drawings 1

working with a creative block

A creative block is due entirely to social conditioning,

Social conditioning!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Social conditioning!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


in that this creates expectations about what you will create, that cannot be fulfilled. First though we must identify what social conditioning is. Well. Best to describe it as pre-conceived ideas, beliefs, prejudices, rules, which are mostly good for society, but not for the individual. The difference between individual and society, being that, society is unfeeling. Mechanical. Whereas the individual is feeling and biological. So. Simply put. We fail to discriminate between what is good for us as an individual, and what is good for society, as a whole. Your expectations, being based on social conditioning, are simply not based on your inner needs; but on that social agenda that was programmed into you by virtue of you being born into a certain culture at a certain time.

(Sci-Fi Story.) A human is teleported to another world where everyone is tremendously creative and free but where there is no
social restraint or organisation whatsoever. The first thing the man sees is a man shitting the street and writing a sonnet at the same time. Gosh! The man enjoys himself tremendously, painting fabulous paintings, writing wonderful, post-modern, epic poetry!!!…. but is murdered the first time he goes to the pub, in argument over how frothy the beer should be! Gosh!)


Now. It is important for society to have rules and beliefs and laws. It is good that people promote social integration. It is good that people act in similar ways, especially regarding the less fortunate members of society. And yet, it is also good to be creative. It is good to express what you feel. And this means following your inner world, and that world may well be at variance the outer world. It may be negative. In simple terms the block is, how can I go against something I know to be good? How? And that will block you. It will trap you in a vicious circle you can’t extricate yourself from.

But let’s take a musical analogy. Say you believe that only complicated classical music is actually good or worth playing. This is a belief. A rule. Then to reproduce that musically you will have to spend many years practising to gain the necessary technique. And this is good if you achieve that goal. But realise. It is a creative block in many ways as this time will not be spent writing your own music and remember. Even a very simple piece of music, you could play with one finger, is still your creation, and not someone else’s. However. This not a fixed rule I am describing. It is quite possible for an individual to understand the pitfalls of ‘identification’ and to tirelessly study technique and still compose his own highly original compositions. This is an enlightened person. We all know them. Steve Reich. Frank Zappa. The problem of course being that we can’t all be genius. In this regard it is interesting to see how all piano lessons are geared to producing concert pianists regardless of whether it is statistically probable that the pupil will ever be a concert pianist!!! It would be much more sensible to gear lessons to something less ambitious and more creatively enjoyable for the pupil. This never done of course.

MOTHER.
“What! Are you saying my child couldn’t be a concert pianist! Arrrggghhh!!!!! Die You Mother-f**ker!

This also explains why vast numbers of people who had piano lessons early on, simply give up the instrument in later life, probably because they were not taught to do anything else, like compose, or improvise, or jam, or listen, but, BUT! just play Beethoven sonatas!!!!!!

But let’s look at writing. Say poetry. Poetry! What is socially conditioned expectation here? Answer is to be a poet, and to be published in a ‘quality’ publication. But to achieve that you will have to play the academic game. Your poetry won’t be ‘your’ poetry anymore. Instead it will be a response, academically, to the poetry climate. A very difficult and clever game indeed. (Plath played this game and won at it! But we must ask, at what price, considering how unhappy she was. What? You think it was all Ted’s fault?… well… there could be some truth in that.) That is if you have the ‘normal’ expectation. In this regard it’s interesting to note that very many well known poet’s like Blake, Villon, Rimbaud, positively did not play the academic game, we’re NOT published in ‘quality’ publications, and yet are the poet’s we treasure most! Hum. Above argument applies it must be remembered to those poets who want to be recognised as ‘Poets’!!! If you are happy being published in small independent mags all well and good and more power to you!!!!! And when I say your poetry, not your poetry, I mean you will be tricked out of finding your own true authentic poetry voice. I know there are exceptions to this rule. Clever bastards who do both at once, but in the main it holds good. Remember. It’s easy to simulate things if you are academically brilliant. And a true authentic poetry voice simple won’t conform to the norm. It will just conform to itself.

Let’s finish off with painting. Panting? No! Painting!!! The ‘cant’ here is that before Picasso could paint abstract or ‘wrong’ pictures, he has to first paint like an old master. What is this saying? It’s saying you can’t just paint. Express yourself. That bad. So it’s a block. It’s saying no. You shouldn’t. You’re not qualified. It discourages, doesn’t it? Think. So let’s reverse argument. If Picasso great because he could first paint like old master then so is anyone else who could do that, and there were lots of his contemporaries, who could, and they, they Horatio, are all quite forgotten. Panting, or panting, like an old master for them, didn’t mean doodley-squat. It didn’t help.

So here is same thing. An expectation. If you want to paint a picture, but if you think it must be a picture which other people will agree, is a certain sort of picture then, then, you have a block. Because, suppose you don’t possess ability, at that moment in time, to technically paint that picture?????????
Then you can’t paint, and you is stuck.

So to finish off. There will be many people who disagree with me here. They will require some more user-friendly and less challenging solution to the creative block phenomena. Or it will have to be some unique personal psychological hang-up thing. This will be so they can hang on to their block, because, let’s face it, it is useful to them. They have an investment in it. Well. I can’t help that, and to those people I say good luck. This then for the odd few, who may agree with what’s below.

