Rapture of Delirium
‘Human existence is like the daydreaming of an idle person lying in bed.’
– Nisargadatta
It is as if someone has called his name, called his name on the wind, in the rain, the cries of the storm-tossed gulls. Yet a name synonymous with the ultimate unknown, a way of his own adaptation, a sudden mood to turn from the collapse and be effective, a placing of himself in his own business like a compass needle locked on, mastering his interest, leading him out of the world of appearances, as if he had been pursuing nothing but woe, watching over a dead land not quite registering it was finished, over and done with, as if he had lost the knack of knowing and sought a new pretext for life, that would not capitulate to the enemy. He had almost forgotten who they were, out here so long. He collapses into the lost mystery, no longer scurrying after such indignities. He would gather his strength and return to conquer them, they would face the gravest consequences, he would smother them in the night in their own encampment . . . but the cries of the gulls momentarily pull him out of it, lost in his thoughts of revenge, little more than a frivolous hatred to get his blood pumping, to rise from the dust and desperate desolation, many times motivated to survive by smashing off the ankle-bracelets of slavery, casting away the senility of an accepted dour fate, even if only initially drawn on by a spectre motioning him to follow in the distance, ‘Come on! Come on! This way’, gesturing with its hand, only to disappear when he was out of the worst of the storm and on the way to safer ground. It had happened in the mountains, was that a person or a ghost? Where did they go? He did not know how he always seemed to be helped, it didn’t matter what nature of being it was, it had my best interests at heart.
He was tired of destroying himself, that much was true. He himself was the spirit of the world, and more, press-ganged into breathing on the planetary surface. What still more did he conceal, these ideas, firing into the shining, the splendour bursting out within. He was no martyr for civilisation, rather they should imitate me, seek deliverance from this ages-old nostalgia for relapsed past gods, find solace in future gods beyond futility and nihilist defections, with more unknown temperaments emergent in the rapture of delirium.
And there he was, no longer prone, standing, standing up and gazing around. The fools! To have brought on such destruction! What a sickness this world suffers from, addicted to war. I will show them war. They pray to the wrong gods to save them. I did not come all this way to sit idle. But the time is not yet. First to fling away this cascade. Let it be as if nothing has happened.
Metaphysically, the gods of the future are expected to be alien, but they are of The Equilibrium, gods to the alien. And nothing.
Even I have an impatient anticipation, amnesiac on Earth, forgotten but not entirely forgotten, in both senses, they have not forgotten me for all I have almost forgotten them. I speak as if faith is a weak power, but it is not. A vision seems thin air as it disperses, its intensity vanishing, just clutches of memory breaking up like a coil of incense smoke. What remains is harder to grasp but undeniable in its presence, emerging from a history of confusion and vertiginous perplexity. An abyss crossed. So crossed one cannot see it any more, as if it never existed, but one is changed. Lucidity replaces futility, the trench warfare of time transcended.
The undercurrent of self constantly denies its diffuse attitude, the inevitable god’s suffering, our unbelief daring not lend it a semblance.
To seek the ever-broadening anthropomorphism, an exploit in vain, a presumptive atheism lacking its own recovery in the infinite, an apologetic for what you dare to call God, the assurance of denunciation loving or hating its anxiety the stigmata of snobs a dead god rotten already. Divergent in broad daylight a mind that has lost its fits and starts a futile lunatic as mobile as the dethroned thirsting to venerate an enemy, abandoning one’s post for transcendence, a sacrifice before battle, the dross of cynicism finds no words worthy of repeat an absurdity contaminating the mystic nothing. The supreme solitude of the age believing in nothing, even the most intense reality dismissed, the haunting voluptuousness of conflict, the improbable leap from the crushing vegetative mind, desire rejected time and time again little more than a spewed panic picking up crumbs. What a lamentable destiny is this wisdom, the literature of the soul dug from the sins of scepticism, the absolute a phantom, an adage of the void, a fanatic of an extremity with nowhere to fall back to but dogma to coax uncertainty, to trample one’s doubts down to ordinary people’s prayers a professional of the void would reject instantly as just a flirting with limits. Gliding through the water, now it picks up the wind, prowling around no longer on the periphery, astray in contradiction.
What a fool this heretic accommodated to nothing but dying, a failure of broken attention, hastening its end in thinking, mere conceptual forms already defeated before transcendence, salutations to the twilit serenity, the endless shore, palm striking the forrid why of course.
The anomaly hates equilibrium, for ever skewing its poles, too late to protest an innocence, the turnstile to the abyss a neutralised retreat, indistinct wounds exercising mastery over the difficulties, pontificating over the happening, just a small gesture of thinking, a concession to the sensation of it, naive to think it is knowledge, a sacking of faith for particulars but finding none, just an uneasiness in the gulf, contemplating disintegration as if it had a dignity falling from the world, the humiliating shame of siding with something, if only the night destroying itself at daybreak. The incoherence seems to make sense, loving and hating the volumes of it, a fated incompletion confessing an astonishment cutting to the quick, some aspiration of exposure enduring the day until night falls again the toxin out of the system. The melancholy that modestly crept out of bewilderment can no longer trouble the night-meditating monk, no longer mulling over the crimes of the age, the plain-walled cell a heavy liquid. The howling hyaenas of dreams fading like the lust for forbidden ambitions. What infamy in his deliberations, what a road to a hanging. Disguised in his moments, populating the silence with screams, a light to outlast it, a neglected lesson in conquest.
