I stepped out into the night, and shook like a leaf hurled in the wild November wind, which seemed to ravel up the drapiery of time, and spread the night-clouds’ lacy jags across the under-sky, while far beyond, the swelling body of the stars, the body of the universe - in which our solar system’s arc, our earth’s turn, the wind’s sweep, my hair’s billow, and my mind’s flow, are fibres to the thread that threads a button to a sleeve - seems still, yet moves, and shows itself alive to the way of all flesh, of change and suspension, puzzle and patterning, the inconsolable and irrepressible urge, the tear and trail of star-fire, the harmony of music in decay, as each fresh note or dazzling silence strikes up new modes, shaking the filmy lattice of space and time to palpability, disjunctions to new junctions jumped in signs shot across the sky, smilingly, the turn of lip in the curl of the wind, begging the untranslatable through flickerings of light, and shooting starts, the wind, incorrigible, throwing clouds across the intermittent whole. A breath taken, in reverent mimicry of the wind’s ritual, stopped my blood short, and struck the clouds from my brain’s firmament, and the sound, the sound of rushing leaves stirring together, time’s waters roaring in my ear, and the veering wind angling upward, that sound, could have urged the stars to fall apart, and let the night’s black mantle fall away, could have been the first breath taken before the last tumultous trumpeting, and I would have welcomed it, as my flesh welcomed it then; then my mind, steady as the moving stars, thrust itself into a smile upon my lips.

2:30 -3:30am 4th Nov ‘10

Thoughts on what I would say if approached by a priest on my deathbed, and asked to repent my lack of faith.

If God would send someone like me to his Hell, I would not want to live in his Heaven.

6th April '09, reading Shelley.

'Going Home'

I feel a pang of the most beautiful sadness - sitting in my rooms in my chair with my pipe and the smoke wreathing out into the room, becoming its own, as I inhale the world as my own, and exhale it back again, kissing farewell to it all through smoke rings, listening to the soft sadness of ‘Ode to a Mountain’ by Melodica, Melody & Me as I should be writing about Milton’s Lucifer and his pitiable descent below even the deepest pity, as the clock clings close to five in the morning, with the snow clinging close to the frozen ground outside - when I think of the man I met in Isla Mujeres. It was with the same sadness, I know, that Kerouac typed out the last sentence of his first novel. ‘I think of Dean Moriarty’. I think of Art. I didn’t quite catch his name, but he smiled when he told it to me, was silent for a while, and returned to his guitar, singing about going home. I know that I will never meet him again, but I hope that I will always remember at least a shadow of that smile, and at least some broken fragments of that song - as he sung I like to think he strung his soul out across the whole world, broadening ever with the breadth of his smile, and promising at least a glimmer of light for us all with the glimmer in his eye, that could drown whole oceans with the half-suggestion of a tear for me, for everyone, and for home. There are crystals in everything, and there is always the unbreakable, unquenchable pain at the heart’s core when one is most nearly alive - cut on such edges we bleed tears. I cannot express it well enough, and will return to my pipe, thinking of Art, or Arty, or whatever he was called, and his music, and his tears, and his smile.

5am 2nd Feb '08

In the words of Jules, 'You've caught me in a transitional period'

I've decided taht 'living is making things in reality, art is making things out of it' with the precursor that reality consists of everything that exists imaginatively (metaphysically) as well as atomically, and that one reads the difference between 'in' and 'out' attentively.
This has only come through pondering for myself exactly why it is that I haven ot written anything, nor have been particularly interested in writing anything, for some while.
The explanation for this must follow that, perhaps for the first time, I am interested in reality, in my place in it, and in what I can do within that, rather than without.

I guess transtional periods are allowed to be unproductive.

2am 18th December

A thought on authorial authority and the stultifying murder of the the author

The death of the author was only necessary when people did not fully understand what it was to be a poet - poets have little authority over their work, and they know this. They are as aware of the impossibility of fixity in words, the impossibility of the relationship between ideas and reality, aware of the unique purpose of poetry as discourse and not definition, as we are now after the purposed execution of authorial authority. Surely this must surely rescind their death warrant.
Milton, perhaps, can stay at the block if we need a scapegoat for centuries of authorial oppression, but i would pardon him too.

3:13pm 21st Nov '08. Reading Peter Conrad's History of English literature.

Note in Swinger's bed after conversation with Ed, Robbie and Charlie ranging metaphysics, freedom, drugs, utilitarianism, ethics etc.

Note - man’s desire to know, Aristotle, explains what happened at the collapse of metaphysics when they rushed to the certainty of physics for another kind of safety - but safety and certainty, although innately desired by man, lead to the entrapment of necessity and restrict freedom (by restricting possibility, imagination, etc). Thus, true autonomous freedom, armed with autonomous reason, exists anxiously wavering between the two lures of physics and metaphysics, and it is our duty to hold that uncertain ground and struggle somehow for free individual happiness where the only necessity is the humanist desire for a happy life.

1:35am 17th August ‘08

Dare

So here we are - and here I am, again. I will try for once to write things as they are, in prose - (although I must admit that all this is iambic…) O.K.
Yes, there is something of a comforting lull in the return, I hardly noticed it at first, with all the rush and grinning and unpacking and show, but as I lay outside lulled in Shelley I felt and smelt and heard the lulling return of the returning waves, and I think I am turned or lulled into the mind or heart of Swinburne, and his great sweet mother, the sea.
Truth or Dare - CJ chose dare and dared me go skinny-dipping the sea, now, in the rain, and wind, and mist, and fucking cold. I did a showy groan and trudged outside - but then bang when I was alone I grabbed a towel and ran, bouncing lithe and gawkward over the gravel road, bounded down to the shore, over the shingle, (slowed over the green hard slippery seaweed), tore off my clothes (except for my fetching red boxers) and charged dancing into the charging waves. It was cold, and piercingly real.
First swim - ‘mix with me’…’wrought without hand in a world without stain’ - although truth be told the water was murky with storm torn sand and sea-stuff. Then they fattened (?) and I had to rip off my boxers…fucking cold…fun.
These moments may not be elation, or rapture, but out here at the land’s edge, where the old elements clash in gay and yet quietly eternal and sombre opposition, melding, facing, an intersection of vasts to set the heart beating, and all that…here, such moments are fit to be remembered because fit to be felt, and because I got up and did something, shook off my groggy hangover and shocked out my malaise, and now bedded and warm I smile still with the fire of white water lightning light of mind and heart swelling and rushing in the undercurrent eddies of my blood and being. I’ll remember it.
Thank you.

