A Great Doubt

A Journal

Amadn Mr

Copyright Amadn Mr 2010

Cover Design Amadn Mr Cover Art by Alan Watts (1971) Cover Font Broken 15 by Eduardo Recife

All Right Reserved

Preface A stone in your shoe... Imagine for a moment. Sitting holding a book, it doesnt matter what book. This one will do if you like. You were looking for something. In an idle moment an itching, something you forgot or omitted. Maybe the book will remind you; maybe it will say it for you; maybe it will distract you long enough that the itching stops. Youll be off on your way again in no time, until the next time. Now, what was it? Maybe nothing, boredom? Then memory persists, vague recollections of times when you were closer to it but, like now, left it undone. You were closer to what? Youre in the same fix again. Leave it, maybe thats better. Ah, but there it is in the bathroom mirror, in your reflection, in shop windows, in the photographs. They keep reminding you, keep showing up, and keep asking questions. Different clothes, longer hair, shorter hair, looking good, looking older, on and on. You hear yourself talking and it sounds like someone on television, or your parents, or old friends, or your acquaintances hard to call them friends they hardly 1

know you, not the old you, the dormant you. You have your badges: job title, nationality, religious affiliation, political party, taste in music, favoured team, etc. Various likes, dislikes, justified prejudices you know the stuff. You tally it up and youre still short. It was there, it was. You switch on the television, more re-runs of the news. A politician is avoiding the truth and being expedient. What should I say? More health warnings and other threats, more news of killing, cant get enough of it, can we? What have they forgotten? A hundred thousand advertisements tell you how to brand your life. They know what social group you belong to and where your sympathies, allegiances and desires lie. Tell us what we want, you cry, and theyll give you something to increase your value for a while. Thats service. Then theres the online you to maintain: millions of users hunched over monitors, fascinated by the light, ironing the creases, lazily scrubbing the mat that will never be clean. Tap, tap, tap on the little tortoise, nobody home. When youve had your fix you go out into the air and reality washes over you, the to-ing and fro-ing. Where next? Did you postpone it? Did you push it farther away? Or did you change by addition again? Maybe that will do; identity is what you identify with. You are all these things added up, 2

you added them up yourself. But was it all smash and grab, were you being expedient, were you shopping for what works and imitating it? Are you one of the unfinished people, miming the words, making other peoples mistakes? Is that you? No, maybe not. Imagine then. What would it be like to lose all those possessions that add up to the insatiable you? Why would you want to quiet that hunger? What if you, designed by committee that labours from morning to night with the utmost effort, defected? You, who are always fulfilling orders, always watched and watching, lest you deviate from the humdrum. You, shaped by countless cues that told you what to repeat and what to repress. What if you abandoned the sort, rank and file mind that must have a quick answer and solution to everything? How quiet it would be without the facts and opinions that you mistake for truth. How far have you gone, how much have you accepted, or lost or failed to gain? How much have you accumulated, how heavy the load? Your greatest burden, the weight of the past, the possessions of the heart and the losses it never forgets. Oh, how that burden can increase and slow the journey, how we treasure our bag of rubbish like that is what distinguishes us. Some love their little scars; they love to share them with the world 3

or to stroke them in private, something to keep you company. What if the part that must always be filled is, in reality, all you have left that is authentic? However much you fear it and run from it, is that emptiness, not the sump of the soul, but the source of it? Are the things you call you the barriers holding back the silence, your defence and the source of all your fears? For those who build their homes within the castle walls, lesser beasts come to prey. Your enemies are more abundant and closer. Your fears have no flesh and bones; they reside in everyday events of no great consequence. The stresses of your life are less tangible, less quantifiable; your readiness is futile against this enemy. Better camouflaged, faster, ignoring safety routines, windows, walls and locks, it attacks you in your home, in the night, in your sleep. Imagine you left the safety of the castle walls, left behind its politics and commerce, its laws and religions, its sciences and arts, and you travelled until, by accident or amnesia, you find a mind that has no etiquette, allegiance or motive. That may be what you miss so deeply and search for in all the wrong ways and in all the wrong places. It is possible, but do you dare to make the sacrifice? Think of the consequences! No inner authority, no agent? You might say that would be 4

chaos, nihilism, anarchy. Do not confuse a mind without commandments with a mind hungry for disorder. It does not reject possessions, only a mind that is possessed by them; does not reject institutions, only the people who are possessed by them. And so many seek to possess us, to think and answer on our behalf have you spent one day noticing how much? We too often lack the questions or too readily accept other peoples answers when we should question everything and not reject anything without question. Who but those with answers seek to silence one with questions, and who but one with questions may silence those with answers? That is the reason, responsibility and morality of one who is awake. I am reminded of those Zen and Taoist characters. What a pity they are so few and you are so many. They could be so uncouth and were sometimes mistaken for madmen, drunks or idiots and would utter a profound truth or a vulgarism with such spontaneity that it might leave you scratching your head as to which was which. Were they bound by respectability and duty? They were not wantonly colliding with social norms but simply being natural or had at least given up a life of artifice. They were operating within society to the degree that society could accommodate their logic but 5

