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.
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.
