TEMPER THE SWORD

TEMPER THE SWORD

 

Temper the sword of justice in the waters of mercy even if that can only mean sometimes a sharp blade and a quick death. Anger blunts. Compassion keeps an edge on things that cuts deeper than knives. The slayer and the slain dance to the music of the same illusion. Their eyes are not at war with one another. If you encounter a rabid fox don’t blame the fox for having rabies, but remembering there but for the grace of an infinite number of random things, there go you, do what you must. You can’t cure the fox by letting it bite other people. But don’t look for the cure anywhere other than in the heart of the disease. Like great wealth use your health to wake the sick up like children from their nightmares though there will always be some you must let sleep. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life, the deranged currencies of revenge. Hammurabi was a businessman. But justice isn’t a way of keeping tidy books that balance. The volcano demands your first born like a pound of flesh to appease it. And you throw something in to escape its wrath like a delusion demands a placebo. Hatred is a snake and when it arises in you like a cobra wearing the hood of the moon like an eclipse of the light there is no flute, no voice, no whip you can use to train it to strike other people. It will sink its fangs like the first and last crescents of the moon into your Adam’s apple and hang on tight like a word it doesn’t want you to say. It will enter your bloodstream like an assassin you raised as your own to get what was never yours back. Life isn’t fair or unfair. Culpable or innocent. And so much must go unanswered like the abyss of the silence that surveys the ineffable loss of its belief in a rational God and knows there’s nothing it could ask for in exchange to make up for it. Justice isn’t a scar you can measure out to fit the wound as if one size fit everyone. It’s a mirage of water and palms in the desert beside a real skull trying to bear true witness to the illusion of it all. That’s why it must not only be done but be seen to be done that whatever judgment comes down, innocent or guilty, the jury confesses its crime like a perjured eye-witness to the criminal.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

COMPASSION ISN'T THE FIRST-BORN OF INSIGHT

COMPASSION ISN’T THE FIRST-BORN OF INSIGHT

 

Compassion isn’t the first-born of insight. It’s not just enough to see suffering and commiserate; you must be that agony as if it were a stone in your own shoe in order to remove it from another. If the healer doesn’t fall sick first, how will the others ever get better? Compassion isn’t one of the sad apples of life. When you bite into it it’s never bitter. Compassion is the action of one true thought that didn’t get lost in the eyes of the mirror like a nightbird in the face of a storm. It delivers its message like blood to the wizard of the heart conjuring the spirits of powerful elixirs out of toxic cauldrons: Let your own sorrows ripen into the sweetness that flows into others like an underground river in paradise and be the dark water that mothers the roots of all. Compassion isn’t a door you open like a roof to let the rain in or the stars out like fireflies you’ve kept in a jar like a lot of good ideas. It isn’t feeling sorry for yourself as a human when you see how others are wounded worse than you are. There’s no inside or outside to it. It doesn’t wear skin to say this is where you end and I begin to the world. It doesn’t take fingerprints. It doesn’t take names. God spoke to Moses from a burning bush in the valley of Tuwa and said I am that I am. Sit still. And know. And compassion answered out of the silence that followed like the female principle of life you are as he is. A vow of solitude that’s bound by the wound deep in the heart of things not the sword that swears by the scar that it isn’t. And insight might come like the sun at midnight to thaw your eyes like the slack glass of old windows that have stared into the darkness too long without seeing anything, but it’s compassion that kisses your eyelids like the moon that whispers her way into your dream like a lifeboat on the mindstream. Insight might stun you with answers but compassion sits down on the ground beside you and asks the same questions that you do with the same mouth, the same voice, the same loss about why there is so much suffering in life and still there’s no word like a stand-in for God that comes like a crow or a dove that knows whether to bless or blame it. Compassion lays her head on the shoulders of the labouring hills like the glow of moonlight and insight understands what its eyes are for when the night looks through them for signs of intelligent life and all it can see are these small gestures of ours that flower among the stars like tears among the thorns. Compassion isn’t the happy widow of a God with horns that gores the world at conception. It isn’t the final term of a law intent on its own perfection. It isn’t a distillate of love that can be isolated from flesh and blood like aspirin from a willow and taken three times a day until the pain goes away. Compassion is the star in the eyes of the dark mother that feels like a familiar constellation too far from home to be seen. Insight might identify the cause of the hurt as desire and prescribe a course of detachment as a copious solution, but compassion opens its orchid of blue fire in the hottest part of the flame like a cool breeze in hell that feels the heat of thousands upon thousands of wounded candles, and taking a breath as deep as the sea, one by one, child by child, leaving the nightlight on like the moon, gently blows them out like a better dream than the one that woke them up.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CRAZY LADY

CRAZY LADY

 

for Alysia

 

Crazy lady in your masks and vehement opinions

about which of all your secret agencies

tortured the starfish overnight

when you weren’t looking

into confessing what constellation it fell from.

