Here is of desire & the desert at Lulu, this one, like the earlier one "of desire ..." one from Oneiros, is inspired by Deleuze & Guattari, this time Mille Plateaux. Instead of posting samples, I instead include a review by Dom Gabrielli, which I happen to like. It occurs to me now to post other reviews of other books, and I am sure that i shall, at the moment it seems a lot of fucking work, however, I still have to list one chapbook and my two shitty novels, & these will appear in the next post, i imagine.
Anyway, here the fucker is at Amazon, just $12 för 148 pages.
Och här har vi samma bok på AdLibris för blott 112 kr, och med hela 148 sidor.
At any rate, huge thanks to Dom Gabrielli for this:
Deleuze
and McLean, unlikely bed partners, A
Thousand Plateaux
and of
desire and the desert.
it
is not tools but the horrid state of masturbatory technology &
intellectual impotence that makes us such scum//
The
‘Deleuzian’ century closed and its successor brought a dramatic
return of the repressed as the scared masses took fright and
clamoured not ‘with’ the tremors of Being but rather ‘for’
the One and its demonized Opposites, all the dreaded identities.
Because as all of us know, closet Deleuzians or not, we are never one
nor another, but certainly many, a mass, a crowd, a bunch and no one
is supposed to win this life-game which only despots take seriously.
With this return of Identity came necessarily the society of control.
Deleuze had correctly predicted whose model was the motorway where
freedom becomes solely an illusion, where everything one does is
visioned, catalogued and potential to be used against us at any time.
All that ensues is clockwork orange, and we as citizens are all
decidedly lemons!
A
Thousand Plateaux written
with Guattari was probably the most overwhelming non-poetic reading
experience I had as a student and many evenings were spent reading it
aloud with my fellow students at NYU in my ground floor flat in the
East Village, 3rd and 7th to be precise. Certain plateaux were read
with a fine tooth comb, others were ignored and returned to at a
later date. Deleuze and Guattari had after all encouraged
artist-readers, non-philosophers, to take what they could when they
could, to create their own machines, their own assemblages with
whatever was at hand because after all the question was always: how
to get out, how to let fresh air in, how to evacuate the suffocation
of despotic institutions like universities which already back then
(1990) were fabricating professor-business men-vendors with theories
for sale and ideologies in suitcases to spread over willing student
minds for pricey diplomas.
Deleuze and Guattari were
unteachable in those days and any mention of them provoked chaos in
the lecture rooms. Frequent adjectives were ‘unreadable,’
‘incomprehensible,’ ‘dangerous’… That is when you could
have real fun with concepts such as ‘deterritorialization.’ Much
laughter was had at the expense of the advocates of the fashionable
doxas of Lacarne, Derridar and Barrethes…
McLean I
imagine had many a roar of laughter reading A
Thousand Plateaux
and as good poets will, his readings and impressions made their ways
into notebooks and pads. Lucky are those today who can read these
immensely enjoyable vignettes which not only play freely with the
spirits of the glorious nomad thinkers but place their concepts
firmly in the society of control, 2016.
It is the destiny
of thinker poets to be overlooked and ignored because they fall
between categories, foul of classifications and ideologies. Are they
really poets, these folk who cite Hegel and Heidegger? Can thoughts
be expressed into poetic form anyway? Let’s face it, the same
arguments have been raised against many an illustrious predecessor.
No need to mention names. But today, I am told, we are all poets. We
all have little secrets to share. We have emotions to dress in
romantic script. We can take up poetry, like a gardener picks up his
spade to dig his first vegetable patch. Deleuze himself hated French
literature for its psycho-analytical bent, for its obsessions and
perversions. The superiority of Anglo-American (and he forgot to
mention Irish) literature being its lines of flight…. its
becomings…. But language is a recalcitrant field. The act of
writing reminiscent of Sisyphus, push a frosty boulder upward, ever
upward, to the unattainable star. He probably won't enjoy me saying
this, but in this regard McLean is a traditional poet, as much as any
today. He perfects his craft in solitude. Book by book, the idiom
improves, singing, laughing, thinking. “One must have chaos in one
to give birth to a dancing star.”
