Will Brecht’s Donkey Understand? : Notes on a Conference

All this talk of beauty

Brecht’s stuffed donkey

Actors in falsetto

flailing about in three interminable acts of crisis.

Artistic arsonists

Setting mountains on fire

So they may weep

and in turn inspire

Modalities, meta-text, sub-text, intertext”“tual, Sexual, Meta-sexual

Meta-sexual-inter-textual-ality

(There’s one for the PHD)

Collaboration… interrogation… provocation

Self….. sacrifice….mutilation…congratulation

Hypothetic… thermic…academics

And if not scraping the century old mould from the kitchen sink

Then off plundering the mythic imaginary.

That endlessly recyclable realm of post-modernist-modernisms.

So removed and obscure that you dare risk meeting any part of yourself  inside of it.

Hoary tales made heady with whimsy

Unfamiliar with cliché

Here?

Too depressing…recent…..relentless.

There…..

Glen miller records on a scratchy gramophone.

Surreal fairy-lit French circuses, butcheries and freak shows.

A mass of rock cuts off the rest of the continent

As onwards the Southern tip wafts

in an un-complex cosmos.