A SUCCINCT PHILOSOPHY
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Posts Tagged ‘metaphysics’
Their Names
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, art, bardic, cold, consciousness, landscape, landscape photography, metaphysics, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, Poetry, the numinous, time, Winter on March 13, 2022| Leave a Comment »
THEIR NAMES
Their names are the doors they wait behind.
Dreaming, dreaming, they thus dream us.
A silver moon scythes the snow fruit that admits us.
Timeless is the round dance of breath.
There is constant war in heaven, and hunting,
And fast, hot seduction.
How else, otherwise, could it be here?
The stars pour themselves into the hills.
There will be ice upon the marshes.
–
The Marrow of Fine Songs
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, art, awen, bardic, Bardic rant, consciousness, memory, metaphysics, myth, Philosophy, photography, Poetry, printmaking, song, Taliesin, THe Black Book of Carmarthen, the numinous, time, tradition, Wales, Welsh language on December 5, 2021| 5 Comments »
A lot of my writing this year has been towards an art/word project inspired by The Black Book of Carmarthen, a small, handwritten manuscript containing poems collected over a lifetime by one person. It is the oldest known manuscript written in the Welsh language. A mixture of ancient bardic poems and prayers, it is at once mundane and transcendent, simple and utterly baffling. The words that come to me are either reflecting some of the imagery or subjects of the fifty odd pieces, or dwell on the nature of the author and the continuity of language and writing. The art works I am making mainly combine parts of the manuscript pages overlain with my own woodblock prints from decades ago. There will, probably, be a book that combines text with image. It is in no way a translation of the original text. It is one artist’s reflections of the magical mirror and timelessness of ancient books.
MER KERTEV KEIN (Black Book)
(The marrow of fine songs)
It is a river
Uncurling in caves,
A white torrent on dark slick rocks.
It is a shoreline cave where mystery is born by echoes,
Far from comfort, where opposites couple in the roaring of it.
Spanning centuries each word tumbles combining elements.
Shadow worlds are dressed in time to shatter and rebuild the fragments.
Oh, speckle-breasted thrush,
Thrice the song to sing.
Morning rain.
Rain of morning.
Dawn storm.
Eternal song.
A river where meaning slips like fishes,
A flash, a flank, and gone.
The next ripple, the next wave, the scintillating light.
Umbral echoes.
It dances from sound to sound.
A juggler slipping from stone to stone
In the midstream rush. Where next? Where next?
And the foaming roar of it:
The world dancing elements and prophecy
And the arc of words cast up and caught, too fast for the eye.
A stream, a stream, of passion itself.
Sound clothed in the names of things,
The naked, naked sound.
A river of God’s being,
A bowstring caught and released,
The mouth’s harp
And its breath drum rhythm song.
—
There are spirits here
There are ghosts
Where I see these landscapes,
Familiar, sunlit, wild
I have never been.
I am haunted by the names
And by the meanings
Within the meanings I know.
Other pages in other hands:
Mirrored, pushing through.
I am become a palimpsest of prayer-
The angels with clawed feet
Offering golden torcs.
—
A language of waves,
Of echoing empty hills.
My eyes water the seeds of words,
Grow vast forests.
The dance of sounds:
Lost timeless for a while,
We dance and dance.
The memories are not ours
That lodge in our hearts.
My soul fragments to the four quarters
As though I am already buried.
There is a cold wind from the north.
A woman who is not a woman
Moves at the edges of my sight
Whispering rhymes with berry-stained fingertips.
One of Three and Three in One.
Before Eden we quake.
The Tower was too high,
The Tree was too bright.
The Flaming Sword
That drove us outwards
We stole for shovels and mattocks.
—
The Ledgers
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, belief systems, business, consciousness, darkness, demons, intellect, landscape photography, metaphysics, mind, neuroses, Poetry, self-deception, thought patterns, time on July 1, 2021| 2 Comments »
THE LEDGERS
I have been collecting the names
of demons from dusty ledgers,
Each a fossilised passion or despair.
Every one a poet and a diva,
Conceited, numerous as neurons
In the brains of man.
Some starved, some sated.
It is the nameless ones
We should be fearing most,
Whose attributes and legions are unlisted.
It is they that twist the fibres of time and space,
That lead us down reasonable paths
To utter foolishness.
They bear the bitterness of millennia being ignored,
Sidelined by brassy, golden heroes.
Volcanic, metamorphic, sedimentary –
They constitute, certain, a slow wearing bedrock.
They know too well the mountains and horizons we long for
Are all relentless and prone to murder.
Dressed in orifices of delight and disgust,
The greatest demon is the one that teaches
That there are no such things as demons,
Denying all history, mocking the laboured divisions
Of day and night, and reasons why,
Filleting the intellect from all shining breath.
They are well-beloved now in sharp suits,
Eloquent in Greek and Latin, they dream in Sanskrit,
Swear in Aramaic, count in Japanese.
They name and number every combination
Of moral gymnastics.
They are masters of the callisthenics of judgement,
Ballroom dancers of complete seduction.
They are the best of us, who best us.
We, the sly self-harmers of evolution,
Ingenious inventors of delusional druggery.
They are dressed in war and holiness
( as we could tell the difference).
