Sympathetic Magic.

by Paul Cameron Brown.

THE RIVER CUTS A CHANNEL

People with money but no fortune or stomach for the life of an albatross, watch him soar on self made wings, fetch the dingy redness of morning's, first catch with a long necked bottle he calls the captain

PRIMAVERA

A poem is perishable and, like it, so much of life is spent in intervals -- the jarring second regaining consciousness, a post-mortem flick of the lank equestrian eyelid that signals, morning's first crepuscular move.

. . . a little salad consciousness about the tumescent room with the sentient purr of a Cat, her musky oils a green verdure lapping primordial scent to engross a little readiness as the day progresses to its oedipal stage and arrested development.

Page 11 SANGUINE

"The clock indicates the hour but what does enternity indicate?"

Whitman

Imagine, being told cubism isn't painting. That Beardsley didn't die at 26, unheralded as a boy genius or Corot didn't come to Paris after all.

Imagine, The Louvre without a rooftop, the intelligentsia sitting down to a ragged table surrounded by sawdust intellects, Proust not being able to write his name.

Now that's splendour -- that's in-depth "feeling".

That's emotion to pull your socks or catch the bus on a brittle day.

It's easy. Try to "feel" the event. It's 1896. People are perturbed (or so we are told) because the century's getting old. Time's rushing by. There's an alarm clock set to buzz at eternity's gate, Midnight 1900.

In probing the malaise that hit Europe circa 1881, psychologists would have us believe the world grew despondent. Despondent because a whole hundred year cycle was about to elapse; despondent because life itself was running out. Those poor Edwardians!

Poor lovers of the elegant, the late Victorians, belle epoquers. A penny for their thoughts when confronting a Pica.s.so without the vantage of hindsight.

Page 12 If Europe and its child bride, America, grew uneasy in the declining years of the past century. How then our era? (These same psychologists pinpoint people's spirits rise in the opening years of a new century.) Now we're poised for the "really big one": the cataclysm. What a boon for the absurdists. Peaches and cream -- not just one century dangling but the culmination of ten.

There's even a word for it. Millenium, I'll say it again.

Better yet, a mere two millenia since Christ's departure, we are poised again on the threshold. Half & half. Like a party twelve pack -- six of one, half dozen of the other.

Remember. when contemplating your ennui or malaise (whichever word is currently most fashionable), you can hardly figure for less. Eternity's given to you, my peers, a singular opportunity. And from what we know of the 20th century. it should be a grand slam homer. Already the clean-up batter is staged for action. The bat looms over the plate.

There's so much bad news it's enough to make an optimist greedy. After all, with this much horror there is caused only for danse macabre celebrations.

1985. Only 15 years left before the digital watch rolls over. before the cannon with the flower pops out.

Those forward looking voyeurs of hundred years back must have felt cheated when mentally reversing their lot with the denizens of the 20th century.

Page 13 In 1885, you could only gripe about the aging process of a single tenth of one component. In 1985, you've got that and the Millenia. Trendy things like atmospheric pressure, negetive ions, adverse body rhythms and a welter of other pseudo impressive formula abound to help out in your witchhunt.

Surprise. 1066 saw comets, omens. signs coded in stars speeding ecross the sky -- a host of ditlurbing.

natural phenomena to boot. The vigilant saw meteors at Caesar's, death.

The National Enquirer predicts Australia will break into the sea. Californians will be upstaged. The futurists will all need waterwings. The Club of Rome hints the next years auger more chilling holocausts.

Everywhere, survival scenarios proliferate. Pro-lifers will rearrange proverbial deck chairs on the t.i.tanic. Soothsayers will become all the rage as we plot myriad escapes. A year's supply of canned goods, anyone?

1885 has a lot to teach us. Umbrellas, a gentle ennui like fine mist compounded by traffic in & out of the Moulin Rouge. Perhaps a surfeit of absinthe helps just as its equivalent does today. "Cheer up, there will always be an England" doesn't sound so bad after all.

And there's always that one recruiting poster, "What did you do in the Great War, daddy"?

Page 14 HAMOMLETTE A VICTIM OF INDIGESTION OR PATRICIDE?

MAGIC PAN: CASTLE OF ELSINORE CHEF: THE MAD PRINCE OF DENMARK INGREDIENTS: THE TRAGEDY OF THE HUMAN CONDITION, SENSELESS FORCES THAT RAGE AND DESTROY A MAN COOKING INSTRUCTIONS: SIMMER SLOWLY A PERFECT SOUFFLE - ALAS POOR YORICK I KNEW HIM WELL...

Page 15 THE EAST IS RED

We can survive a nuclear War. It's scarcely credible, I know, but listen.

The human race has great resilience. We've come back before -- all those plagues, the Black Death, despoliations, scorched earth policies "prove" it.

We're proliferate and we love the s.e.x act. It won't be hard; human fecundity is a count-on. There are so many of us, see.

People have overestimated the alleged horror. After all, (Khruschev pounding a UN table with his shoes).

somebody walked away from firebombing at Dresden.

Look at at all the escapees in Hiroshima. Get the drift?

A Bomb's a Bomb. Really. The really big one (to take Ed Sullivan'a phrase out of context) is just more of the same. Try to absorb that logic. Ergo, Ignorance must be, in toto strength.

Enraged by the impropriety of it all? Anyone who disagrees with this is coa.r.s.e and vulgar.

Of course there would have to be "preparations". (If you have "to prepare" to be a hairdresser, it stands to reason you would have to ready yourself for this.)

Confronting, facts you can die only once. After that, the mushroom cloud is anticlimactic. Remember the Magic Mushroom -- the cult that centred its teachings around Christianlty's debt to hallucegenic drugs?

Some said preposterous -- Christ a magician doping his followers and using the Cross as a stage prop.

Amazing. In this world anything is possible. We have finally created a mutant of people who eccept anything. And G.o.d just another man, albeit a tricky devil at that. Imagine fooling everyone for 2,000 years!

Next, we'll be told we're actually dead. I know some of you have already suspected this but it will be

Page 16 "confirmed". Our leaders will troopse out impressive sounding "flow charts" and backup statistics. There will even be a special chamber to experience what it was like before you knew you were dead with carefully monitored "response signals" to give the audience a "sensasound" aura just like living through an earthquake, only fake. Just remember Monty Python and "possibility".

Meanwhile, in ensuing preparations for war, no aspect of the psychological preparedness should be overlooked. We don't have to be told there is no subst.i.tute for victory.

"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of a King." Hamlet knew. So does The Kremlin. The KGB can "prove" a nuclear scenario is winnable.

According to the most painstaking calculations, a conventional war of any duration "swings" into a pre-nuclear stage. That's when the nuclear option becomes "viable". That's when Gorbachev and the boys calculate "target readiness" and plummet the depths of the human spirit.

The East is Red and ready. The Chinese have been told by Mao 300 million or their number cremated is a small price for global supremacy. A human dung hill is being set in motion for another generation of poppies. Marx lends credibility to this, but with a different opiate for the ma.s.ses. The lumpenproletariat can hack it. Such clever playing with facts, now I understand genius.

For a young physicist, a 100 megaton blast is the culmination of the creative spirit. Certainly irrefutable evidence, this quintessential "spirit".