Mooji-ji

18th Century Concrete Mash-Up Post

Sunday morning spent tinkering with poems and fragments of poems written late the previous evening - concrete poems, handwritten poems, 18th century rip offs - mash 'em up, spit 'em out, blog 'em!

Poetic detritus, maybe...but crucial to the process, the ongoing mental experiment, the eternal ravaging of mind by thought. Here's a thought:

We are all God thoughts...and, just as our thoughts are not us, but inseparable parts of us with their own independent, free-wheeling, free-willing ways (which can only rest through a process of stilling) ...we are indistinguishable from God when we rest in Him, surrender our ears and eyes to Him. And yet we are distinct and free to create all sorts of vanity and delusion, evil even.

More detritus from a head stuck in an endless loop of lives lived in vanity and delusion. Every sun/son is somehow sheltered...somehow.

Random Vascular Encoding - A Tale of the Discarded

The four pieces presented here represent way stages, by products, off cuts of something more solid, more finished, more substantial. Yet I like them for what they are. Sometimes things which we discard have a value of their own, the more so for being discarded.

I wonder if we can recollect and reclaim certain parts of our lives and invest them with new meaning and significance on our way to forming something more polished and complete. Or if what we cast aside and ignore is never really cast aside but remains, clinging to us, helping to form the beautiful rag tag bunch of bones, thought and emotion we are.

I have more off cuts filed away, but it may not be a good idea to bring them out all at once, especially at this time of year. We have to deal with ourselves slowly, treat our formation respectfully, attend to it with patience and care and a gentle touch of humour. Nonetheless, I'm a bring-it-all-out-in-the-open type of guy, as long as I have plenty space to do so. As long as I'm able to resist judgement, judgementalism. As long as I sacrifice foolish pride for consciousness of self. As long as I am a black snowflake falling in the night, melting into the significance of insignificance, where the darkness of prime source circles back on itself, gathering in the strays, a snow sun soaking back its own creative rays.

Twin Flames 1

Vispo Visions of an EEG Scan

On Tuesday I went to the Southern General Hospital in Glasgow for an EEG scan, which my doctor set up after I happened to mention the strange, hot energy in my head and the vibrating sensation at the centre of my skull. He wanted to rule out epilepsy and tumours and all sorts of other unpleasant diagnosis as any good doctor might, but I’m pretty sure the symptoms are a result of kundalini energy reaching my brain after years rampaging around my body.

I was led by a pretty nurse into a quiet room with an easy chair where a hairnet of sensors and wires was attached to my scalp with a sticky wet gel. We chatted a bit and I asked her if she regarded consciousness as a by product of the brain’s evolution or a field of energy which the brain filters into mind. She paused and said, “Yea.” I apologised for being so philosophical. She was nice and I felt extremely calm and relaxed as the scan began, slipping into a quiet and fairly deep meditative state as she asked me to open and close my eyes, while recording my brain’s responses on a computer. The room was poised at the verge of exploration and discovery. I felt peaceful, blissful, wondering if the scan might record the brain’s reaction to the lovely liquid energy flowing up my body into my head. The room began to doze.

Next the nurse set up a lamp before my eyes and told me to look into it while she set off a flashing strobe at ever increasing speeds. This is where it got really interesting. Psychedelic patterns began to emerge from the source of light, followed by a swarm of spidery, spindly letterforms, a hive of asemia, which danced across my vision from a central point of white light. Now I’m an eye guy. I love the perfection of the word and the wondrous effects of just being able to see. But I’m no optometrist, so I can’t tell you what these visions were in scientific terms - a cornucopia of corneal activity, an illumination of the nerves in my retina? I don’t know. They were, however, beautiful, mystical, full of strange meaning and alien insight. They reminded me of Mayan geometry or Aztec script, vispo prayers to eyeball deities scratched in milk white parchment.

All in all it was a beautiful experience, shared with a lovely, quiet professional, in a tranquil corner of a busy city hospital. The results may take up to 6 weeks, but that doesn’t matter. I have my results, my effects, my vispo visions of an EEG scan.

These are two of the poems I made mimicking the experience. I hope you like them. They’ll save you an EEG scan of your own.

No-Self Discovery

I seem to have found it!

It is I. It is not I.

Let’s call it Christ, because Christ is the constant in whom all things manifest. It is Christ and I am. Yet I am not Christ. Such a claim would be ridiculous. It is I.