Ireland
(early) afternoon (3pm?) - 24th June ‘08

I am born. Again.

(end of term, night, lone)

Blew a last blast harmonica cry out my window, it rung a bright and throbbing echo through the benighted meadow quad like love throbs light in the mind and in the womb.
Wooooooooomb.
I am born. Again.
So it is summer, I am free - loosed - disengaged - breathe in, breathe out…and I breathe light as swallows catch and veer in the sun’s rising rays - freeing the echo that has throbbed, for throbbing hour upon echoing wombed throbbing hour, within me, casting careful and dear echoes outward into sound and light, so I shall seek, and catch, and veer, and join the swallows, with my dearest kin.

2:35am 16 June ‘08

I don't know...

I don’t and probably cannot believe in anything any more - this is the relative age, we are too clever now, and nothing is definite; perhaps this is liberating, indeed this is liberating! It is liberating, though, in the way that to be out on a cold lonely wasteland, with no roads, with only the liberated choice to go in any direction you like, to nowhere, is liberating. ‘Man desires to know’ (Aristotle - Metaphysics) - no truer thing has ever been said. Though ‘to know’ one thing is to deny another thing of equally provable potential, will you then deny man’s desire ‘to know’ at all? The second truest thing ever said is that ‘A man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all’ (Oscar Wilde). We see every side of the question, and can believe in nothing. It is liberating, it is cold, it is pointless. Perhaps I am being over bleak - all this is only cold and pointless in the abstracted planes of thought, where the wastelands really are - this world, though, is pleasant, and we are liberated here in a genuine and congenial way. It is true. We are able to seek pleasure freely, able to interpret experience freely, as we should. But it is a subtle agony always to know that the interpretations out of which you may strive to build your life will always crumble in your grasp, eaten through as our poor beleaguered metaphysic is with the dreadful - and yet how liberating! - worm of doubt, of relativism.
I do not even know any more. I don’t know - but damn it I’ll try.

3:49am 30th May ‘08

Right now

I need to be close to someone. Damn. Intensely lonely...i cannot even say exquisitely lonely any more, for there is little relish in this...

1:40am 2nd May '08

Art

Art is the saving symbol and monument of form in a formless reality.

6:18pm 6th April '08

I told this to dad, he said it was absurd to say that reality was formless.
I said it was exactly absurd, which is why it was true.

7pm 6th April '08

Stream 18 - A Philosophy of Ideas.

Everything is unlimited and infinitely complex until a man speaks of it - the words we use to try to explain the inexplicable (which is everything) are always futile; however, that is our business, to find an idea - which is merely a limiting filtration of the infinite universe - of the most value, and of the least untruth. We must disillusion ourselves first, and then carefully and cleverly create our own illusion, suspending our disbelief. It may be that we must demolish these castles we construct in the air a thousand thousand times before we may create one that we think it not insulting to our integrity to dwell in.

3:50 pm 16th February ‘08

Stream 17 - Music

I am nothing I am nothing I am nothing I am nothing. I can be anything I want to be, and consequently I am nothing. I do like music though, and sometimes I close my eyes grow to feeling full, given over to the tides of beauty, its ebb and flow. I can live by that, rolling in the surf.

10:50am 12 February ‘08

Stream 16 - Lethe and beyond.

Response to a girl’s translation of Baudelaire’s poem about ‘Lethe’ and her conclusion that
‘I don't even have any lethe right now... oh well, I shall look at the world with bored poet's eyes and not care, for nothing can affect me anymore’

3:06pm Feb 9th ‘08 -->
everyone must cross the lethe in the end.
really good poem - it's very like that 'laissez moi respirer longtemps longtemps l'odeur de tes cheveux etc' one.
---
8:17pm 9th Feb ‘08
oh and the bored icy melancholia is the symptom of being free by dint of having nothing to lose - it is an attainment of total self mastery, having nothing to care about - some people try to be like icarus, (or stephen dedalus in joyce's portrait of the artsit as a young man), aesthetically free and dwell in the rarefied atmospheres of their own mind without being moved by any exterior essences, but gravity always wins (in the words of thom yorke) just like reality always wins and people's mind will always plunge down into the sea, and that sensory storm called life, and be moved, so i suppose enjoy your flight while you can, everyone's wings melt, and waxing lyrical you will plunge into reality and, if you can, which is the tricky business of real life, you will do it well and be happy and find something to care about, which tenders us towards the other end of the scale from freedom to surrender - for like religious faith or total love, these are the opposites of freedom, where you give yourself up and choose to be moved by the forces of the world, by your own emotions or by those of another, rather than to move freely in spite of the actualities of existence, and to work an icy mastery over yourself. There you have the ideals to which people tend, either freedom or surrender, both are unattainable, because in between those to polar ends is that little thing, which will always reassert itself, reassuringly, frustratingly, called reality.
of course that probably doesn't help but that's what i think about stuff at the moment...of course it's only a philosophical model which can never be true, it can only help us to trick ourselves into thinking that we can understand, but of course the world will always exceed the embrace of the words we use to comprehend it.
drink up, i say.
x

