Chapter 366 of The Meccan Revelations, the master work of the great Sufi Ibn al-'Arabi, is dedicated to 'the helpers of the messiah.' These helpers (wuzara', the plural of wazir; the vizier we have encountered so many times in The Thousand and One Nights) are men who, in profane time, already possess the chracteristics of messianic time: they already belong to the last day. Curiously - but perhaps for this very reason - they are chosen from among non-Arabs; they are foreigners among the Arabs, even if they speak their language. The Mahdi, the messiah who comes at the end of time, needs his helpers, who are in some way his guides, even if they are, in truth, only the personifications of the qualities or 'stations' of his wisdom. 'The Mahdi makes his decisions and judgements on the basis of consultation with them, since they are the true Knowers who really know what there is in the divine Reality.' Thanks to his helpers, the Mahdi can understand the language of the animals and can extend his justice over both men and jinn. One of the qualities of the helper in, in fact, that he is a translator (mutarjim) of the language of God, which he renders into the language of men. According to Ibn al-'Arabi, then entire world is in fact nothing other than a translation of the divine language, and the helpers are, in this sense, the operators of an incessant theophany, a continuous revelation. Another quality of the assistant is his 'penetrating vision' which recognises the 'men of the invisible realm,' that is, the angels and other messengers who hide in human and animal forms.

But how can one recognise these helpers, these translators? If they hide among the faithful as foreigners, who will have the vision capable of distinguishing the visionaries?

Sudden moments of realisation. Most of my friends are drawn, more or less, from the same circles I travel in, our values, though they may vary, though we may spend hours arguing over the smallest thing, are still fundamentally the same. Some are artists, writers, thinkers, some know the incestuous, port-ridden world of Westminster politics, some the dizzy drama and agonising slowness and trial of creative enterprise. All, in one way or the other, tend to question too-easily accepted truths, yearn for something other, or something more than they already have. In so many ways, my friends are people I admire. If I am too blind to that sometimes, it is my good fortune.

That gives rise to strange and sudden breaks in that circle -- when I realise that, in fact, some of the things that are so much a part of my intellectual furniture are rare and foreign, that some of the methods of thinking I take for granted are not shared by other people. I'm not talking about a sort of treasure-hoard of curious facts or obscure erudition, diverting as that might be, but processes, modes of skepticism and questioning that are not universal. I tend to take it for granted, for instance, that when thinking particularly about politics and the striation of culture, that Foucault's analysis of power will in some way inflect the conversation - not necessarily as a consequence of having read his work (academics who are aghast that someone hasn't read a particular book tend to depress me) but simply as a consequence of the wide permeation of those ideas into the general cultural atmosphere. It's a great opportunity, a fantastic and heartening challenge, to find oneself explaining ideas about image, symbol, power, and the location of violence, even if it is through a gin-soaked haze, even if it is (at best) half-articulately, to people who are genuinely interested.

But there are other shocks too. Last night, after an already pleasant evening, I ended up invited by an acquaintance to a bar in Soho - called Little Italy, also a restaurant - an invitation I should have known not to accept, really. I think it might be the straightest place I've ever been, not simply in terms of the sexuality of its clients but its relentless normality, its denial of anything strange or abnormal. Terrible music, so bad that it felt like a thin film of misery clinging to every bit of me, music that proclaimed its own vacuous, mid-90s pop-power, vomiting out of the speakers. The people packed all over the dancefloor, but not dancing, simply crushed together, glassy-eyed with drink, mouths stretched into the brink and ghost of a smile. The very first thing I saw was a couple sat in the corner, a great heap of a man, fleshy from self-neglect and smug conviction of his utter rightness, overspilling and pawing on a drunk woman who seemed barely able to see, while he flashed a yellowed streak of a grin at his workmates around him.

The private party was upstairs, filled with 'media people', flinging their champagne and cocaine around as if it were a symbol of their daring and abandon; in this plastic place, with no windows open to the air, I felt for all the world like I was inside something that was festering, absolutely set in to its own decay. There was a ravenous, manic hungriness, it seemed to me momentarily like the world was eating itself. I do not think I can quite taxonomise it, but perhaps it has something to do with how widespread that drug was, that ridiculous drug that turns people into high-spiralling parodies of themselves, leering caricatures with open, distended jaws - the only drug that has the power to make dullness a species of aggression. At one point, being sized up by two besuited men with identical haircuts, I could just make out the nervousness and the fear behind the question 'so, what is it exactly, that you do?' And then out of all that horror, the one person I knew in the place turned to me, grinning and half-slurred, and said 'isn't this fun?'


On the long coach-ride home, watching the deep dark of the country from either side, I wondered about it. About how alien I felt there, how absolutely outside of it, and how thankful I could be for that. How much, too, that I must have been wearing my self, my identity so obviously, so involuntarily, to provoke the kind of half-aware disquiet and bafflement about why I was there. And how much, finally, I am constituted as a machine of hate, how much I am made of my ability to hate, and how much that power of hating turns in on itself in furious thought, in self-castigation, in disdain for the waste of my time and disgust at myself for even being there. It is a vanity, of course, a preciously-protected vanity, and one of the reasons I try to make up as much of my life of people and things that I love, and the chief reason that I do the things that I love, even when they demand more than I think I have, even when they involve long hours spent staring at a mess of ill-fitting words across a page, and even when I despair of reaching any satisfying end. But is it enough? Is it enough to create a world of the things I love and forget everything else? I'm not sure. I don't think so.

And then, of course, the other guilt, the elision of the vast recesses that I believe - that I have to believe - make up every human nature. Dickens, in chapter 3 of A Tale of Two Cities:

Wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, if some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this.

Perhaps, perhaps. But the vast, indigestible rankness of last night sticks heavily in my throat.

As a child, I had a fantastical dream life, something that has stuck with me through to today. Rimbaud once wrote that genius is the recovery of childhood at will, a sentiment that has always struck me as sophistical at best, but there are occasions when a memory of my former interior world rises unbidden to the surface, and I pause and wonder. When I refer to a dream life, I'm not being entirely accurate, as i wasn't quite asleep while it was happening. From about the age of 7 to the age of 9, my reading material certainly wasn't limited, but the books I returned to and read over and over again were the books of Greek and Norse mythology my father had given me, along with a selection of early (pre-Norman) English history, and a heavily illustrated Bible. I remember being struck by Tiresias, Orpheus and Caedmon in particular, reading their stories over and over again. But it was the heavy colours of the plates in the Bible, the strange, elliptical stories, the incredible names (I used to read the book of Daniel over and over just for the names) and the sense of something heavy about it. I never quite understood why we were supposed to sympathise with Jacob, the thief of his father's blessing, but conversely I instinctively understod why Yael was a hero.

Anyway. At the end of a night, when I was supposed to be going to sleep - I never slept too well, even as a child - I used to lie face down on the bed with a lamp on and press my eyeballs back into my head with my fingers. Hard. Hard enough that I could see a strange, shifting kaleidoscope of patterns, flowing clouds of light and geometrical shapes that always seemed just out of vision. I don't know why I did it the first time, I might have been imitating Tiresias, trying to not see. But I found if I waited long enough, breathed strangely enough, all sorts of other things would start to happen, I would start to enter a new territory of dream.

All sorts of things happened there, but the one thing I recall most vividly was seeing the life after death, and what it consisted of, something I saw over and over again. A blank space, filled with the sort of clouds you only see in illustrated Bibles - like dunes of sculptured, impossible cotton wool. And from these rose, upward to a point so high that they seemed to vanish, two enormous plant stems. One of them was smooth, easy to climb, and the other covered in thorns, with bodies around the bottom. Towards the smooth, easy-to-climb stem, thousands of the dead flocked. Towards the other, no one. Yet I somehow knew that that was the right one to climb, and so, I undertook it. I remember - very clearly - the sensation of blood on my hands, and one of the thorns tearing a line across my forehead. Yet as I climbed higher, a feeling of ecstasy, of real and profound joy began to move through me. I recall looking over to the other stem and seeing its climbers turn into smoke and nothingness. And at that point, when the light became so bright as to be overwhelming, I'd wake back to the real world.

Catholic enough for you? It's not really surprising -- I had a really visceral, malleable, hyperactive imagination as a child -- and I used to think about the Catholic liturgical phrase 'we lift up our hearts to the Lord' in a very literal, not entirely normal way. There are all sorts of analysis one could subject this to, but I think the point to emphasise is how fundamentally real it was to a young boy experiencing it.

From ResonanceFM, an initiative that I think is exactly the kind of thing that radio was made for. Even if they do give petulant old fraud and embodiment of philosophical mediocrity AC Grayling airspace.

==

From Monday August 18th to Friday 22nd August 2008, broadcasting daily from 10am to 3pm and repeated nightly from 7pm to midnight we broadcast The Free University of the Airwaves, a “summer school on the radio”. Designed to appeal to the general (adult) listener, this series of lectures ranges restlessly across many subjects. The Free University allows listeners to dip into a vast range of material. The result is digressive but always stimulating and unusual.