The solidification of some venomous principle becomes his concern, a philosophical simplicity, a deduction without vigour, a symmetry rearranging the structure of mind. What is he capable of? It feels as if it could be flung to the wind, whatever had lodged there. The capacity of words to breathe there, a metamorphosis of nuance, so deliberate the barrier of words, an experience of multiple digressions, the life of the mind transforming into auguries of fate, latching onto words for their signs, a literary production mastered and its void. It possesses a rhythm of its own, sense as a condensate running down cold windows, the effect of something willed, a material expression in the universe he inhabits, the escape of phrases signifying like a torment an obsession with multiple dimensions catching fire in fluid, a solitude that remains a solitude in words, an overrun erasure that refuses to end, striking a moment in a halting sentence, but it runs on smothering his soul. A pitiful stupor, reluctant to solicit his fears, hundreds of gulls crying, a fox throating its care out in the garden as night falls, better to listen to but little to say. He has to listen to his nature, some outcry of noises others call words but seem rather punctuated sounds, raw simmerings of language, that perhaps make more sense than he is willing to concede while uttering them. How does one transcend the absurd, escape the fixtures of thought, surely there is a genius of language that knows not what it says, that laughs at the intellect, unable to assimilate it, sensing only improvisations.
A public of glances.
The author’s scarecrow, standing out in the field, a dislocation of an age, the absurdity of weight. Some trivialised destiny, enduring deterioration, to tell the truth, an affectation that has lost its swing, language run aground, foolish power, the monopoly of death.
Words confuse, they are intended to confuse. Too simplistic to see truth in them, language starts off on shaky terms. A way to file away monotony, days and days of language, only momentarily eclipsed by silence, a silence avoiding nothing, rather in fact dropping pain, the pain of attempting to be understood, a decline in every declaration. But who could read a book of silence. Why does one need to read a book? I have sensed the silence before in words, struggling to get out. I need to find the silence in words if I cannot make use of the silence in silence. To speak of the silence, can you hear it now? It is louder than we realise. Words are just an awkward wallpaper but the room is silent.
I made the mistake of seeking profundity, as if I could plaster it over with words and the words would assume its shape, but underneath was always what I was after, before the words even begun. I wanted a modest accumulation to read, finding nothing much to read otherwise. Could I not stop reading? It seemed a worthwhile way to spend the hours. Or was I only reading the auguries of futility? When the Indian summer came in the autumn I enjoyed reading outside in the garden, watching the birds, the blue skies, only a few leaves dropping from the trees, but soon would come the long indoors of winter, the endless rain, though rain I enjoyed, sometimes as if I needed an excuse not to go out. Life seemed to me to be disintegrating, there was no longer the allure to achieve much, though I kept the habits going in those things I had long ago decided were things given to me to achieve. What I mean to say is that I had lost the point of it all, and almost as if that were a good thing, a prelude to a satisfactory giving up. But giving up rarely seemed the satisfaction I was after. No, I wanted to see something I’d built, built out of nothing. I didn’t mind a meaningless construction, I was rather obsessed indeed by what it would take to render it meaningless, as if that an added achievement, a worth of some vitality. But no, a pure Dada eluded, too soon seeming worthless and mistrust setting in with this direction. The spasm of things had long since ceased to interest me, but what was there to write about but things? Things and people, who are only living things. What else was there? Surely I have said everything there is to say about nothing already? The rapidity of the approach of death should perhaps become a worthy subject. Yet more idioms of destruction. I should take time out to experiment with having nothing to say, not any more. This insistent display of words, surely it was little more than to give me something to read, having lost interest in what others offered to read, mostly. But surely I was also losing interest in my own materials to read. What did it foreshadow? Should I pick up a brush and paint again? Why this need to create? A way of shooing away melancholy, and yet just as likely to plunge one into it too. I had something to say, but it never seemed like it while saying it. Only afterwards, much later, reading it over, did it occur to me it was at least like a wild animal making its distinctive sounds, punctuating the night with its calls. That I could never lose interest in, rather the rising up of rejoicing, again, there he is, the fox with just one or two cries. I do not know what my voice is of comparable presence, perhaps only here and there then subsiding back into the silence of the night, but for the dripping of the recently ended storm.
Perhaps such a formulation of doubts is the near-silence of a wet night. The possibilities of words to merely be sounds, meaning placed there by sleight-of-hand, to keep drawing one along in the expectation of the discovery of a thesis, a translation of emotion, when all along it was the sounds of the night having no other job to attend to.
A fragile squabble with the universe at the frontier of the eternal present, footsteps backwards in time, always living in history yet unbreathing of its air. Splinters of ideas lodged as the truth, digging in, a temporal make-believe. Our time a broken record.
There was a time when we were inspired by books. I still am. But I sense the age is passing for most. Books these days are beggars for attention, people just walk on by. The writer of a book who is an artist will likely die unread by more than a handful. People will talk about the greats of another age, their reputations already long established from a literary time, but will not seek the greats of this age, or they’ll confuse them with the writers of trivial entertainment. One cannot even write for posterity, as it is unlikely to get any better.
So never mind. I write for myself. I always have. Far be it from me to tell people how to read if they show no interest on their own. Who knows what’s going on in this tragic departure. Does it teach us to value our death? So little left here any more of life. We are dazzled by our nothingness, the opaque process by which we live. Tangled in the strings of so many marionettes, cheapening destiny.
Meaning stows away in words that I’d rather were just the sounds. But if it were just the sounds who would read it? In the far future I might be able to make my point more ably. So few to listen, the cacophony gone. There is a peace in few readers, who come one at a time to hear as of old, though I have that now and hardly appreciate it.
One by one they come, but I have withdrawn, leaving only my words. It’s a pest more than anything else, this desire for recognition. One tells oneself it is only that the books deserve more than I seem able to give them. And that probably is it. Yet a belief in fate, that books have their own destiny. If they’re kept in the shadows a long long time, that must be their destiny. Sometimes it seems this aids one’s disappearance, which is more important. Why? I’ve forgotten. But it is remarkable nonetheless. Though I’ve never wanted to be a beggar of anyone’s attention. Even if the words deserve it.
