It's the nights that really bother me- i just don't know what to do with them, or with myself. It doesn't matter how tired i
am, i cannot sleep properly. I also have no-one to talk to, and all the communication i do have is somehow unsatisfying.
I've been on my own here for two months now.
If i go out and get drunk it doesn't improve things. I'm still a melancholic drunk, and alcohol just reveals a metaphysical void for me, and makes me very single-minded, but these days i have nowhere to put my passions and they resound back on me.
I wish i knew what to do. And i wish someone would listen sympathetically.
I've stopped thinking that this is somehow of value because cathartic in itself. If i carry doubt to everything i have to carry doubt even to that. So i know that i have to continue, and i know that i have to be active and inflict myself on the world, not hiding away or denying anything... I know that above everything else, until in fact that realisation is all that remains...
Furtherance, continuance, in the face of no matter what miseries. A thing about misery; the only good thing; it cannot last indefinitely. It is like a piece of elastic, it stretches and stretches and then it breaks. And with the break, the ultimate point being breached, some relief is gained, some falling back upon oneself, like the lull after the crescendo of a symphony, but this lull, this space, is somehow sadder, more desperate, because emptier, because charged with a resolution to continue and not succumb. But is it really a resolution, really a choice, or just what is left after all other options have been investigated and
found to be dead ends?
Meanwhile, there are the nights... I could stare down the nights, look into them, look through and past them, and into their
voids and not be afraid, surely? No, the answer is plain; i AM afraid. Why? Analyse it.......
I am afraid of not being here anymore. I am afraid of being forgotten. And yet i know that i WILL be forgotten and not here.
Why does it bother me? Egoism, maybe. Attention-seeking.
Thursday 27 December 2012
Monday 17 December 2012
Solipsism Again 2
Solutions: I will march up the hill and survey the city below. I will consume cheap palliatives. I will investigate tawdry and uninteresting mysteries. I will draw empty city streets. Above all I must find courage from somewhere, courage enough to somehow live on, dragging my cadaver through whirlwinds and roundabouts of trouble. The blues fall flat and reach my ears no longer. The girls don't talk to me. All communication comes rigidly and departs. I am listening to symphonies but there is some barrier between them and me. I want money and not work, romance and not politics. I give five percent to sex and ninety-five to love. I will go to the final boundary and transgress it for that love. I will throw myself repeatedly into fires. I will be immolated and transfigured, lying generously from an open heart, and telling myself compulsively that nothing remains.
I felt free, I felt alive. I walked down the street and felt the wind in my face. I thought, "I am intact, I am whole". It was a tiny, strange triumph which was soon subsumed into the leaden ocean of time, that shifted around it, that pulled me with it, till again I was lost at the centre.
Back to solipsism. The solipsist, that selfish bastard, sees only the grim fairground of circumstance, the dance of phenomena, pass before his grotesquely all-perceiving eyes; he himself is the centre, the still centre and axis of the world. Still, did I say? No; the eye of this storm is turbulent, it quakes and seethes, it is infected with an unseemly sickness which can never find rest. It quickens and slows like a heartbeat, it pulls up and down on the marionette-like form of the solipsiser, jerking him into motion; it besets him with toothache-like pain, but a toothache of the heart, a wormlike pain that quietly eats at him, which, when he puts his head on a pillow and shuts his eyes in the dark, comes alive in him and begins monstrously to reign in him, welling up from his centre to fill his head with voices, not actually heard or hallucinated, but, almost worse, merely rehearsed or conjectured, ridiculously repeated like stock phrases, as though the emotions were bad actors or incompetent comedians, insisting on playing to the end their tormenting routines.
This is the nameless pain that eats like a worm at the heart of man.
I felt free, I felt alive. I walked down the street and felt the wind in my face. I thought, "I am intact, I am whole". It was a tiny, strange triumph which was soon subsumed into the leaden ocean of time, that shifted around it, that pulled me with it, till again I was lost at the centre.
Back to solipsism. The solipsist, that selfish bastard, sees only the grim fairground of circumstance, the dance of phenomena, pass before his grotesquely all-perceiving eyes; he himself is the centre, the still centre and axis of the world. Still, did I say? No; the eye of this storm is turbulent, it quakes and seethes, it is infected with an unseemly sickness which can never find rest. It quickens and slows like a heartbeat, it pulls up and down on the marionette-like form of the solipsiser, jerking him into motion; it besets him with toothache-like pain, but a toothache of the heart, a wormlike pain that quietly eats at him, which, when he puts his head on a pillow and shuts his eyes in the dark, comes alive in him and begins monstrously to reign in him, welling up from his centre to fill his head with voices, not actually heard or hallucinated, but, almost worse, merely rehearsed or conjectured, ridiculously repeated like stock phrases, as though the emotions were bad actors or incompetent comedians, insisting on playing to the end their tormenting routines.
This is the nameless pain that eats like a worm at the heart of man.
On Solipsism Again
What is this feeling? This feeling is not desperate. This feeling is quite clear. The desire for change, destruction, transformation is associated with clarity and calmness. No frenzy, tears, wailing and gnashing of teeth, if desperation then a calm and lucid desperation. It comes in still moments and declares itself softly. It partakes of fear, but fear advances stealthily and comes as a whole, round, complete feeling, deep like a pool. What shows on the surface? There are no tears. At the worst, I hug the walls. I thought that despair would be accompanied by conventional anguish. Instead, it comes full and blank and almost comforting, it comes like a whitewash spreading from the roots to the summit of a mountain. It is like that clarity, that drunken clarity, that pause in the bustle of thoughts which enables you to see your surroundings as they are. I am keeping myself alive, for what?
Solipsism, the disease of infecting everything one looks at with one's subjectivity, so that it is instantly transformed into something warped and distorted, something bland and flat. And there is no product of culture that I cannot distort in this way. It's "the human condition" they say.
I left the flat and came back to the flat. I was feeling sorry for myself. Briefly washing up at the sink, I struggled to contain the feeling. I went to the livingroom, I put my forehead to the wall, caressing my brow, not allowing tears. Do I exploit these feelings and occurrences by recalling them, by re-enacting them in writing? By doing this, do I wear a mask, do I take pain and pantomime it on a stage, for cheap laughs, cheap applause, cheap pathos? The stirring up of false pity? That is part of me too: Playing to the gallery. This reflection on emotion is not the main event, or the thing itself. The feeling that can be described is not the essential feeling, not the all-consuming, important thing. That comes sourly and wordless, wordless because heedless of words, because pre-verbal, because riding on calm waves of overwhelming terror, and more, a purposive terror which tends always toward action. If only it could encompass or encourage stasis! Then I would be set for life; I could stay in bed. But I know it will not let me rest as I would wish. This is only a temporary rest; and it is this temporariness itself which disturbs me.
Solipsism, the disease of infecting everything one looks at with one's subjectivity, so that it is instantly transformed into something warped and distorted, something bland and flat. And there is no product of culture that I cannot distort in this way. It's "the human condition" they say.
I left the flat and came back to the flat. I was feeling sorry for myself. Briefly washing up at the sink, I struggled to contain the feeling. I went to the livingroom, I put my forehead to the wall, caressing my brow, not allowing tears. Do I exploit these feelings and occurrences by recalling them, by re-enacting them in writing? By doing this, do I wear a mask, do I take pain and pantomime it on a stage, for cheap laughs, cheap applause, cheap pathos? The stirring up of false pity? That is part of me too: Playing to the gallery. This reflection on emotion is not the main event, or the thing itself. The feeling that can be described is not the essential feeling, not the all-consuming, important thing. That comes sourly and wordless, wordless because heedless of words, because pre-verbal, because riding on calm waves of overwhelming terror, and more, a purposive terror which tends always toward action. If only it could encompass or encourage stasis! Then I would be set for life; I could stay in bed. But I know it will not let me rest as I would wish. This is only a temporary rest; and it is this temporariness itself which disturbs me.
Tuesday 23 October 2012
Crescendo and Diminuendo
And now the sun is rising, something dies... And I can't begin to write or say anything. I hear the calling of the gulls in the sky invalidate me. Something is dying and along with it, I feel myself dying. I see the opalescence of the sky light up, but I can't see any worth in it. I feel with a slow realization the wretchedness of everything. And I feel deathly tired.
Writing is useless. Not a thing to be gained from it. No surcease of sorrow, no intimations, no companionships. Nothing. But there must be something, something somewhere, that is beautiful, pure, fresh, untainted. Somewhere there must be an incorruptible core, otherwise it's all in vain.
Nothing is ever communicated by me, not a word of my language is ever understood. In the long run it's wholly meaningless, utterly corruptible, non-translatable to other spheres of thought. Yet there must be something... There must be something...
There must be a golden state! I want it and would die for it in an instant. And maybe dying is what it takes. I must soar above it, I must leave it all behind. And I repeat, there must be something...
No. It is time to begin. I am utterly sleepy again, sicktired, sick of hearing all the noises I must hear, all the sights I must see. The winds of the old rail tracks are rattling in the trees, which is such a mournful sound, like the mournings or blessings of old ghosts.
No lamplight down here, which makes it scary in the middle of the night and all blasted and hollow.
This is the kind of old train tracks where drunks stumble and curse in the dark, or are just namelessly sorrowful with dreams of sleep, returning home. They might as well be blind among the trees and sharp stones. I know his thoughts because the old bum, the old drunk, the nameless ragged teenager of no future and alcohol, is me. None other than myself.
