Instincts towards the Round

Common sense and experience should tell us that we grow outwards, from a darkness that is both collective and individual, a darkness that is not a void, but already patterned by the shift of ages, eras and aeons, cosmically and infinitesimally altered each limitless second. We come into this light armed with a plethora of instinctual truths that we can barely struggle to contain within our brief conscious span. At the same time we are battered increasingly by expressions, assaults and implications of the not-me that the hurling world indiscriminately surprises us by.

Out of these interminable collisions, we strive to create an emblemic set of cards, a box of myths that we can pertinently live our lives by. We come from a clashing point of a seed and an egg, both already seeped in their own complex origins ( a penetration of the collective by the individual) and, try and wish as we may to break clear of those two effects within us, we are incapable of ditching them, whatever the momentous consequences of that union.

The world we meet though (at its rawest) is indifferent to that conjunction and insistently inflicts upon us its own state, battered by both the rushed dramas of space, and the weird fashions of human history. We are conceived from a seed into an egg; we are born as another seed into the world's egg, and spend our lives struggling to survive, struggling to fertilise the planet with our own unique vision, to the furtherance of an intended wiser and wiser condition. Every conceived child has that innate drive; but at all stages the living impetus is a wasteful one. The human tragedy is immeasurable.

Yet not a living presence on this earth does not sense the delectable tantalising harmonies that a single breath cannot fail to invoke. The mess of existence, which is never more than a scratch above obscenity, tempts us, torments us to partake of its dreamed perfections, to draw into our tangible reach its ineffable proportions.

We are our egg, host to our seed; we come into the world in search of our most fitting house. All we do "alive" is a search towards that house, through which our innate rhythms seek outward form in an architecture of our own designing. The myths we live by tell of that journey, if the indifferent cruelties we bump into, or bump into us, allow us that ounce of breath. We are doomed to fail, however long we live: that is not the criterion. In the wasteful nature of survival, where "the fittest" is not a consideration, "luck" not "faith" has the most say. Geniuses are murdered daily in their hundreds. It is simply that being here until we are not, we are the consequences of the myths we follow, or others dictate we should follow; in turn we are all material for myths that those after us absorb into their own stories for living. On such a vast ocean, fact, which, in the scale of things, lasts no longer than its saying, is a kind of jetsam or flotsam.


Age is shaped by its myths; it creates an architecture to reflect them, and to impose its shape upon the discourse that grows out of them. Within that discourse, "facts" that suit the fashions the discourse unleashes express the mores of the day and the limits to its intellectual curiosity. Briefly the day's facts are true. Step back from them, though; see the contradictory facts before and after, that, in their own terms, were and will be also true - and a need cannot afford not to be present that absorbs them into another personal reality, and that reality too, with contradictions all around at its own level, needs its own underlying pattern. Deeper the game goes, and there is no bottom! In this maelstrom, what can possibly hold us together?

Nothing logistic; but a sense of poetry, and an awareness of pattern. In this personal outfolding, infolding, we learn that we are congenitally both separate and conjoined. We may strive to make our own architecture, but the architecture is there before us: it is the maker, controller, facilitator, limiter, encourager of all we do, however uniquely we do it. The architecture too is not sacrosanct. The pressures upon it, from its progenitors, as well as its progeny, from the historical scheme it is a part of, to the future it is aching to shape, will do for it in the end. A new architecture will follow from, or arise to deny it. Each minute living form carries that threat (or promise) upon its back.

In the twenty-first century (as the fashion is, in this part of the globe) we live at the immense moment of a change of architecture. We can pretend that we can go on living in the house that no longer is, but the habits that living has demanded have little more breathing space. The foundations have long ago shaken and admitted to being reshaped. The roots of the house of spirit have rotted, and a new spirit, slower than any cosmic snail, is dragging its own convictions into place. The abyss they may tumble into is all too real. The calamity has gone so far, maybe luck not faith (or its intellectual substitute) is what we have to wish for to see us through. Maybe the earth itself is worn out, and the Gaian optimists have put their belief in a decrepit ball of rock, no more capable of self-righting than a single one of its living components. We are being visited by a monumental Sodom and Gomorrah: destruction is both imminent and deserved. Such is the neo-con view of existence.

I am on the side of luck, and maybe a different kind of faith. The greed of the world is top-heavy, and concentrated into mightily-insatiable pockets. In the ordinary heart there is confusion, and an overload of sickness; but much more than is consciously apparent, milling around in the scree that the collapse of the old architecture is causing, fingers, thoughts, intuitions, incipient songs and other unexpected sounds, brain-waves, words of all languages, the dreams of birds, the cheekiness of fleas, sketches and longings in the blood, are reaching into and across the void, through the mists, in the hope and expectation of a fresh architecture, the first inlets and crags , maybe only the deepest valleys of a new mountain, which itself is but the start of a mighty range, the first glimpses of a soaring sierra for the next body of millennia to explore. It depends upon the quality of the spiritual assumption that is crying its way, edging its convictions into definition, towards a new architectural shape.

It is no longer that difficult to imagine. It is already there, in the symbolism of the round.

72
it gnaws through people from the inside
towards a sky the world's afraid to see
its nature's yet unsure (the flesh it sifts
may tell) but in its driving to be free
dynastic habits have already died

no one's safe from the sowing of its seeds
hope and chaos it blends disturbingly
asking its own victims to be its guide
into a light not one can guarantee
the pains are deep the terror barely shifts

yet (blindly aware) all of us bestride
torrents of torment (murder misery
gladly) to be there when the gravestone lifts