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

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