I have searched for meaning everywhere, in the cemeteries and parlours, in mirrors and monasteries, in palaces and cowsheds.
I think i have seen beauty in glimpses. I am not an unhappy man except momentarilly, but it is this momentariness that disturbs me.
It implies a sickly rollercoaster alternation between highs and lows, sickening obstacles, steadily palling contrasts between patches of colour boring through over-familiarity, like mildew or decay. All the clever philosophés tell us that the purpose is in the purposelesness. Always seemed to me too adroit, a circular argument of sorts.

And if flashes of panic occur, as they must do, this old equilibrium can, with patience and with rigour, balance out its worst features, or transform them, like a slow rolling ocean eroding rocks, though their essential matter remains in some form, dissolved though the atoms of terror might be, to a slurry of apathy rhythmically marked by time.
Here time isn't felt as oppressive; it entails no distortion in an everlasting present.
The past is groped for as a waker gropes for the details of his dream, his sour or pleasant dream, his guilty, inevitable past. All my actions in the past seem to me now compulsive and inevitable, as if another man had done them, an insubstantial ghost, whose inner workings and motivations i cannot guess at. He sees other worlds than me, that man of a year ago. And of course i envy him his naievety.
But when one has the present on one's side one has a lot. Bring one perspective to bear on everything, radically diverse and divergent, facile and profound, giving birth to metaphorical beauties and basking in the qualia, in the rich bath of phenomena whose waves caress and flow through you, attack and depart from you with a painfully slow but inevitable rhythm, pushing you here, pulling you there, adding to and eroding you.
Is it meaningless, you ask?
Completely. The pinnacle of this metaphysics is the loosening of the point and the disruption of the line. Its tedious slow dispersal. All that is commonplace enough.

I find it intriguing, the little spots and blemishes that come to one driven from the centre to the periphery. And yet, the whole of my creed is that wherever one is is a centre and not a periphery, that one's own qualia is all, that one's own present circumstances are sufficient to be known, loved, experienced, perhaps not cherished, but believed and even reveled in. I don't abandon myself to phenomena, but i experience them directly, and i think of them as they happen, without an imposition of intellectual perceptiveness, with no wry humour to speak of, but only with a simple, inward reaching to the depths, and an extrapolation from there to word or action, truth or lies, in some ways a pose, in some ways a stance of unvarnished truth. A truth that yields to no-one and is its own monitor, its own justification and reward.

conclusion 3

"This lamplit room at the centre of all, the thought or the memory of it will not last even a week.
Other perspectives will intrude, banishing and replacing the memories in the conventional and expected way. And thus this room is revealed to be no centre at all, but a periphery, a detour about which little can be said.
Or rather, say as much as you want, fill a notebook with reminiscences, but all the speculations and even the surest statements will be proved wrong, the questions stated wrongly, each one open to contradiction, liable to be reversed. If only it were true that nothing could be said, that it was useless to speak, rather we must wretchedly annunciate lies and idiocies from here to the grave. And yet, with our eyes and moods, and joys, are we not grasping at truth?
The answer returns: yes. They are small but perfect truths, seen and apprehended as such. With words i cast myself into the void but i emerge speechless, content to look and know."

conclusion 2

"What appeared to me before as a mocking, empty arrangement of absurdities to succour fools and ghosts suddenly, with love, appeared to me as grand and significant, flushed with human nobility, a scheme to conjoin and support my love, or a mere background to its drama.
How foolish it was, after this insight, to have dwelled on the void, languishing in its isolation and emptiness like someone who stays overlong in a bath of filthy water, too disgusted to emerge, till in the end i inflicted these insights, gained from limitless empty vistas, upon myself, wallowing in the picquancy that may sometimes accompany the most abject despair.
What insights a dying man may have, since the depth of his misery may also be a height, a vantage point of freshness and honesty from which to view all of life, a distorting persepctive, to be sure, but also one of loftiness, distance, ultimately of freedom. For it is freedom that is sought in the act of surrendering, it is release that is desired."

