undispatch from ny

 i am on that non-verbal gerbil wheel amaretto

       and i've often also been there

for years now, too many count spitting in the

    face

of catastrophe like yow

still it hurts to make less sense of ourselves

or the friends shut-out from the means

     to survive

being alone with their job, alienated to lose

        sight of friendship

in banking on crumbs, scraps fell

from the unhatched sight of ankleweights

         & graft

themselves upon the sticky table, 

gumm'd like any DeKooning as we lose track

whole cities blownoff the map

    where things do happen

sunshine stop. what does that mean it's 1914 again? again? redo everyear and no one is coming to save us, but the positions we can't go back. restructuring stretch in montage afterlives of genocide, and medium-term struggles like what's a party stunt to an eyelid that n'er closed. pain. al-jazeer and the rain of hell. i took drugs. couldn't cope. or not together, sold back to glitch on the Financial Times, wondering if this isn't shit or the malignity of all value = gaza, our profane silkworms to revolt aren't profane enough. i put the sticker on my chest for a wage read back to screen myself, someways down the line unasked-for, ambulance sounds and the new war's on. my artform barfs. i need it badly unspoken, even when i know the coming movement will be toothless & sabotage meant a surefire shot in the dark, noble as to leave oneself no room for the social power of the class to shut it down. the same old shit but without this rhyme, i'm desperate hunger. only here does the earth shine, spit in the middle of our lips to quit working, or destroy the u-/ssa like fuck a war 

things you don't just say on the internet which is already dubious

my ears don't flag it on production tacked onto a wall    if only here is the way we talk / 

       to each other, no seperate powers

including security which it isn't there now

     in the street

where i might not even know any of you strangers & friends

text exchange (excerpt), day after 

a: the cities of war across the planet scream with the dead labor (murdered, suicided, worn, grounddown to nothingness) of proletarians. one-sidedness of LIFE, nowadays, is its own "viva death" cult (sure) of classical fascism for the victors / rulers / ad-lib bourgeoise, for whom "Trump" (gig furher) is simply the perfect cop-out for their own terminal guilt-feelings. abstract wealth accumulation for the the 'possible whopper, whereas we want the little c. 

c: or carlo cafiero a- and -moonism, loot the shoppes & b the prisons, actually insane six years since 2020, not to practice hagiography about it 

a: i wonder if a human, tender “no” is only possible in a world without money and it feels increasingly fucked to speak openly about our commitments--what else are they, however freakishly modest and "nihilistic" with regard to never setting ourselves up over and apart from the wholeclass?

c: yes. which is why the enmity-pill can't be untaken. social revolution is real, in all its v-iolin's

a: but social power of the class that isn't a class (prole-) can shutshitdown on its path to self-abolition. the only real game in town (for fellowfeeling "human" negatives), and literally the only sane thing left (however bleak the prospects, impossible-feeling, and far out it seems...yes) like philosophy. ugh. but i'm not going to play myself even harder & take "positions." fuck a war

c: my hotel cell bunk mate worked in the honda factory and has permanent wrist damage from it. his partner works there until 8PM still

a: groupiscule? sure. but we gotta start from lintrolling our 'lackflag, bub" -- dada

c: featherdust'ing streets of catastrophe, subsistence art / making our lives a littless hopeless. even if it when feels like the news means / i'm going to barf

another friend beat a minor case, another friend got out of the asylum. that would be cause to find something sweet we could do for each other in the cracks o' this fascist landmass, wide open well it's still that new day cue up WB. i am a witch, selfsame. and i want to stand outside in the middle of the rain even when we can't leave or live together deserted if only now for today, on or offline 

A note on poetry readings and the line (WR)

At recent poetry readings I’ve noticed how each line when the poet has finished saying it is used up. There’s no on-going force running through it. No field of inertia that the line is pushing its way through. Hence the rarefied atmosphere of most poetry readings, even when the affect is strong and the language is forceful and is making reference to things that press upon us. I was making this comment to a friend when they said, What about when lines are incomplete and holding something over? But isn’t that still a completion of the line, in that case delayed, but still completing itself inside its own frame of reference?