It is rather like I’m plotting something grander, in keeping them away. A fait accompli. As if to say, I had a bigger idea all along. Now here they are, all written, beyond any chance of interference. And I can say, they kept me company all this time, they did do that, now may they serve a similar purpose for others. Though I did tire of this quest for fame through the written word. It took far too long to be rid of it, and, ironically, that is only because I knew it would come, eventually. When I’d stopped caring. Much harder to remove yourself from it in the midst of it. Best if it celebrated a disappearance, had nothing but mist to hang its hat on.
The swirling of vast laughing within me, whirlwind laughter, the maddest I ever saw, fragmented, misshapen, sinister without God, spun into ‘I’, the centre of everything, the abyss I can feel, falling through a trapdoor, an empty fall, surrounded by a great madness as if Hell were a hole, the dead universe drifting blackly.
In the wake of catastrophe, alternatives rule. The obscure rebel comes to the fore, a new gospel ready-made, the others slow to the kill. Bloody-mouthed words for sure. What does he narrate with his pressing questions, it ticks like an explosive device. His every impulse seems a violation of the rules of a former world, yet appropriate now, incandescent, a myth or a legend in its dangerous beginnings.
An undeniable story now, he is grateful for something to suffice, having trekked so long in the nothingness. Hypnotic, insane in an insane world, but a different insanity to the common herd. A reinvention of what has transpired before.
This world is nothing but actions initiated by the misguided, it calls to him, an insurgent, a revolutionary of other stars. Still cloaked before the panic runs the streets, all he is capable of still settling, an erupted magma white hot on the slopes, the night to see out before he decides, creaking floorboards above sudden awareness of being in a room. Yet still transcendent, improvising destiny, the strange inevitability of the task at hand he appears to be deciding on the hoof. He has been this deranged before, it is a formula for success, he twists the phenomenon around his little finger, wrenching it to his will. This simulated age is ripe for plunder, Pandora’s box ripped apart by wild dogs with the scent of hope cloying in their nostrils. A last vain attempt to overcome a threatening gesture in the firelight eyes. It mesmerises even a warlord. A mere fable told around the circle of warmth in the vast expanse of frosty night, yet full of sorcery and gravity, ironwork not yet finished, intricacies yet to be fleshed out, figments of delirious devourings, gnawing on a bone splinters drawing blood from the gums the taste of one’s own defeat masquerading as a victory. It goes without saying I have studied war, in life after life, or whatever fabrications to convey a near-gloating obsession, little more than faces of the Devil seen in tumbling thick smoke. I may as well be a charlatan with a trickster’s staff, my untruths I spill from my satchel as if perpetual jeopardy lingered around every corner, but I equip you for the dark, you concede as much by your silence.
The story is hard to grasp, but you sense it, ready to lurch a wolf from the page at your throat. One can talk of vanishings, but you will not believe mine until you see it with your own eyes. I come to tell you of another time and place. You did not see me arrive, you will not see me go, only that I am here now, and after an extended lapse I will no longer be here. You will look around to each other in your frighted eyes, as if you dreamed me in the dwindling flames and warm ashes of dawn. The storyteller was a ghost, he came to the past, he left for the future, yet in our hearts he is still here, some strange conviction now reigns, defying every banality of this wrecked age.
This apocalyptic pretending, a spellbinding rope made of the sound of a cat’s footsteps, tethers you in rapt attention. The tongue haze sinks over you, the enslaved of thought turn like iron filings to a new magnetic rhythm.
The labyrinth of all things is solved in nothingness, the countless appearances dawn with a fresh shimmer. The void does away with objects, images, sensations, yet records them for all time. The instantaneous miracle needs no leap of faith, it is always present but goes unrecognised, its significance wilts before our gaze and becomes the same as ever, unappreciated, yet we stub our toe on its mystery, even reducing that to a glazed-over acceptance of mundanity, or not quite acceptance more resentment of the hidebound refusal to budge. What has happened to the wonder? We must soak it in that again. It trickles down from tales told in the half light, it descends into us sluggishly from our moments of animated enthusiasm, as if we no longer know its symbols, its passkeys, as if we were stuck with the shell of its obsession. It is hard to track the footsteps and signs of those who went before, so keen were they to disappear their traces while yet speaking loudly of their way. Some part of us gets it and is impatient for more. The madman’s automatism answers perverse prayers.
The stronghold of sleep, deep dreamless sleep, seems little more than an oblivion, to those who cannot see the other black in the blackness, the strange suffusing light that coats the edges as if with a hint of gloss. The black visions of another land, yet only to push one back onto oneself, the realisation one is not asleep but this is sleep. The tremulous turiya, the fourth state, behind all waitings to blossom, awaiting nothing.
The entrancing extinction swallows the tyranny of the everyday. A fugitive from the world forgets his doubts. Once again sworn in to the greater agenda. Time and time again, how does the timeless still elude his grasp for extended periods? Thankful though of return, acclimatised to the chasm. No doubt in being beyond universes, a rage that clears all obstacles at once, the deprivations of his madness puny, a hoarder of riddles on a tightrope. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. He is in another place, he is not breathing anything.
Of course, the delirium intoxicates with its deadended offerings, is it vengeance one seeks or absolution? Better a trek to the pole of solitude, where all will be explained in tranquillity. The calls of birds the first friends of a world not destroyed, or remade, hardly aware of the distance covered to think it gone.
Craving is an agile beast in search of purpose, it will walk through an entire land of delusions to decipher itself, it expends itself in the wilderness, a catalogue of its shades built up until one can recognise them at their first appearance and put them aside. Those who fall under its spell really have no excuse, don’t they know it is continuing to play with fire after their fingers have been burnt? But few look deeply into these matters, just repeat shallow patterns, predictable as a pendulum.
