Early Writings

1991

2009-10-03T18:54:00.000-07:00

1991

I

From the doors of white pleasure he cried
He motioned to them in the silences
Over the waters, beneath the oaks, beside the rose bush
In the beauty of smiles and of laughter
In the whispered voices of children
He issued manifold suggestions and insinuated
In diverse and ingenious ways.

From the doors of white pleasure he cried
He infiltrated the arts and laboured hard
With the philosophers, scanning continents
Moving to amenable hearts
Advancing, impressing his call
Have mercy, forgive, love, give.

Some ignored him, short of time and out of breath
Others heard him but could not understand
Others understood, but the shadow not the substance
Still others published texts, a way but not the way
All were proud.

And for none the hearing and for none the vision
For they had neither ears to hear nor eyes to see
And he had not yet a face, a shape, a corporeal form.

From the doors of white pleasure he cried
Many were prepared-none more than the Jews
To these he came
He walked, he talked, Immanuel
To make his call clear and bold
He bled his truth across the world.

II

Freedom is the licence to forget
To turn aside from the dense clamour that collects in the mind
To wipe the jewel and begin thought again
To lift the eyes, overtly, in quest
To listen, to presume nothing but that which is evident.
To that time and to that kingdom when vacancy is no more
When the light dazzles and blasts.

III

From birth we teach one another to breathe an artificial air of misery and fear.

He knew he was asleep because he was still indifferent to the fate of each moment. He recognised the urgency of life but only intellectually. The remainder of his being remained as always- paralysed.

IV

The mind must stop itself and halt if it is to prevent a backward slide into the fetid, awkward realm of shadows.
The eyes are opened but only for a brief moment
The soul is released but quickly caught again
Retrieved and bound down, suppressed and overwhelmed
By the charge and brutish storms of life.

V

To draw no distinction between one's life and the birds singing
The summer light refracted off crockery in peaceful tea rooms
And the wind kissing one's hair blowing in burgeoning luxury.

VI

Joy is an invasion, an in-rooting of light
The dawning raised levitation in a smile
The effulgence of liquid eyes set deep in luscious facial flesh
The syrup fluidity of limbs, the orgasmic deliverance of spirit
Crystals, sparkling teeth
The distended legs of the womb queen
Suspension....the substance of this thing is a curious, unknowable
Centreless, pivotless force which extends out and pierces our consciousness
Hung, draped, cascading and erupting at once

VII

Can your swift and polished sophistry, your glib and oily wizardry
Invade the jewel kingdom of the silences
All your words, your chiselled arguments, your passions and your angers
All is nothing when hurled with proud vigour towards the space between words
The silence of the deep emptiness betraying a glory beyond the voice.

VIII

From the bowels of a bloated skull seep the waters of truth
Oozing through and about the parched and famished heads
Of blind and featherless peacockes.
Mankind, puffed up and terrified.
We, the bulbous, insubstantial, stilted proud rapists of the earth.
All this rubbish, awkward and strange
About fear and death, pollution and suffering
Means nothing
And is nothing
To the eternal poised repose of the silences.
Still, since we dwell deep inside the hell of our blindness
And do not see and cannot know the space between words
Onward and hateful we labour and toil and cry and strive
Waiting, waiting
For the mother silence to conceive her son and the effulgence
Of his dawn to surpass us.

IX

A face, light and soft, succulent, inedible, obscure, propertied and vizored, by an Impenetrable mask of enigma.

X

There is no death
It is unreal
They say it must happen but I stand defiant
It happens only because they choose to acknowledge its power.
I shall never die, the eternal sunrise bursts through these bones
And roars above the moon's pale Kingdom.
I choose the insanity of glory over the sanity of defeat.
I affirm life amid the mud and fog of frightened decadence.
The rays of the mind rise up towards the uncreated and I will not fall.
If you see, if you feel the sallow clasp of death enfolding
Do not believe.
If you see the bones crack and crumble
Do not believe.
If you see the ravenous dust swallowing this fire
Do not believe, I live, I am.

XI

The vivid images clutch and pierce, hugging the vein
What is this hollow din, eager, nebulous and angry?
Where are they going?
Where is the beauty
The pastoral dulcet skies?
Who understands and nobody cares
And this is life and what is death?

XII

Returning to those places is like climbing back into a diseased womb
Its like having broken up through the choppy surface of a bottomless ocean.
These colours are only palpably noticed when they are licked, caressed, sucked in by the eye.

To experience a new kind of sexual intercourse you must allow yourself to be confounded, disordered, bemused, benumbed by the simple irradiance of a female face. Consider that you are driving into that face, abandon your moorings, lose yourself inside the entrancing smile, the moist eyes. You are entering the forbidden zone-beware, else you be consumed by dangerous passions and exiled still further. Eden is no place for the man of concepts, but for he who rests his identity on primordial stillness, for him who desires only that he be destroyed by the flux of being. The man of concepts will be burnt up, disabled, his mind will suffer a severe psychosis, for this beauty, this fecundity is quite beyond concepts and will blast apart the mind of the punctillious.

XIII

All this, my beautiful stranger, is illusion propped up by fear
And wrapped in vain certainty.
Come to me, come into my arms
I will show you the gorgeous nakedness of truth,
The crystals and the colours and the delicate flesh singing.
What is the matter, what is wrong, beautiful stranger
Sit down beside me, right here, right now and have no fear.

Over here, gentle leaves are dancing with the wind
Tender branches swaying, kissing, caressing these wild and weary eyes.
What is the truth my delicious Father?
Where do we go now my exquisite friend, my friend
Blasted against the florid skies
Licked cool about the cool liquid rock
Aflame in exile beneath the frigid ribs of man.
Is this flesh cold and flaccid so young?
Is it merely time between the roused pulse and the rotting bone?
Or are there other stranger meanings, suppressed and guarded
Too prodigious, too vast for the stomach of mortal cognition?

Come secret dream, ocean sunk kiss, my secret slit and silent lips.
Flaying limbs lustrous and viviparous in petalled syrup skies.
To you I am coming flowing rivers of ebullience, spanning a kingdom of dreams.
Take me into your fire-laced arms, you cauldron of blazing need
Crystal lady....watered golden power of light.

Let us see and wonder what will happen.
Shall my heart be exploded
Could my eyes burst.....
Will the skies rupture and empty a deluge of effulgence
Will the moment clutch, seize, conceive.
Will the present win, conquering spectral gloom forever?

XIV

I am rising up through the deep black waters. I am the weed.
A screening light, crystalled, brilliant, stings the ragged eyes.
Whirling emollient arms are eating me, vast tracts of liquid flesh devour.
Faces, serene, swallow the vaguest corner of the tortured soul.
What is this air- bloating, lifting, swirling?
The light is pure and fierce but where are they taking me
Over the ocean towards the shore, toward the flaying legs.

XV

Swim with me into the deep oceans of our dreams
Is there nothing but deep sleep forever?
Are we alive, are we real?
I am tortured by unreal pains, pains easily relieved,
Pains unending and cruel
Are you to blame my luscious lady of flames?
Will you not stop your dreadful dance?
Wild ecstasy torn, ripped, dripping limp organs of joy
Love me, love me now,
Calm the screaming flesh now....
Kill me, destroy me
Crack this lonely leaden skull
Stop the phantoms from howling.

XVI

The eye looks intense and deep into the vast depth of being
Your beautiful face is my paradise
It is said we live but all is death
I must consume you now.
Trapped within the partial revelation
Aware of the slaughtered magnificence
The human race burns up in a cauldron of pride
Smoke, thick, indestructible smoke, choking here in my lonely eyes.

XVII

Child, rich irresistible sapphire flame of fire, your time is now
Your breath rubs the death air back to life
Come, Come precious jewel children
Come to the river of life.
Swim these liquid paths, my dearly beloved, my golden dream....
There are no torments here, no dark ghosts, no silent screams
Come, come the sleeping dawn awakens
The fettered soul rampant against the world.
See, here, the mist dissolving into light.
Your breath rubs the death air back to life
One day sooner than now and closer than flesh
It had to occur
It had to
And it is.

XVIII

It cannot be seen
This dying heart
Sliced and boiled, encased by lies
Within the aching tomb of endless desolation
I shall die
I shall die
You will not see me again, my puzzled friend
You will never know what or why
And I shall go and never shall I return
Into this twittering empty groan of some pale twilight fever.

XIX

All those things which yearn to be uttered.
What is a concept, what a description, what a phrase to reflect or capture
The bulging expanse of life
All feels as if it were eternal, without beginning, without end, beyond time
And space, invulnerable, unbreakable, invaluable- still, placid, gorgeous.
And yet when we humans gather together and exchange details and ask questions
And seek explanations of why and for what we ignore and belittle
The magnificence of everything and insult the golden glory of
Our Father's Kingdom.....why?...I ask you why....open your wide
Precious Eyes, my beautiful friends, my rubied partners,
My lovers, my infinite playmates.
Will you lie content tonight
Curled tight around your worries and your fears
Your deep, dark secret angers
Your long suppressed furies
Your screaming bewilderment.

My head is slitting apart
How dare they do this to my dear children
I am a scattered wreck, alienated, estranged from life, dead
How I love young people laughing.
I feel old, I am subsiding..my end devours me and I am gone, gone, gone
Thrown into the hungry claws of the decomposed monster.
Do they not see, can they not hear?

XX

Death is the price a man pays for devoting seventy years of his life
to doing everything other than what he truly wants and needs.

XXI

Did you, woman, display that wonderful allure only to torture me?
Do you want my soul as well as my flesh?
Do you love me or only your concepts? And what of my silences
Care you to dive in with me and live in rapture forever?

That a woman is not, right now, massaging or stroking my flesh is an issue of vague despair.

Is a woman designed for participation in ecstasy?
Is a man built to absorb and feed her charms?
If only women were ugly and hateful- the wordless bemusement would be less.

XXII

All this pathetic puerile noise, this whirling, grating, cacophonous nonsense. Be still, stop it, sit down. When I work, when I have money, when I am pampered and flushed by the acclaim and love of friends, when I am in any sense stable or secure....it is then that luxury and fecundity elude me, there at the gates to Eden, that final consummation, that the ultimate tasting is denied and sealed from me. But when I am lonely, have little worldly security, no anchor, no base, am short of money, it is then that Eden swallows me and the crystals blaze. This absurd, sick situation, this haze of the unconsummated, this shadowed state, wherein so much is experienced but not one thing appreciated, where the circle is never fully joined or the whole filled or the colours full.....this is the curse that cruelly twists our twilight world and is our unnameable stumbling block.

The eye is the lamp of the world. The private mind links matter with the divine. Clean the eye, light the lamp, enliven the mind. So long as a person persists in deceiving himself he separates himself from others and perpetuates the tyranny of shadows.

XXIII

There is no free will- only a certain systematized, automatic and recurrent running away from fear. Without fear we would never stir, never create, never progress or learn. Fear and most particularly the fear that rests in our foreknowledge of death ensures that we confront phenomena impassioned, with concern, diligence and urgency. Fear is our most everpresent and inexorable characteristic.....and yet it is fear that must be driven out, crushed and superceded by a higher, less savage, more beautiful form of life drive. It is fear that must be systematically and assiduously dismantled if the hope of reconceiving man in a sublimer form is to breathe.

XXIV

From the world’s mouths nothing real is heard yet from those mouths cries of pain and suffering pour unceasingly.

How can one human being love one human being without loving them all. Are some any different from others. Really

XXV

The fear of the void, the fear which leads us to constantly struggle away from freedom, is a fear which exists only when love and humility are not circumstantial presences. The fear is only real because we distrust non-conceptual reality and are convinced that if we faced it naked, soul to soul, we would be immediately and devastatingly crushed. This paranoia is at the root of man's thought processes. It is the block which exiles him from Eden.

Our distrust of non-conceptual reality, by which I mean truth (being), begins at birth and possesses strong characteristics of vengefulness and hatred. We do not easily forgive the insult of being torn from a warm and perfectly loving womb and thrown into a cold, wild, harsh, degenerate world. The primordial anger, which translates “Don’t blame me for what’s happened, I’m not responsible, you are, whatever you are, you (who) made me what I am. I did not ask to be born or to be styled by this consciousness, these desires, tortured by these fears. You, God, not me, you are responsible. I am nothing. You are to blame”, this anger is not easily dissipated.

XXVI

Some entirely different sunrise, some wholly fresh sensation, a recollected vision of the jewel.

XXVII

Life is a dance of ecstasies inside the mystery of a summer dream.

