100. Never Naive Enough 1

That’s it then, yes, time
drop everything & rummage
time in a bubble different
it’s not what you need – no
outbreaks of tapirs & bards
we need utopian noise
hey, let’s invent music now

All these new solidarities
can’t life be simpler
                      if loneliest
no no no – it’s a lovely process
improvise the magic to achieve illumination
everyone together who’s that naïve
show your voice to join with ours as if you wished2

 

 

1 “Ah well, that’s me told then. The disingenuous old bugger.”

 

 

2 “Exiting, is he not? with a final swish & flounce of the curtains, moth-eaten & dingy as you like. Still, alright, I’ll try & do this too, just to help the old relic out:

99. New Classes, New Consciousnesses, New Solidarities1

and each time we return we shall receive illumination
a real team I say rooted in bodies still
a process run on here of sharedness & little children
blameless improvisation now2

To Apply a Gloss3
Is there memory still of Dion Fortune in this town? Where unmade roads on its disordered edge lead up to new millionaire mansions & cheap executive apartments? Here, where Dr Moriarty’s eyes pierced her shell of flesh to lay bare what that flesh could emerge into? Oh, a practical Englishwoman making up magic in a home counties country town, through force of will, self‑cultivated power & skilled improvisations. Here’s what there is: where we return to is what root there is.4

Oh loveliest Hertfordshire, Karla & Darrel don’t like you much, & who can blame them? This little southeastern tip of Offa’s empire (remember her?) joined on just here to a small lump of East Saxon land: let’s make a new start. We still do avoid Hertford, I guess – better down into London (another lost part of Essex). Maybe at our roots, even to Harlow, just to doss there & wait out the bad times in the company of mates. And I’m not sure what D.F. would have made of them, that is of us. I’ll just trust she’s lost by now that racial crap, & knows how identity comes from circumstances & will, enlivened through the fertilising energies of hybrid vigour.5

Now, food made & shared together is magic too. Everyone who is real knows this: bards, sea nymphs, small children. That’s why the Christian Church had to cut out the love feast & replace it with ludicrous small-scale professionalised rituals: a symptomatic compulsive repetition. Wasn’t it so much simpler? And in this case can’t it be again?6

Listen to this. That will be when the overcomplex systems stutter into incoherence & we improvise our own new world out of the bits left. Yes?7

 

 

1 “Oh thingummy! He’s off now!”

 

 

2 “Improvisation! More like shuffling around the same old words again.”

 

 

3 “Well, maybe if I’m doing these notes, I’d better say there’s a bilingual pun on “shine” here, because I don’t think you’d get it otherwise. And I wouldn’t blame you at all.”

 

 

4 “No! Not magic, please. I thought he’d forgotten all about that – but it comes flooding back now I suppose. There was a note about this stuff somewhere I think – but I can’t be arsed to look & I’d be surprised if you did.”

 

 

5 “The boundaries of Dark Age Hertfordshire. Can you get that? Who could really bloody care about all this malarky? Who would read it? Well, yes. That question’s answered. We’d better humour him. Tom Williamson, The Origins of Hertfordshire (Hertfordshire Publications, 2010). Oh, it’s all academic. Still mad suppositions about the unknowable, that means – just with a bibliography. And there’s a good photo on the cover: The Devil’s Dyke. I like that all right.”

 

 

6 “Don’t you just hate it when men go on about children & domesticity, and how important it all is? God save us, please!”

 

 

7 “Well, alright then, maybe we can follow this. It’s a good political programme – but I don’t what the jesus this is to do with poetry now, do you? Or is that indeed the cunning avant-garde trick of it? Am I being bloody naïve here? Or not naïve enough? And I’ll tell you one more thing – I’m surely now fed up to my teeth with his bloody old poetic prose.”

64. Some Specimens from the Odes Pinned to the Triumphal Arches

Each time you unscrew the head the truths burn out
But reality is not at the bottom of the abyss
Make it now. They hate our way of life
to be a shard of broken glass, shining like life.

Keston Sutherland, The Odes to TL61P (Enitharmon Press, 2013)

 

Career poets are part of the problem, smearing up the polish, drying out the fire; chucking shit all over the place; not being party to the solution; banking on the nodding head ‘the reader’ saying ‘yes, that’s what it’s like’ so as not to know what it’s for, since meaning is easier that way, gaped at through the defrosted back window of the Audi, hence the spring for a neck; we all know where that shit got us: being what we eat.

Sutherland, p 68

 

Poetry evolves from a vivid play of nerves and confusions into sedative aporiae in mock-heroic marginalese, if you don’t take precautions to prevent it.

