Myself Is Another: Mario De Sa Carneiro, Decadence, “Extremist” art, and the Marvelous / John Allen Thomas

Mario De Sa Carneiro (1890-1916) lived his difficult life in a straight aesthetic line, never deviating from his poetic ideals: transcendence of society through destruction, transcendence through a personal rejection of convention, and above all, transcendence through Art with a capital A.

Determined to prove himself as an Artist in the anti bourgeois mold, he left his hometown of Portugal, Lisbon as soon as he turned 20 and got involved with Fernando Pessoa’s group Orpheu, as extreme in its way as Le Grand Jeu or the Surrealists.

Funding the group’s publications more often than not, Pessoa, Negreiros, Pintor, Lima and Carneiro removed their basic sense of identity through the exchange of heteronyms and role playing which often went against each member’s bookish natures. Carneiro’s other identity “Alva De Campos” was lacking in…

Selections from “DONT’S”

WIELD  INFLUENCE

Engraved on marble at the grave of Christ— the world’s greatest

influencer. This living dead man devoted to memory even while

living; our power crushes us. Can you conceive an eternal mausoleum?

Christ speaks of blood, of a love which consumes every other love.

Do not read his word; influence is indirect. We are writing the world,

reading our lives. Spiritual darkness, once darkness, now light coupled

with fear. You have sinned. You are not God. You lose your sincerity.

The world will say: I am not interested in what you say because you carry

no weight. The greatest among you shall be selfish, an outcast, magnified

by death. The world put into motion certain things which vibrate. Directly

from untoward marriages were evil children, and on and on. A lifetime of

high living, our descendents should be unworthy, it will be our fault.

ssnottets

my psychic damage

power ratings of the

my “life of transgenders”

unrelated: gastrointestinal

dis-stress (related) my

relatives don’t call me my

name i don’t called them

as off then they’d like them

to be it’s a minor cruelties

song who are you song

i am disaster girlie i

am an unstable conc

ssnottets

wife laser concept

tion of emptinged room

ment my childhood again

“it was okay, despite”

no—thispite. “it was

okay, thispite” hold

trying find a face in:

random patter nshott thru

wiff a laser bringinging it

back to to round the com

pairtive angle-wish of

“of the horror of part

ssnottets

at all. something

something beauty

“hole verse thing

feels hopeless” type

image of the image

of a photo but

you can’t quite see

it (pause to think)

it being an it pronouch

child wanting itness

itness was all was a

lowed and…

The Wheel

The pithead used to dominate the town.
My dead forefathers came and went,
were buried in the shadow cast by it.
I passed it on my way to school,
heard its revolutions in the night.
If the pit head was the place’s heart
the great wheel was its soul.
And then there was the slow dismantling.
The slag heap was grassed over. It became
an innocent green mound where cattle graze.
They hauled the winding gear away
and sold the chain for scrap
then took the giant wheel and clamped it down.
They did this to remind us where we came from,
what we did and who we were –
a monument of rusting metal spokes
that radiate from hub to rim
for kids to climb on, questioning.
Some day we’ll come with picks and dynamite,
Dislodge it from its concrete plinth.
We’ll drag it from the valley…

Let’s get something straight about writing, writing is a job, a vocation, a way to pay the bills; just like an entertainment’s manager, a roadie, a bar supervisor, a bar server, a till jockey, a shelf stacker and a labourer (all of which I have done in my life).

Why am I bringing this up now? There is a self satisfying stance when it comes to the arts and humanities by this government that we are somehow not worthy of funding or even fighting for funding. I mean, Theresa May must have a book in her and BoJo surely can crap out a master between his waffle on those bad people in the EU. David Davies now has more time on his hands so I expect a really big sculpture of an arse entitled, ‘Self Portrait #1’. Michael Gove after stripping education back to all the soulless shit that in…

The other night I watched Salma Hayek in Frida, a biopic of the life and death of Frida Kahlo, and though the film did not cover everything about Frida’s life and infidelities; I also found it disturbing that some of the facts were altered to make Frida seem more of a nice person but that is Hollywood for you, nice people are nice, bad people are bad, and cripples mustn’t be too conflicted. You see what draws me to Kahlo (and not Salma Hayek as my wife often points out) was that she lived with spinal pain. It is often hard to get across to people what it is like to have such pain. Some days are good. Some days are bad. Some days are conflicted. All you know is that part of you that should be there is missing. You live with pain everyday, sometimes you tune it…