It's impressed upon me more and more these days that life is the phenomenal side effect of reproduction, and like all side effects and side alleys and detours, fuller of riches than the main way, choked as it is by liars and charlatans, pandering to their biology with selfish moans, until they seem in their ultimate inevitable predictability to give birth to an infinitesimal and tiny orgasm, and, falling back disappointed, still claw at each other like plaster saints, like dying lovers in renaissance pictures, seeking some crumb of consolation from already cooling flesh, flesh that they see, already, crumbling and becoming dust, flesh that they see too readily was a nameless mass, a commonplace abode for an immortal soul, and not worthy of a word or of any effort. They have tricked themselves into love.
How many things are seen for what they are but not named. How often does the heart lie. How unceasingly do we deceive ourselves and invent language games to bypass the hole at the heart of life. We sometimes clearly see, but are always afraid to name, the void at the heart of life, the worm in the apple, the empty space in the middle of pleasure.
At night I'm profoundly emotional, tender, and full of serene regret, wondering at symbolic meanings of empty windows and streetlight. Alcohol opens up a metaphysical void for me, and leaves me strangely determined. It seems to me that I begin to see things in their true light, and how inconsequential they are. A door handle, that, sober, I would placidly turn, now seems like the merest dross, that I must reject, and batter out of my way, mere gross matter, and in every thing, only that, a turning to face sordid matter, concrete, streetlight, window-frames, masonry, all the monuments that man has built to his suffering, all the fucking utilities that he had blindly made to surround his wretched pissing and moaning. I see them in their true light, and cast them from me, painfully conscious of the time I have wasted in acquiring such rubbish.
I want something else, not petty matter, not petty orgasms, but things of the soul, the summit of some tremendous pyramid, made of spirit but clothed in matter, the pinnacle of some triumphant ideal, that one can sometimes achingly find, at last, in the arms, in the hair, in the mouth, on the thighs, between the legs perhaps, of some symbolic woman, standing in, as it were, for the ancient goddess that in the bronze age we all paid obesiance to, standing in for the symbolic muse, becoming the flesh in spirit, the spirit in flesh, and myself, the godhead, the drunk, completing the Trinity and granting myself absolution from the sins of the material world
Friday, 20 September 2013
Thursday, 25 July 2013
This town is always wet with the smell of nightlife and Indian food. Passing by the bleak, glowing doorway and you can smell the tandoori spices within. There's always a gloomy Pakistani guy in a threadbare jersey looming, looking fed up by the brick wall. In old alleyways nearby, in dull closets, that at night are dripping from telephone wires into tangled midnight bushes, all starkly lit by yellow, grim, offensive light. I had my dreams of Nosferatu here, I saw him flexing his claws here by the bush, or rather I dreamed it. Drip, drip, the danked and rusty sound. Nobody ever thought to check these bushes back and trim them, that's the wonder of it! Old tramps in busy shuffling afternoons simply ignored them and spat angrily on the pathetic concrete. Little bauble of spittle on the sicksplashed floor.
That always dreams of urban decay, youthful wreckage of forgotten drunkenness you can see in the wrecked, splintered carry-out cartons abandoned, just dropped pitifully on the pavement while he moaned in his drunkenness. His friends were overtaking him, cursing in the sniffly alley, greystained trainers thudding the awful concrete, arching toes to resist the steady, pulsing ground.
Always strikes me as awful that man can create such horrors! That billions of us boiling down here in the hole can be joyful, unknowing children in golden years of infancy and then, too late, too soon, we find ourselves getting swished by dank winds so we have to grit our bitter teeth on lonely streets, chomp some wasteful snack and discard the sorrowful packaging on the pissy puddled concrete! Where there are awful condoms lying trampled underfoot, likewise abandoned in the midst of some tearful drunken madness. Shirted, mournful youths laughing loudly, struggling drunkenly home.