Stream 15 - Light, Night and Images

Ah now yes here I could have such images in the unseen rush towards midnight even in the night such bright images even in the light such dark visions what need for electricity we have our own binary minds yes on off switch and there’s a language of our own see here now gothic dark spider webbed spiny carriage rattling along over uneven cobbles and the whole thing like bats wings sneaking through streets toward exquisite murder or pain or pleasure some orgiastic opium den what was is priapic yes maybe anyway that’s one image maybe another some glint in the distance yes now it rushes or I rush towards that bright valley sweeping through stone capped mountains and studded with gems of light yes the whole glorious bowl a crown of glory anointing this world and there some fellow on his horse all glinted and armed and armoured and breathing beneath the hung metal of his suit there’s flesh there and a torsion and a feeling of feeling a feeling of lightness and freedom and a smile upon his lips and the air flashing all around under the hung branches with catkins all around and some wonderful image of a woman on the banks of a hidden lake or pool hahh there you have images I suppose and yet here’s an ordinary sight yes there you are hung lamp slunk with your sixty watt bulb yes sixty watt max max and no more my friend I’m sorry but you will never blaze with light, although you play your part

Midnight 1st-2nd February ‘08

Stream 14 - Freedom Scale and Squirrel Dance

So so last night yes what a moment lying there totally abstracted and I just drifted off in my mind all time and space rejected and well Icarian hah come on sammy you jest no no I don’t yes I’m afraid you I do I didn’t drift but I was there predominantly in my mind and discussed or rather spoke spoke on on about some new aesthetic philosophy and things, that living for us must be conducted in a conscious, skilful and painfully frustrating choice between the two poles, freedom, where your self is the most important thing, yes you reject everything around you and refuse to be moved even by your own emotions and certainly not by those of others and obviously you reject time and society and all other prescriptions I mean anyone with half a mind knows you must reject them at birth (although there is a skill and subtle reason to reassume them on one’s own ground) and so yes that’s freedom it’s cold abstracted and its icarus rising rising into the more and more rarefied strata where air dissipates and you rise even above that and you reject perhaps even your own body and self and so there at the height of that you break free from gravity, which is reality, and find yourself, burned up in brilliance, as a sentient and triumphant essence in space, that is the ultimate tangent of freedom, and it must be ecstatic - and yet unattainable, for as sure as icarus burned up and plunged back into the seas of reality just so we cannot really escape this world and this life in which we are born and to which perhaps, sadly, we must defer to be moved by its forces - but there may be no harm perhaps is striving skyward and to master or reject the world and the self…it’s lonely up there though, yes…and at the other end of this scale is total surrender, glorious, it is faith it is love, it is to plunge willingly and to drown in the sea of life and diffuse yourself to the fishes and tides, yes you see faith and love require surrender I know that, but I can never know surrender, sad sad burning triumphant cold lonely and sad, and all my own making haha what larks, nonetheless you see total faith and surrender and acceptance of the world and deference to its moving forces is also unattainable because you will always have your mind and spirit and body and a will that desires not to be diffused, as shelley said yes yes from the moment we are born there is a something in us at odds with nothingness and dissipation, so there you go and you see living as a sliding scale on the one end freedom and on the other surrender - so what, and this is the question for us, so what is in the middle? Well that is life, yes that is life and the skill in living comes in choosing on ones own autonomous ground where you shall settle on the scale between freedom and surrender to the forces of life you see and I think this is important even the most abstracted free aesthetes need something real and need some other heart to beat by theirs even if it is only to compare the undeniable beating of their own, and perhaps a middle way, despicable to the binary mind, is what we must seek, that is the subtlety and the skill and the pain of living, and it’s a game I suppose, hah, what errant storm petrels we straining between earth and heaven.

5:30pm 1st February ‘08

So yes there you are - I think it explains things. Anyway I went out today woke up so late and went out afoot with a vision wrapped in my tablerug cloak feeling like I could fly yes like I remember childhood and all those dreams of flight hah what times mmm, anyway so I went down to the meadows and there was a fine sunset and the cold hanging in the air and a few joggers crunching up and down on the gravel but mostly there was me and so I went strolling down the lane and I remember some tree with beautiful baubles on like some Chinese castle festooned with stellar lamps anyway that was beautiful and so went on on to this lovely spot where I’ve sat before, all ivied crackling trees and crunching dead leaves stirring with spring even on this first day of February and the whole thing an abode of squirrels yet in the middle some serpentine concrete block which I felt as an agent of a concrete world I would sit on and read so as not to disturb this natural squirrel world but they were whirling around all about like children it was wonderful to watch they are so agile and move in bounds more graceful and free than the joggers who were moving in to a wider gyre around my mind they are the slaves of gravity poor people yes gravity always wins but there I was amongst these flying free squirrels and read my Icarian stephen essay and was amused and then read some doors of perception which was fascinating and I resolved to spend much of my life on mescaline but no yet anyway because I saw the squirrels dancing around this bursting crop of crocuses and that was fine fine no need to wrack my brains to see that and to see the beauty, although it was interesting that Huxley had the same idea about life as I did about joyce’s portrait, all the necessary rejections of everything for an aesthetic free perception and again my mind soared as once in childhood dreams up to the heights of abstraction what a wonderful world abstraction anyway I think these thoughts and images will wing me through the next few months beautifully haha I love that eliot I am moved by fancies that are curled around these images and cling the notion of some infinitely gentle infinitely suffering thing, yeah why not so so there I was and walked back wrapped in the same cloak and saw all around the promise of those green driving spear thrusts of spring flowers, ah there’s something so crisp in them so new and fresh so ready to be crushed but even then there’s a relish in it all bedabbled with dew and fresh fresh fine wonderful laughter and so I passed on out of the cold spring sunset and under the eaves and up the stairs and into my room where I found, warming my hands to the task, that the raggle taggle gypsies were playing.

5:40pm Jan 1st ‘08

Stream 13 - Icarus and the Storm Petrel

Ah breath swallow swallow that wonderful billow buffeted brawl of air yeah out my window what a morning and noone awake or is it still yesterday I have not slept I do not know I only know the image of icarus rising rising rising straining to perfection that is the symbol there it is and you know your mind which perceives the flight and the rise and the strain and the touch almost that is a totally different world to your mind which can understand the burning and the fall and the disappointment and the fall and plunge and the sigh there you have it on the one side of the universe an inhalation on the other an exhalation it is always there expectation and disappointment desire and disappointment ideal and reality up and down like the sea and the wings and there somewhere in the wreathing writhing squall there are storm petrels now fighting for their lives and going at it hard

7:58 31 Jan ‘08

Stream 12 - Souldered

Ha ha I see in my mind the word soul is soldered to the word sold like sould I always type it hah sould what larks.
Ah, that it might be soldered to the sol, on feather flight, and I might wax lyrical and melt plunging into the plunging sea of life.

