I blog at www.drownedandsaved.wordpress.com

The Ship of Fools

"Renaissance men developed a delightful, yet horrible way of dealing with their mad denizens: they were put on a ship and entrusted to mariners because folly, water, and sea, as everyone then "knew," had an affinity for each other. Thus, "Ship of Fools" crisscrossed the sea and canals of Europe with their comic and pathetic cargo of souls. Some of them found pleasure and even a cure in the changing surroundings, in the isolation of being cast off, while others withdrew further, became worse, or died alone and away from their families. The cities and villages which had thus rid themselves of their crazed and crazy, could now take pleasure in watching the exciting sideshow when a ship full of foreign lunatics would dock at their harbors." [From Jose Barchilon's Introduction to Foucault's Madness and Civilization].

My new zine The Ship of Fools has now finally been assembled, collated and published. You can obtain your very own copy here via this fancy Paypal button. The zine is a choice mix of gallows humour, pickled organs, 6 for 5 on south London stories into the distant darkness, a biscuit review, the noble gases, a song about Simon Cowell and an explanation of what happens when you throw your wallet into a river. Everything is centered around this carnivalesque ship of fools. There's a dark laughter bubbling throughout.

tarocchi

Ah friends, I've got myself in too deep on an impossible project to suggest new ways of living. My spirits are all over the place. What can communicate a gut feeling beyond words, in spite of words? I've been reading Artaud - I recommend 'No More Masterpieces' from The Theatre and Its Double. It's worth seeking out. Here's one new means of living. It's not as insincere as suggests.

It began as an aristocratic card game in 15^th century Europe, but by the 18^th century playing cards became a means of divining the future. Tarot cards will not change your life but they can give an outline or form for the path it may take, or the paths to avoid.

Although I don’t personally believe in the future, there could be a truth in them cards. The tarot I mean. They’ve got a lot of nerve, trying to reduce the limitlessness of life, its sheer randomness and chances, into the symbolic alphabet of a pack of playing cards. The cards are claiming that a life is game, where fortunes are made and lost. It all seems rather melodramatic, and I must make some sense of it before I swoon.

It is a way of imposing shoddy symbolic meanings on random and banal events, feelings and fears in our laughably uneventful lives. It can never be true as such, as nothing has a meaning except the one we foster on it, true to ourselves and no one else. Yet it ennobles these things, shoves Meaningfulness up the arsehole of existence, and is it not expedient for our own happiness and self-grounding to believe in strange spiritual forces behind our lives, under them? I’m in that phase of life where you can believe in any thing - nonsense, magic, whatever. Nothing serious, just curious. Nothing more or less than a choice. Nothing like that cruel moment where you need to believe in something, anything, where your survival depends on it. No. Just a game some people play when they have little else.

Truth in cards: take it if you need it, don’t give it here, don’t throw it away. I read them cards once and they told me I was a right pretentious bugger.

Late night mass

Transmission:

Tower of Babel, Bruegel the elder 1563.

Tower of Babel, Bedford and Yeats 1964.

...suicidal young women clutching their faces in parks, by sleepless canals and rivers...pious Africans clutching gospels...city addicted to pleasure, mindlessly pursued, drunk, sniffed, consumed...the bleak street architecture of night, inky blue, hurting...rushing commuters are transmuted grey flesh, dead spirits, spectres...premier league footballers become merciless idols, emperors, as mercenary as medieval barons...picture the strike of all cleaners, we'd be dead in months...ex-teachers and businessmen they are, exiled by war and fear...a lighthouse in the city: where? hither, hither...close friends who killed themselves at university, battling with their sexuality, now demoralised by prospects of profit-propagation by psychopathic capitalist vampires...but loneliness is not the colour white. Hear me.

Why are they pulsing to and pursuing the same looped rhythms? They make them unhappy and now they cannot sleep, so they drink and score. Heroin and alcohol, which is the greater demon? Either presides, the latter a little more manichean, the former just plain evil, like brown rock, like pcp, crystal meth, all that rotten fucked up shit. House of Detention in Clerkenwell is one of the last survying sights of something called evil in older days...wandering demons and ghosts dream through us, reeking through the architecture, a different plane of existence...all hail this empire of sewers, London shiver.

Face quakes and quivers, closes like the heart. Vessels burst, onset of apoplexy.

Defaced mini-cabbie portrayed as Ahauserus the Wandering Jew...the motor-car works as omniscient media device, the front window a lens, the rear mirrors a kaleidoschope of shifting, stinking, stale yet pulsating landscapes.

"Londoners are just like rats. They climb over one another. You see the way they try to get to a certain destination, their meanness, the way they fight with each other, try to get to the top of the pile. What is their goal? It is to buy a very expensive car or to buy a swimming pool in their garden. Maybe they want to go on the most expensive holiday they can afford. It is all so blind. There is no morality to them" - minicab driver interviewed on p.75, Night Haunts, Sukhdev Sandhu.

