Eschaton II Sequence section I live reading

‘With spider's webs you must simply do the best you can. We do not have the spider's weaving equipment, nor any substitute for the leaf's living bond with its point of attachment and nourishment.’

WS Merwin: ‘Unchopping a Tree’.

eschatonIIsequence i

Talent is knowing how to get things done; genius is knowing precisely, and at what uttermost perfect point, how to really end them.

Look at us all trying to make it big while the world is ending. Who has the right to a cenotaph of their own choosing?

Love becomes easier to endure the further away from sex you actually go. But that is not to say it doesn’t have its own place on the special scale of that painful brand of bloodless cut and psychic wounding.

There is no why but the when. Wherever we are it is what is then happening and what or who it is happening to.

We only both happen to be here, although one of us is not here. Who am I? Who are you? Speak or be forever spoken to.

But listen. Or anything you say will not be heard, neither by yourself nor by those you would have keenly listen to you.

Kindness appears from afar like the most innocent of errors but is in fact the highest leap of the collective imagination made by nature since honey bees became beehives. Or books bound authors.

Give a lobster antidepressants and give him something to fight for. Give a man antidepressants and God something worthy to live for.

I thought I’d finished a book but in fact it was starting. The process of writing another book that knows where it is going.

The internet never became the social hub of cohesion and collective endeavour that it strives to be so hard in places; it has become a swamp of subcultures and polarised ghetto-like circles. It is clearly hierarchical.

There are places a poet can go unannounced, unnoticed, and with a glance change the warp of the world, and with a word unweave it.

I am bidding on a chance of immortality for more than one generation in the form of becoming the thing I mean to preserve: that is the road, the journey.

The text is like a street lit by gas, strewn with hay and horse dung. But it got you to where you were then.

In many a pile of hay the prick of steel then wisdom.

I am a strange writer with style, but what style I can’t tell: I dress like a homeless disconnected pile of nervous vermin.

To the street rats and eccentrics and quirks I have had to turn my back on: I apologize. The law of the jungle dictates that we cannot acceptably socialize. You stay on your side of the street.

I have found out the hard way what it can mean for an open-minded and agreeable man to be condemned for being innocently indiscreet.

There comes a part of every process or project where all you can do is wait. Identifying those times is essential to getting it done right.

Sleep is like a friend I don’t prod or lean on too often in case she does let me down and I turn against her. I lie with sleep like I lie with a woman the first time you cuddle up close, delicately like a feather.

A seagull can wake me with one of its sonic pipsqueaks. A mouse can exhale with great force in the attic above and my head is in uproar.

My love for my brother is absolute. There is nothing he could do that I wouldn’t try to understand, empathise with and stand by.

Love and attraction are complimentary forces but not necessarily proportionate in quantity or harmonious in nature.

The moon, seen as any dear friend, can be fickle and fluctuating and full and can be hard to fathom.

The sky is alive with activity of every kind, from specks of rain, gusts of wind, rays of sun, or waves of cloud formation. Only life itself could be more alive or active.

The microbes that move the deep ground from underneath our feet are as a whole the very universe that appears to care nothing for their trial or endurance. The universe digs of itself.

Dawn heralds birds the likes of which my previous torture can’t compare to. Entire colonies of squabbling seabirds make me crave for the days of Thrush and Jay and Jackdaw.

The cliffs are as picturesque a scene you will find on the coast along the whole of Britain. Each seaweed envelops a patch on which to make its stand and reflect its reach, representing all of nature.

The twilight arrives in good time but makes it hard for timing.

The sunlight arrives in gradations: every grain is a blast of the day to come, pregnant with pain and promise.

The voices of women still come, some to haunt, some to play, some to torture; but all of them come plying and receiving wisdom.

There is great wisdom in jokes, and in a sense of humour: both of which are required to keep those windows open.

To immerse yourself in an idea you must become a big part of it. The best evidence of embodying an idea is how one goes about it.

To put yourself into the text there is no need for blood, or even a little bloodletting. If ink is what runs in your veins all you need do is spill it.

The architect of an idea is never alone but alongside plenty of company.

That company is usually mixed between those gone before, those who are now, and those who’ve yet to come after.

What but to other worlds do we have recourse in now, now we have destroyed the real one.

To destroy everything that is real it is enough to ignore it.

It is no surprise to me that in art as in all other things we must raise the level of threat to that of a cataclysm, and even then advertise it.

I would like a world-dangering text even if that world were just the body of one knowing subject entirely.

I do no mean to advocate for suicide. I mean to lead by example.

Shooting yourself in the head is only one career you can sample.

Entombing yourself in a text is a difficult task so long as there beats a pulse to the pace of the words. We have to stem the word flow.

We will conduct curves and lines by marks in a logical space, delineated by fair or common use, and discounted for with irony.

A single act, one little word, from a penetrating man describes his character whole, even be they (or it turns out that it’s) tiny.

Systematically we circumscribe our limits and in so doing live them. By drawing the line to a halt we bring an annihilation closer.

Sometimes we can’t circle the line until we deviate from the linear.

The vacuum that sucks from my chest all happiness has never been any more vast, and never been any truer.

I would take the point of my metaphorical nib to the heart of my muse, and drive the thing straight through her.

We want to believe in a world of higher thoughts and powers. But all we get is the same recycling of word and argument in vain going on for hours.

I have no feelings towards my death but I do towards my daughter’s.

The only way anything is preserved is in the one imagination’s ether.

I write to describe my inner pain, the pain of competing voices contradicting each other, jostling for space, and lashing out like a lobster at any one who thinks they can get in closer.

I write out of spite in the main: I wish to point out the cost of losing a son outweighs that of losing a father.

