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Posts Tagged ‘archetypes’

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My white winged soul is over the sea,

Low over the silver waters,

Far from sight, for duty

And the hope of peace.

Gone from this world,

Gone from the next,

Spiralling down to earth

To scour the debris of other’s joy.

There is some small joy in loss,

But not this loss.

Settled and content were we,

As rocks on a sun-warmed hillside

( the popping of gorse, the dust of heather,

the impermanent river of skylarks).

Settled and content, rippled in sheltered shade

(the hum of bees, the dance of gnats).

But each change brings irrevocable change.

Worlds end at every whim,

The ruins dreaming in emptied desolation.

Time, a syncopated stutter

To relive or forget in themes.

The moment before death –

An unravelling of strategy and excuses.

Something pure there, something silent,

Something wrapped beneath the pain and sorrow,

Something unutterably sweet, something eternal flickers

Before the moment and the light dies.

Before the terrible glorious cauldron darkness,

The seething dice thrown before dawn

Where we have lost our voices

And must learn to sing again,

Sound by sound.

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White with snow are the hills on the horizon.
The rivers are quiet, the pools frozen.
Clouds from the north taste bitter cold sunrise.

The deep, dark, breathing earth accumulates to itself,
As if the threads and shreds of shared sentience
Net down the long years and become soaked
With drip and ceaseless dream, each wish and ache
And spark of memorable brightness,
Catalogued, compacted, savoured, saved.

And with these do they clothe themselves: in a world’s memories
And thus, learn to speak in howls and long whispers,
An aesthetic without emotion, a dance only, a game, a chess board,
A gwyllbwyll, a ritual that is not quite imitation nor mirroring
But has its own exquisite golden reason,
A long dreaming sublimation of spent and careless thought.

All these cobwebs and leaves, they are truly
the only gold to be cherished.
The damp and fusty decay of life thrown off,
Carefully considered and gathered again for feasts of kings and angels
And dark giant forms that have no concern for any future,
but nurture the past cradled in deeper woods, rocked in song,
Draped in arcane languages, swung on sunless, starless seas,
Shattered on mirrored starry pools and fountains.

A moment too slow for this world’s water
( a dream of even clearer water, a blood clear river,
a serpent spiral of cool life,
Silver water, perfect loom of water,
eternal life giver, rock cooled, cave silent,
Tremulous with distant footfalls, distant light.)

More real than the real, more real than time,
more present so it is squeezed between each chink
Of time and space, our substratum, our mother matter,
our folded vast and black pinions,
Our beautiful storm, our glory and tragedy,
our mulch of words.
To where all words sink and their images too,
to reform, re-loved beautiful monsters, free from doubt,
Unburdened of guilt, violent and innocent,
purely, demurely selfish and sharing the virtues of edge and shadow.

Ploughed deep in the dark trenches,
the midnight river boat of sun and moon,
sung with choir of gods and stars and lascivious,
long limbed goddesses born for pleasure.
They will swallow us all, open up and consume,
become fecund and full and birth us over and over,
their lovers named and unnamed, loved and laid to rest.
The smallest of things, a feast of passion most holy.
Most holy the earth and its names,
most holy the mystery beneath us,
the mirror within us, the eyes, the feral eyes,
the hungry eyes that look back
and do not ever, ever, look away.

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CHRISTMAS CAROL SERVICE

What we refuse to see, we dream.
What we refuse to dream, grows strong.
The roots and stones we rest on, groan.
By day and night our laborious weight increases.
Mass and energy, the great fall, the future rise.
Reconstructed are our histories, our reasons.

It is the bones that remain.
It is the bones we clothe
With fragments of colour,
Rouge and tinsel.
They mock us who
Do not delight in story
(Failing to see they, too, live enfictioned).

The essentials of life are child-like.
Delightful is the minute and the hour of silence.
Sustaining is the simple breath, the still gaze.
Listen, not even the stars, not even they, shuffle nor stir:
The middle of the night coagulating cold.

No thing can be blamed for this,
No thing blessed.
No distinction, no judgement.
An infinite web of choosing there is,
An eternity of outcomes.
Each path, unsigned, is sought out,
Followed.
No goal but a calling home.

We have lost elegance.
We have lost the subtle shades.
Our cochlear spirals numbed
In loud foolishness, indocrinated false memories.
Sleight of hand – the key always was and will be, distraction.
Watch the bright light, the movement of the shiny.
The doctrine of no ghosts, neither holy nor profane.