You see the muddle I am in?

Ha! I have found it. Here it is. The I, the all in I. Christ. I have it here in me like a bean. It appears transparent, flares up, moves from my sight, then reappears, here, then here. I hold it in my heart, cupped, in the palm of my heart, cupped, lovingly.

Christ the bean, which is I.

At sunset I almost had it, but it would have destroyed me. Red sky spaciousness. It burned me, tore my eyeballs to shreds, left me dumb and gaping. Such catastrophic beauty! The all in all in I. Almost. It.

One place I find it is the bench up there. It happily comes through the trees and the flies and the tyre factory, sits with me happily, as it should do, as it wants to. Jesus, I call it. Here it’s a gently exploding glass, a drenching in love. Here it sits. Jesus.

It leaps from the young lovers to the family enjoying a summer stroll to the little boy peddling his bicycle uphill. It leaps to me. It leaps like the moment you recognise the world and everyone in it, the I that they are. Yes, that’s it! That’s . . . oh everyone listen to the eye that’s new me not me. Swallow it whole! Digest it!

You as I.

You, not you.

Not I.

We seem to have found it. You in me, the I. It.

The Mother and Son of Spirit Text

Meditation 1:

Towards the end of a long and troubled meditation, I began to imagine my body and soul as an ancient kingdom, where Christ was king and lord and overseer of a free and prosperous people. Coupled with this spontaneous visualisation was a deep sense of acceptance of my being as it was, right there and then, slowly emerging from its daily metaphysical wrestling match.

I was able to penetrate a secret region of the heart where Christ had his throne, and freely explore its royal chambers. I knew the kingdom was administered from my brain, a centre of government and bureaucracy, and my whole body was a flat, fertile plain, a rich landscape of agriculture and cottage industry, where the inhabitants dwelt in harmony and concord. I felt incredibly at home in this inner terrain - it was, after all, me, and I prayed for protection and peace for myself and everyone who dwelt here. Guests, visitors, travellers, tourists, and, most essentially, citizens, those who made their home in the happy land.

From this pious georgic, an image of the Mother emerged, a powerful archetype, metamorphosing from Christ the King, enfolding me her tender son. At once my whole being was in her arms. The sense of security and wellbeing was overwhelming, and she began to suckle me at her breast. I could taste the milk, the sweetness, feel it nourishing me, feeding every fibre of my soul. A faint sexual sensation stirred but was overpowered by the mothering instinct and the deep infant comfort I felt entrusting myself to it.

There followed soon a burst of kundalini energy from my base chakra, an outpouring of sexual energy flooding my genitals. I gasped and tried to relax, allowing it to spread around my body’s fertile flood plain, all the while saying soft, gentle prayers to the Father. Once again I was back in the land flowing with milk and honey, in the company of the Mother Queen and her mighty energies. An image of the Virgin flashed in my head, a sense of the Christ child comforted, the Saviour nurtured, before the world outside began to penetrate my consciousness, spilling into me from the street like an army of invading children.

Trinitarian Concrete Poetry & A Glimpse of Nonduality

These last days of summer have a peculiar flavour for me. There is a taste of salt in the air and on my tongue, kitchen smells and cooking clatter, the cry of gulls and a taste of freshly caught fish. Each day rises like a smoke ring, spreads itself out thinly, before fading into the breath from which it came. At the end of one week and the beginning of another, I practise the pure act, or art, of sitting. Sometimes when I sit, alone or with people, outdoors or in a coffee shop, a faint awareness arises of something more true to the course and meaning of life, a fine connection to an underlying mystery.

On one occasion, I was fortunate enough to be sitting in an open square at the heart of the city’s great piping festival. I had just eaten a sandwich and was watching the pretty girls walk by, when a cloud of dense, undifferentiated sound rose up behind me. From the sonic maelstrom, snippets of melody, patches of tone and colour emerged and disappeared at random, chased in and out of hearing by a hairy sound beast. My individual consciousness was ransacked, pushed out into the air around the square, into the energy and vibration of sound, into pure abstraction; melting, merging, welling up like the colours of the dawn, like a bliss poem.