On the edge of each thought there broods a tainted cloak of despair.

Will you toil by the light of the moon or freely bathe in the luxurious waters of the sun?

XXVIII

See the shivering phantoms
Grumbling, complaining, moaning
Like lambs that have forgotten how to eat.

Unite, clutch, effect
Nobody knows the path to the gates of white pleasure except the stranger.

The world is dying, the nightmare closing, passing
The unknown unfelt presence about us is coming
The bulbs, the buds are among us and the chill of winter fades.

XXIX

I want to observe this but from a distance
I want to yearn after it, to set it as a goal in my future.
One must want to dwell in all things before one can be a man of God.
Is life intrinsically arduous or has it only become so because of the disease?
Between one thing and another lives the silences.

XXX

The shrill and malicious drone of a cheap and tacky alarm clock
Rapes the delicate morning air
And everyone follows and nobody lives
And everyone is deceiving themselves and laughing at our saviour
Still strung to the same cross bleeding.

XXXI

Luke's eyes awaken. His bed lies beneath a small, square spiritless window which empties itself onto nebulous, grey vacuity. His room has one basin, rudimentary, notieceable for its lack of washing particulars. The floor is wooden, there is one yellow carpet, matted, thick and heavy. A central light hangs suspended- a lampshade, wan yellow. Luke has a tape machine resting dutifully on a small plastic table. The machine is plugged into the wall-not a pretty sight. Luke is tall, handsome, blond and well built. There are books in Luke's room- on antique low lying
bookshelves near the door.

XXXII

Once again the self-defeating contradiction returns to stalk the earth
With vile teeth sharpened still and wild nothingness aflame in putrid eyes.
I am the ancient weed rising up through the dark waters.

XXXIII

Artists are miserable and rich men poor. The poor, if not bitter and ambitious, are proud and judgemental.

XXXIV

It is to see familiar scenes of daily life set out apart, disconnected, framed in delicate definition. There it is, beautiful, sublime-The gift of God, the life you cannot live.

XXXV

If I called you beautiful
Would you stroke my hair?
If I met your needs
If I dried your tears
If I enrobed you with luxuriant celestial light
Would you show me life
And let me in?
Would the vast bottomless abyss of glory
Enclose me?

XXXVI

What was Camus rebelling against in his metaphysical revolt? Not against God- he disbelieved in one- but against his own inability to understand how the God of Christianity could possibly be what he claims to be.

To answer Camus' rejection of the God of Christ it is nevertheless necessary to explain convincingly to a mind such as his how it is again possible to believe in him.

XXXVII

Utterly disconnected, utterly unassuming, transportedly transcendent, transparently immanent. The still hope of a new beginning.

Not to escape but utterly to face, to heave out from all areas of the will one simple earnest presence.

XXXVIII

I am suspicious of reading and re-entering the shattered world of concepts.

The proud man is always inattentive to the present moment, always abstracted, not with us, not a problem, his empire built from dusty air.

XXXIX

It is not true to say the beauty is glorious, profound, unfathomable. It merely is; naked seeing, naked being, nakedly alive and thriving- as if there were forces, entities and organisms within me seeking life, animation and resurrection through my own attainment of the divine.

Yet I forever want to stamp a label on it, to squeeze it into a concept, as if not to do so would be to die.

To have this death daily and live fully in its strange renewing light.

XXXX

The silken cavern of unbounded joy
So much to give, so much to share
Yet ladened
Bursting with a hungry word
To shake and tear, ruin and resurrect.
Sublimate the sterile fibres of the deadened limb.
I had not seen the beauty before
Only the horror and the putrid flesh
Swirling like curdled milk.

Crystal lady
Refulgent captured winds
If only you saw what I see
Felt what I sense
And could live with me inside the diamond.

XXXXI

Salvation, arrived in the dawning awareness of the enveloping silences, is a rearrangement and reordering of the individual mind through the exiling of the clasping, conceptualising brute, the ugly, dwarfish, fearful reductioner. Such is the long awaited marriage of humanity and Jesus, the occasion of unbounded bliss, the inception of the Age Of Art and the death- crushing, immanent Kingdom of Heaven.

XXXXII

The viviparous pursuits of the enlivened lip. I am not to believe what they tell me though what they say is accepted by everyone.

XXXXII

There is no evil heart, only the violent rumblings that unfortunately obtrude into the realm of action, rumblings created by and attributable to a long, heavy history of repression. And so we see there are no enemies, only embodied enigmas waiting to be unravelled in the exorcising light of truth.

XXXXIII

Caught in a dead wind, late one night
Lashed by the bitter rain, I wondered
Are these legs mine or only those of some awful spider
Caressing the back of constant death?

I lie, I am emptiness, here I breathe our tortured air,
Our dry fetid system, our laughing dereliction
Our sick globe, silver and weird.

XXXXIV

Here the passion to open the eye gates into our kingdom
Set in the faraway valley of mists
Where the green butterfly treads over my heart
Where silent arboreal shadows of ancient rhythmic cymbals
Play out the vast sonorous love of God.

Stay with me, Golden lady
Stay with me, hold me
I do not want to die
I do not wish to fall with a frozen breath from the insane
Zeal of this high mountain.

The still moments, You can remember
When everything hung breathless, as if paralysed
In wait for the return of splendour.
When to be was not to live but to be beyond life
In the enfolding love of a sacred womb
Heaving a chorus of light.

Down through the silent corridor
Past the windows
Into a clearing, bright and wide
You are here, the waterfalls surround you.

Proceed further to the place of dying music
Alone now in the shuddering quiet....be still
Is that your father sweeping the leaves into a crisp pile beside the rotten fence?
Is that your Mother crying in the corner?
Yes?....No?....Where are you going?
Again
Where are you going?

This way, follow
Hands by your side
Tears pressing the skullbone hollow and mad
A small white cup of black coffee is all you'll get
In this sunken chamber where your friends
Guides in this desert of hell
Sit round you strangely, always removed, in a different world
Here to mock and cheer you for a few hours.
One void to another in a cave of smiling skulls.

Now come further, around the corner, across the meadow
The bridge is green, green and fuming
Robin.....Is that you???
Watch out! your eyes, they'll burn
The maiden is taunting, always she taunts....why?
What do you do?
Pity the lost sapphire of fire.
When heaven is raped the angels weep but we know the devils rule
We know our state
We know the sunrise glimpsed over our aching ruin
Was denied by everyone and fled
Call it back, bring it back, bring it back, bring it back
No, too late
Too late
Too late
Falling
Falling
Into an empire of dust
Dust in your eyes, dust under your feet and lights scattered weirdly
This is the land where everything screams
This is the land where nothing is but paralysed lust for hollow dreams
The land, the land
Of dust, of dust
The land of private howling.

The voices are washed
They do not slaughter
But the cruel dawn nears
The savage winds of light arise.

Enough
Did you sleep well?
Here, I've made you a nice cup of tea
Says Mother misunderstanding to a strange child.

XXXXV

Do you remember that long October afternoon
When we sat together in the park on a bench eating ice creams
And stared before us into the wicked flower garden
Erected there for us, only for us, to mock and confuse, to challenge

Do you remember those empty words welling up in us like strangers
The gentle, barren bed sessions
The sex of ghosts, phantoms everywhere on the sheets of a shivering monster.
And do you remember what you said to me,
My dear sweet baby
Do you remember how you killed me with one soft, shuddering sigh

Well, indeed, in those days I was weak
Soft and malleable
An eeiry object of your weird delight
My sweet, sweet baby.

XXXXVI

Follow, the ruin has gone
We can forget like
Quick nimble river children
That that was there at all
The world is dead, the earth reborn and life begins again
Slide, slide
Follow the master
The water is cold, fresh and brilliant
Follow the valley out of the mist
The sun, hot and redemptive in its clean madness
See there, look deep and full, drink in the colour,
Devour the empty spaces
The new adventure
Freedom from a plastic world of ambitious death.

XXXXVII

Still not believe, still unsure
Still caught in the middle where the axe divides
Permit me to laugh golden laughter
And rest the woes of endless pain upon your hopeless shoulders.

XXXXVIII

What did you think?
What could you think?
With brains made of ice and razor blades.
Still, it doesn't matter
Nothing matters, not any longer, not any more.

XXXXIX

We sat down together
Our separate minds in coffins
A strange fear of gaps, of private winds
And cold pallid calmness
The awkward stillness between the objects
When lights blaze for you they glimmer
Far distant in obscure meaning
The voices of familiar gaiety roar chaotically
In a distant mockery of everything certain and benign
Your brain now vacant
Everything stops
The furniture freezes
And one persistent thought bangs with rhythmic absurdity
Against your lust for sense

L

I have great health, I am not suffering from any terminal illnesses, I am young, I have a loving family behind me, I have a number of reliable, caring friends, I have a universe before me. The problem is that I am still being created, I am only partial, the faculties of my humanity, which perhaps one day will be able to embrace life, are still being formed, are gradually, steadily coming to birth. One principle capacity I lack is that of withstanding criticism…. more, of not fearing the gruesome fact that some people may dislike me. When I conquer this fact I shall be able to present myself for what I am, free from the distorting impressions that my paranoiac over-anxiety concerning my bearing brings to weigh on my heart and soul.

LI

I do not want to “date” women. The whole idea seems horrifically vulgar and forced and artificial. I want to love them, one erotically, the rest emotionally and “spiritually”. I cannot easily overcome my primordial, deep seated fears of women and initiate, assert, organise. It seems like a crime to me, a rape, the rude unexpected invasion of a monster. I am absurd. A woman must love me first, she must convince me of her love for I cannot easily be persuaded of its sincerity. She must organise and effect. I am trained to distrust other than motherly, filial advances as empty illusions, unreal, non-existent. This whole matter is vile and repugnant. It has nothing to do with anything but baby making. Where is Christ, life….I’d like, I think, a kind of death.

I am conditioned to believe that one could never truly love me and my flesh. Most of the time my body is unreal, a phantom of the mind, an insensible vehicle only. It does hardly rate able to be loved by woman and yet this is what it needs. I don’t really need a woman, not me, my consciousness. Right now, my consciousness needs to die. My pride and immodesty is colossal. I think I’m some kind of a superman. This because all the evidence observable suggests to me that I remain, in some very essential way, fundamentally different to others. Above? Beneath? A solitary nothingness which will pass through this life unnoticed, unloved, without impact on others, an absurdity. A colossal, sick pathetic joke…..conceiving my essence to be special but actually being something entirely different. I fear death, dying. Do I write these words for myself or for others whom I subconsciously suppose and hope will be fascinated by me in later years? How nauseatingly vain!! What sort of an effect would the devotion of a woman have on my thinking? I am developing, changing, rushing on and I fear this.

LII

Perhaps: It all seems so clear and hangs together so well, so exactly. We are prisoners of the process of becoming; instruments of the creative interplay of Dionysus and Apollo. Apollo creates, is prudent, diligent, rational, conceptual, repressive, suspicious of the radical and centripetal in his consciousness….Dionysus exalts, is entirely non-conceptual in his thinking, giving himself to the given flux of perception and to the vivid, concrete, enveloping immediate being-ness of his circumstances. Apollo and Dionysus, extremes characterising the dual nature of becoming, are not gods, only notions useful in working towards an understanding. Jesus is god, there is only one god. We are his members??

The appropriateness of my going there. The certain inconceivability of my ignoring or belittling the significance of my spiritual insights, that forbidden glimpse.

LIII

One of my fears is that Cheryl will disapprove, another that others will think me dryly religious or in novel ways peculiar or surprising.

My exuberance and liveliness is restricted to my image as clown and jester. I have a great many acquaintances but few real friends. I try to dominate, to impose my character to too great a degree in social dialogue and do not listen or respond spontaneously enough to the speech and action of others.

It seems I do not want to study Theology after all and if I do not come here so be it. But if I do come up, a secure and straight path, that is what it shall involve. The alleviation of psychological burdens which prevent me from loving, giving, living for others. My worldly definition taken care of, it being more than many others in keeping with my inner self, I shall be freed from a certain style of bondage and empowered to live my life on a different plane. But first, shall I get in?

LIV

All the grievances I hold towards humanity and individuals in particular should be recognised as grievances I hold towards myself. I hate myself but I lack the courage to criticise myself. Other people offend my emotions because I see in them the display of an unexhuberant bearing towards me. All the while I am blind to the inertia and uninspired nature of my own presence. I loathe in others what I regard as my own shortcomings and love in others the appearance of those qualities which I hope one day to embody in myself; concreteness, corporeality, gracefulness, compassion, love of the finite, robustness of character, firmity of mind, simplicity of style, openness, the ability to build close emotional bonds with others.