the questioning of social norms is why Siddhrtha abdicated, why Jesus was crucified, why Lao Tzu went into self-imposed exile and why Socrates refused to and was poisoned? History has known many such people and many more it does not record. They had the audacity to question the institutions of the mind and the errors of thought. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man has a fierce gaze that asks a silent, unsettling question. How will you protect yourself from it, how will you once more conceal your nakedness? Perhaps you bow before him, perhaps you kill him Such people are travellers of a world you cannot imagine. No, you will not find it there. You have your simple world of utility, where would you be without that? That world of familiarity and habit is yours to defend. That world is reality until a new model turns it on its head. It is a work in progress, awaiting new facts, new goals and desires, new instructions. It is a world of labels, a world of knowledge, a useful world, an ever receding mental construct. It is for science to revise that work for eternity. Science has told us things about life we cannot sense directly and has shown us how different life is from how it appears superficially. It has told us that what we sense is a fragment of what is but what is cannot be reduced to symbols or completely known. What 6

has knowledge added or subtracted from life? How would those percentages run, by what measurement would you solve that equation? Every time you read life you divide it differently, will dividing it ever put humpty together again? Will dividing it ever make up the difference? What Hinduism and Buddhism call attachment is this process whereby we dissect life in the hope of finding completion. Such a mind cannot enjoy what it fears to lose and fears what it wants most of all. Theres the rub, as they say. Take for an example art and its usefulness. Doesnt art stand at the pinnacle of civilization because it has no utility? Some may try to defend its value by asserting the benefits of art to the individual, society or the economy but are they missing the point or trying to placate those who have no time, patience or money for the impractical? Isnt art cheapened when it is functional, when it plays to the audience? Do we want to be flattered with a poorly hidden clich or be presented with the cleverness of the artist? Is it art because an ego made it or because we are told it is? Great art, in whatever activity or medium you choose to call art, speaks again and again as life progresses because it leaves for you to finish that which you will only find outside it, in life. It asks us to sense what the artist saw in a moment of insight, in 7

awareness. Great art asks to be abandoned; perhaps it is not trying to say anything at all. Must all art await the stamp of critical acceptance, popularity or fashion? Why would anyone pay millions to possess what will never be theirs so cheaply? By what art did they accumulate the wealth to wear another persons talent and hope to know, by association with it, the poverty that made it? Look at the institutions that lay claim to those priceless thoughts. Will you ever find things called truth, meaning or reality in any institution? Will you ever find such things in pages like these? You will find many truths, meanings and realities? You can find new them in any culture and in the people around you. They give you a feeling of substance and continuity but what does this reality consist of? Have you noticed the changing quality of it in various circumstances, how its timbre shifts with your mood? Have you noticed how you excite and suppress that reality and how all your activities, how all you know shapes how you think and feel and consequently what you see? Looking at life with a little learning it is easier to find what complies with your assumptions and quickly or even unconsciously discard or overlook almost everything else. It is easy to become drunk on your achievements and preach or 8

force others to comply with the successfulness of your logic. It is easy to label unfamiliar ideas and, in doing so, quickly own them, dismiss them or cheapen them. It is easy to defend your opinions and hold to the comfort and safety of the status quo. It is more difficult to surrender the authority of what you know or who you are. It takes courage to change, to admit even a small defeat and replace an old belief with something new. How much more courage it takes to unseat the ego and question its many certainties, to surrender them and not find new ones. If you can see beyond the confusion of labels, if you attend to life with unhindered eyes, you might find that a tyrant has been overthrown and you have acceded to that which is profoundest and most intelligent in you. Then the mind sees truth and error co-existing in every thought. The labels are just labels, none are complete or true. Only awareness, that which is not a thing, can show you what you have lived apart from or struggled to understand in the riches of human enquiry. In awareness we find our rest and action, can anything be added to it that does not obstruct it? Where is the dormant you that walks by a flickering flame and hides from the sun? Where is that voice that so quietly comes to you in sleep and speaks even now? Where is that 9

gentle heart that curses you for learning such harsh lessons? Beyond which guarded door lies your unspoilt love, that untouchable core? You have been looking in the marketplace where life taught you all things of worth are to be found. What you have sought is as your own breath. Let it in, let it go, again, again, again, such is movement, such is life. Interrupting that movement produces what Lao Tzu called the ten thousand things, stalling it produces attachments, resisting it produces fear and unhappiness. When you have doubted all, questioned all, when you have gambled all against the odds you will be left with nothing to call your own. This is trust, faith, and self-belief. This many names have pointed towards. Now the mind is like a waterwheel that thunders with the torrent and is a perch for passing birds when the river is still. The turmoil is no longer the minds lens but a screen where the frantic misplaced souls that are shunted to and fro by necessity and chance are still played out; those who are in constant dialogue and strife between what is inside them and what outside. You wonder that this confusion still exists and you once looked with their divided eyes.