Crazy lady can I take you for a sign

the storm has stepped down from its pulpit

because life never cared very much

if it was understood

and you’ve got worlds in your closet

like the unfullfilled graves

of overly sensitive shoes

that want to try you on like a road

that never goes back on its word?

You’re famous as a lover

among the prophetic skulls of the paramours

for always finding the right house

on the right street on the right night

but entering through the wrong door.

You’re a cat-burglar whose heart

goes off like an alarm

everytime you get away

with another break and enter on the moon.

Though you never steal anything

that can’t be put back

I always keep my third eye open

when I’m around you

even if I’m sleeping alone

so I don’t wake up in the morning

and find my will to live shamelessly gone.

Crazy lady you rain on the sphinx in the desert

and write your name in hieroglyphic birthmarks

inside the cosmic glain of a royal cartouche

to say you were here once

and tomorrow you’ll be born again

as a black swan on a midnight river

and after that who knows

maybe you’ll become a voice coach

for a travelling talent show.

Crazy lady I adore you

for the things you throw away

like the unconvincing lines

of a bad morality play.

You’re the wise witch

of your own stagecraft

on the coal road to diamond alone.

And if the clarity drives you insane.

If your freedom seems in vain.

If you hurt in ways you can’t explain

and people are washing up along your coasts

looking for their ghosts among the dead

who gibber through your head

like bats in a lighthouse

in a frenzy of light

they mistake for a mystic experience,

tell them you salvaged all you could from the wreck

when the full moon bounced like a bad cheque

and the lifeboat overturned.

Tell them you’re not the continent

they’re looking for

and just because you’ve left the door ajar

doesn’t mean they can track their lives in

without knocking from the inside.

Crazy lady you were a widow

before you were a bride

like the new moon

rising over black waters

that broke like a watershed of pain

when you were christened

like the last lifeboat to leave Atlantis

without anyone on board.

Crazy lady no one knows

what you’ve buried at sea

when you trafficked in slavery

and captured me on my way

to have my fortune read.

How lightly I wear your chains even now

and for all the things you might be

I can’t see

forgive you somehow

for the mischance of my liberty.

The world loves freedom

but it hates the free.

The world preaches love

but love remains a mystery.

Take your chains off

and the spiders will scoff

that you’ll starve to death

without a dreamcatcher

to snare the butterfly.

Everyone reaches for high ideals

when they’re down and out at their heels

but they eat their own

like swine and farrow

when you throw them a bone

they can gnaw on like gold

down to the nutritive marrow.

And today talks a lot about tomorrow

as the living talk about the dead

as if they knew

what the dead would say

about today languishing on its deathbed

like the prelude of an afterlife that goes on forever

like a weather warning

trying to keep up with a cold front.

Crazy lady let the others thump

their monkey hearts

in a triumph of bread and circuses

to keep the mob

from spying on the watchers

and everyone and everything in its place

face by face as they put

laurels on the winners for their folly.

Don’t let the blaze blind the candle

to its own light.

Night upon night

your darkness outshines them all.

Crazy lady the fireflies

might align your mirrors

like cepheid variables

to a constellation

that changes your eyes like mood rings

and the wind never finish the loveletter

it was writing to you

in a language only you could understand

like the leaves of the poetic tree-letter Q

in the apple groves

of a Druidic tree alphabet

that sings like an orchard in bloom on the moon

because there is no end

of the things it can say

about the way

everything changes around you

like Daphne turning herself into a laurel tree

just as Apollo catches up to her

as if he were catching his breath.

Crazy lady if the others can’t see

how brave you must be

to be so free with your light

in so many dark places

where the world is not impounded

by the memory of what it thought it was,

remember they can only know the outlines of things

however they connect the stars like dots in a thought-chain,

but you know how to break into light

like a night without laws.

Life happens to them from the outside

because they don’t know how to live as you do

like a cause that’s free of its own effects. 

Take perfect from perfect it’s still perfect.

