Jenni Fagan's Blog, page 2
December 16, 2018
National Theatre Scotland
[image error]
The Panopticon will be adapted for the stage by Jenni Fagan from her celebrated novel of the same name. A gritty and gripping coming-of-age tale turned on its head, the production will be directed by Debbie Hannan, November 2019, touring to Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh & Platform, Glasgow.
A snarling counter culture outlaw, a bohemian philosopher in sailor shorts.
Fifteen-year old Anais Hendricks is smart, funny and fierce. She has also been let down by about every adult she has never met. Sitting in the back of a police car she is taken to the Panopticon, a young offenders institution.
Inside the circular, controlling Panopticon the residents develop intense bonds. All have experienced the failings of the care system, Anais refuses to be defined by it.
Brought for the first time to the stage, The Panopticon is a visceral, bloody and brutal testament to life and friendship.
We have a new kind of heroine for the 21st century.
More details to be announced
Written by Jenni Fagan. Directed by Debbie Hannan.
The Bottle Imp
Review by Corey Gibson
When the circumstances of its writing and the intent of its author align just so, a poem can reveal the structures, and especially the ironies and artifices, of the historical discourses in which it’s embedded. Jenni Fagan’s second collection, There’s a Witch in the Word Machine, makes no secret of its designs to do the same. Now, the political and cultural urgency of a collection that is dedicated for all the witches and that sets out quite explicitly to explore words ‘as spells, incantations, curse and solace’ might not seem obvious. But, the opening poem, which shares the collection’s title, makes the radical proposition at the heart of this volume clear. The titular witch casts spells from within the machine: ‘dots, particles, atoms / elemental, bodiless’ are her resource; ‘argot, idiom, double-grave, slash-through’ are her grammatical tools (sometimes weapons); ‘to crash the programme, / rewrite it as it should have / been’ is her desire. However, the poetic voice states quite unambiguously that this isn’t a matter of ‘thaumaturgy’ (conjuring, or the material ‘work’ of magic). Rather, these are spells ‘only’. The result is that Fagan doesn’t get caught up in the leaden debates over poets as ‘legislators of the world’, as Shelley had it; or poetry making ‘nothing happen’, as Auden did. Instead, poetry is conceived as a subversive approach to language that just might break the ‘word machine’ of established discourse and reconstitute it in more inclusive and emancipatory forms.
In the graphics on the cover, and the terms of the opening poem, the ‘word machine’ might be pictured as a vast typewriter, or ‘typing shell’. A mechanical host to the cold inheritance of the Enlightenment – the language of reason and logic; and to the reproduction of powerful narratives that assimilate or erase the lives of those it can’t and won’t herald (not a million miles away from the literal and figurative panopticon of Fagan’s debut novel). Or, it might be where saboteur witches and their spells will find their audiences, reaching out from small, claustrophobic experiences to find their resonant frequency – that pitch and hum that carries them to those who need to hear them. This is the through-line that connects a host of voices helpfully summarised in a further dedication in the acknowledgments: ‘To the lovelorn and the loveless, to the loved and the insecure, to the bored and the crazy, to the desperate and terrified, to the hopeful, to the brave, to all of you’.
The guerrilla war that these voices stage on the ‘machine’ is characterised by two preoccupations: the first, with the body in its violent, loving, and sexual collisions with others and with the spaces they inhabit; and the second, with the ‘realism’ and the ‘reality’ of the lives of this troupe of instinctual and reflective outcasts. And the recurrence of those terms ‘realism’ and ‘reality’ is pointed given that much of this collection was written during Fagan’s residency at Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, where the presence of Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, and Arthur Rimbaud is made explicit. Theirs were not poetics given to any conventional realism. Their physical passions are invoked in ‘Spell for Waking in the Museum of the Lost Generation’ where ‘the passion of subversion / is strong’; and a kind of transcendental call-to-arms is issued in the final poem of the collection, ‘Spell for Angels in Paris’: ‘it is time to rise / we heart beaters …’
That quiet call is refigured throughout There’s a Witch in the Word Machine, often with a devastating simplicity. ‘Spell Written in a Square’ is a twelve-word, one sentence poem describing the pain of living that has, coded into its line arrangement, a small corrective – a cause for hope. ‘You Know’ hits like it’s the one hundred per cent proof distillation of a long line of pop classics: from the post-war standard ‘You Always Hurt the One You Love’, through Culture Club’s ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’. But its compassionate clarity is breathtaking. This sustained effort to give voice to gestures of strength-in-vulnerability, kindness, and solidarity, is not wholly taken up with heartbreak, however. In pieces like ‘O.C.D.’, form and content swallow one another’s tails with hilarious abandon: ‘the brain fucks itself / in circles’.
