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... 

SAD

.... and this is the summer season unusually damp and wet here in ireland land of mists and more mists and sixty shades of grey as well as sixty shades of green and the sun has departed and no wonder we feel sad and sad is named so well that is seasonal affective disorder and we must surely suffer from it here in hibernia named winter by the romans and so i sit here in my attic den and am slightly down and hope that by writing these few words i will exorcise the devil and these words alone bring me back to some thirty years ago and i in  a monastery fastness on the side of the dublin mountains not far from the famous or infamous hellfire club to which we used climb as young men to put in an afternoon that would not lie heavily upon our souls and i remember passing one other student who asked me what i was thinking and i said i was exorcising my demons and boy that's what physical activity does it helps us exorcise those demons that haunt our souls nay haunt our body-souls for this writer is no believer in cartesian dualism this writer is seeking a holism yes a holism that knows only this solidity that i am at the moment this solid blob of flesh this solidity or solid blob of flesh that can think and write and move and do this solidity that wants no self-pity that wants to explore its real nature of which it is at once a captive and yet and yet can fly away on paths of escape in imaginary lands of thought and i sweat and i sweat in my attic room for it is at least 20 degrees centigrade today and my keyboard has become a little sweaty with my fingers and i think of the great gerard manley hopkins sj who wrote of human beings as bearing man's smudge and sharing man's smell naked we came into the world and naked we shall leave it and as i type i realise that there are many things i have let slip many things i must do things that i have been too lazy and too disinclined to do almost like freud as if i wished to let those cares go let them fall away and embrace an ageing that knows that letting go that knows that dying and that death is so much part of this body-soul that i am so much part of this thinking mass of flesh that i am and yes it sounds so good does that phrase thinking mass of flesh that will become a stinking mass of flesh and then no more no more no more and the great freud himself called this the death instinct and he was so right so right so right and all the things i must do are pressing in on me pressing in on me and yet i know that after this writing after this stream of consciousness i must go and do something because doing something is part of my rescue my rescue of this self struggling to know itself struggling to come to terms with what it is with who it is with the shadows that fall as well as the strong sunlight of italy that i tasted for a while and these fingers now are caressing these keys as the stream of consciousness traces itself across the screen of my laptop mirroring the screen of my mind and i am calling out like the psalmist of old the psalmist of old whom the old scholars traditionally called david he the leader of the jewish nation all those years ago and these thoughts keep falling down and shaping themselves like a stream that finds a channel like a stream that finds a channel and i will find a channel and that will be my identity that channel that will be carved from the earth by the beads of sweat on my brow and i need courage to do all this diving down into the unconscious and owning all those demons that live in the shadowy corners of my mind and how i need a fellow soul an anamchara as they put it in the irish language to lead me forth by the hand and say don't think so deeply just go with life just go with life and follow where it leads...

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...

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...

Pressing on just in spite....

