Richard Cabut: On Creative Divination, Existential Vertigo, and His New Book of Poetry, "Disorderly Magic & Other Disturbances"
Richard Cabut sits cross-legged and slightly hunched, hair swept backwards and aloft as if caught in a sudden gust, while an exhausted cigarette tips noseward on a seemingly indifferent lower lip. A single eye meets the light with magnetic clarity while the other is obscured in shadow. Here, washed in a gutter green shade of nausea-nostalgia on the cover of Disorderly Magic & Other Disturbances, Cabut is “one of Marek Hlasko’s ‘beautiful twenty-somethings.’
Only, Cabut is no longer this twenty-something subtly leaning into futures unknown. The man I speak with over email is decades beyond him, and yet his writing remains informed by this young man’s discoveries, obsessions, anxieties. “I always thought of books as friends, or sometimes enemies, but in any event, living, breathing entities,” he tells me, and it’s clear that he’s flanked by some of the best: Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Samuel Beckett and J.G. Ballard, to name a few.
However, Disorderly Magic is not merely a work aligned with greatness. It is dark matter cast in the siren song of words well-wrought. Guided by the esotericism of Aleister Crowley and spurred by generational trauma and bruises borne of banality, Cabut has managed to “disgorge the psychological underworld” writhing just beneath our collective human hum.
Lydia Sviatoslavsky: I’m currently reading Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being. In a section titled “Look for Clues,” Rubin urges artists to seek guidance from their surroundings and take note of subtle transmissions. He writes:
A helpful exercise might be opening a book to a random page and reading the first line your eyes find. See how what’s written there somehow applies to your situation. Any relevance it bears might be by chance, but you might allow for the possibility that chance is not all that’s at play.
Reading this, I was reminded of your preface, in which you describe your practice of “bibliomancy.” When did you discover this practice? How did it strike?
Richard Cabut: Subtle transmissions are always good. And bibliomancy is exactly that.
I first came across it in my teens via Crowley, whose books I started buying circa 1976, at the age of 16, from a dusty old shop in Museum Street, London, called Atlantis.
So, along with punk, I started to discover what we could call esotericism. Both offered an entrée into the immeasurable and out of bounds.
Crowley, amongst other things, used a form of divination called bibliomancy – a randomly plucked phrase or a word from a book to give the questioner some indication of a likely drift or tone of the train of ensuing events/sensations.
I come from that sort of background – high weirdness – which I visit in Disorderly Magic and Other Disturbances – dark peasant Poland where, pre-war, the use of cards for fortune telling, visions and visitations, etc. were standard. My mother was psychic – again, described in the book. There were tarot cards in the house alongside shrines to the Black Madonna (‘Queen of Poland’).
From my teenage years onwards I used tarot and the I Ching, using the Book of Changes (the Wilhelm Reich translation with the Jung foreword – another purchase from the aforementioned Atlantis). But when I began ritualizing my writing practice – I think most writers have some sort of ritual associated with their writing, even if it’s just desk arrangement – it was natural for me to use bibliomancy as way of starting whatever piece or project I was working on. As described, picking a word at random from a random book to act as mojo.
I always thought of books as friends, or sometimes enemies, but in any event, living, breathing entities. Alchemists think matter in any form is, in some way or other, a living thing – and reading is surely a form of alchemy – transforming base substance into gold (i.e. ideas, inspiration). So, I talked to books in a way, and they talked back, in their own way. And when beginning to write a new book what better way to communicate directly regarding the drift of the words to come than via another book (rather than coins or cards)? You could even think of it as a form of foreshadowing, and a radical form of reading all in one – in which the writer and reader are themselves placed in the flow of more than one narrative – that of the book used for the bibliomancy, and also that of the book to be written afterwards. It’s metafiction at its most extraordinary, where you yourself are read or interpreted, using supernatural quotation marks, perhaps, by a book written and another about to be written.
LS: I want to talk about dichotomies in your work, specifically the division between the metaphysical and the merely physical, the magic and the mundane. In “Dreaming’s England,” England is commodified hyper speed, a “vast cold place.” The other England, however, buried deep, is seething magic and desire, “the chance of happiness beyond fucking shopping.” An echo of this division is reflected in the poem that follows, in which the “wound tight” day is answered by the night, healing with “garbled myth and experience.” In both cases, there’s an itchy sense of seeking the ‘other side,’ dark, fertile, potentially fatal, maybe what you’d call disorderly magic…
I am just someone who, like everyone, is
looking for some magic.
