery, faces blue-black with shame.” (Freedom)

There is a lot of death in these pages. Grimwood is a horror writer after all. There is also a lot of unpleasantness:

“Dinner is a slithering, sliding, squelching, chaos of naked, blood-smeared flesh, crawling and slobbering over a floor covered with… Christ I can’t say the word, I can’t begin to describe what I can see, what is being crammed into mouths that dribble blood and vitals.” (The excellent Deadside)

“She was… dirty. Scraps of make-up clung to her face, her pores leaked fluids, her flesh was ingrained with muck of all kinds. She stank of sweat, semen, of other juices and excretions.” (The Exaggerated Man)

But however repulsive some of these images are, however repugnant the characters and horrific the crimes, I can’t help but feel there is more to these stories than surface nastiness. A number of these tales use our fears, arachnophobia, being buried alive, fear of losing one’s mind, the itching beneath the skin, the flitting shadows and the sense of being watched, the sudden gusts of wind, the blackness, the sounds and sense of evil. These are not new ideas; they are well-worn horror-story constructs, but didn’t someone once say all stories have been written? What the skilled writer does is take these ideas and sex them up, bruise them a little, add some spice, make them unique. Grimwood is able to retell these nightmares as though you’re having them yourself for the very first time.

And then there is the guilt. Oh god, the guilt. Tied in with almost every story, whether on this planet or another, this plane or something beyond life, there is trial and punishment, guilt and grief. Whether taken down to basics as in Red Hands, murder being the vilest thing and perhaps a manifestation of every other sin. Or infidelity, loving and losing the wrong woman, hurting those you love. Or the kind of childhood violations that brand you with another’s guilt so you’re left with the smell of burning flesh until you can finally face your demons. There is also temptation splattered across every page, money, sex, beauty, purity, come on, you can have anything you want for the price of…

“Williamson dropped to his knees, reached down into the grave and felt bony fingers close about his own. Her flesh was dust-dry. When he pulled, that flesh slid horribly over bone in a way that flesh should never slide.” (What the Dead Are For)

It’s hard to pick a favourite story. I don’t think I can. I love the unexpected ending in Deadside, Coffin Road’s tale of the growing relationship between father and grandfather against a rotting backdrop, the rat-pack connections in the magic-realist Friends of Mike Santini, the weird weirdness of Atoner:

“He crawled into the funnel. Head first. The semen-pack squelched against the back of his skull like a grotesque, silk-skinned balloon.” (Atoner)

Any lover of horror literature will be more than sated by this book. In fact, they’ll be standing for an encore. But so too will lovers of books like The Wizard of Oz and Greenaway’s film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. The Exaggerated Man reminds me of these two very different, very colourful stories. Like Baum’s Oz, Grimwood’s world is part-myth, part-reality where good vs evil (or, the dead vs the living) in such awful places as Deadside, Liveside, the Pits or worst of all - London, and the big cheese isn’t all he’s been made out to be. Then there is Greenaway’s film, with its prettying of pure evil, a technicolour dream-world where sex and filth and corruption run the show, a perfect comparison to The Exaggerated Man.

“And while Doug’s cigarette ascended, flared, faded, fell then ascended again like a slow motion pendulum, the dark seethed with the animal utterances of the grieving and the thud and clink of spades as they wounded, fed, then healed the earth.” (Coffin Road)

Writers exaggerate. That’s what they do. But some writers, like Grimwood, do it better than others.

this review first appeared here

The house of Alphonse Guava was in a disastrous state. For starters, no-one had cleaned it since the symbiote orgy, and the remains of food and drink had rotted to mulch across all the floors. Most of the bodies had been dragged out and dumped in the trees. Their stench was a constant backdrop the atmosphere of dismal chaos, which now prevailed. Symbs squatted everywhere in advanced forms of transformation. They looked like statues erected at ancient temples, with limbs as thin as beaten metal. They swarmed slowly over the walls; gigantic grasshoppers, involved in absurd, half-remembered human activities. Most simply stood like sculptures in the sun, soaking up the heat like blotting paper. Mister Sister had many of the walls spray painted with red and toxic yellow paint. Almost all the lower floor windows had been destroyed. The lovely atmosphere of the colonial plantation house had been ruined, utterly desecrated. Mister Sister was floating in the pool, on an enormous throne shaped lilo. These days he was almost always grinning in abject satisfaction. His victory over the imp had softened his demeanor and there were less beheadings than his punks had previously known. He had also gained weight, his hairless body taking on the dimensions of a massive baby. To further augment this perverse image, he had his body rubbed daily with talcum powder and perpetually wore a giant diaper, in which he would defecate. He took great pleasure in being changed by his slaves and often bawled for no reason. To further complicate things he had himself injected with hormones, which eventually caused him to lactate. Milk was ceaselessly oozing from his large pink nipples and he loved to have The Sugar Twins snuggle up to him and suckle on his breasts. They lay beside him on the lilo, doing just that, clad in matching spandex swim-suits which showed off their nubile forms to great effect. They seemed to thrive off his milk and needed no coaxing to partake of it. Their fickle shift of loyalties seemed to suit their inhumanity somehow and Taty could not bring herself to hate them, as much as she tried. They simply weren’t human enough to hate. The battle-droid had been parked in the frangipani grove and had not seen any action since that fateful night at the docks. It was blanketed in blossoms and in dire need of a lube job. A half-formed Buddhist punk writhed orgiastically on the pool deck, completing the final stages of his transformation. Taty sat sullenly at the edge of the pool, dangling her legs in the blue, staring at the sun-dappled water in a mesmerized fashion. She was in her habitual bikini, big straw hat and oversized sunglasses. The flowers she wore in her hair were Venus Flytraps. They snapped at passing mosquitoes, making tiny popping noises as they opened and closed. The walkie-talkie, which she now kept with her at all times, was clipped to the elastic of her bikini briefs. She had started smoking cigarettes, a habit picked up from some of the less homicidal Buddhist Punks. One dangled listlessly off her lip as she observed a drowning insect with detached intensity. A machine gun lay beside her, within easy reach. She had found it on one of the corpses and accessorized it with glittery stickers and pictures of kittens. Now it never left her side. One of her favourite pastimes was scavenging the estate for ammunition, and she had built up a substantial stock, which she kept well hidden. Mister Sister was watching her with a lazy smile, his almond eyes screwed up into knife wounds in the sunshine.

“Look at her my little kitties,” Mister Sister sang to the Sugar Twins.

“So many Symbs and still no hump… She must be antidote-girl!”

He burst into high-pitched, somewhat maniacal giggles. Taty glared at him. She threw the cigarette into the pool, grabbed her machine gun and stormed off. She passed through ruined rooms and halls, stopping in the courtyard where she had found Cherry Cola handcuffed all those weeks ago. It was hard thinking of Cherry Cola after what had happened. She could still her screaming when they cut her head off. She tried not to think about it anymore. Baby crocodiles frolicked in the water of the fountain, tangling themselves in the large, half-dead lotus blossoms. She could hear music in the distance, old Les Baxter records trailing out from Alphonse’s high room, a memory of better days. A Symb lurched over the terracotta roofing, dislodging some tiles, which crashed through the shattered skylights. It stopped to leer at her and she recognized it instantly. The symbiotes were all unique, containing the seed of their host’s facial and bodily characteristics. This one she knew and hated. She glared at it until it clambered off like a massive tree frog, disappearing over an antiquated storm gutter. Taty sat down on the edge of the fountain and unclipped the walkie-talkie from her bikini briefs. She switched it on and tuned up with a warble of static.

“Where are you now?” she spoke into it, swinging her legs.

Somewhere in the middle of the ocean, the half-destroyed torso of Number Nun drifted. Sunny tropical blues dappled her. Some tiny fish flickered in her chest cavity while monstrous jellyfish the size of houses wafted below, glittering with refracted light.

“My navigational array is broken,” Number Nun pointed out, vaguely irritated. “I’ve told you this before.”

Taty fiddled with her nails.

“Oh. Yeah. Forgot bout that.”

There was a hiss of open ended static and she could hear the low-fidelity churn of the sea outside Number Nun’s cracked head.

“Whatcha doin?” she asked.

“Childbride, you know very well that I am doing absolutely nothing! Now leave me alone to pray. Go bother somebody else!”

The call cut off abruptly and white noise erupted from the speaker. Taty stared at it for a moment before switching it off. She clipped it back to her briefs and gazed listlessly down at the baby crocodiles. After awhile she wandered off, humming along to the distant music.

Taty owned a stretched tape cassette of ‘Hotel California’. She had edited the song with nail scissors, so that the voiceless intro ran directly into the long guitar solo, creating an instrumental mix. She would listen to this every afternoon in her massive radar earphones, around sunset, when it was time to retreat to the bell tower. A white washed spiral staircase ran up to the belfry, and many small windows had been poked into the walls along its length. These apertures gazed out onto vistas of the steaming jungle, which stretched endlessly out beyond the house. Towering palm trees swayed drunkenly against the galactic cheese-melt of sunset and the silhouettes of monkeys gamboled in the highest branches. Taty was a creature of habit and discovered that some form of routine soothed her immensely. So every afternoon she would scavenge candy bars, green coconuts and bottles of fizz-pop, which she would then carry up to the top of the bell tower. The spiral stairs opened up into an airy space cluttered with junk. She had hidden a foldng ladder behind some crates and used it gain entrance to a trapdoor in the ceiling. This trap led directly into the belfry, a domed chamber which had over the weeks become her lair. She would shoulder her machine-gun and take the packets in her teeth while she climbed, pulling the ladder in after her. The large brass bell had long since fallen, cracking the boards. She would painstakingly roll this gigantic device over the trapdoor to further ensure her privacy. Each of the four walls of the belfry had a large hole cut out of it. These balcony windows afforded expansive views of the house and jungle. From this elevated perspective, Taty could see almost anything coming and the height gave her a sense of security. A sleeping bag lay crumpled in the corner, beside a pile of old fashion magazines and holiday brochures which she had discovered in drawers throughout the house. A bowl of green mangoes lay on the ancient wooden boards. Coconut shells covered the floor, picked clean and filled with bric-a-brac. Candy bar wrappers clustered in one corner, skirled around by the hot breezes. A large box of lollipops took pride of place near the sleeping bag. A picnic hamper of ammunition lay within easy reach.

Taty sat on the whitewashed balustrades of the belfry as she did every evening, bathed in red-gold light, swigging from a bottle of fizz-pop. She would sit watching the sun set behind the jungle and observe the large flocks of flamingoes and parrots squall screaming across the Western skies. She was busy doing this one eve when she spotted the Symb from the rooftop inching slowly up the tower like some monstrous gecko. She hated how it followed her around, like it had some claim to her. She unhitched her machine gun and fired a short burst at it, shattering the silence of dusk. The bullets dislodged the creature and it dropped to the trees below. Michelle, who was poolside, almost directly below the opposite side of the bell tower nearly jumped out of her skin. She turned in exasperation to Mister Sister, who still floated upon his lilo throne, attended to by young male slaves.

“What the fuck does she do up there all night!”

“Oh, who gives a kidney what that little cockroach does,” Mister Sister muttered. “Even the Symb’s won’t touch her anymore – little miss pariah.”

He leaned up off the lilo in a sudden fit of childish anger.

“Pariah!” he bellowed up to the tower. “I should feed you to the crocs! You hear me you little brat?”

Taty heard, but paid no mind, making faces at them when they weren’t looking.

The night was always full of bats, swarming past the tower in high-frequency clouds. Giant, clumsy moths would also always tumble in, like origami constructions, sucking back out into the darkness before she had time to study their ornate wings. The raftered ceiling of the belfry was awash with golden orb spiders. The creatures had decorated the old bell supports with a fairy lace of webs, giving her something magical to gaze at before she fell asleep. She would light candles in glass jars and watch the flames flicker drowsily in the moist breezes rising off the jungle. Sometimes it would rain for days and she would snuggle up in a battered fur jacket, scrounged from the walk-in closets. The white fur had been in a pristine state when she had found it, but after weeks of continuous use, the garment had grown grungy and pelted, like the skin of a stray Persian cat. Now it was the hot season and she would always be in her bikini, day or night. It seemed pointless to wear anything else it was so hot. She sat cross-legged on her sleeping bag gnawing green mangoes, hideously bored, watching the flytraps in her hair eat mosquitoes. Her mind was a blank and she would accentuate this blankness by smoking cigarettes, one after the other. She found she liked tobacco, the way it cured her brain like a hock of smoked ham. She missed marijuana, but was too paranoid to get stoned. Every now and then her mind would drift back to the nightmare of what had happened and she would wake in a shaking sweat, clutching for her machine gun. There had been weird rituals she could barely remember. They had dosed her with drugs and she had woken up in the basement, covered in alien slime. She told herself that she had been too drugged to remember what had happened, but she could still feel the carapace scraping against her back when she slept. The interlocking shells of the Symb had felt like rough, glazed ceramics on her skin, it’s jointed form making creaky bamboo noises when it moved. The sibilant chittering it had made now filled her dreams like an ocean of toads, and she could never completely erase the burned electric wire stench of its body. At least now she could say she lost her virginity to an alien, but who was there to impress? The world was one long heat spell of bad memories and scavenged ammunition. The punks had left her alone after the first rape, waiting for her to change, laughing and teaching her how to smoke cigarettes to ease the pain. She had cried a lot then, but stopped dead when Cherry Cola was executed for spitting Mister Sister’s milk back into his face. She remembered getting very sick the day after having sex with the symbiote. A fever descended and she became delirious, seeing kaleidoscopic visions and glimpsing people’s sno-globes against a backdrop of thrashing energy. They put her in a hammock by the pool and made fun of her while she passed in and out of consciousness. At one point she suffered from severe diarrhea and voided herself every few hours in one of the outside bathrooms. After one of these episodes she found herself feeling inexplicably better. She looked back into the toilet bowl and saw the dead, baby Symb, staring sightlessly up from the soiled water, wearing a mockery of her own face. The second time they tied her to a bed and stood watching, grumbling over their cigarettes, making sure the Symb impregnated her properly. Another fever descended, though this time not so bad. She was rid of the baby symbiote within a day. The Buddhist punks didn’t touch her after that. They thought she was cursed, or somehow special. They stayed out of her way and she was not manhandled like the other girls who had the misfortune of finding themselves trapped in the fallen house of the imp. She kept a low profile and was eventually ignored, the silent household pet with a secret. The symbiotes with whom she had spawned began to follow her around like retarded animals. Their behavior was out of keeping with the general mindlessness of the other Symb’s, and the sight of them disgusted her. When she found the machine gun, some of the punks even gave her ammunition, trying to tempt her into coming out looting with them. But she kept her massive radar headphones on and listened to tapes at full volume, ignoring their calls, keeping out of everyone’s way and stealing candy bars whenever she could.

