Report of the First Congress
of the New Lettrist International
I had been active in the Preliminary Committee for several years,
so I was very excited when it became possible to schedule the First
Congress of the New Lettrist International. Now it was actually
taking place. Our first rendez-vous was on Friday night in a bar
down by the river. I soon saw our little party, recognisable by the
pile of suitcase brought from across the world. Some people I knew
well, others I had corresponded with but never met, and there were
yet more whose very names were new to me. In all there were about
seventy of us gathered on that summer's evening spread around the
tables between the bar and river.
I was not amongst the first to arrive. There were already a couple
of dozen lettrists, some of whom had been imbibing all afternoon.
Our hosts had to remain reasonably sober as they crossed names off
lists, allocated accommodation and handed out transport details.
Most of us would be driven out to an old hospice that evening. It
had been squatted and now constituted the home of a small community
who had offered us their facilities for the weekend. They could
only offer barrack-type accommodation sleeping on the floor and
some had opted for other accomodation. We had brought a tent and
arranged to camp in the grounds of the hospice.
Soon I was part of the whirl of hugs and kisses, as friends
separated by hundreds or even thousands of miles greeted each other
and caught up with each others' news. There was general excitement,
as we all looked forward to the congress lifting our activities to
new heights. When Luther Blissett arrived he was surrounded by a
small entourage. Even at that stage I was worried that a successful
conference might feed his growing sense of self importance. (On
Sunday morning I was able to have a discrete word with Karen Eliot
about this, and we agreed to monitor the situation and bring about
Blissett's deflation, if necessary.)
Varon arrived late, dressed in his customary cloak, despite the
warmth of the evening. He was quick to order some beer to initiate
a drinking bout which would go on into the small hours of the
morning. I knew he would gather around himself a school of hardened
drinkers, and that this would constitute a large part of their
agenda for the congress, as it did for all his other activities.
This meant that he would be most approachable now or on Saturday
afternoon - we would of course see little of him or his hardiest
disciples before lunch next day. I decided to collar him
immediately.
We were both veterans of Outer Spaceways Incorporated, a
psychogeographical outfit which had roamed Essex in the early
seventies. I had been working on a film script based on the OSI for
some students from Farnham. I wanted him to check through the
account of the trip to Paris and the meeting with Sun Ra, an event
in which I was unhappily unable to participate. He thumbed through
the script I offered him, till his eyes lit upon a certain
passage.
"Ah, so you've included the marmite gag" he smiled, enjoying his
own gag. He had pulled this stunt at a particularly dull party,
emerging from the toilet licking marmite from a piece of toilet
paper exclaiming how lovely it was. Of course, this was back in the
seventies when even such a simulation could be inspirational. How
did we know then that by the nineties there would be artists ready
to genuinely eat their own and each others' faeces in order to get
a little attention from bored critics.
Our conversation drifted between reminiscences and a more abstract
discussion about how to historicise the follies of our youth, when
Lynn and Mavis, the 'Trappist Twins' came into the
conversation.
"They're going to be here this weekend" Varon told me. "I've always
kept up with them, and they're prepared to come out of retirement
if the NLI looks any good."
"Have you got Lynn to talk yet", I asked, remembering how she had
never said a word throughout eighteen months involvement with OSI.
Her sister, Mavis could occasionally be induced to mutter, and
would indeed speak for both of them on occasions. Sometimes it
seemed that Lynn was whispering to Mavis, but despite various
attempts to observe this phenomena at close hand, no-one could
assert that her lips had definitely moved.
"Oh no. I've only contacted them by phone, and it's always been
Mavis who's answered. Lynn's got two children now, thirteen and
seven. They all live with Mavis who's got a job as a gardener in
Danbury Palace. She doesn't get paid much, but they let her grow
her own vegetables there, so at least they don't have to buy much
food. They live down a lane round the back of the Cricketeers."
We didn't see Lynn and Mavis that night, but they arrived after
lunch the next day. The morning had consisted of a welcoming
address by our hosts followed by brief introductions by all the
delegates. The first session had been a brief outline of the
history of the old Lettriste Internationale, an account of the need
for a New Lettrist International and a resume of the activities of
the Preliminary Committee. I didn't bother to hang around for this,
but helped Jürgen and Estelle mount some of the exhibits. I
was particularly struck by the Hmong display.
The Hmong are a mountain people who live in Laos and Vietnam. The
had participated in the world wide insurrection against capitalism
following the collapse of the First World War by mounting what the
French colonialists dismissively called The War of the Insane.
Under the mystical leadership of Pa Chai, the Hmong had constructed
a magical gun and successfully held off the colonial authorities
for two years (1919-21). However, when some Hmong warriors murdered
several local Laotians, something which Pa Chai's spirit guide had
explicitly forbidden, Pa Chai abandoned the uprising, and the Hmong
insurgents ran off to hide in the forest. The French authorities
paid some Laotian assassins to murder Pa Chai.
