STARMUD AND MOONWATER FOUR

STARMUD AND MOONWATER FOUR

 

letters to everyone in particular

 

You might be crazy but you’re far from being mad enough to know how much bliss there is in freedom from delusion and reality alike. A cool background bliss that keeps you tuned up like white noise and oxygen, not the universal hiss of the cosmic afterbirth of creation. You’ve got a bad case of mystic deflation. Mystic nihilism. Something was there that you cherished but it got taken away. As if someone had robbed space. What could they possibly take? What windows could you have locked? What doors? You look into the cup. You read the lees and tea-leaves. And you defame the cup for its emptiness because it isn’t the grail you’ve been looking for. You play your luck as if it were the only fate left to you but you’ve lost so many times you’re trying to derive a negative nobility from failure. Not an anti-hero. But one who shuns war because he didn’t go. A draft dodger hung like a Christmas tree with medals in your vain attempt to democratize courage. There’s the compassion of the strong who disdain to use their power against the weak. And then there’s the compassion of the weak who delight in imposing their deficiency on everyone from below as if they were down to their last virtue in a foxhole at Armageddon.

              Anyone can tell what someone’s looking at by the way they live. Prophetic skulls bobbing their way to poetic islands on Orphic waves or siege-minds in a castle with the drawbridge pulled up like an impregnable rule of life. What you see feel think intuit and imagine are all mediums of artistic expression. Why lie to your self-portrait about who you are when you don’t know either? And you haven’t finished painting. A blade of stargrass stirs in the breeze and the whole universe is changed renewably. A sudden thought flys across your mind like the shadow of a nightbird across the moon and it’s not the same unified field theory it was a moment ago.  Go ask your council of mirrors. Anytime anything changes so do you. So show me something that isn’t orginal and mystically specific when everything is a work in progress that creatively collaborates with everything else. Atomic Tom against the Cosmos in a rematch that takes a fall everytime you place a bet on yourself. As the Zen master said. In the contest between the world and yourself second the world. And you might think you have a big advantage over him because he’s dead but he’s still practising a kind of spiritual judo a thousand years later that knows how to use your energy against you the minute he gets into your head. And every human who’s ever lived has already died for you. So take your pick of messiahs if you’re still looking for a quick victory outside of the ring by slapping your own cheeks silly like a punchy Christian looking to get knocked out like Paul of Tarsus taking a fall in the third round. Whenever a man gives up looking and asks to be guided to himself a gravestone is turned into the cornerstone of a church that squeezes the life out of things by demonizing women for their own benefit. You walk on all four limbs like a baby, two as a man, three with a cane and then when you die both feet are stuffed into one shoe on its way to the grave. Be brave. Try to win a victory that no one else but you had to die for. And remember that hate hates the hater first and worst. When you hate you’re reborn again as the semi-colon of an embryo in the womb of a cannibal mother that doesn’t hesitate to eat her own.

 

PATRICK WHITE 

STARMUD AND MOONWATER THREE

STARMUD AND MOONWATER THREE

 

letters to everyone in particular

 

An accidental bowl of roadmud with rainwater in it from last night is enough to reflect a star. And Siamese fighting fish can live a whole life in the hoofprint of an ox in the rainy season. Everybody makes an impression like a five million year old footprint. Put a lot of them in a row and it’s a book. And then there’s the subtlety of the wind writing its name in water and sand and cell tissue one breath at a time. And the ghost dance of white fire that writes in an irrefrangible freehand. Everyone will be brought down by the thing they aspire to the most. It isn’t death that kills you. It’s life. And they’re both innocent.

              Love for most people is a way of turning their backs on their own darkness for someone else’s light. Things get brighter but the wrong flowers come up. And people are disappointed in each other when the weeds don’t bear apples. Your guess is that people who care the least in love are the stronger of the two. But that’s the kind of Nazi logic that’s still dreaming of winning World War II. It’s hard not to be angry at women when your identity has been smothered in love to make up for your old man not being around. Too much ground and mother earth and not enough lightning. The embrace of a mother for her son draws the boy inward and leaves the dangerous world outside. The father drives him out of the center of the circle. Teaches him to walk away on his own without a circumference. Mother-love is water. Father-love is fire. And it’s hard to know which of the two’s the better liar. Without meaning to.