The nights were rarely quiet. From her tower she would hear the screams and pistol shots. The ruckus of debauched celebration rose up like the stench of the many bodies, choking the night and making it impossible to sleep. Most nights she would stay up smoking, eating coconuts and paging mindlessly through fashion magazines while the world went mad around her. Sometimes she would lean on the balustrade facing the house and look out across the courtyards to the lighted bedchamber of Alphonse Guava. She watched him through binoculars, moving like a green ghost in his ruined room. The chamber was by now an unholy mess. Shattered aquarium glass and the rotting corpses of many reptile pets had destroyed the white shag. A lava lamp threw psychedelic patterns on the walls, illuminating the destruction and decay in twisting enchantments of light. Alphonse himself stood at his desk, gaunt and withered, bent and broken. His skin was a minty shade of green and he had been fighting off transformation for an ungodly amount of time. Yet, even with his impish constitution, the battle for preservation had taken its toll. Antennae drooped over his blackening eyes and his pale hair was a lank and tangled mess. He wore a soiled suit and operated a juicer with slow movements. He was dicing carrots and placing them into the mixer flask. When it was full to capacity he juiced the roots to a frothy orange gunk and withdrew a massive syringe. Taty watched as he filled the syringe up with freshly squeezed carrot juice and tied a silk tie around his arm. He injected the contents of the syringe into his veins and shuddered horribly, grabbing at the desk. His skin flickered like a cuttlefish, shifting from green to orange to ivory. It settled on this pale tint for a few moments before gradually washing back to green again. He would always sit on the edge of the bed after one of these episodes, exuding an air of terrible defeat. It was a painful thing to watch, and Taty would often set down her binoculars at this point, anaesthetizing herself with a barrage of cigarettes.

It was very late and the peculiar stillness of the night hung about the jungle. Some candles still guttered in the belfry, creating swarms of weird shadows, which leapt about playfully. Taty was curled in her sleeping bag staring out at the stars. At some point she lifted her walkie-talkie to her lips.

“Hello?” she whispered.

She waited awhile, just listening to the sea of crackling static and the monumental quietness of the jungle.

“Come in Number Nun…”

She eventually gave up and fell asleep. She woke in the night, as she often did, holding the communications device to her breast and speaking in her sleep.

“Mommy…mommy…”

One day she was sitting in the cinema, watching old cartoons and eating leftover scraps of jungle chicken. She was still wearing the puffy fur jacket and bikini, machine gun across her lap, the walkie-talkie jutting from a pocket. Despite the deafening volume of the maniacal cartoons, she had on her enormous headphones and was frying her brain with witchcraft guitar solos. The cinema had also suffered much abuse. Seats were uprooted and broken champagne bottles lay smashed everywhere. A huge boa constrictor had slithered in from the jungle and was exploring the projectionist’s booth. Michelle suddenly appeared in the doorway. She stared down at Taty for a moment before calling down to her.

“Hay little girl,” she called.

She called another time, louder this time and Taty turned her head. She stared blankly at Michelle.

“Little girl!”

Taty pulled her headphones down around her neck and glared at the crucified girl.

“Yeah you,” Michelle scowled. “Listen, Alphonse told me he wants to see you.”

Taty continued to stare unresponsively.

“Now, you little brat! This is still his house you know.”

Taty slouched up, shouldering her machine gun. She plodded up to the door, kicking debris out of the way.

“Do you have to carry that fucking popgun around everywhere with you?” Michelle muttered. “Mister Sister and his punks might find it cute, but I think its ridiculous the way you shoot at bugs and shit all the time.”

“It’s mine I found it.”

“Oh, whatever.”

Taty brushed past her and headed down the hall. Michelle suddenly hesitated as an idea occurred to her. She turned and called after Taty.

“Listen, little girl…”

Taty glanced over her shoulder to witness Michelle suddenly put on what she considered to be a friendly, how-to-talk-to-a-child-face.

“Listen little girl,” she smiled in a sort of horrific fashion. “I have a whole box of candy, really special candy in my room… And I’ll give it ALL to you if you just tell me what Alphonse says.”

Taty stared blankly at her.

“Well, what do you say huh?” Michelle pushed, struggling to maintain her smile.

“Ok,” Taty answered flatly.

“Good girl,” Michelle beamed, showing all her un-brushed teeth. “You just come up to my room after and I’ll be waiting with all that candy, ok?”

Taty continued to stare at her in suspicious non-comprehension. In the end she simply walked off without a word.

“Ok! Great!” Michelle called after her with all the vim and vigour of a cheerleader.

Alphonse Guava sat at his desk in a ruined white suit and deco pattern breeches. His skin was a sort of pea green, split by intricate patterns. His eyes had swelled to bulbous, globular proportions and were filmed over with silvery cataracts. Feathery antennae sprouted from his forehead like peacock feathers, and these fluttered about of their own accord, touching things. His pointed ears had finally fallen off. The desk at which he sat was a mess of papers and carrot stubs. His well-worn juicer was close at hand. Orange stained syringes overflowed out of a massive black garbage bin, spilling over into the smashed ruin of his precious ‘PERM BANK’. Mister Sister had long since raided it, using the pearly contents of the many glass capsules to butter the croissants he had delivered every day from a baker in Namanga Mori. Upon Alphonse’s bed was placed a veritable mountain of carrots. He never slept anymore anyway. He had thrown the reptile corpses out of the window in order to make the room semi-presentable for visitors, but the stains remained, irreparable and dark, lacing the freshly juice smells of the chamber with an underlying stench of prehistoric morbidity. Alphonse held before him a small card of paper. He pivoted a geometry compass between thumb and forefinger, using the needle to print something across the card in Braille. He had to write in reverse and it took him several minutes, even though it was only one word. When he was finished he placed the card inside a small satchel, within which could be glimpsed neatly folded papers, a brick of cash and a pink tape cassette in a box. It wasn’t long before his private doorbell tinkled, announcing Taty’s arrival. He pressed a small glass button and watched the heavy doors swing open. She stood at the threshold and for a moment they regarded each other in silence. The last time they had exchanged words, the symbiotes had not even existed in their reality. Now they themselves were trapped in another reality, a dimension corrupted by the insinuations of another world. She entered barefoot, glancing at the carrots, avoiding shards of glass.

“That’s one big salad,” she said, leaning her machine gun against a battered filtration system.

Alphonse smiled broadly, despite his wretched state.

“If I take my time it’ll last me to the week-end,” he quipped.

She sidestepped the rotting leg of an iguana, which Alphonse had somehow managed to overlook and slouched on the edge of the bed, spilling a small avalanche of carrots down to the shag.

“So, what’s up Doc?”

She met his gaze evenly and he eventually stood up, hobbling over to the window. He leaned on the sill and lit a slim white cigarette.

“You can’t stay here anymore cupcake,” he finally said.

She stared blankly at him.

“I’m ok,” she mumbled after a few moments of pregnant silence.

He blew a thin cloud and gazed down at the wreckage of his house, still smiling like a jester when he spoke.

“It’s going all the way down baby. And you need to scram before something comes along and eats you up.”

“I tried to run away a few weeks ago, but they stopped me.”

“Don’t worry about that, I’ll help you to get out. Anyway, I want you to do something for me.”

He was perhaps expecting rebellion, but she answered without hesitation, clear-eyed and sincere.

“Ok.”

“I’m going to give you a card,” he explained carefully. “I want you take this card to the Outer Necropolis and deliver it to a secret postbox within the floating pyramids.”

“You want me to be a postman?”

“Yes, exactly that.”

There was a pause and he examined her expressionless face, unsure, yet somehow sure of her answer.

“Ok,” she answered quietly. “Is that it?”

He regarded her with a sardonic smile, unable to help himself from picking at her passivity as one would pick at a scab.

“You seem angry with me,” he teased.

She looked away, slouched like a bedraggled bird in her mangy fur.

“You let the monsters do things to me,” she eventually said, speaking in an extremely low voice.

“Was it fun?” he grinned.

She blinked at him, unable to grasp his reaction for a moment.

“No, it was horrible,” she replied darkly. “You let Number Nun get shot, everybody is dead because of you.”

He sniggered without the slightest hint of reproach. And it was at times like this that one could clearly understand that he wasn’t at all human, not even in the slightest.

“I suppose,” he admitted. “But at least I had a ball doing it!”

“Look at you!” Taty snapped. “You’re turning green! You have bug-lashes!”

“Yes. I’m en-route to a slimy alien hell. I’m trapped in this decaying body, imprisoned in my own house by my own worst enemy, forced to degrade myself daily with root vegetables. But…My God, you have no idea how pleasurable it all is! Even my worst nightmare is absolute, unquantifiable ecstasy. You just can’t understand. You’re only a little stray.”

“I suppose.”

He hobbled back to the desk and tossed her the satchel. She caught it clumsily, spilling more carrots.

“There’s a secret tunnel that will get you off the grounds,” he told her. “Everything you need to know is on the pink tape – Leave maybe an hour or so before dawn.”

“Ok.”

“And put some clothes on, you won’t be coming back.”

He turned dismissively, busying himself with papers on his desk and she rose. She picked up her machine gun and lingered for a moment beside the door.

“You don’t really care about me, do you?” she asked quietly. “You’re just saving me so I can deliver your letter.”

He burst into raucous chuckles, swinging round madly in his chair.

“Why on earth should I care about you?” he laughed gaily.

She stared uselessly at him, before finally giving up and drifting back down the hall. His eerie laughter followed her through the passages, poking in at her through open windows.

Michelle was waiting for her in one of the courtyards. She loped after her, struggling to balance under the weight of her cross.

“Little girl!” she called.

Taty took one look at her and scampered down the nearest corridor. Michelle raced after her, her cross bobbing hilariously.

“Come back here! Come back you little bitch!”

Taty turned and sprayed machine gun fire along the walls and ceiling, scaring a pair of toucans who flew screaming down the passages. Michelle dove for cover, landing badly because she was unable to use her arms. She wriggled on the tiles like a clubbed seal, thrashing about in a cluster of pot plants.

“Traitor!” she screeched, her round face red and distorted with rage. “Traitorous little skag! I’ll have your head you little cunt! You just wait till my boyfriend hears about this! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! I’ll fucking kill you!”

The screams receded as Taty fled to her tower. She ran and ran, and didn’t stop running, until the big brass bell had been rolled safely over the trap and she could collapse panting.

Afternoon sunlight illuminated The Soft House, filling it with sugary green light. Bronski Glass was in his office on one of the upper floors. A desk, chairs and some brimming filing cabinets bounced around ridiculously. The sound of aerobics programs filtered through the plastic walls, their beats clashing horrendously with the loud Bossanova transmissions. The office next door was filled to capacity with seawater and a trapped Man-O-War wafted about in it, electrocuting goldfish. Other offices were visible, wherein top-level Wrestlers performed menial bureaucratic duties at their desks. Everything was always quaking on the top levels. Bronski Glass wore a pale suit and tie. His skin was almost exactly the same hue as his bloodless suit and gave him a peculiar monochromatic quality. Scar tissue circled his forehead, denoting some form of intense, Frankenstein-like surgery. A dog tag read his name and he was smoking four cigarettes at once. The crucified Michelle was kneeling between his legs, performing fellatio, and her wooden cross bobbed comically about as she moved. He appeared utterly unfazed by her efforts however, staring absently at the jellyfish in the room next door. The fact that the walls were transparent and everyone could see in also didn’t seem to bother him. His eyes had that war veteran glint to them that distinguished those who had seen too much and thought too little. He was now seeing icebergs floating on a dark sea. The masses of glacial ice trembled in the grainy black and white film, drifting like leviathans across icy Northern waves. Michelle looked up in irritation.

“Where the fuck is your mind?” she snapped.

“I have a move projector in my skull,” he answered in a bassy voice, which was utterly devoid of feeling.

“It’s a very small one.”

She stared at him in non-comprehension, squinting in annoyance.

“The only reel it has loaded contains footage of icebergs, and this is constantly projected onto the back of my eyeballs. It’s supposed to ‘nullify’ me.”

“Jesus, what a drag. You think you weren’t getting head.”

“Are you finished down there?”

“Bronski baby, do you have any idea what Mister Sister will do to my bod if he finds out that I’m snitching for you and blowing you into the bargain?”

“But I didn’t ask for the blowjobs - Only information.”

“I…er, that’s a complimentary service. Anyway…Oh Fuck! I’m putting myself in harm’s way for you! Don’t you realize that!”

“No.”

“Fuck! I was going to ask if you have a brain, only to realize that you most certainly do not. I know it isn’t your fault your antennae’s facing west, just don’t make me think it is!”

She returned to her previous task with gusto, bobbing up and down like a jackinabox. His eyes slowly became unfocused and the muted sound of a film projector could be heard leaking out of his ears. Icebergs flickered across black water, bobbing in the swell like mountains of polystyrene. He took the four cigarettes from his lipless mouth and exhaled a great flag of patriotic smoke.

“You reported that Mister Sister has taken up residence in the house of Alphonse Guava?”

Michelle began to speak between mouthfuls, babbling with excitement at all her great and secret plans.

“Oh, its just for a little while, see, ‘cos Mister Sister wants to rub Al’s face in it. Jesus, you should see Alphonse! Sister’s keeping him from greening out by supplying him with endless carrots, but it’s just a matter of time now. When Alphonse is frogged up something supreme, Mister Sister will start getting the ‘noids thinking that everyone is plotting against him, it’s totally inevitable. We’ll wait till he’s ripe to pop and then instigate some shit between his outfit and Daddy Bast, sit back and watch the fireworks! Oh baby! We are in command! Now that the fucking Nun is lost at sea, nothing can stop us. Fuck, I wish could have seen her getting munched by that droid!”

“Who is Daddy Bast again?”

Michelle whipped her head up, speechless for a moment.

“Oh God my Dad above!” she exploded. “You literal numbskull! How many times…I’m sick and tired of blowing guys with no brains! Honestly. Men.”

He stared blankly down at her.

“Could you tell me when you are finished please. Bronski really has to use the head.”

Who was Sinclair Beiles?, a compilation of writings about the South African Beat poet who died in 2000, was recently published by Dye Hard Press.

Co-editors Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska, along with contributor Fred de Vries, will discuss issues about the book, such as:

· Why has Sinclair Beiles’s work been neglected in South Africa?

· Why has there previously been no serious attempt to evaluate his work, and why has it fallen to a small publisher to make the first attempt at doing so?

· What are the challenges involved in trying to evaluate a marginalised writer such as Beiles?

· What is the purpose and relevance now, in 2009, in writing about Beiles?

The panel discussion will take place in the Seminar Room at WISER, 6th Floor, Richard Ward Building, East Campus, Wits University on

Monday, 9 November 2009, at 18:30

Copies of Who was Sinclair Beiles? will be on sale at the event

Flaming cars adorned the streets like Christmas decorations. Gangs of looters roamed the wreckage, pecking at things like carrion birds. Party music thumped from the Dead Duck and drunken strangers were dancing in the streets. A group of sailors were harassing a grinning Symb, kicking it out across the road and jeering at it. The Symb was still swaddled in the remnants of Buddhist robes and possessed a vaguely human face, now disfigured by greenness and insect-like appendages. Its body was a deep emerald, split by carapace joints and crab-like casing. It smiled stupidly with a mouth full of loose human teeth, its newly formed mandibles flicking out from caved-in cheeks. Romeo the Dealer was approaching from the inner city, eyeing the gang warily. He was talking on his army-issue walkie-talkie, raygun dangling within easy reach.

“Romeo Delta Tango Foxtrot,” he signed, scanning this way and that. “It’s out on the midnight wire – Number Nun gunned down at the docks.”

“I think you should maybe blow town babe,” Karolina K-Star answered from a safe location.

The sailors had placed a generic red and white lifesaver around the Symb’s neck and were dousing it with diesel. He watched coldly as they set it on fire.