4:07pm 29 January 2008

Stream 11 - Death

Ahahaha well here I am again and after a funeral together wholly humbled and humiliated by paz calling me about the pronunciation of demesne which I now discover has nothing to do with demeanour but more domain which is extremely upsetting but anyway swallow swallow oh chelidon etc how beautiful here I am anyway back and Lydia was so lovely and people are so kind the wholly funeral affair was made beautiful and wonderful and celebration by my amazing father whose eulogy was really eu and this wonderful image of him dancing out onto hamstead heath all tribal and naked and drummed and spear shotten and excellent you see he really is one of this nationals unrealised heroes recognised but not realised you see anyway here I am and rather coursing drunk but fine really I have such love for so many and not swaying about the place but calm and considered like Odysseus you know with rage rage against the dying pent up pent in the pen of sheepskin heart and manskin all what the hell am I talking about but you know anyway I know so there you are here is the lamp all downturned and solemn as if even his inert atoms mourned that which I can celebrate but no he is there and existing and that is celebration enough anyway here is about to toll midnight and the next day you see today at the funeral moving my eyes from the pro patria cross to the leaving hearse I saw in that wake a wonderful symbol of a child’s pram being pushed across the stones which the dead cart had just crossed, you see there dust and dawn interposed and there you have it and I saw that in the hymns and minds of men and the hearts and sayings and the nerves and in the very vacancies of synaptic nexons etc etc there was that symbol that keeps the whole thing buzzing the fact that dawn will follow dusk yes that the sun will rise and even if that is a co-incidence of atomic vagaries and random coalitions it may still mean something in the short space between the retina of my dark and yearning eye and the pulsing caverns of my heavy brain
Tom tom tom tom beat beat the animal inside yet nonetheless I can make better music out of scores unknown to the rocks and vacant stars, yes yes, you see yes one day you may understand the value of the truthful lie ha ha keep up ha

Midnight of Monday-Tuesday 28th-29th January 2008

Stream 10

It’s funny how the sky flashed with setting sun or rather lashed to blushing kissed like yes can please and bring a smile even to the most wasted lives and here I am in my room rearranged and cleaned with records playing off beautiful old folk and grumbling in the vinyl and all of it itching with her love ah well I suppose I should go and finish the job clean my clothes what a funny night last night me and becky burst into song singing harmonic and beautiful and I just lay with my eyes closed singing out my youth to the room hah what the fuck they must think me so odd oh well I am amongst friends they can take it

5:10pm 26th Jan '08

Stream 9

Ah ah I missed a day ah yes welll here I am the birdsong and chewing teeth chewing toast and I reeling about whacked among the stones with my bones slinking slunking on to the proof of their symbol and I suppose until then it’s for me to assert my symbol to find my face in the stars yes well we understand that the human game is to join the dots and constellations oh constellations that mean incessantly and mean good that mean the childhood and good and youth and yet are vacant interstellar masses in vacant interstellar spaces as I said merely gaseous masses drifting through inconceivable and indifferent vastness yes yes vastness yes well I suppose that’s all well but I hear munching toast and wondering whether my love or not my love depending on my atoms is asleep well here yes now yes here now yes yes I hear the birdsong and the birds singing and ringing through this bowl of brilliance even in the dark echoes and re-echoes around even in the dark they sing sing on and invite me even though I may choose to perceive the agony of dual perception and the pain of rock in existing between two layers two planes anyway as I was saying the birdsong sings signs wings but then again maybe yes maybe there indeed it actually yes has stopped, well well sad sad I suppose it is not the dawn quite yet so here you are and I will sleep but yes till I do not doubt or I do not cease to hope and feel, thrashing like a fish out of water upstream I do tend and continue to feel that there is some spring, or at least I’d like to reach the more beautiful waterfalls, led always by the touch and kiss of the rainbows…

4am 25th Jan 08

Stream 8 - Ball

Stream 8 - Ball

Ok yeah so got to write got to start to write an essay on silas marner it’s going to be great funny how all the essays end up arguing the same thing is that me or them I don’t know anyway had the most excellent idea for a game its not called football or basketball or anything it’s taken from a conversation sprung from some guy’s jacket that said korfball and that apparently was basketball and netball combined by Dutchmen to no particular effect anyway so I thought why done you just have a game called ball. Amazing, just think of it, it would be like two teams of ten an amphitheatre and a ball. No rules. No objective. Say Half and Hour for each Half, or maybe several weeks whatever. What a wonderfully existential game that would be I mean seriously it would be hilarious and fascinating you could select the people it would be like having a little life in miniature, so confusing for the people just cast into the arena with no initiation before baying crows and there’s this ball in the middle and this other team and then they’ve got their team mates who they barely know and you just say right, play, live, you know, and they make it up as they go along, and the brilliant thing is you would then be able to see how life develops, obviously they’d be tainted or affected by their previous lives in how they dealt momentarily with that little one but on the whole you’d hope to perceive how rules get made and how an aim would rise out of aimlessness, because people need that they’d get bored, so funny, just like morals and god. Fun.

