EVERYBODY SAYS I'M TOO INTENSE

EVERYBODY SAYS I’M TOO INTENSE

 

Everybody says I’m too intense and I say

you sure as fuck aren’t.

And since I was sixteen in highschool

and before that in the local neighbourhood

in the bosom of my family

people have always thought I was mad.

My highschool graduation yearbook says

most likely to become a mad teacher mad scientist mad poet mad.

An oracular assessment of my peers

that has haunted me for years.

But I say crazy is the only antidote

to the extreme chaos of conditioned consciousness.

Look at the world.

Lies lies lies.

A coalition of lies

that calls itself

the history of civilization.

Crazy wisdom.

The tantric insight

into the fact

there is no nature to things.

You’re not a very wise human

if you don’t understand ignorance

is the clearest expression of enlightenment.

You see what I mean?

It’s hard to speak of unity

in the split tongue of a snake

without making an oxymoron of it

at the fork in the roads

it mistakes for a direction.

Regard the dead parachutes of Babylon

no one can understand you

I said to myself one day dying with a sneer.

It’s the moral obligation of a writer to make things clear.

I forget who said it.

But he was a nitwit.

One of the lice of literature

that makes your mind want to scratch itself raw

for the next half century.

It’s that word moral that bothers me.

Not his preconception of clarity

though when it gets down to that

you smear the mirror

when you try to be clear about clarity.

I said that.

It takes an amateur madman

to be a good shrink

and make reality

try to correspond

to what you think.

But what an impoverished way to live your life.

What a distortion of humanity.

If you’re mad enough

there’s plenty of room in the asylum

to embrace sanity with decorum.

When in Rome do as the Romans do

and try not to make a spectacle of yourself in the Colloseum.

It’s been my experience

that so much of what the world calls mad

is only freedom

with the courage to open its eyes.

Most people look into the eyes

of spontaneous freedom

and it terrifies them.

They don’t want to know

what’s not there.

The world ends at the back of their eyelids.

Things just get too deep

and they drown in their sleep

like pearldivers on the moon.

At every moment of your life

life is more certain than death.

It’s all you can say about

where you expect to be tomorrow

and where this is now.

Everybody always wants things

to look the way they seem.

They want to live the dream awake.

They don’t go along with their own mindstream.

They’re shore-huggers.

They live at the edge

of the great sea of mysterious being

in sandcastles with blowholes

that burp like tiny volcanoes in the receding tide.

Herculaneum and Pompey

are mummified in the flow

down their pygmy mountainsides

but it’s easy to see where they hide

thinking they’re out of reach.

But who am I to preach

quicksand to cornerstones such as these?

Everybody always tells me I’m too intense

but they’ve never been through a nightstorm

far out in the Pacific

where the moon’s your only lifeboat

and it’s just gone down like a bright penny in a wishing well

like a last longshot in the slots of an odds-making hell.

And it’s seven to five you survive.

They’ve never fallen in love with a hurricane rose

that’s built like a fortune-cookie

and paints her eyelids

with the blood of ex-lovers

who were sacrificial enough to propose.

If you go looking for the meaning of life sincerely

sooner or latter it will find you

like one fact final enough to delude all the others

into thinking it’s ultimately true.

Complete one act well

and you’ve accomplished everything

because one act begets another

until everything is done of its own accord.

Because your birth isn’t terminal

your death is ongoing.

And the same is true in reverse.

How do I know this is so?

I let go.

I blossom like the memories of a dead branch

in the apple orchards of the Hesperides

everyone of them

a full moon.

I see how innocent my doubt is.

So even my darkness

is a singing bird on a green bough.

I’ve looked at drops of water

at the tips of the blades of the stargrass

like the thin-skinned tears of the sky in childbirth

and everyone of them

was the seed of a new world.

Worlds within worlds

whose only conventions

are the creative dimensions of the perceivers.

Not one size fits all.

I don’t put my finger to my lips

like an ego-I

to eclipse the great silence.

I let it say me with its eyes.

And we both come as a great suprise to each other

when we’re standing

on the same side of the mirror

on the far shore of the mindstream

like two eyes of the same seeing

astonished we’re here at all

without lying to the miracle

about our reasons for being.