Sutherland, p 41

 

The driving forces of the universe, the framework upon which it is built up in all its parts, belong to another phase of manifestation than our physical plane, having other dimensions than the three to which we are habituated, and perceived by other modes of consciousness than those to which we are accustomed. We live in the midst of invisible forces whose effects alone we perceive. We move among invisible forms whose actions we very often do not perceive at all, though we may be profoundly affected by them

Dion Fortune, Psychic Self-Defence (Rider & Co., 1930) p 10   < http://chomikuj.pl/proezekiel666/occultus/Dion+Fortune >

 

Any act performed with intention becomes a rite. We can take a bath with no more in mind than physical cleanliness; in which case the bath will cleanse our bodies and no more. Or we can take a bath with a view to ritual cleanliness, in which case its efficacy will extend beyond the physical plane.

Fortune (1930), p 80

 

no such thing as liberty
sunlight and vitamins, misunderstanding
for the gods upon the tree
free from bondage the misguided soul
– cannot trust unless you give a sign
for in this suit we find the Lords of Pleasure

Fortune (1930 & 1935)

 

And all the others together with them took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them, and they taught them charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants.
And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three thousand ells:
Who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them,
The giants turned against them and devoured mankind.
And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another’s flesh, and drink the blood.
Then the earth laid accusation against the lawless ones.

The Book of Enoch the Prophet, translated by R H Charles, (Weiser Books, 2012), VII, 1‑6 (pp 5-6)

 

Mein innerstes Gefühl dazu ist: im Augenblick ist alles zu, aber es kann in jedem Augenblick anders werden. Ich stelle dazu folgende Überlegung an: diese Gesellschaft bewegt sich nicht auf einen Wohlfahrtsstaat zu. Diese Gesellschaft, die die Menschen immer mehr erfaßt, wächst gleichzeitig mit ihrer Irrationalität, und zwar konstitutiv. Solange diese Spannung besteht, ist sozusagen der Ausgleich der Wärme nicht herbeigeführt, der notwendig wäre, damit es keine Spontanheit mehr gibt. Ich kann mir nicht vorstellen, daß es eine bis zum Wahnsinn gesteigerte Welt gibt, ohne daß objektive Gegenkräfte entbunden würden.1 TWA

Max Horkheimer und Theodor W.Adorno, Nachtrag zu Band 13: Nachgelassene Schriften 1949-1972; 2. Gespräche: “Diskussion über Theorie und Praxis” (1956) (S. Fischer, 1989), p 47 < http://platypus1917.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/horkheimeradorno_theorieundpraxis1956.pdf >

 

Das was im Zusammenleben der Menschen als das Richtige angelegt ist, steckt in der Sprache: wenn man sagt, es soll gut werden. Wenn man den Mund zum Sprechen auftut, sagt man das immer mit.2 MH

Adorno & Horkheimer, p 36

 

Wir lehnen nicht die Praxis ab, aber das Verfügen. Weil wir noch leben dürfen, sind wir verpflichtet, etwas zu machen.3 MH

Adorno & Horkheimer, p 109

 

 

1 My innermost feeling is that at the moment everything has shut down, but it could all change at a moment’s notice. My own belief is as follows: this society is not moving towards a welfare state. It is gaining increasing control over its citizens but this control grows in tandem with the growth in its irrationality. And the combination of the two is constitutive. As long as this tension persists, you cannot arrive at the equilibrium that would be needed to put an end to all spontaneity. I cannot imagine a world intensified to the point of insanity without objective oppositional forces being unleashed. Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, translated by Rodney Livingstone, Towards a New Manifesto (Verso, 2011), pp 38‑39

 

 

2 Whatever is right about human society is embedded in the language – the idea that all will be well. When you open your mouth to speak, you always say that too. Adorno & Horkheimer, p 5

 

 

3 What we reject is not practice but telling others what to do. Because we are still permitted to live, we are under an obligation to do something. Adorno & Horkheimer, p 109

 

52. A Recipe for I Don’t Know What

for someone close to me

Can I really give you this advice
everything hanging in frozen air
great stillness and profound arranging
all this emptiness within
we know one moment it will switch
a full plenary of rain
or the dingy mush when heaven is obscured
but today bright, delicious

OK, well, how can I
except as an other
in a world where what the gods wrote
is a phrase for laughter
& quite rightly not honour
for what the gods are is familiar
as ourselves
             their huge absoluteness
like vast capital letters
to say: this is more than troubled optics
dismal banality of entoptic flux
oh let them then be counters or relics
we shuffle to work out the final sums
our lives suddenly ending up as here