Sometimes there were dim setback restaurants on sloping streets and which behind the dusty 70's blinds you could glimpse an unutterable brown sadness which was always related to ancient brown sauce bottles, all dun and plastic, sitting in the gloom of a homely laminate tabletop. When, as a kid, we would get chips there, I would never see what went on inside. I was almost scared to look in, I was too apprehensive to question. Perhaps there was the hum of a forbidding radio or bumbling TV on a neglected shelf in the back. The owner or proprietor was completely shadowy and used to peer and mumble in the static gloom over counters to hear the order. And sglash the squelchy redhot noise of chipfries which is drowning out the Saturday afternoon requests of brown-haired mothers on the tiled or worse, worn carpet floor in the dim foreboding hallway you have to step inside to announce your order. I got so scared, so shadowy scared that I didn't even want any food. All the hum and ancient creek of brownsauce bottle in the dark restaurant where I never ventured, all I saw were the sinister grey blinds which were the type which got raised with a little drawstring made of little metal beads, maybe uncanny genteel patrons sulking inside in dreams of Lennon, humbled over to draw them shut, all the grim cackle of tinny 70's radio and inside Harold Steptoe is gripping the brown sauce bottle, you can see his mean sideburns by the gaudy toaster.
That always dreams of urban decay, youthful wreckage of forgotten drunkenness you can see in the wrecked, splintered carry-out cartons abandoned, just dropped pitifully on the pavement while he moaned in his drunkenness. His friends were overtaking him, cursing in the sniffly alley, greystained trainers thudding the awful concrete, arching toes to resist the steady, pulsing ground.
Always strikes me as awful that man can create such horrors! That billions of us boiling down here in the hole can be joyful, unknowing children in golden years of infancy and then, too late, too soon, we find ourselves getting swished by dank winds so we have to grit our bitter teeth on lonely streets, chomp some wasteful snack and discard the sorrowful packaging on the pissy puddled concrete! Where there are awful condoms lying trampled underfoot, likewise abandoned in the midst of some tearful drunken madness. Shirted, mournful youths laughing loudly, struggling drunkenly home.
Sometimes there were dim setback restaurants on sloping streets and which behind the dusty 70's blinds you could glimpse an unutterable brown sadness which was always related to ancient brown sauce bottles, all dun and plastic, sitting in the gloom of a homely laminate tabletop. When, as a kid, we would get chips there, I would never see what went on inside. I was almost scared to look in, I was too apprehensive to question. Perhaps there was the hum of a forbidding radio or bumbling TV on a neglected shelf in the back. The owner or proprietor was completely shadowy and used to peer and mumble in the static gloom over counters to hear the order. And sglash the squelchy redhot noise of chipfries which is drowning out the Saturday afternoon requests of brown-haired mothers on the tiled or worse, worn carpet floor in the dim foreboding hallway you have to step inside to announce your order. I got so scared, so shadowy scared that I didn't even want any food. All the hum and ancient creek of brownsauce bottle in the dark restaurant where I never ventured, all I saw were the sinister grey blinds which were the type which got raised with a little drawstring made of little metal beads, maybe uncanny genteel patrons sulking inside in dreams of Lennon, humbled over to draw them shut, all the grim cackle of tinny 70's radio and inside Harold Steptoe is gripping the brown sauce bottle, you can see his mean sideburns by the gaudy toaster.
Sunday, 2 June 2013
Poem on the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics
They tell us, the men in lab coats, with pride,
How the sum of energy glides,
That, running through the fingers of man,
Like wishes of Gods, is in terminal span.
Sadly, they say, silken energy,
Loved by red blood and a sickly sun,
Runs toward its own return,
And winding down, is all undone.
Entropic moves are the moves of day,
And each of our rays are waves goodbye,
Particles of pithy decay.
And underneath the urgent stream,
Only the torpor and langorous dream,
The sad and welcome and bittersweet
End of the chapter and one way street,
A mise en scéne in glittering paint,
The silence that greets the desert saint
Going toward an empty glade,
In a merely black and tinctured shade,
Abode of the forgotten dead,
Finding on dust and vacant lots
The loves of the leaves and the dreams of the rocks.
And one by one the lights blink out,
Absent matter and energy's rout,
There is no chorus from night to night
But peace in the valley beyond the light.