The literal centrepiece of the collection is an extended poem titled ‘Bangour Village Hospital’. Switching back and forth between open and closed unrhymed couplets, like much of Fagan’s poetry, this piece leaves space for its poetic voice to develop. Almost every clause of every sentence hangs in the air like smoke before the next exhalation disturbs it. And in this poem in particular, that pacing is vital, as the infants who were born, lived, and died in this institution in West Lothian haunt it, from the early years of the last century to the present. These ‘refugees from reality’, these ‘life escapees’, produce a kind of impressionistic social history wholly fixed in place and shot through with a yearning for rest and silence. In a sense, it reads like a war poem, examining how history’s losses might be redeemed, and our guilt expiated, if only we’d learn. ‘Responding to Life in a Secret Squirrel Universe’ and ‘Death in Sednaya’, which face one another very near the end of the collection, capture Fagan’s mastery of diverse approaches to persistent themes in There’s a Witch in the Word Machine. The first, with its wry title, stakes out the ‘value’ we must place ‘on existence / and goodness’ in the face of an infinite and unfathomable universe. Whereas the second describes the moments before the execution of a child under Bashar al-Assad’s bloodthirsty regime: his ears, eyes, fingers, feet, and his memories catalogue the love he’s given and received in his short life.
The collection’s exploration of words as ‘spells, incantations, curse and solace’ seem to sit comfortably over the project of poetry more broadly – to take language away from the instrumentalism it suffers in other contexts toward more free and associative usages. The prevalence of the one-word line in this collection speaks to that project, too. In a cultural and political discourse given shape by algorithms and tweets, it seems appropriate to rekindle other formulations that don’t function with that prerogative to reproduce systems of power and exploitation. That’s what I think the ‘spell’ looks to do in Fagan’s hands. Though the witch of the title gives it a particular inflection, it’s one of those words whose definitions and uses are so diverse, that it can speak to the paradox of power and vulnerability that comes with organising words and giving them over to the world.
Witch-hunts, wherever they appear in World History, are where the pop-cultural inheritances of witchcraft were given their most caricatured, and easily reproduced forms. They tend to coincide with periods of capital accumulation, where the reproductive work of women and the ideology beneath the distribution of property, were violently reinforced (see Silvia Federici’s work on this). In the context of the history of capitalism and its bedfellow, patriarchy, Fagan’s collection makes a claim for the re-appropriation of witchcraft, and most especially spells. In his famous essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935), the Marxist philosopher, Walter Benjamin wrote:
[Humanity’s] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.
If the ‘word machine’ and the resurgence of Fascism have the same effect in the twenty-first century, Fagan’s saboteur witch doesn’t waste time with recouping a lost ‘authenticity’. She works to ‘crash the programme’ and ‘rewrite it as it should have / been’ by making space for us all – by politicizing art even at its most intimate. It is wild and destructive, tentative and provisional work.
There’s a Witch in the Word Machine by Jenni Fagan is published by Birlinn, 2018.
