“Pathways through the Labyrinth of The Kamikaze Mind”

By Richard James Allen Copyright © 2006

All rights reserved.

Text for Live Poets Society Reading,

October 25, 2006

(Also performed at The Loft Readings, UTS, August 28, 2008) -

Exploring some ways of reading

The Kamikaze Mind

Author: Richard James Allen,

Publisher: Brandl & Schlesinger, Blackheath, 2006

to reproduce this text or to use it as the basis for any public reading or performance or recording. 

Permission will not be withheld unreasonably.

I could have called this presentation “Reading Strategies for The Kamikaze Mind”, but I think we are way too befuddled with bureaucratic, corporate and military speak, so I am calling this presentation something much more elemental and archetypal:

“Pathways through the Labyrinth of The Kamikaze Mind”

The Kamikaze Mind – what a strange book, or as one reviewer described it recently, what a “curious little book”!  (Chrissie Parrott, dancewest)

Hold it up.  Move it like a flying brain.  Look at it.  Talk to it.

 How do I read thee, let me count the ways?

1) I could look for clues - read the Epigraphs:

Read Epigraphs (9):

“If an astronaut falls into a black hole he will be returned to the rest of the universe in the form of radiation.  Thus, in a sense, the astronaut will be recycled.  However, it would be a poor sort of immortality because any personal concept of time would come to an end…All that would survive would be his mass or energy.”

Stephen Hawking

The Kamikaze Mind documents one such astronaut who launched himself into a black hole.  The recovered fragments of his mind have been organised alphabetically.

So - The Kamikaze Mind is the story of an astronaut who launched himself into a black hole.  The recovered fragments of his mind have been organized alphabetically into a dictionary of a floating mind.  Each thought is proposed as a definition of a word.

I could start at the beginning and read it through…

Read BEGINNING selection:

A – Acknowledgement 11-12, then

Add

Address

Adieu

Advertisement (all 12)

And so on.  So I could read it straight through as a novel, and I would recommend that you do that, since there is a journey and a story and characters and themes that unfold in a linear pathway.

Let’s meet some of those characters:

‘I’ – keeping in mind the narrator is not me!

Read ‘I’ selection:

Affiliation, Agent, Alarm 13

Alternative, Am, Ambition 14

Any, Anonymity 15

Raison d’etre 109

Phew!  What a character!

How about ‘he’?

Read ‘he’ selection:

Biography 21

Bleeding 22

Cement 27

Convince 33

Charming!  And ‘she’?

Read ‘she’ selection:

Cake 25

Café 25

Breakup 23

Each 44

Enigma 45

Invitation 70

Freedom 55

 
‘You’ – is the final main character in The Kamikaze Mind. 

Read ‘you’ selection:

Character 27

Companion 30

Story 127

[back up Cherish 28]

‘You’ has a fundamental role to play, but I will leave it at that and let you (the audience) find your own ‘you’ in the book…

As you travel along through the text, you will find several themes keep coming up:

Sex is big one.  A few examples:

Read ‘sex’ selection:

Butt 24

Desperate 39

Intimacy 70

Boots 23

Melt 83

Little 78

[backup Cocktail 29]

Death is another recurrent theme, not surprisingly since the narrator is a dead man:

Death

Just 73

Spirituality

Alchemy 13

Pour 103

Art

Quotation 108

Creativity

Beginning 20

And lots of ruminations on the question of Identity

Central 27

Characterisation 28

Curriculum Vitae 35

Checklist 28

[backup Chart 28]

The construction of the Dictionary (or is that reality?) itself:

(but I will leave those for you to discover)

Often themes cross over, for example creativity and sexuality

Between 21

Characters and themes, also of course - He and sexuality

Cocktail 29 [very dark]

And you will have noticed, there’s a lot of dark humour in the book.

Déjà vu 37

Planet 100

Posters 102

It spills into themes.

Death and Comedy

Best practice 21

Deal 37

Spirituality and Comedy

Reincarnation 111

Salt 116

Art and Comedy

Caution 27

It spills into characters.

She and Comedy

Assurance 17

Hurry 64

I and Comedy

Chat 28

[backup Death and Comedy Bargain 20]

[general Comedy backup Clarification 29]

You may also have become aware that I have, some time ago, stopped necessarily reading selections in alphabetical order.  And this is where new reading strategies open up.  Because you can explore the themes, and indeed the characters, the more abstract tones and the qualities of The Kamikaze Mind, non-linearly as well as linearly. 

You can make your own remixes of the orders of lines on themes.

Here’s one I made:

Read: The ‘search’ was for ‘God’

 (C) 2006 Richard James Allen. 

All rights reserved.

