Saturday, June 16, 2007

YOU CAN WEAR THE STARS

You can wear the stars like tatoos when space is your ultimate skin. Or maybe they’re genes, macroverse Pax6 Hox genes, all those aeons of light just to position your eyes. How small I am. How irrelevant. Flux. Flow. Fusion. Fission. Where the saltwater meets the fresh, in the primordial atom, was it a flowering out or a coming apart, particle or wave, or is the question as stupid as asking if water can drown? And there’s no point in trying to climb the logarithm of the profundity of my unknowing. The moon is fine where it is. Or I’m a lump of boorish, pasty, wadded matter masticated into a cud of grass and grazer, doomed to be transformed through seven stomachs. And it’s not likely that a blade of grass fed in at one end is going to be pulled out a feather at the other. Or maybe I’m just spooked a bit by time. Or there’s nothing more meaningless than a meaningful life. Anyway, why exhaust yourself like a fly at the pane of the sky, trying to swim through glass, harping on the incommensurable stations of your transformation into a repeating decimal? Values and meanings, but who interprets the interpreters? And there are sediments of metaphor under the river bottom, pages and pages of hidden icons like the fossils of covert programmes that boot me up every morning. And viruses that spam my thinking with artificial erections. So I resort to words the way a dam resorts to run-offs. I leak out of myself like the sea in a bag of skin to avoid being punctured by my own insights like the doll of a darker magic. How can the mindstream neglect its maritime ablutions? Black sail, white sail. Easy enough to understand. But what if, standing here on your headland, you spot one that’s striped, or grey? If the curse and the blessing are blurred? Or worse. My third eye needs glasses? Was love the first mover of life, or does life have a black agenda for love of its own? Two lungs of the same hourglass breathing sand in and out. And the whole of my life, a mirage in a desert. Who needs to go looking for a broom to sweep it away?

PATRICK WHITE

NO GAP

No gap between the tree and the word that knows it like lightning, like a bird. No interval between the cloud and the name of the cloud. No abyss between the universe and the listener watering his flowering inferometers with a sea of waves. The things of the world, these amazing myriad forms and faces and the transformations between them, are the true ground and grammar of our knowing, the infinite inflections of the jewel of our awareness that shines by its own light. You are the lantern, you are the eclipse of your own dreams, the suchness of yourself as you are that keeps breaking through the pimped out mirror like an astronomic catastrophe, so all that is left is the ownerless world, and a universe of your own. Next time you blunder into the eye of your own hurricane rose like a heavy bee, take a closer look. Look at the elegance and eloquence of evolution engendered out of the random, the aeonic orders of the stars. Look how law flows like a bloodstream out of chaos and returns like a leech to bleed it. The cornerstone of everything is empty, without definition, like a passionate love affair. Take off the straitjacket of what you think you know, that weave of delusions as stable as the moon, and put on the cleaner garment of your doubt, and not knowing why or where, understand the two legs you’re standing on are the keys to the cage, and open it like an eyelid and feel your own vastness in the freedom before you. Not random, not chaos, not order, not law, no it, no you, no seer or seen, add yourself like a lost dimension to everything that is and write every word whether in space or on paper as if it were your name flowing like a leaf on the mindstream, the alpha and the omega of this prime time alphabet of maggots and stars that says you to you as if you could hear the roaring lion of the distant sea waking in your own ear. Show me the bacterium that isn’t the cradle of a dragon. Show me a night that dreads its own stars. Or a wind that is lost without a map. Every life you have ever lived tastes of this life now.

PATRICK WHITE

IT'S IMPORTANT

It’s important to let the words sink deeply into the page, an unribboned current of ink let loose in the blood until it merges indistinguishably with your most intimate emotions and thoughts if you want to write from the inside out. I’m sick of the mispelt writing on the wall glyphed out in the cursive script of comets that turn out to be nothing more than burning kites. Sometimes I put off the serious business of the boy to attend to the childish needs of the man, but mostly I am dunced by a genius that labours absurdly by the mindstream for profundities in the pan, unsayable things, gleaming insights that might root a rootless man. If it’s all absurd, then what’s the point of sending absurdity to school? So my discipline is absurdly free. My eyes can supersede the speed of light, and the relative nowness of my seeing is the past, is all available dimensions of the future that will establish me on either side of the Atlantic Ridge of my nose. And yet nothing is divided. Even when my third eye is used like a ball in a lacrosse game. My focus is primordial. Sometimes I see what the snake sees; sometimes I’m an ocean of eyes, and once, having made it as far as the precipice of a genuine abyss, I looked out into space and saw that the emptiness was one face with billions of eyes looking back at me like a gathering of rain just before it falls. What else could I do but flower? What more could I be than I was in that visionary hour? Since then, the best has been to work at things that are not threatened by achievement. Affairs of the heart. Affairs of the spirit. So that, at the end of the day, there is no one so squalid that can’t wash the world off in their own unattainability.

PATRICK WHITE

NO FLOWERS BLOOM

No flowers bloom in the lazy light of a mind that isn’t capable of thinking beyond itself. And there’s no point in trying to send your shadows on ahead into the openness before you, as if a proxy could do your growing for you. Would you hire an eclipse as your gardener? Make the star wait on its understudy? There’s an underground perversity in the world that wants to liberate the executioners from human bondage, that wants to turn their blood green, their eyes into the vampiric abstract glass of an ideology that would lead us through the valleys of life like a shepherd of ghosts. How do you pollinate a microchip? Presented with an infinite choice of variety that is proliferating us, have you noticed the diminishing variety of choice that is simultaneously emaciating the spirit that plays like a child with links of its own? Why do you want to apply yourself like a mental conditioner to the Afro of evolution, the burning bush you’re counting on to turn the dead stick of that wooden dick in your hand into a cannibalistic serpent that can satiate its snake-envy on the magic of lesser magicians? Erectile dysfunction. And your balls the tinkling of two burnt-out lightbulbs in the spotty marquee of a magic fingers motel. Nothing but vacancies. Imperial mirages. Pre-emptive crusades. Worthless, paranoid values pimping the truth up to manipulate the lies of hysterical johns mobbing the red light emergency exit doors like a summons of chemicals to see the latest pole-dancer insinuate herself like the field of an electromagnetic delusion around the earth’s axis, which, of course is that broken wand between your legs. And the cure? The most compassionate act of a feeling person in this century of razor-wire certainties that vine the black wine they press from the windfalls of their human fruit? To be intensely illuminated by the clarity of your ignorance. How else can we stop tearing the faces of children out of the book of life like the expurgated pages of a global policy to give the invisible features of our bloodless abstractions a transplanted identity that might recognize us in our madness?

PATRICK WHITE