Historian Ariel Hessayon (Goldsmiths) speaks on two subjects: “Jews in England” from their expulsion in 1290 to their readmission in 1659; and “Restoring the Garden of Eden in England’s Green and Pleasant Land,” which takes a new view of the seventeenth century Diggers. There is more visionary stuff from Plymouth’s Professor Malcolm Miles, who specialises in concepts of Utopia, while at the other end of the scale Mark Miodownik of King’s College’s Materials Library takes us through an elemental reading of the making of a cup of coffee – illustrated in robust fashion in the station’s kitchen. Oneupmanship not intended, Professor Steven Connor (Birkbeck) talks about The History of Air; and, refreshing beverages sorted, ethnographer Caroline Osella asks, How do you make a man?

There is a strong anthropological strand, with contributions from Monica Janowski (Potency, Hierarchy and Food in Borneo), Magnus Marsden (Muslim village intellectuals) and Edward Simpson (Remembering natural disasters and memorials in Gujurat); while Alpa Shah asks, Would Yosemite be a better place for the Elephants of Eastern India? Only Resonance FM can provide the answer.

Influential professor of design Peter Rea offers various insights into Visual Literacy, illustrated with audio from Kraftwerk, Pink Floyd and the rural blues of the 1930s; Dr.Julian Stallabrass talks about visual representations of war; Professor Jean Seaton has recourse to George Orwell’s enduring relevance; and Roberta Mock asks what constitutes avant-garde performance.

Philosophers AC Grayling and Jonathan Wolff, cultural theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, “new complexity” composer Richard Barrett, folk music specialist Professor Reg Hall and Christine Kinnon, Professor of Molecular Immunology at UCL, are among others of the two dozen contributors to this extraordinary project. The station will post brief and user-friendly on-line reference material, photographs and bibliographies for the lectures. So, first get your diaries out and make sure you’ve noted that between August 18th and the 22nd university is coming to you where ever you may be listening, then get your notebooks out.

Se mai continga che 'l poema sacro
al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra,
sì che m'ha fatto per molti anni macro,
vinca la crudeltà che fuor mi serra
del bello ovile ov'io dormi' agnello,
nimico ai lupi che li danno guerra;
con altra voce omai, con altro vello
ritornerò poeta, e in sul fonte
del mio battesmo prenderò 'l cappello...     [Paradiso; 25.1-9]

[If it comes (and may it come) to pass that the sacred poem to which both heaven and earth have lent a hand -- so that it has withered me over the years -- should overcome the cruelty that bars me from the beautiful fold where I slept as a lamb, an enemy of the wolves that make war on it; then, with another voice, with another fleece I shall return as poet and receive the laurel wreath at my baptismal font...]

So wrote Dante of Florence, 'la mia terra' as he thought of it, the city from which I have just returned. It's not hard, even across so extraordinary a span of time, to understand the sorrow of an exile (who has not occasionally just wished to go home?) but it is perhaps worse when Florence is the home to which you can never return. Sure, the Florence of Dante was a Florence before the great Duomo and before the Medici renaissance, the enduring institutions that characterise the city for today's visitor, but there are certain things about the city that seem endlessly renewed: the great hills above it, the lazy Arno river, the long-setting Tuscan sun over the red roofs. It is not idle or stupid to say there is something special about the place.

I'm glad, of course, to be visiting in the present day - when I can wander through the Uffizi, marvel at Botticelli's Madonna of the Magnificat, be possessed by historical vertigo while admiring the tomb of an Antipope, escape into the backstreets without an umbrella in the driving, warm rain and eat and drink more than can possibly be healthy. Yet there are also, undoubtedly, drawbacks to visiting Florence today. Certainly moreso than France, Italy has retained some sense of religious duty, and often one can expect to be reproached if behaving too irreverently in its great churches, or even refused admission if dressed 'immodestly' (bared shoulders are an affront to Christ, as I discovered to my chagrin while in Rome a few years ago) - but increasingly this form of authority is retreating from the most profitable of attractions, and it is this transformation from 'Church' to 'attraction' that struck me.

I grew up Catholic, severely so, with Vatican II and the monstrous guitar-strumming that passes for a lot of modern Catholicism bypassed my mother's church, which considered 'modernism' the most grievous of temporary aberrations, a blip that would pass quickly in the Church's somewhat more eternal perspective. Though I am no longer anywhere near that creed, there are undoubtedly innate responses that Catholicism bred in me (from an appreciation of ritual, to a somewhat heterodox appreciation of the psychological virtues of an almost-polytheistic devotion to saints, to rather lax morality happy to sin now and repent later) and while I find its formal theology monstrous on an incomparable scale, I also find it fascinating, improbable and not the absolute evil that many believe it to be. All of which is to say the use of the sacred building is not alien to me - its upturned nave the boat of pilgrims, its architecture an echo of the New Jerusalem. Whether its provoked by the marvels of the Vitruvian canon, the semi-instinctive power of the golden ratio or simply a couple of thousand years of accreted culture coupled with deep-seated memories of ringing golden bells, opalescent lettering on a chasuble and rising smoke, walking into a cathedral has the power to take my breath away.

At least I thought so. I walked into the Duomo, Santa Maria del Fiore, and after a few minutes had to slump alongside one of the pillars. It wasn't a consequence of the vast spaces of the cathedral, its towering arches or incredible dome, but the hundreds of milling tourists, clustered all under the dome, glowing phones and cameras held aloft in a dutiful substitution of recording and consumption for awe or engagement. they milled and marched about endlessly, cameras held before them like a raging mouth, recording everything for oblivion, transforming the cathedral into tiny talismans and markers of cultured taste. No pause: arches, paintings and domes endlessly sucked through the lens of the camera. Thousands, eyeless in Florence.

The obvious conclusion, of course, is that God is very Dead indeed, and this is the crowned achievement of capitalism, the reduction of meaning to a series of markers that can be purchased, recorded, appropriated and catalogued in the comfort of one's own home. But that really is the obvious conclusion. What interests me is that there are (of course) meanings, sensations and positions of the self implicit in the space of the cathedral that cannot be appropriated simply by paying for an ever more accurate and megapixelled camera: what was the complex position I found myself in?

When I stood in the nave and stared up again, who was I? I found myself longing to somehow reach out and touch the faith and terror of the builders of the cathedral, who could undoubtedly find the vast points of the cathedral reaching up behind the cross to a dies irae who saw everything. I longed for my feelings entering church as a child, where I could feel Godness pouring off everything like electricity, when I knelt in front of the elevated host unsure whether to stare or look away, but really unable to move my eyes. And then also myself now, who sometimes feels dim echoes of that holy terror, but who looks up at those vast, sad hopeful arches, themselves built in a desperate, yearning grasp to the heavens. On the still air, I could smell the memory of incense.

I am undoubtedly all of these people together, various selves rubbing up against each other, and more, horribly dislocated in time, adrift, free, not quite in one self or another. I sat for a long time looking at Michelino's La commedia illumina Firenze (image above), which shows Dante staring over an impossible Florence, a Florence that could not have existed in his time, that had not yet been built, a city lost to him. Strange and unexpected afterlife, Dante wanders through the 15th century, behind him looms the Inferno strange and out of time itself, his one hand gesturing to timeless hell itself, but his eyes looking away, lingering over his city, la mia terra.

Then this cathedral itself a strange mix of contiguous times, against each other and not quite touching. The bell rung, and out marched the priest and his servers, thurible swinging, almost like ghosts, with the faithful gathered in the pews close to the altar -- the tourists, thinned out but not gone, swung round to take in this new sight, some of them shutting away their cameras out of some sudden respect for an encounter with a human being entirely out of their time. These worlds carefully existing beside each other, somehow miraculously not colliding, somehow barely infringing on each other - the priest's eyes lowered in procession, somehow concentrated on another world where the vast span of the cathedral remained an incredible, unageing monument to a timeless God. The flash of a camera went off, frantic, recording. As I backed out of the cathedral, thinking on the Vitruvian assertion that the coherently constructed temple is built just like a human body, I watched the priest's lips brush the stone of the altar.

tyrell posted an entry expressing surprise and disbelief over some of the problems and complaints posted as part of this blog entry. Interesting discussion ensues, as is often the case. My reply, which I think is worth saving somewhere I can remember, follows below, and, of course, is informal in tone, rather than the more lucid style that might come with editing:

But do you not see the problem with the word 'indulgent' here? It seems to participate too easily in the idea that both the problems outlined in the piece and the act of talking about them are somehow excessive, somehow beyond the realm of legitimate complaint. (In the sense defined in OED s.v. Indulge 1, 'absence of restraint or strictness'; 8 'gratify a desire, appetite, etc.; to take one's pleasure; spec. to ‘partake’, i.e. (too) freely...').