LVI

I am a reporter from the kingdom of life, the rich empire of youth, joy and splendour. I am a messenger. I inform and communicate with the silences and with everything.

I have regained control over my body. It is my servant, it obeys my command. I am master. All times are one, all places are one, we look out from divine bodies towards the eternal kingdom but we see and know nothing. The personal soul is the gate to Eden. The key is rigorous honesty, brutal exposure of, and confrontation with, every fear, damning self-criticism, lavish self-appraisal, luscious intoxication of memory, shining recollection and bounteous imbibing of exquisite encounters of the infinite soul.

The Kingdom of Heaven is the individual soul’s capacity to take conscious control over the stages and courses of growth and development of one’s whole being.

Judging your own life by the standards and examples set by others is death. Impose your own law upon your life. The law, self-conceived, self-binding law of heavenly lust.

LVII

We are like children, hungry to learn, who are taught nothing and idle away their time in vapid, pathetic pursuits, all of which asphyxiate the soul and cloud the inlets of inspiration and imagination. All degeneration and evil, every deprivation of the divine soul has at its root the unsatisfied hunger for real knowledge, for nurturing, for awe inspiring insights into the Kingdom and and an unrequited lust for unbounded glory and exhiliration.

LVIII

Why did I leave Durham? Do I want to return? Do I want to study Theology? What do I find special in Jessica? Is that which I think special and wondrous not so at all? What are my fears concerning my return to Durham? If I studied history or English what ramifications would this have in my mind? Do I predominantly think via, with reference to, the opinions, advice and bearings of others? If so, how do I, Jonathan Tillotson, fit in within the entire system of decision. Am I real, do I exist, is my substance but a dream?

That woman in one evening has destroyed me. No, I cannot after all come to the concert in Manchester. She hopes and expects to see Oliver tomorrow and to go with him for a coffee. But though it appeared that she wanted to go for one with me, she cannot arrange a time in advance and it seems tenuous whether or not I’ll see her again before I go. This distresses me for an infinite number of reasons which would be quite pointless to relate here. My paranoia concerning her is colossal and importunate. The suspicion that she feels I am harassing her fills me with agonised dread, I mean that feeling of horror that recommends, perhaps demands, suicide. The thought that she is discussing me with Clare, that she considers me a nuisance, that she would prefer me not to return, all this destroys me. I should like to be dead. Better that than to endure this unnameable, insubstantial, incommunicable torment. Nobody understands. They’ll think only that I’m keen on her, that all I want to do is fuck her. They will not understand when I say that she has made a claim on my soul - they’ll think I’m being pretentious. Where is life? Where is life? Where have they taken it? I know what love is, I have tasted it, I have seen its glory, the priceless inexpressible splendour of sacred love, the love that forces heaven now…but such is its nature it will only take root, it will only grow and be nurtured and bloom and tower between persons who are able to support it. I cannot express how torturously frustrating it is to feel the presence of a sublime, a divine, an eternal love burning and boiling inside and yet to be cruelly disabled by a searing paralysis which crushes my desire to share this jewel with others. To feel within one’s grasp the possibility of realising a glorious relationship, yet knowing that certain forces, some unassailable facts and circumstances, allied to my personal insecurities and vagaries, are precluding my immersion within one. Its like living on the crest of a wave of light which, obtruding into unwelcoming regions, is mocked from behind—for failing in its duty of illumination - and then battered and confounded by shadows and phantoms from the front –apparitions which simply remain there: unmoved, not enlivened by the light. Hopeless. Alone with the Kingdom. Again: Where is life? I love Jessica, I adore her but not in the way, the urgent, impatient, thrusting way that should worry her.

LIX

Have you noticed how everybody’s conversation is influenced and coloured by the matter of relation, of role, age, class etc. Fathers speak to sons as fathers, sons to fathers as sons, students to tutors as students, tutors to students as tutors, empolyees to employers as employees and vica versa. Strangers to strangers as strangers and etc, etc, etc. And yet none of these categorisations, father, son, tutor, stranger, employee, employer, adult, child have any potent right to claim that they exist in any realm other than the tortured, synthetic realm which we humans erect. In reality none of these distinctions exist at all, they are merely the ugly, dispiriting adornments of our world, necessary I suppose in that people like to specialise and focus energies on exclusive concerns, but utterly anti-life in that they perpetuate this frankly murderous twilight mockery we proudly call life.

LX

I treat everyone not as if they were equal, for that is not realistic, but as if they were all extensions of myself, parts of myself and we one. Consequently, I am forced, against the tide I admit, to love everyone as I love myself.

This is not so outlandish or unworkable an idea. We love ourselves, we respect, protect, preserve ourselves as best as possible from whatever threats the world cares to throw at us. This self-love is instinctive and necessary – it is not chosen or opted for. Even the morbidly suicidal, self-hating deserters of life love themselves, only in their own singularly proud, inverted fashion. We love ourselves and yet for certain we do not know ourselves. Much in us is opaque, mysterious, hidden; often uncomfortably alien to our consciousnesses. That we love so passionately an entity we have no concrete insight into is a mystery so profound, so comical, so mocking that we perhaps do best to continue as we do and ignore its existence, prolonging the delusion that we know who we are, and not disturb any further the habitual working of things with impossible questions that, lacking answers, only lead to paralysis and stultified sighing.

Nonetheless – two insights attend this understanding. Firstly, that it is the nature of love not to hold as a prerequisite for its existence an integrated, fully rational acquaintance with its object. Secondly, derived from this, that loving others is of the same nature as loving oneself since both forms of love involve themselves with the unknown and the strange. Consequently, we see how natural the movement of love is from the self to others. If we seek further reassurances of the naturalness and reasonableness of loving others as ourselves, we can observe the matter inverted, from the opposite perspective. We can look at the blatant, striking, oneness of humanity in the lowest, most manifest senses. We all eat, we all walk, sleep, visit the lavatory, have sex, talk, and if you study closely almost always in the same way, using the same general actions, mannerisms, obeying the same totalitarian laws of gesture and form. Those who rebel from convention never do so totally, only in part, and always only abandoning one style to join or create another. We experience the same pains, physical and emotional, differing only from each other in the question of degree, sequence, frequency. Our bodies, organically, are, so the scientists tell us, endlessly reducible and therefore utterly identical in general nature. The specific discrepancies occur only as a result of our being rooted in particular locations on the psychological, physical and emotional maps. The analogy between, on the one hand, differing cultures, involving distinctive geographical and historical necessities, and on the other persons within culture involving different educational, class, physiological situations, illuminates the matter. We each are what the fact of the universe chooses to make us, and our seemingly vast dissimilarities are only real in the superficial realm; beneath, underneath, as now can be observed if one escapes, even momentarily, from the kingdom of concepts, we are all one, and as one demand to be loved as one.

LXI

Our objections to the existence of God are not founded on an instinctive aversion to the notion of deity in itself but on our offence taken at the nature of the relationship which we suppose he wishes to have with us.

LXII

God wishes us to obey but we wish to command. God wishes us to believe what he says without evidence, but we will believe only with evidence. Trust, faith, obedience – all presuppose alienation from that which we relate to, in this case God.

We will only want to obey, trust, and have faith in those we feel intimately tied to and in close association. But, if we loved him, if we were intimately close, we would not need to trust him, have faith in him or obey him.

LXIII

Please let there be someone out there not stifled by the cruel dream.
Perhaps a woman...a woman. Why a woman somebody asks...who can know?
A woman to kiss me and lead me gently amongst the flowers
With power and meaningless detail over the corpses
Through the hollow, down into the pool where the sun is friendly and laughs.

LXIV

Do I mean what I say?
Is this music caressing me
I shall touch and feel
There
There
There
When the grey dawn has cried for the last time
When the birds breathe
And the smile is firm
And your fingers stop screaming.

LXV

Beneath the world of shadows an ocean of empty light invites
Everything is remembered and everything is felt
The emerald horses are here to reclaim my children
Will the wild princes not join me down by the smooth lake?

LXVI

I can see clearly now the forms of my brothers and sisters
The outlines of their rigid bodies, shaped in the twilight ether.
Always a ravaged ecstasy, always an impossible delight
Where is my Mother, where is my Father?
Why have they abandoned me here to be eaten by the hounds.

Give me the waters from which I might drink
Give me the winds on which I might rise
Up from the bowels of this rampant chaos
Away from the ruins of desolate lust.

The voices are washed
They do not slaughter.
But the cruel dawn nears
The savage winds of light arrive.

LXVII

The desire, the lust is not for sex-the ecstatic physical sensation, the sensuous performance, the achievement, the inclusion within the much hallowed world of romantic love- no, not for that, but for something else, for something totally other, for the Kingdom of Heaven, for the lost comfort and power of the sacred heart, for "the angels of Avalon" and "the Eastern glow", for everything immense and infinite, pure and untainted by this murky and despicable world, for that vision-there.

LXVIII

There it is, I have captured it, the evil insidious thought, brought it up into the light during one of its dark incursions into my thinking- that I am glad at the weaknesses, disappointments and disillutionments of others, since in the wake of such an imperious looking-down-upon I feel myself bolstered and raised up and shielded from all this aching meaninglessness.

LXIX

As he now was one stark duality was current- between the sensation of prodigious superabundance, of excandescent exhiliration, of loving intensely and being loved equally intensely, and the reverse sensation of being eaten, muscle from muscle, limb from limb by some vile force of concentrated malice, some degenerating lust, a will to active torment.

LXX

He wondered how long he would have to wait until he met somebody interested in the issues he was concerned with, interested with the same emphasis, from a similar perspective, a soul mate. Somebody who would not degenerate him; not necessarily suggest new ideas to him- but like a clean and purified air, like a firm and nurturing soil, provide a love filled atmosphere in which the true splendours of his inner being could emerge and flourish. The love and affection of a woman, in exactly the nature of that provided by Jessica in the previous year, was also anticipated. How he yearned for intimacy with a lady, a sacred lady, some golden jewel to support him, energise him, shield him from the putrid void; and how he longed for a man, a friend, to stand there, his companion, his beloved, to stimulate and perpetuate his lusts for the mists and fire of dawn, to laugh with, to be meaningless with, to share the unfolding of life with.

LXXI

Her presence had two effects on him- firstly it soothed and illuminated his heart, secondly it reconciled him and brought him to the life force, the source of energy, the fire of life. With her he was always filled with optimistic, aspirational feelings. He knew it was not so much Jessica he loved but what was inside her, the sap, the fruit of the vine, the essence of eternity.

LXXII

Always he needed a clean break, a fresh new beginning, a sacred yes, a first movement, winds of light to renew and forgive.

Each night when he rested his cheek on his soft linen pillow he imagined himself alive in a far distant paradise, waited upon by scores of beautiful, sacred women, in a land where the ether is material and the softness of the diamond heart sublime.

LXIII

He stumbled upon it, the Shadow, was not this the only shadow..... that here in Durham because he was living in an academic environment, and because his inner spirit no longer safely dwelt within his former, luscious, feelings of infinite freedom and possibility, but clouded itself over with, curling itself uncomfortably around, the stock repertoire of stiff, impotent memories and images of school, he was finding himself, from time to time, ungraciously hurled back into the paralysing moulds of a grey, tomb-like consciousness- never at moments of his own selection and always to his overall detriment. Surely, he reasoned, it was wise and correct to strive to wrestle free and to re-invoke energy and innocence back into his conscious life.

1990

2009-03-05T03:14:00.000-08:00

I

Mine is a fragile raft
It has no force
Thin and small
On growling waters

These people, here on my raft
Are all I have

So I inspect the river for evil and
My eyes are taken to the edge of a vision

The sun - barren with heat
The white tooth of the crocodile
Rides the mocking shores
A, all this sweat
My sweat, on my arms, across my back...is cold

As trees....I have trees
Surrounding me
The sky is alien and the air strangles
A cool breeze along my cheek

I have known the agony

This raft will divide and sink
A thousand burning memories

II

We have nothing to say, nothing to claim or assert, nothing to ridicule or chastise. There is not one thing in the universe that needs our attention. Everything sits well in perpetual proportion, imposing on itself an even, unchanging pattern that cannot be altered and cannot be denied.