Those of us who know this truth,
Look no further for our proof
Than the glad smile which always meets
The light overturned and the swelling deeps
We long at last to submerge within,
Though loving the land,
Yet longing to swim,
As a serpent sheds an irksome skin.
Saturday, 26 January 2013
To the pet shop
Me n my Chinese friend Jay go to the petshop to buy goldfish.
And rayed along the walls more like a petting zoo are meek cats and long-faced Afghan hounds that nod and avoid your eye.
Some dogs that back off when you approach them but then when you show you mean well let you embrace them, stroke their furry backs, feel the flip of their tails, their arch and curl. Black dogs, anonymous brown dogs, thin ones with ribs showing, reclining white ones with thick fur.
Dogs never look you in the eye. It's a threat amongst dogs, as is the baring of teeth. After all this time they have only fitfully adapted to life amongst humans. They merely put up with your embraces.
I tell Jay that I was born in the Year of the Cat. He tells me that the Chinese character in this case actually means "small furry animal with a weak back".
And rayed along the walls more like a petting zoo are meek cats and long-faced Afghan hounds that nod and avoid your eye.
Some dogs that back off when you approach them but then when you show you mean well let you embrace them, stroke their furry backs, feel the flip of their tails, their arch and curl. Black dogs, anonymous brown dogs, thin ones with ribs showing, reclining white ones with thick fur.
Dogs never look you in the eye. It's a threat amongst dogs, as is the baring of teeth. After all this time they have only fitfully adapted to life amongst humans. They merely put up with your embraces.
I tell Jay that I was born in the Year of the Cat. He tells me that the Chinese character in this case actually means "small furry animal with a weak back".
In the army barracks
In the army barracks, prison block of the new recruits.
60's functional architecture, godless and soulless. A main housing block and two outflung wings. Sounds: Coughs of angsty recruits and swing and clutter of cagedoors shutting at dusk.
And all the army newboy recruits are snoring except for one newly-shorn recruit. He lies facedown and bellydown on the rough sheet and embraces his pillow, screwing up his eyes and burying his face in the coarse grey material. At length he drops off but then awakens again when his own fitful snores are mistaken by him for the far-off cries of men echoing in the dormitory, like cries of battle. Near him sleep peacefully, as though dead, worn-our crewcut recruits, tangled in their blankets, feet jutting out at strange angles.
Now day is already breaking and from his bed he gazes out of the large window down past the perimeter of the barracks to the scrubby semi-rural semi-suburban wasteland beyond...
Between the angles of an electricity pylon and a wire fence and a grey administrative building in concrete is a grassy mound and a trickling stream, that in a burst of early morning sunshine seems like a rural idyll, a mini-Eden, to him in his captivity.
And now early to the nearby college dorm steps a statuesque and proud college girl, a brunette neatly and primly dressed, framed by the electricity pylon and the corners of the admin building, and seen by the soldier as though on a catwalk, jauntily stepping. She loves to taunt and encourage the awakening soldiers, who whistle and call out at their grey windows, this girl with her grotesquely proud and chubby face, her shapely calves, her lively, downturned grin. Something to tell the girls about later.
And she looks up at the high windows of the barracks, raising her skirt to show off her legs, patting her behind, mouthing words, seen distant in the early sunshine, pale and fresh.
-Is she an angel or a devil? Still lying face down on his mattress, the insomniac's hand passes below to between his legs.
60's functional architecture, godless and soulless. A main housing block and two outflung wings. Sounds: Coughs of angsty recruits and swing and clutter of cagedoors shutting at dusk.
And all the army newboy recruits are snoring except for one newly-shorn recruit. He lies facedown and bellydown on the rough sheet and embraces his pillow, screwing up his eyes and burying his face in the coarse grey material. At length he drops off but then awakens again when his own fitful snores are mistaken by him for the far-off cries of men echoing in the dormitory, like cries of battle. Near him sleep peacefully, as though dead, worn-our crewcut recruits, tangled in their blankets, feet jutting out at strange angles.
Now day is already breaking and from his bed he gazes out of the large window down past the perimeter of the barracks to the scrubby semi-rural semi-suburban wasteland beyond...