Conclusion 1

"And yet, there is something there, something dark, pliant, soft and eternally opposite to me, something infinitely appealing, eternally renewing, a balance and countrerpoint to the struggles and discomfitures of my nature. Something soft, wise, silent, that knows no fear, some eternal, unfading goal. You can see it or sense it or smell it sometimes in evenings, smell it in the wind or catch glimpses of it on the dark blue horizon. It is soft, eternal, clean.
Not that there is something there i want to believe in, rather the hope that there is something there that wants to believe in me. The beauty of having an opposite, the absolute perfection of a fulfilled wish, the crumbling of the will as the iron of desire grants your wish, the utter beauty of receptiveness. What is more sublime, more filled with homely, primitive spirituality, more apt to command your emotional capacity with a full, bittersweet concoction, addictive in its clumsy mix of joy and sadness, deathly in iys potency, than to re-unite with that which was lost, to embrace your opposite, to surrender to darkness, not forsaking light but rather being confident that the light may shine more fully in its midst.
And this state, this unfading nature, is embodied in flesh in the world. To all flesh is given a light, each individual carries that state around with them in every pore and cell of their body. The feeling of flesh against flesh is numinous, and to unite is blessed."

part 6

"I cling moreover to the prejudice that the natural is how it should be, that one's conduct will in this way naturally effect the natural world, in interactions, in causes and effects, each rebounding and echoing onwards, in a fitting, but not necesarilly harmonious pattern. In other words, to be naturally unhappy is perhaps better than to force yourself into a false, fragile euphoria, arising from a faked confidence. And at least we can depend on unhappiness and pessimism; its stolidness and omnipresence acting as a solid base, predicated on the undivided self, a bulwark of sadness."

Part 5

"The difficulty is that i unfortunately have a heart to apprehend these awkward situations, and that i have also a keen mind to laboriously dissect them, looking at them from every possible angle, going too deep into detail, pondering too much on their imagined significance, seeing in too great detail their imagined subtleties. This is my nature, and therefore it cannot be a wrong thing, as opposed to a bad thing, or a harmful thing, which it may certainly be.
My struggle is whether to fully correspond with my own nature (subjective, uncertain, painfully self-contained) thought it costs me a huge amount of suffering, or to objectify, that is, falsify myself, for the sake of others, in order to appear happier and more self-assured, in short to lessen the load of self-consciousness, which seems most of the time to be inseperable from honesty, from "being yourself", from appearing as i actually am. My conscience dictates that i must appear at all times as i am, considering subjectively, from inside, whatever the cost in suffering, since the subjective viewpoint can so easily become a position of isolation, of torment, of pain."

part 4

"The desire to escape, give it all up, or go mad is always tempting... The impulse toward incoherence always flashes in the near distance, luring me like the song of a siren from the rocks, away, perhaps, from the unstable, sickening sea of my own uncertainty.
Yes, certainty is what i seek, a demand for meaning, purity, an answer. Stupid and unlikely though all this might seem. My disgust with events is such that i cannot bring myself to speak.
This is a stylised disgust and a spin on unhappiness... Yet it is the truth as i see it. Getting ever closer to the truth... an attempt to capture the nefarious truth.
"How was your weekend"? "Dismal." or "wretched, as usual". This is closer to the truth than some blasé word, a cliche, some positivity."

part 3

"The problem now, as opposed to before, is that i find myself increasingly unable to bear the burden, so that the feeling inside is palpable and desperate, something that cries out for remedy. This impedes the normal flow of my life, interferes with my pleasures, distorts my persepectives on every issue, even blurs my sight so that i cannot regard objects in their true light, or be an accurate judge of events. It is not merely, as formerly, a general malaise that can be sat on, suppressed, but a kind of unease and disorientation that begins to intrude into every corner of my life, infecting everything with despondency and cynicism. A quiet moment, an hour when i can no longer read or otherwise amuse myself, and misery descends... It is felt physically, as a pain, as a kind of madness, and all this engendered by desire, inescapable desire. Beauty, desire, failure... I generalise these concepts, maybe in an attempt to rationalize. To placate myself, to stem the rising inner tide that threatens to suffocate all outer meaning, i have endless recourse to the drug of memory, though the morass of contradictory emotions awakened by these puts me alternately into a state of bliss or despair, and ends by repulsing me.
The upshot of all this is that i am compelled toward action."

sisyphus 2

"Imagine a mariner who comes within sight of paradise, his paradise, but loses his direction and wakes one morning to find himself lost on an unknown sea. Imagine the starving man who grasps fruit but finds it pulled from his reach. Then you will find my psychological position.
I am that lost mariner, that starving man, my suffering intensified because my goal seemed so near... the fruit was within my very grasp, the holy shore i saw with my own eyes.
Realise therefore my predicament, closed off as i am by my own rings, powerful and weighty. I myself have set them up to entrap me so. In trying to break these bonds, i only add to their malignant strength. What am i to do, therefore? I confess that my heart utterly misgives itself, and i return, again and again, to a position of dismay. There is little that can be positively stated about a stagnant life such as this. It is a fool's position, a negation, an arena of blankness. I am borne down like lead in the centre of my own spite and mistrust, fearing and hating the world, growing sickly-pale with disgust at phenomena, in the end killing every desire to sprout wings and be free of it all, to take flight.
What are the roots of this stagnant position i have described? It begins with mistrust and resentment at the adolescent stage, allowed to take root and grow. The world presents itself as a loathsome shadowplay, empty of meaning, every form alien and isolating. I look on with suspicious eyes, the desire for destruction welling up in my heart."