Here are some of the gloomiest, most inexpressible thoughts that can echo and slumber around in that brain: "I, suddenly, full of bright anguish, just suddenly passed the playing field beside the dark slopes and the empty windows of the school building at night, and I felt and saw in the window, something that pierced my heart in an old rage mingled with beatific peace, the sad papers and collages stuck up on walls with coloured papers and pieces of glitter, the cluttered-around empty stools inhabited by no-one, similar to that nursery or primary school which I myself attended and which are empty now too, as empty as me on this road, in the dark, sniffing, uplooking, never quite catching the flash of light or the smell of some ancient and beautiful scent in the musty backwheeling classrooms that connects me to the ghost..."
Writing is useless. Not a thing to be gained from it. No surcease of sorrow, no intimations, no companionships. Nothing. But there must be something, something somewhere, that is beautiful, pure, fresh, untainted. Somewhere there must be an incorruptible core, otherwise it's all in vain.
Nothing is ever communicated by me, not a word of my language is ever understood. In the long run it's wholly meaningless, utterly corruptible, non-translatable to other spheres of thought. Yet there must be something... There must be something...
There must be a golden state! I want it and would die for it in an instant. And maybe dying is what it takes. I must soar above it, I must leave it all behind. And I repeat, there must be something...
No. It is time to begin. I am utterly sleepy again, sicktired, sick of hearing all the noises I must hear, all the sights I must see. The winds of the old rail tracks are rattling in the trees, which is such a mournful sound, like the mournings or blessings of old ghosts.
No lamplight down here, which makes it scary in the middle of the night and all blasted and hollow.
This is the kind of old train tracks where drunks stumble and curse in the dark, or are just namelessly sorrowful with dreams of sleep, returning home. They might as well be blind among the trees and sharp stones. I know his thoughts because the old bum, the old drunk, the nameless ragged teenager of no future and alcohol, is me. None other than myself.
Here are some of the gloomiest, most inexpressible thoughts that can echo and slumber around in that brain: "I, suddenly, full of bright anguish, just suddenly passed the playing field beside the dark slopes and the empty windows of the school building at night, and I felt and saw in the window, something that pierced my heart in an old rage mingled with beatific peace, the sad papers and collages stuck up on walls with coloured papers and pieces of glitter, the cluttered-around empty stools inhabited by no-one, similar to that nursery or primary school which I myself attended and which are empty now too, as empty as me on this road, in the dark, sniffing, uplooking, never quite catching the flash of light or the smell of some ancient and beautiful scent in the musty backwheeling classrooms that connects me to the ghost..."
Monday 1 October 2012
Meeting Joe King
We met Joe King outside the pub.
Robert engaged him in conversation.
What band ye in?
The Queers.
It's too smoky in there man, he said.
Lots of passive smoking, said I.
Huh?
Passive smoking.
So you guys from here in Edin boro?
No, from Fife.
How far's that from here?
Across the bridge.
(This clearly means nothing to him).
.....
"We took a walk around Edin boro.
It's nice".
Robert engaged him in conversation.
What band ye in?
The Queers.
It's too smoky in there man, he said.
Lots of passive smoking, said I.
Huh?
Passive smoking.
So you guys from here in Edin boro?
No, from Fife.
How far's that from here?
Across the bridge.
(This clearly means nothing to him).
.....
"We took a walk around Edin boro.
It's nice".
Fragments of Poetry
Perhaps one day she'll close her eyes, and fall,
Maybe her body will feed the earth.
Perhaps her yellow hair will scatter into corn,
Her blood become roses, her loves
A great tide of sunflowers. The earth will welcome her
Like a mother, suck her dry of desires and fears-
She'll be dispersed in the endless womb of the earth.
The earth has a magnetic pull, a woman to a woman,
Drawn by blood, drawn by weight, drawn by
Too many years of love, to succumb, and merge.
A new bloom grows in the ash- an edible bloom
Which has its own delicious dew- new tears of relief I bless it with.
A new dawn can come, smiling between grey apartment blocks,
Penetrating night. And a small word can come like a chuckle from your solar plexus
Like a child's word. A small flame, knowingly enkindled,
Unexpectedly, of its own brave accord.
Sunday 30 September 2012
The Sketchbook 4
On Tuesday afternoon the tutor decided that the students must evaluate one another's work, standard procedure. They exchange sketchbooks. After looking through the sketchbook of the person next to you, you have a brief discussion, pointing out what you like and don't like. The student beside me was young, faintly amused by the procedure, but was also conscientious, and seemed to take the task semi-seriously. We sat perched on stools by the easels clustered end to end.
This is to get us into the habit of looking critically at one another's work, as employed also in the art schools. The theory is that one should learn from one's peers, that art should take place in an environment of peers, commenting, suggesting and intervening. Sometimes, though, the practice seems awkward or artificial, and one says the minimum, to avoid hurting the other or shaking him from his complacency or habits. False praise is no doubt given at times, also. Like everything imposed from outside, even the gentlest and most beneficial, they are sometimes experienced with discomfort or disinterest.
And I hand my sketchbook to the student beside me, an echo of the time I handed it over before. I see it once again, my gesture exactly the same, his receipt exactly the same. And now it seems to be his, for a few minutes, but his nonetheless, to judge and pore over. So, this is a gesture that I must repeat: To hand over that which is mine, which I jealously guard, to a stranger, for in this land everyone is a stranger, even my friend. He is only a provisional friend, till the time he reveals himself as a rival. My sketchbook in the hands of another: What if he misuses it, what if he marks it with rough, careless drawings, or subjects the work to rough, careless misunderstandings? He will see it with another eye, his own, different from mine: Like images seen reversed in a mirror, his eye will distort the drawings while they remain the same, and he will fail to understand them. I feel as though he is prising open an oyster to rudely grasp a pearl which is mine, his fingers settling around it. He will misunderstand.
Now Wednesday and life drawing: I am doing a drawing on a big A2 sheet with pastels. The students stand at their easels drawing. I have before me on my stool an open set of pastel crayons. The boy beside me asks if he can borrow a yellow pastel. I hand it over.
The slightly stunted yellow chalk is in his possession, he receives it with a murmur, preoccupied and careless. I say nothing. He adds highlights to his drawing, carelessly and roughly.
Meanwhile the model sits motionless and graceful against the backdrop of a white sheet.
I gave him the sketchbook and he returned it with drawings which I did not like. I did not like having it in his control, wrested away from me. He took a thing belonging to me, I gave it reluctantly. I give away my sketchbook, my chalk, that which is mine. When they touch my things I feel anxious, but cannot intervene; I am too polite, or I strive to be polite. I would like to snatch my object back, like small children do when they have not learned to be dishonest. Like the child, I do not really care about the object, whatever it may be; I merely want to wrench it from another's grasp because it is mine. This idea of "mine" is a triumph and an end in itself.
And in the end I will give all my possessions away, disperse them like seed: I don't care about them.
This is to get us into the habit of looking critically at one another's work, as employed also in the art schools. The theory is that one should learn from one's peers, that art should take place in an environment of peers, commenting, suggesting and intervening. Sometimes, though, the practice seems awkward or artificial, and one says the minimum, to avoid hurting the other or shaking him from his complacency or habits. False praise is no doubt given at times, also. Like everything imposed from outside, even the gentlest and most beneficial, they are sometimes experienced with discomfort or disinterest.
And I hand my sketchbook to the student beside me, an echo of the time I handed it over before. I see it once again, my gesture exactly the same, his receipt exactly the same. And now it seems to be his, for a few minutes, but his nonetheless, to judge and pore over. So, this is a gesture that I must repeat: To hand over that which is mine, which I jealously guard, to a stranger, for in this land everyone is a stranger, even my friend. He is only a provisional friend, till the time he reveals himself as a rival. My sketchbook in the hands of another: What if he misuses it, what if he marks it with rough, careless drawings, or subjects the work to rough, careless misunderstandings? He will see it with another eye, his own, different from mine: Like images seen reversed in a mirror, his eye will distort the drawings while they remain the same, and he will fail to understand them. I feel as though he is prising open an oyster to rudely grasp a pearl which is mine, his fingers settling around it. He will misunderstand.
Now Wednesday and life drawing: I am doing a drawing on a big A2 sheet with pastels. The students stand at their easels drawing. I have before me on my stool an open set of pastel crayons. The boy beside me asks if he can borrow a yellow pastel. I hand it over.
The slightly stunted yellow chalk is in his possession, he receives it with a murmur, preoccupied and careless. I say nothing. He adds highlights to his drawing, carelessly and roughly.
Meanwhile the model sits motionless and graceful against the backdrop of a white sheet.
I gave him the sketchbook and he returned it with drawings which I did not like. I did not like having it in his control, wrested away from me. He took a thing belonging to me, I gave it reluctantly. I give away my sketchbook, my chalk, that which is mine. When they touch my things I feel anxious, but cannot intervene; I am too polite, or I strive to be polite. I would like to snatch my object back, like small children do when they have not learned to be dishonest. Like the child, I do not really care about the object, whatever it may be; I merely want to wrench it from another's grasp because it is mine. This idea of "mine" is a triumph and an end in itself.
And in the end I will give all my possessions away, disperse them like seed: I don't care about them.
The Sketchbook 3
Back from a break, in which I went to the toilets, I find my sketchbook abandoned carelessly on a shelf at the side of the room. I pick it up and leaf through it: It is full of his drawings, or rather the marks he has made. With a light pencil. I am not thrilled.