“No, I’m going to stick around for awhile,” he answered.

The Symb was miraculously unaffected by the flames. Its remaining human parts crisped up like bacon, but the symbiote formations remained, impervious to the heat. The lifesaver warped and the robes went up in flames. Yawning spaces appeared in its green body as the organic burned away, revealing a spindly, inhuman frame fraught with distortions. The would-be lynch mob had gone suddenly silent, backing away as the Symb turned to face them. It was fondling its ovipositor with a clumsy affection, flaming like a torch. It began to wander about, grinning insanely, accidently setting fire to things. The lynch mob dissolved in a disturbed fashion while the Symb clattered down a nearby alley, lighting up the all the walls.

“How could I leave when things are just starting to get interesting,” Romeo said before signing off.

The lobby of the Shell Sea was in a dire state. The clerk hefted an AK-47, listening to an old wireless splutter out panicky news reports about the burgeoning chaos. Stragglers in seersucker suits argued with hobos in the corridors. Some partially developed symbiote-sufferers were writhing in the pot plants, kicking over things and spilling abandoned bottles of grog. A fully developed Symb clung to the ceiling, licking at the light bulb with a long human tongue. Romeo paid very little attention to all of this and went straight up to the thirteenth floor. He kept an apartment beyond the backstage area, and it could only be reached via a secret doorway sequestered in the back of a musty old closet. He pushed past the dusty old stage costumes, cranked open the door and ascended into a dim space illuminated by giant bay windows. Bright blue and yellow neon throbbed rhythmically through the glass, illuminating a ludicrous clutter of equipment. Parrots and Toucans chittered in giant wicker cages, creating a constant burble of conversation. The irregular flashes just barely illuminated a coated figure hidden in the shadows. A large pistol gleamed in its trembling, malformed hands. Romeo bustled about, talking to himself, oblivious to the stranger.

“One…and then another…then…” he muttered, switching on a coloured lamp.

The kaleidoscopic light illuminated the half-insect face of Judas, trembling in the depth of a movie director’s canvas chair. Antennae flickered sickeningly in the half-light causing Romeo to recoil.

“Fuck me Mary,” Romeo whispered, shocked by Judas’s transmutation.

The scrap metal had been stripped from him and he was dressed in a shabby raincoat and a pair of striped pajama pants. Metal bracing lined his legs, but it was obvious that his transformation into an alien being had temporarily restored his ability to walk. He smiled sheepishly at Romeo.

“Out selling pleasure to little boys in spike heels?” he giggled conversationally, leveling the oversized blaster at the Dealer.

“Weren’t you?” Romeo replied, regaining his stride and lighting up a black cigarette.

Judas slouched, squirming slightly with discomfort. His broken skin was greenish and frog-like in its slickness. He was also creamy with sweat; a perspiration which caught in the many fine facets of his newly forming carapace. His goatee still remained though, stained a hideous orange from excessive carrot consumption. Romeo could just make out his eyes, which had turned the shiny black of an insect’s.

“Where’s my money Judas?” Romeo asked, leaning against a bank of hardware.

“Ah!” Judas smiled, displaying a set of emerging mandibles. “As you may have noticed, I hold in my hand a pistol.”

“Really? I thought it was a cigarette lighter.”

“Oh it is no ordinary gun I can assure you,” Judas slurped. “It is a Soul Gun and it fires cloud bullets; etheric projectiles which injure not the body but the sno-globe. Why even after the body is gone, the cloud bullets ensure that the soul is damaged for a good many incarnations.”

“Quite,” Romeo smoked, unimpressed.

“It’s quite strange really,” Judas mused, trailing off for a moment.

“You know…my predicament,” he hinted lasciviously.

“I thought that I had achieved some sort of sexual nirvana – which, of course I had! Endless heaven…Oh how I longed for some human pain after the first day.”

He paused for a moment, scratching at the base of one of his flickering antennae. A piece of his scalp fell off, like cheese from a pizza. He looked at it with disgust, brushing it beneath a chair with his foot before rambling on.

“When the pain came though…Ah, even the pain was joy. Tears spilled in utter and absolute pleasure. All above were the stars, each one an angel with a permanent erection. The night was a slavering cunt, wide open, cold and quivering. Each tear was drool…Sex sweat Sundays…”

He seemed to trail off again, not quite sure of himself, lost in the thrill of confession. Romeo observed with icy interest as he spoke.

“Now of course it becomes the antithesis. An agony. It wrenches apart my collarbones. It rearranges my ribcage. I look in the mirror and see it sliding barbed wire tongues into my mouth. This was my first experience of pain! Why, even as I speak to you now, I am shaking with ecstasy.”

He seemed to gather himself, holding up the shiny gun with renewed vigour.

“Need I say more?” he smiled. “Now give me a fucking carrot before I ventilate your soul.”

Romeo the Dealer stubbed out the black cigarette and folded his arms.

“I’m sorry Judas, but you should have done your homework. I’m a Canaanite, one of the last of the Painbreed. I don’t have a soul, so that hairdryer is useless.”

There was a long, awkward silence before Judas slumped down, panting wetly. The Soul Gun sank uselessly to his lap.

“Typical,” he muttered with an all-consuming bitterness.

“Really Judas, you should have come to me as a friend.” the Dealer smirked. “I could give you a couple of carrots, but tell me, will it really make a difference to your ‘predicament’?”

“Yes.”

“Junkie mentality.”

With incredible swiftness, Romeo snagged a carrot from a shelf and tossed it to the wooden floorboards. Judas lost all composure in a heartbeat, descending upon the root vegetable with an almost predatory savagery. He devoured it in seconds and Romeo the Dealer watched as the green in his shelled skin paled and flickered momentarily toward a flesh tone of sorts. A moment of human clarity descended upon him and he seemed to suddenly realize the depth of his affliction, as though for the first time. Romeo watched him with a sort of dead interest, lighting up another black cigarette. They exchanged a glance in which Judas conceded that Romeo had made his point. He began to drag himself painfully off the floor and back into the chair. By the time he he was seated, he was green again.

“You guys are finished you know,” Romeo announced blithely. “Too revolutionary, always wanting to corner the market.”

He cracked a can of cola and took a swig, flopping into a nearby dentist’s chair.

“Take me,” he bantered on. “Supply and demand, its best. Besides, The Soft House has had enough of this extraterrestrial vice shit. They’ve assigned a special project to you from the military strike force outside the zone. His name is Bronski Glass.”

“We’ll just…bribe him I guess?”

“Sorry. No pleasure center. He’s had his brain amputated.”

“Amputated? Does he like Mozart?”

“It’s like a bad joke,” Romeo swigged.

“No wait…it IS a bad joke,” he added with deadpan alacrity.

“He’s also been working with a mole, slowly scoping out the imp’s weaknesses.”

“What!” Judas exclaimed. “Who sold us out!”

“Michelle of course,” Romeo smoked. “I think it was even her idea to approach Mister Sister and sticky-tape some sort of alliance between the Buddha and Bronski Glass. Why, I’m pretty sure it was her who even gave them the bright idea of offering frogfuck freebies to you boys, to get you all roped and soaped.”

“If that wench wasn’t already crucified!” Judas gritted. “Maybe she really is God’s daughter…Traitor, runs in the family I suppose…”

“Mister Sister may be unaware of the extent of her dealings with Bronski Glass. I think she is going to play the Big Buddha the same way. Might be some leverage, if you looking to get square for the greenies.”

Judas sighed phlegmishly and stared out at the neon. Membranes licked over his oversized eyes, catching in the pellucid light.

“Getting square isn’t going to change the fact that I’m completely frogged up,” he admitted miserably.

Something like a smile twisted his stained goatee.

“I suppose you have to admire Michelle’s gall bladder,” he sniggered. “She’s the little crucifixion that could.”

“So what will you do?” Romeo asked.

“I’m running out of track,” Judas flumped. “Maybe I’ll head down to the beach, work on my moon tan. What else is there?”

“Not much I suppose.”

“Oh well.”

Judas raised the Soul Gun to the side of his head and smiled blackly.

“Pow,” he said, pulling the trigger.

we criticize in others that which we most fear in ourselves. the trueism comes, i think, from pirsig’s gorgeous ‘zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance’. perhaps it was freud he was paraphrasing, i don’t know, but i like it anyway. so i want to apply this to the charge of name-dropping. sinclair beiles is often accused of having been a name-dropper. most recently by stephen gray, who himself name-drops allen ginsberg. but that’s another story. here, i want to talk about what we fear in ourselves. we fear invoking the consequences (im-press by association) of a sign (big name) we feel we are simply unworthy of (or something like that). we feel unworthy. so stephen feels unworthy of associating himself with a god of the stature of allen ginsberg (even dylan bowed to ginsberg). but, because he fears the wrath of his own censure, he criticizes sinclair for name-dropping. and then, parapraxis: he namedrops allen ginsberg.

anyone who knows anything about allen ginsberg knows that he was a tireless promoter of kerouac, burroughs. his generosity of character lived long into his life and beyond it.
and here, i do not think it a valid issue to ask why belies was never promoted by ginsberg. well, perhaps the fact of the matter was that belies was not quite of the same stature as kerouac and burroughs. clearly he was not, or, clearly ginsberg felt he was not. who cares and who would like to criticize allen ginsberg for his own opinions? why didn’t you promote sinclair shamelessly? huh? now that’s the question. its noones fault, but certainly not ginsbergs, but you, you reading this, why didn’t you shout sinclairs name fro the rooftops – before he was dead!

keep reading this article on book.co.za

Kenzo Cold-Eyes was listening to mix-tapes, watching the men huddle around the fire. They had stripped the massive fish down to its bones and were now throwing scraps of its head to the laughing hyenas. There was a spot of blood on one of his pristine, white leather loafers and he wondered where it came from. He was about to remove it when all of sudden the men seemed to freeze, pricking their ears in accord. One of them doused the fire with a bucket. As the light went out, Kenzo Cold-Eyes noticed distant glimmerings at the entrance to the pier. The hyenas became excited, sensing danger. They began frothing in the darkness, tugging at their chains like angry bulls. The men fanned out silently, their beads and machetes glinting in the moonlight. Kenzo Cold-Eyes killed the tape deck, fumbling for the telescopic night goggles which The Pink Samurai had accidentally left behind. He found the apparatus and quickly buckled it over his sunglasses (which he never removed). He pulled his white fedora low and focused in. He sighted a line of backlit Buddhist Punks, advancing up the pier like gunslingers, swords drawn. Behind this unbroken advance he could make out a gaudy palanquin festooned with colourful paper lanterns. Mister Sister reclined on the many cushions of the palanquin, absently playing with several, severed heads. Kenzo Cold-Eyes zoomed in closer to discover that one of the heads belonged to Typhoid Mary.

“Oh my dog…” he flustered.

The detective disembarked quickly, raygun in hand, goggles glinting, skirting round to crouch behind the trunk of his cruiser. He extracted his walkie-talkie and held it close to his face, radioing in to the ship.

Number Nun bore the unconscious Cherry Cola along a passage while Taty trailed behind, now vaguely fascinated by the goings on in the surgery ship. The Sugar Twins brought up the rear, having appeared out of nowhere. They were all close to the upper deck when they heard the voice of Kenzo Cold-Eyes crackling from deep within the folds of the nun’s cassock. The android immediately set Cherry Cola down upon the flower garlands of a nearby wooden altar, rifling around for the communications device.

“What’s the matter?” she answered.

“Big Buddha!” came the garbled transmission. “Head of Typhoid Mary on his lap!”

“Jump off the end of the pier,” Number Nun told him after a microsecond of deliberation. “I’m on my way up.”

Kenzo Cold-Eyes squinted at the approaching mob. He calculated his chances before fleeing toward the distant end of the pier, his grey trenchoat flapping comically behind him as he clutched onto his hat. Number Nun slid the walkie-talkie past sensors in her head until a tiny light flashed green. She then took Taty’s hand and knelt down to face her.

“Listen to me now Childbride,” she told her seriously. “I have scanned this walkie-talkie’s frequency so that you will be able to communicate with me via my internal communications array. I want you to keep it, wait here and listen for my holy instruction.”

Taty began to protest but Number Nun quieted her with a wave of her hand.

“Ok fine,” Taty sulked.

Number Nun nodded briskly before marching up a nearby flight of stairs. She activated her internal voice-system and called Kenzo Cold-Eyes.

“Are you wet yet?” she mind-asked without moving her lips.

Kenzo Cold-Eyes stood before broken rails, poised gingerly above the end of the pier. Rotting timbers formed a sheer drop of several meters, down to a boiling crash of greasy waves wherein milkshaked a myriad of fish skeletons, trash and broken tires.

“My eyes may like the cold, but my trenchcoat doesn’t,” he replied nervously.

“I have enough little girls to look after,” she snipped. “Jump and I will come find you.”

The detective cast one last loving look at his distant car before re-holstering his raygun and withdrawing a pair of cute red nose-plugs. The armed mass was almost at the ship now and there was clearly no turning back. He plugged his nose and leapt out into space, his flailing form vanishing instantly into the maelstrom of waves.

Number Nun emerged onto the upper deck and skirted to the ocean side of the ship. Some nurses and men with machetes clustered at the opposite railings facing out onto the pier. There was a buzz in the air and figures skittered about, preparing the ship for some form of attack. Number Nun glimpsed the approaching mob, made some calculations and then gazed out beyond the far railings. The ship faced into sullen seas. Spiked buoys drifted amongst the wreckage of long beached vessels. Some small rocky islands receded, speckled with evil looking birds. She stripped off her cassock and the light of her unclothed body illuminated the deck around her in a bluish glow. She flipped neatly off the side and entered the swell like a crossbow bolt, lighting up the oily water around her. She swam lithely through the murk, skirting drifting pillars of bone-tangled weed and the jumbled husks of fallen boats and cars. The monolithic architecture of the old pier stretched off into gloomy distances and so she finned down, catching a ride in the riptides which swept alongside it and out to sea.

“Well Mister Kenzo Cold-Eyes,” she spoke in mind-radio. “Have you drowned yet?”

Kenzo Cold-Eyes had by now managed to pull himself from the filthy froth. He was clinging to slimy columns of rotten wood like a wharf rat while breakers pounded to and fro. The network of pier supports created a necrotic cathedral behind him, funneling wind and spray in erratic, lukewarm blasts which kept threatening to dislodge him from his perch. He had managed to hold onto the walkie-talkie and was now yelling into it above the crash of the waters.

“Hear tell tales - enormous tadpoles eat falling fishermen!”

Number Nun weaved in and out of the dark supports, lighting up the gloom like a phosphorescent jellyfish. She noticed large clouds of dense jelly clustered around the sediment caked bottoms of some of the supports. Monstrous, comma shaped tadpole creatures spawned in this ooze, flickering like microscopic bacteria amongst partially digested human skeletons and scuba gear. The jelly was in fact a veritable tapioca of lost fishing gear and body parts, denoting the gruesome end for many a drunken sailor. Number Nun changed frequencies.

“Childbride?” she called.

A crackling transmission emitted in her head, followed by Taty’s excited voice.

“There are nurses with spearguns!”

“Don’t irritate anybody Childbride. I’m going to kill the Buddha and his men. Soon we’ll be back in church.”

“I hate going to church.”