Crazy lady I know you know

like a voice in a stairwell

that knows you’re there

hiding from a thousand thousand things

enlightenment finds its wisest fools

among the rejects of the usual schools

who couldn’t shape their radiance to the rules.

Their lamps can find their way to the barn.

Their starfish can cling to the rock.

But you’ve got eyes that shine alone in the dark

like two waterbirds disappearing

into the waywardness of their wings

without leaving a trace of their wandering anywhere.

They’ve got too many palings on their fence

to find a hole that would let them get out

and beyond things.

And there are locks on the gates

of the secret gardens in their hearts

they keep shut to keep things in.

They might collect stars

in the canning jar of a telescope

but crazy lady you’re the one

that undoes the lid

and lets them all fly free.

You’re what the rest of us

are supposed to be.

Free and happy

just to see

peerlessly into the mystery

there’s nothing we can’t be

or have been

or will become

that isn’t as clear as freedom

to the stars that envy us

the rarity of seeing

beyond the lucidity of being

into our own unwitnessed reality

that views the world on tour

in a field of play

that makes its themes up as it goes

like a river that flows

as easily up the mountain

of its lone reflection

as down the one

that took off its clothes

like spring snows

and jumped in.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GENIUS ISN'T A GOOD GUESS

GENIUS ISN’T A GOOD GUESS

 

Genius isn’t a good guess that thinks it knows what it’s talking about. It’s not an eagle that can be lead around by a jackass like an eagle on a leash. It’s not the happy ending of a lot of puzzled fossils. It never answers itself the same way twice. It hasn’t got doors and windows and stairs and a threshold with a welcome doormat. It isn’t a house like that. And even the great thieves of fire don’t know how to get in. Its keys and locks are mercury and it’s founded on quicksand from Mars. It doesn’t possess and it isn’t captivated by anyone. It’s not the hot point of a spear of insight flintknapped from the cold stone of the moon. And it’s not the igneous bend in the argument that pours a luminous river of gold out of the dark ore of the amusing philosophers who think they need to defend it like a windmill. It isn’t the will. It isn’t the idea. It isn’t the world as we know it. Its eyes aren’t the muses of seeing nor its ears the sirens of hearing. There’s a breeze of dark matter blowing through space but you can’t raise a sail to catch it. And it may weave the light into the cosmic web of a dreamcatcher but there’s no jewel of a spider to bleed your butterflies like lovenotes to a hadron collider. It’s not the God particle that everyone’s looking for or the unified field theory that explains the light to the stars as if you had to hold a candle up to a candleflame to see what’s burning. You can’t earn it. You can’t deserve it. You can’t reserve it like a table in the corner of a private conversation. Like water it goes where it wants as if its own nature were its only direction. And you can lie about it all you want but it doesn’t care if your constellations are true or not. Or if you’re just flying kites with long lifelines that end in the palm of your hand. It’s not an asylum for fugitives who’ve got one foot in the boat and the other on land. It doesn’t mean anything and there’s nothing it’s trying to understand. You can call it freedom. You can call it enlightenment, liberation, moksa, kensho, satori, the abyss, the void, the blaze or a black lightning bolt from the brainpan of the Sahara that struck the tree of knowledge like the dawning revelation of miles and miles of treeless grassland. But however you try to squeeze a sphinx out of a shapeshifter you’re still just scrawling pictures in the sand the wind will efface like a human with the head of a dandelion. Because genius has no likeness anywhere in the universe. No simulacrum, mithal, or metaphor you can point to like a myth in the sky and say that’s where the light comes from. You can squander the moon in a wishing well but the black mirror still isn’t urgent to be known by your reflection. A donkey looks into the well and the well looks back. It doesn’t echo with answers like a voice with a change of heart and a course correction. It doesn’t show up like a used compass at a quest for perfection. The moment you take it for a guide it leads you astray. You can’t run from it or hide your face in your hands like the dark side of the moon because the light’s too strong. It can rise up like a gust in a backalley and blow stars in your face that can blind you for years and then it can flow the way of water like a luminous path out of the labryinth of your disillusioned tears. There’s not enough content to it to maintain a teacher but all teachings are mere whispers among the shadows of it. Silence within silence like the end of the play within the play, the dream within the dream. But when the buddhas have nothing to say. It’s a good time to listen.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE POINT IS

THE POINT IS

 

