Letters Journal

I will cut out from you the righteous and the wicked.

Curiously Perverse

Q.
You seem to be saying that social managers should not think pro-revolutionary thoughts because by their nature such thoughts are counterrevolutionary.

A.
I am not saying they should not think such thoughts but rather that they are the only sector of the capitalist community that is conditioned to produce pro-revolutionary consciousness. And that in itself should set alarm bells ringing. For this reason, social managers should rigourously question the immediate form their thoughts take. They should reject, as a matter of course, all the political proposals that just happen to occur to them.

Q.
I want to return to the question of the doubled narrative that you identify in class struggle politics, where the discourse of normalisation is united with that of social revolution.

A.
It is curiously perverse. We can identify here a spiral in which the transgressions associated with social revolution are, in themselves, transgressed against as a means of realising a discourse of normalcy.

Insipidities

While we wait for the messiah, your eyes will suffice to give tired men hope.

Suicide is not a choice. If we must live as warrior monks, this is primarily expressed in longevity and endurance, as these are set within the circumstances of our difficulties. Our purpose is to resensitise ourselves and record experiences without recourse to any external justification or purpose but our recordings’ own sake. Recordings are an integral feature of the endurance of sensitivity.

Quintus Horatius Flaccus

The young bloods comes round less often now,
Pelting your shutters and making a row
And robbing your beauty sleep.  Now the door
Clings lovingly close to the jamb, though, before,

It used to move on its hinge pretty fast.
Those were the days – and they’re almost past -
When lovers stood out all night long crying,
“Lydia, wake up! Save me! I’m dying!”

Greetings from the Mouth

——— I looked down upon my hand outstretched to the meat of your palm, which grasped the top of my offered parcel / mine relinquishing it from below. & I did not recognize the skin. I felt no presence in the twitch of the fingers. I did not know we were anything but a mockery of statuary.

. I hadn’t retreated from the scene & lingered to examine its parts. My messenger’s face bore none of the flaws that give shape to a man. His features were so clear as to be nothing but invisible. It was from this that I knew it was H.J. Bohlmann who had offered you communion. The extended hand was Raoul’s & the poem that it delivered the product of a team of botanists who created it as a sort of pesticide.

. Each of us have exhausted their mouth at some moment. Each of us have been repulsed to appear in some group photograph or shrank to see their name in some roll call for the dominion of the virtuoso. & so equally we have delighted in the potlatch that saw our grouped suicides. We have come together to kill one actor & gift his fingers & penmanship to a new costumed hero. We remember when Raoul’s arm belonged to Joachim & the decadence with which we ripped it from the socket before gluing it to its new benefactor. We remember the way Joachim wept intoxicated with joy as we cannibalized his ego and spat it freely.

. With the fertilizer of Joachim, Raoul, Bohlmann, the Rory Twins, Father Josip, & so on we have cultivated a great many lies. We have fucked ourselves so wildly that at last we have born fruit, our own unlikely children! Each breath of new life a laughing forgery. Their mouths now turning as a carousel to seed counterfeits in every direction / roots whose beheading only emboldens mama tree.

. Too successfully policed & so I have disappeared to we. Given a title & so we have taken them all. Us having tunneled with the shovel of I in guerrilla action. Across the bow!

. Made old by a calling we march them all. Ahead as infant’s fancy.

. Truly yours,

. Peter Heard