              So you’re a moony child even at forty looking for another drink and a chance to get even with yourself for not being what you think. You’re a street lab of meds and booze but experience isn’t an experiment. To live as if you’ve got nothing to lose is just another way of realizing what you have. And every cynic I’ve ever met seemed like a failure of imagination. But that’s all right. You don’t have to haul everything out into the light. Not all the fruits of the mind are sweet. But it’s crucial to taste the difference when you bite into life like your very own private apple between the night and the starless darkness that’s afraid of the light. Most people don’t have the guts to be happy. Everybody keeps an eye on everybody else so there’s nothing to see. They drink blood from their own wounds to feel like a scar for a moment or two and then get back to bleeding with a real feeling for what they do. Is that you? Is that you? Is that you? Are you a winner? Are you a loser? Are you a snake? Are you a ladder? Do you live everyday of your life as if you were grateful for dark matter or are you a selfish light that turns back in upon itself like an ingrown solar flare?

              How could anyone in their right mind care? But, there, you see, that’s the twist in it, that’s where the polarities get spontaneously reversed in a chargled particle field and everyone who says they care will later say they don’t. You want to go play with the dolphins in the club meds of your indifference. You own the deed to your innocence. And it’s signed and sealed in blood from Shakespeare’s quill like the tragic sense of life he left you in his will. But the lower you fall in fact the higher you dream your way up to the top. And it’s a careers move on a ground of acrylic paint whether you become a crude atheist or a brutal saint.

              O what a bad exstepfather I would be if I told you what to do. Quit drinking. There’s no prophecy in it and you’ve got to pan a lot of wine with the full moon to find a nugget of truth. Let yourself be disciplined by your art. And let that discipline be the biggest ocean in your life. Better than a thousand acres is a little skill you can carry around with you. Paint. Sculpt. Carve yourself a new heart and hold it up like the bloody fist of an Aztec priest as a sign to the gods you’ve finally found one of your own. Mend. Heal. Cure yourself of yourself and let the snow thaw and what was solid become real. How long have you been apprenticed to your senses like a dog at a table in your master’s house begging for scraps as if your whole face were an anxious dinner plate?

              Don’t waste time on yourself trying to figure out who you are. Don’t try to psychoanalyze Michelangelo’s statue of David before it’s created. You ask me to give you what’s already your own the moment you let it live you. I try to but my powers are weak and it’s a fool’s endeavour to become the professional student of what you seek. And I’ve got ways of getting lost that are all my own.

 

PATRICK WHITE

             

STARMUD AND MOONWATER TWO

STARMUD AND MOONWATER TWO

 

letters to everyone in particular

 

              You want to know what I see? I’d be happy to tell you but it keeps moving on and leaving me here with my mouth open feeling deficiently alone. When I’m the butterfly it’s the net. When it’s the butterfly the whole universe couldn’t catch it if it tried. And I know it’s hard to throw a little light on black matter and the path to clarity is too often vague and metaphoric and what we say to each other in the morning doesn’t mean anything by the end of the day. Trying to grasp it like something you can hold onto is like trying to count the ripples of rain all the way out to infinity and beyond. Death is the muse that inspires all our desperate guesses at what this life is that we’re so afraid to lose without knowing what it is we have. Death, the Unattainable. Death with its unanswerable longing for life.

              Your mother is ill. Your sister tried to committ suicide. Fuzzy died. And something’s overturned the stone of the planet and left you with nowhere to hide. You want to know what’s going on. What’s killing all the angels. What makes the demons strong. Here’s a big clue. There’s nothing logical about the crazy wisdom that is you. Stop playing Leggo with your molecules. Stop trying to build the Taj Mahal on quicksand. Can’t you see how the stars got here without a map? And who could teach you how to be Everyone?

