Otoliths

Some stuff of mine at Otoliths. Yea!

http://the-otolith.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/stephen-nelson-ink-colours-of-kundalini.html

Newspaper Riot

Establishment Launch

I'm delighted to be part of the Establishment. Check this out, seriously, straight from the folks at Knives, Forks and Spoons Press. It's a beautiful thing. Congratulations to James McLaughlin, Jo Langton, and the irrepressible Alec Newman.


http://issuu.com/alecnewman/docs/est._issue_1

Blue & Yellow Dog

I have a sequence in the latest issue of Blue & Yellow Dog, if you fancy a wee look-see.

http://blueyellowdog.weebly.com/stephen-nelson.html

Reflections of the Sea Soul

At one point I skipped across an alien surface of flat, grey rocks, an ancient lunar landscape, already mildly transported.


music
toy


sea
shawl


gull
call


in


Waves skinned the rock below me, burst off the wall of rock, crashed and gulped through crevices and under layers. At my feet I felt the play of water and rock – soft, solid, soft, solid – the zen pond of fluidity and hard matter.


wave
rock

         let’s
play, skip, walk


Looking out over the Firth, the seascape was divided. On my left, an expanse of light, the sun burning through a thin veil of cloud; on my right, dark clouds, dark water, the long limb of Arran, cloaked, mysterious, dark.


yin of sparkle                  yang of deep dull grey


Over me a feeling rolls, the feeling I want my body to dissolve like salt in the water, my consciousness to expand, merge with the sea. A loss of self-consciousness, identity united. Finding myself wholly in a body of water, part light, part dark. More of the oneness. More of me in the other than I can possibly be alone.


sea being

sea breathes

sea

being sea

breathes sea


Arran, hidden. Lifeforce, hidden.


              long
 (lazy island leg)
        
       long
 (lazy island leg)


And then, an overpowering expression of my father in me, my father six years dead, and beneath that, the sense that I am uniting with the child I was. All the sensations of childhood holidays by the coast flooding me, that little boy, that precious time in my life, released, let loose, capturing my consciousness, filling my chest; and the movements and mannerisms of my father, in my body, facial expressions, melodic vocal nuances, overwhelming me. This double identity, this union. One.


swallows swim my bloodstream


I wonder if some genetic quirk has been fully activated by the limitless expanse of sea, and if it has, then perhaps buried in that genetic code is the essence of who I am, who I am in my father, the Father, a union of souls within the infinite expression of the One.


   sh
sh ore sh
   sh


Also, an integration of Self – my senses then are my senses now. Parts of me from different time frames coming together harmoniously. A profound temporal alignment. In the distance, on the horizon, Ailsa Craig, symbol of self, faintly outlined in the mist.


man with flock of
starlings on his head


Finally, I return to the bench where my sister sits with her husband. My mother calls my sister’s phone. She wants to know if she should buy a table for her bedroom. She’d like us to see it. We leave the sound of the seas and the smell of salt air and head back into town to look at tables, and, most likely, drink coffee.


Five Minute Snapshot

two crows pecking sand on the beach some distance from black dog, who spots them, begins the chase. boy in black hooded top runs from mother towards ice cream kiosk, called back, told to wait. another boy bouncing ball, finds amusement in overflowing swing park, ball dribbles, abandoned, into wire fence. child cyclist claims to have cycled 15 miles that day. low plane bends over beach, lands in airfield behind the town, all heads on prom look up.

Lullaby

Costa Bounce (for Mike Cannell)

mind fathom liquid lamb
unbounded BO(iii)NG bus -
limitless.
cuss cess
castration pond, pool pounce
uncaring.
LEGO oud. id


(id
 oud
 odd
 out
 oddity) oudity. nude.


napalm frond. pine coal
carcinogen with


(ith
 outh
 ath
 oath


 banana) bone.

cleft urgent (ramshackle)
constabulary. organic
mead menstruation through
deciduous foreign organ.
rain flow organ.
rain florgan.


cellphone. cellophane.
cellotape. cello.
chill orange. cinnamon testicle.
CRUELtea CROUTon.


MONK VORTex of
lemon tart espresso.

