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Sex-Crazed Dope-Fiend Rapes Chicken: Slays 20

by Peter J. Needham

or University Interaction with Life

Brain-Surgeons, lichen tenders, embalmers and students! Are you impatient to read about a maniac and a fowl? If so, proceed immediately to the special lust supplement at the end of this article. If not, read on and fry your mind in artistic and philosophical oil.

A Non-cartoon—"like shaking hands with a non-existent bandit". This one demonstrates the atmosphere of hovering lucid silence alluded to in the title. The six stars on 'Old Glory" may puzzle the neophyte. Actually, the stars are a reflection of other elements in the Non-cartoon. They have no extra significance.

Firstly, do you consider yourself to be agnostic, moderately socialistic, liberal in ideas, critical of the establishment, sexually enlightened, totally committed to racial equality and firmly opposed to the war in Vietnam? Do you dislike corporal punishment, abhor American foreign policy, object to censorship and support prison reforms?

If you answer "yes , why not join the Friendly Society of Dissident Students? We have individualists in our ranks! Yes, we have a vast mass of similar looking, similar speaking, similar thinking individualists of uniform age, colour, character, and behaviour, all of whom agree with the above ideas. Why not join us? There's a place for you (9 rows down, 5 spaces from the left) in the army of individualists!

A thousand turnips! What hideous sameness of opinion! What lack of originality! Like it or not, New Zealand universities breed lackeys who strut about advertising the thoughts, ideas, and convictions of others. We have Marxists, Socialists, Communists, Trotskyists, Spartacists, Fascists, and followers of Che Guevara, Lenin, Mao, Hitler, and miscellaneous other bods. We lack formulators of private theories, with courage to plan their own ideas and follow themselves.

Why is this so? Concocting your own seething mixture of philosophy and religion is not a hard process. Take the Hindu idea of Maya—the universe exists because you perceive it. Swapping this around somewhat we arrive at an acceptable alternative—the universe exists to perceive you. While this is an intriguing thought, it's just a beginning —you are the only one to determine your own beliefs. By gradually enlarging your mental screens you will suddenly find yourself the complete master of your cerebral environment. Now you can achieve miraculous things.

Who was Karl Marx? Why slavishly believe he was a German economist? A little practice can have you accepting him as a rock-garden, a bass-fiddle, or an edible newspaper. The mind is the eye. Look at commonplace objects; are they not beautiful? That fishing-bag isn't a fishing bag—it's a melon, or perhaps a typewriter-javelin.

Cont. on page 8

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University Interaction with Life — cont. from page 7.

This is true liberation. Cease your fixability; let your mind flow. Do you think Man's wonderous brain was designed to be cemented with concrete thought? Let it expand and cover everything. The university where you toil could well become a meat-forest before you finish reading this; such is the adaptability of the cerebral environment. It's merely a matter of training. Remember; a revolutionary has reactionary limits to his mental processes unless he guards against them.

No dribble takes longer to hit the ground than political dribble. Politics is an evil; politicians are men who devote their time and energy to preventing the masses from becoming porcelain washbasin-fittings. This is why universities are seizing up. Forget politics—statesmen are only doorstops. Sup-posing each of the 700 million Chinese believed he was God. Where would Mao be? He'd be playing bagpipes in a steam kitchen in Miami.

Political cartoons are regrettable in that they perpetuate the myth of political power. Reproduced on this page is a political Non-Cartoon, which forms a synthesis of all human situations that have, are, and ever will occur. To look at a Non-Cartoon imparts a feeling of negative expectancy, rather like shaking hands with a nonexistent bandit. As well as being blindingly funny, it is flecked with pathos, for in the Non-Cartoon all political cartoons are rendered obsolete forever. Such revolution smacks of true genius.

Where are your revolutions? Where are your revolutionaries? There are none whatsoever—hey're bogged in politics. Maybe a few fellows charge around killing millions and improving social conditions, out that's no revolution. When an old man sits quietly on a stack of books and is honoured with a dustpan and bottle of tooth-enamel—that is revolution! Or when you run furiously up the stairs of an elegant palace to confront a naked prisoner who places one foot in a goldfish bowl and sings of his mother— that is revolution! Madness is the mother! But these are my ideas, not yours. Don't just exist . . . Think I Think something totally new! Totally different! Become fervent about it.

What's needed in this country is a furiously writhing awareness; a sort of national Dada. Dada was the product of an upheaval; can New Zealand produce neo-thinking without upheaval? Let's start electric fervour in the universities. Look at Forum, you pack of putty-knife exorcists. Speakers face a torpid mass of student anemia and drivel out irrelevancies. A man gets up and speaks about library reforms; another arises to put forward a plan for world domination. Both speakers are received the same way! It's disgracefull Why such inaction? A man discussing anything—be it Nietzsche or mar shallow buglers—should stand assured of being lauded or lynched at the end of his speech. We must get involved in black polemic anti-death.

Men are mud-fillets; everything that whiffs of obsolescence must be immediately blessed by priests and converted into antimatter. Even the most extreme forms of Socialism are decrepit well before they are spawned because they fail to cater for the necessary psychological aristocracy.

Take poetry, for instance. All indirect poetry is archaic. It must be designed as an onslaught, with each stanza wired to the nebulous ZAP! Plays are similar. Bacchanalian naked grovellers serve only to embellish the immortal phalanx of ligaments. Yes, human ligaments. Plays must be exquisite, even if this requires the actors to be physically melted and poured on to the stage. This, of course, is the perfect play, though unattainable as yet. Our actors are merged into a personification of drama; they have been melted in a crucible and reduced to a viscous hot liquid. The liquid is cooled, and large amounts of gelatin added. It is then emptied on to the set stage; a large jelly trembling with its integral human character. (See illustration of stage setting). The audience will not applaud; all will be silent. The quintessence of human theatrical achievement has materialised before their astonished eyes.' The jelly will next be painted on to their feet and they shall watch live drama enacted on their skin.

Painting, on the other hand, is almost excruciating in its utter visual attack. Because of this it must be approached with great caution, like a child placing a foot in the sun. Painting is not a thick carpet, painting is a protest—as irritating in reverse as a querulous necrophile.

And where is music? Must it go the Cage way, the way of silence and chance? No! Music should be played at night on organs of algum. This is the mirror-image of hymns.

While idiots and misguided men gibber of Mao, motorbikes, women, countries, Cuevara, and so on, the real prophets pass unnoticed like monks in the night. Tinguely, Duchamp, Dali, Lebel—these are the ones who lay the foundations! Build on them with stones of consciousness.

Greaseproof quartermasters, barrel violinists, licorice ebb-foulards, irredeemable sycamores, ashes of darkness and mothers! March now for the implosion of the psyche. I can only exhort you. Your world will follow your mind!

• A type of sandalwood mentioned in the bible.