Winter becomes spring, spring summer, summer autumn., autumn winter and so the wheel spins. Day and night negotiate for hours and each year accept the same compromise. The system, sleep and action, reigns sovereign over the earth. Too powerful, too inveterate for our feeble souls to alter.

We are born ignorant and as we grow our ignorance grows with us. At death’s door we understand at last that we achieve nothing, that all is the same either with or without human existence, that our lives at all’s end, amount to nothing.

III

Not working, unemployed, and yet desiring that that be so is delicately terrifying. The terror runs counter to reason. It evokes chaos.

I am not at all afraid of, and in fact try to encourage in myself, the type of bold, assertive statements which shock.

IV

Wingless eagles.

Alone we steer barren courses through dry waste. Ecstasy, brilliance and cerebral orgasms dampen the void.

You cannot argue with a flower. Still blossoming decay is our excellence.

V

Joseph: The evening lingers. It preys on our thoughts. It disturbs our souls and rouses this fear, this anguish. It says “I am the light” and “there is no light”. But mostly it is black, just black.

Emezelia: You tire me with your obscure speech. It is late; I am weary and tomorrow we must work. We must earn money so that we might live.

Joseph: You do not know how to live. I do not know how to live. But I know this, I know that we do not live, I know that at least - we have no life. You and I, my Emezelia, we are dead, as the lifeless phantoms that stalk our dreams.

Emezelia: You tire me with your obscure speech. It is late; I’m so weary. You do not care. We’ll wake the kids. We must work, we must work, we must toil so our brows and backs survive. Joseph...relax...sleep...the bed is soft.

Joseph: Such cruelty, ramming brains into frail lost beings.

VI

Where are the firmities, the elements of form, the proofs of purpose?

God is found by way of reconciliation through woman. Through love God shows us his face in the wonder of things.

VII

What happens to the mind unfilled? What happens to the bones beyond? We must embrace the burden of our reality.

I love life and I have always loved life. The evidence is the air in my lungs and the blood in my veins. I shall be long since dead if I had never loved life and it had never loved me.

People are hollow and empty; pods with five senses.
But your face is at war with its surroundings. Can’t you see the flowers and the clouds and the waters exulting eternally. You are invited to join them but your pride blinds you. It will butcher you and butcher you again until you let it go.

VIII

The outsider feels at best “half a person”, at worst a corpse and a tired corpse at that, one that longs for his grave, his bed.

A girl meets a boy and flowers of water terrorize a parched desert.

Suicide-life and light opting for death and darkness freely. And where are his Mministers?
Drinking tea and eating cakes in country vicarages. Playing croquet on sunbathed lawns.

IX

His life is a key
A door to nothing and again nothing
It holds no secrets and offers no argument
sustaining always nothing
No friends, no love, no enemies, no hate.

For there entombed in that lifeless place is found
chrysalis of corpse with ageing flesh and fiery eyes.

Unloved, unloving, unreal.
A one death does not hide.
It goes on, he rolls on, it lolls on, there
in search, with tumult
to know again and feel the still black light of death.

The world is stolen from him, the heart of light denied.

X

Imagine death and what it is saying. Consider your end; hold a picture of your “no longer” before your logical mind. Embrace the light.

To some “life” is an invention bred of aggravated suffering. A speculation, a hope, an illusion, a delusion of the imagination.

Just as the snake casts off old skin, so you will lose that shield of pretentiousness and expose the primordial reality within.

My life, our lives - steered by forces beyond life. Our direction, known from the beginning, will be revealed at the end.

XI

Light examining darkness is no basis for an investigation and understanding of our dark reality. Darkness is real and darkness must speak for darkness. To drive off darkness we must first identify it so we might know what to avoid. We must listen to the testimonies of those who suffer and are especially tortured. Then we see ourselves what should be banished.

XII

Clever moralists are not useful and can be destructive. They presume themselves to be relatively happy and accomplished, in a position, therefore, to promulgate wildly about life and how it should be lived. Unfortunately, for the millions who model their behaviour on their recommendations (often eclipsing in the process brute common sense), such moralists only address themselves to the external, observable, so called “objective” universe. They neglect and sometimes deny the existence of the internal, veiled, heartfelt, largely subjective universe that ironically is that quarter of humanity from which the problems which call morality into service in the first place actually arise.

Human brotherhood, peace, collective harmony are to be realised by pillaging and illuminating the private sufferings and private agonies of man - the tensions which originally give rise to feelings of animosity and frustration towards one’s neighbour.

Yet how is this to be done? Is this a call for a whole new science? An entirely new emphasis in art?

Since Calvary the living Christ has made us aware of the great wisdom of loving each other, and the great pleasures that accompany humility. Science and art have elevated the human mind, promoted peace over war, health over disease, order over disorder, freedom over tyranny, and secularism* over tyranny. We have redeemed our physical, societal and economic situation, though of course on all counts there are grunts of reaction.

All has, however, as it were, proceeded on the external, observable, “objective” level. Unfortunately, we have paid for this our advance in a concomitant neglect of the other subjective universe-the one everybody takes to bed with them at night. Consequently, we have promoted some extremely disgusting, pedantic, life denying codes of morality. Our sole adherence to the “objective” has had ramifications. These are clearly visible in today’s world. Everyone, if he or she bothers to think about it, will concede that flesh is soft and vulnerable and that we are fleshy, yet we have all worked very conscientiously (for such is our nature) to build up a world that is capable and on the point of destroying the Earth . These plans for mass suicide have grown because we have grown apart from ourselves and blinded ourselves to our true reality – that we are frail, animate, emotional creatures of an organic integrated ecosystem. This collective impoverishment has resulted from our over-insistence on the objective, empirical standard. This standard has come to be related to the Church in threetwo ways. Firstly, it has invaded Christian thought and rendered the vanguards of Christ’s truth distorters of our palpable, ever present corporeal reality. Secondly, it has produced cold, clinical, narrow- minded, self-certain definitions of the scope and nature of true love. It allows Christians to forget that Jesus clearly defined “love” in his own self-sacrifice. For such a love gives to those who ask and proves by demonstration the truth of its glory. Thirdly, it has led to an immanent insensitivity within the Church to human emotional, and physical reality, which has fuelled anger and opposition in clear thinking, intelligent minds. Unfortunately, these minds did not endeavour to reconcile Christ’s love with their objections but instead embraced the ridiculous religions of humanism and atheism.

I think it is important that we drop our pathetic, time consuming quibblings over what needs to be done with our sad world and, instead, that we look very deeply into our hearts and the hearts of others. We should engage and earnestly endeavour to understand the psyches of those who offend us. We should forgive people not just for their acts but for their thoughts, since their thoughts are our thoughts, as Jjung demonstrates through his elucidation of the collective mind.

XIII

The self yearns robustly for gratification and glory.
How it longs to be special in worldly eyes-
To live beyond death in the memory of a flock
To be pillaged, plundered and invaded by lifeless academics.

I lust for grand, turgid notions of "Me" to swarm and infest.
I long to flourish in an unreal, self-created land of fantastical dreams...
Being dead through life, avoiding every dawn, to condemn and approve only in abstraction, a
Nothing, a heavy mist, a nuisance, an idiot and a fool.

XIV

To be dead and alive at once
To span the divide and render it a summer cloud
Meaning little, saying less
But pointing to ineffable glory.

XV

Feb 26 – On the point of going to South America

The reality of my commitment to the three months ahead of me has focussed itself sharply in my mind. I am clutching onto a nation, a civilisation, a routine, a structure of life and thought that is all soon to pass away. I am on the verge of re-birth into new surroundings, new experiences, into a whole new landscape with different fears, different joys, different sufferings. My eyes will open. Onto what they will open is yet to be discovered. My great regret is my mental unpreparedness. I have not taken enough time to ponder what exactly I’m letting myself in for. I should have reflected earlier on the significance of events hanging over me. Too much is unreal, unbelievable, illusory. Things are really happening this time, really, really happening, but I cannot form a thought as massive and real as the truth before me.

Feb 27

I shall look back on this in twenty years and laugh – ah, the explosions of frustrated youth.

(See end of this entry for more South American writings)

.
XVI

Elijah in DJ

Thank you, Thank you
Might I, tonight, be so bold as to disturb this quiet, this peace, this equilibrium
That controls and sustains the safety of experience,
That puts me here and you there and drives off the void.
Might I entreat of you uncomfort and dread, might I remind you
Of the things you'd rather forget-
Of our horror, the restless inexplicable pains we hide
And can I and should I
Thrust hot irons into this evening air
And rub dry salt into our wounds
And will I unsettle and torment and disturb, turning all our eyes to coal
And our hearts to the dust. I think I must.
For we, my souls, my colleagues, that you are to me and I to you,
We are not alive to the light, for we decide in fear never to see.
Never let me know again the vigour of the light,
For the cloud is safe and it is mine and I am its,
Tonight on all nights perpetually dark.

All around me I see death, a hollow insubstantial travesty of life
Veins, bones, blood artificially electrified, displaying foul splendour
And I the criminal for not blazing in defiant outrage before this curse.

XVII

So, we have an opportunity to redeem ourselves.
This is hope.

The lavish radiant peace I was as a child
The luminous jewel I called myself.
I can recall the substance in flashes, in baffling paroxysms of memory,
Seizing by the bannnister, amidst the rose bushes,
On the grit path down to the lake.

XVIII

Life, the idea, the creation and the essence, the form, the cohesive substance
Struggles, abandoned and derelict beneath
Man's pathetic statutes to his own synthetic brilliance.

XIX

Gods
Ethereal denizens
We have raped the light
Endless joy of the spheres
Astral creation
An ecstasy, males and females.
Is that your mother crying in the corner?

Our life is never here, never quite here at all.
An emptiness in a something undiscovered, or at least forgotten.
And so little time, such little time.
The various agonies of mortal incarnation just short of the light.
Have you ever really cried?

Regard our standing, know what we have become.
Yet I have never conceived a child
So cannot know, never know the substance of experience
Or the object of knowledge.

Silence. Revere.
Rejoice at the scattering of the sun at dusk
The explosion of the sun at dawn.

XX

The most omnipresent feature is an invidious fog.
People are only half real.
The spellbinding resplendence of the eye seems drugged to sleep.
A vacuum, a veil stands between common experience and potency.

XXI

In joy, the lust for consummation
In langour, the concern for steadiness and control
In frustration, the insatiable, robustrious drive for life
In disappointment, the importunance of hope.

Come and remember the warm gentle rays of summer morning distress
Prodding, obtruding, rattling
The enervate brain collapsing.

XXII

I cannot speak, my thoughts are thin and lean,
My head is numb as lead,
My feet flat on dead sand
Shoulders taut in wracked agony
Proclaiming
A collapsing hollow in my skull.
Is this my birthright?
For this , this sterile dull amazement,
Are we born for this?
Or for gentle introductions to memory
Intimations of a strangled glory
A bleeding splendour, a crucified kingdom?.a

XXIII

The alien sky above is burning
We whittle the universe down to the size of our thoughts.

The imposing, uninvited suggestiveness of dawn.

These: lighted dreams that fade.

XXIV

Stumbling over, groping at fierce memories,
A windfall of private lands held in peculiar conception
The awkward recollection of faces and bodies in discussion.
Observe this, my personal labyrinth
But do not enter.
My private place within is impossible paralysis.
Life glancing horrified across
A pregnant incommunicable phantasm.

Memory is disassociated coherence- compact, vivid, terrifying.

XXV

Born to be dead in life and die never having lived.

Dream the contiguous emollience of a woman.

Feel, this collapsing hollow in my skull
Suddenly buoyed, resoldered, infused with strength.

XXVI

The mysteries of life are often solved by men and women who are too old and tired to build upon what they learn, too alien and remote to impress their knowledge upon the vigorous young.

XXVII

Life is only slightly real, only partly whole.
Much is hidden, dark, unheard.
This enormous, hideous, painfully tragic fact is one
We must die with and die with alone.
As the crippled splinters of the something we come from.

Dreams held as real, dreams that know only the reeling, teeminmg luminous whirlwind.

Not being into being-before thought, knowledge, language, certainty.

XXIX

The eyes swarm through the stars and I know only a raging elation all about me.

I am paralysed and stunned, stultified energy, flitting, pondering
The sour emptiness that is me.
This didn't have to happen- this sensory barrage
This entity formed alone and unguided.

XXX

He was drawn to people with large conceptions of life, with thorough raw perplexities, people, artists who knew the problem of life-that it is one seemingly illogical compound of contradictory and incongrous elements....joy- despair....light-darkness...hope-disillutionment...love-hate...past-future....friends-enemies.