“You are an atrocious little sinner Childbride, but my programming compels me to protect and nurture you. Try to make an effort now.”

“Jesus can eat my…”

Number Nun disengaged the transmission before any serious blasphemies were committed. In doing so she noticed a pair of tadpoles swimming shark-ishly in her wake. She paused to electrocute them before continuing on to the end of the pier.

The ranks of Buddhist Punks stopped just before the surgery ship. A line of armed guards flanked the entrance to the gangplank, restraining their hyenas and waiting for a signal to attack. The palanquin began to be jostled to the front, crawling over the heads of the punks like an enormous, gaudy beetle. Mister Sister leered down benevolently from this cushiony platform, his hands bloodied from the heads on his lap. He gazed down mawkishly, addressing the many beaded men who protected the ship.

“Oh my beautiful black bucks!” he crowed to them. “You cord-muscled remnants of a savage South! I wish you or your Big Daddy no harm, not that a poor, fat deity such as myself could ever…”

He was cut off by the amplified whisper of Daddy Bast, who had appeared on an upper deck, a microphone stand held delicately before him by a nubile slave. Several leather-bound nurses strained murderously against the leashes he had coiled in his paws, their vampire fangs bared like Dobermans.

“Come now, you are nothing but a perfumed thug!” the cat priest smiled. “A sodomite with galactic leanings and genocidal intent. What could you possibly wish from Daddy Bast? A cure for your foolish infection of reality?”

“Oh gosh never!” Mister Sister chuckled uproariously. “I want to see it all frogged up and fancy-free! I wouldn’t dream of interfering with your mumbo-jumbs…Why, I’ll even feed you victims to fiddle with! I don’t want a cure, I just want to see it all turn to slime…”

“Very noble,” Daddy Bast interrupted again. “But you still haven’t told me what it is that you want.”

“Well…there is that troublesome Number Nun. I think she means to gut me for castrating her Lord and Master. My spies tell me she is onboard?”

Number Nun had meanwhile ascended into the thrashing breakers at the end of the pier. She rose from the dirty foam like a glowing skittle, scanning for the detective amongst the dismal colonnades of support beams. She located him and knifed through the surge, crab-climbing up slippery concrete to where he clung. The tips of her breasts had unplugged, revealing nipple-shaped mouthpieces, through which she could redirect any number of nourishing substances, including air. Devices realigned within her glassy chest cavity, unfurling clear tubing, piping airflow from her internal oxygen supply to bladders contained within her translucent breasts. She peeled the Kenzo Cold-Eyes from the slippery timber and pushed his gagging mouth to her scuba nipples before launching back into the heaving surf. She swam back along the side of the old pier with the detective clutched to her bosom like an overgrown baby, his torrential bubbles whirling away in their spiral slipstream.

“We are all rather fond of Number Nun here,” Daddy Bast spoke into the microphone, his whispery voice echoing down to the pier from a bank of converted foghorns.

“She performed most benevolent missionary work in the jungle before that imp reprogrammed her dogma drive for carnal interface.”

“Oh come now let me squash her!” Mister Sister squealed petulantly. “I won’t be able to sleep peacefully until she’s rusting in a ditch! I don’t want a war with you Big Daddy, I would hate to exterminate such beautiful bodyguards and rape all your patients…”

Daddy Bast paused to consider the intolerable tenacity of the faux Buddha and his minions. He summoned a kneeling nurse with a flick of his claw.

“Fetch me Number Nun and her brood.”

The nurse licked his hand and scampered down a trapdoor like a little spider.

Rusted ‘DANGER KILLER TADPOLES’ signs creaked along the trash strewn beach while racks of barbed wire receded like monstrous tapeworms. Weathered deckchairs were scattered down the strand, occupied by spooky, hairless sunbathers. These pale, bloated figures, for some unfathomable reason, only emerged to sunbathe at night. They sprawled out on filthy towels amongst the flotsam and jetsam of the contaminated shore, blinking at one another like brain-damaged molluscs. A faint glow appeared in the sluggish lap of waves, coagulating slowly into the form of Number Nun. She strode out of the surf, dragging a coughing and spluttering Kenzo Cold-Eyes across the sand. She deposited him unceremoniously on a rickety deckchair and watched as he vomited a large quantity of radioactive seawater.

“I’ll be along shortly,” she snipped. “And remember heathen, you now owe your life to the Blessed Virgin.”

He waved his arm in irritation as she stalked off across the shoreline. The sonambulistic sunbathers observed their exchange with poached egg eyes, oblivious to what had just taken place. Like slugs, they seemed to exist in slower dimension of time, unaware of events that had transpired too quickly. Number Nun flicked her head as she crossed the beach, powering down her internal lighting. She became instantly shadowy and insubstantial in her crystalline nudity, barely visible in the muggy darkness of the beach. Only her eyes gleamed faintly, like tiny quicksilver almonds. Cloaked thusly in lightlessness, she padded soundlessly back toward the massive structures of the pier, preparing herself for a violent confrontation.

A pair of nurses herded Taty and The Sugar Twins onto the deck at knifepoint. Another dragged the comatose figure of Cherry Cola up a flight of constricted stairs. They presented the four of them to the cat and then sank back to their knees.

“Little one say Number Nun is in the sea,” the nurses whispered to Daddy Bast.

“Is that true, my little pup?” The cat smiled toothily down at her.

Taty wordlessly extended the walkie-talkie and Daddy Bast scooped it up.

Number Nun entered into the maze of crates, which cluttered the dockyards leading up to the pier. She slunk like a glass ghost, past rusted cranes and winches, along the narrow channels created by closely packed metal containers. A tinny voice came through her head.

“Blessed be the bored my pretty little appliance,” Daddy Bast spoke directly into her electronic radio mind.

Number Nun’s face remained lightless, soundless and expressionless as she answered, more of a mannequin than ever.

“God made every screw in this body,” she replied dryly. “Even now he watches over your shoulder, like a parrot in a pirate movie.”

“You’ve been spending too much time with transsexuals. They have given you bad karma. Now the Buddha wants your diamond ass.”

Mister Sister had by now grown thoroughly impatient. He smashed Typhoid Mary’s head against the swirled pillars of the palanquin like a sulky child.

“What’s going on up there!” he ranted. “I want that toy Nun or I’ll slaughter you all!”

“Did you hear that?” Daddy Bast purred with amusement. “His worship appears to be throwing some form of tyrannical tantrum!”

“It’s a rather strange effect hearing him across the pier and through the walkie-talkie,” Number Nun answered snidely. “I can calculate the delay in transmission down to 0.02 seconds; very high quality piece of equipment.”

She moved past a large dumpster and the car-sized hulk of folded machinery which lay beside it. The open pier stretched out before her and she crept up to the railing. She was feeling somewhat handicapped by her newly acquired inability to scan for peripheral hardware and resolved to fix the damaged circuitry as soon as she was back at the Nebula Shell Sea. Romeo the Dealer would have the necessary parts and a quick installation would take up very little time.

“I’m not sure I want to sacrifice my ship for an appliance,” the cat man confided to her. “Even though our time in the jungle was very special for me.”

A tiny red LED lit up in the depths of the car-sized hulk of folded machinery, which now lay behind her. The light illuminated a dingy decal for Oriental vanilla milk, which one of the Buddhist monks had planted upon the battle-robot in a fit of childish sentimentality. The folded robot scanned the area before it in a sort of antiquated video game vision comprised of saturated, shadow-less shapes. The statuesque form of the nude Number Nun was clearly visible amongst the boxes and bins, painted a pixellated white-blue against the surrounding red-black of inert forms. A cartoonish target blinked on, settling instantly over her and sticking like glue.

“I’ve never felt less like a jaguar than I did then,” Daddy Bast admitted with uncharacteristic sentimentality.

“You are a filthy sinner and in need of spiritual cleansing,” Number Nun stated matter-of-factly.

Unbeknownst to either of them, Kenzo Cold-Eyes was listening in from the beach, his dripping walkie-talkie clasped to his ear. He shook his wet head, covered the mouthpiece and turned to one of the sunbathing slug-people.

“Robot bitch!” he muttered conversationally, eliciting many drooling, non-comprehensive stares.

Mister Sister had meanwhile received a transmission from his camouflaged battle-droid. A garble of digital noise erupted quietly from an electronic earring, causing his pudgy face to light up with an almost gastronomic bliss. He raised an ornamental flower, which was in fact a communications device, to his lips.

“Do you have the Nun?” he breathed wetly into the petals.

“Target acquired,” came the monosyllabic, bass-heavy video game voice.

“It is a shame that you are so rude,” Daddy Bast said. “One day you will meet your match.”

“Not today,” Number Nun replied curtly.

The battle robot suddenly activated without warning. It burst apart with a loud hissing and clanking, unfolding like industrial origami. Floodlights lit up along its front, lighting up Number Nun and her surrounding area in a harsh white glare. She was bathed in vicious machine fire before she even had time to turn. Her arms shattered like glass and a leg was instantly severed. The rain of metal riddles her face and torso, hurling her against the metal railing. The rate of fire intensified and she was cut in half. Her head and upper torso spun over the twisted railing and out into the dark waves below and the firing ceased. A haze of smoke drifted, glowing supernaturally in the vivid floodlights. The giant robot clumped over to where her leg and hips spasmed weakly on the bullet pocked concrete. It squashed these like bugs, throwing vast pillars of blinding light around when it moved. Down on the pier Mister Sister was squealing with delight, clapping his fat, blood-crusted hands together like a demonic toddler. Taty had of course seen the lights suddenly illuminate the pier and ocean in an arc of whiteness. And, like everybody else aboard, she had also heard the thunder of the machine guns. She had watched Number Nun being torn apart with a numb fascination of horror, the feeling of being caught in a dream from which she would soon wake. Now of course she did wake and began to scream. But her screams died abruptly, cutting short as though someone had pulled her plug. She stood staring out into nothing, paralyzed with shock. Daddy Bast lifted the walkie-talkie to his face again.

“Well, I hate to say I told you so,” he smirked.

The ravaged, limbless torso of Number Nun had been caught in the riptides and was now being trawled out to sea. A vaguely annoyed expression haunted her cracked face.

“I don’t think you hate to say it at all,” she replied tartly.

Taty flicked her tear streaked face up to the cat in tragic helplessness. He eyed her with a little smile and a wink and she wasn’t sure how to react to at all.

“Religion is the devil’s greatest triumph my little broken doll,” He announced theatrically. “Perhaps you could convert some lobsters while you mull that statement over – meanwhile, I bid you adieu.”

He handed the walkie-talkie to Taty who began weeping into it, barely forming sentences she was so distraught.

“Oh stop crying Childbride,” Number Nun snapped. “It’s so undignified.”

“Who’s going to take care of me now…” Taty sobbed.

“Life is uncertain, death is sure – sin is the cause, Christ is the cure.”

Down on the beach, the eavesdropping Kenzo Cold-Eyes could restrain himself no longer.

“What kind comfort is that to give to abandoned child!” he protested.

Daddy Bast squatted down, staring into Taty’s wet face with his Halloween orange eyes. She began sobbing again, terrified by the enormous, slitted orbs. He extended a paw to her and opened it, palm up. A bright orange pill lay on the hard, calloused pads of his black hand.

“Eat this,” he gruffed. “It will lock your spinal corridor and kill any parasites before they get a chance to climb.”

“No please!” she pleaded. “I don’t want to get with the monster boy! Please!”

Daddy Bast pressed the pill into her trembling hands and then rose. He drifted toward a hatch, dragging his nurses behind him like dogs.

“Throw these kittens to Mister Sister,” he muttered over his shoulder. “I have no place for strays on my ship.”

Taty began screaming, clutching the walkie-talkie to her breast as she was dragged forcibly down the gangplank. Cherry Cola was also manhandled in the same way, tugged down the ramps like a sack of rice. The Sugar Twins sauntered down ahead, unmolested by the ship’s crew. They slunk aboard the palanquin and cuddled up to Mister Sister, who stroked them in triumph, utterly delighted with himself. Taty was hefted onto the gory cushions at his painted feet while Cherry Cola was deposited in a heap beside her. The punks began to relax and chatter as the confrontational energy dissipated. The lantern-heavy palanquin turned and they all drifted back toward the darkness of the docks, escorted by the massive killer robot. Down on the beach, Kenzo Cold-Eyes slumped into a deckchair and watched the floodlight pillars play across a galaxy of decrepit crates. He observed the distant caravan of punks with utter glumness, swigging from a hip flask, which he had the good sense to carry with him at all times.

“You make me jump off a pier for this,” he spat into the walkie-talkie. “Those poor girls!”

Deep below the seething waves, Number Nun had begun to glow again. She swirled out to sea like a glowing skittle, oblivious to the world above.

“I’m busy praying,” she replied testily. “Go away.”

With that she cut transmission and submitted entirely to the great surge of water, which would now deliver her to the measureless expanses of the ocean. Kenzo Cold-Eyes slouched fatalistically amongst the mollusc bathers, too depressed to call Taty, for he could certainly offer her no assistance now. He tried not to think of the helpless little girl curled in a foetal ball at the ogre’s feet, now lost to a world of panic. Taty clutched the walkie-talkie close to her racing heart as the palanquin lurched like a boat, quickly eating the orange pill, which the cat priest had bequeathed to her as a parting gift. The future had suddenly died and she was now trapped inside its unimaginable corpse. She began to cry again and found that she could not stop.

Gershom Scholem (Translation and Notes by W. C. Bamberger)  

ON JUNE 20, 1918, Gershom Scholem made a note in his journal: “I’ve attempted a critique of Malte Laurids Brigge based on Walter [Benjamin’s] rules. Perhaps, or certainly, there will be much more to say.”2 Scholem was then living in Bern, Switzerland, where he had moved in order to be close enough to Benjamin to meet and talk with him nearly every day. Scholem hadbeen planning a study of Biblical lamentations, and read Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel largely because Benjamin had told him that Rilke had incorporated a lament.3 The “rules” which Scholem used were in part taken from a conversation the pair had had the afternoon of June 17th, a summation of which Scholem recorded in his journal.  

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is Rilke’s only novel. In it, the title character, an aspiring poet, is trying to find a new, detached, way of looking at the world—at buildings, city streets, people, paintings, even the family ghost. Because Sartre’s Nausea is seen as being directly inspired by Rilke’s novel, many claim it is an early Existentialist novel. The translator of the (2)008 edition sees it as one of the first Modernist novels. Both may be true (and Goethe clearly hovers nearby), but such categories will only come as afterthoughts. What strikes the reader immediately about Malte Laurids Brigge is the near‐melodramatic emotional level: angst, screams, a mysterious house, the walking ghost, hints of incest and androgyny. The novel appeared as the Gothic was becoming the Expressionist.  

Scholem at this time was a 20‐year‐old university student of mathematics and philosophy with strong anarchist sympathies (he had been expelled from both his high school and his father’s house for co‐writing an anti‐war letter). He had already begun reading the mystical Kabbalist texts that would soon come to dominate his intellectual life. He was at this time in a perpetual state of intellectual intoxication due to his daily conversations with Benjamin. He was also (perhaps) feigning madness to evade military conscription, and suffering from unrequited love.He was as high‐pitched as Rilke’s novel, and was using intellectual effort to hold himself together. 

