Letting Go

sometimes I wonder how to begin a stream of consciousness post and then I say to myself why worry sure you can start anywhere and then continue on without concern as to what will come out for the piece will write itself and some flowers will appear like lotuses from the muck and gunk and bilge and all that slime and all that slime and somewhere deep within it there will be something fine formed like a poem coming to birth coming to a shape forming forming from all those Freudian depths from that cesspit from which rises the Self like some exotic phoenix  and so I keep on writing keep on thinking keep on doing and basically keep on keeping on following my nose to quote my late great mother and all I can do is go with it go with the flow of it the flow of it the flow of it and then even the trickle of it the stop of it yes the stop of it the stagnation of it the vile vile smell of it and I have often been amused that even from the cesspits from the tanks of shit from the tanks of effluent that's anything but fluent anything but fluent without flow stagnant stagnant but this is no angst-ridden piece this is no depressive's account of life no no no it is an observer's account of life as I sit objectively sitting in my body that I almost do not recognize as me as I grow older and older in this out of shape container that bulges at midriff  and I sit and seek and seek and sit and type and write and attempt to compose to find some shape some form some structure some way of being in this world that is light and light and lighter still I search and search for enlightenment for an elongated light-bulb moment for some dawning of the light some dawning some dawning of the light and I write and I think of the shit that has happened not to me no not to me but to those dear to me dear to me those who I hold in my heart in my heart for some strange reason why that link why that holding why why why that holding of them in my heart why and yet I am drawn drawn to their suffering and I am with them yes I am with them in compassion in compassion and all that meditation and all that falling asleep and all that seeking and yearning and searching and then sleeping again and all that reading all that reading all that philosophy and psychology and becoming more and more theology and literature and languages and all the things that I have studied and learnt and I say why why why why and I write in search of what I do not rightly know anymore but I know I am getting to be more observant of the whole thing more and more of an objective watcher of life that is coursing through this body this body enlivened through its blood its blood its blood red vitality that rises from God knows where in some gap some gloriously small gap some Goldilock's window where the light of life came in came in at some temperature suitable to life formation and suddenly there was something that stirred at the quick of things at the heart of things somewhere where the music of the spheres chimes in harmony chimes and spins and spins and chimes and all I have left is this stream of consciousness to warm my heart this damp night this damp night where everything is cold and objective and I long for a passion for life I long for and enthusiasm for an en-god-ening of myself as that word essentially means etymologically being filled with the godhead being filled with a spirit a life a vitality beyond me and I experience this life this vitality this vital-ism that is pure pure gift and then the bolt from the blue the punch in the stomach the headbutt and the knocking senseless of the cerebral way of processing things that knocking punch-drunk of us all at your death Sean and I cannot get you out of my mind anymore after your final act your final act under a beautiful low-hanging evergreen tree where you ended your short life where you tied the rope around your neck where you climbed upon a big strong bough and jumped until the rope strangled you until the rope suffocated you knocked your life from you under that evergreen tree so near to the school where you were happy and you ended it all ended it all there and I went there twice and wondered and wondered and cried and wondered at the awful suffering you must have endured before that final act that definitive act of saying no to the vitality the vital essence that ran through you whatever that essence of life or living happened to be and at end of some nerve ending at some synapse at some strange interconnection of neurons in your brain some dreadful thought leapt forth and shrieked at you and screamed at you that the only way was out that the only way out that the only way was that short lonely drop from a strong bough under a beautiful evergreen tree and I still see you in my mind's eye in the corridors of the school in the corridors of my mind caught somewhere in a synapse bereft of meaning throbbing sparking between neurons and you jumped and let it all go and let it all go and let your life's breath ebb away in the shadows under a beautiful evergreen tree

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...

Post-Holiday Angst

it is so long since i wrote a stream of consciousness that after a year it is about time i let my teeming mind overflow or even act as a conduit for what has arisen within where the metaphor of mind plays interesting games with the brain and somehow i know i ache as i write these lines in that old existentialist sense after having spent the morning raiding nietzsche and lou salome and paul rée for ideas and yes i know that in that triangle of love in that ménage a trois mostly and totally intellectual as it was there yes there was a psychic or intrapsychic depth a depth only keen thinkers could know and yet and yet so much of that thinking was linked with suffering so much of that thinking was linked with pain and this does not surprise me because these great kindred spirits were existentialists who fought against all convention they were frontiers' men and women yes they were the ones who railed openly against society they were the prophets and the seers into the depths of the modern soul and how much they knew especially nietzsche of the catastrophe ahead that all that enlightenment and rational stuff could only lead so far so far so far and it did indeed it would eventually lead to two great world wars oh they were right there was and is no linear progression of truth or of science because everything as the great jesuit poet gerard manley hopkins put it wears man's smudge and shares man's smell as he so well put it in a poem uncannily and ironically called god's grandeur and it was nietzsche who proclaimed the death of god that is the death of humankind's true beliefs because they had sold those beliefs very cheaply for a mess of pottage and i will go on having just come back from a two week vacation in the sun where i read much about the depths of the soul the sheer frightening depths of my own soul and this is what i learned on the pulses of my own heart as the romantic poet john keats i think put it that truth is only truth when felt on ones own pulses...