sisyphus speaks part 1

"Poisoned is what i am, in the heart and infected in the bloodstream. With sorrow and fatigue. My actions become inhibited, my words drop loosely, my fury and tension increase. All because of lack of fulfillment, my particular curse, my culdesac, an isolating cell. It's a disease that cuts off connection, severs the red thread, a babe neglected in the cradle. So that i react with dismay at life, not being able to respond positively. This is not self-contempt, i am writing of desire and its refutation.
The appaling frustration of the energetic mind, of the adventurous desire instincts finding no outlet. Faced to ponder the recurring events, leading to similar conclusions, banal and grey-toned, no rich soil for the passions to thrive in, no extravagant loves to be cultivated. Instead, my reflections morbidly stray upon the same barren earth, cruelly barren, disgusted with the bitter taste of weeds. Stolen, uncertain weeds of delight, shaky and loose in the ashen soil. And yet now and then, to my surprise, while shifting agitated fingers through the weeds, i uncover some jewel-like flower, some blazing fruit, a token of love solidified and pleasing. In the bottom of my heart though i can never be sure whether these blooms are like those carelessly enjoyed by other men, or are deceptive and ersatz, too easily crushed or disintegrating too readily at the slightest touch...."

the spectre at the feast

Wandering in the city like a ghost, feeling very far from myself indeed, colder than a corpse, on Sunday night. But i see the following remembered autumnal sights, which seem to take me back to something antideluvian, something relating to my earliest childhood: yellow light in tenement windows, dwindling outside-pub smokers, empty streets and shopwindows. Passing by a tenement a flash of white catches my eye and i look up to see a woman at a window praying in a full, flowing white hijab, bending rhythmically toward Mecca, her arms flapping like angel wings in the amber light.
And in my mind i compose an open letter to the happy, confident freshers: "Egoism is not the way forward. He who is an artist from his heart does not need to blow his own trumpet in the self-satisfied way of some.
I know one thing; in seeking the truth it helps to be humble and even ascetic, to have a spirit of renunciation. This would literally never occur to some of the students in a million years. Their road of excess isn't leading to the palace of wisdom. It's just looping back on itself like empty feedback. They'll never understand what's noble about that renunciation, the spiritual value of it; an embrace of poverty, loneliness, all the strong, cleansing emotions, is like a dose of medicine sometimes."
And with these and like meditations i fold etc to bed.

prelude 6

If i reach the conclusion or postulate as a theory that this is man's natural condition (which i am by no means fully convinced of), i will have to also find some way to cure it. For i know, if i know anything, that it is an intolerable position, and yet the only true one.
So i need something, some distraction or other, to give me solace, to keep me alive no less. Culture, art, religion, music, all have their good points but it's not long before i tire of them all, or rather they come to me tired and strange-seeming, and i reject them, not wishing to see or hear any more. The other great hope is companionship and love. These indeed seem to be the greatest help for the relief of my condition, but the relief they impart has the great disadvanage of being too brief, and endless attempts to recapture the feeling are not wise. The sensations fade, break apart, become corrupted.
Above all i do not want to deceive myself. A question of interpretation, how the outside world is to be interpreted. I cannot lie anymore, i cannot appear to be fulfilled if i do not feel it. In reality, i feel nothing at all.
It seems i'm getting bogged down in conjecture... If this is unreadable it will at least be honestly unreadable, a true product. I have tried to live as a free man, as an honest man, as a man of integrity, and i have found it to be intolerable. My conclusion, it seems, is a dead end, or a blank wall.

prelude 5

The state of adulthood, then; sobriety, neutrality, barely concealed misery? I am driven back upon myself over n over, into a position of complete subectivity, which to me is identical with freedom, using the self as the only barometer and authority, acting and deciding with complete integrity, being honest to oneself above all else. Acting thus completely in accordance with my subjective, ephemeral whims and shiting viewpoints, i find, more often than not, i reach a position of tormented isolation, as though, by acting honestly, i have merely imprisoned myself in a straitjacket. From this position also springs what i have mentioned above: horrible world-weariness where everything appears to me dull and flat, or things i ought to rejoice in appearing as mere irritants.
Perhaps, though, this position of torment, pain, one might almost call it an illness, is only the old position, the natural one common to every man since men were men. Perhaps it is truly the human condition. What then of the people who seem content, quite glad to live and work and love and die in the world, not reflecting much on its vagaries, or protesting? Is it merely that they are unfeeling and insensitive, stupid? Or do they too have moments of uncertainty, late at night lying in bed, do they go through their own agonies?