It would be very easy to take this reading further and suggest there's some reading of woman as always 'other' here - i.e., always excessive, wild, unable to regulate appetite - the same sort of thinking that's behind painting angry women as shrill or hysterical now paints woman as not knowing when the act of complaining exceeds its proper bounds. (This notion of excess and disregulation of female appetite in comparison with the normative male is what's at the heart of the first complaint you list, again de Beauvoir is the important writer for this.) I'm not by any stretch saying that you're consciously undertaking this, but it's certainly possible to read traces of it in your choice of language.

You write:

As I said in another comment, it's the title of the page:
"Women can't be equal if..."
It's too passive. What she's done is said "here are a load of negative things. Some of them are based on stereotypes of women." (Okay so far.) "Until these things no longer happen, or happen the same amount to men, we cannot be equal." WHOA there.

There's a question of how instantly the concept of passivity is seized on in political discourse as a whole that I think needs to be looked at in a wider context: there's sometimes an idea that circulates that the only good form of response is an 'active' one, whatever 'active' actually means -- usually along the lines of protesting, working, enacting legislation, fighting discrimination in some sense, usually as nebulously defined as 'passive' response. I don't think this is actually as true as it seems to be: a lot of feminist and queer writing emphasises the importance of a safe space wherein an oppressed minority can come together and share their stories and express themselves freely. On the surface, and to an outsider, those safe spaces can seem like a community of victims, re-enforcing the status of victimhood. I think that's a licit, if difficult, criticism that may very occasionally apply. But what's really important is that those communities provide two vital services: the knowledge that your experience is not limited to you alone, that prejudice exists systematically and covertly, and the knowledge that you have a like-minded community available to you. these are the communities that foster the rage and fire necessary to political change. I'm sure you can appreciate the human need to exchange stories and build community.

Why am I bringing this up? Because the page you link to clearly designates itself as a safe space for women to list those major obstacles, a space in which it is safe to build a coherent iteration of those problems. In tackling this list, aren't you essentially stomping in and offering your big masculine wisdom where it isn't wanted? Isn't your sense of entitlement to comment -- and to correct -- precisely one of the problems this list is delineating? I do think you're treating this as if it's a manifesto, whereas to me it reads very differently, as a shared list of observations, not a policy directive.

I don't want to live in a society where everyone's afraid of commenting for fear of offending, but I think as an intelligent person it's sometimes wise to engage where your intelligence can be put to good use - instead of engaging with something like this, why not, for instance, Ariel Levy's work or Finn MacKay's? (Especially since they will probably be far more enlightening in reply than venting against this sort of thing.) I do sympathise, since I occasionally experience roll-eyed, jaw-grinding frustration at queer and anarchist events, where the limits of my tolerance for ill-conceived, economically and politically illiterate utopian dreams are seized upon as if they're practicable, but I also recognise the importance of those dreams to the spirit of what we want to achieve, and in equal measure that my privileged position as middle-class, white, in a (relatively) queer-friendly professional environment blinds me to the agony that causes people to dream those dreams.

You write:

You don't wait until prejudice has disappeared before saying you can now be equal. You make it happen.

Two quick things on this -- firstly, it seems to me that the list isn't talking about prejudice at all, which is a question of intellectual and 'moral' position and forejudgement - and in that sense entirely interior to the individual - but the actions that arise not only from conscious/consciously-maintained prejudice but the entrenched vectors of power in western culture. Now, until those palpable imbalances are gone, how can you claim equality? (On to 'equality' as concept in a minute.)

The second question, of course, is who the 'You' is here? Who's the agent? 'You make it happen' seems to me a bluff, gruff Anglo-Saxon reduction of an almost impossibly complex process. Fine, we can agree that for any X to happen, action must be taken, that seems obviously true. What's the next sentence, and the one after? How do you make it happen?

"equality" (and I'm using it to mean equal chances for freedom, work, views and regard)

Your argument about the lowest common denominator not dictating policy in part depends on your definition of equality, but briefly, popular opinion will almost always dictate policy to some degree, and the organs of popular opinion are really inescapably the less salubrious end of the mass media. Progressives in government tend to find that they have to tread a fine line between what they'd like to do and concessions to public stupidities in order to stay in government long enough to get any liberal agenda reasonably entrenched. Burke, of course, wrote that 'your representative owes you, not his industry only, but judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion' - but, as has been observed many times over, this is liable to make for a rather short, kamikaze-like political life.

But I think your definition of equality is vague (understandable in this medium), but since your argument seems to be that the vast majority of people are in accord with the aims of feminism, and indeed that many of those aims are already practically if imperfectly accomplished - then why is the gender wage gap still with us? In a capitalist society, surely there can be no better measure of an individual's *actual* equality than their earning power.

The passive expectation, negative blocking language and then extreme exaggerated list of conditions are all "indulgent". It's feminists talking to other feminists and describing an entrenched and impossible set of criteria to blame men for.

I don't see - and obviously nor do the rest of your commenters here - the list consisting of 'extreme exaggerated conditions'. That's really your perception. These things can seem trivial to you because you don't experience them, but to say that they're actually unimportant and unrealistic simply because you can't see them veers off into some very dodgy territory indeed.

(But really, who fucking cares if it's indulgent? I know if I experienced half of the shit some of my friends do, I'd want a place where I could talk about it as indulgently as I damn well liked. So what if it's not the most politically efficacious use of time, it certainly doesn't represent the entirety of the actual feminist movement. And really, I hate this idea that minorities of any stripe should have to go cap-in-hand to the established culture, snivelling for rights which are ours by birth and by dignity as human beings.)

You might also ask yourself why enumerating some of the problems implicit in patriarchal culture reads to you as 'blaming men', because I don't really see that happening there at all.

Women can be equal when they make it happen - it shouldn't have to be up to them, but there are plenty of men, and the law, who will help. Once the media is pressured more into it, the majority will reject tired conservatives spouting things like "women belong in the home".

It's the first part of this sentence - and yes, I know it's followed by a series of qualifiers - that really sends me into red mist mode. It takes as its assumption that women have unfettered agency within our culture, which simply isn't true, though undoubtedly greater possibilities have opened up over the course of the last 50 years. There are two fundamental problems with your phrasing here: 'can be equal' implies that equality is somehow present as a concept, or at least reachable, whereas I think meaningful equality would still be so radical and so upsetting to our current culture that it's mostly inconceivable to a lot of us; secondly, and this really is the kicker, 'when they make it happen'. No. I know you follow it with all sorts of qualifiers, but really, that phrase just stinks horribly.

It seems to me that the implicit model behind your sentence is that the structures of conservative patriarchy are inherently rotten, and all it will take is one good strong push from women to tumble it all over and bring us into the age of true, gleaming equality. I think the daily experience of a lot of women, as brought out in the comments to this post, would suggest that you're wrong, but it's more the model itself I have a problem with -- because, really, it lays most of the problem at the feet of women, who aren't giving it the proper push.

I know I've responded at length here, but it's in part because feminist issues do matter, in part because feminism and feminists seem to be an easy target for a lot of people, and in part because it's both a barometer for and deeply intertwined with the queer issues I agitate for.

---

Tomorrow morning I will be flying to FLorence for a few days in order to have an actual holiday. I intend to eat, drink, wander round the Villa Careggi and the Duomo, and spend a good day in the Uffizi.

I was browsing through the Act Art website, wondering what this year's will be like, and came across a particularly irksome piece of phrasing in the call for submissions:

THIS YEARS THEME...

DYING FOR IT! Address’s what’s wrong with the world today.

For example negative moral or ethical judgments, cruel, unjust and selfish human behaviour. War and diseases like cancer and aids. Poverty, famine and global warming caused by human actions. CCTV, censorship, celebrity culture, and the media circus.

I'm going to skip over the grammatical solecism, and concentrate on the thinking: what, exactly, is wrong with 'negative moral or ethical judgements'? Any judgement must necessarily contain a negative and positive component, since the act of judgement necessarily divides its object into recommended and deprecated categories - i.e., to judge is to say doing X would be a good idea, and doing Y is pretty dumb. The faculty of judgement is what, for instance, allows me to say stabbing people is wrong and I won't do it, and nor should you; indeed, it's operative in the call for submissions quoted above, in the suggestion that cancer, AIDS, poverty etc etc are bad things.

Perhaps what's at operation here is the hippyish insistence that judging other people for their choices is somehow the greatest evil possible - and, of course, what I suspect they have in mind here is religious judgement of sexual choices or bodily expression, something that I'd sympathise with. Nevertheless, that's not what they wrote. Negative judgement is what allows me to say that I think conservative, evangelical Christianity is a putrid sore on the face of human intellect; that the project of personal accumulation of capital at the expense of the rest of the world is a grave moral error; that the frantic abandon with which we pour pollutants into the sea and sky is unwise and myopic. I believe it is not only permissible to make judgements of this kind but an inescapable part of being a vaguely socialised human being.

