Impulse – Volume 10 Number 2, Winter 1982

Publisher:
Eldon Garnet.

Editors:
Eldon Garnet, Judith Doyle and Joan (Adair) Brouwer.

Contributing Editors:
James Dunn (Toronto) and Lisa Baumgardner (New York).

Associate Editors:
Ken Baird and Carolyn White.

Art Direction:
Ken Baird.

Office:
Joan (Adair) Brouwer.

Advertising:
Lola Boomer.

Legal Counsel:
Gerald Owen.

Mascot (Deceased):
Severin, Two seasons, eaten by wolves.

Table of Contents:
David Clarkson, ‘Labyrinth’; Caro, ‘Bouzillage’; Margaret Dragu and A.S.A. Harrison, ‘Vice’; James Dunn, ‘Psychiatry as Social Control’; Jack Scrivener, ‘Lineation’; Boyd Webb, ‘Sleuth’; Interview with Lothar Lambert; Ken Decker, ‘absTraction’; Susan Britton, ‘Frontier Life’; Gerald Owen, ‘Pseudolexicon’; Sylvère Lotringer and Felix Guattari, ‘The New Alliance; Interview with John Kenneth Galbraith’; Interview with David Cunningham.

Editorial:

Forces press against. We resist and become tired. The forces continue. If these were positive and not oppressive, all would seem well. We are in the winter of 1982, and are to say the least, not overjoyed. The suggestion of change is met with argument. Opposition is announced in the name of morality, law, pragmatism, the status quo.

Against his complaints and better wishes he’s pushed into a cage, shoved rudely into a car and carried 200 kilometers into the forest. Confused. Frightened. Arriving at a shack beside a swamp. Cowering as all senses of the environment read as hostility. He hears them drinking, laughing, eating. Smells the smoke from the fire but is too far from the flame to be comforted. The next day at the first opportunity he runs blindly into the woods. Wild without direction. Escaping. By nightfall completely lost, completely unbounded. Not the faintest sound of their presence. His freedom has been short lived; the cage is now undefined distance and direction.

Weary, we mythologize a sense of ever more vague potential, but this promise could shift as easily into destruction as creation. Our myths become shapeless. Exhausted, curled into himself for warmth. The strange animal odor of fear fills his air.

Every day, it is necessary to deal with the spectre of vague forces. But eventually that which looms as opposition must be named or measured. The common scales of measurement are now exhausted and rationalize repression. A new set of archetypal positions and actions must be formulated and articulated.

Eldon Garnet