October 30, 2018
October 29, 2018
Bring Me Existential Dread or the Muse Will Sue
This isn’t true, or is it? I don’t know. I have not been here for some time. That can be said of many areas of my writing and personal life, for quite a wee while. A lot has been going on. Moving four times this year. A big bereavement. Renovating properties to try and ground my life in a way that allows me to work on novels with less pressure. Being a Mama, a friend and human with a heart that beats — in a world that has far too many reasons to create existential dread in even the most positive of people. My health has been really bad this last few years. There’s been hospital trips. Rounds of drugs. Getting better. Getting worse. Starting again. When it comes to the words, I had a total loss of faith. Are we meant to confess to that kind of thing? Are we meant to be shiny? Are we meant to be an image rather than a truth? It arrived. It stayed. I didn’t write my novels for about ten months. I felt separate from the industry. The things I was doing to be able to keep writing, trying to find other ways to get some security, were taking me further and further away from getting back to them. I could say I’ve never felt less like a writer than I have done this last year. I wonder if Jessie Kesson felt like this in her crofting years? I find I can’t take elements of the industry. It can be totally counter productive to art — this big machine that adores or denies millions of words each year. I don’t come from a world that had any security. I’ve been living in renovations for seven years straight — in the hope of providing for my family and so that I can still continue to write. Literature is a privileged industry. For those of us with a -+ in such things, there are many reasons to lose hope. However, I loved words a long time before anyone read them. My relationship to what I do is not confined to publication, or the industry, it exists out with those things. I could have picked so many other careers to make a good living from, and done really well from them, I adore making houses beautiful, I take old wrecks and restore them from scratch and at the end you’d never guess how derelict or smelly or weird they were when I got them. In the last ten years I’ve moved over ten times. I’ve slept with a baseball bat by a flame balled window, taken out wee-soaked floors, pulled out ceilings, knocked down walls, lived with bathrooms in the middle of a whole floor with no inner walls and all the electrics and rubble exposed, I slept in a hallway above the door, in the living room, on a sofa bed, on a sofa, at an ex’s, it sounds chaotic but I hid as much as I could so I could parent well with as much stability, security and comfort possible. My son stays with his Dad at weekends or during holidays where I would do the longest and worst hour on the houses and make it fun, and nice, and as normal as possible the rest of the time. I can make a nice space almost anywhere, with very little to hand. That’s a legacy from growing up in care and hating living in soulless spaces. I have worked as a painter and decorator, and an industrial cleaner, I am really practical and there is a certain pleasure to taking a house back to the bones and rebuilding it. I am an artist, so my eye to detail is acute. I recently read Tanizaki — In Praise of Shadows. I felt a huge recognition and solace in the essay. It’s exploration of aesthetics is so pure. I have gone a long road unseen this last year or so. Now I have come back to this place — where I type and think and begin to create worlds that mean something to me first and fore mostly. I know some writers would be appalled by that, those who write firstly and fore mostly for readers, or editors, or reviews, or glory. I write to become. It’s probably really impractical of me. I write to remain. I write to retaliate. I write to challenge, to rage, to love, to mourn, to lust, to hope, to pursue mortality in the ways it does me, I write to unfairness, and cruelty — I write to be. I have not been doing the longer pieces. The novels. Life has been taking me out and I lost faith in my ability to write these books, in a big way. Despite that I brought out my last poetry collection — There’s a Witch in the Word Machine. It’s a book I really care about and I’ll blog about that separately. So, anyway — I’m back in this space of fiction. I drive up and down the A1 listening to music way too loud and over these ten months of non-faith, non-practise (novels anyway) I have come to some big decisions. I worked out the structure of my 100 year-novel, I reclaimed its ending from the following novel and I am ready to stand by some things which I think are fundamentally vital as an artist. The right to create work that does not always comfort or soothe. The ability to believe in myself even when my content as seen as a threat or attack on liberal values (I still don’t understand this) because it pushes boundaries too hard, or perhaps keeping the multiplicity of real life inherent in literature is so rarely seen in a world that has never seemed so culturally conservative. Is it incidental that we are watching the censoring of media, of challenging