What I want to hear, miss hearing, inside the sounded words are forces that exist outside, forces we live inside of that language smooths over with meanings but whose motion words don’t exhaust. I want to feel them there in the poetry, not referred to but felt inside the lines or blocs of language. I felt that when a bit more than twenty years ago I first heard Sean Bonney read from Poisons Their Antidotes: a real hiatus at the end of each line, poisons taken in, not merely antidotes. Not a frame of reference, but energies pulsing in London streets. Present in such a way that they affect the body without the body-image being capable of resolving them or even catching up with them. And not talk, definitely not talk. 

I have felt something similar when hearing Maggie O’Sullivan read her work. ‘Sounding as presencing’, is something she spoke about. Where what is brought into the room is the Irish potato famine, or heart-failure of someone close to her in a hospital, or the non-human life of animals, but always forces that exceed containment. I could add that these are the unformed material of politics, but that would be a long theoretical stretch and what I want to say doesn’t belong to a theory but to what I want to call unresolved forces of life which regimes of sense and visibility turn into reality.

The line that does not complete itself in itself, i.e. in its time-frame, but instead carries (inside itself) the incompleteness of the outside. ‘Maybe running out of time. / Time is frozen light / light’. That was Raworth.

Letter to DH, October 2025 (WR)

I’ve been wanting to reply to your letter of April this year. Each time I have re-read it I’ve come up against the difficulty of saying as a writer of poetry how my attitude to language has changed. A brief history would start with love for Keats and entanglement in Larkin, the latter presenting a hard landing into postwar Britain. Whitsun Weddings (lectures on that book by Donald Davie at Cambridge, claiming it’s central to what can be written), etc, the sour eye and the protection it offered. Latin American ‘social poetry’ was an exit, because it expressed without hedging an actual desire for change. For many years I was translating Latin American poets, writing nothing of my own. At first a runnel then a wider stream of my own writing took shape, although impeded by the circumspect knowingness which the linguistic dexterity of the university environment offered. I abandoned that dexterity and its implication of knowing in Incisions, which I wrote in around 2015, the time of the Poetry and Revolution conference and the subsequent Militant Poetics gathering. Incisions allows the self to fall out of what it’s supposed to know and to sink into uneducated and sometimes incorrect use of the language. (‘Uneducated’ in quote marks).

The difficulty now, in what I want to call the epoch of permission for genocide, is my implication in destructions that I can’t extricate myself from. I come to Mira Mattar’s impulse to stop being a speaking being, given the complicity of language in ‘what they have done to my people’. She wants language to be buried beneath the surface of the earth. I don’t know where to go from there except to say that this would be the destruction of language inside language (Scalapino). But that gets me essentially nowhere. For Scalapino in her book New Time, and others, that kind of destruction was a way to exist alongside real bodies in time, but it doesn’t work any more.

A few weeks ago I saw suddenly the image of a boy around eight years old wearing a home-made suit made of felt, image that belongs to older genocides. The boy was looking past me at what must have been his death—where he will die again? Other times, those of early morning anxiety, there are images which quite rapidly become void, their power to empty all representations producing vertigo.

I wrote in an earlier unsent reply to you, One element of the death drive would include its being a force of de-coding—(partial) erasure of the social-psychic coding inside which we live. I used to think that was a threshold at which something different might be accomplished, a radical break, but the word radical seems to have gone dead, and the caesura that’s in operation has facilitated a death cult. Caesura that permits the crusades, the American genocide of the Indian wars, despotic kingship, etc to cut into present time. And fascist utopias of permission for everyday violence.

Complicity of language, as I wrote early. But am suspicious of that totalisation of language. Maybe the spectre of linguistic totalisation is the desire of social media, something you wrote about in Wound Building.

For reasons I don’t understand, I think of these lines from Verity’s Coronelles: ‘the spider’s knotted hairs / protecting empty space’ –the hairs are deafening—

 

Report on 'The Trieste Mental Health Ecology: beyond "models"' (LH)

 This is the event I’m talking about.