What is in operation here, though, is a laudable social conscience that sits ill-at-ease with art - a struggle to see a form of art that can have social relevance while also conveying a socially radical message. I think this quest is - at least on the surface of it - misguided. Given the processes involved in the production of art, which are necessarily contingent on the intrinsically personal posited in a medium for public consumption, good art is always going to appear from one position as solipsistic, and I don't think that's something to be afraid of. From another perspective, of course, any product is necessarily ('always already') entangled in and interwoven with politics - an apolitical work of art is impossible. What is grating, however, is didactic art, art that seeks status as an explicit teacher of simplistic moral value; for this reason the works of literature that tend to be cherished and studied are rarely encomia or other forms of public art - such art is often all public and no art. I don't want to come over all Cleanth Brooks and laud 'ambiguity' as the prime criterion of artistic value, but good art (yes, I know) contains uncertainty, hesitation, a posited other, a weakness, a space of thinking, a focus on the human and affective meshed with the abstract and the historical. Can good art be enacted with conscience, without compromising either? Well, yes - one might point to Anselm Kiefer, Paul Celan, or on an entirely different level, Stanley Spencer.

There are probably a number of interesting ideas in play here - one of which is the artist as enlightened pedagogue, with almost-shamanic access to truths beyond the realm of standard discourse: obviously this sort of spiritual-artistic claim to authority is dangerous, but simply in order to speak, it's necessary to arrogate some sort of authority to oneself. (The idea itself isn't without interest - Joseph Beuys is probably its prime exponent in the C20th.) The problem is that artistic access to the beautiful or the true doesn't automatically exculpate one from the rigours of a political education - the problem here, really, is that contemporary artistic discourse is so autotelic that it speaks in order to have said something, so autoerotic that its content can be utterly banal and obvious and still be lauded. Hence you get discourse on the levels of 'CCTV LOL BAD SHUD B BANNED LOL' rather than examining the most interesting questions that have no simple didactic answer: what does it mean to be observed? What does the panicked proliferation of CCTV mean? Is it the final manic twitch of a blinded panopticon? The lustful eye of a modern Polyphemus? Am I erased from existence if I am unrecorded, unseen? etc, etc. The double point to be made is this: not only is art as social instruction an impediment to interesting art, most artists can't really tackle the complex questions that these political issues entail (or they refuse to, which is a different mode of engagement entirely, one which implicitly acknowledges art as decadent.)

*

One might also reflect that a misprision of the function of art is present in a lot neo-pagan poetry and writing. I know, I know, I shouldn't read it, and I know it's a little too much to expect every piece of public devotional writing to be Shakespearean and extraordinary (and if anything, an examination of the last three hundred years of devotional writing should reveal that the nauseatingly trivial, smug and banal is by no means the exclusive domain of paganism) but there are somethings I find absolutely bizarre in pagan poetry. Most baffling to me is the belief that poetry is a medium where language works exactly like it does in prose, that the borders of poetry are simple, clear, defined and stable: if I have a message to convey, say 'YAY GODDESS', then all I need to do is draw on a few standard verbal and conceptual tropes (let's say: mist, dew, silver, moon, love, mother, night etc), ply them together in a series of transparent metaphors that bear no internal stresses, difficulties or conceptual strangenesses and plug them into a simple quatrain-based stanzaic form. There! I have committed devotional poetry!

Except that I think poetry is a history of change, a small machine to re-enact a transaction. Poetry does not, qua Auden, 'make nothing happen', quite the opposite, it plunges the reader into a space where deeply-held beliefs, feelings are fundamentally at stake. It's not like there aren't models for devotional poetry in existence, though they are not in the most obvious places. For a model of devotional poetry I'd suggest the medieval lyric, and particularly the marian-focused poems - for instance, at §39 on this page you'll find a lyric with the refrain 'Who cannot wepe come lerne at me', which I think one of the most affecting of the medieval lyrics I know (FWIW, I'm far from a medievalist, so I don't think there's any reason to be intimidated by this stuff). But there are all sorts of spaces of interest at work in this poem, such as: are any of its speakers ever explicitly identified, and for how long is there a suspension of identity? How does the refrain work, and what does its truncation at the end of the poem do? Why is the lyric form apposite for this sort of devotion? What does it mean to be a dreamer in a vision, and who are the audience? Why the particular choice of tense, for instance: 'nature shall move thee, thou must be converted'? And so on, and so on. Other models for devotional poetry can be found in Donne's Holy Sonnets, Herbert's The Temple, or, more perversely, Eliot's Ash Wednesday.

Because I don't want to over-extend this into a rant, I just think there is one last thing to say that is truly important, which is that poetic form isn't a random choice, but the vehicle through which ideas are made manifest (force needs to take appropriate form). Despite the fact I regard her less as the dead hand of formalism and more as the creepy zombie-like hand of arrogant formalism that just refuses to die, Helen Vendler recently wrote an interesting book on Yeats and lyric form, Our Secret Discipline, and though there's the occasional bout of lazy thinking accentuated by trivial pedantry, and a confusion between the affective powers of lexical choice, diction and poetic form itself (for instance, ottava rima is not of itself stately and sonorous, even though its traditional uses are in the public or highly intellectual, abstract mode, it is nevertheless possible to write farcical or banal ottava rima) there is a lot of excellent close reading of the different formal choices Yeats makes in his writing, and the way in which they also carry his meaning. The fundamental point is that poetry does not work simply as an act of telepathic transmission of a 'meaning' but carries out its action in its unfolding, on multiple levels: syntactical, formal, rhetorical, lexical and so on.

Thus the choice of form matters, in part because many traditional forms (the sonnet, terza rima) access a whole history of uses that are necessarily invoked by their use: one might reflect that the eighteenth century use of the rhyming couplet reflects the the new science that casts the universe as ordered, linked, endlessly detectable. The couplet form, particularly in Pope, frequently allows the positing of an idea that can then be corrected or stabilised by its rhyming rejoinder - personally, my reading of Pope is that his endlessly multiplying couplets in some measure signify his own horror, and an intuition that poetry had reached its aureate apotheosis, that there was really nowhere else for poetry to go. ['Keen hollow winds howl thro' the bleak recess, / Emblem of Music caus’d by Emptiness' (Dunciad I:35-36)]

I go on about this because I think it actually matters, and I think that any tenable pagan religion must have a demand for flourishing born of excellence, must demand a literature that isn't sophistic, masturbatory or empty, and that if there is a genuine desire to write something as a sacred product, then engaging with what has gone before is inescapable and necessary.

FWIW, I will be going to Act Art, of course, I just reserve the right to roll my eyes a lot.

From today's Guardian:

Sisters and goddesses
Legend has it that it was the apostle, Thomas, the doubting one, who brought Christianity to Southern India - and now, aside from the odd jealous spat, the Virgin Mary and goddess Bhagavati are worshipped with equal fervour.

"But, for sisters, don't they look rather different from each other?" I asked. A calendar image of the goddess, pinned up behind him, showed Bhagavati as a wizened hag wreathed in skulls and crowned with an umbrella of cobra hoods. In her hand she wielded a giant sickle.

"Sisters are often a little different from each other," he replied. "Mary is another form of the Devi. They have equal power." He paused: "At our annual festival the priests take the goddess around the village on top of an elephant to receive sacrifices from the people. She visits all the places, and one stop is the church. There she sees her sister.""

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2008/jun/28/india

I'm not very good at Pride. I went on a date the other night with one of the youth organisers of Pride London, and in a way I found his naive faith in the power of hand-holding, wishing and smiling to cure all social ills quite touching. He did not take it well when I advocated a Frantz Fanon style of direct intervention. He's a Liberal Democrat, of course, which means he actually possesses no political inclination at all. To me, there's something really putrid and offensive about the etiolated, anaemic politics of most gay activists operative inside the mainstream; a sort of myopic activism ready to compromise across the board for the interests of a single group.

There's a lot to hate about Pride. I loathe the insincere corporate presences, particularly the presence of the police and other authorities as some sort of placatory talisman; they're sort of madly grinning, dancing precipitously on a knife edge over a vast abyss of prejudice, pretending it doesn't exist. I hate how easily Pride went running after corporate sponsorship, how affably it integrated itself into the corporate model of overpriced alcoholic hedonism, how any sense of injustice and anger has been gradually effaced by fake tan and peroxide. Most of all - overwhelmingly - I hate the witless, grinning parade of dancing boys and drag queens, the sense of being performing monkeys penned in for the ungracious gawping of heterosexual masses.

But those arguments are easy to rehearse, and hating from the sidelines, while fun, is kind of an easy way out. And there is, of course, a counter-movement too, the Vauxhall Gay Shame, which presents its own ridiculous problems, and the wider anarchist organisation Gay Shame, which I think is much more interesting. But no, I want to say that Pride itself matters.

