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.

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.

What would a positive, life-affirming, cosmos-embracing and transcendent Queer mythology look like? In the years 2013-15, artist and poet Bruce Rimell got a chance to find out when he was invited to participate in a collaborative project to create an international art publication, 'The Encyclopaedia of Fernal Affairs'.Although this was principally an art-oriented initiative, Bruce quickly went off on his own tangent, inventing a complete constructed language and two song-cycles of fernal mythology which resonated with his own burgeoning sense of his Queer identity. 'The Fernal Songs' are the shimmering results of that literary side project.Centred around Lucaion, a Queer Hero whose exploits around an animistic cosmos showcase a more compassionate, interactive masculine images than the traditional subduer of enemies, and Afer, an all-gendered Cosmic Creatrix, whose song reverberates across the Fernal World, these are sacred songs which move beyond satirical 'queering' of traditional religious forms into a transcendent queer space which simultaneously resonates with ancient memories and indigenous lifeways as well as with possible queer futures of intense beauty and humanism.The 'Song of Lucaion', the 'Thirteen Songs' and the supplemental 'Daiarzan' come with several essays, personal recollections and honest expressions of Bruce's envisioning of what he calls the 'sacred and pristine jewel of queeritude within.'

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.