The Kite Flyer

Dream Poem & Interpretation

My dead grandfather speaks
thru the telephone, sickened
by the world he haunts, its
ecstasy of suffering; appears
& complains the world abandons
him. Late, the Mother enters,
her seductive confidence &
dripping saliva jacket,
confront-
ed by my grandfather who
threatens her with kisses.
Neither is Danny dead; he lives
in tents up the Cauder,
ensconced in hippie liberty;
creator of waterfalls, spirit trees,
sound gardens, jungle highways,
smokes the ash end of the reefer;
dull actors in
1950s sports cars castigate
his absence.
                  My view of it all
is Arran through windows, binoculars,
too late to go to church, tho apparently
not London.




Interpretation:

My grandfather (on my father’s side), not the most approachable man, is paranoia, fear of the New World Order, the awful state of the world. The return of the Mother is the return of the feminine, the goddess, the female energy that begins as spirit, then filters into wordly affairs, politics, business. My grandfather, that old male domination, is threatened at first by her liberty, her sexuality, but gives himself over to her. The skip to my old friend who died recently is a leap to the personal, and speaks of escape, liberty from my old ways, old hang ups about God (at least a mythic God, the dull actor, not God who is One) a leap into spiritual liberty, light, peace. My friends, pleasant aspects of the Self, are creative; the water highways are subtle energy channels running through the centre of my body, uniting earth & sky. Finally, the detached view at the end is a view of mystery, an embrace of mystery. Arran represents mystery, as it did when I was a child, sitting on a beach looking over the Firth of Clyde to its majestic peaks, reading Lord of the Rings. The escape to London is the leap into the now, or perhaps the healing of old wounds at a time when the church is going through its last days on earth. In this situation, though not recorded in the poem, I am with friends and am whole with them, though not without tinges of insecurity.

My Mime Me

What belongs to me.







What I may possibly be.






What is solid, and relates to others, solidly.






What rolls and bridges.






What breaks down, weeps, is reflected in another.






What mirrors in the eye, the I.






What ascends?






What climbs?






Ladders?






What I am when I hide, when I merge in you.






What I am constrained.






What when I am you,






when I am you.






And when I am what.






When when I am.






Or am what.






What I suffer.






What I offer.






What I give back.






What I impersonate,






regale,






glorify.






What I manifest when what is whole in me.






What emerges,






is planted,






is beyond recognition, knowing,






nowing.






What is known.






What.





Now.





Is.





What.

A Week Without Air (Babylon)

sub
ject
ion

ab
duct
ion

con
ceal
ment

Odd Magazine

An odd short in an Odd Magazine. Scroll down to read a strange story of mine. And check out the rest of the ezine for work by Marton Koppany and Alexander Jorgensen:

http://oddarticles.blogspot.in/

Vital Source (The Return Of)

My ebook on contemplative spirituality is now available as a pdf at Lulu:

Vital Source: Diary of an Urban Contemplative

Please have a wee look. You can now download it directly to your laptop or pc. Even if contemplative spirituality isn't your thing, it's pretty autobiographical, so may be of interest to readers of this blog.

beginfinite

A Little Chalk Dusting

Way back in 1995, I had what I came to realise was a kundalini awakening. For ever after it seems this strange, esoteric process, which is coming to a head, quite literally in this year of  2012 (my pineal gland is POPPING!), has been filtering into my writing and music in ways which are never quite satisfactory. Sometimes references are explicit, sometimes only implied; I've told stories about characters who resemble fake kundalini super-heroes, and written poems where the process is treated more autobiographically.

By far the most interesting way of depicting the awakening is through handwritten visual pieces, which are usually spontaneous and rough and probably quite shambolic, but that's why this mode interests me - it's direct, automatic, oftimes a great release of pent up psychic energy, because the process itself is frequently trying, traumatic even, but is, finally, one of new birth and creativity.

I solarised the above little sketch because it's really about being in the grip of something, being a subset of something, and so it kind of reminded me of schooling and that old chalkboard which has now disappeared from our classrooms. It's also about the shadow side of our existence, or what is hidden behind our eyes, behind the material world, behind the blackboard where the teacher keeps the chalk.

Waitressing

left boob pops from

red shirt

coffee

thin & bent as a

willow bow;

sees face on

phone sound

alarming.