Read this by Han Dee.

Lately I’ve been stressed and full of shame, fearful that I’m guilty of political betrayal. Emails sent too quickly, without enough thought. At worst this reminds me of the firm belief I had in March 2022 that I needed to kill myself because I had at that point been guilty of betrayal. Denise Riley begins the best poem in her collection Say Something Back, ‘Lines starting with La Rouchefoucauld’, ‘It is more shameful to distrust your friends / than be deceived by them’.

The brevity of ‘Or without.’ The experience of being sectioned means I’ve lost a lot of trust. The trust of people who believed it was in my best interests to withhold my phone and later replace it with a burner. Perhaps they were right. I placed this burner, white hospital ID sticker on the back, name and NHS number, a spiral added to it drawn by me in biro, on the red fabric with sex worker history affixed near the ceiling and draping into the centre of a room around which the assembled people from Trieste, the Mental Health and Social Justice Network (MHSJN) and elsewhere (‘survivors’, friends and family members of people damaged by the mental health system in the UK, NHS workers including psychiatrists, people traumatised by their work on acute wards here – E was rendered mute and cried explaining this in a workshop, trainee psychotherapists, interested artists, etc.) sat on chairs. Other objects on the red fabric: a copy of Sense and Sensibility, James Baldwin’s Another Country, keys, medication blister packs, writing about a psychiatrist who threatened the patient ‘you’ll be back’ because they were refusing medication and how the psychiatrist herself subsequently suffered a breakdown, a photo of a cell in Broadmoor accompanied by some words, a red umbrella, vape packaging, a spiky ball…

The first person I met was R and we got talking right away. R wasn’t sure how long he’d manage to stay, had heard about the MHSJN event at a recent MedAct gathering. Long years of depression, many days of staying indoors. He stayed the whole day. Told me about a suicide attempt at the age of 21 while at university studying a pharmacy degree. Took his exams in September as he’d been intubated in intensive care and missed the remainder of the final term following his attempt. Regretted not bringing for the red fabric a stuffed toy hedgehog offered by his mother while intubated: it had calmed his stress through its tactility and familiarity, perhaps saved his life. Both of us diagnosed with bipolar. Exchanged details of hospital admissions, physical complications, hypomania, the desire to find a place of consistency, the lack of continuity in the kind of ‘care’ we’d accessed through the NHS. Talked about medication. Talked about the US and the tendency to overmedicate. A lot more. A crutch laid on the table behind. Kidney problems making lithium a poorly suited treatment. We both wrote ‘continuity’ on the pieces of brown cardboard offered to us by someone running an art workshop in the afternoon. Neither of us joined this workshop, preferring to attend the one on the open door policy and no restraint as it operates in Trieste.

Some comparisons between the way things work in Trieste and in the UK:

– Risk model and an emphasis on the clinical (UK)

– Attention model and an emphasis on the psychosocial and on helping the person change their life (Trieste)

Throughout the day I was thinking about Iran. One person who had been due to attend was absent because the attacks made participation impossible. Someone joined the final plenary and not the preceding presentations and workshops because of the emergency protest in central. The event was catered generously by Hiba Express, a local Palestinian kitchen. I messaged S who sent back a voice note about having watched Dr Strangelove just the other day. Didn’t know what else to say for now. I messaged L who said at least it’s sunny, that they’d been at the protest in central too and that there’d be another one in the week. E said that Netanyahu’s plane had landed in Athens and that nobody but Greeks seemed to be aware of this. Firework-like images on the FT news app. Han announcing solidarity with Palestine. Seeing H during the day and in the no restraint workshop. Comparing notes about how organising is going and about my attendance at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office blockade last summer, where we’d been kettled and I’d been afraid and subsequently wondered if I wasn’t best placed in these kinds of situations. 

