beyond mere words

don’t tell anybody
about this place
the woman said

but i can’t
resist the temptation
vision of paradise

heaven on earth
in her eyes
somewhere to rest

body mind spirit
safe haven beneath
clear blue skies

some secondhand thoughts

saving time from what?
what unspeakable evil
is it that besets time
that it needs rescuing so?

time-saving aids are
promised us
as lifelines to
a better life

but what if I should
prove unworthy
and time should
perish on my watch?

The Golden Art

Original artwork by Lorem Ipsum 2014

I can’t exactly confess to having been afflicted with writer’s block this past year. For instead it’s truer to say I had totally given up on being a writer altogether.

Ironically, however, the circumstances leading to my complete abandonment of my craft, I believe, make for an interesting enough story, on reflection.

After having seen my debut novel sink beneath the waves of global public indifference, it was suggested to me I seek guidance in the form of mentoring from an already established writer.

And as an example of the adage “careful what you wish for”, through a series of seemingly synchronistic events, I soon managed to make contact with one of this country’s more celebrated and awarded writers.

What thrilled me most of all was the fact that this writer in question also claims to have been largely inspired to write by the very same 17th century alchemist I myself have been. Too mind-blowingly cool!

Anyway, now the story gets a little bit more complicated. Because my first real contact with this writer is actually with his wife. An amazing experience in itself. For, literally two or three days earlier, I had quite by chance read the book of poems written for her by her future husband to be, with which he had first wooed her. And now here was this great writer’s muse standing before me — in the hallowed recesses of his writing studio no less — sharing intimate details of the intervening 40 years of their married lives together.

“I think he really is happy at last,” she confessed to me, “now that he has decided to stop writing.”

It was the usual story. There’s no money in it anymore, the dumbing down of the reading public, the all-pervasive curse of political correctness. This is a man after all that can recite whole cantos of classical poems in their original Latin, from memory. I mean, I feel stupid even thinking of myself as a writer worthy of the name in comparison.

So I listen to how this great luminary has finally decided to call it quits and feel all conviction drain from my body. Still, I leave my details with his wife and arrange for a time when it would be convenient for me to make contact with the man I wished to be my writing mentor.

Soon afterwards, I do in fact next have a telephone conversation with the man himself. Although the problem is that I can’t seem to clarify whether he thinks he is going to mentor me as an apprentice alchemist or as a failed novelist. Argggh, it’s all so hopeless! I don’t know what the hell’s going on.

“Look, it’s very hard to talk about these things abstractly,” he says, “but I’ve got a book of essays coming out next month that explains everything. Give me your address and I’ll send you a copy. Read that, and then we can start from there.”

Fine. I’m totally confused. Not least because his wife has just told me he has quit writing, and yet now I’m informed he apparently has a new collection of essays coming out. Also, I don’t know if I’m ready to start an apprenticeship as a real-life alchemist any time soon.

A month passes. Nothing. No book of essays comes my way. Just as I suspected. The whole thing was an elaborate lie to brush me off. Okay, so this writer is no JD Salinger when it comes to reclusive writer types, but he’s not exactly the kind to hold literary soirées either. All right fine. I give up, I think to myself. Being a writer simply isn’t worth it. What’s more, I’ve made a complete golden ass of myself with this whole mentoring debacle already.

Two months pass. Three, four, five. Still nada. I turn my attention to honing my guitar playing skills, swearing to never write another stinking word. Alchemy is for the birds. What delusional world had I been living in? Synchronicity? Oh, brother!

Seven, eight, nine months go by. I haven’t written a single poem, stanza or word. But my guitar playing is off the chart. Woo-hoo, couldn’t be happier.

Ten, eleven, twelve months have now past, when I pull up in the driveway and see an envelope sticking out of the letterbox. I grab the oversized piece of post and open it distractedly in the front seat of the car.

