Prologue to the Silent Movie 2

If there is no transcendence, no connection, then we are nothing but lumps of matter. And running on a short lease is meaningless. If this place is really a void, then what we feel, comprehend, the shifting subtleties and endless re-focusings of conscious thought, simply don't matter. The point is that there absolutely has to be something, some way out or some point, some something, some perspective that will hold and not fade, or else I could not stand to physically exist.

In my mind, I am "deprived of so much". But it occurs to me sometimes, at lucid intervals, that we are all deprived. So, concentrating on my deprived state, I allow myself to wander into the illusion that, these few desires having been met, everything will be ok. And this thought is only fuel to more bitter desire.

All such thought is muddled, obtuse, equivocal. I myself am nothing but a shard of shattered glass. The shattered glass of all the old certainties and values.

Our whole culture is made of shattered glass. And the shards mingle and glint and reflect one another. Nothing is more confusing than the rubble of our lives. We have so many choices that choice becomes meaningless. Choice is deadened.

Among this rubble I stumble blindly to find an identity. Among garbage I search for diamonds. The diamond is inside me, you might say. All it takes from me is some switch of perspective, a volte-face of conception, a change in attitude. Vulgar people call it "thinking positive", or even "self-assertion". That's all very well, but I could never make it last, I could never attain such an internal state except for very briefly. It would take an inhuman effort to sustain a positive attitude, what with the ever-present knowledge that such an attitude would basically be false, based on self-deception and perhaps public dishonesty. This is "positive thought", "self-assertion", or insidious self-hypnosis like affirmations and other enforced regimes of positivity. Self-deception I say, a placebo for the soul.

How much more useful, more honest, and more suited to the inherent state of the world is self-negation, habitual negativity of thought, the personality as void? At least it does not rest on a giant untruth. As I've always said, negation can be the foundation of new and beautiful creation. We have to clear the old weeds completely from the ground before something new can be planted. What do I mean by this? I mean obliterate our tired old culture and its choices, burn away its tendrils that have snaked into your mind and affected your actions. Be a mirror to the world. Do not resist and struggle against the void. Become it... and the third millennium is yours.

Prologue to the Silent Movie 1

Who will write the movie? For the movie starts grey.

In abandoned rooms the gramophone is playing. I'm in the old room with the plaster walls. And in my dream where I had expected to find flowers there are no flowers growing.

To have something is eventually to lose it. Therefore anything you currently possess, and love or cherish, will one day be lost to you, causing regret. Regret upon regret. This is a bitter truth, perhaps a banal one.

You will lose friends, good times, loves. Nothing quantifiable, perhaps an atmosphere. But you'll know when you've lost it. It will strike you with a dreadful suddenness, as you stand at night in some bathroom somewhere.

And with it, a pang of old, foul regret.

Death should be like a flower opening. If only death were as certain as one and one are two, like a button being pressed, a light being flicked off. Instead death is shifting and gradual, a long process. The process begins exactly when you realise a part of you has been obliterated and is lost. You are already beginning to rot when you realise: There is no possibility of connection. When that thought is engendered, death begins to creep in.

She put an arrow in my heart

She put an arrow in my heart/ tipped with poison lead

The dart, of obsidian/where I secretly bled, calling

Into darkness for a further loan/of time.

I plucked the arrow from my heart/and heard the sound

Of trumpets call from cities far.

She put a bullet in my head,

The scarlet blood that stained my bed

Conjoined in rivulets and, rushing, spread.

She put an arrow in my heart/and tore it out

I didn't even start.

ice of your mind

Penetrate the ice of your mind. Crack the pool. Allow the fear to well up. If the spirit were liquid then drink it. Reconciliation must come to pass. If the soul were a pool then bathe in it. If a sea, drown in it. Crack that old ice. Get down to fresh water.

Deep down there is pure water. Water the old men would weep for. Water to make the devil shrivel. To make your belly exalt, to put lightning in your veins.

Sometimes it is good to immerse your head in liquid.

"I dress in black my face a mask/money in the bank.

I nod at the words of men/I have never met.

(This is a parody). My tongue is full of lies,

Like swallowing bile. ... but I stand above the sea

And my eyes are open. And I see far into the day,

And I feel in my heart vague poundings/which suggest ideas

And reminiscences. My soul snatches at something,

And, on some instant, misses nothing.

I am only wise when rubber-stamping images of death.

Images: Beguiling and trapping me."

June 8th

A needlepoint would be good for flesh. A rambling mind. Someone's afterbirth. Taken care of. Self-obsessed. Re-integration. A marriage. Celibacy.

These are all mere ideas. Vampires secretly desire a stake pounded into their hearts. Lethal injection would be the best way to go. Acid in the veins. A skin-crawling orgasm makes you arch the neck. You can claim in the dock Manson created you. (That's Charles and no pretender).

These are ideas about flesh.

About the body manifest. The body's failings and resurgences, the body as useless clay, casing for an immortal soul. Ideal of the body turned in upon itself. The body as shadow. Flesh the ultimate image. Denial of sacrament.

The things that the hands can do. The hands can strangle and caress. The Saviour's hands, they tell us, bled. Delicate fingers pull triggers. Hands are wonderful implements for murder. Hands that seize and grasp and choke. This is why we have as our sacrament the body flaggelated and hung up. The sinewy arms outstretched. There is a strain of masochism in our old religion.

That selfish scene, obliquely seen by me; a year or so ago

On windowseat or pane; bus gone by, roaring in pain,

Or plaintive sigh. Reflected light, reveals her domicile,

The chimney marks the room; sad brickwork, dull grey, the TV aerial.

Evening will come to this street again, conquering it,

Time will rush the smiles away, swooping down like a bird of prey,

The street full of a rush of wings. Midges still swarm in the sodium light

Near rooms like empty tombs, blank and shut, blinds drawn.

I too will pass on and give up my room to a stranger, and he to a stranger,

Till all the memoried rooms and times are swiped, effaced, from time:

No more traffic rushing in the street, but motion resolved into silence.

Strange now to think of a lack or a void: A room where a voice is not heard.

Sad now to think of a lack or a void: A space not filled.

But I have seen the sign and so the sign remains;

Like a figure broken from a frieze whose outline stays.

I have seen the sign and so the sign remains;

Drawn with encircling hand around the days.

"Because she was recovering from an illness, and had been near death, she looked particularly attractive.

There was something exchanged from my eyes to her's, and back again. I looked at her eyes with naked honesty and she looked back with the same. I felt as though it was the first time I had ever seen her, the first time I had ever seen a fellow human, the first time I had ever seen anyone.

I saw again, as though for the first time, her button nose, the line of eyeliner on her eyes, drawn simply as though with one stroke, thin and simple like a line on a blank sheet of paper....."

May 20th

i hear the giant throbbing of the night

like a dying engine, squalling, failing,

Unutterably deep...

I'll go for a walk in the morning

Overhear the talk

Of schoolboys, innocent curses

Dropped from mouths

That remind me resoundingly

Of eternity. ... My own backyards and days,

Manhood-cursings, my own vanities and self-deceptions

So breathlessly conveyed.