WORD
Paper planes:
Some glide,
Some crash.
The subtle folds
Lilt and stomp
A trial by word,
A swoop, elegant
And pointed.
Hitting and missing
Of targets.
Languid language
Airborne,
Unconcerned,
Once born.
—–
Posts Tagged ‘metaphysics’
Houses Under Construction
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged animate eye, animate object, aquatint etchings, arts, atmospheres, black and white, book projects, illustration, Isle of Skye, land and sea, landscape, match made in heaven, memory, metaphysics, moods, photography, Poetry, printmaking, rocks, Scotland, seeing, skyscapes, tree forms, work in progress on August 26, 2013| 6 Comments »
The last week or so I have found time and space to push on with a few art-book projects I have been wanting to complete. One is a printed paper copy of “The House of Trees”. It is quite a long poem, but even so a little short for a stand-alone book – at least one that feels like a real book rather than a parish church guidebook! So I have been working out how to interleaf the text pages with image pages. Originally I was thinking of one image page facing each new section of the poem, but practically, because of the varying lengths of the sections, this did not work so well. So I have decided to greatly increase the number of images so that each spread has one image page facing the text page. This has the advantage of consistency, and also of increasing the number of pages to about eighty or ninety – quite a nice thickness! Luckily, I had taken quite a few photographs on the Isle of Skye, upon which the poem is based. On of the most interesting things on Skye was the number of high quality artist’s galleries. I was particularly attracted by several woodcut artists. Woodcut and print are a match made in heaven, so I tried to see if I could get that jewel-like light and dark richness by working with my images.
I have used quite simple techniques (complexity is beyond my computer skills), mainly playing around with contrast and gradients. The end result depends quite a lot on the original colour photos, but I have managed to get some rich, deep tones that remind me of wood engravings, and others that more resemble aquatint etchings. Here are a few that I like. Most of the images I am happy to present as near abstracts, suggestions of landscapes, textures and grains of wood and stone. As they are complementing, rather than illustrating, the text, I want them to set an atmosphere as much as anything else.
You may remember some of the photographs that I used to accompany “The House Of Trees” as I was writing it and posting it here earlier in the year. I have used some of the same images but made many of them more graphic.
I expect I will try printing some of these out for myself on etching -type archive paper, to see haow they fare as objects in their own right.
I hope the juxtaposition of panoramic spaces with close up textural detail will keep the interest of the eye as it moves from page to page.
Somehow the tonal reversals suit the nostalgic, Otherworldly flavour, where mirroring and transformations are a common motif. Also somehow fits in with the eye of memory and metaphysical meditations also….
Arched (part 7)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged architecture, art, belief, buildings, cathedrals, Exeter Cathedral, faith, history, internal space, light, medieval thought, metaphysics, photography, Poetry, shadows, skill, space, stonework, time on August 5, 2013| 2 Comments »
ARCHED (Part 7)
Stone
Cast in,
Rippling
Time’s pool.
Outwards
And inwards,
A settled pattern
Of comings and goings.
And the weight
Of the stone:
An anchor, a haven.
Small, still island
In a restless sea.
A forest for song.
A forest for silence.
A carpenter’s house,
A house of edge and curve.
A mother’s house,
A house of succour,
Of promises kept,
Of warm dark.
Artificer’s jewel:
A design
Of forever.
—
Arched (Part 6)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ambience, atmosphere, Devon, England, Exeter Cathedral, Haiku-ish, interior spaces, metaphysics, photography, Poetry, stone, stone carving, time on July 31, 2013| 11 Comments »
ARCHED (part 6)
Footfalls,
Echoed whispers.
Slow light
Pools.
Names
Fading slowly.
—-
A thin, cool shell.
A golden cup
For space.
Earth wells up,
Slow bubbled bliss
Under flags and brass.
Carapace,
Remnant, skull.
Outline echoing
Slain god outstretched
(still dreaming),
Vines growing
Through splayed fingers,
Fingers growing into mountains.
Eyes full of light
Coruscating, kaleidoscoping,
A replaying of memory
And sound.
Illumination of dark corners,
Interface and intersection,
Cavity.
Heart
Evaporated:
Chambers
Of song.
—-
Stone’s song:
We, eloquent in edge,
Tumbling meaning,
Disguised as the living,
Guiding, naming,
Numbering the dead.
A condensation of merit
And tears, and beating blood.
A lithophone, an organ
For reverberation.
A song for endless sleep,
A cradle for dream.
An approximate eternity,
Outwearing centuries.
Arched (part 3)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged architecture, bardo, darkness, Exeter Cathedral, intermediate spaces, light, medieval iconography, metaphysics, photography, Poetry, space, stone carving, time on July 25, 2013| 2 Comments »
ARCHED (part3)
The bardo of entrances.
Intermediate transitions,
One spliced into the other,
Time and space elapsing.
A slow cool outbreath of stone.
It requires a recalibration,
A rearrangement of the senses.
Slowing,
Time is tamped down
In dusty layers,
Glistening.
An inhalation
Of fractured light,
Absorbed, solidified.
Entering the cave of God:
His ribs, grey skin tight,
Desiccated, stretched out.
Pinned, hammered, sheltered.
We are slowly digested,
( the enzymes of faith),
Becoming less, and more,
Of ourselves-
Becoming one of the waiting.
Slow and turning
From cave
To cave,
( the frozen forests whispering
Chiseled curve and keel ),
A reconstruction of gravity.
Tree roots sky conjoined,
Arched, steepled.
Leaves, gold,
Fruits rotten,
Drift weightless, upwards,
Food for avaricious
Angels.
An embroidery of whispers
An evolution of sorrow,
A still heaven
Waiting for a new
Eternity.