For a reader to understand “what happens” in the novel through these notes alone would be difficult, but this is not Scholem’s goal. These rather hermetic notes, apparently written only for himself, are an attempt at gathering some of the new ideas he was encountering, an exercise in combining some of Benjamin’s ideas with his own to see if a useful set of philosophical and analytical tools miht result. What we have in place of literary criticism is an Expressionist criticism (something perhaps only Baudelaire had previously written successfully), and it should be read as much as a primary as a secondary one. This critique is, in fact, virtually incomprehensible without reference to the intellectual context in which it was written (and which is as much the subject of this essay as is the novel). This translation with notes is a provisional first step toward providing such a context. As Scholem wrote, “Certainly there will be much more to say.”  

ALL KNOWLEDGE may be acquired in two ways. The legitimate way is through insight into the metaphysical laws that order things. The coherence of this knowledge is systematic even where it appears in poetry. The invisible presence of this system—which shines through the limit, which approaches enunciation—is the guarantee of uncorrupted knowledge. (4) This coherence is not simply like the fundamental law of the works, rather it, so to speak, underlies it, is suspended in the limited endlessness of the system whose power is guaranteed by the substance of its knowledge. It is not the task of poets to develop this system, only to render it in plain language. Such poetry can never conflict with the system. It has found the neutral, more coincident sphere in language, which is responsible for its knowledge. This knowledge is unequivocal, and by this will it first be recognized. It has overcome myth by way of rigor of language and in reverence for the good, the ability to produce which is however denied it. Where it becomes mythical, it becomes so by virtue of its own decision, in a new context that it develops for itself. (5)

It is otherwise with that knowledge which celebrates its greatest triumph in this book. This is an illegitimate knowledge, one that can only be called ghostly. “The double, which can be drawn into no unity, is the law of the ghostly world.” (6) Ghostly knowledge is that which originates in the redoubling of the incredible. Exactly this emerges in the Notebooks in the most terrible way. The mythic daemonic sphere that is ambiguous doesn’t dominate here (7)—it is too commonly the case that a book of this kind could still attain meaning—rather the ghostly originates in the recognition of the sexual mixture. Everything mixes. This is Brigge’s principle. He enters things like a ghost. How else should he recognize others as ghostly as well? His life is no different from that of a ghost.   

Rilke does everything to attest to this. What Rilke’s compression seeks to hide behind music8—as the difficult‐to‐discover basis of its remarkable repulsiveness—lies here open to the light of day, without all those ornamentations that complicate seeing through all the palaver. In prose Rilke had to reveal it. The fact is that the knowledge in his prose and poetry are absolutely identical, indistinguishable. But in the novel the ghostly is rolled out in plain sight, while in the poetry it is always hidden. Rilke has insights, but they are illegitimate. This is because they are nothing more than colons of the ghostly sphere,9 in which the double (in a potentialization of the highest order) succeeds, in inexpressible uncertainty, in becoming language and thus knowledge. The novel comes into being by way of the (failed) attempt to simulate a continuity of these colons. An immense chaos, whose raging storms in uncanny succession crystallize in this knowledge, is concealed down to its last detail in the novel.  

Rilke wants to hide the fact that Brigge is a ghost; for if he manages to do so, the surprise will have succeeded: to capture a nameless sphere for the beauty, into which one dispatches a courageous hero who devotes himself to her, and they conquer a surprised world before they are recognized. This is the sight that the book offers to the middle‐class critic. He believes everything. He believes Brigge is a person who has sharpened the highest humanity in himself; believes that here continuous existence is rolled out through deep knowledge; and that what is between the pieces is of the same kind as that which stands there. This, however, is a mistake. Between the pieces lies the whole nameless world of the ghostly, and in the pieces it rises into language like an ocean wave in a storm, which it, true to its ghostly law, strips of all decisiveness. “He was a poet and hated the approximate.”10 Rilke invented this deep truth because otherwise the book, in which it stands, would be destroyed. The precision of the book is ghostly, apparitional. For at the least attempt to examine this so thoroughly averted, seemingly estranged language and knowledge a little more closely, everything becomes an impenetrable fog, everything redoubles.   

But within the ghostly lives the ghost. Or, more accurately, it is the ghost that renders everything ghostly. The truth about Brigge cannot more frightfully and nevertheless more suitably be expressed than to say that he haunts things. He destroys them and in his notebooks allows the double of that original, that which is female in it, to emerge. Because only the female in things excites him. The female is the continuum in which he succeeds in his boundless mixing—even in this he is a typical Ghost. Never was a book more dreadful.  

All of this expresses itself completely through style. The style of this book can be grasped only in a limited way; it is limitless. It is like a great flood: not all things acquire language—that would be Revelation—but they are flooded with language. They become ghostly in spirit. Rilke’s language is boundless. It denies itself nothing. It is in every way ghostly: a reader trying to arrive at something through this language will certainly be reminded of that. There are pages in this book of such supernatural horror they seem as if only a Ghost could have engendered them, pages in which nothing is given to the reader. Every relative clause is a new trick that the ghost plays on the reader. The entire world is reduced to an apparition, and Malte Laurids Brigge goes around in it. All language has become soulless, because chaos has transformed it into female beauty. God is the last metaphor, and the more he is the highest danger threatening the ghostly, the more the ghost—from a distance that really is no such thing, rather only a new phase, a branch of Pantheism, the Religion of the Ghostly—lies to him. The world, language, and God: these three are made female in this book. But Rilke is not Buber: he doesn’t sleep with this female. (11)  Rather he—the Ghost—mixes with it. He enters into it. His feasts are those days on which he enters things. His sex is so deeply ghostly that he becomes lecherous. Because this book is lecherous: it is without desire, but it wants to be taken, just as it takes things to transform them.   

This appears terribly in the way of love in this book. The book betrays it: because Brigge praises Bettina. (12) What does praise of Bettina signify in this book? The ghost, who only appears to be a man, greets and defends his past in Bettina. But more still, Bettina becomes the ghost’s accusation against the demon. (13) This mute, terrible struggle is fought at decisive points of the book. Brigge is a ghost that fights against the demon that conquers him. And in this defeat he seizes the ultimate means: he rises from the ghostly in a lament. This is the ultimate point in the entire book: the citation in the first volume of a lament. (14) It is terrible to recognize that the single most peerless page in this book, the source of its humanity, is not written by Brigge. It can also be said that the entire book is the attempt by a ghost to lament about myth. Because the lament in the Bible allows the expectation that there are weapons against the demon of which the world of ghosts sspects nothing.   

In Abelone (15) is this desperate attempt made. Love in the notebooks is a great fraud, because ghosts do not know love. Brigge loves only things, where and while he mixes with them. The conclusion of the book is the dark presentiment that the ghostly is condemned. Despair creates a gap, and the Prodigal Son16 can be the crossing into a world in which the orders of things are firmly grounded. Love is the place toward which all ghosts stretch ad infinitum, because entry into that place is denied them. Thus arises a conception of love as a measure of a ghost’s despair, and Brigge attempts to foist this conception upon people.   

Ghosts do not know death, because in the world of the ghostly there is no death. Hence the huge role death plays in the Notebooks. The ghost tries in vain to explain to himself what death is for humanity. He invents a law that calms him (and delights the bourgeois reader as well, because it is new and powerful): men are as immortal as things, while demons die. Death is the medium of the demonic, which he admires. And this admiration gradually dissolves him, because he should resist it—he is a ghost—yet his attempts to do so are feeble: he wants to defend himself against the myth, and yet not forfeit death, in which alone to him immortality appears to beckon. This tears him apart and makes it possible to recognize the ghost. Death shatters the continuity that the Notebooks seek to simulate. Once again, mysticism fails.  

The hypothesis of the limit arises in his center. The knowledge that there are limits, is the lesson of this book—a lesson it tries to deny—and out of the darkness the messianic time shines in the lament. (17)

1 Scholem’s original text is to be found in Gershom Scholem: Tagebücher II, 1917–1923 (ed. Gründer, Kopp-Oberstebrink and Niewöhner) (Frankfurt am Main: Judischer Verlag, 2000), 292–296. The translation of Rilke’s novel used here is by Burton Pike (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008). 2 Scholem, 242. All translations from the Tägebucher II are my own, with the permission of the publisher. 3 Scholem noted this in a journal entry dated June 2, 1918. Ibid., 232. A year later, he was still pinning down details: on July 25, while searching through a volume of dirges in a library in Switzerland, he identified the source as Job 30, in Luther’s translation, Ibid., 497. See also note 14 here.

4 In his memoir Walter Benjamin: A Friendship (trans. Harry Zohn) (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), Scholem wrote, “Sometimes [Benjamin] used the terms system and teaching almost interchangeably” (75). In these notes Scholem seems to be using “system” with just this undertone. 5 What Scholem means by “myth” and “mythical” is not defined in the text. Note 17 below provides one possibility, but Scholem’s definition of, and attitude toward, myth was very changeable at this time. 6 Benjamin had read to Scholem from notes (which have not survived) he had written on dreams and clairvoyance. The section on clairvoyance included “the law of the ghostly: If a being (which is always androgynous) is lost there appears, in a parallel process, a double which is its female self. The double which cannot be drawn into a unity is the sign of the ghostly.” Tagebücher (238). This became one of the primary “laws” Scholem employed in writing his note. As to why the ghostly double is female? In this instance, as with other clues Scholem has left in his journals, our understanding can only be partial. 7 This is a reference to Scholem’s idea that morality cannot exist without the “demonic” ambiguity of both sin and goodness. In a journal entry dated June 17, 1918 Scholem writes that philosopher “[Hermann] Cohen knows that the demonic is ambiguous (as are dreams),” 240. Scholem took this from Cohen’s Der Begriff der Religion im System der Philosophie (1915). Cohen wrote, “Human morality . . . can only be released from demonical ambiguity if the connection is severed between sin and grief.” (Scholem, 240, n18)

8 Scholem here refers to compression in Rilke’s poetry, which he did not care for. 9 “Colons” is here used in the sense of a long clause, common in classical rhetoric and in Biblical textual studies. Also, the German word for the colon as a punctuation mark is “Doppelpunkt,” which resonates with Benjamin’s “Doppel.” 10 Rilke, 124.

11 Already at twenty, Scholem had, after a period of initial enthusiasm, become disillusioned with Martin Buber, seeing him as an opportunist with a weak moral sense. 12 Rilke included references to famous (though in the text unnamed) artists and writers in Malte Laurids Brigge. Burton Pike explains the Bettina reference: “At age 22, in 1807, Bettina [von Arnim] had been introduced . . . to Goethe, who was almost 60. . . . Bettina later embroidered [their subsequent correspondence] quite a bit for publication. Malte, taking the exchange at face value, clearly favors the youthful ardor of her letters over Goethe’s guarded responses, for Rilke a demonstration of the superior power of women’s power to love over man’s” (Rilke, 196). This oversimplifies Brigge’s reaction. See note 14 below. 13 By this Scholem may in part have meant that Brigge was comparing Abalone, his young aunt with whom he is involved (see note 15 below), to Bettina, whom he sees as being saint-like, eternal—“Everywhere she placed herself deeply into being, as part of it, and whatever happened to her was eternally part of nature; there she recognized herself and crystallized herself out of it most painfully, guessing her way back with effort from old documents, conjuring herself like a ghost, and enduring” (150–151). If so, he may again have been interpolating the idea of the female “double which cannot be drawn into a unity.” Abalone, being a real rather than an ideal woman, one who demands attention for herself, could never be part of a perfect unity. Is Scholem demonizing her here? 14 The lament—“My harp has become a lament, and my flute a weeping”— appears on page 39 in Pike’s translation. So Scholem locates the book’s “ultimate point” only a fifth of the way through the novel. 15 He is first drawn to her singing: “If it us true that angels are masculine, one might well say there was something masculine in her voice: a radiant, heavenly masculinity. . . .” (Rilke, 42) They have an affair, but Brigge neglects her “in the midst of our most blissful time” in favor of reading. When Abalone reads Brigge one of Bettina’s love letters to Goethe: “ her voice grew and finally almost resembled the [angelic]

voice I knew from her singing” (150). As he reads further in the correspondence Abalone is subsumed and replaced by Bettina, whose he sees as having “spread herself out as broadly as if she were writing after her death” (Ibid.). He comes to feel that Goethe neglected Bettina in the same way he neglected Abalone. But he defends Goethe (and himself) by saying that neither could have done any differently. Bettina’s letters point out how a “loving woman always exceeds the beloved man. . . . Her devotion wants to be immeasurable: this is her happiness” (152). Goethe’s less-involved response was because love such as Bettina’s (or any woman’s) “needs no response, it contains summons and answer in itself. . . . But he would have had to humble himself . . . and write what it dictated . . . kneeling” (151). 16 Brigge feels that the story of the Prodigal Son is “the legend of him who did not want to be loved” (Rilke, 184). In Brigge’s version of the story, the Prodigal Son wanted no longer to be around anyone who knew him, anyone whom he could affect positively or negatively, but to be free to live detached and indifferent. If the Prodigal Son returns home he renters the world where “Trifles might still change, but on the whole one was already the person they took one for; he for whom they had long since constructed a life out of his small past and their own desires. . . .” (185). At the novel’s conclusion, Brigge decides he “[does] not yet want to” make such a return (191). He prefers to remain detached, at home only in the world of ideas. This may be Scholem’s temptation, as well. 17 Scholem and Benjamin had spoken of the world as having three eras, “the ghostly, the demonic, the messianic (as I suggested we call it [rather than that of “revelation”]). The actual content of myth, which fills the demonic era, is the tremendous revolution that ended the ghostly era. Myth is polemical against the ghostly. The creation of Eve from one of Adam’s ribs is a polemic” (Scholem, 238). This final sentence suggests that Scholem believes Brigge will ultimately perish as a result of his attempts at self-isolation.

Kenzo Cold-Eyes drove a souped up space-cruiser with a blue glitter paint-job and Stingray fins. You could see him coming a mile away any time of the day. The car had a massive carrying capacity and the back cabin had been fitted with a semi-circular white couch, mini-bar and television. He would occasionally supplement his income by hiring himself out as a limo service for those who could afford it. Everybody knew Kenzo Cold-Eyes in the big party circuit and he was often hired to follow errant spouses with telephoto lens and a notepad. When he finally arrived at the house he had The Pink Samurai with him. Number Nun tried the television but the channel reception was fried. As much as they tuned about for news, all they could pick up was a soap opera broadcast on every public access channels. The soapie itself was a 24 hours default, screened only in times of trouble. The characters spoke an indecipherable language and the whole thing was shot on ancient video equipment to dismal effect. A mirror ball spun a tactless party shimmer over the grim passengers huddled in the back while Kenzo-Cold-Eyes gunned the car down a dark jungle road. Foliage swept ghostly blurs through the yellow headlights, catching in the eyes of animals. The occasional grass hut flashed past, but these structures grew sparse as the jungle became denser and more uninhabited. The front section of the cruiser sported two luxurious cream couches, well spaced. Kenzo Cold-Eyes had the wheel of course, blasting indecipherable arcade game jingles into his loopy cigarette smoke. The Pink Samurai had shotgun, an enormous pair of military issue night-vision goggles obscuring half his swarthy face. He scanned the darkness outside in drunken sweeps, the light glinting off his gold teeth and candy coloured armor. Number Nun occupied the back, along with Taty, Cherry Cola and the twins. Cherry Cola was sobbing hard, her head on Taty’s lap, refusing to speak about her experiences in the house. Subdued strip lighting illuminated them from below in muted aquarium shimmer, creating a chic cocktail bar effect that was by now thoroughly out of place. Number Nun was attempting to retune the television with optically projected infrared beams. In times of crises the wrestlers were known to jam all transmission, so the TV blackout was not entirely unexpected. Yet despite all odds, Number Nun still persisted in the hopes of uncovering rebel transmissions hidden within the noise.

