Monday, November 29, 2010

ALWAYS THIS SERIOUS SIDE TO ME

ALWAYS THIS SERIOUS SIDE TO ME

 

Always this serious side to me

I think I inherited from my mother

because she worried about everything

and things were always worse than she thought.

Life is prematurely older on the dark side of the moon.

There’s a better view of the stars

but sometimes as Rilke says

the heaviness of life

is heavier than the weight of things.

But one man’s carillon is another man’s death bell

and most people suffer a deficiency of joy

that if left too long attended

can prove lethal.

I’m grateful

despite my innate trust of my own sex

because my mother believed

when she was angry

she had to keep her life in trunks

in the basement

waiting for a day that never came

to live it

because all men were violent sex-addicted drunks.

Meaning my father.

I’m grateful that the man I’ve come to be

hasn’t tried to amend the passions of the boy

that are as much alive in me now as then.

The stars are even more beautiful

when you’re looking through a broken window.

The outside comes in.

And the inside gets out.

I’ve tried to evolve my way out of

the legacy of the abyss

my father left me like an astronomical catastrophe

way back in the Permian of my childhood.

I’m more mammal now than reptile.

I’m born from a womb not an egg.

My mother made me warm-blooded.

And it was growing up

without a nightlight in the darkness

in a hostile environment

that first made me think.

And more importantly feel.

It can be dangerous to get in the way

of people who are trying to ruin themselves.

The self-condemned see people

as the dandruff of the world

they keep brushing off their shoulders

in contempt of those

who have chosen to go on living.

There’s a ferocious messiah

inside every suicide

that’s dying to get out

but he’s tongue-tied

when it comes to bearing witness to oblivion.

The orthodoxy of great pain

thinks of joy as a heretic

and burns it at the stake

to make an example of its innocence.

I learned to shut up to keep from being converted.

I still think that was wise.

A kind of proto-Zen way

a star in the blazing noon

keeps shining

in the world

not of it.

White dwarfs and mini blackholes

abusing their habitable planets

like the refuse of a solar system.

They bent space into twisted children.

And I don’t know if I’m one of them or not

because experience has taught me

there’s nothing more gullible than thought

and I’ve never been much for long

that didn’t delude me into believing

there were islands in the abyss

I could crawl out of

like a creature from the sea

into a new medium

where I could remake myself.

Where I could build myself

a little house of transformation

out of the fossils of my past

pressed like dead flowers

between the shales of the moon.

Where I could build

a small chrysalis in a slum

and go in a bitter spider

and come out a honey-bee. 

But it’s degrading to turn a demon

into a domestic

and live with integrity.

I couldn’t quite get the knack

of dumbing down

to someone else’s best.

There was no room for solitude in the nest.

So I jumped back into the same old snakepit

and on the way down

the highest and the lowest came together

and  I discovered I had wings.

I was an oxymoron. 

I was a serpent who could fly.

I was a dragon o yes

but was I wise?

Could I express the fire in my eyes

without burning my mouth?

Could I make the rain come?

Could I swallow the moon whole

and regurgitate it like an ostrich egg

without shedding my skin

or turning into the afterlife

of a flightless embryo?

Was I a true eclipse

or merely a shadow of myself

that grew longer as the years past?

Was I the double feature

of the creature from my childhood

that crawled out of the dark lagoon

like a freak of nature

that had savagely matured?

Soon the questions lost their appeal to me

and I sluffed off both delusion and reality

like two straitjackets of skin

that couldn’t keep it together anymore.

I pulled them both like twin hinge pins

from the same door.

And just walked out of the house Jack built

into the open like a bird

who preferred branches to rafters

and everywhere it landed

was at home in its homelessness.

The moment you realize

delusion and reality

are not opposite sides of the mirror.

It’s like this.

The water doesn’t follow the path

the moon lays out for the waves

that scatter the light like petals

all the way back to the horizon.

There isn’t a step you can take

that isn’t a homecoming.

There isn’t a threshold in the world

you can call your own.

Green bough.

Dead branch.

Broken rafter.

Same song.

Same grammar of the wind

trashing the first drafts of the leaves

like outdated starmaps nobody reads.

