Moonlight through glass
Beginning of the New Year, according to some counts. Woken, as fairly normal, by roving,climbing, cats and whilst in the velvet struggle to regain sleep, caught a tumble of words on constellated subjects. An attempt to recover the drift hours later is usually unsatisfactory – but then dreams themselves are always so much more coherent before the linearity of recall.
The first unrolled from the title of a collection of poems I am getting ready to e-publish ( “won’t take long, start with something easy”…). The title, “Moonlight through glass” is itself taken from a small relief sculpture I made about thirty years ago : just words carved in relief upon reclaimed hardwood floor tiles from an old dance hall. The image is one that satisfies, redolent with silence, serenity, emptiness, peace. An ambiguity of completion and loss. Its partner is the image of “Moonlight on rooftops”. Somehow the epitome of melancholy to me.
Yesterday evening I was playing around with images for the cover of said, slim volume. Getting into the flow, I was revisiting a couple of colour prints, modifying them for a dramatic black and white. Happily, it turned into a potential project all of its own ( or at least so it seemed in the fever of creation). A sort of abstracted yantra meets medieval woodcut, chats with Blake on angels and ghosts, then nods at the engravings of Gustave Dore ( he with the appropriate accent), with a reminiscence of Book of Lambspring and alchemical doings. Possibly a way of illustrating words on the Mahavidya goddesses. Hence the circling of subjects, the orbit of words, that follows:
MOONLIGHT THROUGH GLASS
Moonlight through glass:
Solve et coagula
Dissolve and solidify.
Resting in silence
A vapour of thought
A mist of emotion
Twin mystery
( two of too many):
Light and orbit.
Something fast as infinity
Slows through a lens
Of liquid sand;
Something as unconcerned
And chaste, a satellite
Held gazing face to face,
A waltz of gravity.
Taking form, giving name, chasing thought.
Dance of equations, conjuration of stillness.
Simulation of solidity, (vibrating nothingness).
To give meaning,
To build a path in a pathless wasteland
(suddenly goals, suddenly distinctions)
Mirroring, reflecting, perhaps, the definition of our purpose.
Narcissus has become our jealous god
(echo lost, echo found).
Dancing round the fire,
Oh, we know that one’s name
That will spin gold for us
(though he will still trick us in the end).
And why, why, do we honour Prometheus,
That medler who ruined more than his own prospects,
Who brought down much more than fire upon us?
Too smart for your own good,
Answers too shiny-
Clear-cut, obvious, too self-serving,
Too monstrously elegant.
Ferment.
Closed system
Athanor.
One strong enough to withold,
To withstand all turmoil,
A roiling of opposites.
Not designed for madness
But madness is where we all must go.
The madness of too much,
The madness of not enough.
An incontinent ejaculation,
White noise, staining silence,
An endless slurry of love songs,
A loop of imprisonment.
Ferment.
The numbness of moonlight –
Passion stilled within the heart.
Whitened. Blackened. Consummated.
Brought forth.
Soot-faced puffers
Strainng to wriggle free.
Moonlight through glass:
The achievement,
The surrender,
The transcendence.
—–
And not too dissimilar ( the metaphysics of stellar cosmogenesis, of electromagnetic emotions), words orbiting the bright imagery, the dark, powerful, inhumanly human goddesses, Ten Nights of Transcendent Darkness, Objects of Transcendent Wisdom, Mahavidya Goddesses. This one the aspect known as Tara ( Second Night of Hunger).
TARA: SECOND NIGHT OF HUNGER
Tara, Tara,
Hungry star,
Unquenchable yearning.
Infinite distance
Is the path to return by.
Light from the farthest edge
Wishing to return to your comforting blackness.
Consumed, conjoined, united,
Undifferentiated,
Possession of belonging,
Lines of gravitational force.
That which separates,
That which holds together,
And beyond all these,
The desire for so much more,
The desire for so much less.
——
For the clearest, and certainly the most poetical and image-rich words, concerning the Mahavidyas I would recommend Alain Danielou’s great work “Hindu Polytheism” ( that majestic title now sadly pedestrianised to “The Myths and Gods of India” ).
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