Things that came up at Birkbeck on 14 June. The Stop SIM campaign, Campaign for Psychiatric Abolition (I tried to find out if Mad Pride is taking place this year, it seems not to have been announced), Red Therapy. How ‘we keep each other safe’ but do we? The four times greater likelihood of Black people to be sectioned in the UK and the much higher frequency and severity of police involvement. The legacy of people of colour and especially Black Caribbean people with regards the rebuilding of the NHS. That these campaigns and issues were raised should be attributed to Micha Frazer Carroll who spoke via video link from Sweden. I think of the way Derica Shields brings some of these issues home, with steadfast force, in A Heavy Nonpresence, perhaps the most important body of work to emerge in years with regards UK state violence and the willed invisibilising of Black people. Cassandra followed Micha with a pre-recorded video message about the way people work in mental health in the UK, as if performing a play but each person with a different version of the script. The problem of patients/service users telling the same story over and over because so many interactions are with a different person each time. How some appointments are only ten minutes long. At the end of the day I met a psychiatrist who mentioned working in Hackney. I asked if she was familiar with Vivienne Cohen House and yes, ‘unfortunately’ she had worked there. I told her about the Google review I’d left and how a receptionist scolded me that this was a bad thing to have done and made it more likely that their existing funding would be withdrawn. The psychiatrist was sorry that I had an upcoming appointment, in two days time from the time of writing this ‘report’. I think momentarily of Can Xue’s ‘Train Dreams’ and how there are many clocks, often telling the same time. How a man who sleeps with a woman who keeps many clocks at her bedside struggles to relax around the omnipresent pressure they exert.

***

Europe’s largest rose garden is in Trieste. A collective project of gardening. Han mentioned Ruth Wilson-Gilmore’s idea of abolition geography as the attempt to combine people and land, wondering at this being somehow borne out in Trieste and in the rose garden in particular. The significance of 1971 in the history of Trieste and the admission of Han’s uncle to Broadmoor for 30 years as of the same date.

Pantxo spoke about the context of fascism in Italy. How Franco Basaglia placed the clinical question in parentheses because the problem of rights was more pressing. Basaglia was expelled in the early sixties from university because of his critique of psychiatry. About the need to destroy the reproduction of roles, of the psych and the patient, through the introduction of other objects and energies. 

The huge rise in mental health detentions in the UK since the 80s. Mad liberation movements.

A film I want to see: Fit to be Untied, 1975, about the challenge to the mental asylum system in Parma in the sixties.

The need to connect the struggle for health to the same struggle in the workplace, in the home and the hospital. 

Self-organisation. Self-realisation.

Basaglia, Laing and Tosquelles had many disagreements but they united on the principle of the dignity of people being at stake.

Trieste established the ecology as it exists today (not without many flaws and ongoing struggles and the presence of some assholes and right-wing people, not without police still issuing compulsory orders for treatment sometimes, killing people in this process in other parts of Italy) thanks to a leftist occupation of the system from within and from without. Thanks to an attempt to break up the institution of madness. 

In 1973, a lifesize papier-mâché horse was painted sky blue and broken out of the asylum in Trieste for a procession. Art as a relational process (minus Tirvanija, Bourriaud, Sehgal, none of whom were mentioned or in any way missed). The horse as part of a spectacle and means of communication. 

The renunciation of authority. 

From 1972-73 Basaglia bought cars for the workers to help them move to and from different neighbourhoods. The mobility of workers and the need to be where the people are.

The Chernobyl explosion of 1986 and Triete’s position on the edge of the Western Bloc, in close proximity to Ukraine. They made a machine to block the cloud.  

Sustenance. The invention of new ways of doing. Responsibility that needs to be affirmed every day.

I asked a question of a delegate about how migrants in Trieste interact with the mental health system. Mental health workers don’t report to immigration authorities. Fuck Prevent in the NHS. Fuck Palantir and Wes Streeting. Come to this day, Abolishing Prevent on 29 June maybe. 