 

PATRICK WHITE


OUT OF SO MUCH

OUT OF SO MUCH EXPERIENCE

 

Out of so much experience

so little to signify it

in a language

extraterrestrial life could understand

about our relationship with gravity

and what’s crudely human about being a human

we don’t even have in common with ourselves.

Out of so much sorrow

so many tears shed

like oceans of wounded salt

like bruised orchids of blood

like the lightyears between windows

living next door to each other

there is so much vastness between us

in an expanding universe

in the way we reach out to each other

like the stars in wavelengths of farewell

toward the red end of the spectrum.

Out of so much radiance

so much shining

not even the ash of anything

to show for it

when the last ghost has left town

with leaving so much

as a loveletter of smoke

propped up against the mirror.

Out of so much that was seen once only for good

and for a moment understood

until we started thinking about it

my eyes taste of what they’ve seen

like iron apples ripening in the rain

no one can take a bite out of

to improve their education

by learning how to bury the dead

because most of what I’ve seen

is pain without insight

pain without eyes

like impact craters in the skull of the moon.

A war of windows in a world without vision

without stars

without dawn and moonrise.

Viral eyes that abhor stained-glass

as much as they do the godless clarity

of the most advanced telescopes

playing Russian roulette with the stars

to prove the Big Bang was cosmic suicide

and we’re here like living proof of the afterlife

of its bad karma

like a hunting religion in an agrarian society.

Out of so much mystic specificity

so little sense of earthly union

in the fractious sameness

that tries to blame everyone else

for why things are falling apart

as fast as they’re coming together.

Five petals open.

And no flower blooms.

The sun rides a victory chariot through Rome.

The moon a deathcart through a slum.

But the stars know

how much the night keeps to itself.

How much it can’t say

when the silence clears the sky of birds.

How much there is to express

that leaves even the dead speechless.

Out of so much verbiage

so many words

so many opinions

stuck like bats in burrs

just beyond the porchlight.

Out of so much hatred of life

out of so much hatred

of light and water

air earth and fire

compressed like a fist of coal

around the blood diamonds of the ideologues

who write political suicide notes

for whole nations by proxy

who don’t know how to bleed for themselves

or convince the dead

they died for someone else.

Out of so many words

so many civilizations

from the Tower of Babel

to the New York Metropolitan

with its polyglot fire alarms

warning Alexander

about the approach of Caesar

and his love of books.

Out of so many voices

that spoke like trees in the wind

or out of burning bushes

and the light of the stars

or the thunder that follows the revelation

that it’s raining on a lifeless Mars.

Out of so much clamour and noise of insight.

Out of so many whispers of stars

and rumours of waves

held up to both our shell-shocked ears

like skulls of oceanic awarenessness

that found us washed up on a beach somewhere

after some serious weather.

Out of so many poems and paintings and heartfelt polygraphs.

Out of so much confessing.

Out of so many speechs.

So many prayers and blessings

So many dead languages that carried their mother-tongue

like mitochondrion in the DNA of their mouths

down through the generations

so that every living word

contains the corpse of a metaphor

like a mummy under a pyramid

or Lazarus catching his breath

to be interviewed

about a life after death

that looked exactly like his

when he woke up to this all over again

with nothing much to say about anything.

Out of so many with so much to say

how few are listening

as if their lies depended on it.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


YOU'RE ALREADY STANDING IN THE LIGHT

YOU’RE ALREADY STANDING IN THE LIGHT

 

You’re already standing in the light

but you keep turning around

to inspect your own shadow

for signs of yourself.

And like most people

you think love means

you’ve got to stay

but love’s a sweeter intimacy

deeper within

when it grows to mean

you’re free to go

because when love is real

instead of solid

there’s nowhere in all these worlds within worlds

the universe is ever separate from itself.

Which means the mind can’t be either.

Or the heart.

Or a lover from a lover.

Hey

that almost sounds like wisdom

but I wisely assure you it’s not

anymore than the colour blue is.

Love doesn’t institutionalize

its passion for madness

in the bones and stones of a church

like the new moon in the old moon’s arms.

