Uplift

and then there is nothing like action to lift a drooping spirit to be up and doing because such action brings us beyond that microscopic looking at self that magnification of everything out of all proportion and like a strange and powerful medicine it transforms us through the sweat of our brows and so i cut the grass and prune the hedges and in so doing to an extent i prune away at myself i cut off all those decaying bits of self-pity and shake free all those ripe fruit and beyond ripe fruit which must needs fall to the ground and in a sense that is what we are doing when we exercise or go to the gym or perform any physical activity as these bodies that we possess are stone age ones and they need to be exercised as too much living in the mind can bring a person down down down and a balance is needed between the spiritual the intellectual and the physical and we need to be rooted in our bodies which after all are all that we have got and we can only dismiss the body at our peril and as i age i am beginning to become more comfortable with this body and realise with st francis that it is brother body it is all that i have and soul or soul is just not contained therein like a fluid in a container oh no oh no there is a unity of being between body and mind between body and soul and so i like the formulation body-mind or body-soul because these two realities which we separate for convenience are really not two realities at all they are ONE ONE ONE calling to the universe in a ONENESS in a oneness in a oneness and we feel that we are whole and this writer needs to feel whole needs to take stock needs to sit with and listen to what the body can tell him and not to get lost in the mind or intellect for that really is often an escapism and escape from the reality of the material body and yes the body is material and yet and yet it is more because i am not just a material body i am in fact a body-soul a body which feels and thinks and moves and cries for joy and sorrow and so i am a body-soul or a soul-body and never again the cartesian dualism for me which divided the reality that we are and left us with nothing but a soul or spirit inhabiting the husk of a body the shell and that and that is all in the past and i write and i write and i let the stream of consciousness flow because i need to comfort myself by allowing my unconscious my great unconscious to speak and to go on speaking and i want to listen because i know that i know so much so much more than i am actually aware of and so like freud i want to make my unconscious conscious i want to be open to all nooks and crannies to all the corners to all the shadows to all the demons as well as to the spaces of my unconscious that have a little more light i want to take out all the dusty ornaments that are lying in the dark corners of my mind i want to accept all the creepy crawlies all the mess and sweat of life all those ants that live under all those un-upturned rocks and yes i want to go around the labyrinth and dungeon of my mind and upturn those rocks and let all the shadowy parts of myself all the neglected parts of my self all the suppressed and oppressed parts of myself let them all out and let them dry off in the sum and become that dried and lifeless fruit they really are for then all my fears will be dried up and lifeless and will not be crawling around and frightening me in my dreams and yes we are just that a unity a strange unity gathered up from bits of this and bits of that within us and i am many selves seeking a union in a greater or basic self if only i could find it and i am left with this with this with this and i repeat it because i need it to sound like a chorus calling to my soul indeed more properly to my body-soul to gather together all the bits and pieces of this ageing self and let it bloom until it is time for the fruit to fall until it is time until it is time to go back to the earth from which i came... 