I count the pages he has used, with annoyance: 12 in all, 12 large A3 pieces of clean white cartridge paper. A substantial portion of the book ruined, or will have to be thrown away. My favourite sketchbook, that I was keeping so pristine, so pure and professional. Contaminated by his careless scrawl. He had drawn disconsolately, as though half-asleep, turning pages as soon as a new idea, nebulous and dim, formed in his mind, to be in turn abandoned. Like automatic drawing.
Spurious pencil drawings with a loose line meandering over pages, as though the drawer's hand drifted by itself from page to page, formlessly dancing, allowing the line to wander delicately as the leaves turned. Also, scribbles and doodles, like would be done on a pad by the phone, while the drawer was immersed in a daydream or dull phonecall, or on a beermat or betting slip. Confined to a corner of the paper, or skulking at its lower edge, like rude and futile gestures.
On one page I find he had drawn a series of boxes, like comic panels, suggesting a sequence to be read from left to right. But depicted inside the little boxes are only what look like stylised depictions of clouds and mist, as might be shown in an old print, obscuring the edges and corners of ambiguous objects. Is this his dream, his vagueness, drawn lightly with a light pencil, did he in fact slumber as he drew? No, he draws like this because he is mysterious, because he is himself a figure from a dream. I find the vagueness contemptible, the cheap pencil, the loose, uncaring line, that commits to nothing. It disgusts me, as though he had marked the paper with dirt.
I count the pages he has used, with annoyance: 12 in all, 12 large A3 pieces of clean white cartridge paper. A substantial portion of the book ruined, or will have to be thrown away. My favourite sketchbook, that I was keeping so pristine, so pure and professional. Contaminated by his careless scrawl. He had drawn disconsolately, as though half-asleep, turning pages as soon as a new idea, nebulous and dim, formed in his mind, to be in turn abandoned. Like automatic drawing.
Spurious pencil drawings with a loose line meandering over pages, as though the drawer's hand drifted by itself from page to page, formlessly dancing, allowing the line to wander delicately as the leaves turned. Also, scribbles and doodles, like would be done on a pad by the phone, while the drawer was immersed in a daydream or dull phonecall, or on a beermat or betting slip. Confined to a corner of the paper, or skulking at its lower edge, like rude and futile gestures.
On one page I find he had drawn a series of boxes, like comic panels, suggesting a sequence to be read from left to right. But depicted inside the little boxes are only what look like stylised depictions of clouds and mist, as might be shown in an old print, obscuring the edges and corners of ambiguous objects. Is this his dream, his vagueness, drawn lightly with a light pencil, did he in fact slumber as he drew? No, he draws like this because he is mysterious, because he is himself a figure from a dream. I find the vagueness contemptible, the cheap pencil, the loose, uncaring line, that commits to nothing. It disgusts me, as though he had marked the paper with dirt.
The Sketchbook 2
Someone told me the guy is just out of prison. I am afraid of him. His large, intimidating mouth, powerful and uncaring, brooding. His eyes focused on things beyond or above me, never seeing me. What was he in jail for?
While there, no doubt, he developed an interest in art. There was some room, there was an easel, there were paints. Then at night he went back to the room where he was confined and the lights were put out. This, his cell, became his kingdom: There he drew and painted. On release, he said in broad tongue he wanted to continue: And so he came here. He is large and moody, a past life of sorrow and difficulty.
The middle class is unknown to him, and exists on a different plane. The working class is unknown to them. And yet he sits in their midst. In dole offices I had seen his type, waiting to be seen, conversing amongst themselves loudly: Used to it. There too I was afraid of him. He lounges relaxed in a big chair, such as is used by staff, large and loutish, his scarred and tatooed hands open the sketchbook and find a blank page. His feet in white trainers. His short glossy hair, somehow intimidating. Legs open, confident. Lips pouting.
I despise and am jealous of the middle classes. I despise and am disgusted by the working classes. I am working class. I hate them all secretly and timidly, never allowing it to show. I pretend instead that I have found my place in the hierarchy. But my eyes see too much, they see it all and I recognise myself. I compare myself to them. I want to be middle class, and yet I hate them. I know I am working class, and yet I hate them.
Can I be a republic of one? No; I am working class, first, second and last.
While there, no doubt, he developed an interest in art. There was some room, there was an easel, there were paints. Then at night he went back to the room where he was confined and the lights were put out. This, his cell, became his kingdom: There he drew and painted. On release, he said in broad tongue he wanted to continue: And so he came here. He is large and moody, a past life of sorrow and difficulty.
The middle class is unknown to him, and exists on a different plane. The working class is unknown to them. And yet he sits in their midst. In dole offices I had seen his type, waiting to be seen, conversing amongst themselves loudly: Used to it. There too I was afraid of him. He lounges relaxed in a big chair, such as is used by staff, large and loutish, his scarred and tatooed hands open the sketchbook and find a blank page. His feet in white trainers. His short glossy hair, somehow intimidating. Legs open, confident. Lips pouting.
I despise and am jealous of the middle classes. I despise and am disgusted by the working classes. I am working class. I hate them all secretly and timidly, never allowing it to show. I pretend instead that I have found my place in the hierarchy. But my eyes see too much, they see it all and I recognise myself. I compare myself to them. I want to be middle class, and yet I hate them. I know I am working class, and yet I hate them.
Can I be a republic of one? No; I am working class, first, second and last.
The Sketchbook 1
I was an art student and every day in the week I would get up and go to the bus station. From there I would get on a bus that took me to the city, taking with me a bag containing art materials: Pens, ink, brushes and paints. I would walk to a building and ascend the stairs to a room where other art students had gathered, this being the requisite place for our gathering. The room was large and bright with large windows, and contained the following: Drawing boards, easels, and stools, with space for the large drawing boards in shelves. The easels would be gathered in a corner at the end of the class.
But one day a new guy appeared in this room which was used for life drawing, a late enroller on the course it seemed.
He approaches me carelessly, his eyes averted, as though uninterested in me, dismissive of me, his mind on other things. He is not looking at me. If I knew him I would think he disliked me. He seems aggressive and tough, not like an art student, who are sensitive, effeminate, classy; from middle class homes and with refined airs. And he says have you got a spare page in your sketchbook, mouth loose and hanging, eyes not looking at me, as though I were unworthy to look at. He is a ned.
My prize beloved sketchbook, big and plush-black, A3, which is a good size, substantial. Got it with other art materials given free in a pack at the start of the semester. We descended the stairs to a room and, on signing a piece of paper, were given the packs containing drawing implements, sketchbooks, and a small watercolour set. But this is my favourite sketchbook, I'm proud of how professional it looks, I lug it around with me. My pride: For the black cover, the glossy frontsheet, the sturdy cartridge paper.
I am reluctant to hand it to him but do so out of an effort to be polite, to be thought of as generous, gracious. What would these other students do? I emulate them. They have grace, coolness, looks, money. From middle class homes. They have not had to strive, sweat and suffer. They laugh softly and easily, their loves come easily and they mix with one another easily. Sure, I say, handing it to him. It's one page. I can always tear it out.
But one day a new guy appeared in this room which was used for life drawing, a late enroller on the course it seemed.
He approaches me carelessly, his eyes averted, as though uninterested in me, dismissive of me, his mind on other things. He is not looking at me. If I knew him I would think he disliked me. He seems aggressive and tough, not like an art student, who are sensitive, effeminate, classy; from middle class homes and with refined airs. And he says have you got a spare page in your sketchbook, mouth loose and hanging, eyes not looking at me, as though I were unworthy to look at. He is a ned.
My prize beloved sketchbook, big and plush-black, A3, which is a good size, substantial. Got it with other art materials given free in a pack at the start of the semester. We descended the stairs to a room and, on signing a piece of paper, were given the packs containing drawing implements, sketchbooks, and a small watercolour set. But this is my favourite sketchbook, I'm proud of how professional it looks, I lug it around with me. My pride: For the black cover, the glossy frontsheet, the sturdy cartridge paper.
I am reluctant to hand it to him but do so out of an effort to be polite, to be thought of as generous, gracious. What would these other students do? I emulate them. They have grace, coolness, looks, money. From middle class homes. They have not had to strive, sweat and suffer. They laugh softly and easily, their loves come easily and they mix with one another easily. Sure, I say, handing it to him. It's one page. I can always tear it out.
Thursday 13 September 2012
Philosophy Class
I show up ten twenty minutes late for Philosophy class, which is held in a sort of basement room reached through confusing and windowless corridors. And crashing in the door puffing and tired, but also ruddy and confident, I breezily announce that I got lost. This is a big statement, fresh in the stale, confined atmosphere of the windowless seminar room.
The room is divided into two sections, where two groups of tables have been placed and discussions are already under way, but loose and desultory discussions, with bored and non-compliant students.
I'm glanced at semi-irritably by the tutors for showing up late. The main tutor is Alice, in charge of the whole programme and school, an American lady in her forties, very bright, open and positive, Californian to a fault. She calls me by my Christian name and, observing social niceties, introduces the other tutors and tries to get me settled into a discussion group. A level of discipline beginning to gather under the tone of an old hippy.
But the other tutors are peculiar and must be recent graduates or trainees. Young and louche and non-committal, they lounge at their tables, barely looking me in the eye. One is a semi-goth and has a light sprinkling of kohl around his eyes, which makes them look bruised.
