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.