It matters because visibility is a good thing. The more you see queer people, the more you are forced to deal with them as human beings who live in the street next to you, are subject to the same venalities and troubles as you, the more you are forced to concede that they are human. And the fear of the other, painting the queer as some monstrous abomination, is what makes the rampant and spectacular homophobia of the Bishop of Rochester and others so easy - although I can't help thinking that the gradual implosion of the Anglican communion, and its slow decline into echo-chamber schizophrenia is no bad thing. Nevertheless, the second 'the queer' becomes humanised is the second prejudice starts to clear. (Though for those of us who wish to embrace alterity, who revel in otherness, who find the images of the monstrous queer, the infectious faggot, the vampiric lesbian fun to play with, there's plenty of juice to be found in surfing the waves of prejudice.)

Why should I care? I, after all, live a relatively free life. Do you see the problem with that sentence? My freedom to love whoever I choose shouldn't be predicated on permission given by others, why should I ever settle on being relatively free in comparison to the heterosexual majority? I want to be able to walk down the street hand-in-hand and not provoke laughter, violence, or even a second look. But really, it's easy for me to settle for my relatively comfortable rights: our second-rate, heteronormative legislation which allows me to be a relatively unimpeded vector of capitalist profitability. I don't really have to care in the way I did even five years ago. Why should I?

Because I live on a small, liberal island in a sea of prejudice, hatred and oppression. That's not overstated: the bodies of young queers are regularly abused, ripped open and cut to pieces all over the world simply for falling in love. That alone should provoke outrage. And it happens in your own back yard. The Home Secretary of the UK recently came out with the vile idea that it's OK to deport homosexuals back to Iran, because they're safe if they live their lives discreetly. That word. 'Discreetly'. That word. That word makes me spit acid. That self-secure, proper, upright word. That ridiculous, frantic, desperate denial of difference. Linguistic blinkers. No, Jacqui, living 'discreetly' isn't enough, certainly not in a country where they'll cut you up and change your gender or execute you for being queer. It's not enough. It's another halfwit mealy-mouthed sop to the red-faced colonels and businessmen and pinched housewives of middle England. God, fuck off, you rank hypocrite! Spending every day fellating the Daily Mail to cling on to power at any cost. Putrid.

That's why Pride matters. It matters as a sign of visibility. It says that forty years ago, you would have told us to be discreet, marry ourselves off, mortgage away our capacity to love under a veil of shame. Fuck you. We're here, we're queer. That's the fundamental affirmation that needs to be made. It's not enough to hide us away. We will dance down the street in our tacky, tasteless grandeur, because it's an inescapable assertion of our simple *presence*. It doesn't matter if it's hollow or makes me roll my eyes. We're here and we demand our rights, and we're going to keep wearing the sequins and the ridiculous outfits until you realise that there's a massive well of prejudice, of centuries and centuries of hatred, underneath our feet and it's up to you to change it and it's up to me to change it. So I'll bite my tongue and join the marches, because to do otherwise would be an abdication of my community, of what, for all its toering follies and dripping narcissism, is my family.

I've spent most of the day vaguely wondering what sort of logic lies behind this sort of thinking:



And.... no, I still don't get it.

You know, one of the reasons i'm probably so disinvested in heteronormative religious paradigms - particularly the reverencing of 'Nature' as constituted by a single multifaceted constantly-reproducing monad - is because I spend every early summer a sniffing, sneezing, weeping fucking wreck. It's not because I'm queer that I've internalised the discourse of the 'unnatural' but because 'Nature' keeps on insisting trying to mate with my fucking face.

Received a message on facebook from an old friend this morning, and made the mistake of looking at his profile. Unmistakable Kaposi's sarcoma poking out from the collar of his shirt. Of course, that shouldn't be a surprise with him, he contracted HIV not long after i met him four or five years ago. And yet, there's the unmistakeable wrench in the gut. Plague. That's how we're conditioned to think of it, despite the absurdity. It was the moral spectre that haunted Catholic education: don't have sex, you'll get AIDS, a punishment with echoes of locusts and blood in the rivers. This is our judgement upon the wicked. And the public health notices with pinprick-angel-eyed boys staring out like a da Vinci fresco, and in angry blockcut below: There's no telling who has it. Plague, our plague. Playground whispers and adolescent mythologies of sex: you can get it from sharing towels, drinking the same water. Paint crosses on your doors.

Armed with science, having volunteered with the Terence Higgins Trust, you'd think those fears would have vanished; the light of science clears away the shadows. Far from it. Reason is a small boat rocking in a vast sea of fears, mythologies, vast presences that move unseeing, unseen. That visceral recoil has stayed with me all day, to the point that I've barely been present. Over the past few months there have been deaths, tragic and sadly expected, and a spate of HIV infections in groups of people so different that I have difficulty imagining them existing in the same world. I joked the other day that it's a bit much to have to look suffering in the face before breakfast, but it's true: I spend much of my time preoccupied with suffering these days.

For a couple of these people, I get the phonecalls because I'm the one who'll turn up with them to the clinic or bear the horrorstruck eyes and fragmented sentences and endless self-hatred. It's not that I'm a compassionate person, it's mostly because I don't inject heroin into my eyeballs and, oddly, when one makes most of one's friends at The Hoist or in the vacuous burnished copper hellhole of Soho VIP rooms, they vanish when the heavy things come along. But, fuck, there are boundary lines; I can give of myself, but ultimately I can't make people take their medication, I can't get people to stare their future straight in the eye. And the whole thing is heartbreaking. There's nothing like sitting opposite someone who hasn't slept in days because of the horror of it all, yet who can't look you in the eyes for more than a moment, who stares at the walls saying 'I just don't know...'

The weight of it all sits in the middle of the field of vision, always there before anything you see, dehumanising, sucking the colour out of things.

The finality of it is another thing. The photo hit me this morning because I haven't been around him for a while, i haven't seen the gradual sallowing, the lines and hollowness, the sudden novel darkness under the eyes, the blank stare. And this, of course, is hardly someone who takes the news and lives on water, air, serenity and organic produce, while taking medication at the precise times it needs to be taken. No, he forgets the cocktail of drugs, shunts his system full of whatever will fit in a needle or devours bottle after bottle. What to do in the face of death but die?

Thinking about this - and thinking about it a lot of late - makes me fucking angry. Angry because there are condoms at the doors of clubs, because there are needle exchanges. Angry that I live in a society where shame binds people's mouths and condemns them to death. Angry that I overhear AIDS jokes among young friends, angrier still when i hear them insist that it can be treated these days, you know and laugh at the barebacking they did last night. Angry that AIDS research funding is caught in a web of specious morality, angry that the queers are rolling over and being murdered in their beds because they have nothing left to cling to life for.

Angry, too, that I think these things, and perhaps a little guilty over saying no, saying that I have a life to lead, that I can't always - or even often - be there. In being the one who survives mostly unscathed there are other guilts. The question: why not me? Because, yeah, I'm generally safe, but haven't always been. And the questions of suffering that arise: some sense of injustice, personal injustice just erupts at nothing in particular; the impossibility of reprieve from the death sentence; the sense, irrational though it is, of being spared. ('You can't conceive, my child, nor can I, nor anyone, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.')

And yet, we lead our lives, actions have consequences. Our lives are made by us. Is that enough as an explanation? No, of course, because it's no explanation at all. Why suffering? I sat at a table of boring Dawkins-Dennett-Hitchens atheists the other day and nearly exploded at the caricature of religion they had; as if the religious impulse were possessed by those too craven, too stupid, too machiavellian, too primitive, too lazy to think 'scientifically'. 'It's such comfort, religion', 'it's just telling people everything's all right'. As if only children possessed the religious impulse. What else is it about but staring suffering straight in the face?

I chose my friends, they weren't thrust upon me. I chose to hang out with artists, and musicians, and children with holes in the head. I shouldn't be surprised when the precarious balance between life and death tips over; I shouldn't, but I always am. It gets you where you live. In between the pointlessness and the helplessness, I come back to the eyes in that photo and know that, daily, I refuse in small or large measure the cry for help that lies behind them.

What we hope for at the School of Dreams is the strength both to deal and to receive the axe's blow, to look straight at the face of God, which is none other than my own face, but seen naked, the face of my soul. The face of 'God' is the unveiling, the staggering vision of the construction we are, the tiny and the great lies, the small nontruths we must have incessantly woven to be able to prepare our brothers' dinner and cook for our children. An unveiling that only happens by surprise, by accident, and with a brutality that shatters: under the blow of truth, the eggshell we are breaks. Right in the middle of life's path: the apocalypse; we lose a life.
(Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 63)

A bad trick. Mistake. Dishonesty. These are the views of Braque. Why? Braque rejected perspective. Why? Someone who spends his life drawing profiles will end up believing that man has one eye, Braque felt. Braque wanted to take full possession of objects. He said as much in published interviews. Watching the small shiny planes of the landscape recede out of his grasp filled Braque with loss so he smashed them. Nature morte, said Braque.