Between the angles of an electricity pylon and a wire fence and a grey administrative building in concrete is a grassy mound and a trickling stream, that in a burst of early morning sunshine seems like a rural idyll, a mini-Eden, to him in his captivity.
And now early to the nearby college dorm steps a statuesque and proud college girl, a brunette neatly and primly dressed, framed by the electricity pylon and the corners of the admin building, and seen by the soldier as though on a catwalk, jauntily stepping. She loves to taunt and encourage the awakening soldiers, who whistle and call out at their grey windows, this girl with her grotesquely proud and chubby face, her shapely calves, her lively, downturned grin. Something to tell the girls about later.
And she looks up at the high windows of the barracks, raising her skirt to show off her legs, patting her behind, mouthing words, seen distant in the early sunshine, pale and fresh.
-Is she an angel or a devil? Still lying face down on his mattress, the insomniac's hand passes below to between his legs.
Friday, 18 January 2013
Case study 2
So you take to walking. The walls begin to close in on you, so you flee them. You gain the empty streets. It is now that you notice a very curious effect, one which relates to your fellow humans. You begin to lose comprehension of them. Their movements and words and ideas begin to seem odd. You see them, of course, engaged on their various errands. You see people in cars, briefly glimpsed. You see couples arm in arm. You see groups of friends, gaily chatting, confident in numbers. You see the blue light of televisions in livingrooms, curtain-obscured, plant-shrouded.
But all they do and say seems impossibly remote from you, much more remote than, say, an animal could ever be. A dog will still deign to sniff you, a cat may flirtatiously rub itself against you. They recognise a fellow creature. But these awful, smug humans, with their hideous selfishness, their pathetic privacy. How they avoid your eyes. How they dwell in illusion, how they artlessly construct and live in fantasy worlds. What can they possibly be thinking? What on earth are their motivations? You gaze at them as though you were behind a wall of glass, and they were all conversing eagerly in a totally foreign language.
Now, the former strange pauses, the feelings of something left undone, begin to expand and occupy more space. They combine with your forgetting of the language of social interaction, and well up at random moments. In the middle of the day, engaged in some commonplace task, washing up some dishes, say, you suddenly halt and struggle to get your bearings, as though lost.
Now is when the solitary man finds himself becoming odd. Sometimes on his nocturnal walks he murmurs to himself, or the interlocutor in his head. Often, now, he listens anxiously at night, trying to detect some texture in the silence, as though it was a blank stone wall that somehow bore a message. As though the silence were the pop and hiss of a needle on an ancient 45, and at any moment, some faint music would emerge. One night, the solitary man waits at a crossing for the light to change to green. It is midnight. He has walked up the long way from his empty flat through streets where seagulls fight over scraps. Suddenly, standing there, he says aloud "I am going mad".
Naturally, this frightens him very much.
But all they do and say seems impossibly remote from you, much more remote than, say, an animal could ever be. A dog will still deign to sniff you, a cat may flirtatiously rub itself against you. They recognise a fellow creature. But these awful, smug humans, with their hideous selfishness, their pathetic privacy. How they avoid your eyes. How they dwell in illusion, how they artlessly construct and live in fantasy worlds. What can they possibly be thinking? What on earth are their motivations? You gaze at them as though you were behind a wall of glass, and they were all conversing eagerly in a totally foreign language.
Now, the former strange pauses, the feelings of something left undone, begin to expand and occupy more space. They combine with your forgetting of the language of social interaction, and well up at random moments. In the middle of the day, engaged in some commonplace task, washing up some dishes, say, you suddenly halt and struggle to get your bearings, as though lost.
Now is when the solitary man finds himself becoming odd. Sometimes on his nocturnal walks he murmurs to himself, or the interlocutor in his head. Often, now, he listens anxiously at night, trying to detect some texture in the silence, as though it was a blank stone wall that somehow bore a message. As though the silence were the pop and hiss of a needle on an ancient 45, and at any moment, some faint music would emerge. One night, the solitary man waits at a crossing for the light to change to green. It is midnight. He has walked up the long way from his empty flat through streets where seagulls fight over scraps. Suddenly, standing there, he says aloud "I am going mad".