CLOUD OF DOOM (Cartoon)

Aztec BEEB

The crypto-fascist in his techno-speak,
Glibly gibbers, it might be Greek,
This alien-speak of an oily tongue,
Forked by the lightning of its own song!

Now hear the jargon of our jarring sun,
Conjugating the verb of our despair,
Finding a methodology for the disease,
That talks up all with a promiscuous grin.

This slippery speech of the unaccountable few,
Who bury the truth with every twist of their lip,
Who pervert all in their perverse path,
To fit their crypto-fascist techno-speak.

The Ross Brand debacle, it seemeth to moi, all stems from the from the fact that being a public service body, the BBC simply fails to do the job a public service body is supposed to do, i.e. to address , cure, or at least point out, the ills of the culture it is part of. (Greek tragedy did this and was paid for with public money, like our licence fee.) The Beeb most patently fails to do this effectively, and so I think there then occurs a pressure cooker effect, where the pressure of not doing what they are supposed to do, builds up and up and up, until, finding a weak point, (Ross and Brand)is found, and it inevitably bursts out in some kind of perverse or unacceptable form.

Let me say this again. The BBC is a lot like, A LOT LIKE, the N.H.S. It is paid for with public money to ensure, ENSURE, health for all! This health, in BBC terms means having programmes that deal with serious themes in an intelligent and honest manner. For example, a play by the late great Dennis Potter. Now, everyone at the BBC knows this, but in the interests of personal careers it is swept under the proverbial carpet in favour of some more appealing formula that has better ratings and is more user friendly; and the result of this suppression is a kind of BBC hysteria, which will erupt every now and then in a breach of the defences and an outpouring of purulent matter!

Of curse the BBC would argue they are doing their job by providing dramas like ‘Capturing Mary’ (Poliakoff.) and ‘My Zinc Bath.(Hare.) Let’s have a close look at these BBC flagships.

My Zinc Bath. Now how do you say ‘high culture’, ‘serious’, ‘worthwhile’, on TV? Answer. You have people say clever things in an elevated almost Shakespearean language about a ‘serious’ subject. To the popular mind this kind of thing always means ‘high culture’. Then you do the other thing people equate with the gravity of a project. You actually get a Hollywood star! Imagine. A Hollywood star!

Now. this is strategy. in reality, no one could understand what the point of this drama was. Because there was no story. It had no real characters. And why are they going on about addiction? Why? This never explained. And is it really like Shakespeare? Answer. No. Shakespeare’s characters say clever stuff but aren’t clever themselves. Often they are created to exhibit the pointlessness of cleverness, for its own sake. This definitely a theme in Hamlet. And what actually happens in MZB? Answer. Nothing. They pontificate. End. If ever there was an exercise in grandiose hot air. This was it.

I repeat. The elevated language thing. The stars. The emotive subject. It was all a trick. It lacked any true dramatic substance.

Capturing Mary. It’s about a house. A big house in Mayfair or somewhere. Gosh. And all the stuff that happened in this big important house. Gosh. And it’s Maggie Smith, in the house. Then along comes the subtly evil Greville White, flitting in and out in his subtly evil way, and he’s played by DAVID WALLIAMS! Gosh. How street cred. And the story’s told by the son of a cleaner. A cleaner! I mean. Cleaner’s aren’t posh. Think! And what happens? Well. You can’t tell. It’s all a bit too subtly evil to know what is going on. Still. It is big house. In Mayfair!

So? Is this drama? Or is it glossy posturing made plausible by the presence of heavyweights like Smith and Gambon? I think it undoubtedly no. It ain't drama. It's another hollow vessel. Also, what I would say is that under the glossy surface of these ‘dramas’, what they really show is a certain contempt for their audience, in that they are not designed to enlighten, only to impress.


How many more ways can you say it? The BBC has become too corporate. Now in their mania to maintain standards all progs homogenised or ‘homo’ genised, to look and sound the same. It like conformity gene run rampant. The cloned leper in his Ivory Tower colony. Imagine if BBC executives were Aztec Priests, all ripping out hearts to appease the God of standards. Imagine going up to them and saying “You must stop this senseless bloodshed!” Would they listen? But how can they? The sun of standards will not rise tomorrow, unless they rip out hearts so there is no choice, is there? They would not listen.

THEY’D PROBABLY RIP YOUR HEART OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Again the ‘cant’ states that we must cater to minorities, yet the minority that would like authentic drama, or stuff that does make you think, or feel, is conveniently ignored.

In Shakespeare’s Henry the Fourth Hal at first humors Falstaff and fools about but at the end he sobers up and says, now, enough infantilism! It is time to grow up! Take on responsibility. But this what never happened at the Beeb. It’s like Falstaff is running the whole show!

Let me say this again . Why has the BBC become like an English version of MTV? I mean next month, they’ll probably do a rap version of Jane Austen! Why are they allowed to say something is ‘drama’ when we all know damn well it ain’t Samuel Beckett! That some tosh about M.I.5. and terrorists, shouldn’t really be labelled ‘drama’. This gives it a status it has not earned. Does not deserve. Drama to be called drama should have at it’s core weighty moral or metaphysical issues that make us question our world. Make us think, fer kirstsakes!!! What we have instead is a bunch of idiot producers, vying with each other to be the one who made the programme that got the most viewers. Just to be one better than someone else. Moronic.