The Poetry of Karma & Genetics

With this bold enquiry we take a tentative step into the world of multi-dimensional space-time, at least as I see it. What’s needed is a new perspective, a new view of the universe, not as a mechanistic beast composed of matter travelling along strands of linear time, but as a holistic organism, a huge field of mind energy where all time exists simultaneously, buoyant and overlapping, carefully filtered through fragile little physical packets.

It’s as if we have a multitude of lives going on at once, but what we experience is generally limited to a segment of time channelled by our bodies. Occasionally however, glimpses of those other lives break into consciousness and suggest a parallel existence elsewhere, in another segment of time stored in this great energy field. So since my childhood, images, dreams and chance acquaintances have suggested scenes of Nazi Germany to my mind, so insistently at times that I’m left contemplating my role, if any, in that bitter little segment of the cosmic puzzle. Hence the above poem, though not strictly about me.

There is a variety of scientific research in the fields of biology and physics into these things, but I’m not a scientist so I’ll only point you to one Rupert Sheldrake, Professor of Biology at Cambridge, whose theories of morphic fields and morphic resonance begin to provide a solid foundation for these poetic enquiries.

It becomes necessary to reinterpret traditional ideas about God when one goes down this route, but the more we explore the mind and these strange glimmers of alternative existence, the more it becomes evident that this energy field is composed of something like pure love, and God, at least from the time of Christ, has always been love.

One wonders too at how matter interacts with mind and how DNA and chemistry in general might be a link to some more fundamental life force contained within this field of love, which seems incidentally, to be both distinct and wholly one with our core being, bridged indeed by love; and at how DNA might be karmically encoded with the life we have set up for ourselves, here and now, as well as there and then.

It seems too there may be a multitude of energy fields within this one energy field, and that every city or family or community, every planet has its own field containing all the information from its past (as we would conceive of it), possibly even an infinite number of alternatives to that past. When you go to a city, see if you can’t slow your mind down and get below the surface boil and bustle, the constant flux, to a more subtle undercurrent of energy, which feeds and feeds off of the physical and chemical activity of its inhabitants. Strange things begin to happen when you do this – weird coincidences, synchronicity, purposeful encounters – the whole cityscape takes on a hallucinatory quality. But I’ve written about that elsewhere.

I’ve tried to create a few visual poems based on these rather blank, but still assertive poster poems (or statement poems!), none of which I’m entirely satisfied with, but which I present here because I probably won’t try to improve on them, and now, for the time being at least, in this one particular dimension of space time, the matter is swiftly and quietly drawing to a close.

Vital Source

For anyone interested in contemplative prayer or Christian spirituality, I've published, perhaps rather hastily given my technological incompetence, an ebook called Vital Source: Diary of an Urban Contemplative. It's part prayer journal, part spiritual autobiography. Formatting these things is a bit of a nightmare but I don't think the reading experience will be too diminished by the glitches. At any rate, if it's at all your thing, I hope you enjoy it. It's fairly cheap and Kindle friendly.

Review of Bobby Parker's "Comberton".

Some questions for you to ponder, or ignore, whichever you prefer:

Why are we born into the circumstances we are born into, given the parents we are given, brought up in one particular time or place as opposed to another? How can we deal with those circumstances, however difficult, in a way that allows us to make sense of them, make sense of ourselves? How can we emerge from these circumstances with a genuine and intact sense of Self, a truth and honesty in our Being which allows us to accept them and transcend them and find, well, a serious slice of inner contentment?


Maybe these questions aren’t important to you. Maybe the mere act of survival is enough. Maybe you just want to get from the cradle to the grave relatively unscathed. Or maybe you just want to escape these pesky circumstances, surround yourself with nice things and respectable people, wealth, learning, in a bid to protect yourself from the crazy filthy mess of the crazy filthy world. Fine. Lovely. But for me, and I’m guessing for someone like Bobby Parker, that just isn’t enough, because to ignore these questions doesn’t chime with a sense of who we actually are. Even in the midst of the crack blown shitstorm, Bobby says:


“I lived to score. It gave my life meaning.”