It’s doesn’t sucuumb to the big clues

about who you is

and then train its thought

like a seeing-eye dog

to keep it on the right path.

Love doesn’t take the chaos out of its art

like the genius of a housefly

out of wet paint

you’re hoping to sell to the purists

as an expression of how beautiful the world is

when you leave everything out.

And it’s as easy as it is forgiveable enough

to fall in love like Icarus

who flew too close to the sun

into the blackhole of a plunging I.Q.

but love doesn’t dumb down to the heart in anything.

It adds itself like nothing to one

and one is amplified tenfold

like an expanding universe

way ahead of itself

like a star ahead of its light.

You learn to feel with your head

and think with your heart.

You begin to realize

what idiocy it is

to be smart

in a world full of insight.

You see what’s wise about madness.

You see what’s foolish about wisdom.

You see that your blood’s full of dark secrets

it keeps from the heart

on a need-to-know basis

that keeps an eye on your art

when no one’s around at night

like a streetlight in the snow.

The mystery of how to make love stay

is the mystery

of how to make the mystery stay.

I think Tom Robbins wrote that.

But you look into the mystery

and the clues get in the way.

Love sees this in that

but you’re always looking

from the inside out

for that in this

and you miss everything that way.

There’s no room in the window for the moon.

There’s no time of day in your eyes.

You wait for love in ambush

hoping to be surprised.

Longing is to love

what emptiness is to a cup.

Something to be filled up.

But you’ve turned into an expert

on what you haven’t realized.

You might know a lot

about being a sunrise in waiting

and when it’s best

to raise the blinds like eyelids

and let the light in.

But love doesn’t try to fix the fireflies

like the stars of a distant zodiac

in a homely mason jar

to keep faith with the future like jam

over a long winter on an isolated farm.

Love is the lunatic

that unscrews the lid

of the full moon

to let the light

in the arms of its journey

find its way home alone through the night

knowing when the stars are out

even the dirt shines

with constellations of its own

that are as high-minded as any starmap

that ever traced it ancestry

all the way back to you.

But love bleeds red.

Not blue.

And just as light

isn’t the pariah of dark matter

that was cast out for shining beyond itself

love isn’t a misfit

unworthy of a perfect universe

just the way it is.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Tuesday, November 23, 2010

IMAGINE ME

IMAGINE ME

 

              Imagine me being here now this very moment just as I am slipping through my own disembodied awareness like a silver dolphin alone in a sea of shadows on the moon on the eyeless side of the mirror. And you. Just as you are. Doing the very same thing because it’s in everybody’s nature to swim through themselves as if they were shoreless, looking for islands in the mindstream among the stars. To be free. To delight in the mystery of exploring themselves like a new medium they discover they have an unknown talent for beathing life into. Beyond reality, beyond delusion, beyond enlightenment and ignorance the knowable human divinity of pure sentience omnipresently at home with itself like the homeless everywhere. Everywhere within yourself even at midnight can’t you see the aura of the gold in the ore that dreams of being dug up? Or how the fireflies are always trying to get your attention like tiny lighthouses off the coast of continents that have already run aground like mountains? Or gone down with Mu and Atlantis? How many lost civilizations are waiting in the overgrown jungles of yourself for you to let the dead use your voice to decipher their ghosts at a seance of whispering hieroglyphs? If the one word the wise never use is complete then you’re a fool to think there’s an end of you in sight. But that shouldn’t discourage you from looking.

