#geoffrey morrison

[kousaberry]

japanese ambient album “wet land” by hiroshi yoshimura mentioned!

[kousaberry]

this guy is saying things that could be pulled out of my brain except that he is obviously much smarter/more thoughtful/well-read, and it’s resonating with me very deeply to see these thoughts from the crevices of my frontal lobe expressed in a published novel. but is that actually what i want my reading experience to be? do i like this or does it just make me feel validated?

[kousaberry]

hugh dalgarno being a diasporoid is everything to me…and he’s communist and lost his home language as he grew to adulthood. this is my white man twin flame

[atreides]

To be standing in the sea on whichever coast one stood was to be touching them all, to be one node in the world-sea, to be witness to the tears of the world, its breaking with the phases of the moon. I saw that leaden line, so heavy, a metal infill in the bowl of the coast, poured when molten but frozen now in place, and rippled like it was beaten out with a hammer. I heard that panting Neptune’s breath, fluid in the lungs, a massive rattle, crash upon crash. I tasted the sea in my mouth, slaked my vampire thirst for the salt of the wound on my lips, smelled the sea air in my nostrils, the low-tide funk of pickled weeds.

— Geoffrey Morrison, Falling Hour

[atreides]

(and let me say too that the opposite is always true, always, you may think you are arguing only about matters of the heart and of fathers and sons but you are really also arguing about the history of nations and the common ruin of the contending classes)

— Geoffrey Morrison, Falling Hour

[atreides]

[A] man on a couch barking at a hockey fight, perhaps barking even more if the fight allowed him to play-act some ethnic or sectarian grudge match (if the fighter on the other team was French and the father was Anglo, or Anglo and the father was French, or if the fighter was from Europe, or if the fighter was Black, or if the fighter was someone Don Cherry had insinuated was a ‘pansy’), while his son watched him warily from the corner of the room and his wife and his son’s ‘effeminate’ school friend waited it out in the kitchen. What more could be said about this country than that? To what other end could its founding ideals – no, they never had ideals in this country, only myths – to what other end could its founding myths have ever led?

— Geoffrey Morrison, Falling Hour

[atreides]

Night and its ministers reminded me of another shade of green, my favourite perhaps, if there is a point to having favourites. I mean the occult dark green of holly leaves and ivy leaves, represented in this small clearing by the vines rushing from a cleft in a nearby linden tree like dark blood flowing from a wound too deep to close. Velvet, poison, death, I thought when I thought of this green, and for this it would have my endless love.

— Geoffrey Morrison, Falling Hour

[atreides]

‘The Scotchman has made up his Mind within himself in a sort of snail shell wisdom. The Irishman is full of strongheaded instinct.’ So says Keats as part of a long passage about the difference between Scottish and Irish people in another one of his letters to Tom from his travels. The passage is about as bad as you would expect. I never said I loved the man who haunted me, and in fact I mostly hate the Keats of these letters, who sounds like any other nightmare English tourist to a place that is not England: bitching about the poor quality of the food, moaning about the shabbiness of the lodgings, always trying to get in a dig about the people who ‘clatter’ or ‘gabble away’ in Gaelic in the rooms adjacent to his. At times he looks at the world with the eyes of a wretched colonial administrator, weighing and measuring the character traits of the Scottish and Irish peasantry to see how far they might be ‘improved’ and ‘refined.’ He was by no means the first. The open secret of each of the modern period’s transoceanic empires – certainly in the bloody two centuries after Keats’s letter, and just as certainly in the bloody three centuries before – is that they practised their demonic instruments close to home first. Spain to the Conversos and Moriscos, France to the Cathars of Languedoc, England to Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. What had Louis Riel written to the Irish American paper the Irish World in 1885?

In their treatment of us, however, the behavior of the English is not singular. Follow those pirates the world over and you will find that everywhere and at all times they adopt the same tactics and operate on the same thievish lines. Ireland, India, the Highlands of Scotland, Australia, and the isles of the Indian Ocean – all these countries are the sad evidences and their native populations are the witnesses of England’s land robberies.

In their own private way, the condescending letters from Keats are incident reports, white papers, intelligence gatherings on behalf of the pirates of the world; he is looking at Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland with a pirate’s eyes, even if he fantasizes the next year about joining Simón Bolivar’s army of liberation in South America, and even if by some accounts his great poem to autumn is in secret about the pitiless redcoats descending upon the Manchester weavers at Peterloo.

— Geoffrey Morrison, Falling Hour