All they need is a little time, a little understanding.
‘Sit you down, take us through your thinking.
We will listen.’
Non-judgmental, professional, just taking
One or two salient notes.
Paring off slices of soul for real estate
At bargain rates, a place to retire to,
With excellent views.
‘But look’, they say,
‘We are nothing
But patterns of thought.
Born, nurtured, clothed,
Given names.
Exercise us,
we will become domesticated,
The new normal.
—
Golden Meridian
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged awareness, consciousness, deep ecology, dream stream, metaphysics, mystery, myth, perception, Poetry, the numinous, vision on June 11, 2021| 1 Comment »
GOLDEN MERIDIAN
“Here at the centre of things.”
(There at the centre of things),
“We see everything and hear everything.
How the chorus of dawn is continuous,
How the shadow, like a wave,
Retreats from the light around the world’s edge.
How the light, like a wave, retreats
From the shadow and silence of night
With owls and thunder.”
There is one here,
( there is one there),
Dressed in liquid gold
Like a summer river,
Like a wood filled with birdsong.
He says:
“If you wish to be more
Than you are now,
You must learn to suspend your knowing.”
He says:
“Your in breath is the outbreath of another.
Your outbreath is the inbreath of another.
She says:
“Look. Listen.
The birds of dawn
Forever singing.”
She says:
“Look. Listen.
The eternal stars
Forever resting
In cool midnight silence.”
He says:
“Beginnings and endings are words.
Life and death are words.
To travel beyond words
Is a road few follow.
All those here are dancers.
Movement comes before sound.”
She says:
“There are no questions
That cannot be answered
With more questions.”
He says:
“Eternal sunrise.
Eternal twilight.
We admit those
Who have forgotten their names,
Only.
What is your name?”
—
A Light Touch
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, assumptions, Butterfly Effect, consciousness, cosmic dance, ecology, evolution, fractals, landscape photography, metaphysics, myth of great beings, Poetry, probabilities, statistics, systems, tightrope walking on May 29, 2021| Leave a Comment »
A LIGHT TOUCH
Every demon knows the trick with butterfly’s wings.
Tesserae, perturbation.
The small becoming great.
An oceanic instability, a gram shifting,
A star dissolving into endlessness,
A thought let loose and floating,
A pinch of plutonium.
Weights and measures,
The weighing-up of Newtonian Laws:
Every demon is a mathematician at heart,
At home in the seventh hell of statistics.
Every scintilla collected, each iota measured,
Each ember sustained with warm breath.
Last straws gathered and categorised.
For everything begins with an itch,
A discomfort, a desire for other.
The angelic hosts slay ninety-nine
Point nine nine of the unrighteous.
The demons nurture the resistant few.
They know that majorities are powerless.
That it is the minority that always spark a new inferno,
That say: why? That plot and saw through the bars,
That dig out the mortar with their fingernails.
The invisible, the insignificant, the disregarded, the despised.
The debris of universes drifting together.
The small becomes great. No blame.
The well has run dry. Nothing furthers.
Seek elsewhere for survival.
The fittest have slaughtered each other.
—
Gatekeepers
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged admittance, ancestors, awareness, Bardic rant, bouncers, consciousness, continuance, doorkeepers, extinction, future, landscape, landscape photography, metaphysics, myth, Poetry, spring, time, Wales, weather, Winter, worthiness on March 31, 2021| Leave a Comment »
GATEKEEPERS
Sometimes, sometimes, and maybe always,
The doors can be so big
That they cannot be seen.
There is, they say, a wall
At the edge of the universe
So far away, so far away
That light from there has never reached here yet,
And never will.
It is neither winter nor Spring.
The year is a troubled child, roaring.
You know how I write:
I wait for words to come.
I do not send in dogs to flush out the birds of dawn.
I wait, to the souls of rivers and owls, to the world’s breath,
‘Til one by one, they come, gathering lightly,
Bright buds, whispers from the old roads.
And they may dissolve again.
They may dissipate, the offerings of time and waiting,
Just not enough to stay or settle.
The giants were called obstructors.
You might say, doorkeepers.
You might say, guardians.
Huge enough to carve out universes from their skulls,
Rich enough to give a thousand conflicting cosmologies.
It shall be storm all day today.
Waters bubbling down
From the cauldron of the hills.
Clouds dark and eloquent as Afagddu,
Dark as a cormorant preening on his pylon.
The layers of darkness arranged
For a perfect dive into silence.
The world has tipped.
Its weather spills out across the globe.
Excess and extravagance
Eating the hearts of the poor.
We await a new inoculation against greed.
But all our heroes of success
Only hasten destruction.
And so, I bow to the obstructions of giants:
The doorkeepers who block the way
And ask the riddle.
What skill do you possess
That you think would allow you to pass?
What quality, what virtue, to ensure
Any continued existence here?
What is the art that will not destroy?
What is the craft that we have never encountered?
What reasons can you make sound reasonable,
Sliding your guilt out of sight as if it were not yours.
Can you learn harmlessness?
Facing the storm you have raised
Can you abide at ease in the flickering light
Watching the helpless ones be swept away,
Swept away.
—
simonhlilly 