              And isn’t that what we were born for? To see and be happy. To attain a transformative insight into the tragic innocence of seeing itself that let’s the witness go free to delight in its eyes without accounting for anything? Even if you’re trying to wash your reflection off your face like a deathmask in a mirage in a desert of stars. Even if you’re scooping up the moon to drink from your hands like a lifeboat in the rain. Even if you’ve crawled into one of the wormholes of space like a prophet in the belly of a snake whispering in Eve’s ear things that weren’t meant to be heard by anyone other than yourself. Even if you’re the most fucked-up, twisted, mutated, incontravertible perversion of yourself, a black dwarf that ate its own children after it had starved them to death by keeping its light to itself. Even if you’re dropping breadcrumbs like asteroids everywhere you go or threading the eye in the needle like a spider in a labyrinth to figure a way out of yourself like genetically inherited dice. You’re still not a victim of gravity. Whatever excruciating transformations you must undergo like the sea enduring its own weather. Nothing can get you down. Nothing can bring you up. Because the whole universe in all ten directions is wired to surround-sound listening to itself like an old recording of what it had to say at the beginning of things before it discovered its voice. But it’s not a Big Bang when nothing’s come into existence yet to compare it to. It’s not the sound of one hand clapping or the crash of a tree in a forest when there’s no one there to hear it. And even if you’re holding on to your religion like a superstitious grudge against the world. And it may be hard at first to discover the universe God the Zeitgeist the Cosmic Id whatever you want to call it never had a motive from the very first that wasn’t invasively human. But that’s just you being godlessly unconvinced of your own existence. That’s just you trying to believe in your own inconceivability like an established fact. That’s just you trying to spread your angel wings over the earthly turbulence of learning to fly on your own.

              So what if you’re a dead civilization before you’re seventeen? That doesn’t make you any less intriguing than the living ones. It’s the tragic heroes we remember the most not the ghosts of the bookends who lived to the end of their long and boring biographies wholesome as twelve grain bread. So what if you’re gnawing on yourself like a bitter black crust of starwheat? You’re still shining. You’re still breaking yourself into loaves and fishs. Some people are bright and light with stars in their eyes and smiles that can only be measured in lightyears. And some are dark and deep as Solomon’s mines hiding their wealth from the graverobbers in gnostic caves of black matter no one’s thief enough to enter. Here’s a Zen koan I just made up specifically for you. If a thief stole the moon from your window would your window miss it? If you ever find an answer that doesn’t let you in on the know as immediately as your mind. Let it go. It wasn’t meant for you.

              You get up every morning and you open your eyes like storefronts and informers and for all that appeared and disappeared in plain view before and through them have you ever heard them complain that anything was ever missing from the seeing? Whatever you’re looking at. Awake or dreaming. Whose light is cast over everything and then withdrawn like day and night? When it’s gone. Stars. When it’s here. Flowers. When you fail at finding happiness you discover peace as a way of consoling yourself. When you fall a god or two shy of perfection you master an earthly excellence that’s out of reach of the angels. Cornerstones and quicksand. Everything here stands solidly on the unsubstantiated reality of everything else. The defeated don’t stand like shadows in the victor’s light. An eclipse isn’t midnight on the sun when the clock strikes Cinderella with a pendulum like an executioner’s ax. You can call it praying if you like but from here it looks like swanning on the block for betraying yourself.

              Or is it Chicken Little when the sky’s falling in all around her like Leonid meteor showers? Did you raise a false alarm? Did you let the world down? Have your zeniths caught up to their nadirs like snakes with their tails in their mouths? Zero. Forever. Did it become inconceivably unholy to tempt yourself with the earth’s believable fruits because they fall back on their dark roots like pregnant rain to climb up the waterslide again like clear fountains everyone can drink from like clouds and birds that pass without a trace? Is that blood or lipstick on the mirror? Was your last loveletter a suicide note full of agitated compassion for what you’d done to everyone else by killing them into life with your absence or were you just kidding when you said life was too hard for the living and what’s the point of swimming when the lifeboats are full of the dead?

              It’s too late for the Mayan calendar to do the Mayans any good. And Nostradamus’ worst guess on a bad seeing day is just another unenlightened truism at the wrong end of a telescope looking for signs of intelligent life. And maybe we’ll destroy ourselves out of hate and ignorance long before we get any answers that might have prevented the onslaught of doom like a prophetic skull that had spoken. Everything is broken. Fractious. Raptors in rapture they’ve made a comeback at last like Nazis in the Black Forest. Like Dante in a dark wood. Like children all over the planet tonight turning into young men and women who remember war like the scar of a childhood Caesarian that marked them for life like that which has been rent asunder. Like an olive tree by lightning without thunder. Or the Israeli airforce. A flash of insight without wondering what they’ve seen that makes them want to kill themselves in a holy war of mirrors vying for perfection of the reflection of a God that escapes detection like a cosmic Houdini whatever chains straightjackets or suicide vests or religions you want to dress him up in.