London Bridge, 1999

and still the talk goes on and on and all those voices with their answers ah but there are too many too many answers surely they must know that answers are all so cheap too easily tripping off the tongue too easily summing things up too easily too easily and now the years have slipped in way too quickly way too quickly ró scioptha ar fad as they put nit in Gaelic that other language of my heart that claims my allegiance so often and yes the years seem to be folding in on themselves like dough being kneaded and the image of my mother's knuckles over the years as she rolled out the pastry for this or that loaf of bread and into the mix she was poring weeks and days and months and years and sprinkling the dough with the fruits of her labour and oh she worked so hard so hard to make ends meet and still the image of her weathered knuckles haunt me as i write these words these wee cyphers that dot this screen in an order coming from somewhere in my unconscious and i remember gerard smyth all those years ago sitting in the staff room of my first school greeting me one winter's morning and asking me what was it all about what was it all about at all at all and then how i was taken aback at such a question so early in the morning and i was undone so undone as undone as t.s. eliot's crowd swarming like ants over london bridge a crowd flowed over london bridge i had not known that death had undone so many undone so many and i was undone then that morning with your question gerard as i knew you were getting at the meaning of the whole enterprise we call life and back then i hadn't known that the poor lad had been given a short time to live having had a congenital heart condition since he was a child and no wonder he had asked that question because he was facing the exit door and i type on and and on here and let the words come randomly or as randomly as i can into my mind and thence out onto this screen and my mother is not far from death now either as we look forward to her ninety fifth birthday that she has lasted so long is a miracle beautiful beautiful soul also so constant always so dependable always there strong strong strong soul in a wizened body poor vessel poor weak vessel and i and i i don't know don't know anymore after all after all the books and notes and courses and i like gerard wonder what it is all about and i am moved as i type these words moved by the fragility of things the very brittleness of life and the randomness of it all the randomness the sheer randomness and then the strange theory of chaos so strange that patterns emerge from the chaos patterns and order from the chaos belying randomness what a paradox what a paradox that there is order in randomness and i wonder and i wonder is there randomness in order too and so i write and so i write to rid my soul of the ache of being of the ache the ache of soul ah the soul the soul which cannot be separated ever from the vessel of the body and as i type these cyphers as i type them the words keep coming and i am so convinced that the soul cannot be separated out from the body not for me not for me the cartesian dualistic lie of the  ghost within the machine no no no there is something greater at issue here some new unity of matter and energy of body and soul call it what you want yes call this unity the body-soul or the soul-body you simply cannot have one without the other and i will type these words as i plumb the dark corridors of my labyrinthine self those shadowy passageways of self and i find these words this stream of consciousness the only valuable guiding light through the shadows through the shadows and i follow i follow i follow towards the light at the centre of the chamber like a volume of spermatozoa squirting up the vaginal passageway of the ancient tumulus or womb of time at brú na bóinne or newgrange and like gerard i ask and i ask and i implore i implore all the deep down gods of the psyche of the psyche and my question is on my lips always like gerard what is it all about what is it about at all at all and much more importantly i try i try to be as honest and as sincere and as congruent and as authentic as i possibly can...

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...   

Identifying the self

Student in a large room in Versailles Palace, School Trip October 2011

...and so we come in one by one one by one from the cold street where we were anonymous ants on an equally anonymous anthill and identify ourselves by being this or that president this or that secretary this or that treasurer of this or that organization in this or that city in this or that country and so on and so forth and that is it indeed let there be no doubt about the littleness of the human situation the littleness of us ants on this giant anthill and yes yes yes how we strive to give ourselves identity how we strive to get ourselves known by giving ourselves this or that distinction and our little great egos we little ants and here we go to the agm the agm of egos sitting here defining this or that or the other term in this that or the other motion before the gathered number and yes there are always those old original founders or as they say in the gaelic those old seanfhundúirí those old pedantic soldiers from long ago those old conservative members who like to be heard who like to dot every i and cross every t and yet i too like such precision which has care for such exactness for such a legalistic turn of phrase for such efforts that rage against ambiguity such a clarity  yes clarity clarity that elusive clarity of which the great Albert Camus was in search all his great little life and i am alluding here in my mind to his wonderful book The Myth of Sisyphus and there he was Camus Camus the former great Algerian goalkeeper and wonderful writer who dared question all the old assumptions who dared to be different who raged against disorder only to end up as disillusioned as the said Sisyphus interminably rolling his lonely rock up a lonely hill only to have it roll down again and again and all he said was absurd absurd there was no rhyme or reason to the whole enterprise even if one could call it an enterprise in the first place as an enterprise surely by definition should have some meaning or even in a more dreadfully wordy phrasing of the same thought every enterprise should have some meaningfulness attached to it oh what a term meaningfulness and how does that word differ from meaning anyway or even does it exist but still let it stand for this stream of consciousness needs it and so my thoughts and words go round and round and so these words on this page spew forth searching out thoughts these words are chasing thoughts if i may use another metaphor and yes that is another old question another old philosophical chestnut which comes first the words or the thoughts the thoughts or the words the chicken or the egg the egg or the chicken and so i continue to write or so these words continue to stream on in an effort to give birth to something upon a page and all is circular and i return Joyce-like to my start or Joycean even to those beginning words of Finnegan's Wake which rattle around my mind riverrun past Eve and Adam's from swerve of shore to bend of bay brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to our beginning where we all come in from the anonymity of the anthill into the room where we all seek to sing our soul to identify our little selves one against the other one with the other over soup and sandwiches and tea after all the talk after all the talk we are only human oh so human we need this sustenance and the triviality we need these small trivial acts this exchange of pleasantries after the importance of our meeting...

