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...

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...