              So why are you crying like a broken teacup you couldn’t pour the ocean into? Is your mind too big for your skull? Look at how the trees bag all the stars in the sky into the tiniest drop of water and throw a hobo branch over their shoulders like a jolly swagman down under and walk away with the spoils of the victors like a windfall at their feet. You say you’ve lost your purpose for living. But here’s one that’s as purposeful as evolution. Begin. Anywhere. Now. Like a crowning achievement that returns to transcendence by getting over itself.

              When misdirection comes to its senses where are you that isn’t always here and now? Because there is no other place to be. If you make goodness the standard of life then you’ll end up practising an occult alchemy looking for a philosopher’s stone to turn maggots into butterflies with the wormy afterlives of people obscenely out of touch with themselves. Knowledge feeds on ignorance and true wisdom doesn’t acknowledge the difference. Great enlightenment doesn’t maintain a teacher. You want to be a star. You want to rise and shine. As well you should. But remember this. The darkness is a star’s best feature. And beauty and meaning and art don’t mean anything to anyone with a heart if they haven’t lived through their own passionate annihilation. You won’t find a phoenix in an urn on a mantle. You want to burn? You’ve got to learn to eat your own ashes sometimes.

 

PATRICK WHITE

             

             


IMAGINE ME

IMAGINE ME

 

              Imagine me being here now this very moment just as I am slipping through my own disembodied awareness like a silver dolphin alone in a sea of shadows on the moon on the eyeless side of the mirror. And you. Just as you are. Doing the very same thing because it’s in everybody’s nature to swim through themselves as if they were shoreless, looking for islands in the mindstream among the stars. To be free. To delight in the mystery of exploring themselves like a new medium they discover they have an unknown talent for beathing life into. Beyond reality, beyond delusion, beyond enlightenment and ignorance the knowable human divinity of pure sentience omnipresently at home with itself like the homeless everywhere. Everywhere within yourself even at midnight can’t you see the aura of the gold in the ore that dreams of being dug up? Or how the fireflies are always trying to get your attention like tiny lighthouses off the coast of continents that have already run aground like mountains? Or gone down with Mu and Atlantis? How many lost civilizations are waiting in the overgrown jungles of yourself for you to let the dead use your voice to decipher their ghosts at a seance of whispering hieroglyphs? If the one word the wise never use is complete then you’re a fool to think there’s an end of you in sight. But that shouldn’t discourage you from looking.

              And isn’t that what we were born for? To see and be happy. To attain a transformative insight into the tragic innocence of seeing itself that let’s the witness go free to delight in its eyes without accounting for anything? Even if you’re trying to wash your reflection off your face like a deathmask in a mirage in a desert of stars. Even if you’re scooping up the moon to drink from your hands like a lifeboat in the rain. Even if you’ve crawled into one of the wormholes of space like a prophet in the belly of a snake whispering in Eve’s ear things that weren’t meant to be heard by anyone other than yourself. Even if you’re the most fucked-up, twisted, mutated, incontravertible perversion of yourself, a black dwarf that ate its own children after it had starved them to death by keeping its light to itself. Even if you’re dropping breadcrumbs like asteroids everywhere you go or threading the eye in the needle like a spider in a labyrinth to figure a way out of yourself like genetically inherited dice. You’re still not a victim of gravity. Whatever excruciating transformations you must undergo like the sea enduring its own weather. Nothing can get you down. Nothing can bring you up. Because the whole universe in all ten directions is wired to surround-sound listening to itself like an old recording of what it had to say at the beginning of things before it discovered its voice. But it’s not a Big Bang when nothing’s come into existence yet to compare it to. It’s not the sound of one hand clapping or the crash of a tree in a forest when there’s no one there to hear it. And even if you’re holding on to your religion like a superstitious grudge against the world. And it may be hard at first to discover the universe God the Zeitgeist the Cosmic Id whatever you want to call it never had a motive from the very first that wasn’t invasively human. But that’s just you being godlessly unconvinced of your own existence. That’s just you trying to believe in your own inconceivability like an established fact. That’s just you trying to spread your angel wings over the earthly turbulence of learning to fly on your own.