Simple. To the point. In actual fact, Bobby writes the way I thought I might like to write when I first started writing. I have a few early short stories which wander into Bobby Parker territory, but they don’t quite cut it, probably because the crazy filthy world they explore was only at the edge of my experience until my late teens, when I drifted into it in order to “find something other”, sheltered as I was in a happy homey Christian dream bubble (which I’m entirely grateful for now, btw). For Parker, however, this world has been internalised since day one, crystallised in a sensitive, honest mind, and poured out in some of the cleanest writing out there. Clean?


“GIRLS WHO
DROVE ME
CRAZY


BOYS WHO
SHOWED ME
THEIR COCKS”


This, handwritten on a dirty post it note. It’s the honesty that’s clean, the straight-to-the-point directness. There’s no judgement. This is the world as it is without frill or pretty cover up. It’s like the Hindu tantrics who break all kinds of social and sexual taboos to find liberation. Parker and the characters who populate his prose poems and handwritten miniatures simply live, even embrace, their vice, perversion, habit, addiction, squalor, and by doing so, gain some control over their lives. Like Stabby Jim, who steals and wears soiled undergarments before masturbating into them, or Bobby and his friend who enjoy sparking up matches because:


“Every strike seemed to make sense, the flare and stink of them. Flicking them still lit into rubbish bins to start little fires. Something we could control.”


Control here is a form of liberation, a way of making meaning, sense. At other times the characters offer a poignant memory which gives life meaning:


“It seems that Liam’s crying filled my childhood just as much as much as the sound of church bells or ice cream vans.”


Or, sometimes, refuge from the pain:


“Until Gemma’s cool hands closed over my knuckles. Until her warm mouth touched my runny nose and called me sugar in the dark.”


Occasionally however, this sense of liberation becomes complete, reaching spiritual heights or moments of elevated consciousness, as in the post it note poem, scrawled and scored out before the declaration that:


“GOD IS THAT
FEELING I GET
SOMETIMES”.


I love how the “SOMETIMES” hangs at the end here before a final scrawled out word, this after harrowing prose poems about mental breakdown and an orgy involving his sisters-in-law. Parker isn’t using lyrical breaks in the down n dirty prose to evoke transcendence; it’s the handwritten scrawl, the score-out, the cartoon doodle portraying the shame, fear and humiliation of this existence that do so; emotions which become so heightened, so all consuming, that they themselves lead to moments of altered awareness, ecstasy even.


“For the first time since we moved here, I noticed how loud the fan on the bathroom ceiling was. How much it sounded like a voice.”


Or consider the poem where an intense emotional breakdown leads to the poignancy and heightened sentiment of intimate contact with his daughter:


“I nodded through the fear and held out my cartoon hands for the sunshine.”


Occasionally, the supernatural breaks through the fear and shame altogether, like the poem where Parker’s anxiety about his daughter’s birth is calmed by a ragged stranger with “eyes like snow globes” and a bus driver called Gabriel.


Make no mistake, the humiliation and guilt flattens him “like the consequences of a terrible lie”, he feels “like a clown with a virus”; but it’s precisely this humiliation and guilt, disappointment even, which, when it hits fever pitch, breaks into moments of complete realisation and transcendence:


“We stopped in the middle of our game and took turns blowing cigarette smoke into the sunbeam. Ghosts in the gold light. ‘Fucking beautiful . . .’ I whispered.”


Just like the tantrics.


I’m a big fan of Stanislav Grof’s perinatal theories, where he postulates that the child’s journey from the womb through the birth canal into the world forms a blueprint or frame of reference for our psychological journey through life. Don’t worry, I’m not going to psychoanalyse Bobby, and there’s a lot more to the theory than I can explain here, but I do see the experiences Parker describes as analogous to the traumatic journey to new birth. The book finishes with a dramatic explosion of light as our eyes see who we are or what we can really be:


“WE ARE LIGHTS”.


Before this however we are faced with the emotional appeal:


“TOUCH ME”.

I’m not sure where Bobby is in his journey and whether or not he’s heading out of the darkness towards the light. His writing about it is a way of liberating himself from the pain, which in itself suggests a way into something more precious. Wherever he is, I’m glad to be his companion along the way.

http://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/comberton.html

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