I remember the girl who sat opposite me. I remember the stillness of my body. Who needs to move? Yet the vision of the girl and the physicality of passers-by felt wholly present and elevated in my mind as it lapped all around the square. The energy of movement became a dance, a play, held together as one in the wholeness of sound and mind I occupied. I remember my mother sitting beside me, trying for all her life’s worth to re-adjust a setting on her mobile phone. I remember trying to help her, hopelessly failing.

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.

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.

The Poet as Shaman

Marks on wood work like magic symbols, signs of an essential communion with the natural world. This week I was among the trees and all the living things that continue to exist despite my lack of care for them. I came across some marks on trees and felt myself join with the energy these marks created. I began to think of the changes they made in me and how these changes might relate to the mark-maker/poet as unwitting

shaman.

The shaman enters into the world of birds, of insects, of tiny beasts, into the field of collective human suffering where an individual’s pain might have its root, connecting with it through songs and chants and symbols, adjusting patterns and removing obstacles in order to bring back healing.

When my friend Geof Huth performed a poemsong at the Text Festival in Bury exactly a year ago this weekend, I thought he was a shaman. He sang into the collective energy of the room and, somehow, altered it. How this works at an atomic or subatomic level is beyond me, but I do know how it affected my body, and, more than that, how his song reached beyond my body’s physicality to a more subtle level of being where I might have found myself interacting with the memories of the room and everyone in it. His song transformed the room, altered the mind of each individual, and by extension, the families and communities those individuals belonged to.

This adjustment, this ability to heal and transform makes every poet potentially a shaman, particularly I think sound and visual poets, whose work frequently steps outside meaning into areas of pure sign, pure sound. What matters most is the loving intention he or she brings to their marks and utterances, and how that communicated intention can alter the reader/hearer’s state of being.

                             

All of which makes nonsense of poetry wars and poetic rivalries. When a poet sings, he sings for all the poets, for a whole community of poets; similarly, when one of us suffers, we all suffer, whether we’re aware of it or not.

The principle reaches into every community beyond the poetry world and is precisely why these communities need poets - as shaman, as healers, even if the community at large remains totally oblivious to their role as such. Words work their magic below the surface, they resonate in a secret space where everything is interconnected. The poet has access to this secret space.

So when we sing or write we should think on the transformations we affect at the very core of being, where body and mind are indistinguishable, and how sound and symbol can re-pattern unconscious mind. Think on how an individual exists within a group or community, and how that community exists within an individual, and how the poet is the unacknowledged healer in that dynamic. Then enter the world of poet as shaman, and see what happens.

  

                                       

Panda

The first wound is the birth wound, separation from the mother. Like Moses, we are cradled in a basket, comforted. No doubt further wounds are inflicted as we grow and we carry them into the world as thoughts, feelings, attitudes, actions.

Imagine someone bearing the wounds of the whole world, not just in his body, but in his heart. Imagine the folly in believing this. What if we did believe however, and in believing, our wounds were healed and we were open to the life that falls from the sky, rises from the earth.

Imagine a tiny spot of blood . . .

Perfect Fit

Where do we fit in the world?

As children - between our parents, a tiny ‘i’ between an ‘f’ and a ‘t’, nurtured, no doubt, or, perhaps, stunted. Eventually the ‘I’ develops, becomes true to itself, or not quite so true. The ‘I’acts, thinks, but never fully realises or understands. To that extent, there is always a degree to which we don’t fit, places we don’t belong, situations which are uncomfortable. But that’s ok. The only place we really need to fit is into our own skin

There’s a passage in the Tibetan Book of the Dead which describes the circumstances surrounding a soul’s rebirth into the physical world we know, where the reasons we are born into a certain family, in a certain place, at a given time are explained as a choice we make in accordance with our karma. Coming from a realm of dark phantoms, all of which are manifestations of our negative and positive tendencies, a kind of hellish zone, the soul has a vision of different couples having sex, and is drawn, through light, to one particular couple in order to enter the womb to unite with the implanted egg of the mother by way of a network of subtle energy channels connecting the spiritual and physical realms.

Mindbending, no doubt, but I mention it as a precursor to a description of a series of dreams I had as a very young child, before the sharp talons of religious belief had a chance to grip me and influence me.