The act of reading is, for me, deeply spiritual - almost the unfashionable word to use, perhaps - but reading, and in particular reading poetry, is a transformative exercise. I am a writer, and perhaps I can only say that for me reading poetry can rend and rebuild. In an essay on Yeats, Daniel Albright notes that Auden (who regarded the job of poetry as 'disintoxication') reviled and feared Yeats' poetry because what runs through his work is an awareness of the its power to penetrate deep, uncertain and undetermined regions of the self, an awareness of poetry's roots in magic and shadow. But what I am concerned with is not only rhyming doggerel as magical affect, but the power of poetry to say things we did not know that we knew, yet strike some deep well inside of us.

In much of my meditation and self-examination, I refer to literary texts or visual art or music... having no sacred book, I have no choice but to take the history of human expression as my mirror, cracked and uneven though it is (and perhaps, for that, its cracks throw up strange reflections and angles denied by the unbroken surface.) And in such reflections, which are inevitably delvings into my small soul, I prepare for some inconsequentialities - with a bag half-stocked with all sorts of incomplete knowledge, and no interest in the vagaries of production, or even the corpse of aggressive literary historicism.

I have been reading a lot of Donne of late, who interests me not simply because of his frank sexuality and earthiness, but because he was a man of deep sensuality with an equal urge towards asceticism and deep religious conviction. Rather than his early poetry - which is witty and rakish, and tends to be the more anthologised - I am interested in the poetry he wrote while closer to death, and in particular the sequence known as the Holy Sonnets. In criticism and analysis, they are usually characterised as embodying particular reformation struggles over the meanings of grace, but that really doesn't much matter in the act of reading. One of my favourites:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to'another due,
Labor to'admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly'I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me,'untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you'enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

One of the reasons I find so much resonance in the poetry of the English renaissance and the reformation is the sense in which everything is at stake - that the stable order of reality is uncertain, that grace might be inaccessible if one falls from belief for one minute, a terror that provokes unrest and novelty. And perhaps more so, the belief in the power of words to alter things - one of the reasons I find the morally upright and censorious interesting is because of the implicit belief in one's own weakness and deviancy that frequently accompanies such rectitude. To read antitheatrical literature of the seventeenth century is to discover a world in which public performance and the crafting of words can move and profoundly alter the audience, to the point of risking their damnation.

But the poem itself: Batter my heart... how extraordinary, how plangent? And in a sonnet of all places, it seems a misshapen sentiment to find. The sonnet, after all, is supposed to be the unequalled vehicle for the anatomising of love - especially in its unattainability, coldness, slippery impossibility. Hence Petrarch's Laura, hence Dante, hence even Shakespeare. But Donne's cold-hearted lover, the object of his jealousy from which he wishes to wring a sign, is God. Just as woman, in the earlier elegies is a treacherous whirlpool or a polymorphous devourer, God's love should, for Donne, be brutal, annihilating, transforming. The extremities of Love are totalising, they are not easy or safe, they are absolute: Batter my heart.

Is this pathological? Is it masochistic, or simply erotic? Does it matter? To begin to answer this question, we must turn to the sense of self that pervades Donne, which is not unitive but fractured and multiple. Look at his choice of conceit in the poem above: the self as usurped town, the habitude of many different voices - and more so, usurped, full of alien things, unwanted things, dissenting voices. Elsewhere in the holy sonnets, Donne writes:

I am a little world made cunningly
Of elements and an angelic sprite...

This sense of the uncertain space of the interior and of a vast, cavernous self of almost-autonomous parts, that rebel in echoes and evoke the unexpected, that horrify the small speaking self because it recognises that they are somehow the same being, is what I find so profoundly compelling. Donne's solution to this is to demand purgation, a pentecost that involves a fire more complete and horrific than the apostles received - burn me O Lord, with a fiery zeal/Of thee and thy house, which doth in eating heal. The hints, dropped mysteries and intimations are not enough for Donne - you as knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend. The idea of mending is not enough, there is nothing worth patching up, what Donne wants is a single sign that in destroying him renders him whole, and thus erases everything uncertain and multiple. But there is another sense in which the ardent desire for union isn't simply pious but eroticised, a divine supplication in which all is risked (an echo of Sappho, πάν τόλματον, 'all is to be dared') because to keep something back is impossible in the force of that love.

Yet there is something still, isn't there? The other strain in the holy sonnets, where the tension comes, is the obstinate self, the self that speaks... the writing self, which is never totally eaten up, which returns from drowning in the Lethean flood. And more, the demand for the sign is here, is now. The concern with annihilation also tells another truth: that there is a self of such significance to be humbled, that the passions are of greater intensity and significance than those of every other man. Except you ravish me, nothing else is capable of encompassing me, except you... Elsewhere in the sequence:

At the round earths imagin'd corners, blow
Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise
From death, you numberlesse infinities
Of soules, and to your scattered bodies goe,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom warre, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despaire, law, chance, hath slaine, and you whose eyes,
Shall behold God, and never taste deaths woe.
But let them sleepe, Lord, and mee mourne a space,
For, if above all these, my sinnes abound,
'Tis late to aske abundance of thy grace,
When wee are there; here on this lowly ground,
Teach mee how to repent; for that's as good
As if thou’hadst seal'd my pardon, with thy blood.

And this demonstrates Donne's sense of his own significance, his own deeply-felt personal relationship with the divine that exceeds the bounds of propriety and even normality: on that last busie day all the infinities of souls should be stopped, and all attention should be diverted to him, and against this cosmic picture he pins the single demand of his own redemption, which demands profound disruption: not only his spiritual elevation, but for God to descend to the 'lowly ground' for him, even that the dispensation of the Christian sacrifice is not enough for him - the subjunctive on the final line dismisses it as almost an irrelevancy, only important as it relates to his redemption.

(It is, I think, sometimes interesting to speculate on the obsessive image, the primal scene of a writer: Milton's, for instance is the fall, not only in Paradise Lost but throughout his work, Donne's perhaps is the incarnation, insofar as it represents the irruption of difference into order - as Yeats put it:

...their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

)

So this reading of Donne, this desire for totalisation, this demand for a sign, the anxious question what is this speaking thing - what is this act of reading for me? I am not a follower of the Christian God, but the idea of grace as an evanescent, mercurial quality interests me. And the rage, the passion, the urgent demand: come down, come down, come down. There are moments, too, when I feel the absence of something torn from me, of the fractures and echoes and doubts that demand purgation and can never be purged. The sense that writing is always an exercise in distance, in writing of my beloved I weave myself a lattice of words which becomes a fence. In staring, gape-mouthed at the face of God one knows that words fail, as a human being, on this lowly ground, I know equally that words (which escape us and exceed us, being both infinitely meaningful and infinitely fragile) are all we have.

*

What have I left out? That there are times when I long for the clarity of the desert. Where do we go to see truth? Into the desert, up to a high place, away into simplicity. Where the sun is strong and the lines are clear. Here is shadow. Here is sun. Make a choice. Where words can be graven into tablets and laws are made. Or equally to sew my mouth shut, to say nothing, gouge out my eyes and see nothing, to bear witness to the blank, pitiless desert. Batter my heart, O Lord, until I am made perfect, unmoving and ambitionless as death. The desire tears me in two. Because we do not live in the desert, we live in a world where our hearts are in our mouths and our silence always on the brink of speaking. We live in a world where I can desire two things at one time, where my desire is not pure but vacillates, that my body speaks with a thousand voices.

And this, finally, what I have not said: the angel and the lover, the lover and the angel, for me, in my foolishness, I cannot always tell where one begins and the other ends. What do we search for from body to body and bed to bed? When I say plant your hand in my heart and when my lover holds the candle or the look in his eyes, open, looking up under the chain or yielding to sharpness... that moment of terror and love in the eyes where both are intermingled at once: those are my best days, when I shake with fear

Many of you will be familiar with Dedalus Books, a small independent publisher with an impressive backlist of translated European literary fiction as well as immensely interesting concept books - they published Gary Lachman's excellent study of European occultism, A Dark Muse, and are the only current publishers of Meyrink, Huysmans and Mirbeau in decent translations

The Arts Council, in their near-limitless idiocy, have decided to drop Dedalus' funding entirely, which will mean that the company won't be able to continue its current operation. The reason given for the removal of funding is 'business planning, inconsistent marketing and building new audiences'. While I don't think appraising publishing houses through a purely capitalist lens is the best way of assessing their value, if the Arts Council wants to play that game, let's look at Dedalus' record for the past year:

-Despite being mainly a translation house, and producing only 1-3 books each year in which it has rights to sell, sales of foreign rights were up to £45,728.28 in 2006/7, a Dedalus record.

-Sales of books were up to £70,053.75 from £47,817.60, despite doing one less title than 2005/6. Dedalus’s total sales income was £115,782.03

-Harvill and Serpent’s Tail are now merely imprints and publishing literary fiction grows ever more difficult. Against this background Dedalus has managed not just to reverse the annual decline in its sales, but increased them by 50%.