Authenticity and Self-Acceptance

and so once again i sit and type these words without the normal punctuation marks in the tradition of the great James Joyce he who let his soul shine forth in sheer authenticity against a society set in stone ah yes he let his self pour forth on every page and in every word that he wrote and how he took all the criticism and rejection i'll never know and yet he persevered and kept right on going calling a spade a spade saying it as it was never once covering up the truth as he saw it and here i go again this evening writing these cyphers which are shaping themselves into words and words into sentences with thoughts running after them rather that the other way around and yes that's what i so love about the creativity and spontaneity of the stream of consciousness way of writing that thoughts are chasing words rather than words chasing thoughts and i will write on here without censorship because being true to self is the most important thing any of us can do in life and today i did so much so much and yet i am not too tired perhaps i'm a little enervated by the way i seemed to let my connection with life lead me through my day and what a day it was beginning with a funeral yes yes yes yes a funeral the inevitable call of the grave which is a universal call and the funeral was that of a young man of 43 years of age the father of one of my sixth year students poor boy poor young man struggling to make sense of life as it is and he only after getting his father back in his life and i was touched by his pain his pain and yet i am powerless to do anything for him but be there with him but be there for him among the many hundreds of others who attended that funeral and the songs that were sung and the hymns that were sung are playing away in my deep unconscious as i write for they touched me they touched me but not in a phony religious way but in a deep spiritual way for these were little children from the young man's little sister's school for that choir had come to lend support to lend their voices to sing this grief ever more loudly and beautifully to the heavens and then they sung their little hearts out bless them bless them and the words of Jesus come into my mind as i type on and on suffer little children to come onto me for theirs is the kingdom of heaven and i so wished to descend into the well of my self into the well from which my soul springs and taste its healing waters to return to the child within me to the little boy sitting in the back lane long ago that little innocent boy who i was playing away happily with a little toy lorry playing away playing away happy and the little boy then and these boys around me now here and now and their poor friend who had lost his father and his grandmother his father's mother still alive and i type and wonder what it is all about at all at all at all and the words of the great John Henry Cardinal Newman come to my mind and i must keep reminding myself that i have not sinned against the light oh no i have not sinned against the light and by light here i mean the light of my innermost self the light of my own authenticity that innermost light even though i am using Newman's words for him for that great Cardinal for that great luminary of the Roman Catholic Church he meant the Light of Christ and i capitalise i capitalise because i realise the power and the control that those purveyors of the TRUTH in capital letters would have wanted it and oh no i want to be modernist and post-modernist and post-post-modernist and so on and so forth and that is why the stream of consciousness suits me because in it truths run free truths run free in lower case letters and these are authentic encouraging and approachable truths not fearsome ones blaring themselves out shouting shouting shouting in capital letters oh no oh no i am feeling so reduced so small so insignificant and i feel like Yeats' great sentiment in one of his great poems i feel like my soul must clap its hand and louder sing for every tatter of my mortal dress and like Hopkins i feel so much this evening that i am in the mud that i am wearing man's smudge like that great Jesuit poet and Greek and Latin scholar that oh he knew great desolation great torment and great despair no wonder he wrote about wearing man's smudge and sharing man's smell and i feel like one of those prisoners looking down from prison bars and seeing the mud but envying the other prisoner who saw stars or as Oscar Wilde put it we are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at stars how i yearn to look at the stars and to leave the gutter heave myself up and embrace the universe in love yea even make love to the universe yea  yea yea even make love to great Mother Gaia Mother Earth Mother of the Earth and i want to write on and to return inward and downward into the chambers of my heart to make my home there to be comfortable there to be true to myself to be at home there to be true to myself to be enriched by the joy of being myself despite all the mud and slime yea yea yea despite all the mud and all that slime that seems to clog my soul at times and i was truly present today for that young man truly present because i was truly present to myself wanting to be there wanting to be really me in solidarity in solidarity yea yea yea in solidarity with the fragility of it all with the impermanence of it all with the finitude of it all with the ending of it all with that sad ending knowing knowing knowing that i had no control over anything over anything except my self except my self now at last coming home coming home coming home to self...

Where does the heart lie?

Mount Etna, July 2008

and where does my heart lie at all and it is quite yeatsian being a veritable foul rag and bone shop of all bits and pieces collected over the years this and that experience this and that meeting of this and that person and as i age i perceive that a certain cynicism is growing within that things are simply not as they seem that my heart has collected so much rubbish and yet it is that rubbish which has made me which has cut me out as the person or character that i am and i feel singularly diffuse as i type these words singularly lacking a centre singularly like the hedgehog rather than the fox that great metaphor used by the ancient philosophers and especially by one of my favourites in the history of ideas in the writings of the great isaiah berlin oh yes i feel like the hedgehog rolling in the field and picking up every little thing in my spines collecting this and that and the other and all of these sundry little pieces are collected in my heart even if they do fall away over time as i move on in life and all of the things i have collected and some of these things are bits and pieces of this and that and the other person and i wonder truly what it has been all about and then a good friend's remark about the comment made by his mother nearing her death as to what the whole project called life was all about at all and that too has stuck in my heart along with her weary 

