(pronounced: "diamonds in the air")
The first essential is to take knowledge
back to the springs, because despite
everything and especially the recent
events carried under that flag, there is
specific power in the idea of it
that
what is known can be used to pick up
or more usually to hold on and develop
as what for the econometrist is
"profitable speculation"-the intellect
on the trigger once more, as those
poor seventh century Irish monks (being
sentimentalists) would have believed
if they could.
If there's any need
for proof & it can be kept from
running to violence (to which ex-
tremity it should anyway perhaps
be swooping homewards) the twist-point
is "purchase"-what the mind
bites on is yours
the prime joy of
control engineering is what they please
to denote (through the quartzite window) "self-
optimizing systems", which they like
to consider as a plan for the basic
living unit. And thus "accelerating the con-
vergence of function", we come to our
maximal stance.
Imperialism was just
an old, very old name for that
idea, that what you want, you by
historic process or just readiness
to travel, also "need"-and
need is of course the sacred daughter
through which you improve, by
becoming more extensive. Competitive
expansion: if you can designate a
prime direction as Drang nach Osten
or the Western Frontier, that's to
purify the idea by recourse to History
before it happens. Envisaging the chapter-
head in the historical outline as "the
spirit (need) of the age"-its primary
greed, shielded from ignominy by the
like practice of too many others.
That
of course is not expansion but acquisition
(as to purchase the Suez Can*l was merely
a blatant example): the true expansion
is probably drift, as the Scythians
being nomadic anyway for the most part
slipped sideways right across the Russian
steppes, from China by molecular friction
through to the Polish border.
Otherwise it's
purchase, of a natural course, the alteration
or storage of current like dams in the
river: what starts as irrigation ends up
selling the megawattage across the grid.
The grid is another sign, is knowledge
in applique-work actually strangled & latticed
across the land; like the intangible consumer
networks, as the market defines wants from
single reckoning into a social need, graphed
for instance as "contour tangent elimination".
And the drift of that is again to divert the
currency (as now in England
to the north-
east). As, it was actually losing its grip
on the population: real people, slipping off
the face of that lovely ground, leaving the
green and pleasant lands of Northumberland
to be near the belly & catch scraps
with the sh** that we set out so grudgingly
on plates for the blind to eat in gratitude.
The grip is purchase again, and the current
chic of information theory will tell you how
many bits of that commodity it takes to
lift one foot/lb. of sh** to a starving mouth,
or not starving actually, but just rather
unthinkingly hungry.
And don't let some
wise and quick-faced historical rat tell us about
the industrial north and its misery, since every
songbird since then (& with no honourable
exception for D.H. Lawrence) has carolled about
that beautiful black colour as if
this were the great rot in the heart.
It was not and is not. The twist-point
of this is again power by the grid, putting
lives into strings of consequence into
molecular chains like the pit-ponies we love
to cry over. Coal is so beautiful as I
could weep over the carbon it shines with:
what is scattered over these colliery towns
is not soot or sulphur or coal or foaming
detergent but the waste produced by
ma** conversion of want (sectional) into
need (social & then total). All this by
purchase on the twist-point, the system gone
social to disguise
the greed of ambition
swimming in great seismic shocks through
the beds of our condition. All the needles are
twitching frantically across their smoky paper,
but society is "predictably" as we know "in
a state of ferment"-as if that could ever turn
to wine or raise bread, from the sad sh** it
is, to that crispy crunchy loaf we shall all
eat only in heaven.
The fact is that right
from the springs this water is no longer fit
for the stones it washes: the water of life
is all in bottles & ready for invoice. To draw
from that well we must put on some
other garment. Do what one can, that's
the gas-and-water talk, which is "do
what we can" and we are the social strand
which is already past the twist point &
into the furnace. We don't burn only
because
we are invisible to each other,
our shoulders no longer so hopeless and
beautiful as they meet at the spine rising
up the dorsal rift: lovely and lonely, until
the whole spread squints into the neck, and
vanishes, into the head.
And unlike Cerberus
we all share the same head, our shoulders
are denied by the nuptial joys of television,
so that what I am is a special case of
what we want, the twist-point missed exactly
at the nation's scrawny neck.
What runs
back, or could be traced upstream by simply
denying that conspiracy of "cause", is the
question of names & the seven tribes,
which are not "predictions" and socially can
be grouped only by the thinnest of
generalising systems. As these are not
economically self-centering, they cannot be
used as designations for targets (like
the gun sight on what "we want").
And the back mutation is knowledge and
has always been so in the richest tradition
of the trust it is possible to have, to repose
in the mysteries. The perversions which
thrust it forward, as a new feed into the
same vicious grid of expanding prospects
(profits) are let through by the weakness, now,
of names.
There is no other break in the
descent, since without that it's all break
anyway. The purity is a question of
names. We are here to utter them. This is
a prayer. I have it now between my
teeth and my eyes, on my forehead. Know
the names. It is as simple as the purity
of sentiment: it is as simple
as that.