Heathcote Williams, poet, playwright, essayist, lyricist, actor, artist, magician, political activist and much else besides, died 1 July 2017.
By Nick Victor, International Times, 2 July 2017
The great man’s passing.
Amongst uncountable powerful magical acts of creation. Heathcote and Mike Lesser brought International Times back to life. Heathcote providing most of the good people , and tirelessly encouraging. all . He was a great man great Anarchist, poet, play right and all round approachable and sympathetic leader. It’s difficult to remember a time since the early nineteen seventies when he wasn’t at the very least an interesting part of me and my comrades life’s. A man of immense heart, sympathy , intelligence and wit missed so very very much.
With deep love and sadness.
Dream for us in the great beyond and we will listen to you Heathcote.
On the Fading of Stars (for Heathcote Williams)
By David Erdos, 1 July 2017
When one of the great voices fades
The world no longer knows how to listen;
Pictures are splintered and what was clear
In a cloud is wrenched loose.
Shining through it all is the light
That was initially formed to dare darkness;
Prising it open, like malnourished hands
On sweet fruit.
A special man has just died who I saw
Fashion light from his laughter;
A small electric bulb conjured
By the dexterous hands that wrote spells;
Dense invocations of words
And comprehensive poetics,
Erudite interrogations of the systems
And codes the failed sell.
And yet his was always success,
From early days, each endeavour;
Word photographs of the speakers
Or the stigmatics rage below stairs,
Then the spraying of truth
Across Ladbroke Grove, stars and places,
The saviour grace for the homeless
Whose continued torrent of language
Drowned out defeat and changed air.
The genius in the room with his
Fountain pen and mind water; the source
Of all rivers for those that he befriended
And loved. A man whose clear life
Captured the fog found in others,
Crystallising intention before posting to hell,
Or above. The journalist of the heart,
And Poet of the eye, whose voice music
Fused word and meaning and turned
Disasters birds into doves.
From ravens to stars he flew with all
Through his writing; Now that a new
Migration has started and we will be
Watching the sky that’s now his.
We will see the perfect calligraphy
Of his lines in those streaks of dawn
And torn sunsets. Let each new thought
Now be his thought and our time with him
This life’s gift.
In Conversation with a Dying Friend
By Heathcote Williams on the death of his friend Mike Lesser, July 2015
“Death… the most awful of evils is nothing to us, seeing that when we are, death is not yet, and when death comes, we are not.” – Epicurus
Mike Lesser
A friend rings me to say that he’s dying.
He says he wants no one to know.
He wants to “crawl off like an animal.
“To hide under a stone. Just to go.”
He adds, “But I know that I’m going nowhere.
“That my atoms will just disappear.
“There’ll be a moment when I’m me, and then not.
“I know that there’s nothing to fear.
He says he liked what used to happen in Crete:
“Have you heard of the Cretan custom?
“Since when you die you’re dead for all time,
“They don’t want you to be spoken of again.”
“I’d also be happy at not being mentioned.
“I don’t wish to be dug up or disinterred;
“So, please, not even a fleeting reference –
“I think I’d rather be left undisturbed.
“As I’ve been practicing Zen Buddhism for years
“I’ve been aware of my dying every day.
“I know exactly what it’s like and I’ll go quietly.
“No nonsense about having a last say.”
Although he spoke of his death with indifference
And in the most matter of fact way,
I welled up with a tear and felt a frog in my throat
Only for his coolness to shoo them away.
I was on the point of saying it’d be quite a wrench
For those he’d be leaving behind,
But somehow I felt that this would be interfering
Given his fatalistic frame of mind.
Then, as if telepathically, he blurted out, “Look
“I’ve got eighteen tumors on my lungs.
“There’s nothing that can be done. It’s spreading,
“That’s why I’m giving away all my things.
“Yesterday the doctor showed me the scans
“And asked me how I was feeling.
“He said, ‘you know it’s sooner rather than later?’ I said, ‘Good.
‘I’ve no wish to shuffle about drooling.’
Mike also had to contend with a heart condition,
A pig’s gland once being used for a by-pass,
Prompting Mike to say when offered bacon
“Do you think I’m a fucking cannibal?!”
He was now told no more bypasses were possible
And asked me, “You know where I can get any heroin?”