prelude 4

But why do i care? Why not take all the canonical works of western civilization and consign them to the trash once and for all, the works that consensus has deigned to be worth reading? The works worth experiencing... Many of them bore and disgust me, and really my aversion springs from the simplest of reasons, that is because at one level, at face value, they are boring and disgusting, old-fashioned...
Maybe the schoolboy aversion to Shakespeare, for instance, comes from sound instincts. Maybe my aversion to religious cant comes from sound instincts, maybe its inevitable given my circumstances and it is my attempt to circumvent this aversion that is artificial and a waste of time. Is it merely because i want to appear cultured and clever? I think it's more out of curiosity. The desire to know...
And then there's the problem of boredom. I am honest about it. I have a desire up to a point. But i have no faith.
No faith; and thereby hangs a long, intricate tale whose details i could rhapsodies on endlessly. I am at the point where each thing comes to me sour and flat, not enlivened, fresh, meaningful in any way. As though, though hearing, tasting, seeing, smelling, i have somehow lost the sharp edge of my senses. A monochrome world, where each phenomenon that ought to excite me appears without meaning, flat.

prelude 3

Defenceless i spose. I try n imagine each thing.. to re-enliven history, culture, for myself. By looking at it from obtuse angles.
The real approach to culture is to discover each thing as it is, to comprehend it on its own terms...
There is something in Burke after all; the theory that each generation has added something, tolerated something, and so that which remains even in terms of prevalent culture, low and high, is something generally accepted and tolerated. Otherwise people would not tolerate it, not slavery or our society as it is. Therefore the masses must accept it. Only expressed in general quiet misery and desperation, of the ordinary type.
Over the centuries a kind of consensus has been built up, of language of culture even of morals. And in the final analysis even the worst injustices and cruelties are merely human products, like everything is a human product, even political and economic systems. In a world of human products and of consensus, i, a human, ought to feel comfortable, but in fact i feel dreadfully uncomfortable. I am bored and disgusted by culture and be received wisdom, hence my attempts to enliven it by approaching it from unusual angles. Misguided, maybe, but really only a way to amuse myself. What i worry about is that thus i am deceiving myself, not acting in accord with my whole, true nature, which is the only conclusion i've been able to reach in terms of conduct. Accords with "democracy", everything the result of a consensus. What they used to call "functionalism". But if consistently followed will not lead one to conservatism. Because consensus is inclusive of change.

prelude 2

A sense of relief; the urge to walk away from it all, to not be haunted, not be self-betrayed, maybe to sleep soundly with no troubling dreams. Though i know i will be pursued, through my own weakness, my own nature; my defences drop in an instant. I betray myself, over and over again, through desire. What is it that i am defending? My inner soul, which i feel to be under attack. So it is that i put up impregnable walls around myself. At the centre is a terrible calmness, lucidity, no madness, but waves of agitation now and then disturb the equilibrium. The best thing is that i can see quite clearly, without outright madness, that is, utter nonsense, but not without confusion, a certain agitation which is inevitable. The idea behind it all is: order out of chaos, to quell a certain restlessness or silence a brewing storm. I can always, must always, contain it, thought it damn near kills me not to express it.
The conclusion i have come to is that it is hope, that oldfashioned thing, that is the prerequisite and starting point of life (in whatever form), and that only the dead have truly despaired. I have never truly despaired, but only doubted. It is only through the agency of doubt that i can establish principles, or come to conclusions, or think at all.

prelude 1

When it comes to describe emptiness- description must be possible.
Description in every case, in minute detail, though madness may result.
Whether true or not, no matter how distorted it may become. Following the trail till the trail ends.
Integrity of self as a basis on which to rely. Completely honest, completely subjective, devoid of anything that seems like compromise. What may result may be unreadable, incomprehensible;
baroque, twisting dissections of agony. And yet it is truth. And it is human. Therefore it has a kind of worth.
To go so much farther on this tack, than anyone, ever. System of thought as arbitrary, thought as it is.
And i experience something like relief, but i know how false, shallow, brief it is.