Have you ever considered the enormous distances

in the body of a small bird?

Or how strangely intimate a star can be

from thousands of lightyears away?

A whisper of lucidity in an oceanic ear.

Something you’ve heard for a long time

but never listened to before.

Never this near.

This clear.

Have you ever wondered which of two sisters

is the older of the elements.

Fire or water?

Or why spring lies about her age

when she’s as old as autumn

and then claims

to be the daughter of the grain

when in fact she’s the womb of summer?

Is it insane to wonder?

Is it too intense to fear

living my whole life

as if I were never here

to take a good look?

Is it deranged to feel

the enlargement of my seeing

is not the diminishment of my being

because I opened my eyes

and saw they were both

two ends of the same telescope?

It’s one thing to let the light in through the gates of your eyes.

It’s wholly another to let it get this far

into the palace of your imagination

without being announced

or scrutinized.

Life’s a breeze

when you don’t look at it

like a disease you’re afraid to get over.

If I’m inspired by the vastness of my ignorance

to turn a leaf over now and again

like a new page in an old book

to avoid being obvious

am I looking for a happy ending

or am I just delighting in my indolence

when I read it like a map of my own lifelines

by running my finger over it as if I were blind

and it were the one who could see?

If I don’t believe we appear briefly

to disappear forever

because everything here

is a vast collaboration

with creative emptiness

and it isn’t going anywhere

what do I care

if you’re confused by my endeavours?

What’s it to you

if I’m a mirage on a grailquest in a desert of stars?

Or if I practise compassion spontaneously

toward myself and others

as if we were all the same wound

under many scars

and if my lies heal

are they not the fruit of insight?

If I’m the dark genius

deeply intrigued

by my own misdirection

that you say I am

though that doesn’t change a thing

about the way I can’t help being

and not being myself

what makes you think

there’s only one star

you can point out

like the needle

in the impoverished compass

of your last course correction

as if there were only one way to go

and the truth were always

somewhere north of you

instead of under your feet

in all directions at once

like the radiance of stars

before the arising of signs?

Today Jesus and the Buddha walk on water.

Tomorrow Lucifer and Kamamara will walk on fire.

But when the opposites

get their shit together

and realize they can’t lift it

and abandon it by the side of the road

like an outhouse on a trailer hitch

or a hubcap in a country ditch

that’s stopped spinning around

and come to rest in an oxymoron

posing as the full moon

that’s come to liberate

an empty asylum

they both walk on earth

bewildered by their innocence

when they discover

they’ve never had anything to do

with the course of events

that made them who they are.

Wasn’t the Buddha enlightened

by watching Venus in the dawn

lead the sun up

like the morning star

that once was Lucifer

before he took the fall like a ripe apple

before he stole fire from the gods like Prometheus

the thief of inspiration

knowing the moment of his perfection

in all realms of knowledge

infernal or divine

was the best time to jump?

And the darkness will always seem like a liar

to those who don’t know the truth.

If I don’t see life as just a bag of water

with nine holes in it

leaking out of itself

as I onced used to

eras and eras ago

and you still do

when I look at what remains

of the dessicated parachute of a jellyfish

you’ve made of your brains

clinging to shore

next to the sewage drains

that poured you out

and washed you up

and wiped their mouths of the taste of a dead ocean

what’s it to you

if I run so far out to sea

from so high up

on the down side of the world mountain

I’m swimming with dolphins on the moon?

I’m teaching blind starfish how to shine

like dark matter with a mind of its own

and no sign of a constellation

with feet of clay

afraid to leave home.

Say what you want to say.

Be what you want to be.

Enlighten your ignorance

and then ignore your enlightenment.

Don’t drive the darkness out of your lucidity

like a scapegoat into a spiritual desert

you’re afraid to enter

because you’re not bright enough to see

that under every threshold

between the inside and the out

certainty and doubt

insanity and the sane

the trivial and profound

the homeless and a habitable planet

there’s a sphere

spinning on a tilted axis

in the immensity of space

that’s so far out it’s in.

 

PATRICK WHITE