Bücher von Bruce Rimell

In summer 2022, poet and artist Bruce Rimell visited the Coasts of Antrim, Northern Ireland. After a lifetime reading Irish mythology, and wandering that ancient landscape in his mind for years, this was the first time he had set foot on the physical island itself. Unsurprisingly, his imagination caught fire, and 'Beeley far The North' is the result.Framed as a picaresque jaunt around the region of Ballycastle, taking in notable legends and landmarks from around the town as well as Rathlin Island, this eccentric narrative poem takes as its primary inspiration the Middle Irish tale 'Buile Suibhne', or, in Seamus Heaney's translation 'Sweeney Astray'.Rather than retell this tragic story of this frenzied and cursed figure, half wildman half broken bird, through a different perspective, however, Bruce chose to take poor Suibhne's madness as a character to inhabit, eyes through which to experience this part of Ireland in a madcap way which mirrored the rapid "seven days, eight nights" of his sojourn there.In doing this, he has also tentatively begun to forge something of a new, unconventional, and hopefully unique, approach to psychogeography, which he has playfully termed the beeley. Oddly unorthodox but always vibrant in tone, 'Beeley Far The North' is an experiment in trying to speak of the human dynamics of landscape in a fresh and hyperactive way.

What do you do when life seems overwhelming, the world seems alienating and physical injury has become debilitating? For artist and poet Bruce Rimell, the answer was to turn away from the world, and to seek solace in landscape, astronomy and poetry.Written over a period of four years, 'Wanderer: Songs of Solitude, Fragility, and Change' emerged from this challenging time: the poetry addresses grief and memory, as well as slow-burn changes in the course of a human life. It mourns the passing of a once-cherished friendship, stands in sorrow before waterfalls, celebrates the passing of the seasons visible in the natural world.Framed as a journey across the heavens, the collection is interspersed with deeply personal, and idiosyncratic, hymns to various planets and stars, before returning home to Earth.'Wanderer...' takes in diverse shifts in identity and lifelong movements through walks in moorlands and the wilds, as well as dreams, otherworldly encounters at secluded falls, and the night sky, all sprung from a somewhat hyperactive perspective.A free verse diary of some dark and difficult days punctuated with shards of light, 'Wanderer' takes the reader through a time of lost illusions, but a magical journey nonetheless. Sometimes, sorrow is as beautiful as joy: this collection seeks out exactly that kind of beauty.

A nameless young man finds himself wandering half-naked through the frozen wintry Bristol night, when he falls - or is he pushed...? - into the river and is washed out to sea.Arriving lost and exhausted upon a strange island enmisted, he comes to a fortress which holds a lithe, enchanted-but-broken, eternal youth in chains, who tries to kill him. It is only through sharing stories of his life that he is able to avert the youth's wrath at being disturbed, easing his traumatised heart by offering him something no other visitor to this dark place has ever given him: presence, and care.This unearthly mythical narrative becomes the poetic frame story by which Bruce, the nameless wanderer, unfolds his life story in fractured, allegorical and dreamlike ways.We move from migraines and his lived experience as a gay/queer person with ADHD, into visionary experiences that changed the course of his life, the ecstasies of true love, and expressions of his personal philosophies and spiritualities, as well as a curious catalogue of artworks he has created over the years as an artist.As this most unusual of autobiographies unfolds, we move deeper into Bruce's queer/neurodiverse, homoerotic/hyperactive inner world, gliding from one theme to another in a genre-baffling, lilting symphony of images, ultimately uncovering his one true mirror soul with all its fragilities, strengths and wonders.He must try to save his own life as well as the youth's, so they can escape this otherworldly prison together.At once melodious and magic, joyous and tragic, 'Nine Nights Awake' is not for the faint of heart: simultaneously riddlingly absurd, sexually graphic and brutally honest, its mythical wildness might well be the oddest and most eccentric memoir you are ever likely to read!

CW: Suicidal ideation, self-harm, sex/death psychodynamics, but the journey moves from such darkness into radiant, transformative light!"and the glints on waves, are not glints on waves, but... stars..."In summer 2010, gay British artist and poet Bruce Rimell fell into a self-destructive spiral of suicidal ideation, confused hyperactivity, and dark dreams so unsettling and so persistent that they threatened to tear his life apart.The most prominent recurring nightmare was one in which he hanged himself and enjoyed it, eager to end his life, but at the last moment he would spit out letters, and so did not die. Waking up terrified, he felt himself coming undone, desperately seeking answers but finding none.When he began to 'enter into the image' of this dream, rather than study it rationally, a new and unexpected transformative path opened up towards a more holistic Queer spiritual identity. This in turn kickstarted the healing of his latent self-destructive urges that arose from his internalised rage at centuries of homo/queerphobic persecution.'Hangman Starman' is a visionary voyage through the darkest realms of Bruce's gay/queer psyche, a brutally honest account of his time in the underworld, and how he worked his dreams to burn his darkness through to the blazing light on the other side.

In the late 1990s, artist and poet Bruce Rimell travelled halfway across the world to live and work in Japan. There in his new home city of Uji, just south of Kyoto, he discovered a wonderful new world of Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, as well as evocative myths and folktales, beautiful rivers and forested mountains.Losing himself in this ancient landscape, where the Uji River emerges from the mountains into a picturesque cultural scene, he soon discovered the traditional Japanese artform of the tanka, and he began writing these brief poems to reflect upon his emotional life, and to note his personal impressions of the historical region in which he lived.After two years in the country, he decided to return home to Britain, initiating a transformative period in his life. The tanka struck him as an appropriate way to record these changes, particularly as the medium commonly evokes traditional Japanese cultural ideas of impermanence, transience and the fleeting nature of moments in time. As he departed from Japan, and settled back slowly into British life, he mused upon sorrows of a life left behind, impressions of natural beauty and failed love affairs, all of which are enfolded into a collection of poems - in Japanese, but with English translations and notes - that represents an emotionally sensitive work of memory, of reminiscence, and of mono no aware, the 'sigh of things', the delicate knowledge that everything in this fleeting, floating world eventually fades and passes away.

The use of psychedelic drugs plants is rising, and with it the number of reports narrating encounters with otherworldly visionary beings. Approaches to these experiences have often been literal, archetypal or dismissive. Evolutionary psychology and the cognitive science of religion suggest innate and non-imagistic mental foundations for these phenomena arising from easily-triggered evolutionary functions during emotive periods of high cognitive demand. Such functions include agent detection, social intelligence faculties and metacognition. This wide-ranging book explores how our deepest mental processes predispose us as humans to believe in supernatural agents, and presents a new hypothesis of how these same cognitions facilitate the emergence of those agents to become present when psychedelic drugs and plants are ingested. Bruce concludes that visionary beings shimmer within as awe-inspiring products of the mind, an experience which rests at the heart of what it is to be human.

Visionary and religious experiences are ubiquitous among human beings, but why do we experience them as coming from a hidden reality beyond the senses? Why should we believe in the existence of deities despite the mundane evidence of our own eyes? Why do we as intelligent primates ascribe any importance to these 'imaginary' realities at all? This creative and speculative thesis seeks to answer these questions in a new way, gazing into the content of visions themselves and exploring the various inner realities that gave rise to these transformative and meaningful aspects of our humanity. Focusing upon symbolic cognition as a fundamental organising principle of human experience, a diverse series of musings upon the nature of reality, consciousness, and our evolutionary origins seeks to transcend our modern artificial boundaries to arrive at a holistic, and delightfully playful, human image for the twenty-first century. An original visionary thesis illustrated with 30 beautiful drawings.