I said “No” then to divert him I floated a whim
That the NHS should be given Afghanistan.
There was more such jokey banter about geopolitics
As if he was loth to be estranged from the living,
But we were uneasily self-conscious given the knowledge
That his ‘now’ was now overlapping with heaven.
While he was speaking I realized I was being given a lesson
In how to understand dying and death:
A friend was staging their own dress rehearsal of how
To behave before drawing your last breath.
He put the ‘phone down and then he rang back
To tell me the cancer was biting his brain:
“I don’t think I told you but it’s affecting my thinking.
“Forgive me if I’m telling you this again.”
“I want to tell you this… I want to tell you…
“’Eternal rightness will not fade…’
“Who said that? Lao Tzu. Eternal rightness won’t fade.
“Isn’t that the best thing you’ve ever heard?”
I agreed it had the ring of truth then I thought,
‘Oh Mike, don’t let this be happening to you.’
As if reading my mind he said, “Death’s incomprehensible
“But, believe me, there’s nothing you can do.”
“I’ve got a plastic bag and if the pain’s too much
“I’ll put it over my head.
“Then I’ll fill it with of a squirt from a cylinder of helium.
“It’s painless, apparently. Which isn’t so bad.”
I wanted to remonstrate by saying that suicide
Was always a case of mistaken identity:
‘The person you kill can become someone different.
‘You’ll be terminating a future serenity.’
But I knew he’d simply say, “that’s all bollocks.”
He said he didn’t regard dying as a problem:
“I’ve done it hundreds of times while meditating –
“I’ve swatted that odious little hobgoblin.”
He was seeing death as a person now, as a figure,
Like those German carvings of living ghouls
Which have, “I am what you will be. I was what you are.
“For every man this is so” – incised on boxwood scrolls.
“Have you ever seen that picture of death pissing?
“It’s called Death Urinating. It’s by Max Klinger.
“It’s of a skeleton holding its cock’s cartilage and it’s aiming
“A streak of piss into a lake or a river.
“And I’m being pissed on torrentially by death at this moment
“But I’m fucked if I’m going to let death know it –
“So suck it up death, you fucking prick. I’ll fuck you.
“I’ll fucking fuck you, you nauseous shit.”
“There. I’ve got that off my chest. Now where were we?
“What were we talking about? Death? Oh no!
“I want to talk about life. But now I can’t. I’ve been sentenced.
Okay so I flirted with death but now I don’t want to go!”
I felt he was angry with me for not being in the same boat –
Not just yet at any rate – then he continued his conflicted tirade:
“Who said , ‘I’m always angry when I’m dying’?
“Well I’m angry with this predator death. Death’s got it made.
“Because everyone’s a customer, aren’t they? so he’s doing pretty well.
“The dead outnumber the living by a factor of what?
“Millions? Billions? Trillions? By now it must be gazillions.
“It makes you think that death… death should be shot.
“According to the Greeks you’re given a happy day
“On your penultimate day just before you die.
“So I’m wandering round now with a bottle of gin.
“No protein, I’m just getting totally high.
“But look at death. Just look at the way it’s depicted.
“Who wants to be seduced by that creeping zombie?
“Who wants to be lured into a state of non-existence.
“Shouldn’t death be more selective, more of a nimby?”
Changeable as the wind my friend had become reconciled
To death when it seemed a bit more remote
But now, when it was more immediate and imminent,
He was fighting it, fighting it laughing, and with all that he’d got.
“You know what? Thanks to nano-bio-info-cogno-synthetic technology
“I’ll download myself into your computer and click ‘Save’,
“Then I’ll pounce out at you while you are checking your email –
“A pioneer of cyborgian neo-humanity from beyond the grave.”
“Thanks to that I can by-pass this alien implant
“That bleeps incessantly and keeps us awake
“With its doom-laden voice saying ‘You’re programmed to die’ –
“The Garden of Eden’s wicked snake.
“The serpent is paradise’s party pooper.
“The serpent’s a nightmare symbol of death.
“Then there’s the ourobouros – is that death eating itself?
“Oh God, none of it makes any sense.”
He was lurching in fiendish exuberance around the room –
Clutching the phone, and the gin and a joint.
He was turbo-charged by a volcanic lifeforce despite himself.
Saying, ‘I want to live’ but then adding, ‘what’s the point?’
