As This Thaw Sets In ....



I took this picture on Howth Head

...as this thaw sets in I sit and listen to whatever it is I am inside call it soul or self or mind or psyche or spirit or heart or whatever energy forces me to write these lines these lines that will come out in an effort to express whatever it is that I am inside and I press on because I have rested enough and waited long enough like a Beckettian diminished hero even anti-hero who fills the space about him with words that do not connect with words that further do not connect with those words of others and all I've got is these words here because the expression of what I wish to say is so so hard so far beyond me as I struggle to make these words behave upon this page ah they are recalcitrant troops indeed and somehow it is a lack of connection I feel tonight as I write these cyphers in search of words in search of sentences in search of paragraphs in search of articles in search of short stories in search of novels in search of some meaning and somehow somehow it has long since hit home it has long since been accepted by my mind or heart or soul or self or psyche call it what you will long long since accepted that the menacing lies in the search not in the destination that the real pleasure lies in the carving of the sculpture in the painting of the portrait in the composing of the sonata and I still reel somewhat from this gradual ageing of my body from this gradual getting to know this BODY-SOUL or is it SOUL-BODY this being this oneness or wholeness of being or self that I am this grappling  with this attempt to come to terms with what is breaking down in me with what is growing up in me with what I am putting together like a surreal crossword puzzle or even a surreal jigsaw puzzle and sometimes I regret I was not born with greater skill in writing with deeper depths to plumb and then I take heart from the sonnets of the great Bard of Avon from great great Shakespeare with his wonderful and wondrously magical language ah those words
ah all those iambic pentameters unrhyming ah and all those soliloquies and all those poems and poems those Shakespearean sonnets and how that great man was often in awe of this man's or that man's gift or talent that so great a genius as he could have envied the talent of others is mind blowing and yet he tells us that in one of his sonnets sonnet 29 it is how he desired all these things because When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,//I all alone beweep my outcast state,//And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,//And look upon myself and curse my fate,//Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,//Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd,//Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,//With what I most enjoy contented least.// all of this, yea all of this heartens me because if even the great bard himself could be full of self-doubt then we lesser mortals can be too and I will write on and I will type these keys till my neck pains me and my fingers begin to trip themselves up in pursuit of even a few insights into this life heavy as it is with unthawed snow with unthawed sorrows seeking a thaw seeking to run away in rivulets and drain drain into the dry earth and begin to irrigate it begin to bring it the balm of healing begin to bring it the dew of pity for a deathly thirst and bring that soil to life to let the soil be dampened with compassion and then to allow the shoots of hope crawl slowly to the air and stab its stems upward towards the blinding sun and that is what my poor soul needs and like Gerard Manley Hopkins 

Howth Harbour at Night

I write my prayer in his words in his words send my soil rain yea yea yea send my soul rain ah I think it was this last the priest-poet or poet-priest said and I have long ago emptied my anger from the Wells of my soul and I am thankful for these small mercies that no anger lingers now no anger lingers now and I type on and all the neuronal connections come to life as synapses leap to life like engines in the metaphorical car of my imagination and I want these words to sing I want them to sing like Shakespeare's words did once and still do sing when great actors give them voice upon the stage or even when the poor drooling schoolboy gives them voice in a stuffy classroom on a wet and rainy day and I want these words to give voice to my soul just the way Gerard Manley Hopkins sang forth his joys and sorrows in musical words upon the page in inscape in instress and in all his sprung rhythm springing forth like strange characters or Jacks from boxes catching us off guard or like a Robert Frost busy with the actuality of living and yet giving that actuality of everyday-ness life in words as saws leaped up and cut off arms or like the snows that fell silently and how he lingered and stopped by the woods where they fell and contemplated the slow miracle of it all the slow miracle of life and I am needing slow miracle and snowfalls in my heart of hearts and in my soul and in my Body-Soul or Soul-Body and I need the frosts of cares to come like they did to the short-lived mind and heart and soul and psyche and spirit of the great poet Chidiock Tichborne before he lost his life in the Tower of London and then to have those care melt away in the thaw run away in rivulets that tickle the grass and the ground and the concrete as they disappear down gulleys and drains and run away to the sea and yes I want to write and yes I want to let my heart go and spread itself across the pages of my second book and to let my soul sing and louder sing as the great W.B. Yeats great Nobel Laureate of Literature said let my soul louder and louder sing for every tatter of its mortal dress and these words linger in my heart where the centre will hold oh yes the centre will hold because there is a Still Point which the heart or mind or soul can achieve there is a Still Point there is a zazen there is a sitting there is a sitting a place where the Body-Soul will sit cross legged in thanks for being alive in thanks for being alive in thanks for these poor words upon a page in search of a prayer to speak its simple beauty...



Diving Down

... all too often I am brought further and further down into those dreamy spaces of the unconscious those places that never cease to amuse that never cease to enlighten and less often now to scare the waking mind and I need these dreams to come and to come and to come ever clearer to hearten me to bring me back to a sense of a full and thriving self and yet these journeys down and up are ever spiralling ever spiralling up and down and up and down somehow circular and spiralling spiralling and circular and always it seems as if I have throdden these paths before have come this way before and yet it is strangely new yet the same and nothing in these depths is ever new and yet it seems a little different just a little ... and I will let this stream of consciousness flow like a river at full flow bringing the struggling swimmer ever onward with its tidal flood where snippets of last night's dreams come ... there I am on some sort of strange mystical rollercoaster on its way through huge buildings and I am with my mother and my two brothers Pat and Ger and a colleague from work Gerard B. and suddenly the roller coaster comes to a sudden stop and I secrete a stone from my stomach something like a kidney stone and it is very definitely formed from my body and when it is spat forth I throw it out a window and it break a lamp which falls on a passer-by by accident and I can barely see the victim's feet behind a garden tub ... and yet I know I am not responsible for this action in that the stone somehow produced itself and somehow I had not decided on anything to throw it at - it became just a missile which propelled itself from my hand out the window to smash the light that hurt the individual beneath it and yet somehow I began feeling guilty very guilty in this dream that I had done something horribly wrong and then there emerged that old Catholic guilt-tripping that horribly debilitating guilt-tripping that weapon wielded about by our traditional Catholic clerical guardians that guilt-tripping that worried my father so that brought him so psychically and spiritually low before he died and woe to those generations of power-hungry individuals in the Roman Catholic Church who crucified many with too weighty a load of guilt and I remember you Dad with love with love now as I enter the final half of my life and I am now beginning to understand what you said to me once all those years ago that someday I would understand and how true how true for now for now for now I am beginning to understand and my dreams are teaching me and the great unconscious is teaching me and in  that dream from some nights ago and in that dream on the roller-coaster Gerry B was warning me that at Mass the following day the priest would call my name from the altar for having thrown that kidney stone which broke the light that injured the man all unintentional so unintentional and in the dream the saving mother in the person of my own mother Mary came and said not to worry because this threat was so below the belt and so unnecessarily guilt-riddenly and guilt-bidningly so and indeed in the dream I did so for I determined within that dream within that deep-and-dark-seeking-light dream oh yes it was seeking light and in the dream I followed towards the light as I determined to seek my accuser out and face him down and say no you are wrong you are purposely setting me out on a guilt trip and I will not be guilt-tripped by anyone for I will face both the light and the dark equally in myself I will dive deep and in diving deep I know I have to go into those murky places those dark hairy horrible places where strange fish swim down into those caverns of the psyche and I will I will I will I will definitely surface even if a little breathless and swim as best I can and finally lie panting on the shores of knowledge in the healing sun...