The Ross Brand debacle struck a chord because it was an attack on an English institution (Sachs) and we we’re outraged because we all know England, ENGLAND, could be great, should be great, but obviously isn’t now where the BBC are concerned. And that’s kinda sad, because we could easily do better.

The powers that be,
the ‘ruling elite’,
the Authorities,
comprised of Newspapers like
‘The Protector’,
or Public T.V. Companies like
The CCT,
Or political parties like
The Techno Lib-Lab Goodtime Fascists,
Were presented with something
A thing, (unspecified)
& they examined it
& judiciously considered it
& after due time they said;
“Oh dear. How sad.
We’re afraid this something, (unspecified)
We have been presented with
Doesn’t fit the academic model!
It isn’t clever enough.
Articulate enough.
It hasn’t the required sophistication.
It appears, well… useless,
Not to put too finer point on it so regretfully,
We will have to reject it.
Trash it.
Dump it.
Sorry.”& that’s what happened.
It got trashed. Dumped.
Dispensed with.
& what was it?
This thing (unspecified)
That they had been presented with??????

* * * * * * * * *

It was a new born babe.

Frida 2

Frida 1

Force Sonnet (Graphic)

BLACK (Cartoon)

Van Gough x 2

Apocalyptic Twilight

the sun sets
casting all in an apocalyptic light.
the bomb goes off
showering all in burning rain.
& in the radio-active twilight
there is nothing left to lose
nothing left to gain,
only cosmic debris,
twisting in tiny whirlwinds
on the infinite chessboard
on which the ghosts of tomorrow
play out their moves,
on which our trammelled carriages
move sedately along sequential ruts
playing an old song
now out of tune;
in this everlasting apocalyptic night
breeding supernovas
in the primal soup.
for it is all just a dance.
a cosmic bossanova
that you play on your yamaha
in an old pullover!
it simply an idea in the mind
of a stone
that says, ‘I’m a stone!
I must atone!
Phone home!’
but in the apocalyptic dawn
there is no one left to call.
there is just a valley of bone.
a prayer to a non-existent God.
something that is, and isn’t.
for this is the apocalyptic twilight,
where the wings of perception unfold!

Ressurection Cirkus

The ringmaster cracks his whip
the red sea parts
and out dance streams of majorettes
twirling batons and kicking maniacally high
they mow down an old clown
blowing soap bubbles out of his toy saxophone
the ringmaster holds up red card
the majorettes protest
the old clown weeps
the sea rises up and huge waves crash down
a single dove flies above
an ipod in its beak
looking for new land
looking for a less craven land
exhausted it falls
like a stone
into the waves below
which subside to reveal
the ringmaster
giving jon the baptist
his ringside pep talk
“get in there jon
you’re the number one
baptizing man, you are
you can put them under
blow them away
rent them asunder
give them hell
christ jon
you're the best!”
so jon leaps up
with his baptizing hat on
a river of crazy foam appears
flowing thru the resurrection circus
dividing it in two
on the left bank
french intellectuals
arguing about proust
on the right bank
the rejects from sodom
slobbering, jerking off, and bad mouthing
nelson mandela!
but jon jumps in
baptizing like mad
the crazy foam flying
until a wave of crazed housewives
running at full tilt
cross the resurrection ring
brandishing handbags
like anunnaki
my oh my
they descend upon jon
and punch the living daylights out of him!
its all a bit monty python (thank g.)

The Bug Man (Story)

Prologue. Young man arguing with his dad about effectiveness marriage. Makes bitter comments about his parents’ relationship. Dad agrees but says he should go see great Aunt Kitty before he decides permanently. Does so. Finds ageing couple still very much in love living in big house Lewisham. They nice to him. Private joke about the bug man. He curious. Kitty tells him following story.