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The main part of what follows began when I was in my early twenties (at least what is recorded here). It was an unedited, very private outpouring that was not experienced at the time as something positive, perhaps only necessary, unavoidable or inevitable. The language was sometimes raw and hurried as I tried to describe something persistent yet all too easily obscured again. Then, in the late 1990s, it dropped off, so to say, and that was the end of it for some years. Many of the passages I knew by heart anyway and the experiences of those days would occasionally drift in and out of memory, so they were neither disturbed nor forgotten but always there was something in them I could not account for. In 2006 I read Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. For a while it sparked the old wandering curiosity in me. I went on to read several books on Eastern philosophies and much else. I read everything I once avoided when I had thought myself discerning. Now, no longer seeking something to adorn myself with, I enjoyed the fantastical for what it was and appreciated the phrases that spoke to me. One book led to another: everything from the sublime to the ridiculous to the academic. Again and again, amidst the rhymes and riddles, the doctrine and exercises, their themes described to me what I had poured out, in different language, all of those 11

years before. They talked of residing in the Tao (La0 Tzu), The Unborn (Chn/Zen), tman (Hinduism), The Grail (Celtic/European mythology), born in the spirit (Jesus), The Philosophers Stone (alchemy), self-remembering (G. I. Gurdjieff), positive disintegration (K. Dbrowski). To my mind, these seemingly disparate philosophies are unique in their ethnic or cultural language and symbolism but in essence they describe the same human journey. They exist because a few human minds have tried to make sensible something that is beyond common sense. I will not attempt here to sift the specifics of how or why their descriptions are different or the same. An academic could exhaust a lifetime discussing and verifying, building each step of the ladder by quoting texts and experts and daring occasionally to make an unsubstantiated leap of imagination. I could fill a book with quotes that speak to me and add a bibliography that would busy you for years but it is for you to find your own proof, if you need it, and what speaks to you. At the heart of these texts I saw common threads that sing of awakening and a shedding of ignorance, futility, conflict and illusion. There are many symbols and metaphors. If you approach them with preconceptions they will always be closed to you. If you approach with openness you might decipher them and 12

comprehend the idea. If you approach with understanding they will be transparent to you. Is it religion or science? Does it remake you more than human or is it a realisation of human potential? Is it a timeless, sublime overflowing that some call bliss or a wondering movement with the mundane. Is it found in desolate isolation or in the midst of human affairs? Can you know where to look for it or must you stumble upon it when the map is lost or put aside? Does it strike you like a lightning bolt or is it something the years teach you? My agenda when reading these subjects was not to differentiate them or unify them but to develop an appreciation of why the goals of these traditions were so similar and why they recommend to others a path to achieve them. I would never have recommended my careless path to another person. I used to say that if you couldnt explain something to a child without making a fool of yourself, then you were talking nonsense. How could I describe all this to a child when I had struggled to explain it to myself? It is foolishness to try. A child has not yet learned the complex rules that govern the adult world and the adult mind; they still see life every day, not some dull replica of yesterday. They have not strayed so far from unspoilt assumptions to 13

accept a society that is not only rich and colourful but also brutal. With any luck, they are still ignorant of how it can be so stupid and can expect such stupidity of you. You need not try and describe such things to a child because they have not yet pillared a shelter so high on such dubious supports. I cannot recommend the paths suggested by any system or tradition. I cannot endorse any techniques as I have practised none. I cannot say if they offer more than a different kind of belonging. I can say that many of their authors have depicted some of the most rarefied expressions of how it is to be aware and what that journey is like. Their words are strange, unfamiliar, easily mistaken for truisms. Imbibed deeply they are a tonic for the favourite ailment of humankind, for its lingering malaise, for a condition that has the indecency to wound but not kill. These words address those who have already begun to ask if there is any other way to be. Those who have awoken to find a world that is not theirs, who question its prescribed patterns of behaviour and cannot shrug off that feeling but seek a spontaneous existence. Those who suspect the deception they perpetrate on others but on themselves most of all that these habits of thought which they have collected describe the individual and his/her environment. It is for those who have begun to doubt 14

identity itself. Can you name a human error that was not caused by identification with a false notion? Every day people are offended by abstractions or assert their own. Ambitions, relationships, human lives have risen and fallen like fireworks on misplaced identity. We obstruct so much that is sensible and allow so much that harms us. For me, all of this literature was at the same time an affirmation and a dismissal of what I had thought a very individual experience. My private document was, after all, public knowledge. Every spontaneous expression had been written many times before and more profoundly and beautifully than I could have described it. Yet in them I found a reason to remove the last burden, that of silence. Why should one person question anothers choices? Can you know why they made those choices or what they see that you do not? Do you know where their path leads or where your own does? Yet isnt the scourge of identity that we will not let people choose for themselves, that what we do not understand in others is a persistent irritation. We would consign others to a life of unhappiness to satisfy our second hand principles. We would leave lifes only satisfaction that they, like us, follow the many, lost to time, wearing the knees

