17 December 2001 outofcontrol


outofcontrol is a quotation from one of Edwin Schlossberg's letters*. It looks so beautiful to me... the potentiality of everything made visible in the simple act of omitting spacesbetweenwords.


It comes to mind as I pause, still doubting the writings of J R R Tolkien (for their novelistic and syntactical realism where, to my mind, non-realism is needed)...

...but despite this objection I am encouraged by his remark (in a letter to his son Christopher) that he prefers anarchy to any other political attitude (not the use of destructive force, anarchistically, but the absence of imposed government and the presence of self-rule - he despises the word government as a Proper Noun and suggests calling each by the personal name of the leader of each governing gang)...

Yes, I believe this of him and of his fairy stories or myths, as illustrations of the temptations and evils of power... I feel encouraged to attempt stories of my own that share the politics of 'anarkia' (as David Miller once called the non-coercive kind of anarchism) but which are I hope complementary to Tolkien's - in that I wish to write of non-hierarchy, and not of the past or even of future, but of the present, in all its connectiveness and possibility for good or evil, when released from control. An optimism, founded on reality, such as can be found or made in any moment. Viva!



*Letters in communication, 1972-3, see invisible books.



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