We hiked the Greenway yesterday, parking at Seneca Creek State Park office parking lot then hiking north to under and just past the 355 bridge, passing beneath the Clopper Road bridge and B&O Viaduct and 270 then back to the park office. I thought of this hike because Monday is Elric 7's birthday and the Greenway hugs Game Preserve Road, the road where Elric totaled the station-wagon, I walked past the exact spot, twice, Landru reminded me though I forget to add white ford pinto, save the bay bumpersticker. Hike also more, the viaduct too, story earlier and later
OUR DEATH/UNDER DURESS
Sean Bonney
Whatever with that fascist shit Bannon. He can have Darth Vader. He can
have that whatever-its-called from Lord of the Rings. But he can keep
his paws off Satan. Satan is one of ours. Always has been. But having
said that, it is very boring to write a poem about Satan. Baudelaire did
it, and it was great. Milton too. And Blake. It is very boring to write
a poem about Bannon. Like, for example, I’m speeding like fuck right
now, and earlier on I was in a bar, and I was hanging out with friends
and they are all complicated and wonderful and I love them, and all of
our worlds are falling apart, and I would like to talk about that, about
what we were asking, about phone reception in the land of the dead, and
etc and other things. But instead I feel that I should be talking about
Bannon. Imagine doing drugs with him. I can keep going for five days at
a stretch. Monsters appear and ghosts and that, and they are uglier
than Bannon. Except they are not, because their conversation is
interesting. Like there we’d be, chatting away for days and Bannon like
he would just be dead on the floor. No-one would notice. You know, he’d
just be dead. We’d have to dump his body somewhere. Like in one of the
new developments or something. How annoying. How tedious this all is. I
guess this has something to do with the sun, that solar bastard. I guess
this poem is lame and I feel kind of lonely and blah but. Remember
this. Our word for Satan is not their word for Satan. Our word for Evil
is not their word for Evil. Our word for Death is not their word for
Death. I hate the word ‘kill’. Will continue to use it.
OUR DEATH/"WE ARE THE DEAD"
Sean Bonney
This is a different landscape. There is a desire to kill here. And this desire ties us together as sinister brothers of the sinister failure of an entire social system. – Pier Paolo Pasolini, November 1st, 1975.
“Defeat is among us, and war, and prophecy.” That’s a line from Muriel Rukeyser. I was thinking about it a couple of days ago, asking myself whether the words followed a sequence, or whether they could only be taken simultaneously. That is, were they like marks on a calendar, or were they a kind of cacophony, a form of sky, an enormous black sky at that, in which we are all basically like haloes or pinpoints or stars, and so to be destroyed. There are no simple answers to questions like that. To try and find one I walked up to Sebastianstraße, and I roamed up and down for around three hours, screaming Rukeyser’s line over and again until my voice began to fall apart. Luckily, there was no-one around, because in the third hour things began to go wrong. Rukeyser’s words had started to become weird shreds of impossible meaning that once spoken could never be repeated because once they had been spoken all else would disappear. The sky was a hoax. The stars were border guards. Etc. I held my hand in front of my face and could see nothing but a bland white light, like a murderer’s mirror, a vicious and impassible glass. Not glass, a gaze. Not a gaze, a glare. Not light, but “Prophecy”, a word that for the past few months I’ve only been able to associate with surveillance, with cameras and with judges. Why? Well, if you have to ask, etc. Put simply, “prophecy” implies a prediction of the future via excessive and possibly aberrant interpretation of all available elements of what we like to call the present. And who are the current powers that survey and interpret the present to such an aberrant and excessive extent? It isn’t poets, and it isn’t mystics either. Anyway, whatever. I kept screaming, past all voice, all body, all of my borders. By borders, of course, I mean senses. And I thought at this point of Marx, about what he said about the five senses, imaginary or otherwise. You know the passage I mean, I’m sure. And the cut that it implies in the sensory calendar. Because these days I very much doubt that I can say with any certainty that I have five senses. Certainly, as I screamed out Rukeyser’s line it seemed I had only three. That’s right, surveillance, cameras and judges. Actually that’s not three senses, that’s just one. One enormous black sky, one enormous pit of cancelled language, one enormous voice rasping out one final, incomprehensible sentence. And it was mid-day. It was very dark. There were no stars. I think the buildings were burning. There were a few of us there, standing outside them, inventing language. We were wondering if that bastard the sun was ever going to return, and what it was planning on doing when it got here. We were talking about prophecy, about defeat and war, about how nobody knows what those words really mean, and what they will come to mean.
That's epic Sean Bonney, Our Death. I was not aware of his until this. And I can vouch, the link above is a wild way to his portrayal that would not be inaccurate. Not that we were close, but his presence on Kate and my radio program led to my sidebar linking him, twice. Now I know why both went dark. Rest to Sean Bonney. I'm pretty sure he needed it.
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