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out of our trousers. We are, different or the same, finding ways to be. What if the kindest insult we can raise is to frustrate assertions and prejudices at every turn, whether by a friendly joke to the well-meaning or by curt shock of logic to the arrogant. What if the best we can do is to pour ice on the warm waters of conformity? What if the best we can do is to proclaim, by example, that life is not blunt, unformed material to be flattened and beaten into shape and bent to human will. Life is a sharp, subtle, sophisticated thing that requires the hands of an artist, hands that know when to push and when to yield to the material. Do you have that bold, faithful touch? Do you employ that art? A book is perhaps the most direct way to reach minds like the one at work here. A book is sought out, willingly and actively participated in and can be discarded at any time. I know now that many have had experiences similar to what is described here and many have responded differently and been compelled to file it in some cultural niche or claim some prize. To do so would be to turn away at the defining moment or to bargain awareness for a more distinguished illusion. It is interesting and compelling to find comparisons but it is a hesitant mind that finds only fragments of 16

familiarity. Anyone might find niches for the metaphors, but there are none to file away what they describe, that indefinable sense that, like a wild flower, only lives in you and fades as soon as you try to give it to another. For me, it will never belong to any religious, philosophical or cultural tradition it was fundamentally a relinquishing of such things, and in time realising that was not a loss. As I wrote then, stay broken, wholeness is a mask. Yet nothing is wanting in that which you do not seek to complete, perfect or make use of. For anyone like me, that realisation never comes until you have tried so hard, plumbed so deep, been shaken so utterly, that the keenness of your seeking mind destroys all that you identified with. Better to find if there are any gentler, safer ways to that repose. By it, lostless, ungained, insperate.

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The mind turns back to imagine an empty harbour and a readymade vessel of inadequate design, over-laden with duty and doctrine, art and literature. Imagine the drama of its failed launch into disputed waters, watch as it pitches wildly, clumsily sloughing its cargo before, by some uncertain fortune, it rights itself. Imagine its impudent silhouette drifting out to sea, the otiose nobility of it. Here is that process then, in earnest, gathered from pocket sketch pads. I have tried and failed to order them chronologically but this is of no consequence. The Lament was written retrospectively in 1998 using various fragments from the previous years and I have broken this up again to fill in the blanks to some extent. Other fragments I have used in this preface. I have given titles to those entries that had none and have added a short introduction, Setting the Scene. Try to see beyond the pomp and wordage, see beyond readings and perhaps you might glimpse, or remember, the discarded, useless and unremarkable.

Amadn Mr May 2010

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The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. Matthew 6:22 (KJV)

At the bottom of great doubt lies great awakening. If you doubt fully, you will awaken fully. Hakuin

From the withered tree, a flower blooms. Zen Proverb

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Setting the Scene It is morning, for example. Amidst the life-seeking and soulsearching glory of this city, division is painted in primary colours. The news will tell us the score if we bother to look at it today. The terrace houses my friends and I live in date from the late years of the 19th century. The decor was modern in nineteen seventy-something. A brown, once vibrantly ornate carpet, worn flat; brown and orange striped wool curtains; a sofa covered in similar material that would look as handsome on top of a skip but it gave up the ghost years ago and the absence of sound spring or beam makes it as comfortable as a deck chair to sit on and a hammock to sleep on. Lampshades in paisley patterns of red, cream and, yes, brown. The walls although plain have nonetheless been jazzed up with African silks, postcards and art prints. The whole place is scattered with battered paperback editions of the best writers to elevate or trash the English language, stacks of cassette tapes, CDs and LPs of equally rare taste. The table is a shanty town of cigarette boxes, tobacco pouches and strewn papers. There are at least two full ashtrays (stolen from a pub) and another two receptacles of uncertain function that are known to all as ashtrays. They jostle for space amongst every mug and glass 21

the house possesses and wine bottles and beer cans. Two guitars lean, one against a chair, the other on a pile of coats. Somebody Ive never seen before walks past to put the kettle on and we chat. Daylight enters via the kitchen the curtains are rarely drawn in the living room this early it ruins the ambience and calls morning a little too abruptly. When they are opened the den-like cosiness of it all looks vacant and untidy. The many people who come and go here are a mix of professionals, unemployed and students, mostly students. Everyone is in revolt against something, becoming

something. We all have a talent, be it mad or sublime. It may be for art or music, a quick wit, a curious turn of phrase or some less definable eccentricity of personality. Anyone else is just taking up space. We talk a lot, here, or in quiet pubs, on into the early hours, flushing the nonsense and running with a good concept until were going in circles and call it a night. Everyone seems to know something youve never

encountered before. We are all experts in politics and religion but speak of neither. There is always something happening, a session, a gig, an excursion. The less notice, the better; we find the money somehow and we share what we cant afford. If all else fails, we go out in yesterdays clothes 22

and see what happens; maybe nothing, but theres a fair chance well bump into someone with a plan. Between times Im out, walking for miles around galleries and gardens, detouring through unfamiliar streets to see where it takes me, and then on to another house. None of them are a home but all are familiar and welcoming and all the while, inside, something uninvited calls. When its quiet and the words come, I write them down.