Night defeats the marauder of the mind. The flatness of time, its remorseless continuance. Hardly seeing the sun in the day, what remains of it in waking late. There is a freedom one seeks, to be free of all of it, as if the over-and-done-with of life is not enough, there is something else entailed, yet let us see, perhaps the end of mortal existence will be enough. Yet one can quietly enjoy much of life, so even that is not clear-cut. It is just one is made to face it, over and over again, the sigh escapes the lungs, one does not even feel like trying to enjoy it, backed into this corner once more, no amnesty lasting. Yet one cannot believe in that either, flinging away everything but one’s immortality, known better, not always seen as an imposition. Seemingly recovering stronger, faster, less patience for transitory states, tired of one’s own howls and shrieks, silent though they be. The eclipsed sun shines its lacy corona on ununderstood events, I have become dust and through dust I shall be. Died too many times already to really care, living in peripheral times lost to sense.
I record these ghosts before the game ends, to divine the destruction. Perhaps I like the hearing, the sounds they make, an inquiry of sorts, conspiring with the freefall, chasing out diagrams of despair. A conjuration of the beyond, because few can do it, so something at least called to. The fascination of being lost in a dark forest. Still one wanders, takes one’s opportunities where they arise, staving off sleep to break my back on words, as if they may one day save from a conflagration, night needed as a confidante, a lover, a path to elsewhere, too desolate to plan.
The grace of being no one, and thereby everyone since they are no one too. The voices continue, of course, they haunt and advise, they occupy this zone, this abysmal plain. One could even see it as a land of wonders and delights, in another air, without too much carried over from before. The voices say as much, when they are not screaming. There are clues, no doubt, of the less considered, something to be deciphered, one is not solely drawing from the maniacal disturbance of the asylum, that is simply its harsher light. It is not the company that I mind, rather the need to inspect every wish for booby traps, so much so I have hardly any any more. Little more than a wish to slide down the wall that currently holds me up and collapse into a heap on the floor.
It is easy to misjudge the mania as ill-willed and miss its essential rhythm, the play at work in its passages, attentive dictation from another place.
Chasing implications and endpoints down clattering corridors echoing its urgent racing, a beggar of elixirs stopping short of jumping from the roof. There is a mastery, however counterintuitive, in the dappled shadows under trees, as if here is a place to sit a while back against the bark. Do the trees know me, they seem to. A magical practice of rest.
A single moment infiltrates other moments in its future, a yardstick to fall back on but never clear, an invisible fortification, then we understood, now just a memory. We reject it because of that, but we know it is still doing its work, crazily emanating, displacing the darkness. I disappear into the shelter of the far-off future, for this moment of my past is in my future, now it is, now I have travelled back, but to me it is my past, I have already experienced it, I have brought it with me, and thus my past is in the future, far beyond many many lives, beyond the life as a unit of measurement, beyond even time of any kind. So why do I say it is in the far future? In solitude I do not need to explain it to myself, but in words for others I can only talk of the sublime light, the farawayness of beyond the beyond, I can only say the far future has broken upon the shore of this life, and it is serene. I do not know otherwise how to describe this emergent force. I was not taken there, I came from there. And brought something with me, and it is this that I spend the time between the four bare walls attempting to delineate. It calls like an alien home.
I cannot say life here on Earth now is a degradation, when I am all the time facing this far-off signal. At first, it was intermittent, the connection, but I have attuned to it, it never allows the sorrows of the cascade to remain for long. The nihilistic flicker little more than a habit sustained by hostile media. Easy to see if one makes a point of staying away, abolishing prepackaged worlds with their wretched conditioning, so easy to wallow in when our retinas are appropriated by the addictive promise of mere glass.
I expect my compatriots soon, but am accustomed to remaining alone, and by alone I mean on this planet. It seems I have a strong faith in their existence, it was something given to me, to survive here. I see it now as an offset to feeling doomed, but I did not develop it on my own from scraps of visions. No, I am confident it was placed there. By The Equilibrium, if I must say it once again. I try to let it fade away, since little new seems forthcoming, but with the only result that a little more dribbles out like water from a fissure in a rock. I can place my lips there and drink. A strange gratitude for so little, because so needed. I excavate a bold conviction of freedom from this age. I am not a believer, I am the believed-in. And I will vanish leaving that belief for others to find, whether my compatriots or not; for myself, I believe I will have gone away with them. Others may believe I shall return, or have never really gone anywhere. Just subsided from sight, his disappearance is his imminence, it must be soon now. Rich rewards plummet from the sky and wipe away despair. The walls are not as solid as they look.
I am so zoomed out I’m in the entropic decline of the universe.
There is a dread of having wasted my time, writing books no-one is interested in. But gradually that dread has given way to not caring, as if I have not even written them, as if the time in which they were written doesn’t even exist. The water in the river has flowed on, so what does it matter? It was the flowing on at the time, as it is the flowing on now. That’s all it is, a river of words. Some glint, some sparkle, the sun on it, or dour and dark on other days. Nothing can stop it, nothing can hinder it. It has always been there, even when I thought I was talking of other things. I have perhaps lost interest in those other things now, the starkness of the river through it, ever flowing, is better to sit beside, having come away. The dread of not having mattered, or not having been seen, becomes rather the good fortune of not having been noticed, I slipped away unheld back. Now I just watch the river, ceaseless day and night. I came here to do something. I have done it in spite of myself, I could not help doing it. It is not perhaps what I wanted, but is something better. An untouched wilderness preserving its privacy. It dawns on me, I did not want people to follow me. The amazement is that so few did. I contrived no escape, but have escaped anyway. One day I will be fully gone, no longer in this practice space. Is it insight, illumination, clarity? A craftsman of the primordial, the velocity of delirium. Those others, they go where their puppet strings take them. Midnights come and go, dawns come and go. I am waiting for some other dawn. The luminescence of collapsed time, the patterns of stars.
I collide with something I am trying to do, not knowing how it begins or ends, I just snatch glances at it already flowing, beginningless, endless. The whole deranged continuance. I don’t have much interest in situations, but the continuing situation underlying all of them. I have put aside so much I have nothing to talk about any more but abstracts. There is hardly even a planet, just deathless space. One hopes for death to overtake one’s lack of ambition, a triumph of waiting. I wouldn’t call it patience, there is little of that. Perhaps I should instead cease thinking I have something to say, another sort of death, not given a chance.