In the gathering back together at the end of the day I found the NHS worker who had already spoken at some length about feelings of complicity with the system as it exists to be taking up quite a bit of space. Perpetuation of harm. History as a keyholder and locker of doors. Every speaker was met with applause. I struggled to bring my hands together in time as I was making notes as a father spoke about a son sectioned seven or eight times. Forced on nasty medications. Denial of harm. Fed up of joining care groups. The desire to keep the son away from care workers who say he lacks insight with regards to his medication. The podcasting and radio workshop he’d attended suggested there was a place for people to speak freely without judgement. Escuchame – the name of Radio Fragola’s programme. There’d be a community event the next day 15 June with Asylum magazine, the father said. He spoke of the desire to set up a house. I forgot to speak with this person about the Philadelphia Association’s community houses which I understand they are presently struggling to fill. A woman who described her pandemic breakdown described The Tuesday Club and how people often don’t really want to talk about mental health. There’s so much else. 

Quality of life does not get spoken about often enough in the UK, if at all, a practitioner of sorts said from the further end of the room. There is space in Trieste for a human to human relationship whereas here there are always risk assessments first, burnout, case loads, class and racism. So many things get in the way of the possibility of a relationship. In Trieste there had been a laboratory that allowed for the suspension of class relations. Art (in communities/with some kind of therapeutic aim) in the UK is often funded by charities and there’s a lot of gatekeeping and people not talking to one another, as well as the burden of constant grant applications. M spoke of the idiocy of the DSM and how the bio psychosocial model had some time ago turned into the bio bio bio model. These were not M’s words but someone else’s from a now quite old article. I thought of the usefulness of ‘bipolar’ for the conversation I’d had in the early part of the day. How I’ve been listening to the very American ‘Inside Bipolar’ podcast and how it's been useful, even if I have many reservations and the way the psych Nicole refers to her patients’ ‘wives’ as noticing everything is lol. Someone with experience in Brazil pointed out how the logic of the British Empire persists – in the idea that some people (especially those historically subjected to colonial forms of exploitation – loop back to Micha’s reference to the rebuilding of the NHS by Black Caribbean people in particular) might be ‘taking’ from NHS services. I think of the logic of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ that NELMA and other groups set out to challenge’. 

***

It’s funny what you repress. In the no restraint workshop we began with each person in attendance saying something about themselves and why they’d chosen to attend. I mentioned my completion earlier that week of the Philadelphia Association’s introductory course and how it had been hard as an inpatient aged 15 to not be allowed outside during part of the five months of my admission. The same in the month of March 2022. I forgot to even think that I’d also been held down on my bed and injected at 15. There were others who crossed the line of former patient now thinking to train. I learned that a specialist service operates in Brixton, run by a charity, uniquely for people of colour. 

Meanwhile I have in mind my lack of attempted contact with S since February. The worry about the ‘revolving door’. 

One of the many parts of the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt I visited on Friday 13th in the afternoon carried a message attributed to Patrick White, remembering Peter Andrew Ryan 19.10.51–12.4.94: ‘THE WAY WE FILL OUR OBLIGATIONS TO THE SICK IS A MARK OF OUR CAPACITY TO LOVE’. Capacity again, that word I often hate for its application to people, recalled by Riley’s idea that ‘things in themselves do hold – a pot, a jug, a jar’. 

KNEECAP Lehrstück (anon)

KNEECAP Lehrstück [9-5-2025]

ACCUSERS:
Kneecap!
You said Up Hamas!
You said Up Hezbollah!
You called for blood!
You support terror!
You invite terror!
You make music —
but music cannot be a shield for this!

KNEECAP:
What did we say?

ACCUSERS:
Up Hamas! Up Hezbollah!

KNEECAP:
Oh.

ACCUSERS:
These are proscribed organization! To invite support of them is illegal!

KNEECAP:
We don’t support attacks on civilians.
We condemn violence.
We’re performers. We perform.
Our statements are part of the act.

ACCUSERS:
The performance is over
only law remains. 

AUDIENCE:
We were there – we cheered because —
Finally, someone said it!
We cheered for the break in the lie.