              What does not change is the will to change. Charles Olsen, a poetic mailman, said that. But that’s not precisely right either because change doesn’t have a will of its own. What does not change is change. Let’s go with that for awhile. A hand moves and the fire’s whirling takes different shapes. All things change when we do. An enlightened Zen poet said that. But now we’re back to go. Everything’s changing and it all depends on you. Now what do you do?

              When you cherish your doubt as much as you do the illusion of certainty. When it’s just as important to get the question right as it is the answer. When you can see your eyes in the dark mirror and not just the white. When you realize the great potential of emptiness that lies within your power. When you open your mouth like a door and all you can say is welcome. When you realize the positive isn’t the judge of the negative and stop trying to separate them at birth like Siamese twins. When you understand that creativity isn’t your invention and what’s original about this earthly existence isn’t at war with cosmic convention. When you stop praying as if you were knee-capped by celestial thugs dealing drugs to a church that didn’t pay up in time. When you stop asking for a front on your afterlife. When you drink and the wine gets high on you. When you look at the stars and their shining is you. When you gaze at a flower and you’re the one that’s blue. When the universe looks out into its dark interstellar spaces and wonders if there’s life on you. When you realize you’re the next habitable planet your mother is going to jump to when this one goes belly up. Who knows what you’ve amounted to even then?

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

STARMUD AND MOONWATER ONE

STARMUD AND MOONWATER ONE

 

letters to everyone in particular

 

You asked me to write this. So I’m just going to write this as if nothing in or out of existence is a lie. No river’s flowing the wrong way to the sea and there’s nothing more foolish than listening to one river tell another which way to go. It’s the same with your life just as it is now without improvement. Modes of water. Modes of knowing for all the myriad paths you’ve taken to the bottom of the world mountain there are no flaws in the sea. The only way you can fit into existence is perfectly. It’s as open and free as that. Believe me. Don’t believe me. There’s no issue here unless the issue is you and that’s enough to taste the rain on the moon for yourself and know whether it’s hot or cold. So there’s no one left at the end to believe in but the rain. And you’ve already transcended that. Like a star that’s already somewhere else by the time you can see it. Modes of knowing. Not thought. Not concept. Not idea or ideal. The cup not the wine. The Morphic shape of your knowledge as it’s constantly changing. Not the design that would hold it still and fixed like an identity by which you can be known not only to yourself but to the others who cling to themselves like fingerprints to a crime scene.

              To give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Shakespeare said that about writing. The airy nothing is you. The local habitation Perth. And your name is Everyone. There. You’ve got a locus. But who knows where you’re going? Heisenberg asked that. I suggest you walk down to the Tay River and ask the water for an answer if you can’t give one right away without thinking or opening your mouth. I’ve known you since you were a teenage boy trying to scam hamburgers off me on a skateboard. From fourteen to nineteen you were a gazelle of light able to leap tall buildings at a single bound or the wire-mesh fence at the back of the Giant Tiger parking lot without groining yourself. By comparison I felt like an old scarred warhorse. You charmed what you wanted from the world with a Puckish grin and an estranged demon that I suspect is what you made of the absence of a father so that you weren’t all light and no shadow. No doubt a counterbalance to the messianic expectations of your adoring mother trying to be more than she was as mine did to fill the blanks in. Too many mangers. Not enough messiahs! Your mother raised you to be Jesus. Mine brainwashed Lucifer in the ways of falling angels. I learned to jump toward paradise without a parachute. So I’ll meet you in this wilderness of temptations and we’ll discuss things as Bob Dylan sings as if life were not a joke.

