dry desert of the soul

all spun out and no inspiration and it seems as if this is the drying time of the soul when there is an emptiness within that dry deadening emptiness when nothing inspires and yet it is not like depression at all because that's a rather painful state but this is a painless indifferent state where nothing seems to matter where all is a certain objective dispassionate cold observation and that's all that's left just me here sitting in an attic study waiting on words to behave upon a screen waiting waiting waiting and there is not even one tear to indicate that something stirswithin that something moves within that something lights the fire that something sparks that something that something somehow would tear through these indifferent clouds set them alight with a passion for life for all that makes life good and wonderful and full of surprises and yet i had all that phony type of jesus saves type of thing so many times before and i ngrew so tired of it of its easy answers to the big problems always so neat and so self-assuredly right - so sugary sweet with all the answers laid out like the icing on a christmas cake laid out like the icing on a christmas cake and here i feel like getting a chorus going to enliven this piece of cheerless stream of consciousness which is failing to gain access to any cave like a potholer in search of a hole down which to descend and as there is no hole through which to descend i am fated to dwell now in the world of mediocrity in  the world where all is dull and dreary but not depressing just lacking lacking lacking any passion any engagement with the depths of life and if we can find no door or cave mouth through which to descend into labyrinthine caverns of the soul and if the ego cannot descend cannot go down into the depths it will never be purified it will never never be able to come up once more from the depths of the caverns where it will meet the shadows of the self the shadows of the soul the shadows of all that is real and once it has been purified in the deep cavernous places of the soul only then only then will it have eaten enough and have drunk enough to ascend to the world of light and enlightenment...

stream before bedtime

ah and the sitting here in the silence of the spacious room that is my mind and i sit and listen to my heart beat in silence silence silence and in the background there is a leonard cohen song playing on my sound system lulling me ever deeper into the stillpoint the stillpoint where i long to be this night as the tears trickle from my eyelids as life ticks away away as memories of ann whom once i loved is now just a fading memory and it was a love that was meant to die die die as we all are dying and yet i am not too sad because there is a peace of acceptance beginning to drop like the dew on the grass in the cold of the early morning and i type these words and wonder at their healing power and i will never dwell in the valley of self-pity never never never because it is a selfish waste of precious time no no no i will climb to the mountain from which i can get a viewing point where i shall rest a while and look back at my climb at my slow and winding climb ever upwards ever upwards towards the acceptance of self the only truth the very centre of self the very centre of gravity of all life and this is all we have that journey to the centre or core of self that centre which alone will hold in this mystifying universe this universe ever expanding expanding expanding and i type and listen to the healing words of the lyrics of a song and these words are healing me as they pour like a balm over my soul ah these words are the sweet waters that heal heal and heal ever more deeply and cohen sings on dancing me ever deeper into my soul ever ever deeper like a caver of the cavernous labyrinthine soul and these words are lighting the way down down down and dance me deeper deeper to the end of love and in that end i will surely find a beginning and these are the words that sound out my heart and then the music ah yes the music that enchants my soul that brings a tear with every stroke and caress of string for i need this music to play on and on for i need more healing that once i thought i never needed i need to be cherished and cuddled and comforted in the arms of mother earth in the arms of mother earth in the peace of mother earth in the peace in the peace of mother earth at her bosom at her bosom and i need more more more than a thousand kisses to heal my wounded heart and yet my soul is light for it courts the beauty of the imagination the imagination oh yes the beauty of the wondrous imagination that can enchant the soul to sing its song oh so strong oh so strong and i listen on not alone to cohen and his songs but to my own soul song that sings as these words will out as the truth of self will out as congruence and authenticity play the strings of my heart and they play them sound they play them sound they play them sweet and what a music those strings make what a music what a beautiful music and the truth it lies in the spacious room that is my mind and it is a room that has some seats and chairs and loads of lovely bookcases with those sacred books of knowledge that once my mother bought in the poverty of my youth in the poverty of my youth in those far away times those days almost forgotten when little or so little was such a lot and sometimes when the night is slow i sit and listen to cohen singing a thousand kisses deep and let those words lull me to sleep to sleep perchance to dream and in that dream of death what sleep may come and thus ends this and thus ends this and the rest as they say is silence... and the fading words... a thousand kisses deep...

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...