Also in the class is a black-headed goth girl, who sits motionless in a mask of make-up, her arms in a web of lace, frivolous plastic trinkets at her neck. The other tutor has a mop of brown hair in his eyes and is monolouging on his travels in the west of Ireland, slowly and laboriously, in a boring brogue.
But I see, amongst the detritus beneath the table, the edges of a photograph, torn from a newspaper, downloaded or scanned or photocopied: It shows a snub-nosed blonde girl, grinning for the photo, in a première frock, busty and vacant. Strange to see these little scraps of glamour in brown philosophy rooms, the grin of the glamour model, one of those girls who achieve a sort of notoriety on those latenight shows.
The room is divided into two sections, where two groups of tables have been placed and discussions are already under way, but loose and desultory discussions, with bored and non-compliant students.
I'm glanced at semi-irritably by the tutors for showing up late. The main tutor is Alice, in charge of the whole programme and school, an American lady in her forties, very bright, open and positive, Californian to a fault. She calls me by my Christian name and, observing social niceties, introduces the other tutors and tries to get me settled into a discussion group. A level of discipline beginning to gather under the tone of an old hippy.
But the other tutors are peculiar and must be recent graduates or trainees. Young and louche and non-committal, they lounge at their tables, barely looking me in the eye. One is a semi-goth and has a light sprinkling of kohl around his eyes, which makes them look bruised.
Also in the class is a black-headed goth girl, who sits motionless in a mask of make-up, her arms in a web of lace, frivolous plastic trinkets at her neck. The other tutor has a mop of brown hair in his eyes and is monolouging on his travels in the west of Ireland, slowly and laboriously, in a boring brogue.
But I see, amongst the detritus beneath the table, the edges of a photograph, torn from a newspaper, downloaded or scanned or photocopied: It shows a snub-nosed blonde girl, grinning for the photo, in a première frock, busty and vacant. Strange to see these little scraps of glamour in brown philosophy rooms, the grin of the glamour model, one of those girls who achieve a sort of notoriety on those latenight shows.
Wednesday 12 September 2012
The Arsonist
At the train station early in the evening. Sits a student almost reclining on a bench like a Roman, reading his book.
A dirty shady middleaged thin individual, in a raincoat and with small glasses he peers through, and a grim look, approaches behind him and before the unfortunate student knows it has sloshed him with a quantity of inflammable liquid. The subsequent strong naked flame smartly and quickly applied to the youngster's body immediately starts a raging and healthy conflagration, to whose furious crackling the student adds impromptu screams. The shadowy serial killer moves unconcerned, and unsatisfied, up the deserted platform. He has moved on from murdering the homeless to carrying out quite motiveless attacks.
And when the platform is lighted, when the overhead lights flicker on...
One by one...
And more people show up, thronging the platform, festive and merry, multi-coloured bright-cheeked couples arm in arm, catcalling kids and football supporters...
He retires to a nearby wall and stands in the shadows.
And it's not long till a bunch of neds, or guys, or football supporters, move up to him and surround him...
Maybe they've come from a football match, maybe they're just ordinary guys from a commonplace, ordinary family, but they surround the serial killer threateningly, harsh electric light cast on their faces from the open door of the station café, small flecks of spittle flying through the air and peppering his glasses and jacket...
And if the killer peeped into the station café, what would he have seen? Warm handsome bohemians sitting talking earnestly, supping coffees, relaxed boys n girls in stalls, curly-headed, leaning over to drawl slowly... and behind them, stations kiosks and bookstores, bright magazine racks and colourful comicbooks, bookstalls, and empty, echoing pantheons, all bathed in bright yellow electric light...
A dirty shady middleaged thin individual, in a raincoat and with small glasses he peers through, and a grim look, approaches behind him and before the unfortunate student knows it has sloshed him with a quantity of inflammable liquid. The subsequent strong naked flame smartly and quickly applied to the youngster's body immediately starts a raging and healthy conflagration, to whose furious crackling the student adds impromptu screams. The shadowy serial killer moves unconcerned, and unsatisfied, up the deserted platform. He has moved on from murdering the homeless to carrying out quite motiveless attacks.
And when the platform is lighted, when the overhead lights flicker on...
One by one...
And more people show up, thronging the platform, festive and merry, multi-coloured bright-cheeked couples arm in arm, catcalling kids and football supporters...
He retires to a nearby wall and stands in the shadows.
And it's not long till a bunch of neds, or guys, or football supporters, move up to him and surround him...
Maybe they've come from a football match, maybe they're just ordinary guys from a commonplace, ordinary family, but they surround the serial killer threateningly, harsh electric light cast on their faces from the open door of the station café, small flecks of spittle flying through the air and peppering his glasses and jacket...
And if the killer peeped into the station café, what would he have seen? Warm handsome bohemians sitting talking earnestly, supping coffees, relaxed boys n girls in stalls, curly-headed, leaning over to drawl slowly... and behind them, stations kiosks and bookstores, bright magazine racks and colourful comicbooks, bookstalls, and empty, echoing pantheons, all bathed in bright yellow electric light...
(interlude)
In the city to the comicshop thru the highstreet past the crowds behind the shopping centre, a shadowy street.
A huge rack of new comics and fanzines. Daredevil and his affiliations, all the mutant comics which have diversified in response to their popularity, multi-coloured covers choking the display, like a series of mini-soap operas competing to distract. And I wonder what Captain America's up to these days.
I move into my tiny room in my spacious new flat.
I take with me my duvet and pillow. Or perhaps there's a florid blanket that my flatmate has spread out to dry or hung in the airing cupboard draped over a clothes horse and I won't have to bother. I halt, talking to strangers, confused in the pigeon-infested boulevards. A duvet is the most basic of necessities.
(I remember, in the kitchen, by the fruitbowl, for my sister's amusement I did my impression of "toothless Joe", then, preoccupied, felt my rows of hard, shiny teeth, and posed like for a photo, as though papparazzi'd, the flash of teeth in a blur. Vanity and insecurity.)
A huge rack of new comics and fanzines. Daredevil and his affiliations, all the mutant comics which have diversified in response to their popularity, multi-coloured covers choking the display, like a series of mini-soap operas competing to distract. And I wonder what Captain America's up to these days.
I move into my tiny room in my spacious new flat.
I take with me my duvet and pillow. Or perhaps there's a florid blanket that my flatmate has spread out to dry or hung in the airing cupboard draped over a clothes horse and I won't have to bother. I halt, talking to strangers, confused in the pigeon-infested boulevards. A duvet is the most basic of necessities.
(I remember, in the kitchen, by the fruitbowl, for my sister's amusement I did my impression of "toothless Joe", then, preoccupied, felt my rows of hard, shiny teeth, and posed like for a photo, as though papparazzi'd, the flash of teeth in a blur. Vanity and insecurity.)
Tuesday 11 September 2012
From a Night Bus 3
And keep looking, keep a watch on the parade of miscreants.
The young disenchanted-looking girl in a blue-black football strip, or the top thereof, dark blue or pale blue stripes on white.
It's been donned by this dark-haired girl in a dim bedroom dominated by her huge double bed, it's too large for her, she tugs at it disconsolately, sulking, the silky glossy material itches and scratches her.
Another girl, in theory, her counterpart, in a green-striped football top, equally sulky-mouthed and twilit.
Reminds me of once in the empty flat I was looking at my reflection in the tall window, as though measuring myself or posing for a full-length portrait, I turned to the side like in a cop photo, I took in the stubble and scars of shaving nicks, I smiled.
When it's dark outside and the bare lightbulb has been switched on inside, the window reflects like a mirror, you can catch yourself looking tense in it.
And sometimes passing latenight drinkers jeer or hoot at you, or afternoon football fans peer up and in.
The omnipresent corner neds, feeling the strength of their numbers. It's always at least six on one, sometimes for the less brave it's simply the throwing of rocks and bottles, and a bit of jeering. It has to be admitted that the worst perpetrators are the supporters of either of two teams from Glasgow.
They always bring their own special malevolence and violence. And I seem to see their faces reflected in the window, the football fans, shouting, almost intruding into the room, splintering the glass, brazen and ugly. And I imagine... What if I were to crack open the window and partially swing it open, what if I faced the threat? Would I find that the casuals were only two-dimensional cartoons or cardboard cut-outs, insistent but silent? Or they have attached themselves to the pane like amoeba, like the suckers of an octopus, or like a flat-bodied ray, and can be scraped off harmlessly like a pancake.
The young disenchanted-looking girl in a blue-black football strip, or the top thereof, dark blue or pale blue stripes on white.
It's been donned by this dark-haired girl in a dim bedroom dominated by her huge double bed, it's too large for her, she tugs at it disconsolately, sulking, the silky glossy material itches and scratches her.
Another girl, in theory, her counterpart, in a green-striped football top, equally sulky-mouthed and twilit.
Reminds me of once in the empty flat I was looking at my reflection in the tall window, as though measuring myself or posing for a full-length portrait, I turned to the side like in a cop photo, I took in the stubble and scars of shaving nicks, I smiled.
When it's dark outside and the bare lightbulb has been switched on inside, the window reflects like a mirror, you can catch yourself looking tense in it.
And sometimes passing latenight drinkers jeer or hoot at you, or afternoon football fans peer up and in.
The omnipresent corner neds, feeling the strength of their numbers. It's always at least six on one, sometimes for the less brave it's simply the throwing of rocks and bottles, and a bit of jeering. It has to be admitted that the worst perpetrators are the supporters of either of two teams from Glasgow.