Oh, shit. It’s the book of essays, but I can’t remember their significance. I’m finally happy being just another second-rate guitarist rocking the suburbs. Man, I’ve given up. Like really given up. What the fuck. I feel like someone has just dragged the needle back across the record of my life, and that the back-masked message I’m now hearing threatens to implode the very reality of my new simple, dumbed-down choice of existence.

“Read that, and then we can start from there,” my would-be mentor had told me almost exactly a year ago.

Start what? I can’t remember what it was I wanted so badly. Let me go back to my Wild Turkey and amplified heat haze. Fuck this, I was happy. I was happy for having quit.

I crack open the cover of the book, searching for answers. But it only gets worse. My mentor has handwritten notes to me in the margins of his own book. His tone is jovial and self-deprecating; his handwriting impeccably informal.

Don’t make me go back to being my old self, I beg the Fates. It’s too hard to contemplate. I’m a fraud. A master alchemist will see right through me. I’ve forgotten how to turn words into a golden phrase. I have fallen out of love with all language and it with me.

But still I hold this invitation in my hands.

Confessions of a Made Man (Libertarian Ethics Explained)

Within this municipality of
Fallen Angels
There’s no gift of sleep
For the truly wicked
Only hex-befuddled
Ultra-marathon night vigils
Convened around the
Dying embers of the many
Cruel luxuries of excess
All this in indirect
Contravention of those
Early accepted promises
Made covenant between
Heaven & Earth
Long since lost
In direct transmission
Due to bad energy diaspora
Committed by the so-called
Highly-favored Soul
Mafia Elite, masquerading
As the Hallelujah Police.

“And I Had Done an Hellish Thing…”

The title quote comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. And, for those of you not familiar with the poem, these words are how the Ancient Mariner describes his killing of an albatross.

Now, I don’t profess to be an expert about this poem, not even for a minute. In fact, like with a lot of poetry, I tend to let the words simply wash over me and then form an impression of the poem based on what stays with me after I have finished reading.

Granted, it’s probably a fairly imprecise way of dealing with poems, but I am far more interested in poetic appreciation these days rather than deep contextual analysis and interpretation. Suffice to say, I’m content to leave such tasks to academics and their PhD students.

So, with that understood, I wish to now talk about what the title quote means to me, personally. Because I admit to currently being obsessed by the idea of having done “an hellish thing”, for which one must next do penance.

I can’t explain directly why this concept should fascinate me as much as it does. I mean, it’s not like, for instance, that I’ve done anything particularly hellish myself ever. Well, not in this lifetime, I’m pretty certain.

However, as a case in point about my obsession, when it came to my writing a novel, I chose for some undefinable reason to write about the defunct Antichrist’s search for a personal moral compass and eventual redemption, in a world long gone to hell. And, surely, there exists no more hellish figure than that, obviously other than Satan himself.

So, do I identify with this figure, then, somehow? This most evil and unforgivable agent of the apocalypse? Is that what is going on here? For why else would I have spent all those hours writing a novel about such an odious character?

And, I suppose, therefore, the answer to these questions must ultimately be, “yes”. Essentially, I see something universal about the figure of the Antichrist. There is something of the Antichrist in each and everyone of us, I would suggest. But let me explain, first, before you object.

OK, for me, then, this is the meaning behind the Rolling Stones’ lyrics to Sympathy for the Devil, where Mick Jagger sings,

‘I shouted out,
“Who killed the Kennedys?”
When after all
It was you and me’

You see, we all carry the burden of guilt for hellish things that are done in the world, even when those things are done ostensibly by others. If there is evil in the world, it is the responsibility of each and every one of us to identify our own individual share in this evil.

Women and children are being killed every day in foreign war zones. And if you live in a Western democracy you must accept that a certain percentage of these innocent civilians are being killed in your name. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true. Even if it’s happening on the other side of the world, in a country you can’t find on a map. It is a sickening fact you can’t truthfully deny.

Whether we like it or not, we all carry this guilt, just like the Ancient Mariner, who had the body of the albatross he killed tied around his neck, as penance.