The pyres of the night a revolution to which one is not invited.
I just write for the empty action of it, having lost my place in the world. I have waited for that which would give meaning to my wait. I can clothe it in a specific scenario, beings I wait for, I now doubt ever existed. But my doubts have no value, time and again they have been wiped away. I remain at my difficult post. I was sent here, I have said it many times. But none will believe it until the others I wait for arrive. Well, they have already arrived, I know that, but you don’t. I wait for my doubts to be overcome, I wait for an end of waiting. I could end the wait by no longer caring. I don’t even know what I care about any more. I attend to my own execution. Some stay on Earth not good enough. But I always knew it would be difficult, so how is this any different? The stain is seeping in. It takes the tint of my anger. The stars I see are already dead. The orders I could give are stuck in my throat. Of course there is a disgrace that my time is not yet, as if I live for a moment of power of absolute dominion. The horrendous status of who I am I guard in being unrecognised, in disappearance, as if I have failed. I tire of talking of it, as if at last coming into my own in vanishing. Waiting to strike, from the shadows. A war that honours this sacrifice. A slave no more to an obscure agenda. As if I am a bloodthirsty beast uncaged, as if I had been awaiting my prey. They will see my demeanour change when the times comes, I hope it will not be too brutal, though brutal is what I expect. But this could just be the pressure of the buildup, stalking the graveyard that still thinks it is a bright happy day. We will wring out a massacre in these peaceful streets for now. My long march is already in the distance, few to follow now, we must wait again for what is not coming again. The catastrophe subsides, a new cascade falls. The dead are dead, the living don’t know they were saved. The recording angel of the fallen cannot help but know it. But like so much, there is little left but indifference.
I cannot know what more is to be said. I just carry on, if meaning wants to impregnate the words it doubtless will do. I no longer look to place it there. The river flows on, the construct of myself with it.
A fog over the morning sea.
I do not know what more I have to say about The Equilibrium. I watch the gulls fly by the few clouds in the blue sky, one of the first sunny days of fading winter. I want to find my rhythm, but I no longer know what deprives me, looking for resemblances in words to something I am not even sure I have lost. What have I lost? Something I am avowed of. It has disappeared into a thousand forgotten dreams. Yet I know it is always right here with me. The world is falling to pieces, the structures collapsing. I find nothing to mourn. Only my own presence no longer wishing to tire itself, not that it ever does, but one loses sight of it, starving in a world of plenty, if only one could see it as such. I keep wanting to take my own advice, to come away, as it used to be. I have no recollection of going back, but I must have done, to be so touched by everything.
I look for a fiction of the hours. To occupy myself with what I have given up on, or not quite enough. Have I given up on what I could not allow myself to give up on? I rather hope so, but still casting my eyes about in the dirt for something lost. The seeming acknowledgement of oblivion, no longer hopes of lasting, yet a philosophical understanding such nihilism is unpersuasive, just a not minding now, were it to be that, knowing it is not that. Rather giving up on caring, is that it? The hardness of the victor once the victory has slipped though one’s fingers hardly a day later. Of course one knew, one always knows, nothing to keep hold of there. Little more than a glance at signs, the time arriving with a superfluous reserve. Some indiscretion that would rather be a feeding frenzy of wolves.
The cruel searing pain, the desire to cry out, already stripped of attachment to every bond, ready even to shed the body but for the feeling it is too soon and one would rather adhere to a natural pattern in that. The unbroken gaze of a statue surveying a corner of its square. I start to see it, having squeezed the nothingness from the world, experiencing only the void now, the sights and sounds still impressive in their wonder, but disowned. Yet the first spring butterfly and bee are light in the sunshine, not a heavy loyalty to indulge once more, it is all those other things that trigger the pain, a world imagined to contend with, to fight endlessly, the useless yacking of petty men. Seeing that, there is satisfaction of a sort, the passion of living time as a sundial, not the rush of hollow concerns. To touch that again, I see my chosen path cleared of the debris, the past affections for the natural world, for nature, littered and tossed aside but still flowing in the almost stagnant brook, one can see the movement of water in spite of the mud and silt, as if always returning to motion, it will not be beaten. And after rain, days and days of heavy rain, flowing almost like a river. It offers a friendship, what others hardly notice. I go back to see it, make a point of seeing it, though it’s nothing much what I notice is more than is easy to say. A not-deadness still in the world, looking after itself, for all everything could be so much better.
At times like these it is not so hard to wait a little longer for one’s vision to be fulfilled, to not mind, even, if it is not. Something is already fulfilled, a nearness to belonging. The friendship of the ordinary noticed to be extraordinary, as if not much waiting was required, and waiting for what, it was already there all the time.
It is a strange intimate gift, words.
Dusk’s stamina, to keep going day after day, the light withdrawing again, its small dominion between afternoon and evening, its slowness and speed at the same time, light like a glass stone, the devouring night sees it away in contempt for its neitherness. I would be an animal of just dusk, but I too am of the night, to fortify another tomorrow, the narration of abduction, the back again of never went away, the pointless meanwhiles muttering their low orison to the sky.
Who knows anything? The abominations of the news annihilate hope, a serialised scream. Even the revolutionary finds it a fearsome demon, all the more powerful for the easy exorcism of the off switch, which stays on too long. Of course, one has said it all, every hidden thing, but there is a malevolence, a seventh seal, that holds back the rebellion at every turn, it drains the lanterns of their light, normalising desperation, a daily fathomless pit. He tried to capture something of it, if only to harvest a tentative suggestion of help through understanding it, the dark names that attached to it, to grasp what was at stake every time failure thrust itself before him. It was easy not to care, not any longer, but the words brought him back every time, as if their accumulation would spill their secrets, studied later, easy to miss in their furnace of creation. It all seemed too much said about nothing, of interest to no one, his muffled lodestar dimming out.