Pre First World War London. Kitty's parents conventional well to do. She is morbidly shy. Intelligent and sensitive. Parents afraid she never leaves home. All the suitors they get for her are weird and boring. At last give her ultimatum. Choice between living with awful stentorian aunt, or.....in desperation she marries Fenwick Reames. Bacteriologist He is ugly man. Very blunt and difficult. They go Cape Town because that where he can study special bug. The five legged African laughing bug. She finds him sexually repulsive. Wedding night psychodrama. After wedding night has dream of him covered in bugs, eating bugs and having sex with a giant bug! She goes crazy in Cape Town. No friends. No prospect making any. Takes up hobby but he belittles it. In disgusted rage she smashes matchstick house. She has minor kind of breakdown. In a church she starts weeping. Man next to her says, “ I know Jesus is very sexy in his loin cloth my dear, but this is overdoing it.” Gives her hanky. It Ambrose De Coverly. The ambiguous diamond broker. He introduces her to his debauched circle of friends. She finds sexual freedom. Sexual relations husband stop. He notices change in her. She calmer. This carries on for an eighteen months. Bug work going well, then!!!!!!!!! Fenwick hears rumors. Attends a party. The cabaret turns out to be his wife performing a sex act. He scandalized! He overcomes shame. Next day. Feels he can no longer go on in Cape Town because of shame. So he takes post in the interior. Small tribe. Mysterious disease killing them. She horrified. She won't go. Contacts parents. But he got there first. Because of scandal, they disown her! She forced go with him. But when there she overcome by pity at terrible state of village. They work together building hut hospital and disinfecting area. Tribe witch doctor educated man. Went to Eaton. Tribe has weird version of rugby game. At first Fenwick hated but when he excels at tribe rugby they learn respect him. Tribe has religion. Worship Lahcutoh. Their god. A giant praying mantis that lives under termite hill. Fenwick skeptical. But kitty has dream. Lacutoh speaking to her. It is about cure for sickness. They must go into savannah and meet him at waterhole. Fenwick rejects idea. But his experiments failing. Only matter of time before they get sick. Out of desperation he agrees to try it. Fenwick, Kitty and Witch Doctor set off. Must pass thru dangerous areas to get to where Lahcutoh is. Man-eating jaguar. Tribe of pygmy headhunters. The evil swampland. At last get there. It is desolate area of small stunted bushes and gray looking earth. Build fire. Wait for night. Long conversation about meaning of life. Then strange dust storm. When it stops kitty vanished! Nothing they can do but wait. Fenwick goes into rage. Witch doc tries calm him down. 2 days pass. Then storm comes again. When it stops, kitty sitting there! She tells story. In storm uncontrollable urge possessed her to walk off. Walked for hours. Came to dried up waterhole. Roaring noise then Lahcutoh appeared. It very awesome!
Kitty afraid. Feels ground dissolve. Falling thru space. Lands softly next to a small bush with a single flower on it. Bush talks to her. Says pick my flower. She does so. Lahcutoh appears. She gets on his back. They fly into dust storm. End.
Witch doctor wants to discuss story from an anthropological perspective. Fenwick tells him to shut it! They go back tribe.
Fenwick analyses flower. Collects more. Extract serum from it. Gives tribe injections. It works! That night Fenwick and kitty make love!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Coda. Fenwick and Kitty set up clinic in London using serum help people with many different ailments. Medical establishment pooh pooh it. But they don’t care. Have family.
Kitty writes book. AWESOME LAHCUTOH! which does moderately well. They have big house in Lewisham, which is constantly bursting with people. In a book kitty has pressed the flower that the god showed her in the gray land.

The young man leaves the house holding the book. She has given it to him. Sits down on bench in tube. Thinking deeply about strange story. A girl sits next to him. He looks at her. He looks at the book in his hands.


End

Going Back To Collage

Ayn & Infinity

Quantum Owl

Deb Of The Year

WHAT ART IS, AND ISN'T

People often say that advertising is art, and on face value it certainly looks artistic but really, here it's just a failure to discriminate. Advertising is creative, but it isn't art, for true art, is always trying to change your perception of the world. In order to do that it has to have behind it a thought process. This thought process informs the work of art with a depth of meaning. True art is the end product that thought process.

In advertising there is no thought process, only ideas themselves manipulated in a clever way to give you the impression of art without it’s actual content. An advert does not want to change your perception of the world. Only perhaps your perception of your need for a certain product or what that product does. Advertising then does not have and ‘inner life’. There is no movement within it. It isn’t going anywhere, in the sense that it will lead you forwards into a new and better understanding of what it means to be alive.

Now. There’s nothing wrong with advertising. If you have a product you need to make people aware of that product. However. It is business, not art. We need to see clearly, ironically, the fog of confusion that envelops things like this and how all of us end up living in this fog, continually mistaking one thing for another, the result of which is we fail to reap that much valued crop of true knowledge, which is the product of discriminating clearly between things.

Put another way this is saying that advertising falsifies the world it presents us with by removing all the pain form that world and then encouraging us to identify with it! Which can do, and it is a fine and ‘jim-dandy’ world to live in, for it is wonderful to live in a pain-free world and have a blissful time; until of course something negative does surface, and we are forced to acknowledge through illness, boredom, whatever, a deeper level, but by then of course it will be too late, and we will experience this negative thing in a very unproductive and unenlightening way. Our lack of consciousness will trip us up quite indefatigably.

Now. This isn’t rocket science. Artists as individuals have always preferred reality over illusion, and have struggled to express that. This is something extremely obvious and simple and it’s this simplicity which defeats us. People will protest ‘but it can’t be that simple’!!!! Or they will say, ‘but that’s not new’! Which is true. It isn’t. But some things are unfortunately universal. Some things you will have to come to terms with. You cannot have them how you want them. They will also say that things must be mindless because we need mindless fun. It is a release without which we would die, or something. But this again is just more advertising in sense that advertising is always excluding something, like pain, or reality, and this attitude excludes the possibility that life could ever be different or that we could other things uplifting and fun, heaven forbid!

So what is art? Ultimately, real art, true art, is anything which does not pander to our wish fulfillment weakness in order to exploit that in some way to gain ‘power over’, status, financial reward. It is anything which does not lie to us. True art accepts responsibility by telling us the truth of pain and darkness in order that we may be equipped with it, in order to deal with it, when it does surface in our lives. So in some ways true art will strike us as wrong in some way. Paradoxically it will strike us as the opposite of what it is. It will seem false when it actually is true. Weird.