McLean's diagnosis is
spot on.
we
have become the creature that both eats & is eaten, a night
forever completely devoid of ideas worth having or any
conceivable meaning/ / gormless Godot is drink again &
snoozing somewhere in the worthless heart of being
(temple
destroyed)
here
there echoes the cretinous giggle of the pornographer
priest
with his active camera, his hymns to null & the absent…
there
are no honest warriors left today
(face
of the despot)
What perhaps even Deleuze in his
aristocratic brilliance could not presage was the rise of the
pornopticon which from priest to bureaucrat, from the Kremlin to the
Pharmahouse, enable the States of the world, all together and without
exception, to re-territorialize desires and ‘pervertize’ the
young, tying their memories and developments to a morbid technology
which handicaps sexuality and puts resistance to sleep in a
nihilistic heaven where even the worst fanatics with furious machetes
cannot escape their immediate return as cartoons. ‘the men who
police thought are not actual policemen who/would hesitate to think,
were this so much as possible in their/ debilitated condition,
preferring to the lick the sweaty nipples of/ evil & devote
themselves to a smarmy fascism//‘
In his most recent
tome, McLean comes to terms with Deleuzian concepts in a 21st century
world. The parabola of the boomerang of perversion is minutely
plotted by McLean using the concepts and assemblages of Deleuze and
Guattari as tool boxes. This is no mean feat and we must applaud
vociferously, just as often laughing at the flippant tangles which
the poet inextricably ties the reader into.
let’s
axiomatize indeterminism
to make the crazies go away
&
keep the right white faces in mental
heaven; there are shapes to
show
maybe, we do not want to know them
mostly, forever
sounds so lonely
you know, like nightmares
with nowhere to
go
(of
axioms & other monsters)
If Outside is Desire. If the
Open is constantly recaptured by ‘answers provoked’ and twisted
into a ‘smarmy fascism,’ leaving poetry the only right to destroy
the ideology of the Inside and resist against the grotesque State
machine, folding onto imbecility a simulacrum of a poem which can be
read as both flippant self-indulgence and fulgurance and
illumination, because both low and high culture, pornography and art,
co-exist like the evil and the good sister in Bluebeard’s cave. The
simulacrum so good, you tire to distinguish one from the other.
If
all of the above, the desert? If Desire is the adolescence of
thought, its necessary madness, its rites of possession, its myriad
becomings, then the Desert is wisdom, becoming imperceptible, the
right to breathe in words. Finally amid the One which is everything.
Here is the Desert.
&
it is the futile Peyote Dance resurrected again for all the
madmen
hanging like bats from the rafters in some
disingenuous midnight
temple. they have torn the scabs from
their arms to wall up the
seven devils dead & eternally
protected accordingly, they
are losing all their memories to be;
they are forgetting memory
& learning to be // they want to be
everything but no body
wants to be free
Rarely
has such lucidity pinpointed the hypocrisies of Self and glorified
selves in Collectives clamouring for Freedom and needing corpses and
morals, when they haven’t been mad enough yet to see the futility
in their madness, when they haven’t collected enough matter to find
the Desert in themselves, in the cold North, where ingenuous temples
grow for the night amid dunes of Nothing.
Who speaks
desert speaks Nomad. But who knows society knows that ‘eyes are for
spying with not seeing’ and that collective hope is an alias for
suffering and ‘they are watching the children the prisoners the
madmen in the distorting mirrors of this disgusting cunting
panopticon’ and we are probably not ready to be nomad and we are
probably not ready for Deleuze or Guattari or any of his one thousand
distorted plateaux. Society is not worthy. It is just killing and
destruction because the State ensure ‘they are born crippled,’
and ‘death is better than labour.’
Who reads this book
knows hope is extraneous to matter. The physics of poetry, the
immanence of the dissecting pen, imply the end of all forms of
transcendence and a mockery of all their avatars. Difference and
repetition of the whole history of poetry. ‘Structure is for
vermin.’
I looked in vain for the Desert. I saw some
animals passing the dunes. I spotted Artaud. I will keep an eye out
for the nomads as i keep reading, backwards, inside out, dancing and
laughing. There really is no need to be sad in this hell, because
‘the outsider comes undone.’
I heard some echoes.
I
saw some footsteps.
I know the desert will burn again one day.