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1993

Morning Train The alarm wakes me at 4:45 in the dark attic. This is not my room. This is not my bed or my memories on these walls. It is cold. The sea roars at the shore, the timeless, ceaseless sea roars at the shore. The wind pushes and pulls, rattling the wooden walls and windows and the lampposts along the promenade that ring like cowbells. The whole house is asleep, huddled and dreaming. I get out of bed, pack and creep downstairs and into the living room. I step over and around the scattered litter and possessions of whoever came and went or stayed last night. One of the girls is sleeping on the sofa by the door. I pause and look down as I leave. She wakes and looks up in fear at the silhouette in the doorway and the sea, suddenly, alarmingly loud. I whisper consolingly and go quickly up to the road, crunching gravel, disturbed by the fright on her face. I am alone. No living thing stirs, the streets are deserted, the houses still. I pass a building site, a 25

cranes long arm lies outstretched and bent, its claw cupped towards an abandoned head, the compass views from its cabin boarded with no view of the broken red clay, the junk, the unfinished walls graffitied with clichs of who loves who, supports who, hates who. I hear something and look around and notice a seabird lies dead in the rubble, no obvious sign of a crime. I wonder if it might have just died, its heartbeats having counted out, and drifted, silently dropped and thud into a ready-made bombsite with only me as a witness. I hurry on and catch the early train and sit in an empty carriage. We move off along the coast and into the countryside, beyond the day, behind the night. Cows stand in fields of mist, only a breath of colour in dawns cold blue light. More fields, hedges and fields, hedges and fields. Calmly, the day arrived and everything, everyone moves in accord with that feeling.

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1995 1998

The Lament I Only a traveller can tell the story of a winters sleep, only a traveller can awake to a world where a fraction of what exists there can be communicated. Only a traveller must venture to cast a quick, cold eye into the unretrievance and imagine for them the journeying feet that have set astray and may once more discover a road beneath them, a geography around them and a horizon as a place to return to. Nameless, they are so many and so many later it is hard to distinguish the form I take from those I serve.

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Note To Self Exhausting energy, tearing at the disposition for meaning. Alone in the skull, always reaching out. What else but to extinguish the light and halt the march of duty on desire. Finding time to evaluate experience, to educate my instincts. Time in the world interior to that I touch. That inner world so often polluted by fear and the threat of isolation. Out amongst friends again, living at the boundaries where our inner worlds meet and action is not dictated. Still too often found outside the garden by the temptation to possess it or be possessed.

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Where Now Where can I direct this? This gaunt animal existence; Where something this bright evening? My soul burns constant, With all the air to nourish it, No wind disturbs it. And doesn't it happen like this? That I have nowhere to take this, No one, not yet, So here I sit, On my bed, Writing, To not be led, Staring and blank, To the sugar water fish bowl. Quit now before the text spirals, As all of life moves ever on, Now and now but never so far away, Never beyond a glance this way or there. So here a page and a little more ink, I let it rest here.

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Roundelay How is this and do you like this? Difference is movement, Again only different.

And enough this?

Do I become less if it is? Perfect? No, but better? Again, when is it ever?

Enough ever?

Again and on, on from the same. Where now? Again or on? Good now and bad now and why?

To move enough?

Oh roundelay, sing a new refrain.

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Sing! Sing for gods sake, gild this rust, tinsel this junk, draw little pictures, delicately colour some damned story of how it is. Breathe a sigh in recognition of all the verbose homages to disappointment, loss, misfortune, humble acceptance and subsequent gratitude. Smirk at the self-same who suffer from terminal adolescence and call it the bittersweet fruit of experience. Build shoddy edifices of filth, sculpt rank tributes in the name of truth and beauty. You fool, you've too much talent to be bored, it's ennui, existential angst. You're the soil that feeds the rose-petalled ignorance of their so-called 'society' man! Join in the wish-fulfilment, join the thrashing egos, join the tourists all mere currency, dealing and being dealt, aye sing!

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Another Monologue Remember again, after the words, the atmosphere, the moments, glimpsing me as I can only imagine, in a trance, head bowed, talking from, about those spaces, points of meaning and connection. Your face and all possible others my guide as to whom I confess. I give them this characters voice, his truth. I sit back and listen too, estranged. It's difficult to distinguish if this is clarity, words coming truly from myself, or am I performing some ritual, ripping the veil of familiarity from your eyes, transported to a temporal landscape, plundering the tabernacle of your soul, weaving a tapestry of words to pigment the pale print of experience? Questions come through and the voice continues, the words pour forth, drawing your arid ears to me, splashing, burning, invigorating. A series of gestures sear the air, I conjure your pain, scatter your doubt, here is real intent. I exploit the space we occupy, borrow movement, change, become some figure constructed from within, my outer self-forgotten again. I am different now, aware of this new dimension of tongue and breath, the thickness of voice, the thinness of air. Meaning cannot be framed in this hypnotic, out-of-time experience, lost in lostness. No, not that, immersed in fluidity. I glance up for a moment, into your smooth blue 32

grey eyes, deep into the darkness, closer now to me each time. Words conclude, a drink is taken, a cigarette lit, a long breath and silence. Notice now the glass, the sensation of smoke-filled lungs, of table, walls, decor, bodies, people, a restrained passing look, a casual remark or joke. Tonight this keeps you warm, disturbs your sleep.

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The Lament II Is it my story? It feels like my own as I approach it. Or is it theirs or some distant self, in another life, speaking to me in ways I never learned, of things I never saw, or experienced or could translate? Some dusk I hope it leads me to a Golgotha where I can bury these thoughts. In an age from then some creature may find a welcome shelter there and come and go as it pleases. Until that uncertain time this graven head fiend warms its walls, sweeps its floor and settles down, charged with a duty beyond achievement. And still it rains, still Im quickened, still the words come and go, thus... Like origami unfolded I lay this fictional life bare, my mind a canvas, this canvas a lens. For years I looked on tainted reflections of life and through them at my own. It was my blighted birthright, from the cradle to the lull of ritual. A world at once perfect, yet where morals are policed by the devils you know, and so to preserve them. All fallen before an impossible mystery, hunched over their incantations with the burden of the Cyrenean, another payment on a mortgaged soul. The cold stone walls reverberate with creaking cartilage and the idle engine of want.