What is interesting, though, is what may be concealed by 'building new audiences' - I wonder if this betrays some discomfort on the part of the Council with the specialised areas in which Dedalus publishes? One may well argue that Dedalus' catalogue appeals to a limited audience, but the same can equally be said of most organisations that the Arts Council funds at far greater expense.

What is clear is that Dedalus needs that funding - so get involved and write to the addresses listed here: http://www.dedalusbooks.com/savededalus.html

And sign the petition here: http://www.gopetition.co.uk/online/16111.html

If you live in the UK and pay tax, this is YOUR money, so write & get vocal about it.

O Rex Nemorensis
Oaks whose arms
are whole trees

in spring when
the river gives
up her dead

I saw you
rise dragging your
shadows in water

all summer I
saw you soaked
through and sinking

and the crack
and shriek as
you lost bones

God how I
wish I could
bury death deep

under the river
like that swimmer
just testing his

strokes in the
quick moving water
which buried him

O Flumen Dialis
let him be
the magical flame

come spring that
lights one oak
off the next

and the fields
and workers bursting
into light amen

Translation a question of the way of loving. In Fragment 130, Sappho calls Eros γλυκύπικρον ἀμάχανον ὄρπετον, and in this single line is contained the entire span of Sappho's understanding of love. It's usually translated as something like 'bittersweet contrivance who quietly appears', a translation that occludes the novelty and profundity of Sappho's words... Some triviality in translation, perhaps. I want to take each word individually, so I can rethink them, make them new; and to take the sentence backwards, from the verb first.

Orpeton: To 'quietly appear' out of nowhere, yes. But more so, to creep in, to steal in. Eros stealthy, behind the curtains, weighting his new arrows, waiting for an eye to glance in a certain direction. This love is unexpected, irruptive.

Stop. Consider it: the boy you have seen a thousand times out of the corner of your eye, across a crowded dancefloor or at another table and paid no regard. The eye falls suddenly, dropping, and the arch of a neck or a smile causes the weight of your entire being to fall through the floor of your stomach. Pierced unsuspecting by arrows. But then also the man you have seen day after day, to whom you turn one one afternoon to find the sun standing behind him. All the while, silently behind the walls of your chest, Eros has been setting up his temple. He has stolen in, ankle untripped, so he can softly line your eye with gold.

Amachanon: 'a contrivance, a device, an instrument'. What is she saying here? An instrument is contingent, on its own it is useless. And Eros is contingent on so many things, an evanescent machinery of the spirit, not only on Aphrodite, his mother, but the arrayed complexity of the human body. He takes his form from our smell and taste, the way a hair falls or the endless novelty of skin. Eros is predicated on strangeness, the strangeness that sets up its residence on the interior, jerks and tingles up the spine... a thing created, a strange face turning up, a drive that always exceeds itself. Eros is overreaching, the spirit that fills our limbs to move them to another.

It is his unmanageability that is the root of his strangeness - Eros is always painted with a smile, sometimes half-curved and sometimes fully mirthful, because at any moment he can reduce everyone around him, even the gods, to floods of obsession and madness. Vitruvius says no temple can be constructed coherently unless it is built exactly as a human body is; Eros' canon is the reverse - his temple is the falling apart of human bodies, their unity at the edges, their dissolution at the borders, their being in another. Eros unmanageable creature.

Glykupikron: a Sapphic neologism, this dazzling word, which we translate as 'bittersweet', but a tranlsation that does injustice through its overfamiliarity. Everything these days is bittersweet. Too tinged with irony or wistfulness. This line is not hollowed-out or blind either with joy or sadness. Our word for it telescopes the timeframe - Sappho's word is actually sweetbitter, where the bitterness hasn't overwhelmed the sweetness, where the sweetness is not simply an afterthought. As if, in 'bittersweet', we thought the pain came first, though as if each isn't tinctured with the other... Why not place each adjective separately - 'sweet and bitter'? Because the conjunction implies their separation - glykupikron is not simply both sensations, but a third, newly produced and different from either of its parents.

How many times have I done it? So often too tremulous to step over the boundaries because each warm morning with knotted limbs calls up the memory of loss, of the hollowness of leaving, of bags and boxes stacked neatly at the door. The silence of a hundred murdered desires slipping down under the weight of the future: "I'll cause you pain". Yet I'll overstep, always overstep. Our love acquires its gravity from our loss, to condense ourselves out of nothing into each other requires a foot pulled downwards and an open eye staring upwards.

Once again, Eros, unmanageable creature, you steal in.

The scholastics say that man has three faculties; memory, understanding and volition. Augustine talks of the 'palaces and caverns' of memory, and it seems this composite image has a truth all of its own: some memories we burnish and revisit and marvel at, others we exhume with trepidation, others still are accessed as a pool of dim light in some black, greater vastness. We cannot but be aware that beyond the limits of our recollection lie still huge parts of our story that are yet closed to us, and where perhaps sleep monsters.

To remember in the light of new understanding is an act of redemption, and from memory understanding can arise. Our sacred books contain lists of names and genealogies: I remember you so you are not lost. I remember you and give you meaning. You did not live in vain: I remember you. (If we could remember the history of the universe from the first outbreathing of the first atom, the spirit over the waters, only then would we know the name of God.)

It seems on this late-night train journey south that I travel through memory as well as space. I am alone in the carriage, with its barely-functioning light flickering off every few minutes. Having left the eternal light of the city far behind, we pass through dark fields curled around small towns, dim islands of light in the distance. I think about the house towards which I am headed, and as is so often the case I remember the smell first: polish on the wood of the bannisters, the tang of old perfume, the smell of my grandfather's hair.

Arrival, and the taxi journey. I do not speak to the driver, remembering this drive past Wythering Haven, the long road to Church Norton on the left, where all my family are buried. Before the 20th century, Selsey was an island, and it still seems slightly out of tune with the mainland, perhaps because of the broadness of the skies and the flat sea. The door of the house sticks, and I feel briefly I am trespassing on things best left alone. In the hallway I raise my unbelieving hand to the dark panelling, a seeming miracle that this place could still exist. It is changed and unchanged. I breathe in the empty air and cannot tell whether underneath it all I can smell the traces of that old smell, or whether my memory is conjuring ghosts.

Tired, I climb the stairs to the fourth bedroom, the bed where I slept as a child, the bed where my grandmother died, and sleep.

*

This house was built by my great-great-grandfather with his own hands. It is not simply that the house took on the properties of my family, but that they are in every brick and beam. That hedge was planted by us. That apple tree was climbed by my grandfather, my father and me. This curious, squat, rambling house has memory in it. I sat on that bench reading the bright gilt and colour pages of the prayer-books. I learnt to fence with those blades on the wall.

My grandparents moved here not long after they were married, and raised both my father and my aunt in the house. My grandfather's Christian religion was of the kind rarely seen: he struggled across the fields in the middle of winter to make it to Church, but his religion was less one of narcissistic fascination with denial and sacrifice than a continual concern with compassion and charity. Suffering provides an opportunity for grace to enter the world. I remember when he said that, above all, "it is important that you should always do what allows life to flourish." Nowhere did that find greater expression than in the gardens, which he worked in even until the year of his death. After my grandmother died, he would place a fresh flower from the garden next to her picture at least once a week.

There are a thousand stories from that house that I could tell. The time my great-uncle ended up scaling the pillars to the balcony because he'd lost his keys and wouldn't dare risk rousing his parents in the night, and ended up tumbling through the window straight into their bed. The time my aunt, a rebellious teenager, baked hashish cakes and my grandmother sold them at a Church fair. The endless reunions on the south lawn, where family gathered and exchanged stories that told us who we were, where we came from. Seeing these venerable ancients in a new light, when you were told the graven and dignified figure in the chair opposite you managed to fall headfirst into the new sewers being dug in the village while coming home drunk from the pub.

Sadness too: my grandmother's descent into madness, my grandfather's silent stoicism born of his love for her. Suffering is an opportunity for grace to enter the world. One of the pictures on the wall is of her as a young dancer, a picture she used to stare up at in her old age, a memory that seemed to bring her peace.

And quietness now, this house in repose, both grandparents having died, lying the other side of the village in Church Norton. Their brothers and sisters all dead or elsewhere. The gardens outside are slightly too overgrown, and where the house stood in fields 50 years ago, it has long been bounded by roads. Other houses have grown up around it, regular houses, unlike this ramshackle one, which sits uncomfortably and diagonally on the gridded roads.

My father as a young boy outside the front of the house. He says he will probably move back here soon, and he is spending more and more time here anyway. He has taken a new interest in the family since his Father died, and I wonder if I will ever do the same. For now I have this house to myself for a few days, and wandering around the gardens this morning, pulling out a few of the brambles and weeds, I felt more at home than I have done in a long time. I'm sitting now in the library, stocked by men who knew what learning looked like, believed it should be encouraged wherever possible, but which was somehow always slightly alien. It has always been my favourite room in the house. The window looks out between the pillars of the balcony, to the roses and then down the road with the sea in the distance. It is a view that encourages dreaming.