thought, the use of propaganda, fascist far-right dogma, the clinging to ideals which claim to be middle-class or elitist as the only way to save us, in a world that should know by now — there are no ‘classes’ of people, there are only those who have more money, and those who do not. What an archaic fucking idea? Class. I submitted two novels that were not ready. I was also told that coming from me, as a woman, as someone who is identified as working class (and doesn’t mind that) (but who has never belonged to any social group that strongly, who was always transient, who always saw through those things and thought them an utter waste of judgment and division, a form of social control so clumsily and creepily employed to keep people afraid of themselves and each other) I was told one of my books had made someone incredibly angry and the other might be best suited to a smut or porn publisher. It was an initial reaction. They aren’t finished yet. How intriguing though that had they been submitted by one of our well educated, upper middle-class white straight men, they would have been received totally differently. However because they come from me there is some element of threat. I don’t write to threaten. I don’t write to anger liberals. I am responding to a hundred years of history in one of those novels and to patriarchy and social exclusion in particular. There is much to make a person feel a true and righteous rage when considering these things. I read a blogger whose articles I find hugely challenging at times. When I find them at their most difficult, it is because they are teaching me most about my own biases or ignorance of an area I don’t yet understand. I am not often considered as an educated person. My background in care is usually mentioned though. My most important education never arose in a classroom but I am close to finishing my third degree in a decade, a PhD. I had some really good reviews for There’s A Witch in the Word Machine. One described me as a sorceress, in an article where the male poet was described as an academic. It is problematic perhaps to think of someone from my background as — not capable of practising some kind of dark art — to be doing what I do at all, nevertheless, there is only one element of my background that is fetishised, the British media in particular only one want one kind of story. Contradiction is beyond them. I am more than qualified in the school of life, and I can hold my own with any subject I have studied. I am not one thing. Yet I am identified as threatening at times (in my work) because of the edge I bring to the literature I write. I am an edge walker. I am a risk taker. You don’t come from my walk of life and do what I am doing, without that ability to throw down your soul as the most truthful thing you own, and back it with humility. The novels were not ready. I am starting draft three of both of them. I wrote a play of my first novel in the interim and I can talk more of that later. I had support from writer friends and the Scottish Book Trust, and Editors and Edinburgh International Book Festival, and National Theatre Scotland, and others, to help keep my sense of reason in my year or so of lost faith. They helped a lot and eased me through a period where I just could not find the time or energy or self belief to write in the way I like to. Perhaps it is useful, vital, or necessary even at certain times in our life, to halt our big pieces of work for a good long time. My life has been beyond challenging this last forty-one years, and this last twelve months have been off-the-scale. Stick that in your discordant syntax detector. I’m standing by all the gaps. The unusual. The uncomfortable. I am thinking about my novels daily again. This time I may not stop for a decade. I may be glad of my years knocking walls down. May they have prepared me for continuing to do so, and more.
July 21, 2017
Bangour Village Hospital (or) Edinburgh District Asylum. A short film by Jenni Fagan.
“https://player.vimeo.com/video/219761618?autoplay=1&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0”
I decided to make a short film about the hospital where I was born. It is a Victorian psychiatric hospital village. The site is 222 acres in an isolated area, near a motorway, in West Lothian. It has taken me a long-time to be able to go back to this site and I suppose it’s unusual to be born & spend time in the womb, on a psych ward but that’s how it all started. There was a maternity ward opened on this site at some point but I was not born there. I have a lifelong attachment to Bangour Village Hospital (or) Edinburgh District Asylum and so I chose to shoot my first short film as a Writer/Director here. I will do a follow up article later but for now I’d like to let the work speak for itself. I wrote and shot this as a cine-poem. I am reading it and the eerie singing noise in the background was recorded in a cave with William Aikman. The film was made with a tiny crew from the wonderful Forest of Black Films in Glasgow. More to come soon but I wanted to share it for free, sent out in the spirit it was made in — for art & truth.
Please RT & share to anyone who you think might like it.