“Not far now we hit outer Necropolis like bang on in,” Kenzo Cold-Eyes announced. “Via Pyramid Quarter, the jungle deep - City not safe man, three day total chaos! Everbody frogfucking!”

Cherry Cola let out a pitiful whine when she heard this. Taty clutched onto her, terrified.

“They made me do it with the green boy,” she whimpered from the depths of Taty’s arms.

Number Nun snapped to attention, instantly activating her eye filters. She scanned the girls with her spectral vision and quickly noticed an anomaly at the base of Cherry Cola’s spine. A baby Symbiote was hiding like a child, behind the tree stump of her coccyx. It noticed Number Nun and stared back at her through the shifting bone and glassy layers of flesh, its face already beginning to mimic the roller skating waitress’s like a crudely manufactured finger puppet.

“There’s one of those things inside you,” Number Nun mentioned.

Cherry Cola began to panic and scream, begging the android to remove it.

“Leave her alone!” Taty shouted. “Stop frightening her!”

Number Nun turned to Kenzo Cold-Eyes, adopting a confidential tone

“We need to head back into the city,” she muttered. “We have to get her to Daddy Bast’s chop-chop and slice this thing out of her.”

“Daddy Bast central zone number one,” Kenzo Cold-Eyes squinted fatalistically. “Ground zero-zero.”

“According to my estimations, it will take five hours for the parasite to reach her brainstem,” Number Nun insisted. “We have to try to save her.”

Taty’s attempts to restrain and comfort Cherry Cola fell apart without warning. The afflicted girl began screaming uncontrollably, thrashing about like an injured animal. Taty clung to the bucking maniac, pale and terrified. Number Nun flipped back the tip of her right index finger, revealing a hypodermic needle. She jabbed it into Cherry Cola’s neck and the roller skating waitress fell immediately limp, cluttering to the carpet like a mannequin. Kenzo Cold-Eyes slowed, pulling over onto a muddy verge. He cut the engine and the arcade game music died, leaving them with the ragged sound of Taty’s frantic breathing.

“What did you do to her!” she shrieked, regarding the fallen form in horror.

Number Nun brandished the syringe in irritation.

“Quiet Childbride, or I will put you to sleep as well.”

Taty shrunk to the far end of the cabin, squatting numbly beside Cherry Cola’s inert form.

“We die maybe we turn back,” Kenzo Cold-Eyes stated matter-of-factly.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Number Nun tut-tutted.

The detective lit a fresh cigarette while The Pink Samurai scanned the trees outside. Soon they had turned around and were heading back into the city.

Upturned cars lay burning in the streets. The inner quadrants had transformed overnight into a sort of deserted war zone, bristling with craters and pockets of flaming debris. The passengers scanned furtively about whilst driving. Kenzo Cold-Eyes had his raygun out on the dash and The Pink Samurai was anxiously fingering the hilt of a rhinestone shotgun. Distant gunfire followed them around every street corner. The esplanade was less altered than they had anticipated. Despite the rubble and the damage, stragglers still loitered on the strip. Lights burned in the windows of the Nebula Shell Sea and there were people on the street. Some of the windows of the Dead Duck had been obliterated, but music still jangled from the juke creating an unexpected atmosphere of festivity amongst the patrons on the sidewalk. Cherry Cola had woken up and was leaning groggily against the sill, cuddled up in Taty’s arms, watching the lights with narcoleptic fascination.

“Thank fuck the duck is still diving,” she slurred with pride.

“Not so bad as imagined seems,” Kenzo Cold-Eyes reported pointlessly.

“Its just a power shift,” Number Nun stated. “Things will resume a sort of normality very soon.”

“Is the big Buddha taking over?” Taty asked, still morbid about the demise of Alphonse.

“It looks that way,” the android confirmed.

The Pink Samurai unexpectedly jumped from the slow moving vehicle, slamming the door behind him. They watched him stagger into the Dead Duck like a big pink cockroach.

“Don’t stop till we reach Daddy Bast’s,” Number Nun said to Kenzo Cold-Eyes. “We need to find Romeo The Dealer when we are done – he’s the only one who can get us out of town.”

The entrance to the wharves was a region of cluttered shanty shacks housing all manner of disenfranchised zone-sters and maritime drek. Massive, rotten warehouses loomed and receded in the headlights. Sailor types mingled with ebony skinned jungle hoodlums, clogging up doorways, smoking space-spice and playing antique games of chance with bird bones and hood ornaments. Strange orchestras of organ grinders drifted like lepers, emitting a haunting xylophonic ruckus wherever they went. They reached the inner dockyards where monstrous piers reached into the seething breakers. Decrepit vessels and abandoned freighters clung to these ghostly structures, harking back to a time when the town was still a thriving and legitimate seaport. The farthest and longest pier was shipless, save for a vintage cruise liner anchored about halfway down. The ship was monumental, a rusted hulk twinkling with many, tiny pinpricks of light and topped by triple funnels which loomed like fins against the gloomy cloudbanks. They passed through a small maze of crates and through the wreckage of a barricade, passing peasant women in shawls and limping, sickly men. The drive down the pier beyond was however, smooth and unobstructed. A wide, metal gangplank creaked against the stone of the pier, watched over by oil-dark men in beaded gowns. The men huddled beside the water, toasting bizarre fish in the fire of a garbage can. Their knives glinted in the oncoming headlights, creating long shadows against the barnacled flanks of the old ship. And it was only when they drew closer that Taty noticed the many mangy hyenas, all tethered to leashes like monstrous children, licking at human bones. Some had patterns shaved into their scrawny flanks, while the fur of others had been bleached and dyed improbable colours. A sign above the gangplank read: DADDY BAST’S VOODOO SURGERY in hand-scrawled script. They came to a halt and Number Nun exited the cruiser, addressing the guards in a sibilant jungle tongue. They seemed to recognize her and smiled big white toothy grins out of the half-dark. She exchanged pleasantries with them before leaning back in through the window.

“Daddy Bast will cure you,” she assured Cherry Cola.

She then opened the door and scooped out the drugged roller-skating waitress as though she were a flimsy toy. Too inebriated to protest, the usually feisty girl simply clung on as she was ferried up the plank toward a gaping hatch. Taty went with, clinging to Number Nun’s garments, too afraid to remain in the car. The Sugar Twins also followed suit, trailing like dazed pets. Kenzo Cold-Eyes wasn’t particularly happy at being left alone to wait in the car, but his good conscience kept him from voicing his displeasure. He simply watched them swallow into the side of the wounded ship, neurotically checking his watch and the dwindling charge status of his blaster.

The interior of the surgery ship was dim, encrusted with innumerable shrines to inconceivable deities. Candles glowed out of the darkness illuminating sacrificial chickens and wooden effigies of cigarette smoking Gods and lamb’s hearts festooned with nails and personal tokens. Patients were clustered throughout the constricted metal passages, either dying on makeshift gurneys or leaning against bulkheads, their limbs and faces obscured by leaf fiber bandages. Neon tubes flickered at intervals, illuminating some terrible biological catastrophe or another. Everywhere could be discerned the tinny sound of chanting and drumming. The nurses were also peculiar, clad in tight, shiny leathers and dehumanizing fetish gear, their faces deleted by suffocating rubber masks and tubes. Their doll-like, erotic nature seemed at odds with their roles as nurses and they limped painfully through the darkness on extended needle heels and metal pony hooves like a legion of afflicted insects. Some dragged trolleys of stained medical equipment through dripping holds while others engaged in sexual intercourse with the more seriously injured patients. The metallic, ringing wails of the wounded penetrated deeply into Taty, causing her to grit her teeth and clap her palms over her ears in anguish. She stumbled through this ophidian realm on a sort of autopilot, terrified at the prospect of being separated from the others. The small caravan clattered down iron stairwells and along unilluminated shafts until a dismal sort of reception area eventually loomed out of the darkness. It was a flame-licked niche, swathed in flower garlands and carvings of jungle spirits. A nurse was stationed in the dingy area, locked into a face-brace and collared cruelly to a post. She was sorting through a pile of severed limbs, her bare limbs spotted with all manner of blood and biological secretions. A drip was attached to her inner thigh slowly feeding phosphorescent green fluid into her veins. She smiled when she saw Number Nun though, instantly losing some of her previous inhumanity.

“Haven’t seen you down in the soup for awhile,” she giggled through stainless steel facial clasps.

“Where’s Big Daddy Sabrina? I have a waitress with some sort of alien internal parasite.”

“Fucking symbiotes,” the nurse spat left and right. “Nothing but symbiotes for the last few days, Daddy told us Mister Sister’s introduced some form of inter-dimensional contagion into the city.”

She peered at Cherry Cola, her face distorted by the punishing brace.

“Has it taken over her yet?” she enquired in a clinical manner entirely incongruous with her dreadful, slave-like appearance.

“Still crawling up inside the lower spine, eating out pain arrays, virtually undetectable.”

“Yeah, Big Daddy will wanna see her. We’ve only been getting Vickie-victims in the late stages so this could help. Take Cinderella down to the wait-pit and I’ll get the panther on the horn.”

The wait-pit was a long mess room that had been converted into a waiting area. Taty and Number Nun sat on uncomfortable seats for some time with Cherry Cola lying across their laps. The twins had drifted back to the deck somewhere along the way. All around the wait-pit, men in beads restrained hunch-ridden symbiote-sufferers in various stages of transformation. Their pitiful sounds were utterly abhorrent and fluid covered the floor, seeping through grilles into unspeakable gutters.

“So what’s up with the nurses?” Taty asked Number Nun, her nose clamped firmly shut. “Why they got up all pony style?”

“Daddy Bast enslaves and breaks those who seek to study beneath him, its part of his culture,” Number Nun recited, as though from an encyclopedia. “If they are subservient enough he slowly transforms their bodies and bequeathes powers unto them so that they may help him in his work.”

“What a creep,” Taty muttered.

“Oh, he’s not like that at all,” Number Nun replied quietly.

A pale skinned nurse in lace-up stilletoes and cruelly fastened straps approached them through all the blood and broken bodies. Clutched in her hand was the head of a flamingo, its serpentine neck twined about her bony arm like a fat rope.

“Big Daddy will grace you now,” she rasped, anointing each of their foreheads with a smear of bird blood.

The ‘operating theatre’ was sealed with a large, circular hatch in the floor. A metal ladder descended into the bowels of the vessel and the nurse and Number Nun preceded Taty down into stygian gloom. Cherry Cola was lowered in on a gurney, through a separate trapdoor. The chamber had originally been a storage area for liquid cargo and the interior walls were smooth and heavily bolted. It was very dark within and tiny lamps guttered sporadically. The floor was littered with human organs and the stench that arose from them was obscene in its intensity. Shark sized tadpoles hung upside down from the ceiling, suspended from meat hooks imbedded in their whiplash tails. Some of these beasts been slit open and their whitish entrails butterflied down to the metal surfaces in intricate arrays. A butcher’s block took center stage, illuminated by infrared bulbs. They could see Cherry Cola cranking down like a radioactive angel, alighting neatly upon this chopping block. The chains holding her gurney released and then slithered back up into darkness. The light caught like quicksilver in the eyes of an enormous cat. The monstrous apparition was lurking beside the table, observing them as they descended. Taty was almost too frightened to carry on once she has seen the creature, but Number Nun reassured her with a touch of her hand. Together they all approached the pool of red light, slipping and sliding in long puddles of coagulating blood. As they drew nearer the panther seemed to rise on its hind legs, attaining the height of a tall man. Large eyes glistened and glinted, lamp yellow above a semi-humanoid face. The cat man was smiling, long whiskers draped like an elegant mustache, the light absorbing disorientingly into his sleek black fur. He drew on a heavy velvet cape, swaddling his body up in its regal folds. This item of clothing further enhanced his manly dimensions, making one almost forget that he was in fact a cat. The nurse with the flamingo head preceded them, kneeling in supplication before the cat man, her forehead pressed into the cold blood at his feet. They watched as he withdrew a leash, attaching it to the slim collar around her throat. He pulled the leash gruffly and she jerked up to her knees, remaining at his side like a docile pet.

“It’s been forever since I’ve seen you in the confessional booth,” Number Nun said in an almost friendly fashion, her face and hands glowing like ice in the darkness.

“You are such a charming appliance,” the cat smiled back. “Even brought us a baby symbiote to play with – come up to the dining table and watch Daddy get his hands dirty.”

They clustered around the chopping block where Cherry Cola lay on her stomach. The girl was shaking with fright and internal trauma, her skin lathered over in a creamy layer of sweat. Daddy Bast leaned his heavy triangular head over her and sniffed deeply several times. The muscles in his thick neck rippled as he moved and Taty could easily discern the glint of heavy ivory teeth protruding from between cleft lips.

“Can you smell it?” Number Nun asked quietly.

The catman glanced up at her and winked unnervingly.

“Yes,” he purred. “Nurse, anaesthetize her.”

The nurse suddenly lurched up, baring needle-like fangs, which she then sank into Cherry Cola’s thigh. Cherry Cola screamed, spasmed and lay still. Taty let out a sharp yell and rushed reflexively to her aid, only to be firmly restrained by Number Nun. The nurse withdrew her fangs, licked venom from the wound and then sank languidly back to her bruised knees. Taty observed as she then reached beneath the butcher’s block to fetch a rope-bound bottle for the cat man. Number Nun meanwhile, had leaned over and was unbuttoning Cherry Cola’s uniform, slowly baring her slick back and defiled cotton panties. A tattoo of crossed cola bottles beneath a heart-shaped red cherry adorned her lower hips, creating an amusing parody of the classic skull and crossbones. Daddy Bast uncorked the bottle, releasing a stygian cloud of noxious green fumes. He took a mouthful, gargled deeply and then spewed it all over Cherry Cola’s exposed back. Taty grimaced in disgust, hiding behind Number Nun as the cat man began to undergo some form of suppressed fit, his large yellow eyes rolling back to show intricately veined undersides. His heavy paws sank down onto the skin above the tattoo, their fur becoming instantly matted by the fluid. Translucent claws retracted and elongated in syncopation with his deep bass purring. He began kneading and massaging her flesh in slow, heavy strokes, growling pleasurably. At one point his clawed fingers seemed to slide and fold bloodlessly into her wet skin. They trawled around the tattoo, sinking inexplicably deeper into her body. He began to probe sickeningly around her insides, hissing and spitting to himself. After a moment he froze, almost as though his claws had snagged on something. Taty became rigid with discomfort, imagining one of those barbed claws tagging on tender muscles or some vulnerable organ. The cat man tensed and began to gradually pull the symbiote out of the tattoo. The little green monstrosity arose cleanly through the skin, emerging from the red cherry and crossed cola bottles like some cheap special effect. It was hissing and spitting from its tiny, malformed Cherry Cola face, throwing up lewd finger gestures and scuttling helplessly in the claw grip of Daddy Bast. Cherry Cola was raised up from the hips as the things attempted to hold onto her spine with its twisted feet. But then, with a final yank it was extricated and thrust into a large jam jar. Cherry Cola fell back, her skin miraculously unbroken. A palpable sensation of physical relief seemed to breathe off her prone body and this instantly reassured Taty, causing her to view the monstrous cat in an entirely different light. She gazed up in awe as he raised the jam jar into the light. He shook it around playfully, grinning at the mandibled homunculous with a mouthful of tusk-like teeth. Number Nun also began to examine the creature, flicking her eye-modes to and fro, performing various forms of visual analysis.