              You’re always looking for fun but you don’t know how to play so profoundly with life your passion turns into a discipline just like iron ore turns into a sword. You don’t know how to pull yourself out of the stone like magic out of Merlin. Like something out of nothing that knows that nothing’s changed. Like being from non-being. Like gold from lead. Like the living word out of the dead rhetoric of Lazarus. Every tragic hero is a holy war that can’t be won. And what kind of transcendence keeps on surrendering to itself like a besieged town begging for mercy from its own occupants? The king wanders through the labyrinths of his water palace like a dumbfounded Leviathan with Jonah in his belly on hold bumming chump change from his baffled servants. Poverty’s a condition of money. Not of your soul when you have one. O Absalom Absalom my wayward stepson life’s not less of a journey just because you don’t know where you’re going. And freedom’s not the placard of a dry flower from the sixties however much you like the music. There are no gates on the high fields that roll on over the hills forever throwing wildflowers in the path of the wind.

              You say you’re schizophrenic. But that’s only two Greek roots in a psychological compound. A name you give yourself when no one else is around to explain your behaviour. The sound of a split personality clapping like one hand in evil glee that it’s the last tree standing. A cedar shake. A flood of dopamines from the neuronic chaos of the cataracts of the Upper Nile depositing the highlands of Punt like silt on the doorsills of  Egypt. Maybe you’re just another way civilization gets around. Not damaged debilitated or broken. Maybe you’re not Icarus but the two-faced god of hinges in the skybound doorway of a bird that’s always leaving home on a wing and a prayer. Maybe you’re a comet in a hyperbolic orbit that’s flying too close to the sun and not the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Not every change of species begins with an astronomical catastrophe. Death isn’t the only destination of birth. Or the direction of prayer. In a way you say you’re looking for god but haven’t you noticed the way nothing’s ever missing when you’re not there and when you want to hide from someone the best place to do it is out in the open?

              Time to get homely again. Down to earth. Put the pantyhose back on the anaconda

like a straitjacket of skin it just sluffed off and get back to the going before the going gets rough. But that doesn’t mean you have to imprint a logo on a cocoon like an iconic butterfly on a real asylum to know your imaginary place in society is lunar seas below the salt. But I’ll let you in on a little secret. There’s more space under the table than there is above. And more stars. You can see the universe in a grain of sand as Blake said. But your mystic specificity isn’t just the eternal turned cosmically inside out. There’s a lot less to it than that. And if you’re a nomadic monad like me (and who isn’t these days?) it helps to remember when you’re longing for something permanent that a tent is a lot older than the pyramids and that’s all that stands between us and the desert sands of our afterlives like an apricot blossom on a Viking rover on Mars trying to squeeze a little more daylight out of the sun to ripen in time to fall. Because as Shakespeare wrote, once he got Hamlet of out his system. Ripeness is all.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

STARMUD AND MOONWATER ONE

STARMUD AND MOONWATER ONE

 

letters to everyone in particular

 

You asked me to write this. So I’m just going to write this as if nothing in or out of existence is a lie. No river’s flowing the wrong way to the sea and there’s nothing more foolish than listening to one river tell another which way to go. It’s the same with your life just as it is now without improvement. Modes of water. Modes of knowing for all the myriad paths you’ve taken to the bottom of the world mountain there are no flaws in the sea. The only way you can fit into existence is perfectly. It’s as open and free as that. Believe me. Don’t believe me. There’s no issue here unless the issue is you and that’s enough to taste the rain on the moon for yourself and know whether it’s hot or cold. So there’s no one left at the end to believe in but the rain. And you’ve already transcended that. Like a star that’s already somewhere else by the time you can see it. Modes of knowing. Not thought. Not concept. Not idea or ideal. The cup not the wine. The Morphic shape of your knowledge as it’s constantly changing. Not the design that would hold it still and fixed like an identity by which you can be known not only to yourself but to the others who cling to themselves like fingerprints to a crime scene.