Dirty Magic.
Disorderly Magic.
//
…Insouciant visionaries following mad logic.
Your writing reads like a successful divination of this “disorderly magic.” How does your own mad logic drive or influence your work? What is the relationship between your work and your life? Do they play nicely together?
RC: As Charles Olson said, the best poetry is the kind of schizophrenia.
It is mad, as you say, but it seems to work. Disorderly Magic is actually about, or at least started out that way, the increasing incidents of mental break down or break up since COVID and the lockdowns, I guess. Everyone I knew seemed to be going crazy to varying degrees.
People, through no fault of their own largely, seemed to be coming adrift of their arcs and orbits – the meaning of the Crowley dictum from Book of the Law – every man and woman is a star – is not that everyone is a Tik Tok celeb in their own little way, but that everyone has their own star-like orbit. And their own arc to traverse. Trouble for self and society, if you like, happens when people lose track of their arc. Or fail to find, or come loose from, their true orbit.
My own orbit, I recognised from an early age, was/is largely based on writing, and by fulfilling myself in that area to the best of my intent I would be able to oblige the stars to revolve eternally around myself. For me, writing is the magic and vice versa.
As a teen, I lived in small-town, working/lower-middle class suburbia – Dunstable, Bedfordshire. Thirty miles from the capital. There, kids left school and went on the track, the production line, at the local factory, Vauxhall Motors. If you achieved some qualifications you could join the civil service. Meanwhile, Trevor and Nancy had been going out with each other since Third Form and watched TV round each other’s houses every night, not saying a word. A preparation for marriage. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew I didn’t want any of that. Instead, I was in love with punk rock. I was in love with picking up momentum and hurling myself forward somewhere. Anywhere. I wanted to rip up the pieces to see where they landed. I was a suburban punk Everykid in pins and zips, with a splattering of Jackson Pollock and a little Seditionaries. In my bedroom there was some Aleister Crowley, a bit of Sartre, 48 Thrills (bought off Adrian at a Clash gig), Sandy Roberton’s White Stuff (from Compendium in Camden) and Sniffin’ Glue and Other Self Defence Habits (July ’77), of course. If, as the cliché has it, escape from the ghetto could only be achieved by means of sport or showbiz, then either learning three chords or scrawling a fanzine was the easiest way out of the suburbs for bored punk rockers. I was rubbish on guitar at the time, and so I started planning my first fanzine, which became Kick. The start of my writing ‘career’ – detailed in more lyrical depth within my last (and forthcoming in a new edition) novel Looking for a Kiss.
LS: Your Chelsea Girls piece knocked me out several times over. I inked the shit out of it, so I’ll just select a few stanzas…
They want to touch themselves
all the time,
but not too profoundly.
Chelsea Girls are the experimental film that
they themselves have been waiting to
participate in all their lives.
Not so much a narrative as a Spectacle–
in state of perpetual deterioration.
We’re not into films.
What then? Chaos.
They give dark depression
an artistic slant.
The Chelsea Girls talk incessantly -
they know
that if they ever stop
the future will be revealed instantly.
Are we seeing a proliferation of Chelsea Girls in the age of the self-made Spectacle, or does it only appear that way as they dominate our pocket screens? How much is the Chelsea Girl a mirror to (or bloated product of) her society? I was reminded of Tiqqun’s Theory of the Young-Girl:
“The Young-Girl is consumer society's total product and model citizen… The ignorance with which the Young-Girl plays her role as cornerstone of the present system of domination is part of the role.”
RC: The Young Girl concept? Interesting. Maybe. And, if you like: certainly!
Definitely in that the Young Girl (like the Chelsea Girls, obviously not a gendered concept) ‘never creates anything; All in all, she only recreates herself.’
For her existence as ‘a battlefield upon which neuroses, phobias, somatizations, depression, and anxiety each sound a retreat.’
And ‘The Young-Girl would thus be the being that no longer has any intimacy with herself except as value, and whose every activity, in every detail, is directed to self-valorization.’
The Chelsea Girls carry that same self value-added nothingness. Their interest in extremes the best reflection of the main tendencies of our time – although set in the 80s, the CGs, are archetypes disgorged from the psychological underworld, and the piece is, amongst other things, a pitiless and uncompromising, as well as funny, I hope, dissection of the contemporary psyche. It is a savage and brutally honest peek at a modern lifestyle characterized by a certain amount of aimlessness, and self-abuse (RE ego and otherwise) via reliance on narcissism, extreme pornography and drugs.