7:30pm 23rd January '08

To Alex

A Message to Alex

Hey hope these work. The In Memoriam one 'From Faith Through Doubt to Hope' is alright, i just totally got involved in the text because all that religious doubt and despair stuff is what fascinates me more than anything. The metaphysical possibilities in a world where God is Dead...in my view metaphysics is the human desire to declare that what is in fact just an assembly of atoms is a stone, or an assembly of words a poem, or a random appearance of stars Orion, or a conglomeration of people a society or anything - it's what people do, metaphysics is what separates humans from animals in my opinion, the ability to create ideas, notions, and from those to create whole faiths and beliefs out of what we now know are just a random lot of atoms held together by molecular bonds. My mini crusade (which i'm working on) is to point out to people that ever since the beginning of the 19th century the authority of metaphysics, the highest seat of which was god, is being deteriorated. This started off as a great thing, it meant that people who objected to being indoctrinated into a specific metaphysical belief system were free to reinvent their own beliefs and ideas from the world which they saw around them - this was made possible by the youthful energy and free spirit of the romantics amongst other things. Tennyson and people like him reacted to the death of god with an appeal to metaphysics and faith that many found annoying and retrogressive, in many ways they were right the progress was in breaking up authority - great. But Tennyson had a point, which you shall see if you read the essay (and understand the basis of the philosophy i'm explaining on which the essay was based, i think, although i've developed it a lot since then). Anyway then the 19th century hurtles on towards the increased freedom of individuals and the rise of relativism with everyone creating their own metaphysical notions and beliefs - towards the turn of the century you can see this in Oscar Wilde's Aesthetic philosophy, which i wrote an essay about if you'd like to read it (but read The Picture of Dorian Gray First). In many ways this is liberating but Dorian Gray is an example of how this can fail disastrously. Middlemarch also shows us characters who have a sense of ambition and desire to arbitrate their own lives although they live in a frustrating and restrictive society that tries to assimilate them to their own mode of provincial beleifs - the book is a subtle and engenious exploration of the dynamic progresses of their egos as their ambitions are thwarted from without, by the imperfectness of the society around them through which some try to develop, and from within, by the pettiness of their selfish egos. Eliot is showing us that there is something profoundly dangerous that the freedom which comes from the death of god and the rise of relativism and individual freedom entails - but of course she sees the beauty and excellence and neccesity of that freedom too. (see paradise lost, the book is all about the essense of a life, whether it is better to life a life of freedom which is YOURS where you will feel misery and joy side by side, or to give your life in obedience to a law so that you will be blissfully happy but not really know it for lack of comparison, and hence all your happiness will not be YOUR happiness at all...yeah but i still don't know whether milton knew what he was suggesting in the last lines of the poem (read them). ask mrs KD for my milton essays, they are wierd) Anyway Eliot is all for freedom and the individual developement of characters and one's ideas after the demolition of religious (and social) authority that used to rule and control the ideas and developments of individuals, but she stresses the absolutely imperative neccessity of a feeling of community, of sympathy, and an understanding that best christian teachings do not have to be thrown away just because you have cast off the authority that used to enforce them...basically she's all about secular humanism and stuff i don't know the term for it but it is the only chance for humanity. Seriously people should just read books it would solve all the problems of the world. Anyway so despite Eliot's sympathetic appeal (which i hope you might see is a profoundly metaphysical one that urges people to note that just because there is no power that ordains it any more, that does not mean that it is neccessary to stop seeing the gatherings of little humans in towns and cities on the earth as a society of people living together with their differing desires and interpretations which require imagination and sympathy in order not to descend into moral chaos, you see?) despite this the metaphysical destruction continues, you get nietzsche who is crazy but brilliant, so right in many ways but so amoral that the implications of the truths he espouses are disastrous for society (see WWII, Nietzsche inspired hitler...) because he, like Oscar Wilde, rejects morals (on account of their metaphysical restraints amongst other things). Anyway moving on you can see then how science conquers all in the 20th century and that is the ultimate blow to metaphysics, as it can counter it with the pure facts of physics any day, that is if you place the ultimate seal of your approval on the value of fact, but then you might as well say it is a lie to call a poem a poem it is just an assembly of words and not even that they are an assembly of letters which are themselves an assembly of atoms, just so a society is not a society they're just people and they're just atoms anyway, of course the idea of teaching kids that 'those stars up there' mean Orion is probably the first thing to go (which makes me very sad for some reason, there's a wonderful bit in In Memoriam and/or Maud where tennyson speaks of 'Orion low in his grave', i think he prophesied the death of metaphysics...remarkable) and anyway so you see yeah how the desire to destroy an overarching prescribed metaphysical interpretation of the world such as Christianity or a restrictive set of social morals or all those things that people rightly hated and were frustrated by in the early 19th century, has progressed to a steady destruction of metaphysics altogether, at first all in the name of human freedom to arbitrate one's own metaphysical interpretation, but then ah SCIENCE get's hold of the progress away from metaphysics and the whole thing is done and what you actually have now, where you will be contradicted if you yearn to say that 'no those stars do actually mean something do me, yeah they symbolise this or that', (and perhaps one day, although of course i know it is insane to say so but it is worth at least imagining the most extreme extents of the philosophical dynamic you will be thought to be deceiving yourself against the facts of science if you say, 'this group of people are my friends they are not just a group of atoms' etc etc or even 'this is a rock, not just atoms', or even 'i am a human being, not just atoms') to repeat, what we have now, or will shortly have, is slavery to reality. So you see the whole progression i have explained, intended to free people from the yolk of a restrictive and imposed metaphysical interpretation of the world, has in fact just led to the other end of the spectrum where you are a slave to reality. It is the ultimate horror in my view. That is what tennyson is about, and me - imaginative appeal, the human right and the human need for metaphysics, and for individual freedom also, yeah. Ah but it probably can't work. anyway hope this random outburst doesn't freak you out it was quite good for me to be able to try to explain the thoughts i've been developing over the last few months. If any of this doesn't make sense let me know because i'm serious about this it's important for me to get this right - hah, anyway yeah if you're interested in any of the stuff about George Eliot or Oscar Wilde i've got fucking good essays on those two so let me know.
Cool, and be brave
when and where is this pinter thing?
Sammy