(First published in Meanjin)

The ‘search’ was for ‘God’

Everywhere     As a child I was told that God was everywhere.  I used to look for him under the bed.

Edge     You’ll find God at the edge of your personality, just as the night is at the edge of the day, in the private invisible world of good and evil.

Faith     I don’t believe in God, but maybe God believes in me.

Irony     “You know what I think?” I tell you.  “God created man because he was lonely, man created God because he was lonely.

Decibels     Nothing is louder than the silence out of which the universe came and into which it will go, the silence underneath time, the silence we call God.

Maze     You tell me that I am a pathway to God and a distraction from God.  But isn’t that a paradox?  I ask you.  “It is the paradox,” you reply.

Misguided     I wrote this to help God, then I realised there wasn’t a God and then I realised there wasn’t a me, and then I got really lost.

God     God is the most beautiful idea we’ve had in quite a long time.

Beauty     “You human beings do not always understand,” you start to speak, “that beauty is not something you possess, but something that possesses you.  It is an attribute of God you must look after and pass on.”

Hysterical     God gave me a dolphin I couldn’t refuse.

So you can follow your interests, look up ideas or words you hope might be in there (if they are not there, you can read what is there, and or, write some new definitions yourself and post them on the website www.thekamikazemind.com!)

Take a chance - flip through, jump around, follow your intuition.

Find Images

Butterfly 24

Individual Lines

Sadness 116

Possible 102

[Individual lines and contexts]

Random Clusters

Exaggeration to Excuse 49

Varying clusters

Cluster A – Along to Alpha 13 to Alpha 14

Starting earlier and it means something completely different:

Cluster B – All to Along 13

Similarly, Individual Poems are easy to flip through & find, for example:

Ether 47

Familiar 52

You can also read the poems alone:

Anima 14

And then re-read them in their contexts

Amnesia 14 to Animus 15

[NB the contextual tone changes radically, thereafter, actually]

You can read a whole letter – some are short, medium or long.

We probably don’t have time for a long one,

but I will read one or two shorter ones

Read J 72 to 73

Possibly read K 74

                                                          [back up mid size one F 51-56]

Or read one line from each letter

Example (or two very different ones)

- Don’t have time for this today, but there is an example of such reading on the website where you can download a set of animations to your mobile phone.

You can flip through viewing the top of each page

– listing first and last words defined on that page.

Read first and last lines:

Expectation and Eye 50

Read one whole page:

Expectation to Eye 50

And finally, you can take a journey of intuitive lateral association

– I like that idea or word, I wonder if it is elsewhere. 

[If not, you might still find something else of interest and go from there…]

[An example of where the word is there:]

Let’s see, perhaps you think, this book would be a great gift idea,

so I’ll look up gift

Gift 57

Angel 14     (we heard that one earlier,

now it is resonating in two reading contexts)

Perfect 99

Different 39

Breath no, Breathe yes 23

Spirit no,

Time yes 134 (there are two but will chose to just take the first one)

Afraid 13 (seems like a stopping place!)

                        [And you can explore for yourself examples of when the word isn't there.]

To go even deeper, you can find out about the thematic and stylistic origins of this stand alone work in the context of its family – it is part of a larger cycle entitled The Way Out At Last Cycle.

Here are some pre-echoes of themes

Madness - A Disappointed Bridge, HOpe for a man named Jimmie & Grand Illusion Joe (Five Islands Press, 1993), p 19, nos 34 and 35

God – A Disappointed Bridge Jimmie & Joe, pp 25-26, nos [61,] 62-64

[Back up God - A Disappointed Bridge

Jimmie & Joe, p 12, nos 6, 8, 9] [etc]

And characters:

He – Interviews for the Freedom of Dreams, J & J, pp 29-34 (see selection)

[Also possible:

I – A Disappointed Bridge, J & Joe, p 11ff

She – Luck, J & J, pp 37ff]

Going back even deeper to the origins of the cycle:

In fragmentation, dreamscape, nightmare:
Chambers, To The Ocean & Scheherazade, Hale & Iremonger, 1989, pp19-21

Finding oneself in a dark landscape full of questions:

Excerpt from The Laughing Movie, TTO & Sch, pp82-84

Dark Humour:

Happy Birthday, which could almost be a prewritten review/

a pre-view of The Kamikaze Mind, TTO & Sch, p105

Find out what the author said in his thesis

Examples;

Speech at Launch

In fact this poem can be endlessly constructed and reconstructed to mean different things to different people

(Barthesian sense a text not a work). 

I have only touched on a few of the possible pathways or stategies.

To conclude where we began, recalling the first and most obvious possibility of reading it straight through, I will read the last few pages of the book.

Yarn 153 to Zzz157

Copyright © 2006 Richard James Allen.  All rights reserved.