              So what if you’re a dead civilization before you’re seventeen? That doesn’t make you any less intriguing than the living ones. It’s the tragic heroes we remember the most not the ghosts of the bookends who lived to the end of their long and boring biographies wholesome as twelve grain bread. So what if you’re gnawing on yourself like a bitter black crust of starwheat? You’re still shining. You’re still breaking yourself into loaves and fishs. Some people are bright and light with stars in their eyes and smiles that can only be measured in lightyears. And some are dark and deep as Solomon’s mines hiding their wealth from the graverobbers in gnostic caves of black matter no one’s thief enough to enter. Here’s a Zen koan I just made up specifically for you. If a thief stole the moon from your window would your window miss it? If you ever find an answer that doesn’t let you in on the know as immediately as your mind. Let it go. It wasn’t meant for you.

              You get up every morning and you open your eyes like storefronts and informers and for all that appeared and disappeared in plain view before and through them have you ever heard them complain that anything was ever missing from the seeing? Whatever you’re looking at. Awake or dreaming. Whose light is cast over everything and then withdrawn like day and night? When it’s gone. Stars. When it’s here. Flowers. When you fail at finding happiness you discover peace as a way of consoling yourself. When you fall a god or two shy of perfection you master an earthly excellence that’s out of reach of the angels. Cornerstones and quicksand. Everything here stands solidly on the unsubstantiated reality of everything else. The defeated don’t stand like shadows in the victor’s light. An eclipse isn’t midnight on the sun when the clock strikes Cinderella with a pendulum like an executioner’s ax. You can call it praying if you like but from here it looks like swanning on the block for betraying yourself.

              Or is it Chicken Little when the sky’s falling in all around her like Leonid meteor showers? Did you raise a false alarm? Did you let the world down? Have your zeniths caught up to their nadirs like snakes with their tails in their mouths? Zero. Forever. Did it become inconceivably unholy to tempt yourself with the earth’s believable fruits because they fall back on their dark roots like pregnant rain to climb up the waterslide again like clear fountains everyone can drink from like clouds and birds that pass without a trace? Is that blood or lipstick on the mirror? Was your last loveletter a suicide note full of agitated compassion for what you’d done to everyone else by killing them into life with your absence or were you just kidding when you said life was too hard for the living and what’s the point of swimming when the lifeboats are full of the dead?

              It’s too late for the Mayan calendar to do the Mayans any good. And Nostradamus’ worst guess on a bad seeing day is just another unenlightened truism at the wrong end of a telescope looking for signs of intelligent life. And maybe we’ll destroy ourselves out of hate and ignorance long before we get any answers that might have prevented the onslaught of doom like a prophetic skull that had spoken. Everything is broken. Fractious. Raptors in rapture they’ve made a comeback at last like Nazis in the Black Forest. Like Dante in a dark wood. Like children all over the planet tonight turning into young men and women who remember war like the scar of a childhood Caesarian that marked them for life like that which has been rent asunder. Like an olive tree by lightning without thunder. Or the Israeli airforce. A flash of insight without wondering what they’ve seen that makes them want to kill themselves in a holy war of mirrors vying for perfection of the reflection of a God that escapes detection like a cosmic Houdini whatever chains straightjackets or suicide vests or religions you want to dress him up in.

              So why are you crying like a broken teacup you couldn’t pour the ocean into? Is your mind too big for your skull? Look at how the trees bag all the stars in the sky into the tiniest drop of water and throw a hobo branch over their shoulders like a jolly swagman down under and walk away with the spoils of the victors like a windfall at their feet. You say you’ve lost your purpose for living. But here’s one that’s as purposeful as evolution. Begin. Anywhere. Now. Like a crowning achievement that returns to transcendence by getting over itself.