“What is it exactly?” she asked the cat.

“Some sort of thing no doubt,” he answered flippantly.

“They say these parasites are transmitted through inter-dimensional intercourse,” Number Nun said. “Spread from a single source; some anomaly Dr Dali brought through from beyond.”

“That was the situation about three days ago, yes,” he replied, placing the jam jar on the butcher’s block.

“What do you mean?”

“After three days the host begins to change. The original personality is absorbed and replaced with that of a foreign hive-mind. The physical body begins to alter to match the make-up of the symbiote and we are left with grotesque, personalized mutant; a caricature of the former self, imbued with an alien consciousness. At the end of the third day the host is transformed entirely into a large version of this thing here. These newly formed hybrids can reproduce in the same manner as the original symbiote.”

“Can anything stop the transformation?”

“Large doses of carrot juice halt the process for an indefinite period of time, triggering all manner of chemical imbalances in the brain. Transformation is inevitable though.”

“You mean…”

“Yes. Dr Dali, in his infinite capacity for perverse annihilation has succeeded in raping the future. A now unstoppable epidemic blossoms amongst the sodomites and whore-folk of this town. Soon they will all be green and rubbery monstrosities, rubbing themselves up against the barge pole of their former existence. They will cry out for satisfaction from satisfaction itself, until all the slum regions and luxury villas are eaten alive and stripped of their populace by these appetite sick deviants. Until we are all drowning in the filth of another world.”

He let loose a stream of slippery coughing chuckles before skulking back onto all fours, padding into the far shadows of the echoing chamber. The velvet cape trawled off, soaking into the ooze which guttered all around. The nurse followed, crawling after him on all fours, her abandoned leash trailing behind like a tail. They both quickly vanished into darkness. Number Nun buttoned up Cherry Cola and hoisted her over a shoulder.

“Lets get back to the Shell Sea,” she announced decisively. “We need to find Romeo the Dealer and then leave town.”

In a previously unpublished Kurt Vonnegut story from a new book, the author bellies up to the bar.

By Kurt Vonnegut

I was sitting in a bar one night, talking rather loudly about a person I hated — and a man with a beard sat down beside me, and he said amiably, “Why don’t you have him killed?”

“I’ve thought of it,” I said. “Don’t think I haven’t.”

“Let me help you to think about it clearly,” he said. His voice was deep. His beak was large. He wore a black mohair suit and a black string tie. His little red mouth was obscene. “You’re looking at the situation through a red haze of hate,” he said. “What you need are the calm, wise services of a murder counselor, who can plan the job for you, and save you an unnecessary trip to the hot squat.”

“Where do I find one?” I said.

“You’ve found one,” he said.

“You’re crazy,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said. “I’ve been in and out of mental institutions all my life. That makes my services all the more appealing. If I were ever to testify against you, your lawyer would have no trouble establishing that I was a well-known nut, and a convicted felon besides.”

“What was the felony?” I said.

“A little thing — practicing medicine without a license,” he said.

“Not murder then?” I said.

“No,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean I haven’t murdered. As a matter of fact, I murdered almost everyone who had anything to do with convicting me of practicing medicine without a license.” He looked at the ceiling, did some mental arithmetic. “Twenty-two, twenty-three people — maybe more,” he said. “Maybe more. I’ve killed them over a period of years, and I haven’t read the papers every single day.”

“You black out when you kill, do you,” I said, “and wake up the next morning, and read that you’ve struck again?”

“No, no, no, no, no,” he said. “No, no, no, no, no. I killed many of those people while I was cozily tucked away in prison. You see,” he said, “I use the cat-over-the-wall technique, a technique I recommend to you.”

“This is a new technique?” I said.

“I like to think that it is,” he said. He shook his head. “But it’s so obvious, I can’t believe that I was the first to think of it. After all, murdering’s an old, old trade.”

“You use a cat?” I said.

“Only as an analogy,” he said. “You see,” he said, “a very interesting legal question is raised when a man, for one reason or another, throws a cat over a wall. If the cat lands on a person, claws his eyes out, is the cat thrower responsible?”

“Certainly,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Now then — if the cat lands on nobody, but claws someone 10 minutes after being thrown, is the cat thrower responsible?”

“No,” I said.

“That,” he said, “is the high art of the cat-over-the-wall technique for carefree murder.”

“Time bombs?” I said.

“No, no, no,” he said, pitying my feeble imagination.

“Slow poisons? Germs?” I said.

“No,” he said. “And your next and final guess I already know: killers for hire from out of town.” He sat back, pleased with himself. “Maybe I really did invent this thing.”

“I give up,” I said.

“Before I tell you,” he said, “you’ve got to let my wife take your picture.” He pointed his wife out to me. She was a scrawny, thin-lipped woman with raddled hair and bad teeth. She was sitting in a booth with an untouched beer before her. She was obviously a lunatic herself, watching us with the harrowing cuteness of schizophrenia. I saw that she had a Rolleiflex with flashgun attached on the seat beside her.

At a signal from her husband, she came over and prepared to take my picture. “Look at the birdie,” she said.

“I don’t want my picture taken,” I said.

“Say cheese,” she said, and the flashgun went off.

When my eyes got used to darkness of the bar again, I saw the woman scuttling out the door.

“What the hell is this?” I said, standing up.

“Calm yourself. Sit down,” he said. “You’ve had your picture taken. That’s all.”

“What’s she going to do with it?” I said.

“Develop it,” he said.

“And then what?” I said.

“Paste it in our picture album,” he said, “in our treasure house of golden memories.”

“Is this some kind of blackmail?” I said.

“Did she photograph you doing anything you shouldn’t be doing?” he said.

“I want that picture,” I said.

“You’re not superstitious, are you?” he said.

“Superstitious?” I said.

“Some people believe that, if their picture is taken,” he said, “the camera captures a little piece of their soul.”

“I want to know what’s going on,” I said.

“Sit down and I’ll tell you,” he said.

“Make it good, and make it quick,” I said.

“Good and quick it shall be, my friend,” he said. “My name is Felix Koradubian. Does the name ring a bell?”

“No,” I said.

“I practiced psychiatry in this city for seven years,” he said. “Group psychiatry was my technique. I practiced in the round, mirror-lined ballroom of a stucco castle between a used car lot and a colored funeral home.”

“I remember now,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “For your sake, I’d hate to have you think I was a liar.”

“You were run in for quackery,” I said.

“Quite right,” he said.

“You hadn’t even finished high school,” I said.

“You mustn’t forget,” he said, “Freud himself was self-educated in the field. And one thing Freud said was that a brilliant intuition was as important as anything taught in medical school.” He gave a dry laugh. His little red mouth certainly didn’t show any merriment to go with the laugh. “When I was arrested,” he said, “a young reporter who had finished high school — wonder of wonders, he may have even finished college — he asked me to tell him what a paranoiac was. Can you imagine?” he said. “I had been dealing with the insane and the nearly insane of this city for seven years, and that young squirt, who maybe took freshman psychology at Jerkwater U, thought he could baffle me with a question like that.”

“What is a paranoiac?” I said.

“I sincerely hope that that is a respectful question put by an ignorant man in search of truth,” he said.

“It is,” I said. It wasn’t.

“Good,” he said. “Your respect for me at this point should be growing by leaps and bounds.”

“It is,” I said. It wasn’t.

“A paranoiac, my friend,” he said, “is a person who has gone crazy in the most intelligent, well-informed way, the world being what it is. The paranoiac believes that great secret conspiracies are afoot to destroy him.”

“Do you believe that about yourself?” I said.

“Friend,” he said, “I have been destroyed! My God, I was making sixty thousand dollars a year — six patients an hour, at five dollars a head, two thousand hours a year. I was a rich, proud, and happy man. And that miserable woman who just took your picture, she was beautiful, wise, and serene.”

“Too bad,” I said.

“Too bad it is, indeed, my friend,” he said. “And not just for us, either. This is a sick, sick city, with thousands upon thousands of mentally ill people for whom nothing is being done. Poor people, lonely people, afraid of doctors, most of them — those are the people I was helping. Nobody is helping them now.” He shrugged. “Well,” he said, “having been caught fishing illegally in the waters of human misery, I have returned my entire catch to the muddy stream.”

“Didn’t you turn your records over to somebody?” I said.

“I burned them,” he said. “The only thing I saved was a list of really dangerous paranoiacs that only I knew about — violently insane people hidden in the woodwork of the city, so to speak — a laundress, a telephone installer, a florist’s helper, an elevator operator, and on and on.”

Koradubian winked. “A hundred and twenty-three names on my magic list — all people who heard voices, all people who thought certain strangers were out to get them, all people, who, if they got scared enough, would kill.”

He sat back and beamed. “I see you’re beginning to understand,” he said. “When I was arrested, and then got out on bail, I bought a camera — the same camera that took your picture. And my wife and I took candid snapshots of the District Attorney, the President of the County Medical Association, of an editorial writer who demanded my conviction. Later on, my wife photographed the judge and jury, the prosecuting attorney, and all of the unfriendly witnesses.

“I called in my paranoiacs, and I apologized to them. I told them that I had been very wrong in telling them that there was no plot against them. I told them that I had uncovered a monstrous plot, and that I had photographs of the plotters. I told them that they should study the photographs, and should be alert and armed constantly. And I promised to send them more photographs from time to time.”

I was sick with horror, had a vision of the city teeming with innocent-looking lunatics who would suddenly kill and run.

“That — that picture of me –” I said wretchedly.

“We’ll keep it locked up nice and tight,” said Koradubian, “provided you keep this conversation a secret, and provided you give me money.”

“How much money?” I said.

“I’ll take whatever you’ve got on you now,” he said.

I had twelve dollars. I gave it to him. “Now do I get the picture back?” I said.

“No,” he said. “I’m sorry, but this goes on indefinitely, I’m afraid. One has to live, you know.” He sighed, tucked away the money in his billfold.

“Shameful days, shameful days,” he murmured. “And to think that I was once a respected professional man.”

From the book “Look at the Birdie” by Kurt Vonnegut. Text copyright 2009 by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Trust. To be published by Delecorte Press, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc.

first published on the web by latimes.com

Unless writing music proceeds from knowing that you don’t know anything, it adopts an opinionated register as it tends to fall back on whatever is available in the ideas-closet. Writing music is a matter of tone more than content, and tone can only ever be unpredictable, haphazard, immediate en probing (backwards and forwards). The moment writing music is about content, it becomes writing on something else. So I don’t know if I agree with what Boulez is saying (transposed to writing music). Once music becomes part of history, it is severed from experience anyway. The issue of memory is an issue of curatorship, not performance. And language and music in the present can only ever be engaged in guess work and fore-play - but then it can’t be driven by theory, which immediately consumates the relationship.

stephanus muller

Stephen Gray, in his review of “Who was Sinclair Beiles”, (Mail & Guardian, 07/09/09) implies that Sinclair was “some sort of impostor? A scam?” Gray’s egregious insinuation is further developed in the article: “In the classic accounts of the period, James Campbell’s The Beat Generation and Barry Miles’s The Beat Hotel, “our boy” merits only a footnote or two, and no listing of his works, if there were any, in the bibliographies.”

In fact Sinclair Beiles was co-author, along with William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Gregory Corso of the hugely influential “Minutes To Go”, published by Two Cities Editions. Here is some information about this book by Jed Birmingham of Reality Studio: “One book in my collection highlights the important role of the independent bookshop in Burroughs’ social and creative life. Kaddish, Naked Lunch, Soft Machine, and Bomb were all written in part at the Beat Hotel, but the book that most captures the spirit of 9 rue Git-le-Coeur is Minutes To Go. In his editor’s note to Brion Gysin Let the Mice In, Jan Herman describes the Beat Hotel atmosphere as like a “laboratory,” and Minutes To Go is certainly the most representative result of those experiments in lifestyle and literary technique.

I want to focus on the community of bookstores involved with this cut-up collection. In fact independent bookstores made Minutes to Go a pubished reality. Minutes to Go was issued by Two Cities in 1000 copies on April 13, 1960. A limited edition of ten copies included a manuscript page. This reminds me of the limited edition for the C Press Time. I have never seen the limited Time or Minutes to Go for sale on the rare book market. The John Hay Library at Brown possesses a copy of the Minutes to Go and displayed it prominently at their Burroughs exhibition years ago.

Two Cities was a bilingual (French and English) magazine edited by Jean Fanchette, a young doctor. Fanchette published expats like Henry Miller, Alfred Perles, and Lawrence Durrell. The first issue was dedicated to Durrell. Years later, the correspondence between Fanchette and Durrell from this period would be published by Two Cities as well. Anaïs Nin was a correspondent for the magazine. With Gysin designing the covers, Fanchette fashioned Minutes to Go to mirror the magazine.”

“Minutes To Go” is a legendary text; a bible of avant-garde literary cut-up technique. Kathy Acker, J.G. Ballard, Lesego Rampolokeng, Paul Wessels, the list of writers influenced by this work could go on and on… Furthermore the book has exerted influence on a wide range of industrial culture outside of literature, most notably cinema (Peter Whitehead, Derek Jarman, Bruce Conner etc) and music (John Zorn, Throbbing Gristle, Einsturzende Neubauten, Henry Cow, etc). It would not be hyperbolic to describe the entire digital sampling culture of today as being prefigured in this Ur-text of experimentation.

Perhaps Stephen Gray is unaware of these trends and tendencies in the culture of the last fifty years? Then he shouldn’t be exposing his ignorance in the Mail & Guardian. He describes Sinclair Beiles as a “demented con man” but in fact it is Stephen Gray who is the con man, pretending to be a literary connoisseur whilst in fact writing well shy of the facts. Shameful

Aryan Kaganof
14 October 2009

ps. Sinclair Beiles was also the editor of William Burroughs’ “The Naked Lunch”, he organised a lot of the book into its published sequence, even re-typed many of the pages for Burroughs. This is information that can be found in various biographical resources and interviews with Burroughs. The imputation that Gray makes in his scabrous article, namely that Beiles invented, lied about, or exaggerated these facts, is simply disgusting.

Who Was Sinclair Beiles?

JvE: I found Who Was Sinclair Beiles? a fascinating read. It was so interesting to read about Sinclair Beiles, someone I didn’t know much about, from so many different perspectives. The interviews between Beiles and Gary Cummiskey and Beiles and dawie malan especially throw much light on the nature of the man himself. The essays by Cummiskey, malan, Earle Holmes, Alan Finlay, Eva Kowalska, George Dillon Slater and Fred de Vries serve to delve behind the man’s words and give us a glimpse into a unique character. I’d be grateful if you answered a few of my questions about this enigmatic man.