June 2, 2017
Truth no. 5
The truth is tooth and claw. It goes tick-tock, tick-tock. It’s Lost Man Creek. It’s a fertile wound. It cauterizes so we can heal again. The truth is loco. It came from Monterey. The truth is chunged. It’s a petroleum pipeline. The truth is an orange baby pulled out of the Paris Accord to punish the world for mocking it. He’s out there in diapers — killing the earth from a hate-based perspective. The truth is bereft. It’s crude oil. It’s a man walking on the moon. The truth is purple. The truth is shockingly purple. The truth is Alimito. The truth is Locust Av. The truth is I know so few boring women. My girls are troubadours, they are shark-toothed bison. The women I know spread ideas like pollen. The truth is a chestnut. The truth is hairy. The truth died in Puerta Vida. It died again in Mexico. The truth never died, they just tried to bury it. They’re always trying to bury it. They throw whole mountains of soil on top of it but it still climbs out skinny and pissed off and needing a beer. The truth is Ptolemy. It’s boarding the train from San Francisco to LA. It’s a fight with a Trumpet before 6am. Blow your trumpet motherfucker and I’ll still shit on your parade. The truth is agnew. It’s friendly smog trails. It’s rush ray. It’s the service King. Enter at your own risk! The truth is whatever you want it to be. It accepts cash only. The truth is taking its clothes of, it’s skinny dipping in the river. It’s turning slow beneath the moon. Fuck truth (they say) just freebase Disney. They are so awful. There is no saving them. The truth is spray boy! It’s asleep. The truth droops. It’s oylim olafu. It is heart felt. It is good. Caution — truth here. The truth won’t get off the tracks. It has right of way. It’s derailed and it’s taking a diversion. I need the truth and the truth needs me. The truth does not vote conservative. The truth does not vote for hate or murder. The truth believes in science. It fills out no forms for bureaucracy. The truth won’t meet me later. The truth holds me like a baby then breaks my fucking heart.
The truth is it was not an incidental part of social warehousing — to raise a risk averse society.
The truth does not do mind control.
The truth is a shuttle. The truth won’t lighten up. The truth can kill you. The truth won’t kill you. The truth did not kill you, it set you free. So many people devote their entire existence to avoiding truth. On the street, in their homes, in their beds. They refuse to record the truths of nations. Of individuals. Of crimes against humanity. Of achievements, of victories, of heroes, sailors, sluts and pirates.
The truth swears more than I do.
It drank all of my saki.
Don’t take the truth to Tiffany’s she has no time for diamonds. The truth is a trilobite. It’s fossilised fuckery. It’s got a ticket. It’s track no.6 in San Jose. It’s California 8308. It’s your hands on my body. It is feeling you in my soul no matter how far you are away.
It has unwanted eyes upon it all the fucking time.
The truth is boarding. Buckle up. Bend over. Touch the sky. Be a tree. The truth wants you. This is a truthening. It’s mounting San Georgina. They don’t want you waltzing with the truth, no, no, no, not tomorrow, not today. Truth will take you on the run. It’ll build fires with you on the old railway. It knows your hunger. It knows how you are scared. People are always asking us to lie for them. That is the truth. They want us to smile for them while they lie to us — for us, about us, and to each other. Truth is dangerous. The truth can be denied but it will not be ignored.
The truth is too much.
The truth is helplessness.
The truth is the too big vastness of all things. The truth is nearly all people want — to care for, feed, hold, educate, love, and sing to every other person in the world but we are raised being told we should all go right indoors and keep our fucking truths to ourselves. We’re told going into the outside world is just too dangerous.
Don’t keep truth from me.
I’ve laid it a place at my table.
I’ve invited it for tea.
I made truth a tiny paper boat. The truth is future packaging. It’s modelo free. It’s been sold. It’s done a long time in the joint but it’s been tunnelling fucking free. The truth is a link belt. It’s jasper. It’s Jane. It serves no fucking master. Kiss me truth, do it slowly, please. The truth is smoking behind the bike shed. It’s a flag on the porch that makes me feel queasy. It’s a hockey stick. It’s being attacked by wild turkeys.
It’s fire.
It’s fear.
It’s trapped.