              When misdirection comes to its senses where are you that isn’t always here and now? Because there is no other place to be. If you make goodness the standard of life then you’ll end up practising an occult alchemy looking for a philosopher’s stone to turn maggots into butterflies with the wormy afterlives of people obscenely out of touch with themselves. Knowledge feeds on ignorance and true wisdom doesn’t acknowledge the difference. Great enlightenment doesn’t maintain a teacher. You want to be a star. You want to rise and shine. As well you should. But remember this. The darkness is a star’s best feature. And beauty and meaning and art don’t mean anything to anyone with a heart if they haven’t lived through their own passionate annihilation. You won’t find a phoenix in an urn on a mantle. You want to burn? You’ve got to learn to eat your own ashes sometimes.

 

PATRICK WHITE

             

             


Monday, November 22, 2010

HAPPIER TO BE ALIVE THAN I HAVE BEEN IN A WHILE

HAPPIER TO BE ALIVE THAN I HAVE BEEN IN A WHILE

 

            Happier to be alive than I have been in a while. Good sleep. No dreams. Led out of oblivion by my own enzymes though the light wants to take the credit I can feel the sacred clown within me beginning to take liberties with yesterday’s profundities like a hummingbird with a funeral bell on a binge. And the best thing I like about this moment of creative solitude I’m enjoying now is that I’m the only one who’s ever missing when I go looking for myself like the last page of a book with a new beginning. Yesterday all the mirrors wanted to be windows and all the windows wanted to put their eyes out. Bonus. A lunar delinquent in the night did that with an Oedipal moonrock that made an impact like first contact with intraterrestrial forms of intelligent being. You want to see the world whole? You’ve got to look at it with broken eyes. You’ve got to let the bird out. The ghost. The host. The smoke in the chimney. You’ve got to peck a hole through the cosmic egg like a fist through plaster. Like a stone without sin through a window. You’ve got to let the sky in like a five year plan to expand your wingspan. You’ve got to get the moon drunk and then ask it to walk on the waters in a straight line. Everywhere you fly you should arrive drunk under the influence of the stars in your eyes. You should make paper boats and origami swans out of the poems you write in the morning and sail them down the Milky Way at night to a lover on a bridge beside a weeping willow that longs for the moon like a wedding ring she lost to the mindstream she’s trying to retrieve it from. I’ve tasted many earthly things over the course of an intense lifetime. Money. Power. Genius. Sex. But the best is to wake up in the morning so indefensibly alive you’re disproportionately happy about nothing.

That’s when words forget what they’re supposed to mean and start expressing themselves. That’s when language takes on a voice of its own and says like God in the Koran to an illiterate Muhammad if all the oceans in the world were ink and all the trees were pens you could never exhaust a subject with no likeness. Or to propose a simulacrum in my mother tongue. No pictographic gangland graffitti with paint can clouds ever territorially sprayed the face of the moon with anything so indelible it couldn’t be washed off like watercolours in the rain the next morning. Or blood. Or tears. But you’ve got to read it from the inside out like a gnostic gospel of pain if you want to get the deeper meaning of it like the negative space of a spit-painted hand on a cave wall at the back of your brain long long ago when you remembered you were no one and left a sign like a star on the palm of nothing at all to show where you disappeared into the Open like the immense farewell of an intimate greeting to those of us who haven’t been born yet. That’s when time drops off my body and mind like a leech in a waterclock and everything shows me what it means to have nothing to say in the first place that isn’t just blowing smoke in the face of inspiration like a fire that follows you around the circle like an autumnal equinox in the abandoned zodiac of an old story that’s making you cry. Time to make up some myths of your own to put new flesh on an old bone of the cold dragon wrapped around the north pole like the skeleton of a physcian who isn’t healing very well. New equinoxes. New solstices. Expansive canvases of space and deep passionate eyes that feel everything they see like the occult colours of stars hidden in the sunlight.

