simonhlilly

Well,
I just started to put down a few ideas that have been floating around for a day or two and this came out! Its not supposed to be anything than a stream of notions and a seasoning of spleen.

A rant I suppose against the self-congratulatory busybody know -it- alls who have always plagued mankind with their cleverness.

A good argument is like a good wine – it doesn’t last for long before it begins to go off. Eloquence is not a sign of wisdom – its just a melody with a catchy tune that sticks in the brains of the listener. Wise words only indicate where wisdom once settled, not where it now dwells. History is the evolutionary struggle of stories. The past tells us what is going to happen next (again!). Language does constrain how the world is seen and understood……

Pythagoras and Empedocles were riddlers and poets, regarded as political and military assets, terrorists and subvertors of the State, depending on who was paying their bills at the time……

As soon as we learned to put our memories down on paper we began to forget the true tales of who we were and where we came from. Now we are relying on an invisible spirit world of waves and photons to keep all our memories and identities what shall we be in danger of losing?…..

Muttering like Issa, wandering like Wang Wei, Ranting like Blake… A roar of white noise…..A memorable fancy…

Demons of gravity, angels of disease.
The invisible
The unseen
As the hidden worlds of spirit.

A spell is
A song
With intention,
A formula for chemical
Reaction.

It pulls the invisible worlds
Of sound
Image and meaning,
Ciphers for understanding,
Weaving them
To urgent eloquence.

A new faith invents
A new vocabulary
Of damnation.

Truths become lies,
Angels become devils,
Natural becomes blasphemous.

In the construction of Christ-
Saviour of the Empire,
Slayer for Peace
(the peace of bureaucrats),
music and dance died.

To define the new as new,
The old is damned.

Song, dance, smiling, drumbeat –
The offering of exuberant energy
As a sacrifice to feed life,
Becomes anathema.
There can be no more priestesses
Wild with drums and wine and rattles
No more pipes in the fields,
No more whispered prayers
To the herbs of healing.

Authorised, sanitised, regulated
Prescribed,
This is now
That,

Now we have found it:
The one formula
Of existence,
The equation of righteous power,
The excuse we have been looking for
To topple the walls
To break the chains
And reforge them in
A bright- edged delineation
Of certainty.
A sanitary prison.

Such was ever the past,
Ever the present,
Ever the future.
The invisible spirit
Resolves under machines
Of magnification-
No more than worms
And waves,
Fields and flux,
Sparks and shadows.

Because the language of mathematics
Can be demonstrated at every level
Of Creation,
The Universe is based on
Mathematical structures. All simply
Equations, no need for souls,
No need for mystery.

yeah! Right!
Can anyone spot
An error of logic here?
When will the fierce laughs
Of ridicule wake these
Small creatures….

The arrogant fantasists
Dwelling in the temples
Of nuclear power,
The myopic academic
Backslappers,
Patronising intellects,
Waspish with jargon.
Doctors of dust and death:

Your stories are the stories
Of the old priests
New-dressed in pious fashion
For the amnesiac, somnolescent
Herd.

Your pronouncements:
Equal to the ravings
Of acid-tongued
Loathers of life,
Chastisers,
Dust mouthed prophets,
Desert thugs of dogma…….

Ancestral bacteria
Dwelling nonchalently
Along with us still.
Unconcerned
With our new definition,
With pushed boundaries,
With enlightened approaches,
With educated guesses.

Warming their hands,
Blooming, flowering
A cultured approach to living.

And beyond them
Their own ghosts,
Wisps of virus,
Memory of hunger,
Longing to remain.

Beyond them,
Small whispers of death,
Prions
Insistent angel messengers….

The old sages,
Disruputable, shaggy browed,
Retired civil-servants,
Disgusted, tired, exasperated,
Leaving the towns
For the silent mountains-
They saw
The return of the swallows,
The lascivious tongues
Gulping in green light on
Every branch,

Ten thousand things
Collapsing to dust
And reforming on the
Warm breezes of Spring.

They spoke in riddles
In song
In poetry
In the truth of paradox,
In the light, sparkle-eyed humour
Of the clear souled.

There was a beginning
There was a beginning of a beginning
There was an anteriority
Of the beginning before the beginning.
There was an anteriority
Before that anteriority……

This is not a new song
This is not a new song
This is not a new song.

This is an old song
With new words
And a new tune.