The bones.
It is the bones that shape us.
The bones of the ancestors,
The bones of the children,
The hidden, red-marrowed, singing bones
Inside us.
Mortice and tennon, ball, socket,
Vessel, rope, sinew, glistening cartilage.
The slide and pull of grace.
The dance of staying in one place,
( an interchange of coming and going, being and forgetting to be).

What stirs us,
(I mean to say),
Is the equation of balance.
Number clothed in colour,
Colour clothed in light,
Light clothed in philosophy,
A weighing and positioning of fulcra.
Forgetting that stillness
Is not absence
But presence.

Holographic ideogram,
Mala, a string of meaning,
Where things slip between names,
Where a blink sees more than.
Circumstantial, peripheral,
Ephemeral shall I be.
Beams and motes –
A matter of simple perspective.
The opposite must also be true to itself.

The grinding down of bones,
A fertilising dust.
Tears frozen and thawed,
The watering of life.
Turn out the light, dear,
The stars shall be enough.

—–

There is little logic in the arts of Christmas, nor is there any one cultural imprint. It is a mish-mash of archetypes and long-loved mysterious imagery. Thus this wandering of thought and layering of idea that flowed from finger to page this morning…… Reaching and goodness and redemption though, must surely be worthy ideals to construct neural pathways around. Seasons greetings to all and all.

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lingam1

RAG AND BONE MAN

 

Misdirection.

Frantically waving

The world tries to warn :

Going the wrong way!

Looking out

When you should be

Looking in.

 

In the palace

Broken debris accumulates.

 

(Holding a red, wriggling

Worm of thought.

Articulated, reticulated,

Sinuous, slippery.

Transfixed now,

Sectioned.

 

It oozes

Phonemes,

It oozes

Pheromones.

Colours of, shapes of,

Moments of, pain of,

Pleasure of.

The demon (daemon)

Of Meaning,

No Archon this,

Nothing but Choronzon –

Crowley’s chaos beast.

Bright bubbles of edge

Bursting into void.

Clasping reality:

The cliff-face, wave-foam,

Everything

And nothing revealed.)

 

In the palace,

Silent, deserted,

Debris put by:

Collected are souvenirs,

Remembrances, clues,

Identifiers, histories,

Reasons, threats, excuses.

 

What has been rejected,

Labelled unacceptible,

Exerts as much gravitational pull

As the central proud combustion

Of signposted identity.

At the edge

We place the dark gods,

The Titans, the giants from before.

The ones whose names

We have all but forgotten,

The ones of the earth,

The child-eaters,

The self-generators.

 

With stick and staff

The thick-lensed caricatures,

Bewebbed stuttering scholars,

Chemical smudged whitecoats,

Steadfastly measure and dissect.

Never looking within

Never stirring the dusty dragons

The leering, prancing obscenities

The brilliant but quite mad molecules.

For, tell me if I am mistaken,

Is not the person but a bombastic dictator?

No democracy there, no credence given

To heart or lung or liver.

A hijacking by a handful

Of slick, white myelin-sheathed johnnies,

Serotonin spivs, smart mouthed,

Cocky seen-it-alls, know-it-alls.

 

These our trusted advisors,

These our judges, our jurors

Pretending po-faced objectivity,

Arbiters of reality,

Politic grandparents

Guiding us away

From the dark corners

The guts in the cellar

The stains and axe marks

The awkward questions

The nightmare realities

Of distinct extinction

Irreparable re-examination

Of priorities.

 

The patient sublimates.

The patient projects.

The psychopath, quite reasonably,

Believes a distinct view

Nothing but a gift, a duty.

 

Fearing that anathema

Of the Irrational,

The horror of insanity,

The embarrasment of pettiness

That dwells within,

A roil of unscientific, subjective

Oddness

(we all know it, we all know it

How can we not know it?)

Sweeping the dirty

And the improper continually

Under the carpet,

Rearranging the tired flowers,

A quite flick of the duster,

A spray of masking wholesomeness.

 

Spending nation’s worth

Probing the fractions of matter,

Qualifying,

quantifying statistical expectations,

Mathematically generated creatures,

Galactic searchings,

Subatomic manhunts

Whilst

Heroically

Ignoring

That one thing

We can call ours,

The architecture

Of thought,

Pulse of Memory,

Symbiosis of consciousness,

Monster of imagination,

The flicker of

Inward sound,

Power

Behind the throne.

We cannot, m’lud,

Declare the patient sane

Nor their acts judicious

Nor their perceptions true

Lest the evidence is forthcoming

From the Defence.

 

Is the ghost a demon?

Is it a god?