Stream 7

You find your jaw’s clenched tighter on your teeth with the weight of your head on your knee, yes, and the lamp’s still here but it just looks tired maybe I can take that with me everywhere like my permanent objective correlative companion, not great conversation though and would require power for comment - hum ate lots of toast today what significance Is there in that but I suppose also necessary for eating I wonder if you could survive by eating books? Hum not really thinking much at the moment reading silas marner and the doors of perception, the former dull in truth and the latter beautiful in what I suspect are sadly lies yeah it made me think though imagine if Kingston for a bitter brilliance of vision and hard endurance and Harvey for broad and incisive thought and cj for heroic feats of the mind and body and excellence of character and fender for wild insight and an invincible liver and mind and rowse for pure genius and human perfection and maybe minoo to bear the blades of irony and paz to carry the fires of the heart and yes and thaw the icy blindness of the world and maybe becky to open the door to heaven and hell all in her crazy head and her singing and maybe gins for sense and sensibility and a reminder of a good simple soul and maybe hektor for a sarcastic angle and a smiling dream and my little brother on a leash for pure power and the unstoppable roar of the next generation and I carrying the weight of the wings of the perfect ideal just left off school broke the windows and soared into the open air and wilds of the world we would wow we would be such a force wow for powowowerful powerful force for brilliance and excellent joy and genius, and we’d dash about pondering and smashing and smiting and thwarting and confounding and surrounding and resounding and expounding life in every article to the confused villages of the world and when our dust settles hah they’ll be like what the fuck was that and get on with their grubbing wastes of time hah but we’d ring the world a thousand times and the dawn would rise on every place where we had just flashed joy and love and brilliance into the night before and the dawn would rise and find us gone and the dawn would rise and find a wake a fresh cool dew of joyful tears which would bless the soil and sink in - ah yes what the earth needs is a fresh rain of joyful tears.

Stream 6 - Flash! Da. Dance.

Did you hear that da wow da ha ha I wonder how many people were reading the waste land in the rain when THAT happened good lord yeah I remember I was going to write a poem about the god in lightning yeah think about that god is lightning I said to almost a year ago wow joe look at that we were so wasted out in my garden with the rain all around and columns of electric light and power were bursting and blasting all around and I thought yeah I though that’s the closest you’re ever going to get to god yeah wow what would I give to be struck by lightning oh the life you would careen through in that second of absolute perfect destruction, wow da hah, yeah well it’s just electricity, but the rain is the rain is the rain is so fantastically wet. But really yeah, rain is all swelling and swishing about I love the way it falls, it’s not just here it has to come all the way down down down from breaking skies and thunder and swirl through the air oh my what a sound again da blasting and blitzing the atoms of the air yeah the atoms fused in that smashing moment of powerful meaning that’s what I like to think, but I suppose it’s just a diffusion of positive to negative energy, levelling the contours of the world, though it may make my metaphysic spirit leap
___

I forget, my grandmother died peacefully this morning I am sad for my father he is the last now, but then comes the rain and the thunder and the speaking skies you might think them twins these events mocking one another in a strange slow dance, moving thighs and I was reading all the time about George Eliot who I know now is a woman and all the wonderful thoughts and hopes she had and that heart and her ‘unusually strong sympathetic imaginative appeal’ or something and yeah that is all you need, so I’ll appeal sympathetically in my imagination to the ghost of my grandmother peggy yes I can conjure her up even in appeal like an invocation asking the atoms of the world if they might fuse just for me, yes there you go - dance dance together all it takes to make a meaning in the world is to set the atoms and the stones and pebbles and beaches and stars and hearts heads and feet dancing in an accord and moving around the same point if only for a moment then you have meaning so I’ll see the world for a second dancing to the tune of a peaceful death, yes that will do that will do - it is sad though I hope my father can find comfort undeceived, it is so hard these days, and we are so truthful and candid white, we get by
___

And still it rains

When the baby’s born oh let’s turn it to the snow
So that ice will surely grow over weak and brittle bones
Oh let’s leave it to the wolves
So their teeth turn it to food
Oh it’s flesh keeps them alive
Oh as death helps life survive
Oh the world can be kind in its own way.
Oh well your future’s a machine with the mechanics of a dream
It is your mind that spins the wheel and your heart that makes you feel
All the guilt for all your sins oh and as the wheels spins
Oh well it plays as they believe and for your husband you have grieved
Oh the world still deceives you as it turns
Oh in my lucid moments I can see
That the heart may be the weakest part of me
Oh and the moon controls the movements of the tides
Oh but it has no weight on the movements of my mind
But if you turn your hand to flames oh the light will burn the same
Whether you just pass it through or if its what you meant to do
Oh and you sense of culpability
Is from the gods that you believed will show you grace, oh when you turn to lace,
Oh but now the love you’ve found has laid you in the muddy ground
Oh but death will let you down because your cursed
You still go on the same
Oh my god what a beautiful intelligent flowing heart of a song, that is utterly fantastic - I suppose I shall tell them, how wonderful even though here there’s torn paper and a black bit and the record’s still going pumputididuw over and over and over but now its stopped and maybe it mocks the beauty of the sound that now has passed its echoes are louder than those of men yes perhaps but still in my heart and mind the song rings on yes yes ring in the new, blue blue boundless blue of my truth and fair colour, you have my heart forever in ashes or sunk to the whirlpool and the fish shall lick me and there you have another song that will echo on in the sunken silent chambers of the sea , oh Ireland and the staka beans, sing to me across the aching sea, sing sing across the twisted yelping seas, bring me beauty and bring me tears, bring me gorse and heather pain of my flesh and wine of my blood oh yes Ireland and my island yes that feathered isle yes I’ll be with you in you on you and all about you when the summer is upon us, pending sun pending the spring’s approach, and with such a soft approach of stellar wind of youth and life can spring be far behind?