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Spellbound Textful days, page filled, turned to, lived with. I behaved with their stiff-collared sang-froid, their intellectualism, the dry stoical eye and protracted lips. Poised, waiting for the banal traffic of clapped-out ideas to halt before the peacock struts his oh so sweeping statements and pretty ideas.

Uncertainties embellished on high, raised to axiomatic status, reduced to mere decoration to disguise the dust that gathers about their heart, that quickens the pulse and clouds the brain, the cataract that obscures true observation, acceptance, and understanding. Perhaps Ive gazed too long at these tainted reflections and through them at my own. What have I to say now?

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Waiting Here you are laid bare, observed half-hidden and unresolved. Prostrate, here, and still, over-exposed in pale light. Emaciated vigour, shivering limbs all unfolded. Your flimsy bandages would fall away at the gentlest touch. Some subtle suggestion binds them to you, creating an illusion of wholeness, from a distance, of vitality.

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Something Unspoken Sitting there at rest, Again aware of, The uninvited, From the dark of sleep, Still the residue, Grown in the quiet. It crawls up your throat, Choking utterance. Will to equal it, So unconvincing. If I could catch it, Night sleeping or day dreaming, As it caught and catches me, Then no more the enemy.

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Wordscoming s d o o i s e k e e t o a t e a i n n d a r k o d s h a d o r d s i a s u i t f i f u l n a t c l y e o d e a c t i f r l s i r i n t o c n i i t s r c g h t s t i a c e e i e u l h a n g t i s s h e n d l i o r a n g e r o e d w s v a w a i

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b a b l r e e f n d l

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m t o b e a m a n m i u e v e t o n s e d a t e g a t i e r a g a i k n w i n p

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The Precipice It comes most readily in that relaxed early morning or late night, lethargy giving way to lucidity, fuelled with a little nicotine. Standing on the precipice of delirium, looking ahead and not below and giddy at the expanse of possible thought. Then I might sleep, my head a heavy stone and so embedded with things that it is hard to extract from it, to keep its heart molten, fluid in wakefulness. Creating something to carry with me, those thoughts, that mood, to garnish the day, add wonder to sense. You grab what windows of presence you can, wrought from a sea of absence, furnished from the swell of reverie.

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Fugnose ssiskin holyboo rickety doo wumph rinkle here de bee woncen singadink ristle a kingshin dona betta comsir teta bloom sang a ring du bope singe righty ho here we go a word in year pease ach but werze me words gong sensa silly billyo hmmnn shhha fink man fink yah I mean to say away now here you oh you high blink yes yes lovelovelove and sunny plexus tickle wehe shup pu pup nyin woh there chool me mema sinky now we go aho what ayou yew saying to me gotta go werd you comfrum yer hear now now bybye though uhu ok bumpt into some old finker must be mad nowsee howhee fought

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The Lament III He says that you will soon leave this place you're in, this place that is his day and night. These thoughts that bear you up weigh him down. Who will assist one who walks alone, collecting more dust than he can shake off as he travels amongst the weary and weakens? I began to acknowledge in them that which I had commanded without, denied within. Wisdom falters, courage fails. Star-guided through the dark trenches of the mind, a guide to those who fall from one who never leaves, who lives to explore its alleys and secret avenues, its cellars, its vistas, its exits. He dreams of escape but has found no one the equal of these walls, so rich with the idleness of a species. Unlike most but like a few, he came willingly, in search of something meaningful. He dreams of an old country but it is his duty now, to these recesses of the mind to weigh in words the burden of those he's read, to walk paths under new stars, where no thought or image is written and no answer given, and write his own there. This last part of your journey is yours alone.

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The Road to Lessness Fields of coarse tobacco, dusks light ribbons between hills of white pepper and gunpowder. Shaved trees reach out to the heaving clouds for nourishment, autumns confetti about their feet. No faint life but my own silently visits.

Resolve Such a bitter sleep was my sleep because I am asked to dream, to unthinking dream, unthinking remember,

unthinking forget. But it is not unthinking through this pain I go.

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Revolt Torn from the living, in that boundless silence, my errant imagination exhumes the monstrous voices that had once been my stay, once welcomed. Now run amok, they indulge themselves. The more I struggle to contain them, the more they exert their influence, their power over me. If these creatures destroy you it is by your hand. This is the self-destructive ego realised, your terrible conscience, and with the courage of purgation, you must accept its anger and its judgement. This is your revenge against your own foolish hopes.

Consumed Caught in the blaze, transfixed, in abandon, in some drunken haze of annihilation. Wanting at some dark, mute level, screaming to be purged by the light that rushes to consume me, can I fix it in my gaze?

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Little Robin Little robin sees the sky, Just beyond the windowpane, A narrow gap from the air, Panics as I try to help, Fluttering about my face. I hold my breath and grasp it, No need to be frightened now, Open! Out! Take into the air! My quiet breath, quiet breath.