The point is not to find yourself through your art or anything but to lose yourself so completely in whatever you’re doing you forget who it was you were looking for and what you hoped to achieve. That way the whole universe collaborates in its own becoming in every mystically specific moment of you and nothing’s left out. Yours is the secret name of God written on six million leaves and you’re the wonder of whose work this is. And who can assess the number of stars it takes to make one eye that can turn around and see them? Just don’t underestimate the creative power of extinction. Or forget that silence is the ultimate theme of the music that it gives birth to. And stop treating your questions as if they were a long chromosomatic line of impoverished relatives trying to save up enough to buy their way into one blue-blooded aristocrat of an answer that quickly forgets where it came from. Separation is evil. Severance and self-containment are the eyelids of death. You should take hold of yourself if ever as if you were cupping water in your hands you’re about to return to the river.  What did the Sufi say? Be melting snow and wash yourself clean of yourself. That’s the way to get back to the root of things. Life blooms from below. If there’s a painter left at the end of the painting to say I did this, or a poet who’s still a poet by the time he’s finished writing, or a lover who still knocks on his beloved’s door from the outside, burn them at the stake of their own delusion for not being heretical enough to be consumed. Extinction isn’t the end of things anymore than mammals are the end of dinosaurs. Or God leaves off where the devil begins. But you haven’t emerged here alone in this vast space to seek the eventual forgiveness of this long night that marrows your golden bones with dark matter. You’re not the skull-bound period at the end of a long spine of a sentence that’s learned to walk upright. Pour the elixirs and snakepits out of the grails of being at your feet like stale wine and the emptiness is charged with becoming again. Lighting it up and blowing it out; it goes into action again. Ask any candle. Enlightenment isn’t a long river that anticipates the sea. The wave breaks where it begins. And its greatest delight is in being the no one it always was. With no one watching in the shadows of insight. Consider how nothing amplifies. Put zero beside one and a feather becomes a wing that’s ten times bigger. That’s how you start a universe from scratch. That’s how you take to the sky. Throw yourself like a lot of nothing into the mix and there are stars strewn everywhere across space like a nervous breakdown trying to get a grip on things like starfish and galaxies. But there’s nothing to be afraid of. Water doesn’t drown in water and fire doesn’t burn in its own flames. And when you get right down to it nothing isn’t the exhaustion of being that’s run out of thresholds to cross. It’s the original homelessness that set us on this path to everywhere like a direction that couldn’t leave anything out. So bury your name in the night and forget who you are in your solitude and let the torch of your blood flame out like the setting sun. And strange stars will appear to tell stories around their fires about whose house they think you were born in. And when no one can answer for certain. They’ll pull back their curtains of light and gape at each other like wide-eyed windows staring out into empty space as if it were your face alone that they looked through.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE POINT IS

THE POINT IS

 

The point is not to find yourself through your art or anything but to lose yourself so completely in whatever you’re doing you forget who it was you were looking for and what you hoped to achieve. That way the whole universe collaborates in its own becoming in every mystically specific moment of you and nothing’s left out. Yours is the secret name of God written on six million leaves and you’re the wonder of whose work this is. And who can assess the number of stars it takes to make one eye that can turn around and see them? Just don’t underestimate the creative power of extinction. Or forget that silence is the ultimate theme of the music that it gives birth to. And stop treating your questions as if they were a long chromosomatic line of impoverished relatives trying to save up enough to buy their way into one blue-blooded aristocrat of an answer that quickly forgets where it came from. Separation is evil. Severance and self-containment are the eyelids of death. You should take hold of yourself if ever as if you were cupping water in your hands you’re about to return to the river.  What did the Sufi say? Be melting snow and wash yourself clean of yourself. That’s the way to get back to the root of things. Life blooms from below. If there’s a painter left at the end of the painting to say I did this, or a poet who’s still a poet by the time he’s finished writing, or a lover who still knocks on his beloved’s door from the outside, burn them at the stake of their own delusion for not being heretical enough to be consumed. Extinction isn’t the end of things anymore than mammals are the end of dinosaurs. Or God leaves off where the devil begins. But you haven’t emerged here alone in this vast space to seek the eventual forgiveness of this long night that marrows your golden bones with dark matter. You’re not the skull-bound period at the end of a long spine of a sentence that’s learned to walk upright. Pour the elixirs and snakepits out of the grails of being at your feet like stale wine and the emptiness is charged with becoming again. Lighting it up and blowing it out; it goes into action again. Ask any candle. Enlightenment isn’t a long river that anticipates the sea. The wave breaks where it begins. And its greatest delight is in being the no one it always was. With no one watching in the shadows of insight. Consider how nothing amplifies. Put zero beside one and a feather becomes a wing that’s ten times bigger. That’s how you start a universe from scratch. That’s how you take to the sky. Throw yourself like a lot of nothing into the mix and there are stars strewn everywhere across space like a nervous breakdown trying to get a grip on things like starfish and galaxies. But there’s nothing to be afraid of. Water doesn’t drown in water and fire doesn’t burn in its own flames. And when you get right down to it nothing isn’t the exhaustion of being that’s run out of thresholds to cross. It’s the original homelessness that set us on this path to everywhere like a direction that couldn’t leave anything out. So bury your name in the night and forget who you are in your solitude and let the torch of your blood flame out like the setting sun. And strange stars will appear to tell stories around their fires about whose house they think you were born in. And when no one can answer for certain. They’ll pull back their curtains of light and gape at each other like wide-eyed windows staring out into empty space as if it were your face alone that they looked through.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O THIS MORNING MORE THAN EVER