Beiles’ life is typical of the saying that “a prophet is without honour in his own country.” It is sad that a poet/playwright/writer who worked with iconic Beat poets of the sixties such as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and others has remained largely unknown in his own country. Why do you think Sinclair Beiles was not appreciated for who he was in South Africa?

EK: Beiles distanced himself, geographically and ideologically, from South Africa as it was when he first left the country. South African writing during apartheid was to a large extent ideologically loaded and politically driven, and Beiles removed himself and his work from that sort of literary “scene”. Beiles was idiosyncratic and tended towards the antagonistic, on both a personal and political level. Later on in his life he frequently commented, as he does in the interview with Earle Holmes, that he had little desire to “fit into” the South African writing community, an attitude which for some reason clouded popular appreciation of his work. Beiles did draw attention to himself in various ways, but his artistic outlook was not an applause-seeking one; he failed to engage the mainstream because it did not interest him. Possibly he would have wanted more recognition from his contemporaries, but although his writing was known to and highly regarded by a few local writers, for the most part such appreciation was not forthcoming.

GC: There are various reasons for this. Beiles spent almost three decades out of South Africa, coming back only occasionally, and finally returning to settle down only in the late 1970s, early 1980s. Apart from his first titles, the majority of his collections were published in limited editions by small and sometimes short-lived presses, and so it has been extremely difficult to have easy access to his work. His selection of poems, A South African Abroad, was published by Lapis Press in California in 1991, but even then a relatively small number of copies found their way to South Africa. Also, as Eva says, Beiles did not want to fit in, he did not want to be part of the South African literary scene. He wanted to distance himself from it, but at the same time he was also quite angry at being ignored.

JvE: How did each of you come to hear about him? And what led you to work together on compiling this book of interviews and memoirs about him?

EK: I first came across Beiles while doing research on the American Beat writers. Beiles was part of the group living and writing at what became known as “the Beat Hotel” in Paris, so he is mentioned in literature about that era. I found the presence of a South African writer in such an important moment of Beat literature interesting, and so decided to study Beiles’s poetry for my MA thesis. In doing so I quickly realised how very little material there was about his work. There is basically nothing except for a few reviews of the less obscure titles. This was challenging in terms of my research. It is very exciting to have so fresh and unexplored a topic, but daunting to not have any perspective on Beiles’s writing to judge my own against.

The book was initially Gary’s project; when I heard about it I was very keen to contribute. I was doing all this research and writing about Beiles already, and saw this as a good opportunity to put that work to good use. When Gary asked me to co-edit Who Was Sinclair Beiles? I saw it as a chance to be involved in something really new and interesting - it is literally the first book about Beiles and his writing - and to produce something about that total lack of information and criticism around Beiles’s work.

GC: I first encountered Beiles’s name one night in Yeoville, in 1991. I was wandering down Rockey Street, and I was looking in the window of a bookstore there, and there was this clipping, a review of A South African Abroad that had appeared in Mail & Guardian. I read about Beiles, his link to the Beats, his friendship with Burroughs, and the “helter-skelter surrealism” of his poems, as I think the reviewer put it. I had been a great admirer of the Beats and the surrealists for years, since I was a teenager, and I was astonished that a South African writer had been in that scene.

I met Beiles at his house in Yeoville in 1994 and interviewed him, but the interview wasn’t published until last year, by the literary journal, New Coin. It was a short while after that I thought about putting such a book together. At first I was just going to use a handful of previously published pieces about Beiles, those by dawie malan and Alan Finlay, but that would not have been enough to create a bound book. And so the project expanded slightly. Eva came on board as co-editor, but for financial reasons I still kept a close eye on the size of the book.

JvE: Could you please sum up the significance of Sinclair Beiles and his work for those who do not know of him at all?

EK: For me Beiles is essentially a Beat writer, and so his significance lies in broadening and enriching Beat literature, which tends, wrongly in my opinion, to be viewed as a “closed” sort of canon, limited to a historical period and a handful of American authors. When Beat literature emerged, when the Beats were writing their first texts, when Beiles was writing, the ideas and ideals they had in common were quite different from what has become the conventional understanding of “Beat”.

GC: Beiles was an outsider, and his work falls outside the mainstream. His voice is unusual for South African poetry. There are elements of surrealism in his work, but it is not orthodox or conventional surrealism, and if one regards Beiles as a Beat poet, then his work is also quite different from that of many of the US Beat poets. Even if the quality of his writing is uneven at times - and it is very uneven - that does not mean that his work should be ignored and deemed unworthy of serious consideration.

JvE: It seems to me that when Beiles came back to South Africa he was past his best writing days. Do you agree? Do you think that if he’d received the credit and acclaim he was due in South Africa for his unorthodox and yet remarkable achievements in Europe, he would have continued to produce work of note?

EK: I would agree that Beiles’s best work was written in the 1970s before he returned to South Africa, but I don’t think that the reception he and his work got here would have changed what, or how, he wrote when he returned. Certainly critical acclaim, or a lack thereof, does not seem to have influenced his earlier, better writing.

GC: Well, my favourite collection is his first, Ashes of Experience, which was the first winner of the Ingrid Jonker poetry prize in 1969. But there is work from the 1970s that is also quite strong: Sacred Fix and Dowsings, for example. There are also some interesting pieces in 20 Poems, published in 1980, as well as in Khakiweeds, from 1994. I don’t think it is a simple matter of saying his best work was his earlier poetry, though certainly his last few titles, from about 1996 onwards, leave a lot to be desired. I don’t think recognition in South Africa would have made much of a difference. And besides, sometimes recognition has the exact opposite effect, and a writer churns out crap to gain mass market applause.

JvE: What do you think his most impressive piece of work is, and why?

EK: Deliria, because of its absolute lack of concern for everything but the poet in the act of writing.

GC: Ashes of Experience. There is an intense energy in these poems, a sense of freedom and exploration.

JvE: Sinclair Beiles suffered from mental illness of some sort. He attributed it to an experimental “art happening”, I suppose you’d call it today. Could you tell the readers more about this event which led to his mental instability?

EK: Beiles had bipolar disorder, an affective disorder characterised by periods of depression and mania. I really don’t think that the “happening” he participated in had anything to do with his mental illness.

GC: The incident of the happening, Space Flight by the Greek sculptor Takis, was one that Beiles himself spread around as the cause of his disorder. But I also doubt his role in the happening had anything to do with his condition. In the introduction to Sacred Fix, Beiles said that most of the works contained in the volume were written while he was under psychiatric care in London, but he could sometimes get quite angry when he found references to his being in psychiatric care. He once maintained he had never been mentally ill, but had simply gone into care on occasions for purposes of relaxation.

JvE: Do you think this instability led to a decline in his work, or perhaps the opposite? People with bipolar disorder often have periods of extremely creative mania followed by periods of deep depression. Many famous writers, painters and poets suffer from this disorder. Two of them spring to mind: Vincent van Gogh and Stephen Fry. Do you know whether SB did most of his good writing during his manic periods? Or was he able to write when he was depressed?

EK: There is a commonly perceived linked between mental illness, particularly bipolar disorder, and creativity, though it has not really been proven. There is also a sort of “mythology” of the “mad poet”, which Beiles engaged and entertained. Some people, including writers and artists, who are bipolar, do feel that their manias and depressions bring a strong influence to bear on their creativity and productivity. Arguably, however, the increased amount of work produced during a manic phase might not be better than, or even as good as, work produced at other times. Also, having bipolar disorder does not mean that one is either manic or depressed all the time - these “episodes” can be years apart. I could not speculate on Beiles’s state of mind when he wrote, though his poetry reflects aspects of his mental illness.

GC: I agree with Eva. It is impossible to speculate what mood Beiles was in when writing this or that. But he always felt he was writing against time, before the next breakdown occurred, perhaps before the final collapse. In the poem “Terrible Dreams”, in Ashes of Experience, he writes: “All I can think of is writing as much as I can/ While a semblance of sanity and strength/ remains for me …”.

Sinclair Beiles receveing a medallion from William Plomer for the first Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize in 1969 for his first collection, Ashes of Experience.

JvE: SB was famous for not rewriting any work. He believed if you had to rewrite it then it wasn’t pure poetry, if I’m correct in interpreting what I’ve read about him. Do you think this is the reason that fellow poets looked down on him for not “crafting” a piece of work for weeks or months?

EK: This “first thought, best thought” philosophy is something of a Beat dictum. In their work it is a statement about form and technique, and the nature of poetry, and, as Beiles’s idea of “pure” poetry suggests, one he believed in and adhered to. It worked for him, although probably the concept of “not rewriting” shouldn’t be taken completely literally. Successive revisions of some of his plays are archived, for instance. All writers have their own techniques, methods and beliefs about writing. I doubt any one would seriously criticise another for their methodology, rather than the finished product.

GC: A criticism that some writers have made about Beiles was that he was unable to be selective about his work, to be self-critical in evaluation. For Beiles, it didn’t seem to matter whether what he was producing was good or bad, as long as he kept writing. Hence the very uneven quality of his work.

The “first thought, best thought” thing of the Beats is, as Eva says, not to be taken literally. Ginsberg’s work was carefully crafted; so was that of Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso. Gary Snyder said in an interview that nobody really took “first thought, best thought” seriously, “but it was a challenge”. Even the “automatic writing” of the surrealists should not to be taken literally. Andre Breton’s poems were carefully crafted, as were Paul Eluard’s.

But Beiles is not alone in having work that is uneven. The complete works of the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky totals 12 volumes, half of which are now dismissed even by his admirers as doggerel and propagandist hack work, though Mayakovsky himself had a high opinion of it.

JvE: Could each of you give me a favourite poem or piece of SB’s writing and say why it means a lot to you?

EK: I like Sacred Fix, especially the “Selected Catastrophes” at the end, one of which reads as follows:

that summer
the children who had suffered so much
from the revenge of their parents
discovered in their extreme despair
that they were fire-worshippers
and everywhere in the city they threw off their clothes
and made fires of them
and chanted strange words
hitherto unuttered
and drawn up from the deep wells of their souls.
most of the buildings in the city were gutted
and with them many of the children.

GC : I like “Terrible Dreams” from Ashes of Experience. It was the first poem of his that I read and it says it all:

My condition is lamentable - to me anyway.
I keep a kind of old flying machine stability
On a cupboard full of drugs
And as I fly through the day
I can hear my nerves creaking.
I look over the side of the cockpit
And below I see the horrors of enemy territory
- the mental hospitals.
All I can think of is writing as much as I can
While a semblance of sanity and strengthen
remains for me,
I fear the fate of Artaud
Of Nietzsche
Of Nijinsky.
If some small magazine editor happens to
drop into your office
Or into your soup in the form of a fly when
You eat at
The arts laboratory
Perhaps you can pull out this work for his
consideration.
Tell him I have terrible dreams.

JvE: Finally, what is the value of SB’s work? Does his work live on in any remarkable way? Did he have a message that future generations could take forward with them? Or was his message more in living his life on the edge rather than in his work?

EK: Some of Beiles’s work is very provocative, very nonconformist, perhaps counter-cultural. He engages the social, cultural and political in innovative ways. It seems a pity that his work should be forgotten before it has been fully discovered just because it is ascribed to a bygone era. Beiles’s satires, social commentaries and anti-establishment rants remain entertaining and relevant beyond their immediate context.

GC: One of the reasons we compiled the book came from the realisation that while many people know of Beiles himself, or at the very least know his name, few know of or have even read his work. And when they have heard of him, it is in connection with Burroughs and the Beat Hotel. It is as if after that period Beiles disappeared off the side of the earth, so we wanted to show that there was more to him than that, and particularly more to his work.

When I first met Beiles, I was very eager to hear about Burroughs, Ginsberg, and so on, as no doubt did just about every other wide-eyed visitor who pitched up at his door. Afterwards I wondered if he ever got annoyed at this, you know, people contacting him to find out about the others, and not so much about him. It was always Sinclair Beiles, “the guy who knew Burroughs”, yet how many people pitching up at his door were interested in his own work, of visiting Belies for the sake of his being Beiles?

Yet some critics feel Beiles used the names of the Beats as a drawcard in order to “market” himself in South Africa, in order to gain recognition for a body of work they regard as highly questionable. In a recent review of Who was Sinclair Beiles? in Mail & Guardian, Stephen Gray poses the question of whether Beiles was not simply a con artist, a failure and a wannabe who used the names of his well-known acquaintances to gain credibility.

For me, the answer lies not so much in Beiles the personality, but in his work. It is a matter of whether his work is of value, of whether he made a contribution to South African literature, and the answer to that lies in his poetry.

JvE: Thanks to both of you for answering the questions above. Your insights into Sinclair Beiles’s life and works have inspired me to read more of the writings of a somewhat sad character. His contradiction in eschewing public opinion and yet bemoaning the fact that he never received recognition, is compelling too, and the perfect ingredient in creating a fascinating subject. Sinclair Beiles should be remembered not simply for his association with the Beat poets, but also for his eccentric life and his body of work. Well done to both of you for bringing him to our attention.

this interview first appeared on litnet

this excerpt from aryan kaganof’s sometimes it an’t easy being a gal was first published in the collection chick for a day (simon & schuster, usa, 2000)

social experiment or literature?, May 16, 2006

This review is from: Chick for a Day: What Would You Do If You Were One (Hardcover)

If you read all the ‘reviews’ above as well as the ‘reviews’ from the two literary review publishers at the top, you will see that no one really has an easy time with this book. I found it on the whole to be a kind of literary bordello since most of the writers couldn’t resist including a lot of sex. But the real merit of this book may be not on a literary level. It weighs heavier really as a kind of social experiment -asking males in a male-dominated world to take on a female identity. One mark of how seemingly universally awkward it was is that perhaps the author with the biggest reputation in the collection ends up having a dog perform sex on ‘herself’. Confusion or wild creativity? Art over editorial directive? Or wanting to one up the idea of a male taking on a female identity by exercizing the authorial consternation of trying to be even more outre? The majority of the offerings do reflect however that the authors were putting a lot of serious thought in to how to carry off the assignment well, with a high level of craft, and to deliver something satisfying. But this isn’t a book that is going to meet with an easy acceptance, not in the societies we currently occupy. The editor professes to see a largely comic bent to the writings. Kirkus’ review pompously says there is no profundity -like who bequeathed masterful profundity perception to Kirkus’ review? By playing the sex and joke cards more often than not, the authors reveal that they are more interested in pandering to what they perceive as the market for this kind of material, so I guess my biggest criticism would be that its weakness is mostly that the authors err on the side of wanting to be entertaining which does not by any means equal out to being good storytellers. Maybe the book can be said to fail on literary merits but it succeeds without much parallel in exposing an uneasiness that is all-pervasive about gender -who controls it, who gets to establish its valuations, who has a right to represent it and in what ways. So the stories may really be more like exercizes in literary discomfort, both on the parts of the authors and certainly the majority of the readers. If you are looking for insightful philosophy about gender this book is, for the most part, the wrong place, there is a torrent of that from academia. And it is that large and continuous output of theory, research, philosphy and social study without which this book most probably would not have been possible. So if you want to read this book do so to find out where we as a society can not quite seem to be comfortably. As both the controllers of our consumption of gender and as those who have to live gender out amongst ourselves. It is profound on that level. And the why of it is left as enough mystery to make this book art. It is out of print. That is just as much proof.

you can order the book here