Because too exacting. What exactly is it that prevents me from writing? With the light on?
I can compose melodramas in the dark. Whole styles and speeches. It is not because i am confronted with things. Things are lighted and revealed in all their tawdry glory.
I'm confronted with myself, maybe? It's too much like daylight; with all the associations of routine and duty. Everything is revealed anew when the light is snapped on; all the ill-used objects, broken paraphernalia that i have invested exhausted hopes in, my old shoes, now battered and hurricane-torn, falling apart, broken bits of cardboard, palletes speckled with useless globules of paint, strangely beautiful but over-familiar.

small poem for 4am

Where have the dramas and daydreams gone,
gloomy at rest and at dawn? I learned the ways and the names of some,
counting them one by one: like beads in a game, they rattled refrains
like peas in a hollow drum.
They flowed through my fingers like sorrows remembered, like wars relinquished and
Won;
And each precious moment earmarked to be kept, now dashed to the ground and done;
Like beads in a game, they rattled refrains, like peas in a hollow drum.
And if i could win the sight of the world, the world that the lover lost
In the body and arms of the girl i loved, in the footsteps that we crossed
Then i'd pay with words and money, id pay with fire and frost,
Id pay with my heart and my blood and my soul, id pay whatever the cost.
But the answer returns like the wave that spurns, the breeze that strikes us dumb,
And the trinkets i count and covet amount to a paltry sum:
Like beads in a game, they rattle refrains
Like peas in a hollow drum.

Whistling in the Dark

"We on the roller-coaster of life have long since given up our urgent desire to get off, and, instead, succumb to the ups and downs which are, after long use, known and predictable, and always of short duration, the downs as well as the ups.
The problem that awaits then is not one of despair but one of boredom.
So, how to get through it? Concentrate on the qualitative over the quantitative, good advice in general. Lack of interest in material things is a sign of maturity. Stand on your own truth and stick to your guns and you will not go far wrong in this vale of tears.
To me even in misery there are always such qualitative riches, which is part of the antithetical sweet compulsion of pure existential choice.
In that dynamic space, between the poles of fatalism and freedom, despair and hope, there are whole continents and oceans of beautiful, ugly truth.
We are, as Rimbaud says, "slaves, but not cursing life"."

dream in present tense

Im up somewhere high and have been writing a note. In the skyscraper where are set into the floor thick glass panels showing a sheer drop. On one of these i sit and can all too easily imagine myself falling through. No feeling of verigo or dizziness, only a repulsive sensation of fear related to falling which makes me recoil and stand up in confusion.
Outside to a level platform in a shopping mall, again incredibly high up. A motorcycle has somehow become broken loose from where it was chained to a railing and plumeted down several stories to a fast food restaurant. A small girl shows me the broken chain and i look down, hundreds of feet below.
Now im in the city and i see a friend, some blonde girl dark eyeshadowed, but she fails to catch my eye and makes her way down an unknown culdesac, near the confluence of lights where the traffic still sighs even though it is late at night.
I say to someone, "It is intolerable to wait".
(Memory of Preston Lancashire when the woman jumped from the bus station rooftop. I didn't see it but i heard a suprisingly loud crash, and thought someone must've thrown some heavy object, a chair or table, from the roof.)

Right up until this summit of lost peace that takes itself as the standard and point, i will adress sorrow. Thereby banishing it and reducing the pain of life, and of acting. Like i have come relentlessly from point, advocating it as a creed, blind to the pathos i was creating, deaf to empathy except momentarilly, and not free in myself. And i was unfree enough to speak a language no-one understood. Sorrow: i address it, and set it dumb. I give it everything, i try and kill it with candour. I feed it till it bursts, it diminishes, or it should. I sometimes mock it, but i am usually serious. And in everything i was a totaliarian, a fundamentalist, a melancholic.
These were not roles but demonic possessions which shook me, i spoke in tongues and cried out how i missed my home. I was stubborn but not ungenerous; i gave of everything freely, and everything returned to me, the totalitarian, who accepted and rejected arbitrarily and soundly, always with one eye on the clock. I disarmed suffering by welcoming it, but not sacrifcing to it. And i spoke the truth in the face of death, and it did not matter, and never will matter, that no echco, however faint, was returned. The tragi-comic mask slips, and the void is revealed.

Cut-up number one

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after gilgamesh

Like if we came from the mountains and came down in the valley
And found our tribesmen slaughtered
And you are saying i simply do not care about politics
I care about the changing of the seasons
And the song of the birds.
I can lie and say:
I have learned to live with my solitude.
I have done violence to myself in wanting to jump
Out of this world.
And i will not roll in the blood and the mud,
Backbreaking work for babies not yet born,
Toil for millions in the new dawn.
I will find a corner in which my spit
Will become like a river
And my curses (fucks and shits)
A rich compost heap
On which to grow
Bitter silver flowers of hate.
Razorsharp, the petals
Of brilliant metal.
Grit in the eye of the demi-god
Burning a sacrifice to the immortal
Prometheus.