So, they’re contained & quivering
vibrating within this flawed blue bowl
heaped then in holiness
                        children &
                        parents &
                        partners &
                        families &
                        houses &
                        distances &
                        money &
                        its lack and
                        the decay of things
                        their inadequacy
                        & besides
                        the whole nature
                        of rule & control
                        & the point at which
                        what we’ve got is still better
                        than the guys w/ hatchets & big hammers
                        & then too
                        that absolute
                        sense of difference
                        to the world
                        & people
                        we are variously
                        born into

                        I can’t see
                        really
                        your collection
                        I expect
                        I’ve put
                        the ingredients here
                        & then
                        what processes
                        of lives & aging
                        of saying & not saying
                        of meaning & projecting
                        of hoping & of fantasising
                        carried on or rejected
                        the rules are rigorous
                        & I don’t understand them either
                        I think it needs
                        negotiating tenderly
                        as if a dark room
                        approaching the little one
                        & I know
                        you can do this
                        & do it so often
                        that all can be well
                        as the room’s vacuity
                        will surely decay
                        within hazes of nothingness
                        into human love acting

Then, like
it’s starting to bake
let it cohere
around what there is
& who there is
that runs around
laughing with life
believe in this
as your gods
hidden within
this sorry world
to redeem us yourself

[I got this from nowhere but here, and having stood here, all my life.1 I don’t really know what can help you; here is where “hope” and “faith”, like brown and red sauce in an unreconstructed cafe, make the whole mess better is the plan. Somehow & nevertheless these things may work – tenderly, not splurging, never to gain, but to live within & give. Yes?

But nothing is really from nowhere & I did get some of this recipe from Kenneth Rexroth’s poem “A Sword in a Cloud of Light”, from the sequence “The Lights in the Sky Are Stars” (dedicated to his daughter, Mary), The Collected Shorter Poems (New Directions, 1966), p 239 – tho first encountered by me with surprised delight on an A-level English “unseen poem” paper I was teaching.]

 

 

1 To lead on further, through the pressure of the maintaining of the reality of powerfully projected mental forms I’m exploring, as you know, through Dion Fortune, Stortford’s greatest student. Thank you here then too, Dr Theodore Moriarty, and all at The Grange.

29. This New Vagrant Sanctuary1

One Positive Thing That Has Come out of Stort Poetry Group’s Change of Meeting Place to the Bar at the Rhodes Centre:
– at least no one can maintain ignorance
  as to what has paid for all our poetry now

 
stories unfolded the universe in wonder
a dream or a scar to me or you
to themselves hidden, small, disordered

 
somewhere in the west midlands
the dog’s head has got the vapours

 
bubbling of declining games
swift above the brambles
all the symbols of memory
think in utter astonishment

 

O: “Sometimes, don’t you sometimes wish you didn’t care? I mean of course you want a change, we want a change, but if a thing ain’t godsdamn coming, then the next thing I wish is that I didn’t care.”
A: “We are become history. There is no backward now. No way back. You know what we have to do. Where we should go.”
J: “We don’t choose what we’ll remember, what stops with us.”
– even now he is a citizen of this new vagrant sanctuary

China Miéville, Iron Council (Pan Books, 2005) pp 88, 275 & 295

 

and all done
in the various regions of this dark and obscure Terrestrial Star
where, wandering as strangers, we lead,
                              in a short space of time,
                              a life harassed by varied fortunes.

from letter from Thomas Digges to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, quoted in Benjamin Woolley, The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr Dee (Flamingo, 2002), p 155, cited from F R Johnson & Sanford V Larkey, “Thomas Digges, the Copernican System, and the idea of the infinity of the universe in 1576”, Huntington Library Bulletin, v5, 1934

 
massed choirs might have helped us once Sig. Verdi
but the succour we seek surrounds us not like rain
but a bright feast we have prepared for
                                        flying coloured words
                                        above the grey
                                        of conceptual & concrete poetry
                                        that’s never
                                        as beautiful & nourishing as
                                        music, good food, common fun

 

“Here we meet with the idea put forward by Mme Blavatsky, that there can be no manifestation without differentiation into the Pairs of Opposites. Kether differentiates into two aspects as Chokrah and Binah, and manifestation is in being. Now in this supernal triangle, The Head Which Is Not, the Father and the Mother, we have the root concept of our cosmogony, and we shall return to it again and again under innumerable aspects, and each time that we return to it we shall receive illumination.”

Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah (Aquarian/Thorsons, 1987), p 45

 
close attention close attention
of children concerned/unconcerned
chomo ildrmef mchi
loseor attrtro entita
chble bis ildrle let
in close attention lose

 

Der Garten trauert,
Kühl sinkt in die Blumen der Regen.
Der Sommer schauert
Still seinem Ende entgegen.

Hermann Hesse, “Der Garten trauert”, as Richard Strauss, Vier letzte Lieder, “September”.

 

 

 1 Is this all a mistake?