“What’s the point? because we’re all utterly doomed.
“You know why we have nuclear power?
“It’s to ensure we’re supplied with weapons grade plutonium.
That’s depraved. Isn’t that totally depraved?
“The industry doesn’t give a fuck about the waste.
“I’m glad I’m not going to be around much longer
“There are things that I just don’t want to see:
“Kids with vampire marks on their necks –
“Because they’ve had their thyroid glands removed.
If such a vampire circus is the high watermark
Of our civilization, then we’re disintegrating.
Fuck me. What a lark. What a fucking lark.
“You remember the old Metropole in the Edgware Road?
“The music hall? I feel like I’ve been invited to watch an unmagical cabaret:
“To watch a ghoulish someone sawing their leg off.
“And that someone is me. It’s me. It’s me.”
Three days later Mike’s nephew, Nicky Victor, rang.
“I’ve got some bad news Mike’s committed suicide.
“He put a mask on and gassed himself. He knew what he was doing.
“He left behind a list of the people whom he loved.”
“The police came in droves because a gas cylinder was involved.
“They took his sudden death to be a terrorist incident.
“The fire brigade came as well,” Nicky laughed at their over-reaction
And yet they were right, for death is life’s insatiable terrorist.
Mike’s body was removed by the Coroner’s van –
The Coroner being obliged to investigate sudden death –
Mike’s three computer screens were now blank; silent witnesses
Of Michael John Lesser’s final breath.
On the floor were several scrumpled drafts
Of his final message to the world:
“This morning I awoke with the certainty
“That it would be my last.
“I have rarely spent a more pleasant morning…
“No thoughts of the future or of the past…
“Just fleeting images of those I love. I have gone nowhere…
“An appropriate place for the imaginary. (Signed) Mike.”
Video: In Conversation with a Dying Friend
Narration by Alan Cox. Video by Claire Palmer
An old photograph, dated 1945
By Heathcote Williams, 2016
Heathcote Williams in 1945
My sister has found an old photograph
Of me holding a bucket and spade,
On a beach fringed by coastal defenses –
I’m roaring with laughter. Unafraid.
It’s 1945 though I’m completely unaware
Of the war, or of thoughts of invasion.
I know only paddling, the wind in my hair
And my mother with her contraption –
A Box Brownie for which she’d ask you to smile
For a creature within it who was miserable –
She’d make up nonsense names for the goblin inside
Then she’d ask you to dance for its approval.
I’d try glimpsing its presence through the lens,
To see within the dark of the box.
When I smiled, she’d click and then I’d run off,
Run away to play on the rocks.
My father was absent; my mother was all mine,
A three-and-a-half year old boy.
A tiny body with a hand-knitted bathing suit.
Now, as I look, I’m stunned by the joy.
In the distance there’s a man on the horizon
Who leaps as he reaches up for a ball.
Icarus has been flying too close to the sun:
Fifty million bodies have taken a fall…
With every other block being bomb-damaged
London looks like what’s left of Baghdad.
But to a child the bombsites were playgrounds;
Play-power is what the photo brings back.
My sister has found an old photograph
Of me holding a bucket and spade,
On a beach fringed by coastal defenses –
I’m roaring with laughter. Unafraid.
It’s 1945 though I’m completely unaware
Of the war, or of thoughts of invasion.
I know only paddling, the wind in my hair
And my mother with her contraption –
A Box Brownie for which she’d ask you to smile
For a creature within it who was miserable –
She’d make up nonsense names for the goblin inside
Then she’d ask you to dance for its approval.
I’d try glimpsing its presence through the lens,
To see within the dark of the box.
When I smiled, she’d click and then I’d run off,
Run away to play on the rocks.
My father was absent; my mother was all mine,
A three-and-a-half year old boy.
A tiny body with a hand-knitted bathing suit.
Now, as I look, I’m stunned by the joy.
In the distance there’s a man on the horizon
Who leaps as he reaches up for a ball.
Icarus has been flying too close to the sun:
Fifty million bodies have taken a fall…
With every other block being bomb-damaged
London looks like what’s left of Baghdad.
But to a child the bombsites were playgrounds;
Play-power is what the photo brings back.
Heathcote Williams
15 Nov 1941 – 1 July 2017
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