Brilliant realizations still sparkle at corners. Lazy writing, they call it. Leisurely to a fault. One addenda after another.
I say, i am not a bad man. I have seen and known bad men and i am not one of them. I just like to see things through my own eyes, do things at my own pace and in my own way, that's all. I like to think my own thoughts out fully, even if the results are despair or madness. You can travel through such darkness and out onto the other side. For me this dialectic trajectory is extremely common, almost omnipresent. That's why what i am writing about is hope. What is conceived and expressed spontaneously and from centre is most authentic and worthy to be expressed. I fall back upon the old myths of integrity and authenticity unashamedly, i have no postmodern embarassment about these things. J'accuse the phil. department finally of intellectual fraud, of not believing what they say. J'accuse the postmodernists of imbalance, nihilism but not of the romantic and worthy sort, of circular reasoning, and of inhumanity. How dare anyone announce the grand meta-narratives as dead. Question their orthodoxies by all means, blow raspberries at them, decry and throw them down. But be aware that they are human products, and as such still have an appeal to the human hand, head and heart.

Going Underground 3

The light goes out- the eyes still blaze in afterglow
And peace of night descends. The heart misgives itself, lets loose its load
As if therein was meaning. The mouth speaks a word which is no word
Not pure, profane, nor loud or quiet
Yet drifting like the shadow of a great smoke. A silence
Profounder than clamour hushes, prudently, an unheard sigh.
The heart's load, let loose, seems set forevermore
Frozen invisibly, poised, a figure dead eyes welcome
And embryos recognise in the womb.
A darkness of no name sinks kindly on the breast
And heart of no beginning and no end
In secrecy responds.

Going underground 2

To go underground is to greet the dark
Harried by pitch black night in clouds that roll in swords that stab
Words become sharp and angry- we must flee
The earth is cold but opens up its maw and a new claw
Comes to grasp the heart, set the teeth- the veins are flooded
And clogged with a bitter poision. An old cry is wrenched up
From the throat. The hand convulses, grips- teeth grind
The cry trembles to a laugh hysteria snaps
Replaced by a dull wind
"Do not look for them, they are not here
They are fled underground."
In the belly grows black ink in the heart sudden pain of black ink
In the throat black ink chokes powder-blue, mocking red, underhand, unseen
In the arms the black ink flows convulsing into painful tremors
The black ink takes possession of the whole body
Whipping it back like whiplash into a pleasureless orgasm
Blackness indigestible, indestructable
Quiet, unseen, invisible.

Going underground 1

Undergorund is a good place to be. Deep underground where they can't get you, underground where it's dark. Like at the bottom of an ocean or the bottom of some deep sepulchral mine, blue-black, shifting, yet a more substantial, more solid physical state than being up and out in the open air. It is secret, fantastical, sublime. In many cultures and old religions, a sacred association was attached to "the underworld", the underground regions, like the Celts digging deep shafts to reach down, ever farther down into earth. You can get in touch with something intangible there, in the deepest cave, because of the sensory deprivation, the mild shocks of fear that fume hesitantly from your breath, like exhaust fumes, like respiratory waste peremptorilly exuded, like cursewords. Because of this, the depth at which you stand, the weight of silent earth above you, the darkness, your fears and emotions, your quick-morphing desires seem to spark and quiver from you, like little gurgles of electric orgasm, and seem in the darkness to take living and ominous form. The spirits that rise from you open their mouths and let out inaudible shrieks of primitive joy and fury, which you can nevertheless as shivers in your viscera, seismic, real, almost spiritual is the sensation.
The darkness of the deepest underground cavern is different from the stuffy and homely darkness of your bedroom at night, where grey-faced phantoms, the echoes of despondent old suicides, might so easily lurk. The darkness of the underground is far more ominous and blacker, more vast and unfeeling than the bitterest arctic night. The ghosts that may be found there are not the flickering recordings of dispossesed humanity found in suburbs and forgotten industrial towns. There you might encounter the ghost of the earth itself, a sterner and more ancient ghost, but one that the ancient inhabitants of this island knew about from the earliest times. Their attitude to what lay beneath the ground in dark places was one of reverence and awe, giving way to intimate respect. This is the love of the earth itself. And why not because the earth deserves to be loved. The primitive heart, which saw more clearly than the modern heart, was always able to perceive this. But where i differ from Native American and a lot of other traditions is not to resolutely see the earth as a mother, a womb, always soft, bounteous, rolling, blossoming forth in fruit for her children....