They always bring their own special malevolence and violence. And I seem to see their faces reflected in the window, the football fans, shouting, almost intruding into the room, splintering the glass, brazen and ugly. And I imagine... What if I were to crack open the window and partially swing it open, what if I faced the threat? Would I find that the casuals were only two-dimensional cartoons or cardboard cut-outs, insistent but silent? Or they have attached themselves to the pane like amoeba, like the suckers of an octopus, or like a flat-bodied ray, and can be scraped off harmlessly like a pancake.
From a Night Bus 2
We continue.
If you keep walking up this street you eventually come to the docks, to more grim architecture, to a shiny multi-level shopping centre. But on the next corner the streetlights fail altogether, leaving us utterly in the dark.
And I begin to think, should I leave this girl behind?
Down in the crime-ridden streets, some cops bustle past, shine their powerful torches briefly over our faces and across the brickwork, snarling and impatient.
And I think or imagine the names and faces that are roaming the summit of this street. A paraplegic queen walks with a cane, who may link arms with his buddies, who may embrace them out of a feverish love, who may out of loneliness cry out and knead the bodies of his lovers. To avoid his desperate love you cross the street. When the lights fizz back on you see his body face down in the road, surrendered to oblivion, his cane beside him.
Now the non-commissioned officers drunken out on the town from the naval base, have come tearing down from the city centre. The leading officer, in a white suit covered with garrulous gold brocade, corners a victim. Very handsome but absolutely savage, red-mouthed and drunken, eyes deep and evilly gleaming.
The victim though is a standard soap opera villain. A grubby young man on the lam from prison, and therefore with nothing to lose, an unwashed hooded top, an unshaven chin. Without a moment's hesitation he picks up a length of scaffolding-pipe from an adjacent skip and begins fiercely to reign blows on the head and body of the non-commissioned officer, denting his pristine white suit. So the soap opera prison villain character is proved a hero.
Though the girl begins to emit a high-pitched shriek, which might attract the yellow-jacketed cops.
The soap opera revenge villain in this case is complex, he's in love with a certain girl which embittered him and made him a desperado, fighting on, with his heroic and villainous qualities, the clash of steel ringing in the street.
If you keep walking up this street you eventually come to the docks, to more grim architecture, to a shiny multi-level shopping centre. But on the next corner the streetlights fail altogether, leaving us utterly in the dark.
And I begin to think, should I leave this girl behind?
Down in the crime-ridden streets, some cops bustle past, shine their powerful torches briefly over our faces and across the brickwork, snarling and impatient.
And I think or imagine the names and faces that are roaming the summit of this street. A paraplegic queen walks with a cane, who may link arms with his buddies, who may embrace them out of a feverish love, who may out of loneliness cry out and knead the bodies of his lovers. To avoid his desperate love you cross the street. When the lights fizz back on you see his body face down in the road, surrendered to oblivion, his cane beside him.
Now the non-commissioned officers drunken out on the town from the naval base, have come tearing down from the city centre. The leading officer, in a white suit covered with garrulous gold brocade, corners a victim. Very handsome but absolutely savage, red-mouthed and drunken, eyes deep and evilly gleaming.
The victim though is a standard soap opera villain. A grubby young man on the lam from prison, and therefore with nothing to lose, an unwashed hooded top, an unshaven chin. Without a moment's hesitation he picks up a length of scaffolding-pipe from an adjacent skip and begins fiercely to reign blows on the head and body of the non-commissioned officer, denting his pristine white suit. So the soap opera prison villain character is proved a hero.
Though the girl begins to emit a high-pitched shriek, which might attract the yellow-jacketed cops.
The soap opera revenge villain in this case is complex, he's in love with a certain girl which embittered him and made him a desperado, fighting on, with his heroic and villainous qualities, the clash of steel ringing in the street.
Monday 10 September 2012
From a Night Bus 1
But it's back on another bus for me, another nightbus, where I seem to spend my life...
There comes a point on a south-bound dusk bus where one can no longer even sleep, but has to gaze, stupefied, out of the window. All significant loves, hopes, terrors, epiphanies, have happened to me on lonely buses, commuter buses, bridge-crossing buses...
Into the city of melancholy crags, the acropolis enshadowed already, over the steel bridge with the dark water below, and what if the suspension breaks and the bus plummets far below into the sea...
This being a congested commuter link, we get in late into the Metropolis bus station, night it seems is falling.
I'm sitting down near the front. I've struck up a conversation with the girl in front, who I vaguely know. As we get to the bus-station she turns around, asking if I'll be staying the night, smiling politely. A small, plain, blonde girl, common and with a coarse, insipid face, tending to ingratiate. Large anaemic blue eyes. I'm taciturn and awkward- "No, I'll be going back over".
For I have to make two trips. Tedious. So I can't spend long in the city, it's already getting dark. No place to stay anyway as night deepens, except the sister's, who has a warm, welcoming flat in a peripheral suburb.
But at the bus station as I roam over the floor of the huge entrance foyer the blonde girl sidles up alongside me and forces her warm little hand into mine, keeping pace and starting up a bright, breezy chat. Sounds of departure, shuffling feet, dust on pillars and abandoned doorways, buzzing electric light... Shadows.
She wants to go record shopping. But it's closing time. We walk down the long dark street that leads eastwards out of the city, partially gentrified now but once grim and rough, and still containing endless Asian foodstores and halal shops, Greek butchers, Chinese laundries, shops where Turkish cassettes are sold, windows festooned with Bollywood stars in green and red, near tattoo parlours and the smell of Indian meals.
This street is exposed to winds, and on the other side is a closing-down video store, a discreet sex shop, a glass-fronted beauty parlour. A city clock, a traffic island, a dingy basement newsagent where an Asian man stands behind a counter, a picture of the Kaaba pinned up behind him. This street is long and dark. Worries about bus times, I look at the glowing digits on my fat-faced watch. 17:45.
The girl has put up the hood of her sweatshirt but still grasps my hand, leading me onwards determinedly. She halts at an esoteric music store, even though it's closing: The steel shutter is already half-pulled down. She peeps under it and exchanges a few words with the man cleaning up behind the counter, a portly bearded man in white, he smiles slyly, says "Salaam".
There comes a point on a south-bound dusk bus where one can no longer even sleep, but has to gaze, stupefied, out of the window. All significant loves, hopes, terrors, epiphanies, have happened to me on lonely buses, commuter buses, bridge-crossing buses...
Into the city of melancholy crags, the acropolis enshadowed already, over the steel bridge with the dark water below, and what if the suspension breaks and the bus plummets far below into the sea...
This being a congested commuter link, we get in late into the Metropolis bus station, night it seems is falling.
I'm sitting down near the front. I've struck up a conversation with the girl in front, who I vaguely know. As we get to the bus-station she turns around, asking if I'll be staying the night, smiling politely. A small, plain, blonde girl, common and with a coarse, insipid face, tending to ingratiate. Large anaemic blue eyes. I'm taciturn and awkward- "No, I'll be going back over".
For I have to make two trips. Tedious. So I can't spend long in the city, it's already getting dark. No place to stay anyway as night deepens, except the sister's, who has a warm, welcoming flat in a peripheral suburb.
But at the bus station as I roam over the floor of the huge entrance foyer the blonde girl sidles up alongside me and forces her warm little hand into mine, keeping pace and starting up a bright, breezy chat. Sounds of departure, shuffling feet, dust on pillars and abandoned doorways, buzzing electric light... Shadows.
She wants to go record shopping. But it's closing time. We walk down the long dark street that leads eastwards out of the city, partially gentrified now but once grim and rough, and still containing endless Asian foodstores and halal shops, Greek butchers, Chinese laundries, shops where Turkish cassettes are sold, windows festooned with Bollywood stars in green and red, near tattoo parlours and the smell of Indian meals.
This street is exposed to winds, and on the other side is a closing-down video store, a discreet sex shop, a glass-fronted beauty parlour. A city clock, a traffic island, a dingy basement newsagent where an Asian man stands behind a counter, a picture of the Kaaba pinned up behind him. This street is long and dark. Worries about bus times, I look at the glowing digits on my fat-faced watch. 17:45.
The girl has put up the hood of her sweatshirt but still grasps my hand, leading me onwards determinedly. She halts at an esoteric music store, even though it's closing: The steel shutter is already half-pulled down. She peeps under it and exchanges a few words with the man cleaning up behind the counter, a portly bearded man in white, he smiles slyly, says "Salaam".
Sunday 9 September 2012
Thoughts Before Sleep
Just think, we are on a planet, a ball of rock, that is moving through space which is so vast that we could move through it forever and never see another star. We're clinging to it like ants.
And everything that we do will be obliterated and forgotten about. Everything will be lost, all our doings undone, as though they had never existed.
All this time we have been fooling ourselves, giving names to empty collections of atoms, and thinking that they had substance. In reality, nothing and no-one had a name and our concepts were uncatchable will-o-the-wisps which we willingly allowed to deceive us.
What a frightening pre-sleep thought: That to do was the same as not to do.
I insist and declare therefore that all of us are star-crossed and must laugh in the face of fate, defying it. To do so is the only heroism.
And everything that we do will be obliterated and forgotten about. Everything will be lost, all our doings undone, as though they had never existed.
All this time we have been fooling ourselves, giving names to empty collections of atoms, and thinking that they had substance. In reality, nothing and no-one had a name and our concepts were uncatchable will-o-the-wisps which we willingly allowed to deceive us.
