Stepping into the Round

In The Observer today, there is an article deploring the descent into the "Denaissance". For forty years or more I have been pointing out (with the roar of a mouse, I sense, given that I have never had much of a public voice) that the Renaissance has been on its last legs since the start of the twentieth century. No matter whether a good or a bad thing, it has been an inevitability. Ideas are exhaustible; great movements wear out as efficiently as weak ones. The Renaissance rediscovered classical proportions and reworked them to its own yearnings. It gave us, among other things, colonialism, capitalism, another version of democracy and the proscenium stage. All these powerful forces are in their last spasms, though they like to behave as though they own the best of civilisations and are the nearest thing to eternity we can get.

The Renaissance is the last age in a chain of ages contained within the era that started with Mesopotamia. The rape of Mesopotamia is now on, being dragged apart by a destructive greed that characterises the dying stages of all mega-ideas. The end of the world seems nigh - or will be if the human race cannot break out from the chains of its own contradictions. From political malfeasance to cosmic collision, the pattern in all its holograms is doomladen. The ups and downs of a vast mountain range have exhausted the human imagination. A skull encrusted with £40,000,000's worth of unflawed diamonds glitters in a black hole of worthlessness. Capitalism and the Proscenium Stage could not be more futilely illustrated. The lit space has become the phantom of all operas.

Actors-all, trained to the fine tips of their own egos, wrapped up in excellent tin-foil, have swallowed their Adam's-apple. (Even the women who don't have one.) The back-wall, the God-wall they have trusted their reputations on, is collapsing on them from above and behind, even as they desperately try to convince those in the dark well in front that they are still to be trusted. All is not lost however, even at this second-to-midnight. There is no way back; the only way forward is to step into the circle that the dark ones will readily make. and stay there. Not a circle though that has been so dolled up that an enclave has been created that, in a world without meaning, still keeps at bay the non-actors, gawping in, still, to another rendering of the lit-space. What a travesty this has become - the buggeration of the symbol itself!

The step forward has to be ecological, environmental, self-dispossessive as well as raw, imperfect, rough, bare (these words have all been said before), empty of accoutrement and special lighting. Actors must go it alone, stripping away the hierarchy of forces that have nobbled them for a sake of a share in the kudos. Directors, enablers, may have to take their hands in the first place, but the space they are entering has no need of figures that the proscenium had to have for its own unnatural functioning. One step into the genuinely unencumbered middle and the word is freed to become poetic, spiritual, again; in touch with the de-falsification of myth, the yearning of the soul (stripped of its religiose demeanours).

Above all, the word, and the actors who give it their bodies, stop being the passageways of the authoritarian command, a one-directional thrusting power, and render themselves to become the voice-and-blood ritualists of the ordinary dream, expressed from all directions in all its paradoxes. Freedom is equality and equality is freedom: diversity is the natural offspring of their union. The God-wall no longer faces and deters the hoi-polloi; instead the wall has transfered itself to behind the people, supporting its backs, encouraging its use of a power beyond present day imagining. Maybe a god-within; maybe an entity that will have to be born out of these totally new dimensions of thought and feeling, this released imagination. All will be affected, in the deepest possible (temporal) ways.

If the human race survives the present immense chasm, created in part from its own pollution, but also from much vaster forces of ideas and energies no temporality has control over, then, as nothing else , the symbolic round is there, the seed for an uncontainable exploration of the inner side of the human psyche. And it will be no panacea. The unanswerable questions of today will have to find answers, and there may be a dark age or two to be grimly hung on to. But, in my view, survival depends on this slight, immeasurable shift, which will turn reasoning inside out, re-energise the blood, shake the imagination out of its present sorry games, and eventually, maybe, allow co-operative human enterprise to speak and act for the good of all peoples, equally free in their widespread disparity.

And if this is all not possible, dare to believe in it nonetheless, roughly, imperfectly, rawly, even naively! And may it be many many lifetimes before it too wears itself out and a fresh unimaginable symbol rises to take its corrupted place.

pathway


it has a sudden way of choosing itself
feet may think they have the map sussed out
with all the striding possibilities resolved
(a great deal of walking goes unconsciously)

so why of a moment does the landscape
not accord with what the map suggests
and feet begin to find a nervous turning off
from what had confidently been intended

maybe the brambles here have gone askew
or the marker tree a lightning strike has bent
this field was tares before and now is oats
the look of everything has bred a light

that never was and every trodden stone
has shifted seismically away from a past
that knew itself too well to be disturbed
nothing’s in place a second-gone once trusted

so a pathway says hello the map discovers
(not meaning to but freshly finding right)
and feet congratulate themselves to learn
from the start they had this walking in them

the pathway chosen is an ordinary one
once revealed the map has always shown it
who walks it does so with contented eyes
it’s where it goes to no one’s been before

the break-up time

such a storm raging beyond
the senses we try to track it with
mountains crumble inside our words
gravity becomes a lead weight

no time for greatness (vast conceits)
fashions unfold like stick umbrellas
in a cocktail glass (gaudy and smart)
intellect gags upon the question

for fear of stricken answers (today
can’t stretch its yester-legs
for all its striving to be new)
we metamorphose into scree

take a deep breath and think
a good bad-time to be alive in
disintegration gives carte blanche
to future hope (the fool is crass)

fools say the earth is singing
its crannies sucking in old seeds
poems (long since scorned) re-stock
them with nutrients unguessed

these goings-on are deeply painful
nature (bewildered) arse-about-face
seas can’t keep their tides in order
vague talk of reshuffling the stars

so damaging the gossip it’s best
to say nothing – have hiccups (hold
breath and count to four thousand)
imagine a seed’s inside – and listen

where we could be now – choking
in scree and willing a seed to tick
(nothing much else to hang on to
but to dice for the first green shoot)

we exist in the break-up time
annihilation’s sirens are cooing
more seeds though in the earth
than any worn god can credit

keep fingers crossed against murder
(the sprays of iniquity) even
when the mists are lethal some-
thing good goads the nerve to grow