Naturally, this frightens him very much.
Case study 1
I am definitely not a misanthrope.
I call myself a lover of mankind, and I try to act as such. But it's true that mankind eludes me. I see nothing in men but rivalry, gliding like ghosts to their errands. I know for sure I am not like them. As for women, they are a blank. They are and remain a problem, even to themselves. They are a riddle. Watch them slouch with shopping-bags through streets. What can they be thinking?
And so it is that I, estranged from man, am cast among them, slowly, ponderously walking, through an autumnal town centre, in a post-industrial city. To an office building I go, and ascend the bare steps up to Level 3. The place smells like a hospital, and is so scrupulously clean that one has an urge to defile it. After standing at a plastic podium for a while, jabbing my finger on a touchscreen, my name is called and a small, curiously twisted woman with a faint moustache moves a slip of paper in front of me, which I sign with my name. This is my life and cross to bear.
I was explaining to someone, some interlocutor in my head, "I used myself as a case study. Effects of solitude on the human person. One goes through phases. First of all, one feels liberated. The mind is refreshed and acute. The deliciousness of the solitary vices, the solitary virtues, are happily indulged in. Lust and philosophy, life and history as joyful, diminutive games, played on the blank wall of the mind. Everything incommunicable and private, everything endogenous and subjective, can be revelled in. At first these encounters with the bare self are unchallenging.
After a while though, usually late at night, one suddenly finds in oneself, arising unbidden, a curious, hateful dismay. One discovers it like one would discover a cavity in a back tooth, with a sort of disgust and shame, and at the same time, a morbid curiosity about the sources and progress of the decay. It comes at bedtime, as a strangely definite sense that one has left something undone. It is when one tries to pinpoint exactly what has been left undone, that one becomes puzzled. Why can't I happily sleep, fold etc. to bed? And then the whole, stark truth wells up at you. I haven't lived. I haven't lived today. Something, some opportunity or other, has somehow been missed, or rather, it never arose, and this not arising, this failure of phenomena to appear, this absence, is felt like a presence, like a ghost in the room which stands all night by your bed and prevents sleep.
I call myself a lover of mankind, and I try to act as such. But it's true that mankind eludes me. I see nothing in men but rivalry, gliding like ghosts to their errands. I know for sure I am not like them. As for women, they are a blank. They are and remain a problem, even to themselves. They are a riddle. Watch them slouch with shopping-bags through streets. What can they be thinking?
And so it is that I, estranged from man, am cast among them, slowly, ponderously walking, through an autumnal town centre, in a post-industrial city. To an office building I go, and ascend the bare steps up to Level 3. The place smells like a hospital, and is so scrupulously clean that one has an urge to defile it. After standing at a plastic podium for a while, jabbing my finger on a touchscreen, my name is called and a small, curiously twisted woman with a faint moustache moves a slip of paper in front of me, which I sign with my name. This is my life and cross to bear.
I was explaining to someone, some interlocutor in my head, "I used myself as a case study. Effects of solitude on the human person. One goes through phases. First of all, one feels liberated. The mind is refreshed and acute. The deliciousness of the solitary vices, the solitary virtues, are happily indulged in. Lust and philosophy, life and history as joyful, diminutive games, played on the blank wall of the mind. Everything incommunicable and private, everything endogenous and subjective, can be revelled in. At first these encounters with the bare self are unchallenging.
After a while though, usually late at night, one suddenly finds in oneself, arising unbidden, a curious, hateful dismay. One discovers it like one would discover a cavity in a back tooth, with a sort of disgust and shame, and at the same time, a morbid curiosity about the sources and progress of the decay. It comes at bedtime, as a strangely definite sense that one has left something undone. It is when one tries to pinpoint exactly what has been left undone, that one becomes puzzled. Why can't I happily sleep, fold etc. to bed? And then the whole, stark truth wells up at you. I haven't lived. I haven't lived today. Something, some opportunity or other, has somehow been missed, or rather, it never arose, and this not arising, this failure of phenomena to appear, this absence, is felt like a presence, like a ghost in the room which stands all night by your bed and prevents sleep.
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