STRUNG OUT
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, calligraphy, cosmogenesis, creation, doodle, gap, graphics, headllong rush, language, meaning, metaphysics, Poetry, Pythagoras, rishi, scribble, some sort of philosophy, Sound, space, speaking tongues, the other side, time, vacuum, word on April 30, 2013| 3 Comments »
****
STRUNG OUT ( a bereft history of every sing)
In the beginning,
The worm word:
Strung thin sound.
Hesitant, looped
Monochord.
Free:
As much as it wanted,
Tied:
Either end an anchor
Of some
it
or other.
Simple,
Soon tangled
( darned attraction
Of molecular
soup).
A good idea
Scribbled over.
Attempts at,
Forgetful of.
Seriously playful,
Now only
Serious, panicked
Lost, mazed
Trapped
Traipsing time
Tired
But unable to
Prevent
Echo, mutter,
Wild laughter.
Self portait-
The void black
Reflection
Dilated pupils
Staring, straining
Into space.
Midnight skitters,
Meaning pretends
Itself.
Vocal chord,
Knotted, node,
A gap between
Wuh, wuh, words.
****
something to do with the primacy of sound, language, self-referencing mixed in with cosmogenesis, DNA as a jam session ( that slick four-piece polyrhythmic jive), a quote from Robert Musil, via N. Filbert ( jump starter of my brain). Souped up silence, those seers who strive beyond language, return from heaven stumbling and drunk, stutt, tut, tutter. I place on the tip of my tongue a consonant of fire, a vowel of air, extinguished by a sliver of spittle, mistakenly taken as a reason, a viewpoint, what is only a howl of sound, a pushchaired child hooting for echoes in cavern subways….
the images are some sketches of the seed syllable ‘hung’, one of the three primal sounds of manifesting mind that may or may not become paint or silver or more words at some point
Untouched
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged consciousness, fabrication of reality, Illusion, language, metaphysics, neti neti, perception, Poetry, self-created, storymaking mind, weaver of sense, what the sages taught on March 14, 2013| 5 Comments »
UNTOUCHED
We do not make our own reality, nor the reality of others, nor the dream of reality, nor the wish of reality. We glance off the Real as light off metal, as wind off ice. At best we taste an edge. Then enfold upon ourselves to fill the void. Pretty shards of sight woven to inhabit a world. Sonorous thoughts woven to withstand irrelevance. Needle-slight, this point of view.
A compass of stuttering,
an occassional brilliance,
a stroboscope,
a fabric of simultaneous equations.
Erasing one world, one instant gone, recreating one world. Shiva blinks, eternity ends. The Ladder of Being, the descent of doves to the chasms of fire. A riverbed of laughter tells me what is my nature. This not this. Now not now. Never, not never. The tune, that one extraordinary tune, the perfect sequence, secret to all things, sweet and haunted, is a candle in a still cavern of dream.
Sung and forgotten,
sung and forgotten,
each note sung and forgotten.
Memory is not the answer, but memory is a clue. Will it can it shall it free us?
One word held, a flower reached for, a line that becomes straight, a point between the pointless, a key, a way out or a way in. Chained, owned, here we belong. Nothing to do but build and destroy, forget, forget. The thirteen classes of beings, the ten thousand things, the aeons and elements stand aghast, amazed:
the song of this stream,
the rippling of the sight of it,
the rainbow surface, the dazzling light.
Best song of the singer of all, golden chains to our tongues. The oracle speaks clouds of nonsense, vapours and dust. It follows its own nature. Sun and moon. The fifth day it shall return. Look to the north, the wild birds dance, the sight shall become a sound. Everything will be accomplished.
Vapour trails,
name of one writ in water.
Forgetting is the clue.
Do not forget it. Never forget it.
Forged, iron, still,
now the thing that never was, is,
and now, not.
Capture this sound –
it becomes silence.
Hold on, hold on
and it will be lost forever.
To say all things simultaneously, one chord, bringing all edges together. Eleven or thirteen dimensions. Constant is the speed of stillness. Nothing illuminating nothing. It illuminates surfaces once it arrives without moving. Constant speed of light. All sound, a commentary on the nature of silence.
A river in heaven,
Heaven’s river,
Way of milk,
Road of stars.
Looking in, looking down, looking out.
Hunters and hunted on circular paths.
Vindicated, never meeting.
Untouched is the Way.
Untrod by any shoe.
Unsigned.
Forgotten.
One Wish, One Blessing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged awareness, blessings, clarity, consciousness, death, fulfillment, happiness, life, metaphysics, Philosophy, reality, wishes on February 24, 2013| 2 Comments »
ONE WISH, ONE BLESSING
If there were one wish offered
Then it would be this,
And if the power I had
To bless were certain,
This would it be also:
To die happy.
A simple thing,
A strange reminding
Of ends and farewells,
But think:
A happy death.
No fear nor overshadowing,
Free from uncertain doubt,
No buried regret, no guilt,
No aching yearning,
Nothing unresolved,
Nothing left undone.
Complete, completed, content.
Relaxed, ready, rested
To stay or move on.
A simple thing
So few have found.
It cannot be taught,
It cannot be contrived,
It cannot be hesitant.
One moment
Never to be missed.
Inevitable, certain,
Nothing more owned,
That fracturing of thought,
That clarity so long put off,
End of all tomorrows.
I would wish you
A happy death.
May we all be blessed
A happy death.
A life filled
And glorious,
Radiant
With all emotion.
Tasted, consumed,
A banquet
Sharp and honey-sweet.
Poised,
Skilled,
Generous and gentle.
Worn well
But lightly,
Not hoarded nor wasted.
Loved, lived, left.
Nothing else
Would so suit
A perfect world,
As this is,
But to do so.
A wish.
A blessing.
Die happy.