ACCUSERS:
Words have weight.
And weight breaks the back.
Will you stand by your words?
Will you go to prison?
[sneeringly] Will you become the next Bobby Sands?

KNEECAP:
Those who help the downtrodden
are the scum of the earth.
We are the scum of the earth,
we must not be found. We play the game.
We pull back the words,
The law is a net,
but we are small fish. Smaller even than Netanyahu.

AUDIENCE (splintered, some uncertain, some defiant):
But weren’t you brave?
Didn’t you mean it?
We believed you meant it.
We wanted you to mean it.

ACCUSERS:
They didn’t mean it.
They never meant it.
They’re cowards, they sell rebellion like merchandise. They’re capitalists!

KNEECAP (to audience):
Do you want us jailed?
Or do you want us here,
shamelessly playing in Republicanism, which is our sandpit,
Making music in the wreckage?
Bobby Sands: we inherit him
or we profit from him
or we betray him. Sure. But we don’t become him. His revenge is our laughter. We’re different.

AUDIENCE:
You won’t go down for the cause?

KNEECAP:
We are more likely to simply be prisoners than political prisoners. This too is a kind of progress – solidarity between criminal and political prisoners!

AUDIENCE:
We cheered. Then we watched them retreat.
We also know
that jail or prison
is not desirable.
But this spectacle is sad, because it shows how unsayable reality has become!
And we know
the real story is not this,
not these words, or retreats in meaning or intent.
The real story is that Israel pummels a defenceless Gaza,
starving the population, whole families buried under rubble.
The open-air prison is now a death camp. Indescribable brutality, and an almost cosmic indifference in the collective commentariat and ruling classes.

KNEECAP:
On stage, the performance was a statement. Offstage, we made a statement that implied that statement was a performance, but that was the real performance. We can only say this here, in a play which is essentially fanfiction.
We are not free,
but we will play free. FREE FREE

AUDIENCE:
PALESTINE

KNEECAP:
FREE FREE

AUDIENCE:
PALESTINE

Mourning to the Left of Me, Mourning to the Right (N)

It was nice to have you and Hannah around for a moment in Vilnius. I didn’t manage to jot down any notes after our conversations so what follows might need some refreshing, but here we go.

Well I’m gonna try to triangulate a few conversations I’ve been involved with lately. It's one of those periods where there a lot of concepts and newish points of emphasis and priority appearing and I struggle to place them all as words—it will definitely take some time.

Alongside our gathering on militancy and mourning, I’ve been talking with some friends in Armenia, the Anti-Denialist Coalition, about the idea of sacrifice as a framework by which the community of the living, variously, justifies and disavows death and dying. For the ADC, the Zionist avowal of the Holocaust as a practice of sacrifice of millions of lives deemed threatening or unworthy for the European community of the living, was approached as an opportunity. The dead were sublated as a groundwork for the building of a new subject: the Israeli Jew. As they ask: “Who and what have been and are being Holocausted, after all, at the hands of European Nazis, fascists, national capitalists, avowed anti-communists and white supremacists? For what superior motive? In order to maintain or preserve what?” This sacrifice, for the pure community, and its resistance by a forms of life who refuse to be ‘one’, continues by way of the Palestinian today. The holocaust as ‘sacrifice’ disavows the life taken in order to maximally avow the life to come—it turns death into a project, a means, for the fulfilment of community as a dealienated communion. As Nancy will nicely put it:

Generations of citizens and militants, of workers and servants of the States have imagined their death reabsorbed or sublated in a community, yet to come, that would attain immanence.* […] The modern age has conceived the justification of death only in the guise of salvation or the dialectical sublation of history.

Against this fascist logic of sacrifice and salvation, Nancy notes another justification of death. The death of those who revolt from the intolerable conditions of life under oppression. Yet these deaths are not sublated as projects: “no dialectic, no salvation leads these deaths to any other immanence than that of… death (cessation, or decomposition, which forms only the parody or reverse of immanence).”