Forty years later, in 1959, an illiterate Hmong peasant called
Shong Lue Yang claimed he had a divine revelation whereby he was
instructed to make himself an opium pipe, which would facilitate
communication with a divine power. The drug-induced states helped
him communicate with his twin sons, with whom is wife, Pang Xiong,
was pregnant. They taught him a new alphabet for the Hmong, and
Shong Lue devoted his time to studying this whilst his fields were
tended by birds, mice and ants. When his sons were eventually born,
his wife's parents paid a visit, and his mother-in-law castigated
Shong Lue and Pang Xiong for being lazy. The two newly born infants
turned blue. Shong Lue showed his father-in-law an example of his
new script (direct communication with his mother-in-law being
forbidden in Hmong culture), who then showed it to his wife. She
put a stop to her torrent of scolding. Although the twins faces
returned to normal, they nevertheless both died in the next couple
of weeks. Nevertheless, Shong Lue found a message from the younger
twin who explained that they had decided to depart because of the
amount of trouble they had caused him.
Shong Lue Yang devoted the rest of his life to propagating his
script amongst the Hmong people. Although persecuted by the Viet
Cong, right wing Hmongs maintained that the mythical origin
disguised a Russian and/or Chinese 'communist' plot. These Hmongs
had adopted the imperialist Roman alphabet. After twelve years he
was assassinated by troops of CIA backed General Vang Pao in 1971.
Since then his followers have still propagated his script even
though the punishment for using it in Vietnam is judicial
murder.
I thought this was one of the more interesting matters raised
during the Congress. The first debate I attended was on anarchism.
Shinsetsu O-Tearai from Japan, opened this with scorching attack on
Johnnie Moore's Anarchy and Ecstasy. She quoted chapter and verse
from Ei-sai's The Protection of the State by the Propagation of Zen
and mocked anarchism as an intellectually unstimulating doctrine
secreted by the European enlightenment. She then propounded
Do-gen's theory of The Sutra Equal in Size to the Whole World
concerning a 'text' which was written with characters drawn from
heaven, from man and the beasts, and from the vegetable world. This
she compared to John Toland's theory of seeds within matter, and
William Blake's injunction "to see the world in a grain of sand".
She concluded that only Lettrism can reconcile the finest fruits of
East and West. This was received with rapturous applause.
The carefully managed show piece of the Congress was delivered
after lunch. Blissett presented his 'flaming' of Hakim Bey. He
characterised his methods as the three-fold technique of
conspiracy: action/cover-up/exposure. The first phase consisted of
publishing a book allegedly by Bey. In fact all sorts of elements
were inserted amongst genuine Bey tracts, including one of Stalin's
speeches. This occurred whilst two of Bey's publishers were having
a squabble. Buffo had edited out a reference to Che Guevara as the
"Rudolph Valentino of Red Fascism" so as not to offend the
leftists. The others wanted noting to do with him. Bey got dragged
into all, and wound up backing up Buffo with threats of court
action to the others. Then Blissett's book was exposed as a being
fraudulent, designed to expose the intellectual inadequacies of the
Italian avant-garde. It was taken up by the mass media, and Buffo's
complaints that only mainstream culture should be attacked in such
a way exposed him to even more ridicule. Varon took advantage of
the subsequent discussion to point out the completely spurious
nature of Blissett's three-fold formula, as the middle term, far
from being any sort of cover up was the fortuitous actions of
people unconnected with the original plot. Blissett accepted this
point, but as a strength rather than a weakness.
That evening I managed to catch up with Mavis. It turned out she
was involved in a complex piece of Lettrist gardening which
apparently involved planting seeds according to algebraic
calculations based on renaissance theories of sympathy, by which
various species of plant were linked with the humours and
astrological events to create an alphabetical garden of the stars.
At least that was what she seemed to say through her mumbles. Lynn
smiled but said not a word. I later heard that Blissett had got
really paranoid about the two sisters, and had even speculated that
they might be spies. Fortunately he was put in his place on that
score.
Sunday morning was sparsely attended which was just as well. The
talk about Nonsology had been brought forward from the afternoon -
but without informing the speaker. So it never took place. However,
by lunch time everyone was assembled, and prepared statements were
read out. These had been concocted by five or six hard-nosed
politicos who had boycotted the other socialising in order to
produce their verbal confections. They were generally well
received, and the afternoon was spent ironing out the practical
consequences of these lofty pronouncements.
By four o'clock the congress was wound up, and the delegates
started to drift off. We would not be meeting up for over a year
now, and a warm atmosphere pervaded the hall as we each took leave
from friends old or new. The New Lettrist International had now
been launched and we had all resolved to plunge back into our work
with renewed zeal. I was proud to be part of this historic moment.
London Psychgeographical
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