XXXI

Life is neither fair and square nor is it easy. It throws individuals into states that come from nowhere; it as frequently invests a soul with inexplicable joy as it does with alien shades of dread. Life then might arbitrarilly, illogically, absurdly (as if it had a mind of its own) reverse these sensations ruthlessly, baffling and stupefying the subject so thoroughly that all that can be thought is how anything could be so cruel as to throw life together into such a frustratingly inconsummable arena.

Each time I truss my mind with these wires the soul cries within.

XXXII

The world surrounds us, engulfs us, ensnares us yet persists in eluding us. Only once its contents and multifarious permutations find pristine reflection in language, may we feel conjugal with the world. Only once experience is viewed and conceived through the window of language can its true marvels be plumbed and graciously acknowledged.

When we communicate we express ourselves and understand each other in this way: one person conceives a notion, he packeges it in words and sentences, passes it over to another by speech or through the written word. This person, in turn, unpacks the notion from these words and sentences. Inevitably the possibilities for distortion and misapprehension are mammouth.

Even now I am building golden memories. This moment is claimed by the enshrining habit of my future.

Ill- prepared to receive the full, immense truth, reduced, we absorb in instalments and episodes.

XXXIII

Through the love of our egos we condemn life to prolonged corruption.
A billion universes clogging, cursing, deranging
The one whole universe to which we are all innate.

Having approached too near the heart of glory
We recoil, tremulous, flushed, relieved
Mildly agitated that we allowed ourselves such a near encounter
And once again content ourselves with our own very small, very dark worlds.

Why do some minds admit prodigy, let it swarm the mind,
Whilst others remain numb to its presence?

XXXIV

Forces in the self rage and rise, imbruing desire and will.
It is these energies that the self must deaden, and deaden by following.
The ultimate effect on the individual is the creation of an unacknowledged condition of inertia and emptiness. This he terms happiness.
In reality: vacuity, a stilling, an ending of activity.

Here he stands- chasing vacuums so that he, the tired languid soul, might be spared the pains of true life.

XXXV

The capacity of the past's vivid permutations to petrify the mind and desensitize it to the present.

The horror that engulfs the soul when the immensity and ineluctable complexities of existence suddenly dawn.

To collapse, atrophied, for the love of a grain of dust or a twist of light.

XXXVI

All is linked to fear
The fear of life, its risks, of guilt, ridicule, humiliation.
But mostly the fear of a certain type of personal trauma, that of stumbling on the bewilderment and disorder in the world and of having to reconcile this, adapt it to and engage it with the personalized time-honoured ego stance.

XXXVII

Habitually, the ego strips the universe of its glory, reduces it to a manageable size, adorns it with congenial permutations (whilst decrying the residue) and controls it through a stubborn imposition of rules, standards and expectations. The ego becomes definer and master of the universe, supreme judge, leader and power.

Everyone decrees that they know and can run their life and its circuit
Such an assurance, for many, is the only thing that can stave off the abyss.

Here, our realm
Where the edges meet.

XXXVIII

On that day in may
You deranged my sombre face
Upturned the cemetery ruin of the past
Infused fresh dreams, arms stretched to wealthy peace
And you never knew that I was your first born
Your child, frenzied blind lover,
Once again in blue
My eyes bleed thirsty for you.

The sand is dry and the sun is wild
I never prayed and asked God to make me a child.

XXXIX

Mysteries:

That music moves us. Why does it do this- to where?

That children are in contact with such potent, arresting appearances of bliss?

That the natural world is exquisite, simple and compelling, while humanity is unnerving, ugly and complicated.

That we strive to understand by reducing, by cutting phenonema down into their rudiments for dispassionate analysis.

That we find it a great strain to look one another in the eyes.

That when we experience uplifting art we are distanced from our selves, that they are coshed into retreat by the compelling truth that engulfs our souls and apportions our consciousnesses. That this makes us blissful, that we desperately struggle against this marvel and feverishly clutch onto those sprawled trappings of the self which persist in defiance of joy.

That people are aware of the presence of prodigy within them yet never express it.

XL

Youth- the irrefutable unripeness and inescapable exclusion.

It is startling but a vast wealth of notions, concepts and cognitive permutations do not belong to the true reality of our world but only to that universe housing the self and its rampagings

Hatred
Fear
Anger
Loneliness
Conflict
Wealth
Competition

And all other intricacies of the stance that judges and sustains the delusion of ubiquitous separation.

XLI

We love going to the movies, yet life itself is such a presentation- one which costs us nothing, lasts indefinitely and always casts us in the leading role. Yet we still love going to the movies- to forget, to escape, to evade. Observe your own film streaming out of your eyes, the film you influence and manage- is it a good film?

The grand delusion is that one has no power, that an attempt to assume powers is a pretension. This is pure folly at its most crippling.

XLII

"I thank you for this fresh direction, this new perspective.
I pray that the feelings of well-being and purpose,
The awareness of the higher love,
And the courage to accept the responsibility for life,
I pray that each persist beyond the Okavango.
I pray that on all counts my strength does not weaken
Or fall prey to the importunate deceptiveness of my self..
May this joy last and buoy me forever,
And with this purified constitution may I live my life
In perpetual service to the divine peace."

" Let humanity turn from its resistance.
Let it recognise real life and by its presence
Unfurl the joys of living and the infinite intricacies of rapture.
Might the primal intended state of bliss engulf us."

The only truth is joy, the only peace is joy, the only point to life is to magnify that joy.

XLIII

Light, levitation, crimson irresistible lips.

The bliss is transient because I choose it to be. I decide upon its elimination because my ego is frightened of the mammouth derangement it is undergoing.

XLIV

Only when a man has looked squarely into the soul of darkness can he know anything. And all he can then know is the light. With this knowledge of darkness and of light he cannot listen to folly without becoming immediately subject to feelings of revulsion and disgust. A crippling, a freezing of hope, the struggle for joy

The bright, still and sterile heat.

My eyes attain vision. (move to earlier)

XLV

Waking alone in a tender bed of synthetic flowers
Amazed caresses across my flesh
Exploring creations delicacies
Alarmed with primordial surprise.

XLVI

I know for I have kissed the hidden suppressed splendour of your smile
So do not drop that vile mask of emptiness across your angel face.

So much and nothing
Strange intuitions of Ruddy florid bliss.

XLVII

Being frightened of one's circumstances mortifies and paralyses
He struggled within the framework of an imposed fate
He struggled to assimilate his ideals into the brute fact that he was a student again
The parameters, the permutations of his experience were now very different
They reminded him of a suffering he thought he'd escaped
They militated against the peace and security which was once so paramount.

XLVIII

It is one thing to passively consider: "life is passing me by", quite another to advance from esteeming the issue with nonchalance to grasping it with passionate despair. The transition induces stark, urgent, astringent feelings of insuffferable horror. One reviews and scans and looks upon the fact of the past with an eerie, clinical disdain that is absolutely unfamiliar. The shocking understanding that life is real and fierce and moving on, that it possesses an impersonal, unsympathetic drive of its own which will, without pity or regret, abandon one to floundering inertia. This realisation is accompanied and punctuated by feelings of nausea, humour and tragedy.

XLIX

The evening is soft upon the pillow tonight
Empowered, bright aspirations
Light the sensitive waves that swell the tender frail escape.

Absorb me wholly, make me oblivious
Exterminate this rancid fear,
Execute a deluge of loving rapture
For I love you
My life, here, in a world bred sterile
Found hollow, lived in a duty perverse.

L

What rigour, what energy, what sacrifice must I endure
To become the lily in the field I long to be?

LI

The suspicion that existence is ineluctable and uncanny
That a coherent appraisal and understanding of my identity does not exist
That little or nothing is reducible and quantifiable
That the intrinsic natural state (from which we sense ourselves freed at rare moments)
is, in truth, an inexpressibly, thoroughly unknowable occurence.

LII

The close, hugging awareness of a distant world
Like and unlike the one we know
Where radiant eyes converse and explode
And delicate emollient arms are swaying..
Where love is infinite and inexpressible, timeless,
Incredulous of proud reason's blunt and vacant teeth.
Unwilling even to register the vain gnawing of its lies.

LIII

Nov 11th 1990

It seemed a bit foolish to discontinue diary writing after such thorough efforts abroad so here I am tightening knots again. University is enjoyable, engaging, mysterious, belittling, intoxicating and depressing. I am convinced of the existence of the soul. My experience ion the Okavango was so searing I’d be a fool to refute its significance. Studying philosophy, however, my thoughts have been jilted and exposed to challenge and threat. I’ve come to see how disparate people’s minds actually are, that the universe really is private to oneself and that all we can be absolutely sure of is the presence of “exposure”. My gap year is invading me less and less now but I long for a letter from Cheryl.

Since I arrived in Durham I’ve kept myself from relationships or other engagements. Rebecca wrote me a letter in early October. I’m still besotted with her and after meeting in Manchester wrote and expressed (rather weakly I think) my affections. She hasn’t written back. My best female friend is “Jessica”. I’ve met Alexandra five or six times, popped in on Emma in Newcastle, spent a few days fancying Rosalind and, am trying to pluck up the courage to send poetry to Samantha in Collingwood. Last week I “Got off” with Clare. She fancies me but I don’t her. Very nice girl nonetheless.

I’m really trying to train myself to live in the present, in the NOW!!

I think that “Action and more action” is a code that should guide me at university

(continued at the end of this post)
.

LIV

When the ink stops flowing the notion left installed
Is that life, the collective exposure
Is perfectly malleable and lithe.
The still point about which exposure swirls is the inflouursescecence of my thinking
The only thing I know, on the sole account of which my exposure is attacked by something and not by nothing.
That I can call the universe any name I choose
This is my freedom, my power.
The occurring wealth of phenomnenma that attacks my senses
Instills awareness and fuels thought
I am convinced that things are happening before and about me.
Nothing is unfamiliar or novel-tables, colours, voices, shadows, ink
Everything I see I own.
I Know what befalls this occurrence
How it rises, falls, brightens, pales, quickens, slows, alarms
Soothes, panics and is settled.
I know my material ambit-clothes, soap, coffee, food, hills, people, sunshine.
Yes, it is mine.
I am able to feel acquainted with the occurrence
Since life, its stage, is all about me.
Life is what my being perceives.
If thought is the subject of the occurrence
Life is the object( I am nowhere to be found and yet everywhere.)

A cool hollow pain in my skull is imperceptible to those who could save me.

LV

To see infinity in the finite
Oceans in your tears
Fire in your arms
Flowers in your hair
Rivers in the air
Rip your eyes from your skull and hurl them at the stars

A desparate passion in the name of truth, Jesus Christ
To be and do un-according to habit
The attuned Christian-who would blast apart a million billion follies with one flash of the eye.

LVI

Distance me from brutal perception- sensations that drive me to the void.

Public thoughts in private minds, we know what you are thinking.

LVII

I am aware of nothing but the treading of heels and the
Banal clanging of an old iron gate.
Nothing is killing me
Nothing is hounding me
Nothing
These bones are not mine

Fear, battering, encroaching, loud and unruly
Ferocious frustration in a vacuum.

Lament, lament the unknown kingdom
Blessed is he who gives freedom luxuriant, unqualified ebullience.

Foreign emotions I have not known
Retreat, retreat behind the fortified walls, retreat
For a mighty storm is thrashing wildly towards us
A devouring maelstrom is coming.

///////////////////////////

South of American Diary (well, until early April, continued)

February 27th (continued)

I have been very foolish. It is only in a position of wealth and complacency that my life becomes unreal. My last two months in Cambridge, emotionally, mentally, financially – have been unreal. I have acted the greedy fool: vain, aloof, self-righteous in the extreme – in the last analysis, immature and naive. This “rock star” existence might well cost me dearly when I return in June – to modest bank balances and the sobering awareness that my Trust is finite.

I want to shut the door on my self-obsessed romantic past. I want to grow up.

What we need in this life are principles.

Feb 28

James saw right through me and insulted my so called “intensity”. I remember drinking rather a lot and not paying for any of it. Then I discussed global death with a nice Canadian 53 year old. She smiles and laughs too much – particularly when discussing serious issues.

March 1

When I write diaries I’m often cynical, but when I sit and think “Give me my diary” the thoughts in my head embrace life and worship its manifestations.

March 2

We shall be arriving in Peru during elections. I am hearing stories of an armed Shining Path attack on an Encounter OverlandO vehicle last autumn. Looking into a barrel of a gGun is one sure way to energise and make real a person’s appreciation of life – is sure to leave one gasping for a return, a return to this medium we call life, but if doing this is going to leave one dead, I wonder, was it worth the bother?