LS: In “Feelings Get Bleached Out,” you write of the Camden boozers, “fading testaments to times past” who are now living in “their own colorful movie,” which they stubbornly believe to be “surely more magical” than the “9-5 conformists…” Here, we see a sort of disorderly magic gone dry. So chaos calcifies into another form of routine. How to sustain the magic? How to invite it back as time flicks on?
RC: Well, for me personally, it’s a question of recognizing and accepting – and I’m old enough to be able to do this I think – although I agree that true age isn’t always measured in years lived – that a person’s orbit isn’t a straight line, and that it curves and dips sometimes and rises at others, that your arc can be some sort of amorphous, unlimited, unstructured stream with ambient undercurrents of impact – disorienting but always in motion.
The stream can drift, cascade and sometimes dry up a little. But that even the terrible or very boring periods are, at the end, part of the magic. I think it’s this understanding that stops solipsism curdling into the sort of cynicism that refuses the possibility of surprise, fostering a sense of self-annihilating malice. The kind that leads people to sit or lie motionless, overwhelmed with the feeling that it’s no longer possible to set things right in life – i.e. to be a part of their own orbit – and the only possibility is to forget. But it’s actually essential to remember – and that is the one-word answer.
LS: “Thoughts while watching Chelsea Girls” and “Music I Listened to in My Head While Walking Around the Jean-Michel Basquiat Exhibition.” both fall within William Burroughs’ definition of cut-up:
Cut-ups make explicit a psychosensory process that is going on all the time anyway… I was sitting in a lunchroom in New York having my doughnuts and coffee. I was thinking that one does feel a little boxed in in New York, like living in a series of boxes. I looked out the window and there was a great big Yale truck. That's cut-up—a juxtaposition of what's happening outside and what you're thinking of.
Were you toying with these ideas? The juxtaposition of the internal/external experience shows up in your work somewhat frequently. I’m very interested in the way these internal experiences interact with the physical world.
RC: Right. Language as a tool that triggers, traverses, expresses and examines the potential and the limitations of interaction of thought and action.
It’s not dissimilar to automatic writing – a means of bypassing rationality and logic to explore the hidden connections between words meaning and their sources and effects. It offers us a way to understand the intricate bonds between concepts through the ineffable, unifying force of connotation.
It also implies a dance between objective events and the fluctuating subjective psyche of the observer. The self, we maybe realize, is not a fixed point, but instead a constantly evolving entity that can be better comprehended when we chart its movements.
In the right hands, cut-ups – a form of literary, psychic collage – can accomplish this task. As though using a filter to sieve out what is ultimately unimportant, rearranging the pieces of, um, reality into a more (un)comprehensible whole, allowing us to see – and cause events. It’s a spell. It’s a language of opening up structures and edifices.
LS: In the introduction to Disorderly Magic, you write, “The aim is to transform/reconstruct the sense of the world as the unfolding connection between people, events and place remake its pattern.” A la Donnie Darko. What inspired this aim?
RC: Well, I think I wanted to explore, in a lyrical way, the interaction between memory, art and reality, or truth.
I’ve always been asked, in relation to my work, is it real? Did it really happen?
I suppose I’ve always answered, yes and no. Is the narrative an accurate portrayal of ‘what happened’? Not entirely, no. Is it true? Yes, of course!
I think we can say that truth doesn’t depend on facts. It depends on imagination and context. CS. Lewis said about truth: ‘For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition. It is, I confess, undeniable that such a view indirectly implies a kind of truth or rightness in the imagination itself.’ I’m with CS.
JM Coetzee says ‘We should distinguish two kinds of truth, the first truth to fact, the second something beyond that… we should take truth to fact for granted and concentrate on the more vexing question of a ‘higher’ truth… the best you can hope for is a story that will not be the truth but may have some truth value of a mixed kind – some historical truth, some poetic truth – a fiction of the truth.’ I’m with JM.
I love that idea of that poetic truth – one which grasps, like barbed wire, the essence of truth.
Writing is always edited and selected from a cache of imagination and memory – sequenced and altered, sped up, slowed down, disconnected, reconnected in different ways. Public and private identities are configured and reconfigured – pushed and pulled – events compressed and distorted. In this way the ‘real’ story is disrupted and the new story becomes the unreal truth. Or vice versa.