By their acts shall ye know them

By the world they allow

Not by their advertising campaigns,

Not by their multiple-choice questionaires

Not by their glossy manifestos.

 

Not by anything

But the evidence of their own,

Lonely, determined dive

Past the mechanoid elves,

Past the phosphorescent jellyfish

Past the trembling glory

Past the irrefutible

Past the last possible excuse

Past the only reason

Past the words and past the silence

At last to the bright halls,

The shining paths,

The alien, familiar gardens.

 

I hung for nine nights

I hung for nine days

Upon the World Tree.

Naked, I reached downwards,

Screaming I took up the runes,

Word upon word

Word to wellness

World was woven,

One Eye am I,

One view, completed.

concentric5

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BIOGRAPHY

So,
The convention will be
To write of oneself
In the third person
As if it bestows some sense
Of authority:
The speaker is not I,
But a distant, more prudent eye
With sound judgement
And quiet discretion.

Avoid the possibility
Of monotheistic, dictatorial
Rant, the deus ex machina,
Spinning conclusions,
Brooking no opposites,
Constraining loose ends,
Sweeping inconsistencies
And paradox beneath
Reality’s rug.

Avoid the diamond bright,
But fracturing personal:
Become object, steady,
Measurable, a round peg
In a round hole,
Unthreatening, unsurprising,
Tamed, but, of course,
A valuable asset
To add to one’s library.

He thinks,
Nay, considers
(as it more calmly seems),
Or she, or it,
Is more properly
A they:
An Olympus of Many,
Peaks and troughs,
Conflicting, railing,
Boozing, boasting,
Plotting, muttering.
A hall of mirrors
Where the entrance was lost
A long time ago
And the exit, not even considered
Whilst so much fun is being had.

Microcosm of a medieval cosmology.
Replete, ornamented,
With intriguing pornographies
Of demons,
Scurrying from dark corner
To dark corner.
A few tedious angels
Sapped of backbone,
Whining, probably vegan.
Limp handshakes,
Postal workers of petulant deities,
Busybody do-nothings,
Front-of-house cosmeticians,
So very nice, so very polite.

They do not seem
To get an equal say, these legions
Of the backstage crew:
They may regret the day
They failed to overthrow
The uneasy status quo,
Voted in a nobody
To demark their presence
In the world.
All these front men,
These politicians,
So well mannered, so reasonable,
So sane.

The artist believes,
The author believes,
His mission, his vision,
His seminal works, his art,
Critical acclaim for, original message,
Ouevre,( my God: ouevre),
The watching gods would weep
If they were not crying
With laughter.
Same old, same old.

The Palace of Memory
Desolate, inhabitants silent,
Turned to stone.
Emperor’s new clothes
( the sheen of language,
This cut of the cloth of meaning),
Vaporous, ubiquitous.
The waste land,
Haunted by skeletons,
Plagued by mediocre excuses,
Wiping out populations
Of bright, bright futures.
Roads not taken.
Caution never, ever
Cast to any wind.

I speak for my constituents
(whilst ignoring their precise
And idiosyncratic wishes),
Loving the sound of my own voice.
We are loving that new look,
So you, so suave!
It is us,
The ones that placed you as our mask.
The many that flicker
Behind the facade,
That ruffle the petticoats,
That question in quiet tones,
Casting eyes heavenwards.
This was never the plan…..

——–

Few readers, I think, will be aware that publishing houses expect an author to write their own biography and jacket blurbs. The assumption is that some benign and well-versed critic or literary lumina has taken a few precious moments to do an old friend a favour….

Knowing this, there can be a kind of bleak humour involved in seeing how pompous and delusional, or how tongue-in-cheek, a self-portrayal may be.

This, together with an interesting look at the political evolution of theologies and theological entities by R.L. Culpeper, created a soup of ideas that is still eructating around a fermenting brain. ( the madness may continue….)

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This is a drawing of an Iron Age Celtic coin design. Part of an interesting group that is sometimes linked to a Classical commentator’s description of the progenitor god, Ogmios who is pictured as one whose followers are linked to him by the golden chains of eloquence. A series of coin images from Brittany show a large profile head surrounded by other small heads linked by rope or chain. Ogmios is supposed, though it could also refer to head-hunting, tribal obligations, or spirit helpers/ancestors. As they must have been magically approved, if not created, by the druid intelligensia, I am wondering now whether such images at least on one level, reflect the understanding of the levels of self/soul/spirit that would no doubt emerge from the long years of poetical and memory-based meditations and studies, which even impressed the Classical Greek philosophers.
This image seems to be a refinement on that series and seems to show a masking of one by another

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