March 3

Head off south down the coast towards San Sebastian. I was freaked out over the beauty of “Meat is Murder” by The Smiths – luckily I had a window seat, which clarified and gave wider scope to the romantic strivings of the imagination.

Felt young and free swimming in the beautiful sea. I am finding it easier to relax but today I was put slightly ill at ease by the things I read in 1984. The world depicted is so evil and endlessly hopeless, so different to the society of this truck and my world back home, but it is conceivable nonetheless. In our world there is suffering of all shapes and sizes, affecting different people in different ways but behind it, as a compromise and an escape, there lies the possibility of thought, of personal rebellion. Not in Oceania. This is the land of despair, the most outrageous of wastelands wherein the virtues of “simplicity, goodness and truth” are consciously strangled in the hope of their ultimate elimination. Power is truth, the few over the many. Everything that aspires to beauty and joy, to celebration and ecstasy, physical or cerebral, is annihilated. The forces of darkness mirror and magnify endlessly. To accept orthodoxy is death, to rebel against it suffering and despair in death, to promote it, fury and animal lust in death. Death, heavy death, death forever, in the mind, in dreams, in the skin, in the bones beneath the dead skin, everywhere. Freedom is abstinence from sex – freedom is extinction. Anyway, back to the real world.

March 5th

We stopped at a National Park for lunch. The rock formations were gorgeous, all of irregular, thrusting shapes and sizes, the landscape a distant planet…prehistoric. Reciting “The Wasteland” on the edge of a cliff, arms raised, scanning the panorama of a green, undulating valley under blue sky blew my mind. The union of man and woman permits the mergence and harmonious clashing of humanity, holds a unity, a primordial wholeness, that evades the lives of men alone, women alone. WE are the dead. Long drive in the afternoon. Maturity is understanding, maturity is acceptance, maturity is joy, maturity is humility.

Simplicity in humanity is beautiful. Obscurity, complexity and intensity are irritants begetting ugliness, neurosis and fear. As usual I cannot say the things I would like to say. In their stead, false tracks are laid to feelings of emptiness and restlessness. Every night the universe crumbles. The morning is the wreckage, the after birth. Self-giving, sympathy, control. Peace, insanity, love.

March 6th

Today I am a cook, with Anne and Suzanna as helpers. I am not of great service, dithering, indifferent, indolent and shy – I ride on the backs of my companions’ enthusiasm. Everything happens without any feeling of encounter or engagement. Things are happening around me but only a part of me is plugged into the situation. The rest is somewhere else, lost, in the past, in my ego, in the imaginary landscapes built up in my mind.

Get drunk and mildly chauvinistic towards Suzanne, Anne and Jane. I seem to gauge some kind of strange, innocent dignity from this particular mask. Something in my head tells me that I am the manipulator, that contrary to the strain of the world I am succeeding in justifying the ways of man to women. How ridiculous is my vain folly!! Suzanne thinks I’m a “dark horse”. I don’t know what a “dark horse” is but I suppose its warm, patronising offence of some sort. Very drunk. Radar has a conviction that we are not all going to get shot in Peru. I am a little over obsessed with the idea of death. I seem to have lost swimming trunks.

March 7th

Had an interesting chat with a pissed Australian woman about the future of adolescents (as regards direction) and the problem of adult patronisation. The dulling of youth audacity and blood and the acceptance of life for what it is at its various stages, both coming with maturity, was also discussed.

March 10th

After receiving no mail from the Post office in town James informs me with friendly exasperation “What do you want letters for? All you need to do is talk to people.” He then accused me of being anti-social, which I found difficult to deny. Then, as we approached camp, I reflected on the fact that excepting social formalities and group orders or requests, I was basically being ignored. On remembering what Francis once said about the energy people can give someone simply by talking to them and recognising their existence, I felt pangs of nausea intensified by the happy memories of Outward Bound.

My bed is uncomfortable on account of sagging canvas and defective legs.

March 11th

A free day in Asuncion means a full day in the bar. A very lazy day, but welcome since it allows me some time to myself to think etc. Restaurant meal in the evening. Interesting discussion with David (the tent mate I never talk to!) about the merits and demerits of science & philosophy. I appear insecure in my decision to study my degree. Cheryl is an interesting lady. I thrust the Smiths at her and she thought they were “quite good”. Over dinner we discussed why it iswas that young men get pissed all the time. Youth Idealism was introduced by Andreas. On Radar’s last trip, a Brit called David left the truck from Quito at Santiago. He verbally abused the women, made no attempt to fit in and in every general way alienated himself from the group. The situation continued to deteriorate. By Santiago, he was throwing his possessions around the truck. The last straw came when he ripped the speakers away from the stereo and threw them out of the window. Though Radar conceded that it was his legal duty to take him to Rio, he made it plain that he didn’t want to and that he wanted him out. This guy David sounds interesting. I should have liked to have met him. The anger, the outrage, the anguish in his soul – where did it come from, what does it mean?

March 15th

Second binge of the day in the evening in downtown Germanic style steak house. Somehow I get talking to Anne about religion and get mega intense about the fuck ups and uselessness of humanity. Anne bores of the scene and retires. With prompting I walk her home. James and Jamie are not in the hotel room. I go to sleep with the light on, expecting to be woken shortly. Two hours later I am disturbed by the phone. A moment later there is a firm knocking at the door. I open the door to Jamie, who strides in with Etonian air pervading. The pair had gone to the tango. James is jubilant because he got friendly with a Brazilian and has arranged to meet her the following day. He looks forward to a bit of steamy sex.

March 16th

James is up early. He showers and borrows Jamie’s best trousers. He has arranged to meet “the girl” (who is apparently very good looking) at ten o’clock by the pyramidal needle. Jamie and I go with him, promising to keep our distance. On the way we have a coffee at a very tarty café, meet some Brits and buy a red rose. By 10.30, the girl has not materialised. Chuckling to myself quietly I leave James to compose an innocent explanation. The truth of the situation was, however, that James had gone to the wrong pyramid and might even have mis-timed his appearance by twelve hours. I wander back alone, getting ridiculously lost on the way.

Evening meal in the airport restaurant. Hollow out a bit and am forced to discipline and suppress the temptation to spout venomous, cynical vibes of intensity. Crash out at hotel, once again without the two James. Two to three hours later my eyes open to the sight of James clambering (laughing/shouting as he does) through the small flap above the door. He jumps down, lets Jamie in and they both run over to me and start laying in (HA). . For the last 15 minutes the phone had been ringing and they had been banging mercilessly on the door, hollering breathless to no avail. When I’d appreciated what I’d done, I was seized by hysterical laughter (which was not tactful). I went to bed feeling sorry and a bit fucked up.

March 21st

Tonight wine, G & T and beer mixed up with bravado and a dose of elan make for one fucked up teenager. Dancing in the cook tent is a highlight of the evening. Monica is shocked. After I’d retired and whilst Radar was rolling around in the fire, this Swiss girl confronted Jane: “God, John drinks so much alcohol and he’s only eighteen.” To this Jane replied, “he drinks so much because he’s eighteen.”

March 22nd

Today takes us to the coastal resort of Villa Del Mar. We walk along the beach, and have lunch, before heading off to the centre. The fact that we’d actually now crossed the continent seemed to impress nobody, myself included. I walk along the sand with a stick and carve numbers and messages in the sand: my initials, my age and year of birth, age of father, prophesied age of death (131). Very simple and innocent, and very nice since Sue and Myoko appear intrigued.
.
March 24th

In the evening Susanna, Anne, Anna, James, Jamie and myself have a Chinese meal in a cheap, but very good restaurant. The rest go to an expensive Italian. As is boringly predictable, we, after the conviviality and excesses of last night, had chosen to contrast with, as Anna might put it, a “nice, quiet, civilised meal.” This we had -, a resoundingd non-event, stifled by the lust for the affected conformism of well balanced etiquette and the equally potent preference for inertia, for the unchallenging, the undemanding, for the cosmically irrelevant. All this, and how long have we got? – 70 years we are told. Nobody obsessed with the urgency of life can prevent feelings of horror and despair from boiling inside. Yet what did I have to offer, what could I say or do? Nothing. The reaction tonight, as had been many a time in the past, was defiance, passionate defiance. Especially, I refused to eat with chopsticks. A knife and fork seemed to be superior to chopsticks (in fact they bloody well are). Still, it was the principle. Food good.

March 25

Lie in a park listening to the “Queen is dead” and reading Dostoevsky (Dostoevsky gets on Sue’s nerves). “Letters from the Underworld” is excellent and original). Perverse suffering. So much of it, so dementing, so dangerous. I buy a cheap steel Inca necklace (2/3 dollar) because it is something to do. Tonight sees a return to the same Chinese restaurant. Again, the food is good. I am overwhelmed by the peace that perceives everything in a beautiful, brilliant light. And the feeling of substance – the form and foundation, the intuition of coherence and meaning. Words, movement, even thought is extraneous. Joy – simple, innocent, perfect, and nobody to share it with. All we can do is talk gently and quietly to each other, and think, always think before speech. Words in this world are all we have. Be diligent, be prudent.

March 26th

Truck suffers from food poisoning. David is ill so I put up the tent solo before cooking, which he appreciates. Walk onto beach and look at stars with Cheryl and Sue. Not romantic or memorable, but the stars are magnificent.

March 27th

Read Krelza. Taste and harmony as the basis of all morality. On into Atacama desert. Dry, hot, dusty, in fact everything you might expect of a desert. Camp off the road. Irritated when “The Beautiful South” is shouted down. I was cook, after all, and didn’t attempt to aggravate their ears with The Smiths.

March 28th

Long drive through the desert to an exceptionally attractive campsite – spurs, rolling undulations and marvellous evening and morning skies.

April 1st

Feel queasy and dry in the mouth and brain. We all walk through the Valley of the Moon and are picked up at the other end. I can appreciate how hard it must be to survive for days on one’s own in desert conditions. Firstly, there are the weather conditions – bright, dry, still and sterile heat. Then the endless, unchanging expanses of sand and rock does little for the morale, instilling symptoms of mental neurosis and fatigue. Who you are and where you are and what you are doing and what for are certainties put in question by the enormity and alien features of the surroundings. The corrosion and weakening of one’s hold on reality and reason is intensified by the cold, brute fact of solitude. With no companion or friend with which to share these negative feelings, the real possibility arises that the basic and essential principles of life – that life holds hope and future, that it is a noble and admirable and virtuous a thing to be strong and defiant in the face of adversity, and that thought and memory and action and desire are significant and somehow and to someone important, and moreover and especially that we are duty bound always to strive towards the good and put an absolute and unfaltering trust in the order and inevitable progress of things – in short, that this and that will be alright, will hold fast, will find a foothold, devise itself a meaning and context and rise above, defusing and casting out as it does, all the miasma’s, the chaos and storms of human experience; all these principles could, in the desert, so easily crumble away and lose all fecundity, all vividness and substance. The meaninglessness, the void rises and subsumes and nothing is left to the individual but collapse. Strength and force of character is not an issue. Everyone has their “Marabar”.

April 2nd

Head off to the Chicuquamata copper mine – the largest open cast copper mine of its type in the world. Just a very big, sand coloured hole with layers cut into the side to enable the enormous Sstar Wwars looking trucks to descend and ascend.. best bit is when we clamber over and climb into some enormous tyres.

On the way down from the mine I tell James that I “excel in adversity.” I should have sobered it down to “I perform best in adversity.” Anyway he doubted this (and he has so much to go on, too!) and he proceeds to talk about himself, his strengths and ambitions, and of how with correct and thorough mind application anything can be achieved – one can even become an Encounter Overland driver! And all the while, the tone of his voice indicated that he presumed I thought differently, and that he thought he was doing me a favour. Oh well, who cares. James is a good bloke at heart. God knows he and Jamie have enough to whine on at me about, though. He’s intelligent, young, blind (like me) and likes to lose himself in verbal activity and laughter. On this last point I’m envious but he does intrude and annoy the peace and silence sometimes. Jamie’s the same, but I think he has greater mental agility and has an alarmingly perceptive and discerning mind.