And you know what? It stinks! Sure, some of it is simply middle-class guilt, I’m describing. A privileged form of despair, if you will. But, deep down, anyone with even a scrap of conscience must concede that our lives are ultimately built on the suffering and exploitation of others.

I understand it’s not a pleasant message I’m putting out there. But I honestly believe it to be the truth. Likewise, with the novel I wrote. It may not have the most pleasing literary style or even a heart-warming narrative, but it seeks to tell it like it really is. Not how we like to think things are, but how they are below the sanitized surface of political correctness.

But why? Why would I intentionally set out to remind people about what miserable wretches we all are? Why, indeed…

Well, anyway, let me tell you why. Because I have done an hellish thing, and this is my penance.

“All Movement is Accomplished in Six Stages…and the Seventh Brings Return.”

Georges_Gurdjieff-thumb (Photo credit: jwyg)

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the life and teachings of Gurdjieff, let me just quickly explain that he was a Russian mystic of the early twentieth century, who insisted most of humanity languishes in a state of torpor similar to a deep hypnotic sleep. His remedy to this trance-like somnolence was what he termed the Work, which essentially consisted of training one’s mind to stay alert during our day-to-day dealings with others and our environments.

One concept he used in particular to explain why, as people, we often fail at what we set out to achieve or accomplish has stayed firmly with me in the intervening years since I first read it. And, in fact, I believe I saw confirmation of its validity this very morning.

The idea is based around the way that a musical octave is divided within the Western tradition. I make this distinction, because in Eastern musical scales all kinds of microtonal possibilities come into play.

All right, so the next piece of the puzzle, as it were, gets a bit theoretical, so bear with me while I elaborate. Although, at the outset, I will point out it might help to think of what I’m going to say next in terms of the black and white keys on a piano.

No matter. What Gurdjieff said was that our progress (within any endeavor that we undertake) will always follow the same pattern as an ascending major scale.

Now, for the musically uninitiated, a major scale consists of the following pattern of tones and half-tones (or semitones, if you like), namely TTSTTTS, where T stands for tone and S for semitone.

Ok, so before your eyes glaze over, I’ll simply add that what this means is that there are always two points in any major scale where the notes are only separated by an interval of half a tone. Specifically, this occurs between the third and fourth note of the scale and also between the seventh and eighth (or octave) note of the scale.

In the key of C, therefore, the major scale consists of the following notes: C D E F G A B C, where E and F are separated by only half a tone and B and C are likewise only one half-tone apart.

By looking at a piano keyboard, you can physically see what I’m describing by way of the fact no black key exists between E and F or between B and C, for that matter.

Essentially, what Gurdjieff proposed was that these two half-tone intervals represented a “weakening” of the scale. Moreover, he saw that this idea of weakening could be seen as a model of how, as humans, we constantly waver from our initial resolve in the course of setting out to achieve our goals.

Conveniently, just as there are seven notes in a major scale (before the return of the octave), there are also seven days of the week. So it is quite easy to see what Gurdjieff was getting at by thinking of Monday as the first note of a major scale and Sunday as the seventh note, with the other intervening days corresponding to their major scale counterparts.

What this model then suggests is that there exists a “weak” point in the week between Wednesday and Thursday, as well as between Sunday and the returning Monday.

Think about it. You resolve to start regularly exercising bright and early one Monday morning, and for two full days you amaze yourself by sticking to your new, grueling regime of physical fitness. But on the third day you wake up stiff all over and decide to throw in the towel. Sound familiar?

Well, you have simply fallen prey to a “semitone day”. And it’s a pattern that applies to all those times in life we resolve to change something about ourselves or our circumstances. Whether it be starting a diet, learning a language, controlling an anger management problem or the writing of that sequel to our blockbuster debut novel.

Similarly, Day Seven is another semitone day, and is usually experienced as those maddening times when it feels like we have simply given up just as something looks likely to succeed.

But don’t despair. Gurdjieff taught one merely needed to be aware of these weak spots and push forward that little bit harder on such days.