1am 21 January 2008

Stream 4

Sound sound your instruments of joy yes yes here I am with something of a buzz in my head and the light is glowing sort of all around but as I said the walls are still here ho ho I’m set free as the velvet underground would blurb, anyway yeah good morning I really should be writing an essay but perhaps it would be better just to spray all about even though I’m sitting here with a milk carton just slouching by my elbow and it’s not even the one with a history with which we concealed a sausage no no it’s ordinary frightfully ordinary like most things but it can give pleasure of a sort anyway got loads of joy joy hm the lamp’s turned its head low not really wanted any more…there you go I can see your face again, and what is a spoon doing there a spoon in june, spooning the moon, hoom hoom. Talking to people is so lovely. Ah the voices and the tramping on the gravel outside in that wonderful cradle of brilliance between the meadows and old library they’re like sirens or maybe they are sirens but I suppose I am no odysseus no I’m just sitting here wasting time, but cheery hah. Perhaps if I think of heaven close my eyes yes there it is all white and lovely with rainbow pearl and clouds with golden fringes golden fire fretted and excellent and high but here and peopled with those things yeah angels I mean maybe you can hate the hierarchy of heaven but my god he thought of an angel is so utterly wonderful I don’t see any reason why we can’t aspire to be angels just like that hero Lucifer aspired to be a god, hm guess we’ll be splatted for it, yeah, anyway yes those pearling pearly towers glimmering and glowing of their own marbling wonderful hard soft ethereal surety. Funny that they don’t exist its sad I suppose I can’t understand the triumph and satisfaction scientists get out of crushing religious people they are really shooting themselves in the foot, sort of. Ah compassion for all the silly peoples of the world, especially the successful, who are generally low. Come on now turn turn your thoughts to hell which is not here people who say this is hell on earth are so very wrong and havn’t got any imagination or perhaps I’ve been living in limbo all my life anyway enough of that hell hell yes good bad god what a place and fire and torment and all those words that people use but the inexplicable horror of pain so broad and sharp and whole and everlasting that you could almost think it glorious like that poem I wrote you know sprawling on a spike in hell I could have such thoughts and dreams are made of well yeah I meant it but here here here what I said here is alright it’s better than alright at times it can be utterly wonderlic but here I go interceding all the time. What errant heroes we crawling between earth and heaven on a hilarious sliding scale ha ha I love slides, swing and roundabouts are fun.

Stream 3

Wow what a night what a morning I mean I am changed am I changed? I thin I don’t know I’m still here and the carpet is still a strange colour of dark dark red and sinister lines all crossed about and the table and walls and stuff and lamp is still here but I think that doesn’t matter because I am changed even if a little bit perhaps you might say the armour of my unassailably intellectual self has been pierced I said to her it felt like I had been stabbed in the heart rather like that Saint Theresa stuff but then again may I am there same here I go again all literary and referential when yeah anyway last night I cried and she kissed my tears and I seared that symbol into my skin and brain because wow I mean seriously if that’s not surface and symbol then what is yeah hah look you this excellent o’erhanging firmament I mean to say look you there is my little red book that I will burn if I smoke hah it’s my story about how great and all poetic I am yeah hah don’t know or really care any more if it moves people again as I said I am moved - somewhat worried though last night I did all Maud and we have proved we have hearts in a cause but I am stronger than that I will find a cause through my self oh well who knows its all so fucking confusing hah but I’m enjoying it yes you see I really really yes am enjoying it in the most lovely and tear cut way and I say tear cut by way of artistry that doesn’t really mean anything I see I’m not being as affable as before or maybe more I don’t really know yah I say again I don’t really know and that’s probably the most of it. Just downed a cup of tea how funny perhaps I can see and stare at that proud cockerel glaring at me with his beady china eyes you see he’s not really glaring at me he’s made of paint ingrained into the glazed mug but he looks as real to me as I do to myself and so why not why not he’s staring at me straight in my eye, although perhaps its because I just downed all the warm warm lovely tea from his mug and he’s cold there I’ll full him up with hot water look ha ha compassion even for a painted cockerel now you twerp sammy. Well at least I’m not being a melodramatic poser any more just gibbering along like the rest. I find my mind less worthy than before or of less worth but I think that it is my heart which thaws, I’ll go talk to cj or someone they are all such good people yes in truth I am very fortunate very lucky to be here and alive even if there’s no empire to overthrow or great castle in the mists and even if the dawn is not rosy fingered and Helen is dead and never perhaps existed and ikarus maybe was a total twat I don’t know but I can smile at that cockerel standing there proud on his little patch of painted ground even though it fades into cooling whiteness his colours stand proud and stark against the surrounding white curved emptiness of the earthmug, that’s his little world, he his, I mine, and there you go there we go here we go up up looking up always I suppose don’t forget you’re fucking astoundingly clever don’t lose that yeah…
5pm 19th January 2008

Tears - Stream 2

O God God how weary stale flat etc the world was to me only an hour ago as I cast my mind willing unwilling at careless canvas, corpse-content…but now ah I write in ears and all the lines of yearning have cut themselves salt-crystals yes I cried thinking of Ireland and my childhood and the slop, the stones and stony beaches and the air, that winding road and brakeless bicycles, swaying long grass sun-blushed and that island that was always my symbol and my heart though I never quite felt why…yes I am moved I am moved around these images and moved to tears in the inexplicable freshness of pain purging the crowded hall of my chattering gibbering selves, God! I heard her call my name in my whispering ear I seem to hear it even now, it was the first flash. Such love pouring pouring a waterfall on the rocks of the earth but the flowing tears dropped on me I grasped the key she asked me of Ireland and my mother and I broke and shook only in an instant and felt the keen taste of tears in my eyes. It was like magic her thundering love spoke I spoke of all the joys and loves and losses of my smiling youth full of joy.
You may see my going now by a trail of crystal tears.