What a frightening pre-sleep thought: That to do was the same as not to do.
I insist and declare therefore that all of us are star-crossed and must laugh in the face of fate, defying it. To do so is the only heroism.
Thursday 16 August 2012
For My Sins
For my sins since I have come to this town I have been a fool and continue to be so, eschewing all masks and roles but for that, offering genuinely, and without scruples, the most intense compulsions toward wholeness, even truth. Rage, envy, regret have been my burden.
From soulless nightclubs, allnight bakeries, reflected electric light I have been able to draw a kind of sustenance, noting that the poet must be indestructible, even if he has to creep like an insect across a dirty floor, the city, any city, is his Revelation, his Koran and Torah, his Old and New Testaments seen in inscrutable flashes, on the fresh-lipped faces of friends, behind their human eyes and on their mortal noses, behind windows, too, where liquid light wanly flickers and goes out.
Little shards of redemption, always ungraspable. Always fleeting, transitory, illusory. Always ephemeral, the gifts of music and wine, vacant-eyed girls under sodium light, dropping forth from their mouths scripted sounds of assent or delight, weariness or boredom.
From soulless nightclubs, allnight bakeries, reflected electric light I have been able to draw a kind of sustenance, noting that the poet must be indestructible, even if he has to creep like an insect across a dirty floor, the city, any city, is his Revelation, his Koran and Torah, his Old and New Testaments seen in inscrutable flashes, on the fresh-lipped faces of friends, behind their human eyes and on their mortal noses, behind windows, too, where liquid light wanly flickers and goes out.
Monday 6 August 2012
From An Old Letter
There is nothing much more to be expressed. I have the most awful feelings almost all the time now. These are what I must struggle to express, but it's hard work. Only because she has something in her, some intangible thing, that is deeply attractive... a vast, unfathomable well, the source of another Nile.
There is a flame that still responds. There is after all a heart that beats. There are brown clothes, scents, rooms, that from this distance still come back to me. Her mouth, her smile, her hair, her eyes, all gone, done for today, wrapped up. And yet I know as sure as death that they'll recur, haunt my dreams of other days. There seems to be something in me that will not rest, nor be resisted. And all this fear is to another soul wedded, all this shame is to another life bonded, all at once, all in misery, all in love.
I love because there is no such thing as love. And I can't stop.
There is a flame that still responds. There is after all a heart that beats. There are brown clothes, scents, rooms, that from this distance still come back to me. Her mouth, her smile, her hair, her eyes, all gone, done for today, wrapped up. And yet I know as sure as death that they'll recur, haunt my dreams of other days. There seems to be something in me that will not rest, nor be resisted. And all this fear is to another soul wedded, all this shame is to another life bonded, all at once, all in misery, all in love.
I love because there is no such thing as love. And I can't stop.
Poetry as Struggle
Force out creativity in blocks of earthy stone, onto the paper.
Unload your brain, all of it, in a tantrum Jackson Pollock mess with no boundaries except writer's cramp and sighings of existential fatigue.
A sick complaint of desks and empty bedrooms.
I decided to take the Muse and strangle her, till she vomited all of her beauties on the page.
All her nonsense and ugliness too, that just as relevant.
Trapped forever under stark, austere glass.
Poetry! Fuck it, almost kill or abuse it so that the muse herself either dies from shame or is driven mad with laughing.
Try and grasp reality, force it into sense and beauty, force it like a struggling animal into the cage of words and, before it can escape, pin it like a specimen onto the page.
Sheer poetry killed and hung up for spectators, all the exquisite poetry you ever dined on vomited back up, like Saturn vomited up his own children.
That bird of poetry becomes like a stuffed museum piece, poised forever in pretend flight inside the book covers, until the reader comes along, ignites it into life again with the power of his imagination, and it soars... and then falls, crashing, into oblivion.
Art or writing was to me then, some kind of awful struggle, a fight with myself to express some kind of beauty or meaning, to wring truth from madness, to take a zero and make it into a one.
Doing this I had to convulse, fatigue myself, loosen my wrists and grit my teeth, screw up my eyes to see more clearly.
Till some blasted, sudden, half-understood vision would force itself upon my mind, blooming vaguely into an explosion of words.
I had to become a godly creature striking jagged lightning into my own world of words, till it became ignited into quivering beauty.
It was ultimate focus intractably screwed down onto objects, all of the truth squeezed out of it in an instant, discarded like a flipping fish onto the page.
Unload your brain, all of it, in a tantrum Jackson Pollock mess with no boundaries except writer's cramp and sighings of existential fatigue.
A sick complaint of desks and empty bedrooms.
I decided to take the Muse and strangle her, till she vomited all of her beauties on the page.
All her nonsense and ugliness too, that just as relevant.
Trapped forever under stark, austere glass.
Poetry! Fuck it, almost kill or abuse it so that the muse herself either dies from shame or is driven mad with laughing.
Try and grasp reality, force it into sense and beauty, force it like a struggling animal into the cage of words and, before it can escape, pin it like a specimen onto the page.
Sheer poetry killed and hung up for spectators, all the exquisite poetry you ever dined on vomited back up, like Saturn vomited up his own children.
That bird of poetry becomes like a stuffed museum piece, poised forever in pretend flight inside the book covers, until the reader comes along, ignites it into life again with the power of his imagination, and it soars... and then falls, crashing, into oblivion.
Art or writing was to me then, some kind of awful struggle, a fight with myself to express some kind of beauty or meaning, to wring truth from madness, to take a zero and make it into a one.
Doing this I had to convulse, fatigue myself, loosen my wrists and grit my teeth, screw up my eyes to see more clearly.
Till some blasted, sudden, half-understood vision would force itself upon my mind, blooming vaguely into an explosion of words.
I had to become a godly creature striking jagged lightning into my own world of words, till it became ignited into quivering beauty.
It was ultimate focus intractably screwed down onto objects, all of the truth squeezed out of it in an instant, discarded like a flipping fish onto the page.
Tuesday 24 July 2012
On Desire
Or, to take, to steal. What is it that loves? The eyes see, the brain thinks, the fingertips touch. To love is a function of what? The soul, perhaps they might have said. Something loves... the self, the soul, the will... The heart, it's function is to pump blood around the body. Affection is felt, but felt by what?
Passion is the function of what?
Analyse your desires carefully and you can find your true self, your true position. Honest to yourself and therefore full of integrity. What do I want? Away from clichés, separate from prejudiced expectations, I use my desires as a guideline, a rule of thumb.
Desire, flowing from me, is a bulwark of truth, something that can be counted on. The royal road to knowing yourself. Desire leads to unhappiness and pain, says the Buddha. Obvious truth. But what of it?
It can lead also to moments of joy, glimpses of fulfilment. I will not cut myself off therefore from desire, become an ascetic, seek to "transcend" the flesh. It is human to drink in life, seeking fulfilment, not accepting pain but fighting it, using your desire as a weapon, drowning your pain in sweet floods of love, aspects of joy endlessly renewed, eternally renewable. A guarantee of your life: That your desire is inexhaustible, and that your sorrow can be conquered.
Passion is the function of what?
Analyse your desires carefully and you can find your true self, your true position. Honest to yourself and therefore full of integrity. What do I want? Away from clichés, separate from prejudiced expectations, I use my desires as a guideline, a rule of thumb.
Desire, flowing from me, is a bulwark of truth, something that can be counted on. The royal road to knowing yourself. Desire leads to unhappiness and pain, says the Buddha. Obvious truth. But what of it?
Friday 11 May 2012
Song of the Occident
Here is the dread land that the grey clouds sweep over,
Here the cathedral, here the summer shower;
Here the medieval, here the modern reigns over
An aching acre past its hour;
This is the round and utter West, the liberal West, the soulless realm,
This is the ultimate Occident, dreamed of by blue-eyed, cynical men.
Wonderful, wonderful land, first host of the grave of God,
A God that died, and went west;
We now accept your Gods, New World:
Lip-service sacrifice to holy Commerce.
With one eye on the hedonist future,
And one on the ruined past-
Between the Reich and Flanders Fields
We stand aghast: To turn and fan the flames
Of future parties, future games,
Clothed in paltry, borrowed hats
Purchased from bankers and bureaucrats.
This was our world but we let it go,
Our nation, our empire, in one throw,
Of an idiot die to the world below.
That was the world that was, it's over, let it go.
O what a world it was, it's over, let it go.
Here the cathedral, here the summer shower;
Here the medieval, here the modern reigns over
An aching acre past its hour;
This is the round and utter West, the liberal West, the soulless realm,
This is the ultimate Occident, dreamed of by blue-eyed, cynical men.
Wonderful, wonderful land, first host of the grave of God,
A God that died, and went west;
We now accept your Gods, New World:
Lip-service sacrifice to holy Commerce.
With one eye on the hedonist future,
And one on the ruined past-
Between the Reich and Flanders Fields
We stand aghast: To turn and fan the flames
Of future parties, future games,
Clothed in paltry, borrowed hats
Purchased from bankers and bureaucrats.
This was our world but we let it go,
Our nation, our empire, in one throw,
Of an idiot die to the world below.
That was the world that was, it's over, let it go.
O what a world it was, it's over, let it go.
Wednesday 21 March 2012
The Sound
At night, if you listen very hard, you can hear a sound which you can never hear during the day, because traffic, etc, drowns it out.