We live at a point in time when, as we well know, ‘art’ has been assimilated into the business community. Consequently artists must now become ‘brands’ that you market in much the same way you would market any other product. Like say baked beans. A quick, easy to consume, sweet product, but remember, a mass- produced rather soulless product. So that what as artist is saying now, the ‘meaning’ of what they do, is now of much much less importance that how well it can be branded and sold. Now the artist is created by the ‘art world’, not the art world existing to serve the individual vision of the artist. Now for an artist it is now about materializing your inner truth or a truth of life but about about materializing some kind of marketable mass truth or ‘concept’, as in ‘conceptual’, that will be what galleries are looking for and be in tune with ‘groupthink’. It is all very Orwellian. Now you could say something radical but that would be because people want to hear something radical, that is chic, and it would simply have no radical effect. It would be just playing the art game. Remember. The art world is an institution and like all institutions it is self-serving and self-interested. As long as it can go on believing in it’s own myth, all is fine. Nevermind the toxix stink of death, stagnation and decay. The ant-noise of mindless crowds troughing down on the next ‘batman’ extravaganza! Nevermind the grey sterile boredom leaking out of every fast food funfair and infecting gay life with a morbid virus of truth and inertia. THINK!

Granny’s in the coal house with a government man
In shades talkin’ turkey to an ole buzzard with the blues
Who sold your trainers to pay his dues
& you YOUS!!!
You’re in the alley trying to drum up interest
In your next world war, the one with extra horrors
Narrated by Jane Horrocks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

HONOURING YOURSELF

If we do want to start to honour ourselves, to take back our power and
to begin to live more purposefully, then we need to understand some
fundamental things.


From beginning we are taught to conform. Identify. Be sympathetic of or mindful of what others think and feel and feel. And of course this right and good. But in terms of your inner journey, this a big block. The inner journey being a completely new departure, which does not really conform to, or fit with your old world. But what usually happens is that people carry on in old mode, by applying a value system where it no longer appropriate. A good example is our adult value system. Or what we believe to be true as adults. We often apply this to our perception of our childhood world, completely forgetting that a child does not have an adult value system, obvious as this may seem. How this translates is simply that a child will feel things which the adult will find unacceptable. An adult will say truly, that I do not feel any hatred towards family members. This is true for the adult. And yet as a child it may have been very well the case that the child did feel this hatred. In this way we falsely apply a set of conditions to an inappropriate location. If we say I can’t jump 20 feet in air. That true. But if we were on the moon, it would be patently untrue.

Thus, honouring yourself, is to put yourself first for a change. To allow yourself to be honest about what you may have felt as a child and to do this without prejudice. Also it means in everyday life, not to take such an adult view of what we say we are feeling. Truth is, and one most people would prefer to ignore is, that we need to go thru dysfunctional in order to become functional. Mostly, people just want to embrace a more positive healthy option straight away. And this often encouraged or seconded by self-help literature which, in order to be successful or effective will stress the positive, the wholesome, the beneficial, over the evil ‘negative’. It will always encourage you to think there are formulas, answers, solutions to things and not, sometimes long and difficult processes that may last for years. This is not to say, and I repeat NOT, that positive wrong or bad. No. Positive good. What I’m saying is you can be positively negative. Think. I’m saying we can put our dysfunctionality to good use and that is kinda cool, and what artists have always done. What I’m saying is you should build your church on a rock and not on a shifting sand . And that rock is truth. Think. Truth may not be P.C., but it is truth. And here truth is that if we feel something, that thing must exist. Be in us. Have an origin. To ignore it because it’s bad, not productive, negative, is the height of stupidity.

In the Magician, a novel by Somerset Maugham, the hero meets a magician in Paris. Hero finds magician a disreputable, repulsive character. He makes point of showing his contempt and disgust of him. This result is bad consequences. Read the book. It cool! Here though we can see how very aware Maugam was of the view we take of the dysfunctional, here seen in shape of repulsive magician, and how we shun what we consider unwholesome, negative and bad. And how this results in us having problematicos!!! Think. We could just as easily be non-judgmental and open, for will our condemnation of something, change anything? Answer of course is no. The ‘evil’ magician remains evil wether we condemn or shun him or not. As Osho points out in ‘yoga:the science of the soul’, the world runs on prejudice. We develop beliefs, inflexible opinions and dogmas. We learn to shun, to label, to judge, to be against, often purely on reflex, with no personal experience or knowledge to back it up.

To honour yourself, start by recognising the true nature of what we term society. Culture. Civilisation. These slippery terms we have for that strange sea we swim in. For wether we like it or not , people simply do not create social structures which encourage or enable us to uplift ourselves. Social structures are self serving and exist simply to keep on existing. That is all. Our world may well help us to achieve, live, succeed, make art, be poor, whatever, but it does not encourage or help us to transcend. In truth, it probably does the exact opposite. It suppresses, it indoctrinates, it censors; people become asleep, and this sleeping sickness can take many forms, be it clever, stupid, religious, new-age, scientific, you name it. So truth is, awareness eclipsed at birth and then ruthlessly suppressed until death. Think. This is our world. It’s not a political theory it’s a fact. If you say there are no facts, no truths, then understand this. The person who is saying that has had their awareness eclipsed at birth and then ruthlessly suppressed, meaning…that person is asleep!

Now this is a radical truth. By you need a radical truth to deal with a radical situation. This does not mean however, that people are intrinsically evil or that society bad, or we need to be political extremists carrying bombs and stuff. That would be stupid. On the one hand is our understanding. On the other hand is the action which results from that understanding. We needn’t ‘act it out’ if we realise, understanding the nature of society, is to understand what has happened to ourselves, and therefore it is we who have to change, and not society. To say we should change society is to take the symptom for the disease, as we are the creators of society ultimately, and it’s as Shakespeare says, ‘the fault is in us, Horatio, in that we are underlings’. Like Caliban, we see the ills of society and raging at our mirror scream, “No. It’s wrong! It can’t be allowed!” The very first step in honouring yourself is to know, it must be allowed, yet we must still know it shouldn’t be. For as long as we continue to deny the essential rottenness of social systems there will be no progress. Whilst at the same time recognising the need for social systems! It is of course an anomalous situation. A contradiction. A logical impossibility. An impasse. The way forward is the way back. This is radical thinking. It is honouring yourself, a thing you haven’t done until now.