So really I was no more than a babe, a toddler, enclosed by loving parents, fitting nicely into a warm milky world in this strange land called Scotland. My dreams were vivid and recurring, and always involved a being made of light, a humanoid form composed of light among other, similar forms. I wandered the dreamscape (which was by any other name a heaven) as this being, filled with light and peace and bliss, communing with those fellow beings who, I imagined, would go on to become my parents and grandparents because they raditated a kind of familial love. They did, however, warn me that what I was about to undergo would be difficult, a trial, some even pleading with me not to go through with it, but to remain with them in this comfortable light zone. Regardless of the warnings, my mind was set on the journey ahead, and I was drawn, inexorably, to a portal through which I would travel to waking consciousness. And I always awoke, remembering my dream.

Before too long, the Christian culture I was brought up in lead me to impose its own interpretation on the recurring dream, which always felt momentous and hugely significant. I imagined I dreamt about the Holy Spirit. What else could this light being be? Over the years, as my ‘I’ has developed independently, I have come to regard the dream as a kind of memory of pre-existence. I still fit this cosmology into a basic Christian structure - it helps to have context and reference - but I am free to fit it however and wherever and whyever I like.

Sometimes you feel as if you really don't fit in. There’s opposition. Scientific, social and religious orthodoxy are constantly trying to squeeze our experiences into a model they themselves have constructed, and sometimes those experiences just don’t want to be squeezed. Again, that’s ok. I’m not going to butt heads. What I have I hold in my heart and keep fresh there. As long as I fit beneath the loving, milky moon, I have no complaints, and I’m willing to keep quiet and still, until I’m drawn into something limitless and eternal where there is boundless room to fit in and feel exactly how I need to feel.

Until that day . . .

Here's a poem I wrote some time ago in response to the section of the Tibetan Book of the Dead I mentioned. I wrote it in plain language, because that was my only way of responding to something so incredible. That might be no way to write poetry. I don't know. You tell me:

Conception puts an end
to it. A landscape of
mental projections. Experiences,
tendencies. When you
consider the opportunity for light
at release. Unrealised.
The unfathomable
transition. Imagine entering
a hall of seductions, the allure of
desire, materialising on a
footfall. Manifest delight.
Pursuit. The phantoms whipped
up, whisked off, vanishing
under the strain of habitual
grasping. Cravings. Devils.
And monsters. Hideous visions of
residual emotions. Unless you
happen to loose the urgency,
even sympathetic qualities
rear up as temptations. The
grip of accumulation continually
deflects. It may be necessary to
actualise the essence of who
you are. Only possible with
acute attentiveness. A series
of judgements, like stones
on a balance. Black. White.
Countenance. Counting. Encounter.
A vision of couples, copulating. That
sudden pull towards an opening.
Entrance, entranced. Connecting
with the seed of matter, a root
in water. Cells demystified.
Womb lit. A patterning growth.
Ghost parents shaped from form. The
surge and trauma blueprint. Caught
in floating transition. Then light,
gross, material, once seen,
less remembered. The bardo of
embodiment. Life.

Unconditional

Out of the winter blue I receive a text, and the text is from my sister who has taken time out of her busy day to send it, and in sending it and in what it says, she has given something of herself which is clear and clean and true to my recent thoughts – a gift, out of the winter blue.

The text quotes a writer I love, who says that God gives Himself to us in every created thing. So I stop, and look around, and see in people and places and things, what I’ve been given. Our food is the will of God, which is, quite simply, reality unfolding moment by moment as a loving gift.

By sending the text, my sister created a space for me to witness beauty in a shopping mall, in a bus ride, in a view over a rail track. She also created space for me to write a poem, and helped me notice something tiny and lovely hidden behind a wall where the bus stops.

The tiny spores or buds growing out of the moss took my breath away. A little colony. A tiny community. Delicate. Fragile. And, incredibly, host to an infinite grace in their smallness. Another gift on a day of gifts.

It Must Pass

The moment you read this you surrender to the moment you read this. Where is the ‘I’? It is lost in the momen t.

From whence does the moment arise? Not so much from the preceding moment, but from inside the Whole.

Reading is a supremely sacrificial act. Unless the reader imposes his ego on the text, she absorbs it, digests it, allows it to nourish her, thus distinguishing herself from ego. The Self growing out of ego, replacing it.