A composition entitled darkness.
Our human life is a mayfly’s compared to the life of another dimension. The tranquil human is ready for this revelation. Such a hard life in many cases, yet absurdly fleeting to this perspective, a simulation of time. The instant of all eternity, perceived in a flash, the ocean the shipwreck of time floats in. Death a strange irrelevance. The immense past, breathe of its monsters, a defiant mysticism sunrays from a dark cloud.
Something emerges from the depths of dread. Sporadic prayer. The cat jumps up on the sill outside and watches me through the window with his unflinching cat face, he’s had his snack for today, now he settles down to just watch me writing. He’s a funny old cat, quite friendly but hisses if you stroke him too much. His programs are always the same, like all creatures, though some variance between cats, but he is uniquely that cat. How quickly one moves on from what one was going to say, interrupted for the better, perhaps. The clairvoyance can come another time, perhaps now, perhaps not.
Does one ever know what one is going to say? It just comes, to me. I only know it when the words arrive. It so often seems I have nothing to say. Because I’m not planning anything, not trying to write something, happily free of imagining I’m plotting something out, more interested in the way the spilt water flows of its own accord, not even trying to channel its spread. A continuum of implications, a staggered oracle, the forces of a deadend drive a second breathing of a first breathless. How can one gauge it, all one notices is the speed blur of the cascade, time and place lost, what society, what truth, the visionary stands at the doorway gaping wide, the transmission of limits, fragmented barricades of light, deciphered like an ocean.
The drag of fate asserts itself, an incantation echoing across a battlefield, the stunned expression of defeat, or victory, unsure what losses to count. Always a cliff edge to tempt flight. The face of Earth soaring into space, not human at last, a stray of myth and legend. Loathsome history a binding peg of another being, someone one has forgotten to be.
The blood sacrifice of mania, the future discernment of the breath of the exhumed on mirrors, flowers on fire in the sun. Charred shoulders bearing the weight of the world, wax dripping into human ashes. Footprints in fishbowls, lipreading wavering flames lost in trance, the surfaces of strangers. The lit-up tunnel the wall of time. The sensation of living in impermanence but knowing one’s immortality needs nothing of this. One has to be beyond being called upon to save the world, though one daydreams coming out of the woodwork to answer the right invitation. But it doesn’t seem to be the way it is going, my role on Earth heading further into anonymity. Perhaps I just leave the signs of office, as if I was once here, but disappeared, presumably still watching though, like an eagle on a mountain ledge, lost interest in exerting authority, especially now that it can no longer be doubted. A power left without a person, but the sense no-one can pick it up, a sword in the stone. The time allotted never enough. The tunnel dies out. History sends up its flare.
Nothing is more irritating or more suspect than just about everything when you take the trouble to look at it in search of coherence. If it were a preacher, what would be its sermon? If it were a dissertation, what does it take for granted, what is its central motif? Is it not a god panhandling for worshippers? Yet it just sits there, also, sublimely silent, not bothering anyone with its endless questions, like the corner of a room hardly noticed most of the time for all it’s staring back at us like a dull mood, yet beautiful if one stops what one is doing to just look, a magnificent juxtaposition of commonplaces, a philosophy right there, an irreconcilable chameleon with which one could quite easily become obsessed, a dusty right angle with a few books stacked in the crux of its meeting planes leaning into each other painted white for a decade or more, even its cracks in the wall focus the attention like perfection rather than anything that really needs attention, only a perfectionist missing the point would want to mend it, the plaster was mixed years ago, the cracks filled and smoothed and painted over but the cracks still came back, what point circling it with the attention once again, it has its own ideas, it all grows like a lichen on a rock falling into a better ruin than one could invent, indeed most of the time one hardly notices, poor eyesight removing blemishes only visible close to and then not really something falling down very slowly but the unique character of what it is.
A poetic wall, its dents taking the sunlight to create a terrain as the numbered days pass, the project to make the universe intelligible receiving hints in looking at it as it is, like walking on the moon harbours no desire for a different moon, so why on Earth such dissatisfaction? It is as it is, and that is splendid when one truly looks. The mystic meets the demands of the moment.
The will ferments, becomes incendiary, used only in higher states to migrate cascades from the catastrophe of human Apocalypse to appear to be prevention rather than abandonment and instantaneous remaking, humans unaware how close they came without The Equilibrium’s unseen intervention. I sometimes wish to show them the power, but have no wish to demand their submission, operations will remain covert. The extraterrestrial will not be a guest on a late-night chatshow, the revolution will be cloaked. But certainly a madness will enter society, it is unavoidable, to offset the actions in Low Earth Orbit, to cover them over, to prevent Earth from realising how compromised it is by the hostiles. And I do not want my power to be known, for then I may be forced to use it in the visible spectrum. It would be better to remain unknown, until I have left the planetary surface, my mission complete. Yet one daydreams, of course, of directly intervening, of the open use of weapons. It is the human side of me, momentarily forgetting the strategy, yet remembering the near future, when The Equilibrium strikes against the hostiles. I can outwait all human mistakes and remain in seclusion, as already detailed. I do not need to test the veracity of my claims, I am sure of them.
No more than an hour of consciousness is enough to make one wonder whether it was a mistake. And yet there is a strength to endure it. The visit of a cat, reading a book, drinking tea. They don’t seem so bad if pain doesn’t inflict itself upon us. The unchanging is always there, even then. Do we know something any better by consciousness? It seems we have to be its biggest supporter. But we never get a chance to really think about it, save always, if not distracted. But what is life, apart from one big distraction? And then, a distraction from what? From staring into space with no thoughts, and that’s there more often than we realise. Speaking for myself, at least. It has taken a more distracting form in the age of screens. Few can resist this world that is but a slavery of attention, a thorn in the side of being.