I saw it happen to the youngest member of our household today. Let’s just say, he and school aren’t a great fit. Anyway, he had resolved this week that he was going to try really hard to make school work. And for two days he actually managed the impossible. He was the model student. But this morning — the dreaded semitone day — the wheels completely fell off, and he arrived at school without having eaten his breakfast, ready to wreak havoc in his usual way.

So what did I do? Well, I explained Gurdjieff’s theory to him, for the first time, pretty much as I have for you right here. But did he buy it? you ask incredulously.

Would you believe me, if I said he came home with the headmaster’s prize for handwriting and is currently sitting and picking out tunes on our previously-neglected piano, as I write this?

Gee, thanks, Gurdjieff! Whoo-hoo, and now we’ve got three whole-tone days of coasting, in a row, to look forward to, until the next semitone day rears its ugly head…

Music major and minor scales (Photo credit: judy_breck)

“Pleased to Meet You, Hope You Guess My Name”

I was thinking today about those words that have disappeared from use during my lifetime. And for whatever reason the first example that came to mind was the term Christian name.

Now, strictly speaking, a Christian name is the name given to a child when they are christened, and therefore it is a baptismal name, if you like.

However, when I was growing up, the terms Christian name and given name were totally interchangeable. Whether you had been christened or not, you were always asked by people to provide your Christian name when filling in surveys or forms etc.

I understand this conscious shift away from the term Christian name is an attempt to create a more religiously tolerant society, whereby members of other religions or beliefs (including atheists) don’t feel marginalized or offended by the said term.

Ditto for how we are now encouraged to wish people a happy festive season, as a opposed to Merry Christmas. As an aside, Happy Solstice Celebrations might at least give people a link to the astronomical significance of this particular time of the year.

Ok, whatever. So, look, here’s the thing, I’m not going to argue for or against this push towards secularizing language as it pertains to my own views of the rightness of the Christian faith.

Instead, I am questioning what is being offered to replace what I see as a loss of meaning (or impoverishment, if you will) within language generally.

The idea of a Christian name showed that an individual “belonged” to something higher than simply the family they were born to. Yet now one simply possesses a first name and a last name. Even the terms family name and surname are in danger of being totally eroded, I would argue.

Same for our national holidays (holy-days). They are in the process of becoming nameless breaks from school or work and nothing more.

It’s a way of reducing words to numbers. Easter becomes a four-day weekend, for instance. And it’s that myopic ass, so-called political correctness, that’s driving it. But at what cost to our humanity, ultimately? Where will it end?

How long before the days of the week are also renamed? Monday becoming One Day, Tuesday becoming Two Day, Wednesday becoming Three Day etc. After all, Thursday and Friday are actually Thor’s Day and Freya’s Day respectively, aren’t they?

Surely, the inferred pagan worship of these Norse deities alone, as instituted within the words Thursday and Friday, is cause enough to reduce all week days to a more suitable number-based system of naming?

Hell, while we’re at it, why stop there? I’m thinking, why not do away with our personal names altogether, too? Whether Christian or Muslim or Rastafarian or what have you. Take the omnipresent name John, for instance. It means “God is gracious” or “God is generous”. What God are we talking about here? Jehovah or Allah or Vishnu? It’s a freaking minefield of potential cultural conflict.

Numbers are so much safer. People can’t take offense at them, because they hold no special meaning beyond what they quantify. So let’s replace our names with our social security numbers, which we could have tattooed or barcoded onto our foreheads for convenience sake. What say you?

Let’s be done with the bothersome task of trying to find new meaning in an increasingly secular world. The sacred has no place in either language or our lives anymore. Even a word like enthusiasm is too contentious for widespread use, meaning as it does, in its etymological sense, to be filled with god.

I jest, obviously. But my concern is real. And I believe it is the duty of us writers to help find new meaning within our shared language, before it’s stripped bare. A universal language of the human Spirit, at the very least, is what is needed, I propose. Because if we don’t create new meaning to replace the old, we’ll eventually end up losing a lot more than the right to own our own names, I can guarantee you.

