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Divinity
by Mingus Tourette
Forward by Marvin Gander>>
"You three cunts, that's what's the problem, up down
and inbetween. Cryptic fuckers, and all that sort. That's
the problem Tourette's got with you. The devil, the ghost
and the host. And you expect me to believe this shit.
You people and your god and your devil and your walk up
a mountain that doesn't exist. See, the old man, dante and
his poet Virgil, at least they made it poetic. And so it
goes. Railing against, over the railing."
So it goes. So it starts. So it begins. So it ends, as Mingus
Tourette would say. He asked me the other day to write a
forward for his book, which i thought would be difficult,
given that he hadn't actually written more than a couple
of 'CUNTOS', but I was signed on to interview him about
it, so what the hell, I says. Sounds like fun.
If you've been around the books at all, you're going to
recognize the structure of his Divinity project immediately.
It came into being as a concept about six years ago,
the first time that Mingus opened a copy of Dante's Divine
Comedy. Mingus started writing something analogous at the time,
but it turned out to be a filthy 'erotic vampire movie'
that he's long since dumped into the vault. As he says,
he didn't understand the process of writing at the time, and fucked it up royally.
Though he'd shit the bed on his first attempt, he kept it in the back
of his mind that he was going to work on it again when he knew what the hell
he was talking about.
A couple more years passed, and Mingus started corresponding
with a German art director named Owen Von Reichstag for
some school project or paper article or something, because
the director had written an artistic manifesto about film
making. The manifesto was called 'Das Minuten'. Mingus was enthralled
by the idea of creating something similar, an artistic credo to
live by, and started gathering a tight cabal of local writers
to help him draft one.
Me and him were starting to get to know each other at the time, along
with a few other guys who wrote poems and were generally
sensitive men in the Al Purdy sense of the word. That is;
we drank, got drunk, couldn't get laid, wrote it down. It
was mostly just talk round the pub table, but Mingus kept track. We started discussing something called
'mindstream', which to his credit, came from Mingus's mouth.
Mindstream was an idea, something like freefall writing,
like stream of consciousness, but further above, less collected,
tied in to reality only at the base of it all. I won't go
into it here, because the true definition lies in Mingus's
seminal essay "Mindstream: Straight
from the Stem". In any case, we started to refer
to it; 'write a mindstream piece', 'rip it straight mindstream' and so on, and the thing
took root. Mingus used to joke about its creation as part
serious, part selfmockery. 'It's like a religion. Started
out as a lark, that's your word, and ended up as something
real. Like believing in a self made god. At some point you
can't remember if you created it, or if it created itself,
or in god's case, it created you.'
Felt like patting him on the top of the head. See, I'm older
than he is.
It was a couple years later, and he was the one who'd
gotten articles published and who'd getting some respect (in a roundabout
kind of way) about the method of mindstream. He had written
a number of pieces that experimented with telling the same
story twice; once in a typical narrative, once in a mindstream
form. Still, he'd never approached a novel length project with
the technique. Until now.
Mingus sold Rorschach at bf on the idea of the mindstream novel
and got the writing post to create 'buzzcock'. Buzzcock is the experimental online novel about Rory Buzzcock's quest for the drug 'Bollocks', a drug that's supposed to allow the user to manipulate reality. It takes place primarily in Morocco and Amsterdam. Mingus was originally
going to write buzzcock twice; once in mindstream, once
with typical narrative. His intention was to leave it up to the public to decide
which they thought was stronger in the end. Buzzcock was begun
in typical nonmindstream form, but somewhere along the
way, Mingus ran into a problem. He fell too far in love with his characters and
couldn't bring himself to write the story two ways. He's
still writing buzzcock in typical narrative form, and it will eventually appear on bf, but the thing was, he still owed it Rorschach to write a mindstream novel for bf. So he had to come up with something.
The solution was right under his nose, but he fucked with
it for a long time. He was playing with other titles he was thinking
of writing and trying to turn them into mindstream, but
it wasn't working. In the way a poem's a poem and not a
novel, he couldn't force anything to conform to mindstream
ideals. He was writing lots of straight mindstream and bitching
to me about how he couldn't get the project's theme down
proper and asked me to read some of his material, so I did. He owed me a pint,
so I sat with him while he watched young girls walk by the
pub and read his latest stream. There were lots of devils and ghosts
and hauntings, and I look up at him in the sunshine and
said, 'Looks like Dante's still rattling round in there with you.'
That twigged it. He kind of let out a soft groan, and
with glazed over eyes, pulled a pen out of his pocket and started writing.
I didn't exist any more. I handed the sheets back, drank my pint and watched the
girls while he figured out his 'divinity' on napkins. That's how it started.
Now, Dante's the base for this project, no doubt, but it's a whole new novel, so don't think it's a knockoff. It's the same idea that old Joyce had when he read the Odyssey and decided it would be well set in Dublin. It's a whole new creation. There are old pieces of parchment, and the plot's near the same, but it's an entirely different divine comedy. I hope that you'll see that newness and enjoy it. He's added as he's wanted and taken away as he wanted. As he would say,
'Just like old Gabriel. Laying carnage and waist on the field as he passes, deeper, deeper, down the hole, into the stream, over the river Acheron, past the boatman and the woods and deepdeep into the hole, into the abyss, directly down the stem, overflowing as it is, down the mindstream.'
-Marvin Gander
June 2001
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