Howling into a Dark Auditorium

Damage Limitation, Rupert M. Loydell (zimzalla 068 ISBN 978-1-907570-21-6)
The Salvation Engine, Rupert M. Loydell (Analogue Flashback)

The work of Rupert Loydell will be well-known to any regular (or even irregular) reader of IT. His prose, poetry and artwork appear here most weeks. In addition to producing numerous volumes of poetry, he has written extensively about art, literature and music, covering, in the process, figures as diverse as Brian Eno, Barbara Hepworth and David Lynch. As well as his work for IT, he is on the editorial board of the journal Punk & Post Punk and edits the online journal Stride.

Loydell has said of his approach to poetry that he works ‘by sieving an overload of information and textual material, heard, observed, read and seen. Through selection, editing and re-ordering I assemble narratives that try to make meaning of the world around me and my progression through it.  My poems and prose-poems are fictions, there is little sense of ‘personal truth’ or ‘actual experience’ within them, yet their fast-moving and flickering structures seem to approximate how we live today, the effect of being awash in a confusing world where we collaborate with ‘friends’ on the other side of the word but do not know our neighbours.’* Elsewhere, however (in conversation with American poet H.L. Hix), he has said my ‘writing processes and techniques are fairly traditional ones’. These two statements might seem contradictory and, in a way they are, but, rather than contradiction, what we’re talking about here, I suspect, is essential creative tension. Loydell is all the time trying to create work that goes beyond the epiphanic and the confessional while, at the same time, attempting to find meaning in what’s going on around him, an approach to writing poetry he describes as ‘post-confessional’.  As he says in an earlier poem, ‘Note to Self’, ‘Remember there is a narrator / in the poem as well as an author.’

Damage Limitation is part of Loydell’s ongoing investigation into cults and obsession. It begins with a brief, potted history of the band Throbbing Gristle and Genesis P-Orridge’s subsequent venture, Psychic TV, outlining the way both bands managed their public image, pressing ‘all the obvious buttons’ to portray themselves as provocative, transgressive and offensive; while all the time Genesis P-Orridge ‘wanted to control everything, despite their questioning the very notion of power and control’. As it says later, in the poem ‘Sacred Calling’, ‘Carnal brutality and easily accessed sex; whatever sells albums. It’s a style of control, dodging accountability, empty violations. This is a song. It really is.’

In ‘Whisper Campaign’, a zigzagging pattern of cut-up word-pairs mimics a sound-wave against a graphical presentation of the threshold of hearing and the threshold of pain. In other poems, cut-up text is itself cut up and packaged into boxes. Although the book has the look of a pre-digital fanzine that echoes TG’s ‘unsettling do-it-yourself vibe’, the visual element goes way beyond the decorative: the patterns and images often suggest visual representations of sound, working with the poetry the way music can with lyrics.

The poem ‘Dance of the Machines’ is prefaced with a quote from Alex Kitnick’s book, Distant Early Warning: ‘The dance of the machines during the past two centuries represents the most violent and lethal expression of human somnambulism and self hypnosis.’ The hypnotic lure of TG and PTV lies in ‘the counterculture’s desire for psychic understanding’, while, in fact, the whole project is a microcosm of capitalism, its ‘industrial music revolution’ holding up a mirror to the Industrial (non-musical) Revolution. And the machines we build are not merely physical: the processes whereby people can groom, control and abuse others could be described as a form of psychic machine-building. Like  physical machines, these, too, can be deployed on an industrial scale. As Marshall McLuhan says in The Mechanical Bride (a quote which prefaces the last poem in the collection): ‘Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind. To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control is the object now.’

Talk of psychic machines brings us straight on to The Salvation Engine. This pamphlet, which came out before Damage Limitation, ‘grapples with the frightful mix of personality cults, religious populism, liturgical experiment, rave culture, censorship, puritanical mindlessness, and stupidity within the organised church, questioning and critiquing its power structures and beliefs, not to mention a lack of safeguarding and accountability, which allow and sometimes encourage abuse, manipulation, greed and desperate beliefs to thrive.’ The first poem is prefaced with a quote from a letter to the Guardian about how the Church of England has been in a state of denial about sexual abuse ever since the allegations arising from the ‘Nine O’Clock Service’ in Sheffield almost thirty years ago. (The trial of the minister at the centre of those allegations is finally due to take place in June this year.) In other words, Loydell is exploring what is in many ways similar territory to the world of Damage Limitation, only the institution subject to scrutiny here is culturally – but maybe only superficially – poles apart from the worlds of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV. To echo the title of that first poem, we’ve been here before. It all begins innocently enough (although with a sinister verbal pre-echo of the world of Damage Limitation):

     the night mingles easily with throbbing beats
               [‘Deeply Sorry’]

but in the end

     The spell is broken. Lucidity hits. We’ve been treated like dirt.
                [‘Haven’t We Been Here Before?’]

As it says in a later poem,

     a cataclysm of murderous noise lubricates
     conversations about emerging dark manias,
     slow-burning psychosexual abuse.
                [‘Touching Distance’]

The narrating voice discovers:

     Hell is being shut inside an alien heaven,
     unable to even compose a goodbye note.
                [‘Rap Messiah’]

Given what we know about Loydell’s post-confessional approach to writing poetry, there is a disarmingly personal feel to these poems. One gets the feeling, reading them, that the narrating voice is howling into a dark auditorium which may be empty, or full (it’s too dark to tell), as if it has to offload the poems into the darkness, irrespective of whether there’s anyone there to listen or not. (If that sounds outlandish, all I can say is that it is the image that came into my mind as I read them). However, the poetry never loses its forensic edge. In the poem ‘High Anxiety Evangelism’, it says ‘I am in a dilemma with regard to narrative, / am alienated from my own story.’ I thought this was interesting, given what I’ve just said, but, there again, who is the ‘I’? The uncertainty intensifies the chilling sense of isolation.

These two pamphlets expose the workings of the fearsome engines of control and abuse that can take hold wherever people gather together. It’s scandalous that the concerns of The Salvation Engine have yet to be fully addressed and resolved; and, thinking of the work of Cosey Fanni Tutti and Chris Carter (‘Chris and Cosey’) beyond TG, life-affirming to know that life can go on and creative impulses survive. There’s good, thought-provoking poetry in both, although if I had to rescue only one from a fire, it would probably be Damage Limitation, simply on account of the artwork that goes with it.

Dominic Rivron

* Rupert Loydell’s ‘Process, remix, juxtaposition, assemblage and selection. was published in Axon journal and can be read here.

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