It is death walking along beside us and at some point we take it by the hand. Time is shorter than we ever know. How the fuck do we save this planet while we are still here!! The truth is we can do it. The truth can change everything. The truth wants only good things for you. The truth is a house on the hill while people sleep by the tracks. It’s tents. Trollies. It’s washing. The truth is never-ending. The truck is knocking on everybody’s door. Look on the mat — there’s a leaflet.
The truth is looking at you.
Aye, you.
You are the truth. The truth is you. You are the time, the place, the hope, the beginning of what comes — after. You are the greatest hope for truth. I am too. The truth can smell you. The truth is this world is so, so beautiful! The truth is you are meant to be here. The truth is good to you. The truth likes you. It would buy you a drink. It would hold you in the night. It wants to have your children.
The truth is not wily.
It’s a friend of coyotes.
The truth is hay for sale. The truth is mustard. The truth is Jonty’s. The truth is Vietnamese. The truth is morgan hill. It’s memory ivory. The truth broke down and an old lady held it. The truth hates to be alone. The truth saw the sheriff. The truth is church-like. The truth is I’ve had holes in my converse since I got here. The truth is landscapes fly and trains stay still. It’s jicama. It’s twisted lily. The truth is available. Sign here, and here, please. The truth is veterinary. The truth is water. It’s not on lease. How am I doing, truth? Actually don’t tell me. The truth won’t take me to bed unless we’re both so drunk we can’t see. The truth is blind. The truth is horny. The truth is that when I was a witch I always did it sober. The truth is all ways. The truth is I’ve always been a witch and too a little bit gin and mostly scientist and spirit keeper. The truth is pretty good. It’s certainly truthful. Don’t deal truth to narcissists. Don’t feed the narcissists. Don’t give bombs to narcissists. Don’t give countries to narcissists. Don’t give spray tan to narcissists. Oops, okay. The truth is sociopaths are good at some things. I’m not saying evolution has no place for them. The truth is — fuck you. The truth is — fuck me! The truth is fuck hate. FUCK HATE. Fuck the cunts that perpetuate hate, that hurt other humans every day — the truth is for those people — I have no atoms of empathy — evil walks among us each and every fucking day!
The truth is — don’t cross me.
The truth isn’t coming out to play. The truth is some friends mothers loved me and the others were worried I’d steal their jewellery. The truth is I did not steal their jewellery although I might have been tempted by their valium. The truth was never a thief. The truth is if I wanted it — I worked for it. If I couldn’t afford it, I didn’t buy it. I could not be a thief as too much had been stolen from me. The truth is calling out a list. The truth has pincers. The truth is a red handle. It strips away rubber moulding. The truth is rarely fatal, except for when it is. The truth is in a call box. It’s leaving the country. It fucked the sheriffs daughter and it’s now speeding down the highway. The truth won’t take me to dinner but it often makes me breakfast. The truth is I can’t breathe but I can write, fuck me sideways I can type. The truth escapes me. We need to hunt the truth down and nail it to the wall — who am I kidding, truth is going to track me down and read me poems whilst I bleed. The truth is we need the great loudspeakers-of-truth to blare out all day. The truth can hold a tune. The truth is outside the embassy. The truth is marching. The truth is if you keep immigrants paperless and nervous you can pay them so much less and you don’t even have to worry about paying out for their broken, fractured, dislocated sense of self. How do you belong without a country? This country does not want you ma’am and your homeland wants to kill you. I tell you this, the truth is not written in the stars — it’s for us to put down. The truth has autonomy but only if we give it our vote, our life, our blood, our time, our hearts, our brains. The truth is a clown. It’s musical but it can’t play drums. It’s a dog wagging its tail. It’s a god. It’s a dog-god. It’s a cloud-beam. It’s a girls voice singing all the way down that alley. It’s all hype and hypo and hypero and hyppero. It’s under lock and key. It’s handcuffed. It’s sweating. It’s governmentally detected. It has crosshairs on its forehead. It has a bullet with its name engraved in silver on the side. The truth will be deleted. It is studied by assassins. Believe me, governments and goblins all do well know — the truth is deadly. The truth is the land. The