April 5th

Heading off to the high altitude mining town of Potosi (4,000m). Noticeable feature is when we walk through canyon at lunchtime and it rains. Roads are primitive and dusty in Bolivia and the people peculiar, colourful, Indian and small. Camp at hot Springs. We are immediately swamped by Bolivian school girls who make this trip to the springs twice a year and on this occasion, unlike any before, had something more bizarre to report than the luxurious (and green) heat of the water. Autographs given out by James, David, Albert, Myoko and myself. Girls are particularly taken by Myoko and Anne. Some fruit and vegetables are stolen, but otherwise nothing suffered. Midnight swim. Albert thinks I am Cheryl’s “boyfriend.”

April 6th

Share a room with Albert in the Hostel Carlos. Feel thoroughly pissed off and empty- nervous and paranoid. Meal with Albert at restaurant across from street. Talk very little, but his silence puts me at ease

The afternoon trip to one of the many co-operative mines on the Cerro Rico hill is quite brilliant, by far and away the highlight of the trip to date. All the petty and trivial sophistications that are common to human interaction and integration whenever life is comfortable, easy and predictable fell away when we began crawling through these dark, choking, hellish corridors and came face to face with the small, crippled human animals that scrape their existence from the solid asbestos ridden rock with foot long picks and iron limbs. They pray to the devil for minerals and luck and live and work all day off the oblivion of the Coco leaf. My life and the lives of every one with whom I associate has absolutely nothing to do, and nothing to share, with the experiences of these men. Working three hundred days a year, earning sometimes as little as $45 a fortnight, with a pittance for job security and a pension scheme directly related to the amount of silicosis in the lungs of retired miners. Few live over 45 years and most begin work illegally in their teens.
Most significantly, to the living, suffering, consciousnesses of these miners, all the subjective drivellings and inflated laments at one’s emotional and sexual privations that are a feature of western life, must seems as nothing but a rude insult, an outrageous kick in the teeth to these men who strive only each day to come closer to our paradise. Our sufferings and our lives, our encounters and immersions are dilute and fickle compared to this. So ungrateful – so devoid of joy and celebration, insight, rapture and fulfilment. Nobody can expect these men to understand why the rich complain and remain invariably unhappy.. I love these bulldozers, who have not yet lost touch with the earth and with nature and hang on to the correct and righteous function of man – to act as an intermediary between the soil and the rock, the fibre of the earth and the magnificent creations and monuments that arise from it, standing firm and strong in testimony to human dignity.
Regardless of their nobility and strength, it is not a condition I envy for I am not accustomed to it – the very real tragedy and pain and physical wretchedness they endure would be insufferable to a tender, unbattered piece of meat like myself. They also have no conception of a life without toil and cannot hope to appreciate the huge variety of experience and activity that is available to us on earth. They are not inferior; unlucky, devoid of opportunity, loveable but enslaved; virtuous but unable to project their power and worth outside and away from themselves – to be wholly human. Give them money and cars and “conversation” and health and education and longevity and they will become (sterile) just like us. No synthesis possible. Pity really. For the individual maybe. Krezla is a genius; his mind is full of high explosives and power.

Durham diary (continued)

November 16th

My mind is foggy. I think I’m gradually becoming a Christian. I’m aware of the acquiescence that is gradually pervading my character. It was weird to listen to Steve Wright- as though I’d ruptured or been punctured. I have an urge to explode. Never has my life been so multifaceted, curious, bewitching, ineffable. Yet I’m caught up and involved. Alexa insinuated that I should forget about Cheryl – perhaps I should. Keats – oh for a life of sensation and not of thought.

People see me, my face is very calm, but they infer that I’m depressed.

I’m thinking that my leather jacket is a symbol of, a projection of guilt, fear, anger – that it comforts my despairing aspect.

What is needed is a stimulus, a raw, very forceful, pulse to galvanise the audience. A Strident blast. What I’m after is a presentation of impossible suffering on the one level, on the other a depiction of otherworldly, yet intuitively inferable, associations between things and the realm of joy. The failure to live, the unlived life, the ineffable fog, joy, jubilance – habitual themes.

18th November

Work is not as cool as it might be, though it is not “bothering” me. The Course in Miracles. “The Sspecial ones” are all asleep

I am living in the past less than I used to. Nightly conversations persist with Oliver.

Borrowed “The Tragic sense of Life” by Unanumo. From the central library. Am I meditating on life when I could be living it?

The house move psychologically disturbed me.

19th November

Alex Linklater accused me of living in Platonic otherworlds.

I’m still lusting after life and terrified of dying but fairly serene, nonetheless.

20th November

Tim is an exceptional person. In behaviour he is rambunctious, assured, brazen, invariably obnoxious. Once known, however, he is caring, helpful and positive. His outlook on life is cogent and disarming. Egocentric-; me and the world, get on, climb the ladder, make something of your life. He doesn’t respect me. He thinks I will waste my life and needs a kick up the arse. He urged me to state what I’ll leave behind at the end of my life. Tim is convinced he will build a business empire, that his name will be immortal. He genuinely believes women are inferior and enjoys “frightening” me. The galvanisation that runs throughout Tim’s words is good. I am stirring, I think, from slumber. I only wish he’d respect me. Perhaps he does, he must, or does he use me – YES!! Will I become a Nietzschean brute and ascend to worldly peaks. There is a side to my nature that wills this. He said I’d die leaving behind a trail of smiling faces and nothing more. I will be faced as an old man with the realisation that life had passed me by. I perceive alike already. Thank you Tim – what you say “moves”, it is creative, energetic. You were rude, however.

Energy, energy, damn you Tim, damn you and your blasted mind. He instils in me the belief that I must prove myself to be like him, that I must mirror his stance. But yes, life is passing me by. It bloody well is. Present, now, now, do it now, now, now.

22nd November

Thatcher resigns. I estimate 400 million times the number of times “Thatcher” has been said in Britain today. Pissed and tired. Life is an event in which we are involved. The mystery will at some time be unravelled.

I love you and your whole body and everyone you touch, physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally. Alexandra has split up with Nick.

If I’m learning a lesson it is to glory and revel in the present moment, for such is all that truly exists. The power and capacity for projection is a powerful one. An idea for a play is growing. It will depict the polarity between one man who hates life and a woman who loves it. I’m considering devoting my life to spiritual research and ecological protection.

True, pristine, unsullied consciousness is the occasion when the mind believes “I AM” without an object. The ego is unfathomably destructive. When it is a presence in the mind, creation is warped, bludgeoned and corrupted, shrunk down to fit a mould invented for it out of fear. When it is dissolved away creation dances as a union and in the minutest components of infinity and eternity isare embraced.

I actually feel entirely alive. I haven’t felt like this for a long, long time.

29th November

I suspect, perhaps, that Jessica fancies me but I don’t know.
I am conceiving the idea of a play of short acts that externalise and embody in characterisation on stage the components of the self – ego, soul, spirit, truth.

1989

2009-02-16T08:12:00.000-08:00

I

Dear Adam*,

You refer to our standing at the brink of life, with the key unused in our inhibited palm – too true. And who will thank us, who listen, who care, who understand when aged sixty or whatever we consider the lost opportunities, when we contemplate the immense harm our passivity has wrought.

“The strength of a nation lies in its youth.”

As I see things it’s a question of spirit. Unfettered by the hassles of life: illness, conventions, duty, family, age, personal inhibitions, systematatised employment, selfishness, and lack of honesty and frankness, the human spirit would climb to unbelievable heights, creating actualisations of our most potent visions of utopia. For would you agree, can you imagine the impossible?

Given what we’ve got, and within our assets’ scope, we can create the perfect world for a perfect living. A human’s desires are simple: Food, shelter, drink, love and fraternity, stimulation of personal interests (reading, sport, whatever).

Everyone would do the job they were best at and this would be what they wanted to do. All would ensure that other people found the perfect post. None would be alone.

Mysteriousness, darkness, morbidity, selfishness, anxiety would vanish since discussion would be radically open.

Nobody would harbour secrets, yet privacy would be retained and purified. All would recognise that life is “shared”. Nothing would stand to cause dread in the hearts of men.

There would be no hunger since people would appreciate the gorgeous nourishment and authentic satisfaction derived from sustaining others.

People would realise that when your neighbour suffers, you suffer, since existence is a shared phenomenon.

Individuality would flourish, since nobody would have to be anything other than what they are. The diversity that would grow would be authentic and therefore spectacular.

Such a world, the real object of our hearts desire, would reflect and embody our innate potentialities. This is the world that haunts me.

We consider ourselves “individuals”, not part of the whole. We don’t care about those many whose love has not invaded our hearts (in fact, for convenience sake, we’d quite like to abolish love and replace it with “mutual respect”). We hate those we don’t understand (they disturb the placidity of our ego’s). We claim as much of the world for our own as we possibly can. We scoff at profundity and debase life. We are small minded and hopelessly self-conscious.

You think you’re sick. I know I’m mad but in ways one has to be.

Why do we remain cluttered old wrecks begging the eternal footman to strike us down a little sooner and spare us this pain?

II

I stand adrift from reality. I do not stop to dwell. Hanging on through people blooming with life in a time of year that affirms the wonder of creation. Yet I rot with angst and tremble with dread over a “failure” that would write off any such claim I have done, do or might proffer for my vindication. I can’t fall…I can’t..so I work and I work, I waste the dawn and neglect the smiling beauty that teases me. Liberation, the spreading of wings, a summer meadow, sweet, luxurious liquid air inflates my spirit. But what shall I do now the sun has risen? The days march forth, the potency lingers, yet it fails, it dwindles and normality irritates my high aspirations for a life of liberated spirit, youth, peace and joy.

An existential consciousness was aroused. I became through her words and in her flat, an entity beyond thought, something real.

III

The choices of life are simple and clear:

I choose to affirm life
I choose to negate life.

Don’t talk of justice, fairness, equality
The weight of matter twists our ideals.

Don’t think you know that which you don’t
The colour of this painted world is grey.

Just think of light on a black surface
Lighter than white, brighter than the sun.

The infinite soul is joyful
Our freedom so real and forgotten

Every day our minds walk the corridors of heaven
The thick, incandescent blood of our crucified Lord
alightens our perception and opens our door.

IV

To understand modernity one must appreciate that everything is upside down and back to front.

Why is the past re-enacted, the spoken folly re-said
The sin repeated, the truth unheld. Why does nothing change?

I do not feel poetic today…I want to expand and aspire…I am frustrated…and if I kick…I shall cut my leg on this bed, this blue bed.

It is we, not nature, not God, not fate

Our sufferings as a species springs directly from the hopelessly redundant, and shockingly incorrect belief, common these days that there is not a life after this one, that this realm is not merely a transient springboard into the life hereafter.

Cerebral Nobility. Thought is universe. The ardour of light.

The noumenon is my fascination; the thing, the preoccupation, the entity…. life in- itself.

V

I am young, I am alone, I am vain, I am tortured. Life is empty of meaning, sterile, parched, incoherent, unfulfilling, desperate, frustrating, bankrupt and boring; tiresome, essentially futile. This situation is an outrage. For individuals at specific occasions salvation descends in the form of love. It is seldom earnt and strikes arbitrarily. Just as it appears, as it were, out of the blue, so it disappears again without warning, tending no explanation. The suffering laid on the individual is horrendous and violent.

The inner void and swelling feelings of resignation characteristic of the outsider. The outsider- he, she, beyond, barred on the outside from the circle of intimate, sexual love. His anguish is so overpowering that ideas of death, violence and chaos flourish and dictate physical action. The deep personal awareness that within the human race enormous emotional injustices bar a certain specimen (and who knows who that specimen is, or why that specimen is) from sharing and delighting in the very real potency flaunted by physically engaged lovers, compels intense anger, intense outrage, intense bitterness, intense jealousy, (often finding expression through a hatred of humanity and the world), though, in the last analysis, intense longing for this as yet unlived life.

What is at the root of this frustration? Does the outsider torture himself in this way merely because he “wants” something for himself? It may appear so. Does he, therefore, view the “life” radiated by lovers in the same light as any other, more material, less animate object of desire?

Is the will to love similar or the same as the will to succeed in business, or to obtain a Golf G.T.I. or to purchase greater and greater stockpiless of clothing, tapes and modern conveniences? Would the acquisition of love, when attained, be contemplated with the same feelings of cool satisfaction and pride as applyies when further material mansions are added to the stockpilestockpiles? DoesIs love, in the last analysis, in so far as it consists of an entity to desire, deserveing of to being categorized alongside all other desired entities, as just one other? with other entities under a universal, all composite heading, desired?