To finish, consider the irony of the following quote:

“Words have meaning and names have power” – unknown

Believe Me, Everything’s Going to Be All Right — Just Remember to Breathe.

Rosa Celeste: Dante and Beatrice gaze upon the highest Heaven, The Empyrean (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have experienced the afterlife. You wouldn’t know it to look at me. But there you are. I’ve said it.

Incredible? Impossible? What is your immediate response? Simple disbelief? Or is it possible you too have had a similar experience?

Just look at how many questions that one simple statement I began with has already raised. And all this before whether or not I’m telling the truth has even been called into question yet, either.

Well, whatever, let me tell you this, then, that the statement is entirely true for me. In all honesty, I can say I have experienced the afterlife, firsthand. More than once. And the person who first took me to the other side and showed me what it’s like was my own father.

Bear in mind, however, that my father committed suicide when I was 16 months old. So maybe it’s only fitting it should have been he who acted as my guide in this respect.

It’s getting pretty surreal about now, isn’t it?

But it didn’t feel that way at the time. Believe me, I was experiencing my own personal nirvana. This was the peak experience of my life. All I had ever wanted in life was to meet and talk to the father I had never known. And here he was, guiding me to the edge of the great cosmic honey-mind of souls that awaits us in the afterlife.

Welcome to Breathwork. Because, if you can believe it, the above description pretty much encapsulates my own first introduction to the alternative therapy practice previously known as rebirthing.

“But what is it?” you ask.

Ok, it might help if I tell you another name for it is “conscious connected breathing“. Simply put, one joins the out-breath to the in-breath, with no pause in between.

And that’s it. Within roughly 10 to 15 minutes you too could be experiencing your own altered states of consciousness, although to be fair it is ultimately best to be in the presence of a Breathwork practitioner when you do it.

I myself was so amazed by the whole experience, I even started training to become a Breathworker/Breathwork practitioner myself. Really, I guess, my impulse in regard to this came out of an almost evangelical urge to share what I had experienced with others. Or more, precisely, to help put people in touch with their own personal experience of nirvana.

But I’ve put my training on hold for a while. Because essentially I still fall into the category of being a wounded healer. My own sense of self and well-being, I find, is something I need to work on. Yet if this weren’t the case, trust me, I’d be rebirthing anyone and everyone I could lay hands on.

Now, I’m not saying you’d have the exact same experience I did, if you went ahead and tried Breathwork for yourself. But I am saying the transformational healing power that was unlocked in me by my own experiences is unlike anything else I have ever felt.

Moreover, the results have been extremely long lasting. And, in fact, the all-encompassing atonement I felt when I first realized I was in the “literal” presence of my father has stayed with me ever since, absolutely indelibly. We made our peace with each other that day; I really and sincerely believe this to be the case.

And so, in conclusion, while absolutely nothing could have prepared me for this incredible experience and my first ever taste of Breathwork, all I can say is I sincerely hope the same holds to be true for you too…

Taking the Time to Take Things Nice ‘n’ Slow

“Punctuality is the thief of time” (Photo credit: tsukismama)

Time is an illusion. Sure, we’ve all heard it said before a million times. But today I’m challenging you to actually slow down and really think about what this statement means. So, tell me, can you spare the five minutes it’ll take for me to explain to you just what it is exactly I’m going on about?

Good. Well, first, then, in a purely philosophical sense, let me give you a working definition of what time actually is. Are you ready?

Ok, time is simply the clearly observable fact that everything we experience doesn’t happen all at once. Or if you want to put it another way, we experience our lives as being a series of sequential events rather than as an instantaneous happening.

Now, I’m not going to debate here whether this experience of sequential time is an illusion, although I suspect in all likelihood that it is. No, rather I’m going to instead focus on drawing attention to the completely arbitrary way we as humans divide up time as we perceive it.

At the outset, therefore, I feel the need to tell you that I personally don’t “do” time. I don’t wear a watch, I never check the clock and I ask people to refrain (wherever possible) from telling me the time.