It's like a constant sub-bass vibration or oscillation, like that given out by an electricity sub-station, or like the sound of cosmic radiation, like some infernal machine or engine always left running.
I described it in a poem as "the giant engine of the night".
If you listen to it long enough though, you'll notice that it has definite fluctuations and variations in texture.
You have to have absolute silence to hear it.
And you know what I was thinking this morning, while listening to it? I was thinking about earth (the planet) and all the nonsense that goes on there, and how stupid it all is.
And I wished that for once, I could say something with all my heart and mean it.
And I wished that I could say pure words in a pure language, that would set it all in a new context, transform all the base materials to gold. It would be like the kind of prize that only has value when you give it away, this new language, and this new context.
It would be glorious, like a full summer. It essence and its quality would be: Permanence. It would be the transcendence of the final boundary. It would burn like the flame that Prometheus gave to mankind. It would shine like the gold that paves the streets of the New Jerusalem. It would be the long-awaited alchemical transformation of material dross to spiritual gold, the philosopher's stone and holy grail combined.
And I was writing all this down when my pen ran out.
It's like a constant sub-bass vibration or oscillation, like that given out by an electricity sub-station, or like the sound of cosmic radiation, like some infernal machine or engine always left running.
I described it in a poem as "the giant engine of the night".
If you listen to it long enough though, you'll notice that it has definite fluctuations and variations in texture.
You have to have absolute silence to hear it.
And you know what I was thinking this morning, while listening to it? I was thinking about earth (the planet) and all the nonsense that goes on there, and how stupid it all is.
And I wished that for once, I could say something with all my heart and mean it.
And I wished that I could say pure words in a pure language, that would set it all in a new context, transform all the base materials to gold. It would be like the kind of prize that only has value when you give it away, this new language, and this new context.
It would be glorious, like a full summer. It essence and its quality would be: Permanence. It would be the transcendence of the final boundary. It would burn like the flame that Prometheus gave to mankind. It would shine like the gold that paves the streets of the New Jerusalem. It would be the long-awaited alchemical transformation of material dross to spiritual gold, the philosopher's stone and holy grail combined.
And I was writing all this down when my pen ran out.
Tuesday 14 February 2012
We Poets
We poets, not many of us left, are left to starve while they give all the means of life to footballers and pop stars and other soulless idiots.
All the energy, all the value, and all the time, given away for free to atrocious, selfish, privileged, witless bastards, who want to reach "the top", whatever that is. When you get there, you realise it's nothing. A hollow wind echoing in an empty chamber, a diamond made out of glass, a paper tiger with no teeth, a Hollywood western saloon with a blank wall behind it.
People don't go mad you know. Something happens to them. A thing called life. That's all. They aren't mad, or sad, or bad. They've just lived, that's all. And it's enough to fucking break your heart, life, to break it.
The poet is the human paradigm. In him is seen all, all the failures of homo sapiens, all the failures and all the hopes, and all the weakness, and I'll tell you the insight he has gained therein: Love is important. That's all. He thinks it might even be the meaning of life.
Whenever I wake up, I am infinitely disgusted and disappointed to find myself still in existence.
A sad story, bittersweet. The last act of the oldest human drama; heartbreak. I've written the same lines over and over, and still I can write no other. I've written, in my heart's blood, my last words, a farewell to mother earth, who loved me imperfectly. (Good idea for a poem).
All the energy, all the value, and all the time, given away for free to atrocious, selfish, privileged, witless bastards, who want to reach "the top", whatever that is. When you get there, you realise it's nothing. A hollow wind echoing in an empty chamber, a diamond made out of glass, a paper tiger with no teeth, a Hollywood western saloon with a blank wall behind it.
People don't go mad you know. Something happens to them. A thing called life. That's all. They aren't mad, or sad, or bad. They've just lived, that's all. And it's enough to fucking break your heart, life, to break it.
The poet is the human paradigm. In him is seen all, all the failures of homo sapiens, all the failures and all the hopes, and all the weakness, and I'll tell you the insight he has gained therein: Love is important. That's all. He thinks it might even be the meaning of life.
Whenever I wake up, I am infinitely disgusted and disappointed to find myself still in existence.
A sad story, bittersweet. The last act of the oldest human drama; heartbreak. I've written the same lines over and over, and still I can write no other. I've written, in my heart's blood, my last words, a farewell to mother earth, who loved me imperfectly. (Good idea for a poem).
Sunday 12 February 2012
Real Life
Real life, real life, real life! How many times do we have to wake up and be resigned to it! How grand is what goes unseen, what is never known, the private trundlings around undertaken by us all in solitude, the long spaces of silence, the little turnings-round to breathe some incidental stutter of comment and then rise and depart to go in some other room and live out your life forever there, unwatched, uncommanded, in life which is a kind of freedom in itself.
Maybe they talk over trivia and happiness inside, mouths full of food, slurping, spending all night in front of TV, such an upright, healthy, respectable thing for the old to do. Interrupt each other with melodious, mumbling gossips, interrupted too by the resoundant electronic voice of the television, eternally private and unseen in the halts and honesties of real life, sighing for themselves.
Softness, desertion, the horrible reality of an empty room.
Maybe they talk over trivia and happiness inside, mouths full of food, slurping, spending all night in front of TV, such an upright, healthy, respectable thing for the old to do. Interrupt each other with melodious, mumbling gossips, interrupted too by the resoundant electronic voice of the television, eternally private and unseen in the halts and honesties of real life, sighing for themselves.
Softness, desertion, the horrible reality of an empty room.
His grandparents 2
Gosh and groan for this real place, these real spectres in their homes of bricks and mortar, hush in their home, the creak of wooden floorboards on carpeted stairs, brown benevolence in pasty-plated meals in the happy kitchen, shh and watch it darken down inside when no-one's there, this maison mordant in blue homeliness, careful in boring midnights, pillared with slimy slate and strong beams of oak reinforcing the musty loft, of home, this soft and bounteous home, with clashing doors and pittering steps and boxed-in, bricked in rooms holding borrowed, calamitous desire. Kitchen sinks, clattery devilish pipes, artifices of faucet and silvery h20s plashing enamel, the people inside inwardly collectivising in the drear, snoring, lumping, living out their lives till they die.
Hush, pshaw, pluf, the vagaries of breath are what constitute life inside. Utterly soft in breath, eyeballs quickly roaming up and down and round room, expurging like a bellows the puffs of rolling phew, slowly creeping, the cells and hairs of the body, metabolising, reinventing particles for fuel-like growth and thoughts of sleep.
Sigh now, humph in your righteousness, creak up from your chair, roam stiffly through to kitchen breathing from nostrils, all softly, achingly alive, amidst perpetual rolls of memory, and though their lives are more or less over, the old, still they're at the centre with their souls not yet withered, but ripe, bright with superior understanding, all full of a perfect, still love.
And yet now, in their eyes, see them, they're all full of hush, a kind of hushing sorrow, especially when asleep they are already dead in a warm, embittered hibernation. All the crags of their skin, the endless, duplicitous wrinkles, the tired-out old skin of knuckly hands, enwrapped and mummified, prepared already, in the heart of life, for death. They are as if turned to stone, statues of grief already in their age. Awaiting with sour, bedevilled courage the imminent grave. Hush now they're asleep.
Hush, pshaw, pluf, the vagaries of breath are what constitute life inside. Utterly soft in breath, eyeballs quickly roaming up and down and round room, expurging like a bellows the puffs of rolling phew, slowly creeping, the cells and hairs of the body, metabolising, reinventing particles for fuel-like growth and thoughts of sleep.
Sigh now, humph in your righteousness, creak up from your chair, roam stiffly through to kitchen breathing from nostrils, all softly, achingly alive, amidst perpetual rolls of memory, and though their lives are more or less over, the old, still they're at the centre with their souls not yet withered, but ripe, bright with superior understanding, all full of a perfect, still love.
And yet now, in their eyes, see them, they're all full of hush, a kind of hushing sorrow, especially when asleep they are already dead in a warm, embittered hibernation. All the crags of their skin, the endless, duplicitous wrinkles, the tired-out old skin of knuckly hands, enwrapped and mummified, prepared already, in the heart of life, for death. They are as if turned to stone, statues of grief already in their age. Awaiting with sour, bedevilled courage the imminent grave. Hush now they're asleep.
His grandparents
An old lady his grandmother, respectable in proud livingrooms, and grandfather too when he was alive, the kin of happy old couple you'd find anywhere, frosted whitehair, glasses perhaps, content and weary with muddled livingroom shrewdness and TV, dressing sadly in grey dreary sweaters and maybe respectable slacks, old gran, with furry cat reclining drowsily on sofa cushions, and she herself, travailing pickily from putting kettle on in kitchen to livingroom again, has occasion to laugh sometimes at the memory of the fact that she's lived so long and can see the folly of life for what it is, can see the wheel of life and death in a wistful, almost despairing, yet comfortable way. Folding hands on lap as she peers at TV to tut at news with grave undertones of tradition.
And she in her dun sepulchral hall with its flowery, respectable ornamentations or faded workingclass wallpapers, has a dim plastic telephone sitting on a little utility table.
Crude and muttering she may use it sometimes to chat, all in grim-mouthed straightness, on the horrors of the modern world or perhaps joys of it, standing folding arms and musing, the phone maybe is an off-white old lady kind with a dial still and not even buttons, and with an old crackened number implanted safely in it since some forgotten night in the 70s. It's the channel through which flows all the trivialities of eternity and family and gossip and where the heart of soft remembrance remains. A token of modernity in respectable scented homes.