Having written this I then watched Simpson’s episode where Ned Flanders loses his home in a hurricane and undergoes a ‘Job’ like crisis of faith. He ends up in the nut house and undergoes therapy. Turns out Ned’s problem is, yes! You guessed! He has never honoured himself. Having all his life suppressed his anger because his hippy parents couldn’t discipline him, it resulted in his bonkers episode. So you see. When a thing is so obvious it has become a joke in the Simpsons, isn’t it time we gave it careful consideration?

Wha da ya mean?! You don’t like the Simpsons! Really. Bah, humbug!

CRASHED ANGEL

I found a crashed angel
At the side of the road.
His face grey.
His wings all tangled up.
I took out my hanky
And mopped his brow.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Maybe you could help me up?”
I did so.
He stood unsteady
Leaning on my shoulder.
“How did it happen?”
“Oh. The usual story.
I was so full of the love of God
I flew up and up and up.
But I lost control,
And came crashing down.
Stupid really.”
“Not really,” I said.
“A mistake we all could make.”
And I gave him a big hug.
He smiled wanly. “Yes.”
We walked on.
At last he said,
“Well. Time to get back to H.Q.
Work to do.”
“Yes,” I said.
And off he flew.

Have you ever seen an angel fly?
No. Neither have I.

Adam Everyman

COMING SOON! From
W O M B A T C L A S S I C S

ADAM EVERYMAN
(A picaresque English Novel!)
by
HENRY PICARESQUE



Chapter One
In which our hero goes to the Jobcentre but it is shut, and
he has to come home again.

Chapter Two
In which our hero spends all day considering buying a washing
machine, but then remembers he can’t afford one.

Chapter Three
In which our hero takes back his library book.

Chapter Four
In which our hero has a bad back form sitting down too
much.
Chapter Five
In which our hero, combs his hair, quite a bit.

Chapter Six
In which our hero, (Yes! You guessed!) has a quiet wank.

Chapter Seven
Due to an industrial dispute at Wombat, chapter seven,
has been cancelled!

Chapter Eight
In which our hero, in his usual inconsequential manner, whilst
watching the alien invasion on t.v., is visited by her Majesty the
Queen! who whisks him off in her Lear jet to visit the seven
wonders of the world! (which the aliens are dissembling to
transport back to planet Zircon, where Lady Di has a love-nest
with her chauffeur, Ron!) all the while paying homage to our hero
for being so picaresque, in a picaresque sort of way!

Chapter Nine
In which our hero has a fag and contemplates infinity, for at
least ten minutes!

dumbing down those quirky corners!

a gay friend of mine, a successful writer has been moaning in print about the demise of the small gay press. in order to survive he has been forced to take up the gentle art of porn. yes! porn!
"Have you ever thought of writing porn?" he asked. "It's easy to get published, and you sell a lot of books." As these are the only words that a writer ever really wants to hear, I rushed home and embarked without much thought on a filthy homosexual rewrite of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, entitled The Low Road.
"As these are the only words that a writer ever really wants to hear!"
This of course strikes us as funny. why? because it is very clever. the writer in saying this is acknowledging that there is a choice. he could retain his integrity in remaining a 'serious' writer, but that's it's a choice no intelligent person would make, in a world, culture, that does not encourage, honor or value integrity, and we laugh at the casual effrontery of admitting this, our craven nature, without a blush or the slightest guilt. we also laugh as it's a release of tension for we ourselves feel guilty that we do not make this choice to have more integrity and so our tension is released when someone brazenly admits it with no guilt at all! yes. the thing is deuced clever, what-ho.

but hang on a mo. where did we begin? oh yes. the demise of the small gay press. which our writer never explains he merely laments. but i can offer a tentative explanation. the current trend or direction is to dumb down. this in effect means everything becomes more mainstream. life has less quirky corners. and what quirkier corner could there be but the gay world?! so this issue of the gay press really just shows that dumbing down has spread even here! a place you really wouldn't expect to fall prey to this as the gay world is, god bless them, anti intellectual, anti heavy stuff, is an antidote to the serious stuff the dumbers down would dumb down! incredible. but it seems dumbing down knows no limit. it is unprejudiced. across the board.

which means what? well think. it ain't rocket science. it means our gay writer is responsible for the thing he bewails. if we accept dumbing down to be about a lack of integrity and our writer shows a lack of integrity in turning so quickly to mindless porn, then then, he is responsible for the thing he bemoans. he is hoist on his own petunias, as bill would say. it's this self helpy thing of creating your world with your own thoughts. we are responsible. no one else is.