Cosmology 4

Why the revolution, the giddy interminable spin around that star? With those other bodies, some gliding swiftly, some lumbering slowly by. We spin round meaninglessly, like a cork in a whirlpool. Involuntary obedience to imponderable "laws of nature"- vast, sad, immutable laws. A machine which seems to have no function, and to produce mere coincidences of inexplicable, huge phenomena. If a deity's hand had set the planets in order, how cruel of him to leave them so empty, so devoid of life or interest. Dusty balls of rock, vaccuous gas giants, moons spattered with craters. So that hopeful mankind, emerging from the cradle of his planet, could reach out to them and find himself, once again, alone. He finds nothing but the playing out of the same empty and hostile processes- Clouds of acid gas, dull volcanoes, distant dust storms. Barren wasteland upon barren wasteland. Man, in gazing out into the universe, is merely confronted with his own uniqueness- and is thereby a valuable lesson.
But i see lonely Venus, a pinpoint of light in the sky. I see her in the evening when she comes with a great luminescent blue haze from the horizon. She is also seen in cold grey ragged dawns, with the sky behind paling thinly. She's the only planet i've ever seen. The others lie even further out, behind the deepest folds of velvety space, across unimaginable distances. They have all the intangibility and mystery of the old dead gods they are named after. If they appear at all it must only be as an imperceptible pinprick of light. But to me, an object seen in the sky, astoundingly distant, disconcertingly alien, ceases to be a point of philosophy abstractly speculated about. Instead, i am imparted suddenly with a deep feeling of mystery and awe, and those laws of nature which i, with superficial objectivity, thought to be meaningless seem in practice to be quite beautiful, grand, and significant. Perhaps this is no answer at all, or only half an answer- But i only know (and the knowledge suffices for me) that the star that comes over the horizon and brings the day with it does so for a reason.

cosmology 3

Black night, empty space. Imagine a void that you could travel in eternally, meeting nothing. Imagine it utterly silent, and you, a mote, a speck, drifting through it.
Night gives us intimations of mortality because it is boundless. The night sky does not confine, but can be penetrated, and travelled into endlessly, giving up all its vast silent secrets. Travelling into the night sky you would emerge into space and notice no difference, for night is eternity descended upon earth, it is a glimpse of the absolute. Neither benevolent nor malevolent, but as vast, as impartial, as silent as eternity. It's a quiet, placid fact which speaks of an unimaginable stretch of distance.
Yes, at night i can glimpse eternity. I can feel myself as a speck in the void, a mote in the night air, unstable, invisible, of meaning only to myself. During the day i can see from horizon to horizon, and am enclosed by the dome of the sky, my eye can't seem to penetrate that hard blue, like a neat gloss of paint. Then i can feel myself a man on earth, attuned to mundane things. To go beyond earth, to leave it behind in my mind, i need darkness. Darkness you could swim into as though through an ocean, going ever further outwards. I know before i submerge myself that the ocean is limitless... What confounds me, what embitters me is that i am just a poor swimmer with feet of clay. The depth and distance of the ocean makes me dizzy, and i might lose my way.
Who'll have the courage to look with me into the night sky and say that what they see is something that is endless? Who'll then have the gall, the impudence, to give us a reason for our being set in the midst of it? Really there are no reasons and no answers. I am hushed by the blackness, the absence of sound. I am a speck in the limitless void. Not going forward, and yet not remaining static.

woken Tuesday from nightmare, idiotic
having apoplexy over nothing important soon to be
unregarded. leaving bed, behind, valueless,
each distortion, or yr noble prick & its demands.
peeing... distraction. what if... thoughts like that.
life without a system or slogans, to live life...
(I was halfway to paradise when my pen ran out).

cosmology 2

So science at its aboslute limit, spanning the whole of creation, surveying the expanse of the universe, is brought back to its roots and made animal once more. Because these are exactly the limits of the human mind, size and depth and distance, and therefore they may be said to be, in a real way, things we were not designed to think about. All the great scientists, Newton or Einstein or Stephen Hawking or anyone, still has that limitation in his brain, a physical, animal limitation by which he is righteously dwarfed by a universe he would seek to know. Maybe an anthropologist will tell you of the social basis of the human brain's functions, how it's to help to hunter survey his range, plot the tracks of far-ranging reindeer, cast his spears. What, as basic as that? Hunter versus hunted, something rooted in the animal kingdom, hairy-faced hunters sniffing the wind? And maybe a biologist will tell you of the limits of the mammal brain.
And so it's ironical that in the judgement of distance mankind meets its limit, because hairy hominids in trees grasped at branches and stared down with wary eyes. Maybe the limit of the imagined cast of my mind is just a couple of miles, from horizon to horizon, and thus it is brought home to us that we are animals in an animal environment, just like monkeys in a cage, albeit ingenious monkeys that dream and conjecture about what we see outside the bars.
Before, when i spoke about myself as a speck, what was i really picturing? Something like one of these specks of paint on my desk, or a mote of dust on my carpet. Yes, the human brain really is painfully limited.