I remember the simulacra. Baudrillard’s theory of the same, arguing that documented history is nothing but an unreliable copy of the actual past created by an impaired memory system. And personal history via poetry or any creative format? Same. Exactly. The feigning of originality or identity or validity. Memory, in this respect, is something illusionary by nature, and it does not reflect the past as it was, but replaces it in a different, ‘better’ or ‘worse’, form with exclusions, inclusions, adornments and shadowings – a translucent whirl of snow. A translucent whirl of mist. A translucent world of mist. An obscuring of the understanding of our stories and our very subjectivity (the self itself a construct of memory and imagination). Centred not in the notion of preservation but in discovery and the urge to free myself from it, to expand and appear beyond it. We tell our stories to alter ourselves. This creates the shadows, in which the lure and allure exists. At the heart of your question is a shifting interaction between shadows and furtive peaks at what lies both beneath and beyond.
LS: You write of the sacred, ghosts and hellfire, the “god in the typewriter.” If you’re willing to share, I’d love to hear about your own belief system, what it's driven by and how it guides you.
RC: Well on the surface it may seem like I subscribe to some variant of vaguely offbeat spirituality made for post modernism with focus on aforesaid spiritually-based syncretism and psychoanalytical principles of the ‘self’. I.e. I believe in it all, all of it…
… but only because of complex anxiety issues possibly arising from generational trauma (see relevant poems in Disorderly Magic) prompting a need for the occasional half a 3.75mg of Zopiclone (close relative to Ambien) at night and a bit of psychic consultation, holding on to scattered fragments of thinking about belief and faith, tarot, I Ching, chakra activation, yoga practices for concentrating the mind, body etc. – hopefully triggering at least nodding terms understanding that belief is not just a utilitarian function – a very faint interest in the symbolism and use of magical processes (sigils etc.), applauding the foggy notion of spiritual precociousness as a brash and audacious refusal to give in to the state of the world or the universal situation, regressive hypnosis (maybe one day, could be fun), refusing to look for short cuts or consolations, blithely dismissing ‘scientific rules’ as ‘statistical approximations’, applauding the very idea of devotion but flaking on the practice, although irregular prayer at the church of the poisoned mind, as it were – with the idea in mind of gathering resources to stare at what is fairly terrible without too much anguish or artifice. All for the purposes of defeating said anxiety via (the fleeting illusion, perhaps) of capable control. A kind of psychic pre-ordering of an easier life, if you like.
But, no actually, I think the blind universe, which runs on pure chance and loaded dice, doesn’t give a shit, and nothing but nothing will exist until you yourself create it.
LS: The call of the void (l’appel du vide) stirs within your writing, resisting “calculated determinism,” seeking “transportation along non-linear narrative,” a desire to “float adrift.” How does poetry answer this call?
RC: Poetry is not dissimilar to dark energy, it possesses yet often confounds complete recognition or stability – it and we (both reader and writer) can drift or glide. The vertigo of the modern sensibility and self (‘all realities in time grow into a fiction about the self’). Although there is no measuring time, it means nothing. As they say, all poetry, all writing is a beautiful attempt to be what you could/should/would have become. The verse/life subsequent to this one. In that respect I guess it’s a form of hauntology – not artistic mourning for futures lost, but discovering and altering the consciousness of that loss, if that is what it is. Anyway, there is no point in mourning – the past is continuously becoming something else. There is no loss after all. What we find when we return to it are shards and shapes shifted. Not for nothing is poetry described as the supreme fiction of the self (Wallace Stevens). My favourite poetry and some of attempts of my own, if I’m in the mood, take in hand the idea of words as invocation or enchantment, exploring the various disparate ways the self might evolve or alter and how it’s essence might transition flicker and change. Agitated, edgy, fathomless from and living in a new and other world. Je est un autre – Rimbaud – the Other is the poetic self, the seer, metamorphized through artistry. And burning images sear via hallucinations thrown at the turning page. Always observed with eyes assertive of a higher vision. And thrilling to the senses – hot like some celebration of a new star visible for the first time. Its fresh orbit registering the same tension as that of our own act of floating adrift in the visionary impulse.
*
Richard Cabut is author of the novel Looking for a Kiss (PC-Press, 2023, previously Sweat Drenched Press, 2020), and the book of modern literature/poetry Disorderly Magic and Other Disturbances (Far West Press, 2023). He co-edited/-contributed to the anthology Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night (Zer0 Books, October 2017), and was also a contributor to Ripped, Torn and Cut – Pop, Politics and Punks Fanzines From 1976 (Manchester University Press, 2018) and Growing Up With Punk (Nice Time, 2018).