but why? i know this chap. he ain't a bad person. he is intelligent. why does he automatically make this kind of choice? well. what i'd say is, it a product of the seductive nature of cleverness!!! cleverness or being sharp is the ulimate siren intoxicating our senses with her beautiful charms! it is seductive because it appeals to, or flatters our vanity. it says look how wonderful we are. how clever and superior. look at us! sophisticated clever beings who have a clever answer for everything. is this the Faust story, or isn't it? but in reality our cleverness is self defeating, for now our gay writer no longer has outlet for what he really wants to write. i.e. 'serious' gay fiction, and not, mindless porn AND AND AND! so the quality of his life has diminished, for, that thing we really want to do, express, be; that thing which is 'us' and we want to scream from the rooftops; makes us feel good.
FEEL GOOOD!
it is our soul urge. our passion. our reason de atra!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
let's face it. we can be clever, or we can be honest. if we were honest we'd admit cleverness ain't never helped us. 'if'. but between those two small insignificant letters lies a vast unbridgeable gulf, and, for the vast vast majority, that is a bridge too far; so let us go on bemoaning things we have no control over. let's.
amen.

The Feeling Level

Question. What connects Modernism with big game hunting?
Answer. Ernest Hemmingway!
Question. What connects blowing your brains out, with bull fighting?
Answer, Ernest Hemmingway!
Question. What connects a bowl of soup with a dead shark?
Answer. Marcel Proust or. Ernest Hemmingway!
Question. Why do people think there is always a rational answer to a rational question?Answer. Ernest Hemmingway!!!

People will always deny the importance and even the existence of a feeling level in drama. My own sister-in-law stated a common view that you cannot mix funny and serious. She is a very intelligent person with a college degree, and understands the concept of the ‘tragi-comic’; it’s just that she wants her comedy straight. Likewise her tragedy. Her view is the conventional one. This though is brilliantly contradicted by the Simpsons, where comedy and ‘serious’ emotional moments are freely mixed, and has huge audiences with no one complaining. To re-state then my argument, people in general, deny the need for a feeling level in drama or entertainment in general. Either they jus flatly deny it, or they say that all that is required is efficiency, professionalism, and that it simply follows the recognised formula. On t.v. this would be something like ‘My Family’.In theatre it is something that is cleverly staged, the actors being brilliant at impersonating stereotypes or accents,, and that it must have some kind of relevance to some current issue, or be from a current text like a successful novel. This is the norm now in our ‘fringe’ theatre. The fact that plays we all love and admire like ‘Waiting For Godot’, The Chairs’, ‘Uncle Vanya,’ do not follow these rules or this formula, is just ignored. I think people are aware of it, they simply choose to ignore it in the interests of the all consuming need for ‘success’, and getting that much needed arts council grant. Look though at things from T.V. we love, like ‘Hancock’, ‘Dr Who’, ‘Python’, it’s the same story. These things do not follow the formula and they all have a distinct feeling level. But still, managements will always say, in order to get an audience you must do something formulaic. One-dimensional. Accessible. Entertaining in the slick clever sense of that. Because that’s the only thing people will pay for! But when theatre comes down to purely commercial considerations I think it means, as an audience, we have wandered from the path somewhat. Wandered into that sterile wilderness of the right-thinking 'entertainment' and P,C. theatre, if you can call it that. We skate over our sterile surface and the feeling depths are conveniently ignored. Is there anyone out there who really thinks that 2008 will produce a new 'Look back in anger' or on T.V. another 'Singing Detective'? (Of course you protest, but isn't it our choice about the kind of thing we want from theatre? Well yes. No one is demanding people accept anything at all. It is simply about our awareness of things. If we take a health analogy, you could say well, it's more comfortable to just sit around all day, which is true, no one is arguing about that, but would this lack of exercise really be good for your health??? ) So. Our theatre is bankrupt because we are bankrupt. Always selling out for a shot at Hollywood or a part at the R.S.C. in yet another re-hash of that great theatre deity SHAKESPEARE! Who was, and I mean this, the greatest writer what ever lived, and yet. Why is Shakespeare so popular with us luvvies? Answer. Because his work has a very definite FEELING LEVEL. It isn't just some rhetorical Elizabethan formula. What I am really saying is that at this moment in time, the power of social conditioning is very strong indeed. The pendulum has swung back from the open permissive 60's into the present moment's rigidity and conformity. At this moment, people are virtual sheep! No pun intended. And I am not saying we can change this. We can't. Seeking to actively change it is foolish. All we can do is become aware and then try to find others with a similar awareness. So that we could do something a tad more authentic, and then we could sleep easy, which is really all that counts, ain't it? But let's make another argument. For there are 'X' number good arguments why it is so imperative to understand this. DEPRESSION. THE 'd' WORD. Bad. Very sadly a friend of my partner committed suicide last week. This was a tragic waste of a young man who was creative and talented. The cause was depression. And what really is depression? It's what the word says. Depressed. Pressed down. Closed off. Not opened up. We deny or depress something and that give us a feeling of deadness, hopelessness, rigidity, and the consequent inability to embrace your feelings. It's really just the inability to open up to something, which is not 'material'. To go with something irrational. Spiritual. The result of our rigid commercial brainwashing, which says things can only be one way, so if you are depressed, you stay depressed. There is no hope! Sad. As Joseph Heller said: "I get the willies when I see closed doors." We should meditate deeply on that one. But what will be the stumbling block here is the simplicity of what I have just said. People do love to complicate things.
Never the less. It really is that simple. Remember. The 'experts' want you to believe it is complicated because that keeps them in a job. THINK. But when I use a word like spiritual you will think I am some sort of religous nut. No. I'm not. I'm a normal darling just like you. However. Due to our compartmentalised thinking, COMPARTMENTALISED, we don't feel that the question of the sacred or the spritual applies to something like depression. Or the theatre, for that matter, DARLING!. Well. I understand this. People feel fragmented. Unconnected. They don't feel connections between things in the same way they don't feel connected to say, the environment. Which is a pity. (Today I shall mainly be eating fruit! ((Fast Show.)) If you read 'the experts' of course you'd know, that the originsof theatre are religous. The Greek Theatre was a Religous festival. Not like Edinborough, eh? The stories in Greek theatre are about man's relationship to the Gods, or to that OTHER LEVEL, sort of above us or below us or something. If you look at boring, unreadable old Homer, these two levels are absolutely clear. Especially in the Illiad. (That's a book by him. Hint.)The Gods on Mount Olympus, watch the Greek war, like on T.V. and then zap down occasionally to interfere a bit. Men and Gods. Now. NOW. This is exactly like Waiting for Godot! Two distinct levels, but in 'Waiting For Godot', it's more modern. Here we got the 'real' level and the 'symbolic' level. The tramps on a road, that's real. The situation, a crossroads, at twilight, with a single tree, waiting for a mysterious man, that's SYMBOLIC.but in both things it's the way these two things interact, the Gods with man, and in Waiting For Godot, the way the real level interacts with the symbolic level, the interaction of these two levels, which is trying to get us to a third point. And what is that third point? Jones on the back row. Yes! The Feeling Level! That mysterious place where something magical happens, we hope. Well. It's definitely a complete mystery to most people. It's as if some bits in their brain are missing, or some strand of their d.n.a., because when you talk about stuff like this they stare at you live some kind of confused and very dumb animal. But not you dear! Oh no. Not you! So to recap. All of the above is only to try to make us luvvies think about how their could be more meaning in our present theatre and how we could put it there. If we wanted to. If, that is.