cosmology 1

If the ancients in their worship of mother earth, earth godesses, etc had known about the actual size of the universe, would they come to the conclusion that it was a mother universe with us snug and secure in the womb of it, full and safe in empty space?
For its size is such that it shocks the human senses, it's a scale by which we can be measured and found less than insignificant. It is the boundless whole, the empty void of pre-creation in itself, frighteningly empty, and we are only its microscopic germs on the backs of microscopic germs, unbelievably miniscule, an infestation of atoms invisible in the grasping, touching, enormously vast stretch of empty and starlit space. Speaking for myself and my little human race, for my planet and its neighbours, for my little spiral galaxy- that is, speaking as a microscopic speck on an infinitesimally minute dot- what can actually be said that is not made meaningless, in the actual, as opposed to the apparent, scheme of things? The universe laughs at us because we are a speck, and we strive, and do not laugh with it. Which begs the question why do we strive, why do we bother, we insects, we germs, kicking and biting against one another, for brief and temporary reasons. This is not mysticism, this is not the voice of metaphysics. These conclusions were arrived at by the route of cold scientific fact, that droning voice so arrogantly brought home to us over the whole course of our lives, insisting on its own superiority, oblivious to the fact that by starting out to explain everything they have ended by explaining (in human terms at least) nothing.
Of course, in the wider scheme of things it doesn't matter. I am a speck on a speck on a speck, creation's aborted consciousness.

Written June 17th

I walked away today, with a small, compact feeling of joy, i was smiling and even laughing to myself, but it wore off as the evening came on... And yes the old longing has come back, and with it much, much more. Its bittersweet. I suppose the intimations of mortality are haunting me with the impetus to produce something lasting. That will retain its strength or resonance, beyond what i will end up doing. And i want to write out of what i sustain within my own subjective thought. That is, the ingrained and inward pool of feeling that tends always toward action of some kind, delicious and growing like today, a wet spring, approaching an early summer, in which i don't feel daunted or afraid, but could sustain myself, old as i am, for ever, not regretting anything, not passively accepting anything but noticing everything, so that those that can come after me can say that i lived.

I care nothing for how others see me. I am extracting my suffering and laying it bare. Write! Offensive bile, mundane rubbish, write fictions and factoids... but write! Write truths, what you consider to be truths. I'm sickened by symbols, by common sense, by received wisdom. All of it is liable to be reversed.
Write even if you can't write. Above all, complain. Complain and cry from your core. It's liberating. Disgorge, hold nothing back. Write love letters. Look at everything and discard freely what does not appeal to you.
On politics i know one thing: The "there is no alternative" people are wrong. Haunt your loved ones, be full of bile even if it's counter productive. Find what you're sure of and stick fast to it. Don't deny your negativity and jealousy, instead, ride them like beasts, feel their power and glory. It's not masochistic either, to hell with masochism. There is a transcendence in it, in accepting poverty, sickness, violence, all the negative emotions; there's a synthetic end, a conclusion, a get-out-clause, an escape which partakes of their violence and intensity. For every backward action there's an equal and opposite forward action. Drop self-consciousness except where it seems apt.

I'm restless and i can't settle down to anything.. I think i want to experience life, and love. Other men's visions appear to me stale and flat, uninteresting. I like pictures, not the printed word.
I like the spoken word and the unvarnished truth. I love to counterpose myself against false statements, shallow words. Things seen falsely and shallowly, to empty myself of pretense and, finding something still within me, to cast it out into the void, shattering the fragile cage of social interaction, or disregarding it, not holding it or anything as sacred, not chained to anything...
I don't like films or fictions. But i like comics, sequential pictures, they seem to me honest and useful fictions, especially the better Japanese ones. It's a different way of seeing; though reading right to left fills me with uneasiness.
I start a book but never get far in, a conventional western book i mean. I think i haven't read properly; indeed i never read anything properly. I forgot how to read years ago. All you can do is write your own truth, but you can never read. I get no pleasure from it, except an arcane, perverse, bitter joy at inflicting myself, my nihilism, on others. I want them to know that i am alive. But i can't write stories anymore. Still, what is emerging from me, from my core, is unique.

Group conformity encouraged by the reward of acceptance...
Impersonal state control enforced through personal acceptance, because to dissent it to become socially undesirable.
In this way, the needs and desires of the individual, natural or not, can at every stage be used against him, to persuade him to perform certain activities...
The difficulty comes when the individual loses faith in the rewards held out to him. Loss of faith in commonly-accepted values brings with it a breakdown in conformity.
Thus is born in the individual a desperate desire for personal autonomy, unconnected and free from regulation, a drive for liberty.