Of course not. The will to love is the will to know God. The need, real and total need to experience totality- in- being. The will to love is dynamic, combustious, and equally present in all. Desiring love is desiring wholeness. When love is denied, (on account most probably of some aspect of socially reared and radiated pride) wholeness is denied - and man flounders in the rocky crags of particularism. He rebels and feels abandoned. In jealousy and envy, fostering pride, he learns how to hate. This is our agony, our burden. We must share the burden of our reality. How can man love? By loving wholeness. Everybody, not somebody, everything good, not something good.

The love of love raises, it heals and glorifies. The love of power debases, tortures and destroys.

The love of power is the love of the serpent, the devil who deceives us all.

VI

Amidst the endless deluge of humanity, fragments exist which clutch. I am myself, but I am also you, all of you, and you are me and each of you each other. I am the small clerk, the high executive, the vagrant lost under the tide, the miner, the murderer, the headmaster, the bizarre, the inexplicable, the obvious, the wonderful and the weak. I am the Queen, I am the tyrant and the saint. They are me and I am you, all of you, and we are each other. We are ourselves and you are me and I am us. Only in perception is the truth upturned.

VII

Inadequacies of expression quell minds desperate for outrage.

A place wide with people. Surfeit of will in deficiency of knowledge, prompting vanity and blind stubborn optimism in air exhausted of meaning. Nothing coheres. Sight. Taste. Smell. Touch. Sound. Patronising sense-no closer to insight. No rapture, no joy, no fulfillment, no faith, but, perhaps worst of all... no anger, or if anger, anger at the wrong things.

If we do not watch out- young pretty English girls burning in Auschwitz.

VIII

Letter to Rebecca

Essence: narrative expounding and detailing intense emotion. Uninfluenced by objective rationalism, freed offrom pretentious glorification. Love as it relates to longing, to transcendence, to metaphysics, to meaning. Love as it attacks the condition of the individual and opens doors to horizons otherwise undetected.

Aims: to smash, dessicate and destroy all and everything that clutters up and distorts correct appreciation of the eternal- now. To purge the passages to the heart - of death. To annihilate them.

Nature: monologue, in the form of a letter which by its very nature could never be sent.

Scope: as far and as wide as possible.

Motivation: Aan awareness of the agony. Frustration at the sight of life’s unnecessary impotence.

IX

Life is glorious, uplifting light. Splendour like a thousand stars bursting, like ecstasy out of control.

The tragedy is real. Only the individual can rectify the crime.

X

My thoughts are crazed. They race and each day is different. A Christian? A Smiths freak? A power hungry yuppie? A country tree planter? A hippie?

I see great things in the mundane and nothing in the important. The greatest security is death.
My life is so irrelevant and yet I am moved, selfishly I suppose, to write all this nonsense. The 1990’s - can anybodybody bear the weight?

Ecstasia. Life, substance and joy. The Fall approaches.
Our ends entice, demanding attention. Stay with me awhile.

We, you, me and him, are the embodiment of a whimsical gift. Jim Morrison is in contact with an extraordinary beauty.

Morrison and Eliot are colleagues. They pursue the same theme, the galvanisation of human existence, from opposing ends of a convergent spectrum.

XI

I should love so much to sit here all day and each hour be visited by wonderful people and moments from my past. Beams of light and utter marvel. Reproductive ecstasy.

Scan the horizon for light and move towards it. Scan the horizon for darkness and illuminate.

If my life improves nothing and builds nothing. If it helps nobody and is devoid of significance and implies a void....

Maybe we’ll never accept as fact the miraculous fact of our existence.

There I am, sitting still, ordinary, on a stool in a coffee bar. Distal, vacant, listless. I have made a habit of gazing into my dull eyes. Life, as usual, is flat, bland and sterile. Then he comes to me.

XII

Am I evading and neglecting my anger? Will it explode out of me with terrific force? Do you suppose the splendour of the universe is built upon an assurance of the ego? Do you feel tiny and expendable, by any chance? Yes, I know. B, beauty makes it easier for the soul.

People live in hell all the time. Here, there, where you least expect to find them, hellish apparitions surround us. In the underground, at the dinner party, in the office, on the television, in the restaurant, under the bridge, between the oaks, in the courtroom, in the university.

Heaven is real and the light radiant.

XIII

The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock

What is Eliot after in this poem? What answers to what questions does he assert? What is his hope? From where and from what derives his central idea? For what does he yearn so inconsummabblly? Can anything as delicate and precipitious as this be endured? What is the agony, the humble destruction, the defeated terror and exhaustion, the cosmic confusion, the angst, the intense yet torturously suppressed love that this man has for life? AlthThough sexual in image and insinuation, the poem is principally spiritual drama.

XIV

To suffer is to live....until the dawning of his Kingdom.

Here I am writing all this self-centred nonsense when millions starve to death and thousands are homeless.

I am alone. The forces of the universe are pitted against me. I want to love. I am the same as everybody else. I cannot escape the riddle.

Love-to intensify the moment. Constant experimentation until the end of time. At the risk of shock, of alienation.

Women clutch onto things to stay sane, men their pride.

Is there a secret buried inside, or is this all I am? I am ready to die in South America. Yet my ambition? To say the un-sayable, to achieve the impossible, to obtain the unobtainable.

I cannot believe I have endured 18 years to arrive at this state. I exist and the world, despite its confusion, its shortcomings and its shadows, is a wonderful place after all.

XV

The sensitive mind, in adversity, responds to pain with either intensity and a certain nobility of reserve or with moaning and complaint. The mind of Morrissey does both.

Morrissey is firmly absorbed in his ego yet for some strange and surely frightening reason he is in touch with a power that is wholly spirit.

A mythic, primordial, beautiful spring of intimate communing, like espionage, a surreptitious invasion. Noticed by those, whoever.

I perceive life as an uphill struggle though I know it is easy and straightforward.

The Smiths are healthy because they mercilessly thrust the true everyday postures of darkness in front of our eyes, for our faith and love to appreciate, absorb, understand, lament and finally surmount. In the process we grow and how massive we become. How great is our humility.

Morrissey, I admit, can seem an idiot but how idiotic is our world and how perfect is he a précis of it.

What is music but a whip? To goad and punish, invigorate and torture.

God, the irresistible force. Irresistible and yet I resist.

It is invigorating to conceive of the Smiths as an utterly positive group of musicians.

XVI

What can I write? I know very little but I know about time and about life and about waste. The enemy is difficult to name. It is satisfaction, indifference, fear and apathy. Yet it is more than and none of these.

The condition of 1989 is my condition. That is my fate, our fate, the fate. The span of consciousness is seventy years, and eighteen of those have vanished. What is eighteen was eleven, was six and what is eighteen will be twenty eight and forty two, is twenty eight and forty two. I see a pattern. The thread is of a similar line and length but alters its dimensions in time from person to person. The intensity innate to that thread is focused toward the end of life in exceptional instances and more commonly on the point of or after death. This is the problem. The intensity should be focused now, for everyone now.

What can one do but be honest? It gets you to heaven certainly. Honesty, sincerity and truth. Not romanticised ideals but real means to an actual end. They are ageless values, as sturdy and unshakeable as the hills.

He who can see the world for what it is, who eats its food for what it is, who enjoys its fruits for what they are, and not for what they might pretend to be, is he who may be honest to himself and to others. He is the way.

XVII

People smile and laugh all about me. They enjoy the moment, talking of particular matters, present ambitions and past regrets. For these life does not hang delicately, tauntingly. For them it is pleasant, it is now and there is nothing more to say.

I’m interested in fantasy worlds, aspiring castles, violet skies, vast plains, creatures.

There is life and there is society, the earth and the world. Largely irreconcilable.

I have been excised from my friends and projected into a bizarre land of dreams. Abstract speculations, monetary ambition, creativity-nothing is of greater value than friendship. Friends put a damper on the will.

The days march on, issueless.

Live for the present and project it into the future. Collaborate with the past but keep it at a distance. Do not live to invent in your life a proud past, for the proud past is but wind and air.

The search for meaning is man’s only noble passion- all others constitute a superfluous waste of space.

I want to illuminate the souls of man, to show my fellow men what they really are-to expose the truth.

I have never met anyone like me in my entire life. Never once have I looked into someone’s eyes and seen myself. I am very strange, different from everybody else.

XVIII

Things fade, change and merge into something else. Words dry up and rot, music must take over. All is real. Evil, fear, hatred, suffering. The whole experience of humanity is groaning and all has happened. We are dying, we are vain and misled. We are as dogs in a cage.

Tragically, to become happy, man must yearn for something beyond his reach.

From all his years of thought and action man has learnt one thing: to love, cherish and guard the things in life that do not belong to him, and to neglect and depreciate the things that do.
I would not be surprised if, at the moment of my death, my only visualisations were of the grace and magnificence of young women, my thoughts those of outrage and disgust, at my life-its ignorance, its depravity and its waste. The unclenched reality.

XIX

Hanging from a knife edge, life falls into its components, transfixing its subject. Suddenly everything is clear, vivid, potent and translucent. The cobwebs, the veils, the pedantic distractions, the vanity - the consuming vanity; everything that stands to distort tour de force awareness of being is annihilated. The universe is shocked into simplicity as the subject is blasted with the consequences of his condition. For he is alive, but how near he has come to death? How precious is this thing called life, this being pulsed by air, enlivened by blood. He is perhaps able for the moment, if the universe condescends, to know it all, to know it all, to taste the other realm, that sphere towards which all questions, tribulations and sufferings aspire. For a second he is the truth. Yet it cannot last. Either swallowed up by death to return to dusty origins, or lost again in the oblivion of mortal clay, his theistic experience passes and is forgotten.

When I’m asleep the world feels nice. I’m lonely, but so are you.

XX

Humility, love, grace, humility, love, grace-unfolding, eternal repetition. Every man, woman and child awakens every morning to wash, to clean, to work, is trapped in an unbreakable love contract with life. Our prisoner is our own unknown, the beyond conscious impulse to activity, both mental and physical.

I want to undergo the worst of human suffering, to experience the numbness of horror, so my eyes on return be reverted from the darkness back to the eternal light.

I wish a thousand dawns into every moment.

XXI

This moment is sad due to the persisting difficulties of the writer in enduring existence in its layered bafflement and twisting dread, its cunningly suppressed energy and joy, its betrayal of memory. People mean so much. I love them all. The impossibilities of judgement. The inadequacy of relative analysis as a way to conclusion. These people are more a part of me than are parts of myself. I have lived for and through them more than can be understood.

Is it sentimentality or a grasping onto life?

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Notes

* Adam Lidster, my friend, the only person with whom I discussed my ideas. Or at least the only person who seemed to listen. This extract taken from a letter to him.

All theses writings (which are only a selection) were written in the latter half of 1989 from the time just before the end of my A-levels, during the first half of my ‘Gap year’. During this time, in the ‘real world’ of events and actions, as opposed to that of my mind and imagination, things were pretty good. We had not yet moved from Barton Road in Cambridge and I spent the early summer going to various dinner parties with school friends, usually in the Tin Machine (see earlier post); then I went walking in the Lake District for three weeks before spending time working in a pub (the Granta in Cambridge) and for the Cambridge Evening News, before going to Israel with friends to visit a friend who was working there in a hospital.

The divisions I’ve made in Roman numerals is pretty arbitrary, though I was following a kind of ill-defined logic of coherence as I edited. The point is two-fold. Firstly, that what I wrote in 1989 was written as it was written, in bursts and starts, according to no plan or conscious structure. Secondly, that it now seems easier on the eye and brain, to me at least, if it can be broken up into segments retrospectively. No doubt I have moved certain utterances around from their original configuration, and while I have tried to maintain chronological integrity, no doubt this has faltered. I have also left out quite a lot, usually that which I deemed just too cringe-worthy.

1988

2008-06-15T04:25:00.000-07:00

The winds of change howl
Tired trappings of decay flitter away
Hope, armed with strength, riding the horse of courage
Storm me down
Carry me forth.

The greatest tragedy is that we seldom write about the matters of the highest importance. Our minds abound with thoughts supreme in significance, yet writing, even talking, usurps and perverts our solitude, denying the public and our conscious, active selves access to innate truths.

Solitude is the answer to death. Under its yoke all times become one, the eternal is glimpsed, life transcends death and death itself is humbled.

Christ’s life, his work and teachings constitute a solid brick wall, standing firm and resolute against the assaults of fallible, emotionally subservient, human reason. His words are timeless enough to demand expression by silence or, second best, music. The rational dialectic, stifling vocabulary and complex meanderings of the "thinker" fail, having set off on a journey into the unknown.