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The Unretrievance A heaving and sighing sea pours into a black vortex. I am pulled around its all-consuming centre. Crashing around me are the possessions that once crowded my room; the books, the art, the trophies and trinkets. I half-swim, half-grab amongst them for something to keep me afloat, but watch helpless as one by one they are torn from me. In that loss something thunders and cracks, a high-speed flickering reel of images, beyond my conscious grasping, rush, flush from my crowded mind, on and on. My body turns silently, vacant, transfixed by the total destruction, stripped bare, utterly alone. Is this madness, what is there now? My brains are barren stuff, a tissue of thoughts feeling substantial and what is that to lose?

Void A matt black globe courses timelessly, a figment of nothingness. Grim gouged sockets gaze oblivious after the perished seed that founders in the vast intangible. Amen, he sweeps the void about his skirts. 45

Twilight An aura of suspension gathers around you, lungs leaden with sluggish air. Thought yielding now, thickening flow, velvet dark silt stirs. Beneath a heavy brow eyes burn a myopic flame, pupils pulse and eclipse, a halo of shifting autumnal colours. Fluttering lips frame a traitorous kiss and taste again the quickening.

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Lotus My eyes unhooded, besotted, I have again my nothing. Aweigh in this unfathomable, Black rags reel in a balmy sky. A draught of ethereal air enters, A horse croaking accompanies, My crying breath cast out. I shudder, cough and vomit, Grubs fall from my lips. A fading obligation orbits my skull, Some tourniquet constricts my brow. One hand claws the earth; I wipe my mouth with the other clenched fist, Tawny skin, black nails, Rotting cloth hangs from my wrist. I arise automatic, Spilling petals and twigs, Limbs carry me to the roots of a tree. I begin again the urbane ritual, My clothes fall about my knees, I bathe the scars of the plough, Behold the face turning, returning. 47

I am a stranger to the watcher, The flick of his liquorice tongue, 'I am the worlds fugitive, what beckons me?'

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The Lament IV From this mirror to the world where desire is acted out am I gone and lost a thousand times, and these words, my guide and sometime tormentor, beyond me for how long? I unknotted a tangled soul that some colour might illuminate this damned story borne of listless passion and the whey of idealism. Such a fiction I dared to dream and gaze and watch it turn so rotten and twilight come too soon. Who is such a man but a dream made flesh and so easily forgotten?

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1999

Spring I Crisp and crash towards blue sky, walking amidst the rooftops, in easy reach of the mountains, clear in the near distance. Elevated and quickened by the sweet cold air on raspberry tongue and silken lung. Experiencing the touch of all the colour of the world, bathed in calm scent and a narrative of textures, and the only sounds, welcome punctuations and stirrings of occasional thoughts of no urgent consequence that drift off amidst the immediacy of a soul sensing day dusking.

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Spring II The weather decides the mood today; hazy mountains, milkwhite sunless sky, and the air soft and warm. I head for home through the quiet suburban avenues; the occasional car passes slowly, the sound of tyres on tarmac most audible. Looking into dark interiors: this one someone sitting at a table, this one preserved for guests, this one a study lined with books obscured by large plants. Across the junction and past the cottages with their shuttered windows, wooden garages and trees with twisted trunks and blossoming in orange and pink and lavender, the birds hidden and singing among the branches. On past The Lyric and across the river, singing aloud. Long rows of terraced houses and narrow alleyways and to the house. Out again in no time and no buses around so walking again, another bridge downriver, looking at the slow rippling water. Past the old house on the corner, ruined render and brickwork, windowless, great tufts of grass on its sills; a pigeon struts along its chimney top. Into town, detouring by the old church; flowers are being brought in. Good day for it. Sounds of workers on a new construction; I look in through the green gauze and the dust, lamps dimly illuminating progress. Through the market, switching off the chatter of the people strolling, sitting 52

around. Enjoyed the eyes of a friend for a few minutes and then on to the union; sat in that little cavern with coffee and cigarettes. A day when the tide comes in over memories, a stirring calm, a thought to how I was and how it ended. It is spring, life is in the air, everywhere, between the bricks of the old house, in the trees nesting. Faces awake from winter.

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Graduate You wouldn't recognize this picture. The overlapping shadows of fifteen hundred lights on a clear ocean of floor and some hundred bodies cling to the walls in the same stupid costume and then I see you across the hall in that green silk dress, like a beacon. I set out, my body some alien extension, out of sight, in manual control beneath tunnel vision. The incomprehensible expanse around me bulges, exerts arbitrary elastic forces on my limbs. Flapping trouser legs with clown feet kick imaginary footballs with each step, stifling shirt with swinging baboon arms, my long neck sways to a charmers tune, my indecisive facial muscles, the peculiar angles they choose when I glance three-quarters in a mirror. Her face at last and her smile, I hang on it like washing and casually say hi.