*Nancy uses immanence in a peculiar way here to express the non-mediated, a kind of social organicism, an ontological purity that only a subject transfigured into the deathly oblivion of a pure symbol of life can effectively perform but never achieve.

What I take this passage to mean is: the death of those that rebel against oppression does not resolve incompleteness, the ceaseless movement and contradiction of being-in-a-finite-world. These deaths rather stay with us as the unresolved struggles and co-extensive potentials of the living. We live together with the dead but only within the parameters of the affects they imparted and what the imparted impart. There is no sublation of the comrade as immortal symbol, only interminable loss and its inheritance. Such deaths also surmount the liberal order's paradigm of the individual whom, in negating tradition’s temporal continuum, turns death and dying into an unbearable task and insignificant burden—the privatization of time.

Yet within the fascist logic of sacrifice and salvation, we also find a left-wing tendency. The horizonal, futuritive, vitalist politics that makes death into a project for the yet to come. Once again disavowing the sacrificed in light of an avowed community of the living/dead. The needs of the sacrificed are disavowed and their inheritances only acknowledged to the extent they can be put to use in some instrumental, future-building, project.

A scene: The Soviet planners in post-war Vilna’s decision to build the Palace of Cultural Workers on top of a graveyard and use the graves, many of which were Jewish, as the stones for the steps leading up the big hill. The dead as defaced stepping stones and foundations for the wellbeing of the living and the yet to come. You could imagine a short story by Platonov detailing this scene.

Here the dead are not immortalized symbols but crudely materialized tools: stripped of context, culture, hopes, and finite needs and turned into a cement-like mixture, put to use by socialism whose needs are freed of the burden of the past as tradition. We could add to Hannah’s comments on the death denying slogan of the left: “don’t mourn organize” / don’t organize build.

And this is where mourning and militancy, or as you formulate ‘the militant death-drive’ come in, as a necessary corrective. You begin by nicely conceptualizing Freudian mourning in your letter to Will, so let's start there: “To withdraw your ‘libido’ from the world of the living, according to Freud, is what it means to be ‘in’ mourning; but it also means prioritising the claims of the dead over those of the living.” And while mourning is seen to be a necessary step in retreating the object of loss—its eventual overcoming through a reinvestment of libidinal attachment—melancholy as the stubborn endurance of this attachment and attendance to the demands of the dead is found to be pathological.

The death-drive, as you note, interrupts this vitalism in its avowal of the irreversibility of loss. For Crimp, the struggles of the living continue after this recognition of our finitude, but “the claims of the living are necessarily attenuated, diminished, or interrupted by the ‘canalizing’ of feeling towards those that are no longer ‘there’, and who cannot benefit from any victories that we might win.” The militancy of the death drive, as this intransigent bearing of loss within the community of life, goes further than simply allocating a distributed space for mourning, it demands the vitalism of the healthy be rethought. Death-drive-militancy interrupts vitalism, with its denial and erasure of death and dying; neither instrumentalizing nor immortalizing the dead. It is a demand the dying and dead be avowed in their own right in the conversation instead of simply used as its resource or horizon.

Returning to the Coalition's thesis, if the avowed and disavowed holocausts of modernity are two modes of justifying death as a project and means of the living and of those to come, we need to ask what it would mean to rencounter death as this non-sublated, co-extensive, Mitsein with the living and what concepts could be introduced to re-articulate our notions of life in the aftermath of this event?

  

Letter to a friend (Kyle Lovell)