Gated garden, St Ann's Park, Raheny

and how can i deny the truths that rose to meet me and rise to meet me now as i type these poor words this stream of consciousness here in order to plumb my own depths find my own truth as nietzche would put it after all that's what it's all about not about finding the truth in capital letters like an objective truth out there cold cold cold - no no no that truth is warm it courses in our own veins always always coursing and let me be true as nietzsche and ree and salome and yalom and all the philosophers and psychiatrists  i like to read are true to themselves as this is the very heart of existentialism and i want no marshalled thoughts here no comas no periods or fullstops nothing like that possibly what e e cummings was about possibly what james joyce was about possibly possibly possibly and all is possibility if only i become brave enough to take a chance and in the end learn to own my own fate learn to love my own fate as nietzsche was wont to put it and he did express it in a beautiful latin phrase amor fati the love of one's own destiny and even yet i can subscribe to this hard and difficult and painful though it is and i can subscribe to his metaphorical doctrine of eternal recurrence because once one has really found and integrated one's truth one's very own unique truth only then only then can one choose rightly and wisely because once one has realized and integrated that truth there is nothing left to choose anymore because that is existentially you and you alone or i and i alone...

and newman had it right you know when he said it was impossible to separate out the thinker from the thought that these two were inextricably links and that other old phrase i learned from thew great lecturer i had years ago the great barney kelly that phrase from the french enlightenment thinker buffon that le style c'est l'homme meme and nietzsche knew this and all his friends knew it and no wonder he was one of the first existentialist because he knew the man could never be separated from his thoughts and that was salomé's writing in her memoir on nietzsche and that was her recommendation to anyone wishing to read the words of this complex oh so complex philosopher and she said we must direct our attention to the human being and not the theorist in order to find a way in nietzsche's work and yet strangely newman who was anything but an existentialist knew this too and of course all this shows how fallible are all our categories and after all are not all philosophers tired of telling us that they do not want to be forced into this or that school of thought after all each is uniquely themselves and so i write in a confusion  here yet in a healthy confusion that is integrating all the subpersonalities in me all the positive and negatives even the bisexuality in me and the tension between both poles that is alive in me these days the tension the tension the tension from which comes often the inspiration to write the inspiration to set things down on paper

and like nietzche and breuer whom yalom has walking through a cemetery in vienna i walked through the cemetery where my father is buried yesterday and it quietened my soul salved my conscience it was as if life was greeting me in death yes in death in the very inevitability of dying and death and i read the headstones like i would my prayers when i was a boy all those years ago when i was a little lonely boy so long ago yet in a strange way just like yesterday and as i bowed my head before my father's grave i stood in the silence in the profound and deep yet bright silence and watched all those lovely honey bees go from flower to flower on the fuchsia bust resplendent in red in blood red blooms among the dead and they were all there all there people or souls whom i once knew liam o. not far from my father's grave and pat mc. not too far away either and i walked and walked but could not find my cousin mary's grave but it was somewhere there somewhere but i had thought of her yes i had and then the unmarked grave of my past-pupil who drowned one night on his own vomit jesus he was only sixteen only sixteen not even started out on the journey we call life and i waled and walked and walked and sort of cried silently inwardly in my own soul at the impermanence of things at the fleeting nature of time and at the frightful inevitability of dying and death and death and dying and yet of life and living...

and the sound of the wonderful honey bees brought me back to tommy quinlan's grave back to the grave of my dad my dear old dad who once told me that someday that someday i would understand and he was so right so right so right and it is like that great drama by eugene o'neill that we studied in college all those years ago like that great play long day's journey into night where mary tyrone says to her son that life teaches us to accept what we cannot understand what we cannot understand and yet and yet there are those like nietzsche and salomé and even i who wish to understand and yet that is the cross we have to bear our deep desire to understand and in the end there may be no understanding per se and yet and yet we are meaning-making creatures and we need to make meaning and whether that meaning is in the end meaningful in an objective sense is irrelevant once it is meaningful in a subjective existential self and so

i will write and i will write i will write myself beautiful and ethical and true and moral and congruent in these words that come not just from my thoughts or from my mind but from the whole man from my thoughts and from my person as salome says above ah yes these thoughts are from the very centre of my being  from what it feels like to be human from heart and from head from deep within me and it is a cry for meaning like monck's famous painting the scream and even if the universe is indifferent we have friends or at least this writer knows he has friends who will listen to his tales of weal and woe

... then the sound of the combine harvester and the tractor from the next field to the cemetery drew my attention drew my attention as the world of basic work continued but it was a work that binds us humans to the earth from whose bounty we spring and on whose bounty we live great mother earth great mother gaia in all her rich abundance as the harvest was now being cut and the farmers are so happy this year as there will be a bumper harvest for a second year in a row and life and the living and the planting and the growing and the reaping go on apace and will continue to go on and it is all a cycle a cycle yes a cycle and it is those who deny the cycle and believe in the illusion of the linear myth that truly die...

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...