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Out from the Red Book (The Book of Voices)
Out from the forbidden book,
the hidden, the book bound
in oxen skin, bound in blood,
written in blood, as ever ( perhaps).
All gods (perhaps) begin in imitation
of the gods before.
Infected by the ticks that suck so greedy for meaning.
They begin (perhaps) as commentators, as compilers of concordance, as hagiographers, innocent and pious. Warming to their subject, become polemical, become critics. Constructing their own palaces they forget they are not dwelling within them, and so they become populated at first with (perhaps) the inanimate objects of remembrance –
a bowl,
a key,
a shrugged-off coat.
But soon the mirrors appear, innocent and deep as pools to windowless walls, become themselves windows, become doors, become landscapes, become the weight of antediluvia, become reason enough, become cared for, become owned, become obligated.
Demons are a different species entire.
Not content with philosophical dream
( who is who and what is real,
really real, that is divinely speaking, that is).
Demons cut the crap,
they want results, statistics, measurements, tangible, manipulatible (viz.)
Demons are out to make real change
in a world they disown and disavow.
A world they have spontaneously generated into,
demons deny evolution and chance.
They are here to correct all the clumsy mistakes, all the errors of judgement, all the delusion, all the fantasy. Demons are not here for the ride. They do not acquiesce. Intellect and cunning are their survival skills. To make a difference.
Wait. Wait.
A rolled mist
Blurring edges
Is sitting on the mountain.
Late summer air is still.
It may or may not rain.
Assiduous sheep are tugging
At the grasses,
Or seated, stare off unfocused:
Repetition of mantra
One continuance of chewed whisper.
Listen now. The air remembers rain.
Small leaves dance.
An incense of warm earth.
It becomes cooler
and the dreams return.
It begins with a slight inflection, a singular infection,
a voice that is or is not familiar. A stream, a trickle of thought.
A seed putting out simple translucent root, a fine idea, a resulting pleasing symmetry of leafed cotyledon. A simple isness, A here it is clear and sharp. Before long it, how you say, ramifies, manifestly bifurcates, adheres to Fibonacci's mad acceleration. Where there was one voice, now a fractalised howl of mob and counter-mob, simultaneous equations where x equals why not.
And so the poor dreamer,
and you, poor dear reader, face the chime of choice
which voice it is to follow and where to jump off ( this careering madness),
and when to argue back and when to say no I am lost
in a construction site for a palace I gave no permission for, on land I may once have said was temporarily mine own, or borrowed, or coveted, or squatted upon in a long evening of rest and so fell into dream and slept and melted into the earth, and dreamt of centuries cascading and so thusly, thusly,
the branched words
create and dissipate
and melt.
And what then of the nature of the soul? (Another voice, this one, fighting back up for its moment of enunciation. God or demon, I cannot tell). An eternal this, unchanging as rock. Perhaps once it was so. Before Pre-Cambrian, before the Ice's oceanic weight bore down, grooved and dragged, split and scarred. Crushed and ground down in green darkness, ejected into sunlight as sand. This beach, your soul eternal: the gulls angelic and the gulls demonic pattering for worms buried in your upturned, dreaming face ( as it were).
A radical change of direction, a root radial, circumstantial, circumspect, returning to the red. The red book of Carl Gustav, the Red Book of Hergest, The little red, the red rag, the red flag ( who was raised first by slaves in peasant revolt and by the Welsh Valley miners in the Merthyr Riots long before the bolsheviks begun to get bolshy at the Bolshoi).
The red palace,
the red hall,
the red encampment.
Our mitochondrial mothers chanting in darkness,
sweat and iron and honey.
Beyond gods' dreams or demons' politicking. Beyond history of flesh, before and after reason. A drumbeat trance, a passion ululating. A long house divided into rooms, fires and pools of water, a vestibule, an entrance way, a tunnel, a choice of doors, a basket of grain, a purging void, a suspension of all but breath. Before the gods wrote psalms ( such bitter pious violence), before the demons copied them in glorious, golden satire, before the bifurcation of left and right and wrong, before our bilateral superiority, our redundant symmetrical mirroring, before the cultivation of the tree – thought-topped, guilt-rooted. A simple red ark holding all, a grain. Carp, pericarp, stamen, a seed neither plant nor worm nor fish nor fondness. A hearth of mothers. All things, they say, have been your mother. Birthed by all. Nurtured by all. Loved by all. A golden thread of goodness, stitching, stitching. A darn, a repair, a suture.
The cloud has lifted,
Tentative sunlight.
Mountain's crown domes up
Into a temporary sky.
All the flock is rested now,
Stilled and free from hunger
( though a crow still hops between them
Pecking for worms in the grass).
One tide voice recedes. One dream takes the advantage. The red book pulses, veined an endless circuit. It disappears into green hedgerows and down to the valley wood. If the worth is not here, it does not lie elsewhere. The word's sound in another's head. Demon or god, I cannot say. That is all. That is an ending, or a beginning.
—
Notes: this tribe of voices arose after reading a couple of pages from C.G.Jung's 'Red Book'. The text was a dialogue between two entities, one of whom suggested to the other that it was real but nonetheless a fantasy. This being the case, many more possibilities were able to be conceived. Being real, and being fixed, and being limited. Jung has been assiduously avoided for a century now. More subversive he is than Marx ( who of course modernly eschewed all things spiritual as a hoax). The voices I was entertaining could have been those of the sub-cellular. I have met them before. They have impeccable logic, and are deadly to the pompous ruler of the personality.
How the voices are represented by the red flag of peasant revolt is a clever twist ( just noticed). The cellular majority rising against the oppression of the elite. But also the red rag of forbidden blood. The mysterious female contract with creation, and so the women's huts, and so the Neolithic floor plans of squatting goddess form, and so the subdivided longhouses that remind one of the mitochondria, those indwelling stowaways in every cell – the female genetic line from primeval bacterial beings….
simonhlilly 