This idea, of course. doesn’t belong to me alone. I was first introduced to the whole anti-time concept by Carl Honoré‘s The Power of Slow. And since listening to the spoken word version of said title over a year ago, I have tried to live without external time constraints ever since.

But why? you ask. Aren’t you neglecting your civil duty as a functional member of society to always know what time of the day or night it is?

My answer? I don’t care.

I refuse to go back to being a slave of time, not since I’ve committed myself to this choice of paradigm shift for so long now already. And anyway ultimately the benefits are too massive to give up.

Ordinarily, I’m a punctual person. Punctual to the point of compulsion, if I’m going to be honest about it. But without a watch to rule me, I’ve learnt to become more fluid in my approach to things. Where before I couldn’t stand to be even a minute late for anything, now it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

What’s more I used to demand the same level of punctuality from others, whereas now I don’t. Something which, I believe, has made me a much more easy person to get along with I’m sure. Beyond that, let me also confide in you that I used to suffer from insomnia. Whereas now I don’t, largely in part to the fact that I have no idea of the number of hours of sleep I get each night. Problem solved.

Obviously, there are still those occasions where time is of the essence. Our lives demand that sometimes we have no choice but to be at a certain place at a certain time. However, even in such instances I would still advocate an anti-time approach.

As a case in point, about a year ago, I was asked by an extended family member to drive them interstate for a course of medical treatment that couldn’t be obtained within the city we both lived in at the time. The family member was terminally ill and was unable to drive for the four hours each way it would take for him to get to the hospital appointment and back again.

Just like anyone else who might have found themselves asked to do the same, I said that, of course, yes, I was more than prepared to do this for the family member concerned.

Ok, so, typically I would have approached the whole trip as a kind of frantic mercy dash. I would have sped most of the way and sworn at each and every one of the inevitable delays that come with long distance driving.

But the revelation that occurred for me on this trip was that the usual stress I would place myself under in such circumstances is entirely a matter of time-based anxiety. Typically, I would be stressing the entire way that we were going to arrive too late for the possibly lifesaving appointment we were trying to get to. The whole time I would be frantically checking the clock and panicking that we weren’t going to make it.

By contrast, I didn’t look at the time once. Sure, I roughly knew from experience how long it would take to make the trip in question. But other than allotting the general amount of time necessary to cover the distance involved, I resolved to let the actual passing hours and minutes take care of themselves.

A risky move, when someone else’s health and future are a stake, you might say. Yet I had only just recently converted to the whole “slow movement” that Carl Honoré is a prominent exponent of, along with a few other high profile advocates of this same general call for slowing down society. And because of my being new to it, I suppose, I wished to test how powerful the “power of slow” really was in real life.

But what about the outcomes? What happened? Did we make it “on time” for the appointment? Yes. Yes, we did. Even after getting lost right at the end, I was told we managed to arrive with 20 minutes to spare, evidently.

And the appointment? Did it save the family member’s life? No. No, sadly, it did not.

But I still believe the trip illustrates a larger truth about life. Namely this, we are all ultimately headed for the same destination, but the way we choose to travel on our way to getting there is entirely up to us. We can spend all of our time stressing about how little of it we are allotted, or we can instead focus on deepening our bonds with our fellow traveling companions while we still have the chance.

Distilled down to its essence, another way of saying this is that life is about the journey, not the destination. So why hurry?

Ouroborus — Used by the Alchemists as a symbol for eternity, where the end is the beginning is the end is the beginning…etc. And therefore as a symbolic representation of the cyclical nature of time.

A Sign of the Times

God spoke to me
In a dream
Last night
I didn’t mind much
“The end of the world
is nigh!” he said
Speaking in a voice
Both deafening and
Impossibly quiet at once
I’m okay with it, I
Suppose I’ll get used
To the idea but still
Worry with such messages
Filling my head I’ll
Wind up crazy
Homeless prophet bum
Warning all
“Prepare to Meet Thy Maker!”
Wearing nothing under
A sandwich-board sign
Leaving me naked
But for being clothed
In these words of moral
Catastrophe.