Unjust reward

The music lesson

Is there a specific goal for you as an artist?

Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, from a 2008 interview:

Q: Is there a specific goal for you as an artist?

A: I believe that, for humanity to progress, the model  of the world, of reality, that parents pass on to their children needs to be replaced when the kids are in their teens by a darker more complex vision.  One, taking into account all kinds of miasma, multiple plans of existence, sexual liberation, human perversity, idiocy, and beauty.  I believe that only benevolent outsiders, such as visionary homosexuals who bare their artistic souls in public, are fully qualified to do this.  As long as children stay with the model of reality provided by their folks, no progress will be made.

My goal is to provide the same service for like-minded kids, that William Burroughs did for me, when I first read the Naked Lunch as a 13 year old in the back of a dingy WH Smith's bookshop in Pontefract, Yorkshire ...

And from AA Bronson's Negative Thoughts:

I am about to write an e-mail to a man I have never met.  He lives in a small town in the Midwest and teaches algebra at a small university, collects food stamps, and spends his time learning Ukranian and drawing strangely beautiful images of cue balls and tarot cards.  He is smart and gifted.  He is wasting himself.

I have learned all this from his home web site.  But in responding to him, in thinking of telling him of his gifts and talents - for I feel it is a responsibility of older gay men to acknowledge the gifts of younger gay men - I realize it is myself that I am talking about, my own gifts and talents that I am wasting.

All the ghosts came to that party ...

From Derek Jarman's Kicking the Pricks:

AND THE SHIP SAILED ON

Adam and Eve (that's you),

And Pinch-Me-Not (that's us),

Went down to the sea to bathe,

Adam and Eve were drowned,

Who do you think was saved?

PINCH-ME-NOT.

What was Pinch-Me-Not up to? Well, years ago he danced to a wind-up gramophone on the deck of HMS Invincible with his mates. Afterwards the lads went below decks, stripped off, and fucked so hard they forgot the war. The ship sailed on and on, and reached a desert island. Was it the Isle of the Dead? I'm not certain.  It could have been Easter Island with its giant statues, or Stromboli, where in the sulphurous smoke of the volcano, he discovered a wild flower growing 'essence'. He picked it, and pressed it, and sent it home, to the neat little back-tobacks which he had left far behind.  His mates were pirates now, deserters, they fucked each other all night; no one came less than eight times; in the dawn they were like a clean room, minds opened.  The fucking burnt away the cobwebs, and broke their manacles.

One day, as the sun came up, they reached the very edge of the horizon. They lay in the dawn, crushed in each other's arms, satiated, but still erect. Who made love to whom that night? All the ghosts came to that party: Alexander the Great threw himself to the battalions that died for him, Socrates pronounced a blessing. Many were there secretly, but I'll not give them away. There was Richard Coeur de Lion with Lord Kitchener, who pointed at us and said 'Your country needs YOU'; Gaveston had his cock up Edward's arse; they had minstrels-Tchaikovsky was blowing Britten-and painters to record them: Michaelangelo, Leonardo, Caravaggio.  The guest-list was endless and they built their own world far away from yours, with doctors and dentists, bricklayers and ploughmen. The authorities never caught up with them because they were wizards and witches and faeries.  It was a queer old world; you can stamp on a fairy ring, but it will bring you terrible luck, and neither you, or your children, who know how sweet the faeries are, will sleep soundly ever again.

I'm seeking the Minotaur

The Fair in the Woods

The Woodsmen blow their horns, and close the day,

Grouped by some logs.  The buckskins they are in

Merge with ground's russet and with tree-trunk's grey

And through the color of the body's skin

Shift borrowings out of nearby birch and clay.

All day a mounted angel came and went

Sturdily pacing through the trees and crowd,

His brown horse glossy and obedient.

Points glowed among his hair: dark-skinned, dark-browed.

He supervised a god's experiment.

Some clustered in the upper boughs, from where

They watched the groups beneath them make their way,

Children of light, all different, through the fair,

Pulsing among the pulsing trunks.  And they,

The danglers, ripened in the brilliant air.

Upon a platform dappled by the sun

The whole speed-family in a half round clapped

About the dancer where she arched and spun.

They raced toward stillness till they overlapped,

Ten energies working inward through the one.

Landscape of acid:

where on fern and mound

The lights fragmented by the roofing bough

Throbbed outward, joining over broken ground

To one long dazzling burst; as even now

Horn closes over horn into one sound.

Knuckle takes back its colour, nail its line.

Slowly the tawny jerkins separate

From bark and earth, but they will recombine

In the autumnal dusk, for it is late.

The horns call.  There is little left to shine.

 

LSD, San Raphael Woods: 'Renaissance Fair'

(Thom Gunn, 1969)

Cruising Yggdrasil

Protection Sigils

Hey Hey Caravaggio

There

There all the barrel-hoops are knit,

There all the serpent-tails are bit,

There all the gyres converge in one,

There all the planets drop in the Sun.

(W. B. Yeats)