The wrecked half-light of the commonplace illusion, the trances of disequilibrium, the avid suspension of reflection, living a postponement because nothing else to do. The madness of another annihilated evening. Perhaps a little work done to offset the utter waste of time.
Clairvoyance put out to pasture foreseeing so many Apocalypses prophetically concussed. Only such brutal visions make one feel alive, but left living for nothing. Of course, one rises up against it, brushing the devastation away another false alarm, grateful even to have survived, that it is not today that seemed so real just moments ago. It is something dealt with, as if it did happen but was dealt with, again. It gives one a purpose in living to exercise a siddhi, a power in catastrophe, but will it be there in the real one, for all it seemed that was the real one, as it did before and before that, many times. How would I tell the difference when I haven’t told the difference so far? Only in the aftermath is it clear, and aftermath is the right word, for all the destruction dissipates like an early morning mist. The message is the same every time. The Equilibrium will not allow it, The Equilibrium will protect. It is not a faith I asked for, but I am given it nonetheless. I am of The Equilibrium, it is what I am here for. It is better not to understand it in ordinary moments. Just watch the birds, listen to their song. Live on Earth as if I am a human. Record these passing thoughts as if they had some meaning or purpose. A trickle through the martyrdom of silence.
We mumble prayers to our recommended idols and glimpse the power to remain impassive, this weakness that steers us. We are incapable of lowering ourselves to salvation, or damnation. We employ the language, half poets in its absurdity, wishing for temptation but none comes so we have it instead as asceticism, bypassed by happiness so forced to choose a higher course. But it is hard to want anything but the way it is going anyway, to see what it has planned for us, holding out hope still of the silty river making it to the open ocean, hardly even stopping for specks of gold, just something to watch slip away until out of sight, no longer wanted, as if the pace of the rushing water picks up, a reward for our detachment. Hardly even detachment, just noticing too late. But we’ll have it as detachment too, it is almost like it by the time we can muster up a decision, which has to be to decide against, by this stage. Why keep hold of anything? Why break ranks at this late hour? Have we not pulled up enough weeds? It is hard to know to what we are obedient, when it is just holding back from meddling like a fanatic. Have we found our shelter by not submitting to compromise? Every day, a fresh iconoclast is installed. Where is the enemy we are vowed against?
The impotent crowd indifferent to the solitary, his solitude flourishes, in retrospect not so much going away as being left alone. His place becomes a wilderness without trying, he did not leave, they did, he remains playing with his originality, plying his trade, not really knowing what drives him any more. His obscure agenda a mystical phenomenon, demons digging in illusion. A few small moments tidying up the lavender, readying it for spring, his friends the bumblebees accustoming themselves to their old flightpaths poking their heads out as the days warmen winding up their clock again. He lives for penetrating the secrets of his existence. For difficult days at a time he doesn’t know whether to open his mouth and terrorise the world with words, some covenant of experience vibrates in the abyss. The provisional manifestation of the world reveals on the surface an order that appears out of one’s hands, for all it is nothing but one’s own projection. One regains the upper hand by setting it aside, an insufficiently enchanting delirium solidified to a crust, beneath the voluptuous depths tell another story on the verge of eruption. What can one see beyond the blood in the eyes? The tinnitus chatterbox of the mind for ever appending its commentary, who does it work for? Like the disintegration of an oath, it claims supremacy, but always lapses into its old ways, like a hangman’s rope placed around the neck. Nothing but a degradation of the silence to listen to its temperament.
Worn-out madness permitting itself its gestures a paradise of fate bogged down in stunted miracles. A phonetap on lost lightning storms, too tepid belief refracting the dimmed light, the dislocated shoulders of angels like wing-clipped ravens stuck in the tower drowning in vigils an exasperated power to ascend cut short. A demon master of life undertaking to suffer, loving to suffer, ashamed of its longing, the immature laws of nature standing in the way of freedom on the fringes of the extraordinary, only complacency collapsing into the good, the giant plaything of lost souls terrifies without knowing why. What can be said of satisfaction out here? It is simply another day in Hell unbelieved in.
A force in secret, yet losing interest in exerting it, losing interest in everything, no longer attached to the warmongering disgrace of life. A peaceful sunny day, why seeks words?
So many shackles in life, can one really be released from them by a usefulness in meaning? Do they even exist without thoughts to bind?
The unexploited expanse, freedom from hysterias, unfit to thrill in the interrogation. Flinging ourselves into the unknown for the sake of philosophy. A long silence to conquer this world, scaling one’s way up the sheer surface of the abyss. Who knows these unique moments handed to ourselves, the mystic suspense glimpsing the beyond, as if reaching one’s station in another life.
A career to discover, a parade of destiny claiming it is in my interest, dictating the intelligence of it.
Sometimes you don’t know you’re gone, spent a long time going it’s just become normal. Even friends don’t notice it. It’s just longer since they last saw you. And where have you gone anyway? You hardly know. You evoke comparisons with the past, but you were going then too. You hardly realised it. You need less and less of the old familiars, yet everything is familiar. Never realised sparseness could provide all one’s needs. Yet why do I call it sparse? The bees are humming.
These melancholy reflections need a certain time to consider their state, their turn at existence. The magical begins well, but one is no longer in this world. Who cares to get anything in it?
The human dimension has worn itself out, I embrace nature in other forms that interest me still, the wildness of the wind and rain, humans I am far away from. What fragments of philosophy I retain I could just as easily discard. The formless is the original, everything else just a terminology to classify illusion. I got it into my head to ignore as much as possible, to find a new territory to make the abyss endurable, to make me forget the mind that tolerates it. I still listened to the inner voices, but the thinkers of the past I allowed no more to bewilder and baffle me. Did I really dismiss anything? I hope so, even if it was only discarding as I was accumulating. I still accumulated, but the more I accumulated the less I seemed to know, and the more I liked that, well-read but knowing nothing and not caring to know anything. So why did I read? It was more like passing the dry sand between my fingers, why did I do that but for the pleasant sensation of it falling away and knowing it would always have to fall away that that was all it was good for, and that was perfectly fine.