Later: "What do I like best about London? Nothing. Nothing at all." Cabbie is attacked, robbed, by the predatory rats and ghouls of underclass suburbs, neglected ghettos as familiar as media paedophilia scandals. The ghost architecture of a post-industrial river...high rise luxury prisons, brothels of stokebroker, banker, interior designer lifestyles...the poor are the soil, the shit, the exploited base of capitalism, a trade free only for the extremely rich and greedy, the psychologically primitive AKA privileged, the avant-garde homo erectus who ate neandarthals.

The hunter's favourite creature is always the one he kills, more so than his companion hound or the way he treats his loved ones. Consider the greatest animal and bird collecters, Americans like Charles Willson Peale and the second Baron Rothschild. Peale loved nothing better than to shoot the birds he loved. Rothschild contributed to the extermination of Hawaii's more naive creatures. Today they steal the last eggs of the last female of the species. There are always buyers, collectors who will kill for the last evidence of anything.

The computers are always on, the best workers never sleep you see...the flats become entertainment bazaars, playstations and xboxes, facebook, fridge full of cheap booze and microwave takeaway-imitation dinners...endlessly apologising, masochistically polite and self-effacing: you, and I mean you sah, madam, all those people you've ever known but never had the motivation or interest to get to know or understand: you deserve better than the anxiety you're chained up in. You have the freedom to be good and beautiful, like all humans. For that, you need to be good to yourself, and nothing more. We have potential. Hence faith in democracies, education - and then the transnational bourgeois intelligentsia have the gall to talk about Enlightenment metanarratives ah mother.

Ach says the friar, the city is a sewer: weakness, addiction, fake stimulation, social inequality - this is what said friar sees conspiring the converging parallel lives that shrink into a whirling gyre, vortex perhaps or burning fire, fire. Others see bus routes, the beauteous and quietening settings of the Sun, mysterious faces, bland text messages...all people are Christ he says...especially the poor, the weak, the zombified junkie teenage sex workers...the pain...friar sees his prophet's crucifixion...god of pain and ignoble suffering...spectre-deity sees all and does absolutely nothing in the city of the broken and the dying. This is the fate of the self-harming insomniacs, spent and thwarted lovers maybe, mostly molested, abused, messed, fucked up...pity the prayer of the damned. Ah city of dreadful night.

[Read Night Haunts: A Journey Through The London Night by Sukhdev Sandhu for more information...]

annual appraisal (please complete and return by post to _____)

23 tomorrow. At the moment I feel nothing for it. I am in the company of abysmal hospital-style coffee. I could offer a list of events of this 22nd year and suggest a hypothesis of how I might have matured as a result, but it's an unnecessary and vain exercise. We don't change through property of number, and in the course of things I don't feel like I have altered, either in my way or my manners, or my opinions concerning things.

I still love black coffee. I still drink too much. I still squeeze and roll my tummy in as I walk to prevent it possibly looking flabby. I've walked far more of London, brewed beer, see people close die and arrange all the functional necessities of disposal. I gained confidence, discovered happiness, became bewitched with a beautiful notion of secret proposal and unique engagement rings. And then like the course of all things, I lost that happiness entirely by the end of last year. I had devote winter to charting a new course, rediscovering confidence a little, brick by brick. I've read a good deal, but not the Schweitzer, Burton, Montaigne and Reverte that still looms from the shelf. I gave my blood to the nhs and my words to another zine, ignominious as all others. I failed to find a meaningful friend though I've met many friends - my old goal now adjusted with the realisation that the world I treat as my friend, but there are none now that I'd look to as a friend to me. This observation seems banal yet dispiriting, but it contains within it a fiery independence and pride.

These words will age quickly, sooner than I will. I'm actually quite young, too young for this old life-weary affection I end up adopting. I offer nothing unique to arts, sciences, popular culture, or conversation. This is 22-year old testimony. My goals are as they have been. For now it's fair weather, but I've been toughened by last season's storms.

pith

I want to tell the world

Something about itself

But I know nothing of it

So what can I say?

That I am true, or that I speak

Perhaps I can tinkle a

Single tune on a pianner

Or turn a pithy phrase?

Or that I've known love

And the bitter taste of cigarettes

On a balmy wet autumnal afternoon?

But there is her in the corner

And the clatter of my own never-played melodies.

It won't help in mapping my

Image of You, whatever You be

Or the world and its anger

Its listless lusts all indifferent

Perpetual propagation

As stubborn as nitrogen.

Lord this is no measure.

UK yarbles

Does that paper bag
Tell us anything we need to know
About why live?
Except that we do,
And the motives of our passion, and indifference?

That we are, because we is?
That we be, because we do?
If it was simple as that
Scientisis wouldn't have
Dressed us up as chimps
Or aquamarine amoebas

There's longer explanations
In the silences,
Be it in rhythm or number
It's all a more fantastical
Explanation for electricity
That we're worth defining
Something -
Beyond UK yarbles,
Or lesser gress tax payments,
Or sexual frisson
XXXXXXXX
Or barking on
Packed computer carriages
No final works these
In 30 seconds
There's wicked songs in
Final mornings
Pink pagan manipulator
Loss winner
The least melancholy, he
The bossman
Absent bloody winner
Hater
No truth in politics or Greek words.