O THIS MORNING MORE THAN EVER

 

O this morning more than ever

I want to disappear into my life

like a bird into the blue oblivion

of a migration of one

that’s never coming back.

Things aren’t solid.

They’re real.

And tonight I will appeal again

to the subtle intelligence of the dark matter

that resonates throughout space

like energy musing upon itself at rest

after long labour

to let me evaporate with the stars

like a breath somebody took

deeply into themselves

and then breathed out.

Did my eyes sweeten the windows

they looked through like women?

Did my looking help ripen the stars?

Strange wounds.

Stranger scars.

There’s no end

to the myriad afterlives of water

that a human lives through

like the weather

of an undiscovered sea

and time just keeps

carrying things forth into the carrying forth

like a clepshydra of severed heads

bleeding like buckets

one into another.

An alphabet of prophetic skulls

that never finish a sentence

because the things we say

already have more in common

with the dead

than they do with the living

from the very first word

that falls from our mouths like an apple.

If I have spoken in tongues and symbols

and mixed occult elixirs

like secret constellations

to heal the injured night

my voice never forgot

that it was a mere gesture of moonlight,

a mystic adagio of picture-music

dancing alone in its own shadows.

And if I went crazy in the pursuit

of an earthly excellence

it was just to pass the time.

Anyone with a spirit needs a cosmic hobby.

Anyone with a mind

needs to let go now and then

like a universe that expresses itself completely

and then stands a human up

like a finger to the lips of a prolonged silence.

And what can you say

to those with a heart

that wait for blood to return

like the wind to their sails

with good news

like oxygen from Atlantis

that things are beginning to look up

except drink up

until you’re sober as dry land again.

The ecliptic intersects the celestial equator

at the equinoctial colure

and it’s spring again

in the northern hemisphere

where the crocuses

are poking their noses

through holes in the snow

like bruises beginning to bloom.

If there is no wonder in your love

you will never know

the profound delight

of being grateful for your life

and the stars won’t humble you

when you ask the night who you are

into knowing what they do.

Stop listening to everything with your mouth

and sit down beside the fountain

like a road or a sundial

that’s found its way back

and hear what your ears

have been saying for years

about the coin you lost in the mindstream

like your passage across the river of death

coming up like the moon

over your left shoulder

to take your breath away.

Wisdom renounces the wise

and therein lies enlightenment.

Ignorance embraces the fools of the spirit

and there are no words for it.

The best is clarity.

Clarity is all.

This is a doorway.

This is a wall.

And this is all the gold of India

I would give if I could

to sit down with Hafiz

by the banks of the Ruknabad

among all those Persian roses

and steal musical riffs from the stream

to say what we impossibly mean

to the young slave girl

with the mole on her cheek

who’s learning to speak our language like a muse.

If I have longed for things all my life

as if they were out of reach

it was one of the dark jewels of my childhood

the died like an eye for a lack of light

that taught me

longing is more creative

than fulfillment

and the nightbird

on its broken branch alone

sings like a wine closer to home

than all the daylight choirs

of happier wings in the vineyard

that inspires the liars into blossoming

like loveletters on the wind

they don’t know where to send.

So I tell them without believing

they know what I’m talking about

to take a page out of the orchard’s book like I do

and when spring’s in the air

send them everywhere.

 

PATRICK WHITE