            I’ve smuggled stars across the borders of the blind for years. I’ve been a blackhole prohibition mobster at the centre of all the dark matter in the universe that controlled the galaxies like speakeasies and numbers rackets I ran on my home turf. I’ve been the cosmic criminal of an underground cartel. And then I’ve been shot down in the street by mistake like an innocent bystander under a truce of blood that covered my face like the flag of someone else’s country at halfmast. I’ve longed for a future with no regrets and a past that denies everything like a passport that can’t put a name to my face in a game of show and tell. I’ve put down roots of fire like a dragon in a well and learned to get along with the stars and fireflies and the penny wishes of harvest moons going down over the hills like somnambulists in a dream that’s as perennially true as a witness protection program.  And I’ve got teardrops running down my clown cheeks like the tatoos of a prison hitman who made his bones like a rogue constellation in an elephant graveyard that forgot the names of the dead. And I’ve been extradited from one holy land to the next like a Yemeni caravan of terrorist camels on the moon that carried their burden of proof for the existence of God back and forth like silkworm suicide vests to both extremes of the Perfume Trail. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. Everyman’s death diminisheth me. And the children and the women and the aunts and the uncles over and over and over and over and over and over again.

But this morning for a moment I’m free. The light has no history. The children have enough to eat. Corruption is a monostome that has to eat the shit that comes out of its own mouth and the landlords are sleeping homeless in the streets in winter over heating vents they can’t rent to anyone. The generals’ hearts are satisfied and the all the gains of war are ruined by singing and dancing. Pippa passes and God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. Seven come eleven. The dice are loaded on my side by the joy in my eyes that plays the long shot and wins. The phoenix the dove and the dragon are at peace in me. And even the crow is burning like silver on the shoulder of the moon. Tears are running down the cheeks of the mirrors who can’t stop laughing at what the Wizard of Was looks like naked to the Morgana la Fay of Now.

                Sometimes it’s good to get out of the flow by going over the edge of your mind like the single drop of a waterfall that’s as self-contained as the world it reflects like a secret identity of its own. But it’s better to be the nothing behind the mask that sees through it all. In a world where the wise are good losers and the fools are bad winners and the booksmart are placing sad bets on the politicians they’re running like another drugged horse in the race to lead the people by the nose into a victory wreath like a quarterhorse into a plough-horse’s yoke it’s good to be abundantly nothing without beginnings and ends. In a forgotten starfield somewhere down over the hill where the older constellations give names to the newborn fireflies. In a long look back at the future like a road you’ve already taken to a place that was run out of town like one too many destinations settling down like refugees with outlaw friends. It’s good to be left like boots out in the hall to your own resources and walk away from it all with wings on your heels without a flightplan to anywhere like an occult understanding of the night that isn’t blinded by a close-up of a star in its own light. It’s better to be the medium than it is to be the message. Hermes Trismegistus. The thrice-blessed. It’s better to leave the party like the happy ghost of a grateful guest that counts its blessings among the dead than overstay your welcome like a bad host at a needy séance. It’s better to be a demon with good spiritual manners that doesn’t insult the feast by not eating than it is to be an angel without an appetite that doesn’t know how to break bread with the devil. Or eat with a long spoon when there are strange letters without Rosetta Stones in the alphabet soup of a liar. And flies in the Holy Grail of an anointed oilwell that greens the kingdom with corporate cash like Frankish kings at the cathedral of Reims who sold Joan of Arc to the English. When you’re in hell among the chaopolitans of cosmic Rome it’s good not to act like a rural homesick hick from Eden with an accent as thick as an Adam’s apple. When in hell do as the damned do and start a church of your own. From little acorns great oak trees grow like bones. From a single grave. Gothic cathedrals of stone.

            As for me and my house to borrow a title from Sinclair Ross. I’m so happy this morning that I’m as lost and alone as water everywhere. That the sunlight streams through me like a broken window in an abandoned home no one’s died in for years. That I’m awake in a dream that sleepwalks like the high tide of a lunar ocean over the watershed of my tears without its feet touching bottom. Without thorns in its paws. Without the cause and effect of the scars and the wounds that war in the womb like an unholy crusade over who did what to whom first and will born guiltier than the other for it. It may have been the moon’s bird, the crow, superstitious as silver, that taught humans how to bury their dead deep inside themselves as if they were a murderer like Cain whose gift was not acceptable to God, but it was a morning dove in the white-gold sunlight, free as this joy that doesn’t care if I’m worthy of it or not, breathing itself into life like pure oxygen just for the love of it, that taught them to dig them up again. Like old loveletters slipped under the open doors of deathrow like the slim hope of a second chance that didn’t come too late or in vain.

 

PATRICK WHITE