Current Issue

of kurt schwitters
is rummaging in my kitchen
for lindt chocolate wrappers
tinguely museum entrance tickets
and a newspaper photograph
of a palestinian family
sitting

in the ruins

their home dust this picture
through which elsa in a wedding dress
dyed with the blood of seamice
plays an epileptic flute

Anne Blonstein

THURSDAY RADIO

featuring a live session from Adorno the earthly & divine in human life light music strip-weave the nature of his beliefs for prepared piano & a field recording of workers singing in a tobacco-grinding factory in the Dominican Republic London cornett & sackbut ensemble the seven last words variation on an original theme syncopation nacht und traume meditation & processional tod und verklarung farming today a trip to an art gallery seems to offer respite from tensions between Van Gogh & Samuel Becket the interactive problem-solving programme for those intriguing questions from everyday life email: questions.questions@bbc.co.uk there's a price to pay science & Einstein are funny do science festivals preach to the already converted or are they doing for science what Hay-on-Wye does for literature? Adam faces an uncertain future he has chosen to live his life in the shadows? " I don't believe in 'isms'" said David Cameron. "We're beyond ideology" said Tony Blair if so is the lack of explicit ideology a good thing? give us answers to what happened & help us predict if anything on this scale will happen again classical hits listeners may cast their votes online

Peter Hughes

GOING HOME

I too thought I was going home. But the dream took me and fed me into houses, one by one, simultaneously. I was their bricks and mortar. I was their interiors, their inhabitable spaces, the doors, vents, windows into them, welcoming me through them - the me who was also their guest. And each of the houses that offered me opened its soul to me, that soul that was its interior yet could not be located in any single part of it, in any one nook or cranny, but hung there, pervasive, everywhere, so close you felt you might touch it, that you were always on the brink of touching, but never could or did, not quite, even in the arrangement of a vase of flowers on a table with slanted sunlight on it, the flickering shadows through windblown branches of a tree outside the window casting on a wall where the picture of a tree might be flecked in shadow - the piling of utensils, the bric-a-brac ... Whose soul was this, the interior's or mine, who was that space's guest.

What is the soul of a house, what constitutes
its curious, indefinable character
to mark it from all others but the welcome
it is and gives into its own interior

And through the entire house, a faint draught is blowing.

Richard Burns

THE G.SPOT

And the physical illness a prelude, though it seems commonsensical to expect that last; if one were going to die and move on the physical symptoms would neatly, naturally, arrive finally, after the psychic change. This being, however, no natural or common matter, rather super-natural; the soulshift, the slough and shimmy of a snake (snake seems correct if one accepts or investigates that particular symbolism) shucking its old skin. Remade. New. Often expressed in terms of a second (or re-) birth.

Psychologically it would 'make sense' for the physical disturbances to come first; the headache and/or nausea which manifests itself before certain meteorological or, in extremis, geological cataclysms. Which seems far removed from the snake and its split; transparent length left behind on a cool cave floor. So much subtler, but only by comparison, as an actual event. As metaphor, a hurricane or earthquake is not inconceivably dissimilar to the snake freeing itself from the remains of a prior skin. As a symbol, the realm extends beyond the natural or super-natural, into/back/toward a proto-nature, a forming or accretion of soulstuff which is so far beyond speech it is pre-verbal, nuclear, a world so inextricably bound inside this world it is out of and gone, being as yet unmade.

The window that opens, suddenly, magnificently, perhaps uselessly; a perverse stimulation of the brain's G-spot, a hastily mapped location in the temporal lobe. Divinity lives in the greyest areas. Visitations; electrical fluctuation and anomaly. The physical 'preparation' merely combined stimuli in innocent flux, and the angel of death old hat like an alcoholic surgeon with the shakes.

I saw God. I mean I saw the end. I mean I went inside the end and saw God. I saw everything. Which is God in the end. I was sick, altered, stimulated and I saw God. I mean I saw the snake of myself splitting myself and leaving the old skin. I was a volcano. I was absolutely in and out of this world. The snake as a circle, the whole thing. I dont have the words, there arent words, words are linear, delineating, you will see lines when there were none. I was a world, no, a guest at the birth of a universe I made. I was God.

Psychologically, an indiscriminate mania. The province of lithium salts and sand-tray art in a controlled environment. Unsustainable temperatures invoking delirium, delusion, hallucination. The realm of jealousies and fear of goal-seeking behaviours gone awry in a controlled environment. The snake witnessed and abandoned as poisonous. The hurricane, tracked by expensive equipment and years of research, experienced at a distance deemed safe, within language, soothed by validated experiment. By probing the hidden with surgical precision, using the same hands to write up method for the same hands to explore hypotheses with the same hands.

The window that opens, suddenly, with what appears ultimate beauty, un-mapped and untouched, becoming the whole snake and going as soon and smoothly, without intrusive drama. God on a good day, the most one never hopes for; beyond language, leaving the fantasy of angelic discourse...I was an earthquake, I held my death in my mouth and swam in a perfect circle of molten now. The physical illness a prelude to the endlessness of the end, a way into (beyond/out of) speech, the inherent entrapment, a soulshift and the magnitude, the acknowledgement of that, and the acceptance of the magnitude of that acknowledgement.

Sandra Tappenden