The sea is always present here. The air is slightly colder outside than one might expect with the sun. The seagulls with their mad, rolling eyeballs tend to fly around the village with impunity. There have always been crows in the garden here, as long as I can remember. Black and white birds circle in the sky and cry. One can't help seeing the emblems of death here and there. The sea, the crows. This place is so sodden and heavy with memory for me.

I try to bear those memories in my head with equal weight: the long, black funeral cars, the coffin lying in the library with the candles and flowers either side of it. No one weeping or crying, but faces carefully blank. To think only of these things would be to look at this house as only a sad thing to wander through. It is not. Though I walk through the hall and the kitchen with a certain heaviness, I do not feel exactly sad. It is a sense of finality, the end of one period and the space before another. How could I be entirely sad? Out of the window of the kitchen is the hedge that has a strange indentation in it: five or six years ago, my grandfather, while trimming it, fell into the hedge and found himself trapped in it. Instead of calling to me - on the other side of the hedge - he gradually clipped his way out of the branches. That story tells you everything about my family.

And I have tea, and I am writing, and I can see the sea, and on the piano earlier I was slowly remembering and singing the devotions I was taught as a child. To remember. Not as simply a witness, but to re-member, to knit together and give meaning.

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

HERE

‘Here' is a 70 minute remix by Jim Hollands of a rarely seen existing work written by Joe Orton, called The Erpingham Camp. It was originally screened on TV in 1966. It has been experimentally remixed in sound, image and words, with subtitles, and is partly in anaglyphic ( red/cyan ) 3D. Large parts of the work operate under flicker frequencies of 8-13hz, and as such are viewable by epileptics or those prone to seizure at their own risk, and is best watched whilst under an influence.


I can't help thinking about Here in terms of its accidence rather than simply its substance, the physical aspects of its transmission. In particular, memories of the film are, for me, intercut with the feeling of the sharp cardboard of the 3D glasses at my ears, wondering about when was the 'correct' time to be wearing them. Certainly, there were moments where the film clearly dictates conventional or anaglyphic viewing, but there are phases where one encounters uncertainty: how am I meant to be viewing this? This serves to establish a recursive loop between viewer and film, where the 'correctness' of the viewer's reading is continually called into question. Reinterpretation is perpetual. But the accident of its viewing for me - struggling to see the film around the bobbing and weaving head in front of me - reflects some of the strategies employed in the film itself: my struggle to see the film was not, of course, simply a question of my physical positioning but the strategies of multivocality employed in Here itself. The questions I am presented with as a member of the audience are manifold: do I interpret this in terms of what I know about its author(s)? Do I attempt to read it in the light of its theoretical position? Which elements of the film should precede others in an attempt to interpret? Is my act of interpretation an act of violence against the integrity of the film's hermeneutic? Indeed, is the film's hermeneutic circle closed or infinitely open?

There are several narrative media that operate within the film: the primary visual narrative of The Erpingham Camp itself, the narrative of the visual effects, editing and graffiti overlaid on the original, the textual narrative of the subtitling, the vocal narrative (which frequently diverges from those subtitles) and the protean musical narrative, which shifts between unifying the various strands and holding them in counterpoint and tension. It is important that the film is not soundtracked - that is, its musical narrative does not exist as a series of conventional tropes to prompt the expected emotional response in the viewer. There is no easy swell of synth strings, or reliance on traditional cinematic signifiers of love or heartbreak, but a musical palette that reflects the uncertainty, combativeness, strangeness or softness of the film's methodology. The multiplicity of the musical resources point up the mirage of corrosion and quotation that make up the texture of Here - and, in particular, the reliance on musical forms outside the normal purview of contemporary 'art' film for much of the soundtrack demonstrates what I read as Hollands' attempt to totalise his queer experience, and thus necessarily raise questions about how far totalisation is possible in any medium. It should be immediately apparent that a single voice, a single author cannot accurately reflect or encapsulate any theme: Here is not only an assertion of the death of the author, but an attempt to push the tissue of multiple voices to its limit.

We live in the age of the digital simulacrum. Contemporary culture places a reliance on the abilities of the digital world to accurately reflect life that can be best described as naïve, and sees the digital world as something that is simply inscribed: recording what happens in the 'real' world, a one-way transaction between the real and the digital, reactive rather than having its own agency. Throughout Here there runs an understanding of the possibilities of the digital: that we are born from the simulacrum and of the strategies of representation its use, abuse and perversion open to us. This is most obviously evident in the corrosive, pixellated effect used to treat much of the original film, as if the singularity and purported unity of the primary text were being exposed and collapsing in front of us. The extraordinary shift into three dimensions is a clear signifier of the depth and levels of meaning, articulated and unarticulated, that exist in the new, remixed text. The problem that immediately comes to mind is about the nature of graffiti: what does graffiti say except 'I was here', or even 'I declare my authority over this surface, this text; now I own it'? I, my, me. But the entire process of Here involves the explosion of the personal into the total: how does this fit?

The answer lies in the first part of our premise: that we are born from the simulacrum, from the intertext. In particular, all over the film lies the mark of the Father - in this context, on this level, Orton - and the graffiti, the very process of remixing, is an oedipal yell, an attempt at decapitation. And yet, of course, there is a persistence of vision: Orton's film is the very substance of what is being remixed, overwritten, and the process of overwriting necessarily participates in that original substance. This oedipal reaction is itself queered throughout the film through the obvious lovesong to Orton that makes up much of its verbal content, thematically parallel to much of Orton's own work, simultaneously scatological and deeply concerned with the avenues of identity through which sexuality comes to be expressed. In this sense, it's possible to read Here as the loving and inevitable oedipal hammer-blow to the head of the Father and a record of the new possibilities found among the shards of bone and fragments of voice.

But this interpretation doesn't totally circumscribe the film. In particular, one of the voices present in the film, at times significantly in the foreground, at others less evident, is the voice of loss, despair and heartbreak. This stands in a complex counterpoint to the voice of ferocity and stance of combativeness that characterises much of the visual effects work and sexual brashness: they both reflect, grow out of and rely on each other. One of the most emotionally cathartic moments of the film for me came at one of the transitory moments in the middle, where the various narrative strands (textual, musical, visual) come together, push out of the screen into three dimensions to ask the stark question: 'what if my life had taken another direction?' - the juxtaposition of this question with the various graphic and unashamed assertions of desire serve to undercut the distance and hardness of that other voice. This voice of heartbreak is evident through the film as a voice that is in love with the idea of the total, the unified, the singular identity but is equally aware of its impossibility.

One thing that is immediately apparent from the very beginning of the film is the importance of overwriting and revoicing, but nowhere is this more evident than the credits sequence, with the refusal of the textual or vocal narratives to line up with the demands placed on them by the karaoke sequence on screen. This revoicing doesn't simply signify aural graffiti as an act of defiance, but an assertion of queer identity: the process of asserting such an identity is not simply a question of making the queer voice louder, but muting the dominant voices that always appropriate and overwrite queer voices. In this sense, it could not be enough to simply make one's own film, but employ the techniques of oppression in another way: now is our turn to put our words in their mouths. And yet this technique itself is already doubly strange: revoicing is always the act of the minority, of the oppressed, and Orton himself writes from a queer perspective. Again the oedipal theme recurs, but this time in the context of allowing a multiplicity of queer voices to emerge - queer voices that take delight in their contamination, that they are always already implicated within multiple lineages and networks of ideas. But this should not imply a happiness or comfort in these voices: not only do they articulate the anxieties of the interior and the discomfort of being found in someone else's mouth, but towards the end of the film reach even outside the limits of language. The voice escapes language into a scream: the scream is the primary ethical confrontation - it is an inarticulate cry of identity and anxiety at the same time, and the first signifier of new life. An infant's scream has many messages: notice me, feed me, take care of me - but also, who am I? where am I? what have you done to me? The scream is always the marker of an individual who has become subject to an extra-personal force.

Syllepsis in this film, the disjunction between the narrative strands at any given point, signifies a break, or an opening in its texture; similarly, the encroaching corrosive or explosive visual effects give the sense that it is visually opening out into something wider than itself. There is, therefore, an inevitable sense of space that pervades Here - not only a visual space, but a space in the texts of the narratives themselves, composed as they are of quotations and different voices. This puts me immediately in mind of Benjamin's Passagenwerk, a palimpsest similarly composed of quotations severed from their original source, yet the two works are also entirely distinct. The feeling of space in Benjamin exerts no stress, whereas the feeling of space in Here looms massively over the entire experience, in part because the film escalates to a point of self-destruction a desire to simultaneously assert itself against the blank space and be absorbed into it. It seems to me that Hollands is of the apocalyptic school of film-makers, and Here becomes a revelation of the absolute, collapsing the infinite stresses of identity into the immediate. That is its name, after all: it becomes a locus for everything in the queer experience of identity-shaping without attempting to reduce it to a single voice. I found it utterly heart-breaking and entirely moving.