Mount Etna smoulders... July 2008

wise old face woman of great wisdom and woman of great love and then my own mother with her memory wiped clean wiped so clean that almost nothing is left... and then all those existential things that weigh upon my shoulders as i age and what is the mind then just some vague or not so vague metaphor for some kind of consciousness emerging from the matter that is the brain and am i no more than a collocation of atoms as russell once described the human animal and human animal is a term i love for when we use human being we are putting so much weight the weight of whole cultures on our creaturely shoulders that i often think we cannot bear poor animal self poor bodily self and within deep within but never as a ghost within a machine for the body is no mere skeletal house for the indwelling of the soul or self or whatever because the body-soul or soul-body is indivisible a continuum for one arises out of the other out of the other arises the totality or rather in and with the other rises the totality of the self... and still i wonder and still the wonder grows as to what it is all about at all and in these christmas times when people rush around like headless chickens looking for this that and the other present for this that and the other thing where lies the heart where lies this heart this rag and bone shop of my soul of my self where lies it all at all at all once it lay on a womanly shoulder safe and yet that once is just that once for the years have faded as have memories of that encounter and yet there is no loneliness here there is no regret for the heart cannot regret its hedgehog ways its hedgehog ways its collecting of this that or the other person over the years all it can do is press on and those beautiful words of jesus that the son of man had no where to lay his head ah maybe he meant that he had nowhere to lay his heart and where is the heart of jesus these christmas times and where is the heart of buddha and where is the heart of vishnu and of every other hindu god and of every single religion under the sun and where is the atheistic heart and the agnostic heart as they are all made of the same crooked wood of humanity...

Recognition and Identity

A younger me - some 25 years ago - playing a guitar and singing!

...and identity whatever that is and perhaps it's something to do with memories and the way they shape themselves into patterns on the brain and burn down ever inwards to form to shape the mind the mind the mind which breaks or can break like frightful waves against the jagged cliffs and so interminably ever onward until the death of consciousness and indeed it often bemuses me as i grow ever more deeply conscious of the self ever more deeply in the cavernous pits of the mind and plumb the depths of identity and wonder where does this soul belong and still it dawns and continually dawns on this mind that there would be no pain without consciousness and just now i remember the suffering of another the suffering of an eighteen year old boy-man to be more precise who is living through the pain of depression the pain the pain the pain of that depression which this writer once knew thankfully for a short period of some 12 weeks many years ago many years ago and thankfully that burning into the self that cycling and re-cycling of painful thoughts has not returned has never returned and that is more than thirteen years ago now and i wish i wish i could make meaning and significance out of all this oh no oh no the task at hand is to write on and on and on to write and continue to write ever-onward ever-onward in just because there is meaning in the act of writing insofar as something happens something is shaped something pours itself out something at the heart of whatever it is that has made these atoms and molecules shape themselves into consciousness and as i write on i wonder at the littleness of it all at the littleness of the i against the vastness of space and i was and am taken by the words of the great romantic poet and philosopher - the great s.t. coleridge oh yes those words his words made my heart burn within me so many times when i was reading him like when he told the story that his father had often brought him by the hand as a young boy out into the country to taste of the darkness and to become habituated to the vast to become habituated to the vastness of the night sky and how little and how insignificant a mite we are in comparison to the expanse of space and the looking out into the vastness that great vista of emptiness with splashes of white light dotting its surface and yet the mind the consciousness that centre point that central place that viewing point that still point that solid ground of self or of ego or of consciousness which not only knows but knows that it knows and maybe that's what it's all about and yet the pain of that knowing the pain of knowing that one pains that the heart breaks that the mind breaks on its own mountains down as the great jesuit poet gerard manley hopkins once put it and all these writers are about making sense of human experience about making sense of the project we call life about trying to throw threads of meaning across great boulders of the unknown otherness of things in the vain hope of explaining them and ah and ah but these threads of little knowledge and smaller meaning will never hold will never hold because the vast epistemological task is so daunting so frightening so terrifying and these words are coming thick and heavy now as the tears attempt to form in my eyes and these fingers tickle these keys as this little brain with its mind trying to escape trying to run riot on its captors trying to escape the bounds and boundaries placed upon it by the physicality of its imprisoning brain and that's it that's it it's consciousness that's the transcendent self and that's what it's all about all about that projecting of that image of self that projection of that sense of self that's me this self-transcendence this self-transcending self this self reaching out for identity looking for a container of self in another in another wanting to be held like a little weeping baby wanting to be cradled in the arms of another wanting to be nurtured wanting to be held wanting to be recognised ah ah yes ah yes and the philosopher charles taylor is right it's all about being recognised by a significant other or others and being open to such cherishing to such recognition and the ability to reject all mis-recognitions as alien destroyers of the self as alien destroyers of authenticity of the truth that is the me that is the me or that is the i the i the i the little the little me wanting be held and identified and acknowledge by another in mutual embrace in mutual embrace...