5:30 am 19th January 2008

Stream 1

I am not sparking or lightning light of mind at the moment, I’ll just splurge onto this page like rage rage onto the canvas though it’s a strain such a strain but no no pause I suppose I’ll just do it yes what am I talking about there’s people outside talking all chat and walking and skuffin pebbles and I’m in here taking about what they’re doing and becky’s just gone and told me to write my life story but I can’t write what I have been doing if I havn’t got the slightest clue care or inclination about what I am doing but to be fair as I glance at what I’m actually thinking I wonder if I am actually thinking or feeling or believing these things because I see that I just invent positions angles ideas emotions even whole characters and selves for fun for lack of anything else to do for lack of desire or direction I suppose its all down to expectations like I expect so fucking much from life but havn’t got the energy to take it or don’t really know what it is I’m supposed to lay hold of or maybe its yes its because what I expect and desire and want so very very much doesn’t exist any more so I’m reduced to reading about people for whom such wants were not a fantasy or desire, not I’m just sitting here basically not alive except for my fingers spraying all over the place and not to anyone particular benefit or even detriment I suppose I should learn to expect less I suppose oh fuck I suppose i probably will which will be even worse. God look at the dreadfully average stance and planar level of these thoughts they are stuck to this dreadful average world made of lamps tables chairs walls ceilings walls floors walls and doors and windows but more walls than doors or windows you see even as I try to see this world I’m always symbolising everything and it should be wonderful except that my metaphicical capacity has a morbid bent I don’t know maybe I’m tired, I know if I was in Ireland I’d be happy and my mind would leap and latch onto the sea and stones and green and I’d see the elements which I can understand and things wouldn’t be so complicated and yet so unimportant yeah I’d like a world where everything is simple and absolutely crucial, but here‘s a labyrinth without there actually being one maybe if I just laid down in a corner I could become content with the cracks and the meagre rations and the stagnant air and just wait for the beast to come to me. Sigh sigh groan and stuff I didn’t really sigh or groan I’m inventing postures because I’m lying supine on the world and wrapped round its dull curvature that just proves that however far you go you’ll eventually get back to the same place, though maybe eliot was right and that’s the journey you know to arrive at the place you started and to know it for the first time but then what hah the whole thing is utterly impossible as ladislaw said and he half knew he half felt what he was talking about and I less than half know and do not feel anything oh god I want to want so much and one day I’ll just stop thrashing around in the mists of the past for some castle that’s already sunken into the mists and lay down and stop wanting to want and lie there fireless and average like Walcott said and things will be simple and the mists will clear away and I’ll see this city and the people as the atoms they are and I won’t be a person any more I’ll be a sensory animal driven from distraction to distraction by distraction again as eliot said I mean fucking hell even trying to think about the simplest things I go to eliot because I don’t have any real thoughts of my own but then again who has oh yes girls yes they do because they feel stuff maybe that’s it maybe I should have a look for emotions but they are sensory and I don’t feel very much even in the physical self I can see what self harm people are about I suppose it’s not about attention at all but noone will understand them just as everyone will see right through me, oh well I don’t suppose I’m really that unhappy here we go yeah there was jd what was I saying oh yes I don’t suppose I’m really that unhappy I’m just inventing it to try and stimulate some sort of pain like a feeling even an intellectually invented one but it wont work ha ha I feel like tantalus yes I like him very much and ikarus will always be my hero and paris is damn cool you see I was brought up to want to be these people, obviously they never said so but when you looked at the fucking idiots you were learning with that were more interested in their lives and the desks and classes and cars and streets and other people and their families and moneys and draff like that and didn’t care about ikarus I mean that is the most tragic thing in the world and no one cared like the musee des beaux arts and even that I can’t lay hold of because paz showed me that poem. Yeah I remember the poem I wrote on the bus when I had that hideous hangover that was some pathetic fallacy there I suppose it actually works like when the tree tentacle finger skeletal bones rapped on the bonnet(sic [top of the bus? hood?]) and I felt touched and then I thought of tentacles of my mind like reaching straining fronds thrashing about looking for something to latch onto yes haha I’m some freak squid head hm maybe that why my hair is like this, just an extention of my desire for desire damn I wish people could understand how fucking good that poem I wrote is, prayer, but it’s only relevant to me or anyone who feels like I do which I doubt and hope not I suppose by way of fellow feeling yeah sympathy and all that eliot as in george who I once thought was a man she’s a wonderful person you see now I’m writing as if someone’s going to read god no I must not my life will not be read by anyone ever its not that interesting but it wracks me ah some hideous bent alley towards solipsism and an opium den no no screw honesty to myself If there’s a spot of evil in me I’ll rub it out yes I’ll be unimpeachably perfect I’ll quote myself again and again and again and I’ll become a great poet and create and create and be and spread and spring and watch and then do stuff and talk to people and love yeah do you think you could ever give that much you who so reserved and contained and complete you who know no fear because you don’t care about anything jesus christ yeah can I invoke you never tried to talk to you before and to be fair I don’t think I will now sorry maybe another time ha ha invocations love that word but you can’t use it really because its just calling up spirits that don’t exist but that’s what talking is and what art is it won’t exist in a hundred years those bastards who just LOVE reality are going to break my metaphysical capacity yeah my philosophy is so good it will turn the tide back to the romantics and the Tennyson days fuck yeah but ha ha no sammy it won’t because you’re an anachonism bad luck better luck next time better luck last time rather ho anyway where was I yes those bastards who just LOVE reality can’t see the point in the lovely lies of imagination and they have never looked at the stars and seen faces stare back at them you see that’s what metaphysics is that what mankind is its just looking up at an array of dots and seeing your face staring back at you ha ha god made man in his image I know its been said before but we made god in our image we made the world in our image we make ourselves in our image we have to or we don’t really exist I absolutely flatly refuse to be a simple real shambling assemblage of atoms and chemicals so there so long as I can if you love reality so much why don’t you marry it! Hah yeah well there you go look at that lamp there staring at me it’s even gat the gall to advertise itself max 60 watt bc with a little picture of itself under its chin to make itself feel better well yeah go for it I don’t mind I’m me ho ho what does that even mean I’m me, anyway its not true because a subject cannot be an object or maybe it can I don’t know but moving on you see I’ve noticed that jd and kinky and people and stuff have entered my thoughts from the outside and are going to draw me away from myself and for that I thank them and becky too yes I suppose other people are the most important thing yeah that’s what I learned in school today ha ha but only being half ironic probably totally sincere actually but guarded because my self is the stone that covers the cave where I lie crucified well remember that poem you wrote about her yeah the stone is rolled away love changes everything even I suppose doesn’t matter who the love is for if you can roll away your self for just one second and go and hug someone yeah hah maybe that’s it whatever I’m too tired yah I could have done a lucky tirade but it would have been too artful, too artful altogether, and lying is pathetic but I say that but doesn’t my metaphysical desire absolutely rely on lying no you’re connecting the poetic and the prosaic worlds they don’t correspond come on sammy keep up catch up up diddly.

Writing in Water.

I thought i'd give it a go.