Going back to good old Shakespeare, we can see how aware he was of what I am banging on about in Loves Labours Lost. Here it constitutes the theme of the play! The King of Navarre and his 'mates' set up an Academe dedicated to pursuits of the mind alone, taking an oath to this effect. The joke is though that no matter how many oaths you take, the flesh has a habit of asserting itslef. Shakespeare is making fun of the stupidity of denying there is a feeling level to life, whilst at same time recognising that it is 'the norm'. He creates this dramatic action of the academe and the oaths in order to play out dramatically the consequences of this denial. Hopefully rather comic consequences. Although there is a sad note at the end. In other words the very idea of denying the feeling level is Th our greatest dramatist, quite preposterous. QUITE PREPOSTEROUS!!!! For what was Shakespeare? He was the ultimate 'all-feeling' man. He felt everything. Deeply. And in the plays, take away the language pyrotechnics, the brilliant stage business, and the narrative, and what have you got? People who feel! Lear is angry. Hamlet is depressed. Lady M. is ambitious and a bit inhuman. Claudio, in Measure for Measure, is afraid. Fearful. And, AND, they all feel in relation to other things. For Macbeth it's the uncanny. Lear it's the Gods. Hamlet it's court society and family. And it's this and this alone, that gives the MAGIC to his work. Without it it would be dead. Flat. Academic. Now. Here's another fact, Mr Stephen (know-it-all) Fry! One thing that inspired the renaissance and in particular Shakespeare was Hermetic Literature. This is the Greco-Roman way of gnosis found in the tractate attributed to Hermes Trigmesgistos the Greek incarnation of his Egyptian counterpart the God Thoth.
Now. Sounds like rocket science but it aint. It was just that they read some books of weird sort of philosophy and it made sense to them. They thought it was cool!
* * * * *
Ask Atum
To flash a ray of illumination
Into your awareness
Giving you the power to grasp in thought
His sublime being.
For the invisible
May only be seen with thoughts
Which are themselves, invisible.
* * * * *
You have to remember the Elizabethans still had one foot in Rationalism and the other foot in Magic, so this kind of thing made more sense to them than it does to us. And what is 'Magic'?, apart from the name of the new Springsteen album? Eh? Boil magic down to its essential component and it's like a seance. Contacting of other 'levels', like say, the 'spirit world'. And what chracterisies these other levels is you can't rationalise them. They aint material. (n.b.wether they are what people believe them to be is another question.) It's like being aware of people's shadows. Does a shadow have any material existence? And yet, would you deny that it does exist? This last argument could be put straight into Hamlet. But what we are talking about is the Occult. A thing popularised somewhat in last 100 years. But still a thing which is marginal. Concerned with minorities. Something that most people can't see the damn point in. Let's be honest. Going back to good old Hermes, he neatly puts the root problem. He says, if by magic you could see things the way I do, or the way the Gods do, then you'd know the meaning of the word sublime, which is, wait for it Godot! that everything we so rigidly insist on in terms of what absolutely neccessary for new theatre is nonsense. A product of our ignorance of the invisible element, simply because it is invisible which think, don't meant it aint there! OR! OR! Put another way, it's like all those thousands of directors you've worked with who were so very focussed on getting what THEY wanted and who really didn't give a damn about what YOU were feeling. Not a damn. Can you understand that? That you have suffered because of this? You have. Don't look at me that way. I'm telling you! Well. O.k. Maybe you still don't get it. Oh hum.