Friday, February 18, 2011

DISAFFECTED DISENCHANTED DEPRESSED

Disaffected disenchanted depressed.

Toxic insight into the nature of what’s worse

than the way things really are among humans

for thousands and thousands and thousands of years

when you look behind the scenes

of the morality plays that pass for the truth.

It’s all true

or nothing is.

Keep trying to write my way out of this

like an emergency exit at the end

of a long hall of mirrors

that are sick of looking like me.

Trying to remember what I meant

fifty years ago when I devoted myself

to this excruciating discipline of vacating myself

to be whatever I was called upon to be

to live a life of poetry

from the inside out

as if it had nothing to do with me.

Bright vacancy.

Dark abundance.

The ferocity of my childhood

prepared me for the nightside of the street

and I learned to see in the dark

what there was to be afraid of

and long before rapture

it was terror that enhanced my awareness.

The gods eat their children.

Injustice wills what shills for the divine.

Tolerance is a defense mechanism for the sublime.

The people are krill.

The people are the algae of the sea.

The people are thermophilic bacteria

seven kilometers down in a diamond mine.

The people are the voodoo dolls of the rich.

The rich stick pins in the eyes of the poor

until they’re blind enough

to convince the people they’re stars.

Can’t go on like this.

Coming apart like a oilspill.

Haemmoraging like an eclipse

gored on the horn of the moon.

Mithras Tauroctonus.

Maybe I’ll bleed wheat yet.

Fat chance.

They’ve got asylums for those into self-sacrifice

where the serial killers act like spiders

charged with the care of the butterflies.

And right next to the eternal flame

there’s the eternal mouth

trying to explain all this blood

that keeps flowing from the same old watershed

like one long last eloquent sentence of the dead

that runs on like a periodic incommensurable

without a point.

It’s a forgone conclusion

that the future is already a thief.

And somebody’s thrown bad meat down the well of the present

like the moral tone of a hypocrite

preaching to the furious ones

how to hate their neighbour

and blame it on love.

Got to find a hole in the ice.

Come up for air.

Break through to the other side of the mirror

and hope there’s no one standing there with a spear.

Not all the cosmic views are beautiful and radiant.

There are blackhole insights that are so universally devastating

the third eye is all pupil and no iris

and everything you see is as dark and indelible

as cannibals saying grace over what they’re eating.

Even the dragons have nightmares in this darkness

and the sharks that are circling like sundials

are afraid to go to sleep.

I stare into it with three hundred million year old reptilian eyes

because that’s what poets do.

They go down on the Medusa without turning into stone.

They break themselves like twigs and trails

and cracks in the planet

when the wilderness gets lost in them

to say they were here once

where you’re standing now

alone with the Alone

like an alien

lightyears from home

and ever since it’s been habitable.

Better to look into the darkness like a pioneer

than an exile.

The stars don’t drive their light out into the night

deprived of a door a window and a threshold

to survive on shadows among the homeless.

Even from the bottom of a deep well

you can see the stars in daylight.

Embrace the night

and the creatures of darkness

even when your eyes shatter like glass

and you can’t see your features in anything you’re looking at.

There’s more than just the Big Bang

and Steady State theories of the universe.

The first is actively mad

and the latter passively depressed.

But you can take a tantric point of view

and combine the two

into a crazy kind of wisdom.

You could see how the light

depends upon you for its seeing

and that you’re the original insight

that embodies it in being.

That the clear light of the void is eyeless

and illuminates nothing

until you open yours

to lavish the night with stars

and be the place they’re going

as they look back at you

ahead of their future

waiting for you to put a face to their knowing.

Life is a perennial insight into a temporary mystery

that looks through

our extraordinary eyes

to see what’s unattainable about us.

Listen to the universe as if it were speaking to you in your own voice.

Look and see.

Listen and hear.

You don’t need to polish the mirror

to make the darkness brighter.

A crow is a crow

not a dove in hiding.

You don’t need to denounce one

to reveal the other.

They’re not opposites.

They’re twins.

Like creation and apocalypse.

They’re simulacra.

And the valley of the shadow of death

is the exact likeness of the holy mountain

that casts it like a deathmask over a mirror

to remember its own reflection.

If you’re looking at stars with tears in your eyes

maybe that’s the only way

you can teach fire how to swim.

If you’re drowning like a nightsea in your own weather

maybe that’s just the way

you feather your waves like birds

and teach water how to fly.

If the stormclouds have left you starless

and your luck plays dice with your knees

and the cure is begging favours from the disease

maybe the dark waves all around you

pulling Icarus who flew too close to the sun

by his winged heels

down

are just water’s way of teaching you to walk on water like the moon

by lighting it up

and blowing it out like a lamp

a firefly

a star

a mirror

a mind.

Appearances are not the illigitimate children of reality.

A blackhole falls on its own light like a sword.

But one’s not a hero.

And the other’s not a suicide.

Maybe they’re just the pupils in the eyes of space

sacred wounds

keyholes in time

trying to see for themselves

what things look like on the other side.

Maybe there are times when the black mirror is brighter than the white

and infinitely deeper than a star in the night

that can only take it back so far

into the darkness that gave birth to it

before it runs out of light.

Maybe this depression is nothing

but the crone-mask of the dark mother

she puts on like the moon

when she’s sick of her webs and her veils

and giving birth to lifeboats

that don’t know when to lower their sails.

PATRICK WHITE