The weariness I felt was simply a means of getting closer and closer, it was full of rejection, it was a kind of song. I had exhumed too many meanings, frayed deteriorated remnants of fallen cities. I had sacrificed a universe to a bold calculation of something better, I was tired of haggling with hallucinations, preoccupations of second-rate minds whose explanations were little more than a means of staying on the payroll. The sham of knowledgeable voices could not compete with the wild winds of solitude and the inner persuasions of the daemonic. That I could just pass on, as if it were no more than sounds I liked to listen to. I had wandered in discontent too long, the suspect activity was still listening to others.
Why do I need to understand anything not original to myself? Why do I need to understand anything? Have I not been left indifferent to everything I have learnt?
It is a mistake to think carrying the baggage of others serves our laziness; delving down inside ourselves may initially seem more work but in the end one happens upon a treasure chest. Laziness then is hardly being bothered to scoop out more than a handful or two of the jewels to show others, the rest are fine left where they are. One gets the general picture from just a little, and can die with the vast portion unexploited. It is not as if the others are even interested. One has walked so far from the others anyway, it is strange this sense of even wanting to share anything, as if one’s luck was always in being ignored. Perhaps one wanted to prove it, but in retrospect only to oneself. A lot has to go away to make this clear. A strange notoriety in absence, a private religion of refuge with only death in sight. Are these his epistles to no-one? All the same, he listens, having nothing else to do now. A little serenity to take the edge off continual bodily pain, the latter of which he tells himself will go away but often wishes for death as the means rather than simply dissipation in time. It has his attention too much, is it solely to adjust him to serene extinction? Not wishing, no, not any longer.
My aim is not to wrench comprehension from readers but rather to transplant it to another kind of experience, an altered consciousness with something new to say. Even those who have read everything have stopped short of this knowledge, unschooled in its value entirely. It is surrounded by confusion bound up in the already known. There is no manipulating it, controlling it, it can only be lived, rediscovered by launching out to sea. It will leave no memories. Ideas fail it, sentences fade away like dreams in attempting to describe it. Before you reproach me for insufficiently evoking it, sail along a little way, come to appreciate the struggle to order it into bite-sized pieces. Interfering words, yet what else have you to sit patient in this forgetfulness?
I speak of a kind of survival reconstructed from contradictions, and simultaneous transcendence of the temporary. As a writer I have always been concerned with the unwritable-about, I gather up echoes sidestepping the triviality of daily life, a philosophy of contempt for a world not good enough. I am kept in suspense while madly rushing over the edge of a cliff, thoughts disguising perpetual freefall. Walking in lockstep with delusion, who sees it, who can even begin to struggle to escape? Every day the tedium of contemplating a new shelter to imprison oneself within. But it is not noticed, it is just another day, perhaps pleasantly watching the bees for much of it, everyday hours watching the bees on the lavender, one forgets there are other concerns to mystify in the evening. The breath of the streets, almost forgot there are other people, even the word ‘other’ since one was not part of this ‘people’. Even now, hard to think oneself back into it, until a passerby asks ‘Can you get to the river down there?’ and I answer: ‘No, it is blocked off down there.’ Ah yes, a person, with a person’s concerns, and I carry on walking already in danger of being imprisoned in the belief of being in a world. As if just prior the ruins prevented from intruding, sitting on the grass a while before getting up to walk in the camera’d world, the myth of living. The snakecharmer’s cobra rises from the basket, long shadows calling down twilight. Even the everyday weeds in the wasteland bring out the flower collector in me of yesteryear, rather beautiful, as if made so by magic to heal the boredom of overexposure, every butterfly watched even though only common whites, as if nothing else to do but savour the smallest contours of the land like cloaked marvels, docile at last, a wild animal eating from the hand. Our thoughts often seem sedated from true wonder, best they live in their own evasion, stranded starfish awaiting the tide to flow back into the sea, we don’t have to pick them up.
The blood of multitudes stains bookshop ideologies. We forget the illusions that kill us. All that remains is antagonism to half-thought ideas tried out at dinner parties some of us leave behind with a little regret at becoming so antisocial, but we’re drawn away by a pulsing heart for something else. The question is always there though, why are we living like this, why have we left behind so much? The pace of the onslaught that carries us deathwards consumes us hardly understood. One should tire of wishing for better, was that not why one left in the first place.
Yet one still wishes for better as a cold shadow of a former wanting, no longer knowing what it would look like. Since one hardly wants anything and sees only the speed at which death approaches, so what’s the point? Still though the sense of having been hard done by in never getting anything one wanted, but what does that mean, something that lasted? Burnt-out fragments of yearning touring the cosmos like so much space debris. Hardly even memories, not even of a better or worse time, one can barely tell the difference, all transitory. The pretensions of life, one surely tried them all out in the mirror, even now the pretension of having put it all behind you. The wish to live authentically has only a false world to try itself out. One isolation seeks another isolation. Listening to the rain though is enough, when one no longer visits the waterfalls, the great moors, the icy tarns, the mountain heather. As if something of it comes to find you, buried in the city.
The bees never relent on the lavender. I visit them in the rain for the feeling of doing something worthwhile.
Otherwise bewildered by commonplaces churning in a monotonous kaleidoscope. One can become better adjusted by excising the news, unhearing the concerns of a petty world lurching from scandal to scandal.
Daily life a dilution of a few high points held in memory, a sacrilege to forget, everything in the past yet a memory of a past with nothing there as well, just waiting, waiting. That’s one thing about the present now, no longer waiting, knowing only too well little comes.
Yet things did come, expansive and brilliant, and even now, if one looks hard enough, this endless sameness is nothing of the sort, that’s just a habit of thought supposedly long abandoned. The silenced stream of repetitive thoughts shows they have little power. Even as they start up again little more than a glance decolonises them.