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2000

Open window Out of the emptiness a voice without substance, an image develops of such simplicity; a vast sky where the clouds have paused for a moment. The trees cut out in the foreground seem to share the same repose. A slow tide of grass, a glistening stream, the shifting shapes of fish swimming beneath the surface. A flower grows alone, it is an impossible blue. It awakens me to the cold red clay on my feet. I stand weightlessly erect, my clothes shifting with the complex rhythm of the breeze. I see this from a distance and close my eyes, feel the movement of the trees. Petals, soft as snowflakes, drift slower than gravity, slower than time to the earth. Their perfume, an unnameable sensation, fills my chest, an energy that reaches into my temples, releasing tears. Inhale. My warmth is emptied, filled with cold air. The sun shines warm on my skin, on the earth, wanting through the mist the frosted hills. Feel my hands through my hair and

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exhale, watch as I walk, the brush of grass sweeps and sways around me, erasing my path, silent as the breeze.

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2006 2010

Easter Story It is evening. A young man sits with his back to a tree, head bowed. Hearing footsteps, he looks up to see a girl running back to the group. She has left an egg on the ground. He smiles and lifts it in his hand; it is quite hot. With adept hands he cracks a large piece of shell away and plucks out the cooked egg and eats. This is his first meal today. He feels the dust, blown by the wind, speckle his face. He looks up at the first few stars of the night. The same dust freckles the inside of the eggshell still in his hand. He smiles and quietly watches the group sitting around, a couple here watching him curiously, others chatting, laughing, singing. This is a story for tomorrow perhaps. The professor sits in the old leather armchair in his study. On a few shelves here are his published essays, articles and books. The remainder of the wall is filled with the classic and contemporary works of various sciences and photos with him 57

alongside some of the authors of these. A little girl rushes in and stops at a respectful distance, Happy Easter, granddad. He smiles, thank you, darling and off she runs. He has never been fond of chocolate and opens the large bottom drawer of his desk. There are two thick folders to one side where neatly filed are years of work that once scattered less prosperous walls and desks and he knows now will never be completed. He gives these the faintest glance and decides not to put away the gift. He unwraps the foil and presses the thick chocolate with his frail hands; nothing. He smashes it with his fist, collapsing a quarter of the shell. He picks out the larger pieces and looks in at the smooth interior of the shell and a little pile of colourful, sugar-coated sweets. He looks up and out at the garden and, uncharacteristically, inexplicably, he shudders, sobs bitterly.

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The Potter Once there was a potter whose daughter announced that she was to marry in three months time. He decided that he would gift her a beautiful storage jar with the most elaborate ornamentation his craft had taught him and the finest paints he could afford. In the quiet of the evening, after his days work was complete, he would continue with his masterpiece whilst his old blind dog slept by his feet. When tiredness danced in his head, he would place it on the workbench and cover it with a cloth in case his daughter might see it and spoil the surprise. After two months the jar had been fired and the delicately painted relief work was nearing completion. He stepped back to admire his work and woke the old dog that must have been dreaming. It leapt up in fright and ran blindly about the workshop crashing into the workbench. The man watched, frozen in horror, as the jar fell and was impaled on a pair of tongs. He picked it up and looked at the glow from his lamp through neat holes punched in each side. He sat it down and screamed from the soles of his feet, Come here so I can kill you, but the dog was gone. It would know better than to return tonight. For days the man could not bear to enter his workshop. He cancelled all orders, telling his clients that he had taken ill. 59

He was ill, consumed with anger, frustration and self-pity. He found it impossible to share the excitement of the wedding preparations. Consolations were silenced with more anger. In one such moment he sat alone in the garden when his turmoil was disturbed by a gentle humming. How can that woman be so happy, he thought, can I not have a minutes peace? Shut up in there, will you?, but still it continued. He stormed into the house, searching from room to room. No one was home except his dog, which shrank from a dismissive boot. He paused by the workshop, Ive told them a hundred times not to go in here. Opening the door, familiar smells greeted him, familiar quiet, familiar

apparatus, tools waiting expectantly. Then again, the simple music stirred the air. He followed the source of it to the open window in his workshop. There sat the jar on the windowsill. He stood before it, thinking of the hours he laboured over it; it was beautiful but ruined. Not even fit for a pisspot, he muttered in disgust. For the third time the song came and in amazement he realised what it was. The wind breathed through the jar and with its subtle shift in direction the pitch rose and fell. In a moment his shattered contentment was made good and his work complete. Come here so I can kiss you he cried, rushing out of the door. The poor animal, 60

thinking him insane, fled from the house and his master still in pursuit, laughing uncontrollably. That evening the potter sat down and carefully applied precious leaf; golden rays of the sun emitting from one side of the jar and a silver halo of moonlight on the other. What luck that was, he wondered. The old blind dog shrugged its eyebrows.

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The Blade Some see only a story and read no meaning Some think it unremarkable and never seek it Some think it foolish and mock the mention of it Some think it evil and chasten against it Some worship it beyond comprehension Some follow it but it leaves no path Some claim to know it and sell the dream of it Some sensed its presence and fear the memory of it Some it has touched and made mad None have stolen it or bought or won it It brings no rewards though all seek its treasures It has no power yet no effort can equal it It is not in memory and not in hope It is not in want or reckoning It is passed to none yet to anyone found It cannot be owned yet all possess it It renders whole those who receive it It rents asunder those who resist it Any may ignore it but none escape it

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Haiku Loose the fool upon your back Throw your stinking corpse Rest pilgrim, rest weary ass

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