And she in her dun sepulchral hall with its flowery, respectable ornamentations or faded workingclass wallpapers, has a dim plastic telephone sitting on a little utility table.
Crude and muttering she may use it sometimes to chat, all in grim-mouthed straightness, on the horrors of the modern world or perhaps joys of it, standing folding arms and musing, the phone maybe is an off-white old lady kind with a dial still and not even buttons, and with an old crackened number implanted safely in it since some forgotten night in the 70s. It's the channel through which flows all the trivialities of eternity and family and gossip and where the heart of soft remembrance remains. A token of modernity in respectable scented homes.
Saturday 11 February 2012
A Giro
Unemployed Robert. Gets up on certain days out of sluggish bed to yawn, slams door behind to step lightly onto his next errand, travels here n thereabouts with love and hate struggling for supremacy in his mind.
Or they sends him a little scrap o paper stuck through his letterbox and he opens it with wearisome hate at government like we all have, surveys the stern departmental exhortations, the black n white scrawly print, signs his quick name on the form saying "I am actively seeking work and am entitled to this money" and clumps to post it off again. That big, grey department, shady in their rooms, humble with power and pretensions of being public servants, sitting around at desks in front of computer screens clickety-clicking, ordinary men and ladies with ordinary dumb homes, receive it like a row of facts and figures and registrations and numbers to click it nearly on their windowscreen computery file, caring absolutely nothing for it in their efficiency, and then plumf! Three days later he gets girocheque through letterbox, ordered there by the shady lady secretaries and government misanthropes and he goes, cashes it, takes home bundles of paper and so on, ad nauseam... Grotesque unemployment benefit, he hates it, makes him sick.
Or they sends him a little scrap o paper stuck through his letterbox and he opens it with wearisome hate at government like we all have, surveys the stern departmental exhortations, the black n white scrawly print, signs his quick name on the form saying "I am actively seeking work and am entitled to this money" and clumps to post it off again. That big, grey department, shady in their rooms, humble with power and pretensions of being public servants, sitting around at desks in front of computer screens clickety-clicking, ordinary men and ladies with ordinary dumb homes, receive it like a row of facts and figures and registrations and numbers to click it nearly on their windowscreen computery file, caring absolutely nothing for it in their efficiency, and then plumf! Three days later he gets girocheque through letterbox, ordered there by the shady lady secretaries and government misanthropes and he goes, cashes it, takes home bundles of paper and so on, ad nauseam... Grotesque unemployment benefit, he hates it, makes him sick.
His Parents
And his mommy and daddy, respectable themselves in the burdened responsibilities of home and job and children, yet happy with it, grim in married intercomplexities and the joy of home, the vast joke of it all, the sly Saturday afternoon mumblings and redhaired once-youthful football wisdoms of his father, and commonplace perhaps joky mother, horrible in workingclass complicity, harassed and enjoying with vast blankness their kids and even the semi-serious realisation of son Robert upstairs.
Ah there they are, hopeful with TVs in dusk, warm in marriage and the pain of love, the family, domineering, wise, indomitable downstairs. Cooking and running the household and cleaning up and settling down, controlling finances with sometimes strict eyes on stuff and even the emptiness of partial white trash despair. See their tight, hallowed hearts, their sad dingy histories of 60s and 70s, the feelings they have as parents and begetters, middleaged softness having brought up kids and worked all the time only to be left abandoned in this horrible suburbia.
And the vengeful, despicable way he considers them, himself suddenly having a great, huffy, giving-up contempt. A real dark and fatalistic disappointment he had for his parents which is the same grand, almost grievingly angry disappointment he had for others. Him upstairs in independent silence or happy calm-mouthed minding his own business, lounging with disgust upstairs, mild resignation as he considers the dumbness of his peers.
And after cashing giro the scrappy twists of note and paltry coin he's left with, after giving a chunk of it away for rent. Till suddenly he cheaply thinks of economy sometimes and worries again to wonder about sighs connected with only one note left in jacket pocket to last him two weeks, or having to finger together and peer over the silver coins or even evil-smelling brown coppers to meagre his way into saving up again. Lack of money, perilous scrapings together, having to plumb the depth of your pocket only to gouge up a bunch of coins and scrappy pompous notes like so much dross.
Ah there they are, hopeful with TVs in dusk, warm in marriage and the pain of love, the family, domineering, wise, indomitable downstairs. Cooking and running the household and cleaning up and settling down, controlling finances with sometimes strict eyes on stuff and even the emptiness of partial white trash despair. See their tight, hallowed hearts, their sad dingy histories of 60s and 70s, the feelings they have as parents and begetters, middleaged softness having brought up kids and worked all the time only to be left abandoned in this horrible suburbia.
And the vengeful, despicable way he considers them, himself suddenly having a great, huffy, giving-up contempt. A real dark and fatalistic disappointment he had for his parents which is the same grand, almost grievingly angry disappointment he had for others. Him upstairs in independent silence or happy calm-mouthed minding his own business, lounging with disgust upstairs, mild resignation as he considers the dumbness of his peers.
And after cashing giro the scrappy twists of note and paltry coin he's left with, after giving a chunk of it away for rent. Till suddenly he cheaply thinks of economy sometimes and worries again to wonder about sighs connected with only one note left in jacket pocket to last him two weeks, or having to finger together and peer over the silver coins or even evil-smelling brown coppers to meagre his way into saving up again. Lack of money, perilous scrapings together, having to plumb the depth of your pocket only to gouge up a bunch of coins and scrappy pompous notes like so much dross.
Friday 10 February 2012
A land 2
In this pisspoor region, which has for centuries, from time immemorial, been nothing but the poor angsty relation of big proud lowland cities, the abode of fishery fools in hamlets, a thousand damp squib copses of grand tree, no more really than a big draughty swamp or forest and with simple sad little hills (not even respectable or brave enough to have mountains). A great tragic place full still of that half-remembered familial crackjawed embrace of quick dialects, respectable cleancut cultures all full of dull football and grey jokes of alcohol and dialect.
Sodden wet all over which makes the lush grass bloom in endless dew-wet hedgerows and makes the streets of the big towns look depressing with a secret fatigue.
All this looming, belly swell of a backwater, all these dark misers here transfixed, suspicioning and crafting nameless whispers to each other in popculture livingrooms, a fat sleepy Pseudo-America, suburban windows in the black dusk, big electric widescreens with dumb uptight families gathered round, nosey neighbours or skinny secretaries, ugly people or beautiful savage girls, big TV wires stretched over green countrysides, dumb rave kids with skinny gaunt faces and never-fulfilled hopes, violent little teenyboppers who fall pregnant and are dumb with TV in rooms, pissed on by rain. Kingdoms of Celts, some bitter and dark and mysterious breathing "fucks" into the air, some shiny and blond and giddy with some awful knowledge, in some bloodthirsty sacrament of their own.
Walk across a wet grass, go and curse your neighbour in a fatuous beery joke, go and watch TV, fall asleep.
Sodden wet all over which makes the lush grass bloom in endless dew-wet hedgerows and makes the streets of the big towns look depressing with a secret fatigue.
All this looming, belly swell of a backwater, all these dark misers here transfixed, suspicioning and crafting nameless whispers to each other in popculture livingrooms, a fat sleepy Pseudo-America, suburban windows in the black dusk, big electric widescreens with dumb uptight families gathered round, nosey neighbours or skinny secretaries, ugly people or beautiful savage girls, big TV wires stretched over green countrysides, dumb rave kids with skinny gaunt faces and never-fulfilled hopes, violent little teenyboppers who fall pregnant and are dumb with TV in rooms, pissed on by rain. Kingdoms of Celts, some bitter and dark and mysterious breathing "fucks" into the air, some shiny and blond and giddy with some awful knowledge, in some bloodthirsty sacrament of their own.
Walk across a wet grass, go and curse your neighbour in a fatuous beery joke, go and watch TV, fall asleep.
Tuesday 7 February 2012
A land
Here is a land, utterly low and strange-seeming, completely steadfast and common, bitter with stringy television wires, wet with last week's grey rain under leaden skies, forever musing with respectable, sad complacency on browns and greys and must of midnight roots.
The natives here are maybe (some of them) proud of the place, maybe craggy old dudes stuffing their noble pipes proudly are fond of it, fond of say this hillock or that backstreet, misty-eyed about some family or other back here and all connections and memories thereof.
Who constructed this place, who strung despair in this valley? Flagging industrial pirates, soulless coal exploiters, murderous dwarfs cuddling in barely-lit latrines. The very sadness of the fact that anyone can be bothered to construct such very anxiously dull, brownbrick, dead buildings everywhere and to a uniform relentless pattern too. Dreamy, hopeless village of disappointments sleeping brownly in pastoral workingclass smokestacks.
The natives here are maybe (some of them) proud of the place, maybe craggy old dudes stuffing their noble pipes proudly are fond of it, fond of say this hillock or that backstreet, misty-eyed about some family or other back here and all connections and memories thereof.
Who constructed this place, who strung despair in this valley? Flagging industrial pirates, soulless coal exploiters, murderous dwarfs cuddling in barely-lit latrines. The very sadness of the fact that anyone can be bothered to construct such very anxiously dull, brownbrick, dead buildings everywhere and to a uniform relentless pattern too. Dreamy, hopeless village of disappointments sleeping brownly in pastoral workingclass smokestacks.
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