“Selected Catastrophies” — subtitled “In the Cavern of the Damned” — is the fourth section of a book of poems by the incandescent South African poet Sinclair Beiles, entitled Sacred Fix. It was edited by Gerard Bellaart and published in 1975 by Cold Turkey Press in a limited first edition of 250 copies. This poem comes fifth in the section. Its prescience and despair are striking, don’t you think?
society! I will not support you when you shed your hideous electronic disguises and stagger through the alleyways of oblivion looking for shelter. o society you betrayed me with your promises of paradise and then I found you out and kept to myself, and now the whole world has found you out and is banging at your deserted edifices demanding new lives. society! you have left a wake of perplexity behind you. your experts, disillusioned, are casting themselves into the sea. the whole damned pantomime has come to an end and people are searching for themselves in the rubbish dumps . . . society which destroyed souls and implanted a supersoul an inferior mass soul has lost all its energy and fled. society, if you stagger by me carrying your disguises under your arm I will trip you up and laugh.
Here is the fourth poem in that section. It illuminates Beiles’s desperate state of mind when he was writing these poems.
there is a way of committing suicide called poetry there is a way of taking a knife and carving from the infinite nothingness of the sky a solitary cell in which one spends a lifetime pacing about occasionally shouting messages through the barred cell window at different passers by. there is a way of trying to create a universe with all its constellations from the view of people scurrying by in the rain with their umbrellas up, a way of ruling a nation of shadows. there is a way of imagining one possesses all the secrets of the soul and this gift will provide one with freedom, a way of imagining all the sights not yet photographed by the travel agencies there is a way of believing one has special dreams . . .
With thanks to Gerard Bellaart who sent me images of the original mimeographed version of “Selected Catastrophes.”