land belongs under bare feet. Dip your fingers in the soil. This world belongs to kids and they should all be climbing trees. The land is truth and so to are farmers, sailors, tinkers and traitors. The truth will be evicted. Truth’s got a Russian landlord and he’s just put up the rent! The truth is on the other channel. The truth did not miss the train to LA but it does miss the good old days. The truth his nostalgic. Nostalgia’s truths mistake. The truth is there’s a lot of wood in America. The truth is Del Monte. The truth is Salinas 7. They’re shredding documental truth, they’re drowning truthful atoms. The truth is atomic. The truth is southern. It’s a man raising his fucking fists. It’s a man scaring a woman. It’s underplayed. It’s vile. The truth says, go warriors! The truth will hate you later. The truth won’t trade or barter. The truth has been upgraded. The truth’s the best performer. The truth is there is no truth. The truth is truthless. I’ve copyrighted the truth. The truth won’t sue me. The truth is not trash. The truth does not travel business class. The truth does not own me. The truth is thirsty. Make it a double if you’re buying it gin. The truth is hiring drivers. The truth is not extinct. The truth is stupidity and ill-intent are a global misdemeanour. The truth is not so sure about humans. It’s not totally convinced. The truth is driving through a brush fire and it did not blink twice. The truth is I was on the Amtrak eating a salad and talking to Jackie whose son plays in Rancid when the flames were flamey either side of the train …. we just kept going, it was all just totally fucking okay. The truth is I felt sad in El Paso. The truth is sick of type A personalities. A is for arsehole! Aridian. Ailments. The truth is the world is full of people who think their needs are THE MOST IMPORTANT ONES and they say I am just making sure my needs are met — because they are so much more important than yours — but still, hey buddy, call me friend!
The truth is self-serving entitlement is a cancer to intellectual evolution.
The truth is idiots think entitlement is a totality. They think it is eternal. They kill the planet and people as if the plague they profit from is a birthright. They act as if they are fucking holy, as if raping the worlds resources, bombing its children, battering their lovers and daughters unconscious, murdering wives, mothers and sons — abusing children, institutionally implementing generational racism and poverty and homophobia — perpetual murderous crimes against humanity — carried out with the full weight of the fucking law behind them — claiming heaven is a place where murder is sent down by celestial order and that murderous animals will be rewarded and deified in some future infinity!
I apologise to animals. Not one single kind of you, murders like we do.
I tell you this — and I will tell you it any day or night — if your God tells you murder is holy, then listen hard — your God has lied.
Your God might be money.
It might be capitalism.
It might be celebrity.
Or, fascism.
It might be good old-fashioned hatred and greed, it might be patriarchal or matriarchal psychopathy but the truth is this — you will be held accountable for the hatred in your soul. What you give to the world will be revisited upon you three times over in this life or the next. I met God and the exact words she said were this — not in my name.
Not in my name, would one single child on this earth go hungry, frightened or dead.
The truth is uterine. The truth is I am always looking for the signs. The truth is epidemic, let’s start a global conversation — do you think revolutions are not started by bakers or bartenders, by people like you, or me?
The truth is taking a moment. The truth has bowed its head. The truth is praying for all of us. The truth is making me nervous. It’s looking for a foothold. It’s flickering a candle. Offer it a cradle. Give it a place to lay its head. The truth checks your fingers for a ring. The truth is trespassing. It is forbidden by law. Lately it’s been general but it’s getting more specific. The truth is a southern cross. Truth — hopes. It is architectural. The truth is ready to fight for you. Are you ready to fight for it?
The truth loves you.
The truth is in motion.
The truth is a warrior.
The truth is a saint. The truth is a sinner. The truth is a coward but it’s also a wizard. The truth is a hermit but its come to our party. The truth is our true creator, it’s age-old, it’s the only educator.
The truth is love. Love is truth. You are love, you want love, you have love and every fibre in your body was created from light, we are all of us pilgrims and its time to take the floor now.
That, is the truth.
