The sequence is meant as a satire, with a fairly broad range of targets; I
think my purpose in writing it is to try to find out what the basis of such
a satire might be - whether it has any justification, any ground or axiom,
beyond the exercise of a rather adolescent cleverness in a spirit of rather
adolescent alienation. Not that I want to disparage adolescence
particularly - it's in adolescence that this question of where one's stance
is rooted and what it is rooted in really begins to arise, and as I
deliberately abstained from writing poetry throughout my own adolescence I
suppose I may have some catching up to do. The sequence is also a companion
piece to an earlier sequence, The Spirit Zone, which is similarly a display
or demonstration of "wits and powers" - an exercise in showing-off -
combined with another thread questioning (and in places defending) the
social and other privileges of the "spirit" behind such effrontery.
In Mary Shelley's "The Last Man", the disease that eradicates humankind is
communicated at devastating speed through all the networks and shipping
lanes and exchanges and thoroughfares that make up the nervous system of
empire. The same fiction occurs in more recent books about the ebola virus
and global terrorism. Section v of the Noble Mice concerns this particular
dread: it's about
cyber-warfare and biological terrorism, about the vulnerability of networks
and communities to infection and infiltration. The body politic imagined as
a mass of common will - Blair's "power of community" trampling the
excommunicated malfeasants, cheats and frauds - I then counter with the
spongey, rhizomey "entity" which is made up not only of the good loves, of
justice or one's neighbours or what have you, but also their mutant strains
and metastases, the bad and perverted and anti-human loves. This isn't
exactly relativism, but it does entail having to find a different way of
telling the difference between good and evil than checking to see if the
right hymnbook is being read from.
Cheers,
Dominic
----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin J. Walker" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, October 06, 2001 6:54 PM
Subject: Re: Noble Mice v.
> I just want to express my admiration for your poem, Dominic; if I as yet
> fail to understand whether there is an actual referent for your words,
this
> is secondary besides the sense of precise imagination (that sponge-like or
> coral continuum), wit ("worm of worm/run rings around the commune") and
> sheer verbal delight (who could have thought "reciprocity" contains
> "recipes"?) that almost invades the reader. I really enjoyed this: any
> authorial notes toward further elucidation?
> Cheers
> Martin
>
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