Going Underground 3

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

Going underground 2

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

Going underground 1

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

Cosmology 4

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

cosmology 3

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

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

cosmology 2

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