The Diamond Signature & Death of the Imagination

by Penny Rimbaud

"An enor-mous-ly ambitious and sonorous work of the eye-magination." —Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The Diamond Signature is what Penny Rimbaud considers his most important work. It formed the basis for the band CRASS, who revolutionized both punk rock and politics in a blistering seven year career, which found them reviled by the mainstream, and revered by hundreds of thousands in the underground they helped to create.
"The first draft of The Diamond Signature was completed in 1974 and since then has been revised countless times. I have always regarded it as an organic work that could be added to or taken away from at will—several sections of it were adapted for us by CRASS, the anarchist punk band with whom I was drummer and lyricist, other sections have been liberally scattered through subsequent novels."—From the preface.

Penny Rimbaud was a cofounder of the Stonehenge Free Festivals, and the main protagonist in the legendary anarchist punk band CRASS. He is the author of A Series Of Shock Slogans And Mindless Token Tantrums and the spoken word CDs Christ's Reality Asylum and The Death Of The Imagination.

Genres: Music, Punk

245 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Using the pseudonym Penny Rimbaud, Jeremy John Ratter has long been a thinker, artist, musician and activist within British counterculture. Opening Dial House in Essex in 1967, an 'open house' for visitors interested in alternative living which exists and is a centre of activity to this day, for example for permaculture courses, he then found himself with like-minded individuals who coalesced into the anarchist punk band, Crass, also forming their own Crass Records label and becoming central to the large underground 'anarcho punk' or (as called in the USA 'peace punk') movement that still exists in its more obvious forms here and there, but also was influential way beyond, in terms of plain-speaking political and personal expression, severe criticism of and opposition to the political status quo and dominant patterns of culture, egalitarian, non-commercial and d.i.y. approaches to music making, record labels, distribution and any other resulting 'business', as well as in simply creating a massive network centred on the record label for small d.i.y. punk bands, records, concerts, related artistic projects, information distribution, activism, graffitti campaigns, media manipulation and tricksterism, etc., etc., etc. Since the band's break up in 1984 he has carried on with writing and his own artistic and musical projects, as well as continuing to live in and help maintain the function of Dial House.

Reviews

[Brad · Rating 1 out of 5]

I picked this up because I'm a fan of Crass, though I've never been a megafan of any sorts. I know next to nothing about the actual biography of the band or its members, only that The Feeding of the 5,000 is a pretty solid album. I was excited by the description on the back of this edition that made this sound like an experimental, anarchist prose poem weighing on the state of America in the early 1970s. What I got was like Garth Marenghi trying to write erotica.

Here is the opening of part 12, titled "Fuck You, Darling."

Flesh. Flesh, fleshness. The seeing of flesh. The falling away of its coverings. Only these bodies, these frames. What within? What beyond? Flesh. Nothing but the burning of your flesh on mine. Flesh. Fleshy fleshness. Flesh that I would expose. Flesh that I would press against you. Flesh that I would push onto you. Flesh that I would force into you. Only the eyes can see the dressings. Flesh. I see the dressings, but feel the body.

I hope you find "fleshy fleshness" to be some absolutely stunning wordplay because you're gonna run into it a dozen more times (at least). It even comes back in The Death of Imagination, a play written by Rimbaud/Ratter two decades later. He was so convinced of the poetic value of "Fleshy Fleshness" that held onto the phrase for 20+ years and recycled it -- this time contrasted with Holocaust imagery!

If the sexual sequences of this book are meant to be sexy, they fail. If they're meant to be grotesque, they fail. If they're meant to be in anyway profound, provocative or meaningful as metaphor -- whatever the hell metaphor that may be -- they fail. It's a near endless stream of erect nipples, erect cocks, and "cunts" (his choice words here, not mine) that becomes so repetitive it borders on self-plagiarism.

What's in between is incomprehensible. Maybe I just stopped paying close enough attention after a certain point, but I had no idea what the hell the thesis is here. Is he saying anything?

There were moments of some nice, flowy sentences that kept me engaged for long enough to realize it all amounts to nothing, and until I was too far in to realize no twist or change would be happening. I know this is a decently obscure book but, even for punk fans, avoid it.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Expecting something more along the lines of Shibboleth, I didn’t really appreciate this when I first read it a decade or so ago. But the two texts presented here are beautiful, an artful exploration of life and sex and death and the boundaries between them.