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Posts Tagged ‘Soul’

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And now, at last, these geometries fade and waver,
Shimmer and dissolve. They pale into dream by the minute,
Their patterns particular, their patterns platonic, eidetic,
Now smudge and stumble, arching poetry drowned
As crystalline mechanics impose precisions of direction.
Here revolve the greater means, the spheres of motion.
More primal their causes, more abstract and faceless
In their godwards ascending.

Spera nona – spera motus octave spera que fit motus eius de septentrione ad meridiem et e converso ( ninth sphere, which moves the eighth sphere and causes it to travel from north to south and vice versa)

We spin and drift
Caught in a mighty flow of will,
Ninth and tenth now are these spheres,
Mighty, faceless,
A slow measuring out
Of purpose,
A swing of footsteps,
A steady scythe, left to right.
A fall of stars,
A winnowing light.

Spera decima – spera suprema qua fit motus de occidente ad orientem et est pricipium motus (tenth sphere – highest sphere in which takes place the movement from west to east and which is the principal of all movement).

Fold up and slew the horizons.
The palaces of motion,
Hollow vowels, time evolving
Revolving through centuries
Turning one way, turning another,
A dance, stately and preposterous.

Natura pricipium corporis (Nature as the principal of bodies)

The four spheres of the soul:
Anima vegetabilis
Anima animalis
Anima rationabilis
Anima celestis

Discontiguous,
Folded between the transcendent, fierce certainty
Of angels, and sullen dust,
(The grinding orbs of time and space),
Float four soul worlds,
Unhinged, awaiting injection,
Awaiting ejection:
A breathed upon word to vivify
And consecrate voiceless earth.

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STOKER AT AILSA CRAIG
(For G.B)

A soul windswept stares out to sea
The last time, maybe the last time.
Holding fast the eye on the wind isle
Buffeted and free, the brine woven air,
The taste of it, the taste of ships, eternal engines,
The past, freedom, a roaring coming in, a roaring going out.
Once and forever there is leaving and return,
Debris on the tideline, broken, poignant rubbish.
Voices far and near stolen from mouths,
Winged and drifted, gritted with sand,
The ground-down centuries of the dead.
Let the soul free, winged and drifted, wild voiced,
An exultation, a long howl of why, a longing cry.
The wind shall whip it away – all the warm familair,
The flesh, the dream, the reason, the plan.
Burnt up in wonder of the vast sky,
Turned bird, turned cloud, turned salt spray,
Turned, returned, wheeling away on white wings.
Lovelorn, love borne, alone to let go and stretch out,
The illusion of that sure, bound horizon.
Stretch, stretch out, thin the pain, dissolve in view.
So many, so many gone on before,
So many to follow.
It will not be so hard to leave the heart,
Once the hawsers are cast off,
Once the eyes have turned from firm land,
Once the rocking of eternal waves takes over,
We shall find sea legs, a new spirit, a new way
Without footprints, without shadow.

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I have been looking at this work now and then for a while. Like the soul, (should it exist), this is a work in progress. It takes its ideas from medieval cosmography, where there is a concentric hierarchy of planes and beings extending down from, and up to, the Godhead. A mythic universe, populated with the history of thought and dreaming

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Or do we descend,
Pulled by the centre?
Or split, (not knowing)
Each way seeming the
One, right way,
Disorientated
Or reorientated, lost
Or on the road home,
(Something, something here
Is familiar..)

Centrum mundi

The centre of horizon’s cross,
Hung saviour seeing
All things,
Constrained, speared
By:

Terra
Acqua
Aer
Ignis
Corpus corruptibilis quod est
Quatuor elementa,

This corruptible body
Consisting of four elements.
Corruptible, corrupt, corrupting,
Spinning away ( or towards)
Perfection. Untrustworthy,
Fickle mud rising
Yearning for perfect emptiness.

Then, in their spheres of crystal motion
Each in their turning, each lord of spirits,
Masters of music, ordainers of action,
Gatekeepers, judge and jailors.