I do not write to clarify, this is not that kind of note, addressed to my mother. The only thing about me she understands is that I did not become one more plumber.

Pipes hold no interest for me, except for voice and capillaries.

I am a God who just participates through ‘me’.

I am a creative force, and an organizing vision.

I will ride the carousel until it ends, not until it ends me.

You don’t know the lure of contentment till you found the cure for-self consciousness.

Contentment is not satisfaction, it is not the satiating of a given will. Contentment is more the will’s disappearance, or at least its shrivelling like the head of a pin.

I do not trust the needle. I don’t trust in anything that has one, and only one, specific narrow usage.

You don’t use the needle to burst the balloon: you can use any pin point.

There is only one gateway drug and that’s cigarettes, not pure and blunt joints.

The sky fills the seat of the brain, the wind fills our eyes, and the sea our bodies.

Nobody knows how much time they have left, only that they have it.

I would have the world turned on its side, if only to see how unique it would look to have a sideways sunrise.. I like sideways. But nowhere near as much as I like upside down.

If the world were turned upside down, other than the stars, nobody would notice.

I use, and recycle our discarded conceptual tools for target practice.

The stranglehold of loving feelings is a protracted madness. The feathered touch of more distant love is more akin to witness.

Despite the power displayed by one it is at the same time weakest. For what is strong is often just as brittle.

The key that so escapes us and would lead us from the cells is made from gossamer exceeding the tensile strength of metal.

The key that so escapes us is like nothing of this earth: among the elements it is rare and most exceptional.

Those who find it turn the lock and find themselves out in the open. The night sky glows and stars play instrumental harmonies as real as the bricks that made your prison castle.

Something of us hovers when our attention’s fixed on others. That is the image of the God whose work you’re wondering upon, and stumbling like a blind man lost all over.

There is something outside me something that’s bigger, like a book, but a real bestseller. I believe I skip-read down the pages and draw lines under pregnant/degenerating phrases.

The bible was put together by a complex committee. I was also composed by a bunch of personal forces beyond me: I am also holy.

Kindness is never motivated by selfish interest, for then it would not be a kindness but a means to gratify.

Kindness can itself prove quite gratifying this much is obvious of course. But the gratification comes from delay of gratification.

Doing nothing is not often praiseworthy, but it shouldn’t be condemned as a form of action either. As an act it is morally neutral. There is never a moral imperative to act rather than not act, except in the case of medicine where they are sworn to intervene in someone’s woe promptly and positively.

You do not have the right to avoid or to be averted from misfortune.

We can call such inactivity moral cowardice or low moral character, but that is to make a value judgement no act has yet been called upon to incur.

It was foolish or inconsiderate not to seatbelt your kids in the back of the car, but it is not morally wrong – it is morally neutral.

Taking the pre-existing fixed seatbelts off could indeed be seen as morally wicked.

This is the solution to the trolley-problem: there is no duty therefore there can be no problem.

Besides the merits of utilitarianism are dubious considering our ignorance about all future matters.

If good is your goal then pursue it; if evil is your aim go for it. Neither is rationally indefensible.

The morality of morals is their entire essence. Even naturalism reduces to impulses interpreted as good in some way or else not so.

Psychologically we are more complex than nature as our scarification demonstrates so well.

I am not pursuing my own interest. It is the interest of the Other, that is what currently interests me.

If I appear to occasionally lack story, pacing or themes, it’s because there is only one theme, one story worth the pursuit, and that is a man and his dreams.

I dreamed that I was a ghost writer.

I dreamed hundreds of ghosts would arrive to read the scrolls I left them. And they all looked and nodded their hooded heads.

It is not as if I ask the dead to rise and live again. On the contrary I would have us all die and see the single view from nowhere.

For this is as much a picture as it is a world or is a point of view. There is much to do in the way of interpretation, but with effort we will get there too.

I am starting to think death and consciousness are quite unrelated. I do not think of rational souls but of disjointed eyes looking over the sea and seeing swirls and shadows.

Some of the swirls turn to shapes. Others recoil and fall. But all the while the sun is somewhere in there, shining.

Light has the strange touch of the divine, but that is not to say blind people cannot be touched and moved and swayed by beauty.

Beauty is where the light lands and falls, warming the hands and the fields and the spores that the air is filled by, like the scent of mint or thyme or lavender on a cool Summer’s day in a small country garden.

The blind impose order on chaos perhaps more rigorously and with constant frequency than do we the sighted. In that they are already almost enlightened and holy.

I wait every day in some way transforming data and light from basic food and matter. I mechanize my thoughts and ideas, electronically saved, then sent to live in the cloud. How does that differ from praying?

If there is a theme then it is that we will die. Our words will dry out, our books will be lost, our kids will be old and forgetful. Every few years the globe is washed clean again; what we leave will be torn down or unrecognizable. And still we plan wars for over thirty years.

While my parents still live I am not alone in the world; while I have kids I have some paltry years of consolation. With a book I might live for a century or more, on some long forgotten shelf in some utopian future.

I will not end up like a dog in the street, I will be more like DVDs and dwell at the bottom of bargain buckets.

I would not carve my books into the face of stone or metal any more than I would paint with diarrhoea.

I am building a textual tomb and in it may these stray thoughts be buried. At the very least there will lie a quiet voice amid the noise of history.

My pyramid I aim up straight to whichever most distant star. If you are reading these alone attentively at night, look up every ten or fifteen pages you will see my imprint, you will catch me there.

I look down on you the way a patron looks: with care. There may just come a time when, looking up, you’re glad you were.

We are not alone conjoined here in the pages that we are.

If you would be rescued in the night: leave your door ajar.