Yesterday, for some reason, I was a little fretful, a tad anxious. In the city I was overcome by an array of sensory stimuli. Crowds, street music, beautiful girls. Somehow, I lost myself, became a feather swept up in the wind. I went for coffee and decided I had to retune to the reality of the moment. I had to sacrifice my senses and become aware of what was immediate, what was essential. Instantly, I felt a joy within me, and left the coffee shop looking around, completely unselfconscious, taking in the people, the faces, the lovely children. Soon I was caught up a stream of wonderful coincidence.

For some reason I had it in mind that I had to shop at my local Sainsbury’s when I got off the train back home, and fumbled about in my pocket for a £1 coin which I’d need to unlock a shopping trolley. Finding only a £2 coin, I decided I’d change it for two singles at the nearby Catholic bookshop and give £1 to the beggar lady outside. My coin was met by scrutiny and suspicion by the strangely anxious nun at the till, but she managed to change me and I left the shop, still in the moment, still full of joy, still closed off from the excitement of the city. When I handed over the spare £1 coin, I was met by the touch of the Romanian beggar lady’s swollen arthritic hand, and immediately recoiled in revulsion.

Now it turns out I had already decided earlier in the day that I didn’t need to go to Sainsbury’s after all, so my excursion to change the coin was entirely unnecessary, and my confusion served only to allow me to feel the touch of that beggar lady’s hand and confound the suspicious nun. But it doesn’t stop there.

On the train on the way home, I sat across from a really tall, thin, effeminate guy, an odd looking young chap who looked around nervously, reached over to me and asked me to open his bottle of Irn Bru because it was too tight and his hands apparently weren’t strong enough. (Me with my arthritic guitar player’s hands!) I laughed and took the bottle, struggled a little with the tight cap but managed to open it, handing it back to the nervous hands of the effeminate young man.

Those hands! A coincidence of hands, of being in the right place because of a momentary confusion of intention, because I had shut myself off to the thrill of the city’s stimuli and entered a realm of grace among a marginalised minority. Or so it seemed to me. Being in the moment, swept into a channel of joy, underneath the attachment to attraction and physical desire.

Christ is the ecstasy of the moment fully realised.

Pierced

The yogis talk about a drop of nectar in the heart which, if pierced, releases an ocean of bliss into the body. Sounds nice. Bliss is always good. But remember the part about the piercing.

Christ was pierced and all that spilled was a cupful of blood. Or perhaps there was more. Ask St Theresa. The ecstasy of divine love through the arrow of suffering.

Whatever the case, you can't rush bliss. You have to pause. Wait. Feel the heat, the knife, the red hot tip entering the heart. And the slow drip of love.

Comma. Pause. Love.

The Eye of Silence

If I was true to my truest Self, I would sit in silence for the rest of my life. Since the world however, makes demands of me, and I have to move through it, I have to move through it as a poet.

The true Self is secretive, hidden in the eye. So the only way to uncover it is by gazing longingly into the eye of another. The true Self is really only found in another. Once it is found it is stirred to sound, to make language. These tiny movements of language are the true sound of the Self in the world.

Tiny movements, tiny sounds. The still, small voice. 'Ah', 'E', 'I'. The sounds of our deepest Selves, stirred from silence, gazing longingly on the world.

The Dream of Ailsa Craig as a Concrete Poem

Ailsa Craig is a volcanic plug in the Firth of Clyde, off the Ayrshire coast where I holidayed in Girvan as a child. It's a beautiful green/grey rock which sometimes wears a hat, sometimes wears a skirt. For a while now I've been dreaming of Ailsa, not as memory, but in a more mysterious, perhaps symbolic, perhaps even revelatory way. It occured to me that She is a natural object of contemplation, whose beauty appeals to the human gaze and naturally touches the human heart. So perhaps, I thought, the dreams are speaking to that part of me which is contemplative; so the rock becomes a symbol of the Self immersed in awareness of Itself, a symbol of the meditative state. Seems plausible. Often the dreams involve images of multiple Ailsas arranged in hilly, rocky clumps along the horizon; often they are shadowed, dark, misty. Perhaps then these multiple Ailsas are symbols of the divided Self, fragmetation, parts of my psyche which aren't wholly integrated. Do I sound like a Jungian? Well, maybe I am.

The rock is of course a huge letter in the middle of the sea - a glorious 'e' surrounded by wind & waves. She tells tales of an ancient past in her curling outline and deep rooted plug. And an 'e' is of course wholly, logically geological. To me at least. In my dreams, where language is picture and picture is language. Dreams as concrete poetry!