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Spera lunae, luna

Chimes she does and roars,
Moon scything time.
Each mother’s mirror,
Queen of slow oceans
Queen of indigo night.
Ever thirsting, drawing moisture,
A mist of dream, a catalogue
Of sorrows whispered in midnight,
A chariot of ice tears, her starry train.

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Scribbled reminders.

A big mistake it is
To hold that life belongs
Within the certain bounds
Of ones that begin and end,
Live and die, generated, disintegrated.
That outside the skins of being
Are voids of senselessness.
Look bravely beyond the borders,
Yet fail to recognise reflections in mirrors:
Self is an organ
Not an organism,
A way of catching the light,
Ice floes on oceans,
A difference of density.

No matter how pink
The clouds of dawn:
The blackthorn blossom remains
White as snow.

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The way music moves us,
(And from where those fiery winds?)
Meaning hidden, meaning most.
A call of lover, mother, home,
A lost path, a landscape,
Dreamed, so familiar, nameless.

The way it moves.
(And what is it?)
A picture of worlds made in mind,
Mind made real, mind talking.
A giving out, a giving of form.
Sounding depths, shallows rippled.

A language of moments
Escaped from time.
Shaped nothing,
Coming, going, resounding,

And music is how we make,
How we shape, our souls.
For all that lives, sings,
(Does it not?).

We find what we may be
By holding, turning, curving air.
Moving, it moves us,
Moving, it moulds us.

Sound exists only
When it is going out
Of existence.
Music moves us
By the accumulated memory
Of notes no longer heard.

(Chords are the thunder
Of one instant.
A tune: a patter of drops,
A blackbird, after storm has passed.)

Wrapped up in it
We find our skin and nerves.
Tingled, a breeze, a whisper.
Edges, but edges that cannot be measured.
Scales, large, small, up, down,
In meets out and melts.

Note, notation, sound
And space timed.

Thought free from subject
And object.
Thought, wordless,
Exultant.

Ripples in the ether,
String theory,
Sound in a jar.
Movements,
First to last.
Scriabin on a mountain
Scribbling Siva.
Drawing colours
From the tenuous darkness.
Chladni smiles.
Shri shri shri.
(Sings itself).

—-

This is in response to a comment, whose whereabouts i just can’t find at the moment, but the first line here is what it was. Apologies and thanks for the inspiration, whomsoever it was….

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SOUL’S MUSIC

This, then, is the music.
My head: a rippling stream,
A passing breeze,
A rustle, a lifting
And a falling.

Notes that cascade and tumble
But hold still.
New green leaves, new shade;
Harmonic tides,
Distant waves pierced:
The gull’s wheeling turn;
A slow stuttering starlight;
A bloom of sun, a drift of moon.

Fingers rippling on water strings
A remembrance, an essence, a perfume,
A rise of incense.
The turning of a page,
The sound of honest paper.
A rhythm of gardening,
A stroke of brushes,
A slow file turning soft, bright silver,
An edge revealed.

Trembling cascade,
Inevitable shift
From melancholic
To elegaic,
A broken heart soothed
Somehow
( but never mended).
The smell of rain.
The smell of summer.

A sequence moving along time,
Planned but reckless,
A bed, a couch, a cradle.
Always building to this matchlessness:
The revolving, wheeling heavens.
A path between dawn and dusk,
A road paved amongst the stars.

It is neither the truth
Nor the lie of words,
Neither the insistence
Nor the revealing of maps.
It is weaving the name of a soul,
A secret name known by all.
This music, a familiar mystery,
An itch, a longing, a homecoming
Just beyond that green hill.
Just beyond that hill.

***

There is that sort of dream wherein one listens to, or manages to play, the very essence of oneself, the most perfect delightful complete sounds, the most exquisite melody. Probably a compilation of the oldest, forgotten echoes from childhood, the phrases and rhythms that themselves formed the brain’s shape, how it moves within itself. Always fascinating, the way a composer or musician can be recognised by a phrasing, a pattern of intervals, a sequence of chords. As if they always return to those notes that name the shape of their own soul.

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