              To give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Shakespeare said that about writing. The airy nothing is you. The local habitation Perth. And your name is Everyone. There. You’ve got a locus. But who knows where you’re going? Heisenberg asked that. I suggest you walk down to the Tay River and ask the water for an answer if you can’t give one right away without thinking or opening your mouth. I’ve known you since you were a teenage boy trying to scam hamburgers off me on a skateboard. From fourteen to nineteen you were a gazelle of light able to leap tall buildings at a single bound or the wire-mesh fence at the back of the Giant Tiger parking lot without groining yourself. By comparison I felt like an old scarred warhorse. You charmed what you wanted from the world with a Puckish grin and an estranged demon that I suspect is what you made of the absence of a father so that you weren’t all light and no shadow. No doubt a counterbalance to the messianic expectations of your adoring mother trying to be more than she was as mine did to fill the blanks in. Too many mangers. Not enough messiahs! Your mother raised you to be Jesus. Mine brainwashed Lucifer in the ways of falling angels. I learned to jump toward paradise without a parachute. So I’ll meet you in this wilderness of temptations and we’ll discuss things as Bob Dylan sings as if life were not a joke.

              You’re always looking for fun but you don’t know how to play so profoundly with life your passion turns into a discipline just like iron ore turns into a sword. You don’t know how to pull yourself out of the stone like magic out of Merlin. Like something out of nothing that knows that nothing’s changed. Like being from non-being. Like gold from lead. Like the living word out of the dead rhetoric of Lazarus. Every tragic hero is a holy war that can’t be won. And what kind of transcendence keeps on surrendering to itself like a besieged town begging for mercy from its own occupants? The king wanders through the labyrinths of his water palace like a dumbfounded Leviathan with Jonah in his belly on hold bumming chump change from his baffled servants. Poverty’s a condition of money. Not of your soul when you have one. O Absalom Absalom my wayward stepson life’s not less of a journey just because you don’t know where you’re going. And freedom’s not the placard of a dry flower from the sixties however much you like the music. There are no gates on the high fields that roll on over the hills forever throwing wildflowers in the path of the wind.

              You say you’re schizophrenic. But that’s only two Greek roots in a psychological compound. A name you give yourself when no one else is around to explain your behaviour. The sound of a split personality clapping like one hand in evil glee that it’s the last tree standing. A cedar shake. A flood of dopamines from the neuronic chaos of the cataracts of the Upper Nile depositing the highlands of Punt like silt on the doorsills of  Egypt. Maybe you’re just another way civilization gets around. Not damaged debilitated or broken. Maybe you’re not Icarus but the two-faced god of hinges in the skybound doorway of a bird that’s always leaving home on a wing and a prayer. Maybe you’re a comet in a hyperbolic orbit that’s flying too close to the sun and not the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Not every change of species begins with an astronomical catastrophe. Death isn’t the only destination of birth. Or the direction of prayer. In a way you say you’re looking for god but haven’t you noticed the way nothing’s ever missing when you’re not there and when you want to hide from someone the best place to do it is out in the open?

              Time to get homely again. Down to earth. Put the pantyhose back on the anaconda

like a straitjacket of skin it just sluffed off and get back to the going before the going gets rough. But that doesn’t mean you have to imprint a logo on a cocoon like an iconic butterfly on a real asylum to know your imaginary place in society is lunar seas below the salt. But I’ll let you in on a little secret. There’s more space under the table than there is above. And more stars. You can see the universe in a grain of sand as Blake said. But your mystic specificity isn’t just the eternal turned cosmically inside out. There’s a lot less to it than that. And if you’re a nomadic monad like me (and who isn’t these days?) it helps to remember when you’re longing for something permanent that a tent is a lot older than the pyramids and that’s all that stands between us and the desert sands of our afterlives like an apricot blossom on a Viking rover on Mars trying to squeeze a little more daylight out of the sun to ripen in time to fall. Because as Shakespeare wrote, once he got Hamlet of out his system. Ripeness is all.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ALWAYS THIS SERIOUS SIDE

ALWAYS THIS SERIOUS SIDE

 

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 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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