The Eternal Now

Sculpture at the American Military Cemetery, Normandy

Sculpture at German Military Cemetery.

and all spiritualities talk about living in the now the eternal now because it alone is all we have as the past is already gone and is merely a somewhat cloudy memory while the future has not yet come and is merely a fleeting vision if we are lucky and that's it my soul-friend the future and the past are illusory leaving us only to dwell in the eternal now that now that goes on forever leaving us with the mystery of time which we know only by the changes wrought on and in our very bodies and that is what ageing and growing old for me is yes that's what it is a coming to terms with the body-soul or soul-body as a unity ah yes that is what growing old is for me yes it is a coming to terms with my body an acknowledgement of its weaknesses and failings with all its bumps and lumps and imperfections exacerbated by the weathering of the years and my spirituality is a growing of my soul-into-body and my body-into-soul a growing beyond all atomization a growing beyond all splitting of the self because my self is so intimately bound up with my body that i know of no separation and ageing is carrying me beyond old certainties and old categories one reads of in dusty old books a going beyond the dualisms and dualities a going beyond cartesian categories of body and soul and yet those old rationalists knew a lot but they kept mathematically dividing reality and even Self whereas the modern thrust of psyche and of Self and of body-soul is to unity union and unification and to live in the now is to hear my stomach growl after the light meal i have eaten as it sucks in through osmosis whatever nourishment was in the food i ate and this is the now of my body and of my body-soul as it feels these keys and taps this flow of consciousness on this screen in front of me the nowness of it all and the dog barking somewhere at the back of my house and i acknowledge its presence as I do the feel and gentle rattle of the keys that give shape and form to these emanations of the Self or of body-soul or of soul-body and all the while i am becoming an Observer or Witness of all about me as well as all within me and i am becoming a Listener to Self as well as to Others and this is the way i can be in this world and a i type i feel like e e cummings who wrote without any punctuation becoming as it were part of what he was writing rather than the creator or objectively ordering person-writer-narrator as the ordering mind begins to notice and observe rather than to order and predict and determine or pre-determine and ageing for me is becoming a letting go a going beyond a wanting to control a going beyond a logical or rational ordering of things to meet my ideas of how things are or should be it's as if i was becoming a more neutral screen or plate letting all those stimuli from outside and even from inside register on it and meditation is teaching me to listen and in listening to accept to accept to accept to accept a small word worth repeating but its denoted and connoted meanings are so hard to achieve and yet i am painfully and gradually doing it and i love the fact that my mind now is teeming onto this page without control of my consciousness and i feel like i have dived into an ocean and am learning to swim learning to let go the Ego learning learning learning to knock it into shape to take away its desire for control dreadful control which has led to Hitlerian destruction and devastation ah my soul ah my body ah my body-soul ah my soul-body my oneness and unity of being i delight in you that delights in others and that brings some lightness to this world weighed down with the madness of manic capitalism which is gobbling us up like an ever hungry monster and so many of us are prey to our desires and the ads on t.v. and radio and magazines and Internet all yes all are purposely composed to lure the desires of the id of the id that cesspit primordially rooted in our being... now now now NOW...  that's all i need all i need as the i diminishes  

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...