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....