Dear,

Did I tell you that I wrote an entire pamphlet because I never came to terms with the hell of all these bleak enclosed spaces, or bring myself to love this country that drinks from the puddle to prove it isn’t gay, & I’ve found that three times is too many to do the same reading & four ends up melodramatic when this depression is fundamentally ontological & clouds the heart, which is why I promised myself I’d never write like this again, that I’d be generally affirmative to the whole of things in spite of my commute & tendency to bicker, that I would write kinder work emails & gossip a little less, as this errata isn’t cute & flagellation isn’t my link to a life well-lived but it is duct tape, piecing together every critique I’ve voiced to you across these last few years which includes how I’ve been well-shielded against grief by distance but still think the world would be a better place if Callie and Sean were still around & our friends do too, so that’s keeping us together & I didn’t realise how much of these last few years were marked out by absences & Ian says that apocalypse doesn’t rest easy on the tongue but it’s still there, in everything I write, the dull gaping maw of the sun & the itinerant need to imagine a life that isn’t blacked out by bad faith philosophers & who the fuck made Lionel Shriver one of those, did I miss that, I was kept busy drinking & trying to find a way to outline a theory of metaphor that was generative & I have Ricoeur to thank for that, him and the UCU strikes were a big help in tearing me away from a career that would have killed me.

& in those poems, I quote John Berger, that handsome bastard who disappeared to the countryside & wrote that single portraits of love do not exist but they do so either I’ve misunderstood what he meant or he was wrong & I know what I’d bet on, because there’s an open, weeping scratch at the core of this last year & it began like all good love poems, in a dark cafe when I was off-centre & skint & willing to be charmed by anyone & did I tell you that I know exorcisms don’t work, like that time I was blessed by a drunk priest as a kid for €50 & I’m still exhausted, so all of this is still unexorcised. London & how I built this one feeling into a brutal monument & when I wrote to Danny with these poems I said a little about my fear of unmooring from the world, though more than that, my fear of how comfortable that fear felt, how I had built a limbo system of nursed distance, of writing to cover the silence, of how it then became a position about whatever we mean when we say ‘community & communication’, so reading them again & again feels softly indulgent to a catastrophic selfishness that does nobody any good but then maybe something will still come of it, maybe there’s a metaphor or two, a line that someone reads to someone in bed, maybe that is enough for me. You once told me that at my worst, I’m a romantic & that’s still true I guess.

& I’m not writing this to you as an explanation or manifesto, just speaking to the mania felt after a pandemic & Danny said that the poetry community is a terrifying or terrible community, in the sense that the things that we offer to one another are often the signs or sigils of our own inability to exist in it & I did cry when I read his email, sitting in Birmingham with these poems that didn’t feel like they did much but he kindly disagreed & everyone has disagreed so kindly these last few weeks, but I’ve been slipping back into old habits & no-one can afford self-destructive tendencies in this economy, with so many people dead & when I wrote that Berryman had one right idea, I meant that he found that bridge in 1972 but that’s too bleak to say in a poem & I don’t know if I ever believed it, but it was one of those sigils of how I couldn’t exist without a cruel streak & a signifier to my general feeling of collapsing ideation that had been accumulating like poetry pamphlets & that dull fear of useless adoration, so when I ran into an old friend we laughed about the way we used to fall in love with everyone we met, in a constant state of infatuation that pissed folks off & we were always a little too sad to keep it together, because I’ve found that laughing at yourself with a friend is always a tonic to the worst infections of self-pity & like I said before, I agree with Hill that the poetry better not be in the pity, no-one is saved by it & nothing is borne from it, & then last week in Birmingham I told Alex about how I had once printed off all eight pages of Denise Riley & Wendy Mulford’s 1979 pamphlet No Fee & put it on my wall, a decade ago in a different city & how a lovely art historian I was not quite dating said I must be a hit with the Tumblr girlies & we laughed because who reads Denise & Wendy to be a hit with anyone, which I suppose is what I mean with all this, that the inability to exist coherently & the joy found in the cracks of miscomprehending the social are all related in small ways & I gave up on philosophy because everything I wrote felt like a private mythology rather than a framework but sometimes that’s all you need, & I’ve always done this because I can’t imagine a life where I don’t fall in love again & again or read your poems & cry, or offer up a some half-posture & half-charming devastation at my own coping mechanisms for the abscesses of the dead, or expect too much & give too little, & these small ways in which I lived, exhausted & loving, are perhaps why you still sound so happy to hear from me even if I ramble a little & I have always loved to hear from you. Please do write me back, when you can.

With care & care,
Kyle